Leesfragment: Red Comet

Nu in de winkel: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath door Heather Clark. Lees de eerste pagina's op Athenaeum.nl.

The first biography of this great and tragic poet that takes advantage of a wealth of new material, this is an unusually balanced, comprehensive and definitive life of Sylvia Plath.

Determined not to read Plath’s work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark presents new materials about Plath’s scientist father, her juvenile writings, and her psychiatric treatment, and evokes a culture in transition in the mid-twentieth century, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Sylvia’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; and her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a true marriage of minds that would change the course of poetry in English.

Clark’s clear-eyed sympathy for Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.

Prologue

In December 1962, Sylvia Plath moved into William Butler Yeats’s old house. Yeats was one of Plath’s greatest literary heroes, and she had been thrilled to discover the vacant townhouse in London’s Primrose Hill after the breakdown of her marriage. She was starting over, and she felt the move to Yeats’s house was propitious. “My work should be blessed,” she wrote her mother. She offered a year’s rent to secure the two-story maisonette—nearly all the money she had. Three months before, she and her husband, Ted Hughes, had traveled from their home in Devon to the west coast of Ireland, where they had collected apples from Yeats’s garden at Thoor Ballylee and climbed the famous winding staircase to his tower’s roof. Plath threw coins in the stream below for luck. The couple hoped that the trip to Ireland and the pilgrimage to Yeats’s sacred tower would rekindle their marriage. But Plath returned to Devon alone. There, and in Yeats’s house, she would write some of the finest poems of the twentieth century.
One of Sylvia Plath’s favorite short stories was Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle.” The story concerns a man, John Marcher, who spends his life waiting for an extreme experience—“the thing”—which he likens to a beast crouching in the jungle. It will be, he says, “natural” and “unmistakable.” It may be “violent,” a “catastrophe.” Only too late does Marcher realize he has lived a passionless existence awaiting the thing. He has instead become the man to “whom nothing on earth was to have happened.” The story ends as he flings himself at the tomb of the woman he should have loved. “When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure,” James wrote. “It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.”
Sylvia Plath dreaded the prospect of such failure. In 1955, before setting off for En gland and Cambridge University, she wrote to her boyfriend Gordon Lameyer, “the horror, to be jamesian [sic], is to find there are plenty of beasts in the jungle but somehow to have missed all the potshots at them. I am always afraid of letting ‘life’ slip by unobtrusively and waking up some ‘fine morning’ to wail windgrieved around my tombstone.” Modernist visions of human paralysis terrified her. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and James Joyce’s “The Dead” became personal admonitions. “NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs,” she told her Smith College students in 1958. “BE RIGHT OR WRONG, don’t be indifferent, don’t be NOTHING.” Plath’s appetite for food was legendary—she once emptied a host’s refrigerator before a dinner party—but she was equally hungry for experience. She was determined to live as fully as possible—to write, to travel, to cook, to draw, to love as much and as often as she could. She was, in the words of a close friend, “operatic” in her desires, a “Renaissance woman” molded as much by Romantic sublimity as New En gland stoicism. She was as fluent in Nietzsche as she was in Emerson; as much in thrall to Yeats’s gongs and gyres as Frost’s silences and snow.
Sylvia Plath took herself and her desires seriously in a world that often refused to do so. She published her first poem at age eight and later vowed to become “The Poetess of America.” In the years that followed, Plath pursued her literary vocation with a fierce, tireless determination. She hoped to be a writer, wife, and mother, but she was raised in a culture that openly derided female artistic ambition. Such derision is clear in the speech Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson gave at Plath’s 1955 Smith commencement, titled, “A Purpose for Modern Woman.” The best way these brilliant graduates could contribute to their nation, Stevenson said, was to embrace “the humble role of housewife, which, statistically, is what most of you are going to be whether you like the idea or not just now— and you’ll like it!” Stevenson, the liberal darling of his day, went on:

This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, has great advantages. In the first place, it is home work— you can do it in the living room with a baby in your lap, or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hands. If you’re really clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he’s watching television.

Stevenson acknowledged “the sense of contraction, the lost horizons” these women would feel in their new domestic roles. “Once they wrote poetry,” he mused. “Now it’s the laundry list. . . . They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age. But what they do is wash diapers.” He hoped this view was not “too depressing” but concluded that “women ‘never had it so good’ as you do.”
Plath was determined to play her part, but, as Stevenson’s speech suggests, the odds were against her. She lived in a shamelessly discriminatory age when it was almost impossible for a woman to get a mortgage, loan, or credit card; when newspapers divided their employment ads between men and women (“Attractive Please!”); the word “pregnant” was banned from network television; and popular magazines encouraged wives to remain quiet because, as one advice columnist put it, “his topics of conversation are more important than yours.” Government, finance, law, media, academia, medicine, technology, science—nearly all the professions were controlled by men. Some women made inroads, but the costs were high. As one of Plath’s Cambridge contemporaries wrote, women in the 1950s had “internalized from a lifetime of messages that achievement and autonomy were simply incompatible with love and family,” and that “independence equaled loneliness.” Still, Plath thought a different fate from the one Stevenson had predicted for her might be possible. Like her Joycean hero Stephen Dedalus, she was filled with “Icarian lust”: she would seek out her destiny abroad, collect experience for her art, and stay in motion. Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized. Plath spread her wings, over and over, at a time when women were not supposed to fly.

The Oxford professor Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf’s biographer, has written, “Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental- illness, self- harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case- histories first and as professional writers second.” This is especially true of Sylvia Plath, who has become cultural shorthand for female hysteria. When we see a female character reading The Bell Jar in a movie, we know she will make trouble. As the critic Maggie Nelson reminds us, “to be called the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing.” Nelson reminds us, too, that a woman who explores depression in her art isn’t perceived as “a shamanistic voyager to the dark side, but a ‘madwoman in the attic,’ an abject spectacle.” Perhaps this is why Woody Allen teased Diane Keaton for reading Plath’s seminal collection Ariel in Annie Hall. In the 1980s, a prominent reviewer noted that a Plath “backlash” had resulted in some “grisly” jokes in college newspapers. “‘Why did SP cross the road?’ ‘To be struck by an oncoming vehicle.’” Male writers who kill themselves are rarely subject to such black humor: there are no dinner- party jokes about David Foster Wallace. In a 2017 article that went viral, Claire Dederer argued that Plath had become the culture’s ultimate “female monster” for committing suicide and “abandoning” her children. As the critic Carolyn Heilbrun noted, “If you admire Auden, that’s good taste. If you admire Sylvia Plath, it’s a cult. . . . It is the usual no-win situation: either a woman author isn’t studied, or studying her is reduced to an act of misplaced religious fanaticism.”
Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become a paradoxical symbol of female power and helplessness whose life has been subsumed by her afterlife. Caught in the limbo between icon and cliché, she has been mythologized and pathologized in movies, television, and biographies as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death. These distortions gained momentum in the 1960s when Ariel was published. Most reviewers didn’t know what to make of the burning, pulsating metaphors in poems like “Lady Lazarus” or the chilly imagery of “Edge.” Time called the book a “jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape.” The Washington Post dubbed Plath a “snake lady of misery” in an article entitled “The Cult of Plath.” Robert Lowell, in his introduction to Ariel, characterized Plath as Medea, hurtling toward her own destruction. Even Plath’s closest reader, her husband Ted Hughes, often portrayed her as a passive vessel through which a dangerous muse spoke.
Recent scholarship has deepened our understanding of Plath as a master of performance and irony. Yet the critical work done on Plath has not sufficiently altered her popular, clichéd image as the Marilyn Monroe of the literati. Melodramatic portraits of Plath as a crazed poetic priestess are still with us. A recent biographer called her “a sorceress who had the power to attract men with a flash of her intense eyes, a tortured soul whose only destiny was death by her own hand.” He wrote that she “aspired to transform herself into a psychotic deity.” These caricatures have calcified over time into the popular, reductive version of Sylvia Plath we all know: the suicidal writer of The Bell Jar whose cultish devotees are black-clad young women. (“Sylvia Plath: The Muse of Teen Angst,” reads the title of a 2003 article in Psychology Today.) Plath thought herself a different kind of “sorceress”: “I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect,” she wrote her friend Mel Woody in July 1954.
Many of Plath’s friends have grown impatient with these distorted versions of her. Plath’s close friend Phil McCurdy does not recognize the “literary psycho” he encounters in biographies that fail to capture her ebullient, brainy essence. “We were crazy, but it was crazy about Kafka,” he said. Plath’s Smith confidante Ellie Friedman Klein is tired of her brilliant friend being chained to “the death machine,” her suicide sensationalized. That Plath is now identified with the clichés she examined ironically in her work is part of her tragedy.
Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote of Sylvia Plath, “when the curtain goes down, it is her own dead body there on the stage, sacrificed to her own plot.” Yet to suggest that Plath’s suicide was some sort of grand finale only perpetuates the Plath myth that simplifies our understanding of her work and her life. Previous biographies have focused on the trajectory of Plath’s suicide, as if her every act, from childhood on, was predetermined to bring her closer to a fate she deserved for flying too close to the sun. This book will trace Plath’s literary and intellectual development rather than her undoing.
This is the first full biography of Sylvia Plath to incorporate all of her surviving letters—including fourteen newly discovered letters she sent to her psychiatrist in 1960–63 and several important unpublished letters—and to draw extensively on Plath’s unpublished diaries, calendars, and creative work in addition to her published writings. Because the Plath and Hughes estates allowed me to scan Plath’s and Hughes’s published and unpublished papers throughout this project, I have been able to quote directly from sources rather than hastily scribbled archival notes. This is also the first Plath biography to delve deeply into Plath’s family history, including her father’s FBI investigation and her grandmother’s institutionalization; to feature a surviving portion of Plath’s lost novel, Falcon Yard, which I discovered misfiled in an archive; to make use of previously unexamined police, court, and hospital records; to offer new interpretations and insights into Plath’s life based on the testimony and archival holdings of more than fifty contemporaries; to put forward new information that changes our understanding of Plath’s last week; and to draw on the entirety of Ted Hughes’s archives at Emory University and the British Library, which hold many unpublished poems and journal entries by Hughes about Plath. Lastly, this is the first biography of Plath to incorporate material from the Harriet Rosenstein archive at Emory University, which opened in 2020. Rosenstein interviewed scores of Plath’s contemporaries in the early 1970s while she was working on a Plath biography, which she never finished. These spectral voices from the past shed new light on Plath’s relationships, her medical treatment, and her writing.
This book is by no means the last word on Sylvia Plath. Over time, new material will surface and new questions will emerge. But it is, I hope, a richer, more accurate, and less pathological portrait of Sylvia Plath’s life than what now exists. By sifting through Plath’s poems, prose, sketches, journals, and letters, as well as the transatlantic archives of her husband and contemporaries—and listening to the testimony of dozens of friends, many on record for the first time—I have tried to recover what Plath gave to us rather than what she gave up. I hope to free Plath from the cultural baggage of the past fifty years and reposition her as one of the most important American writers of the twentieth century. Plath’s best poetry is as aesthetically accomplished, groundbreaking, and reflective of its historical moment as the poetry of her idols, W.B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. She ought to be remembered for her transcendent, trailblazing poems, not for gassing herself in her kitchen.
Of course, what makes Sylvia Plath’s life compelling to so many readers is its tragedy. Her life, her fame, and her art will always be tied to her suicide—there is no changing that. But the most famous woman poet of the twentieth century was neither fragile ingénue nor femme fatale. She was no Medea, no Eurydice, no Electra. Rather, she was a highly disciplined craftswoman whose singular voice helped transform American and British literature, and whose innovative work gave new energy to the burgeoning literary and cultural revolutions of her time. The goal, then, is to recover Sylvia Plath from cliché—to offer an alternative narrative to the Plath myth, to debunk the sensational and melodramatic rhetoric that surrounds her, and, finally, to examine her life through her commitment not to death, but to art.

Sylvia Plath was one of the most highly educated women of her generation, an academic superstar and perennial prizewinner. Even after a suicide attempt and several months at McLean Hospital, she still managed to graduate from Smith College summa cum laude. She was accepted to graduate programs in En glish at Columbia, Oxford, and Radcliffe and won a Fulbright Fellowship to Cambridge, where she graduated with high honors. She was so brilliant that Smith asked her to return to teach in their En glish department without a PhD. Her mastery of En glish literature’s past and present intimidated her students and even her fellow poets. In Robert Lowell’s 1959 creative writing seminar, Plath’s peers remembered how easily she picked up on obscure literary allusions. “‘It reminds me of Empson,’ Sylvia would say. . . . ‘It reminds me of Herbert.’ ‘Perhaps the early Marianne Moore?’” Later, Plath made small talk with T.S. Eliot and Stephen Spender at London cocktail parties, where she was the model of wit and decorum. Very few friends realized that she struggled with depression, which revealed itself episodically. In college, she aced her exams, drank in moderation, dressed sharply, and dated men from Yale and Amherst. She struck most as the proverbial golden girl. But when severe depression struck, she saw no way out. In 1953, a depressive episode led to botched electroshock therapy sessions at a notorious asylum. Plath told her friend Ellie Friedman that she had been led to the shock room and “electrocuted.” “She told me that it was like being murdered, it was the most horrific thing in the world for her. She said, ‘If this should ever happen to me again, I will kill myself.’” Plath attempted suicide rather than endure further tortures.
In 1963, the stressors were different.

[...]

Copyright © Heather Clark 2020