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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Her newly published, unexpurgated journals reveal the poet's true demons -- and support a little-known theory about what drove her to suicide. First of two parts.
May 30, 2000 | It's the tally of "my lusts and my little ideas," wrote 17-year-old Sylvia Plath of the journals in which she confessed her judgments, her "test tube infatuations," her story notes, her cake baking, her dreams and her fears from the age of 12 until days before her death by her own hand at the age of 30. Plath's characterization of her journal stands in stunning contrast to the monumentally revealing document she created: more than a thousand pages scattered through various handwritten notebooks, diaries, fragments and typed sheets, the sum of it an extraordinary record of what she called the "forging of a soul," the creation of a writer and a woman whose many veils and guises have succeeded in forestalling anyone from knowing who she really was, despite her lifelong quest to discover the answer for herself.
"You walked in, laughing, tears welling confused, mingling in your throat. How can you be so many women to so many people, oh you strange girl?" Plath asked herself in the summer of 1952 when she was about to enter her junior year at Smith College in Northampton, Mass. Now, with the English publication of Plath's unabridged journals this spring, we are closer than ever to knowing the real identity of this disappointed wife and bereaved daughter, this suicidal mother of two, this poet of electrically charged perceptions and amplified imagination, this woman "enigmatical/shifting my clarities," this Lady Lazarus who evolved out of her own inner torment, the record of which now opens fully, or almost, before us.
The publication of these journals is a watershed event. They allow us, for the first time, to see this dazzlingly, maddeningly fragmented woman as an integrated being. The Plath that emerges here is paradoxically at once saner -- less a creature of willful mental excess -- and more buffeted by forces beyond her control. Those forces, it seems tragically clear, were not just familial, but chemical. Almost from the day she died, readers and scholars, faced with the huge, faceless enigma of her suicide, have been perplexed and thwarted by Plath's mental condition. The unabridged journals and other new information, some of it reported here for the first time, lend credence to a little-noticed theory that Sylvia Plath suffered not just from some form of mental illness (probably manic depression) but also from severe PMS.
The idea that Plath's demons had a biological basis, far from being reductive, only increases her stature as a poet and a human being. She wrested her art from great darkness.
In the fall of 1962, during the final flood of creativity that preceded her death by a few months, Sylvia Plath alluded to her first suicide attempt in "Daddy," now her most widely recognized poem. "At twenty I tried to die," she wrote, "...But they pulled me out of the sack,/ And they stuck me together with glue." Four decades since Plath killed herself on the morning of February 11, 1963, it seems more accurate to say that she's been stuck back together with paper. Tons and tons of paper: her own posthumously published poetry collection, the fierce and mythic "Ariel," an encoded autobiography which indeed, as she predicted, made her name; the softened "corrective" of the dutiful, chirpy "Letters Home" edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath; her Pulitzer-prize winning "Collected Poems," which builds inexorably from polite surface poise to crackling, incinerating force; a smattering of fairly neutral stories and telling journal fragments in "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams"; and her journals, published in heavily edited form in 1982 that, depending on whose side you were on, made Plath appear either mad or victimized.
All of Plath's work, including her three additional poetry collections, remains in print. But even more voluminous is the critical response her writings have generated -- about a dozen biographies and "recollections" and hundreds of articles, critical studies and cultural commentaries.
What's most noticeable about the veritable industry of books and articles about Plath is that none of them succeed in creating an integrated portrait of their subject. She is variously portrayed as a fragile, brilliant immigrant's daughter scarred by overarching ambition and her father's early death; a righteous proto-feminist shrugging off husband, children and the crippling reins of culturally prescribed domesticity; an unreasonable perfectionist whose outrageous demands alienated everyone who crossed her path; a devoted wife and mother shattered by her idolized husband's betrayal; and an unbalanced artist who would use and sacrifice everything, including her own life, to serve her art.
By her own admission Plath was a woman of many masks, someone who felt it necessary to reveal only facets of herself in any given situation, social or professional. Her husband, the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, wrote in the introduction to her 1982 journals, "I never saw her show her real self to anybody -- except, perhaps, in the last three months of her life."
Hughes, of course, has been the central figure and object of suspicion, even persecution, in the vitriolic 40-year-old controversy regarding the "real" Sylvia Plath. In the summer of 1962, the Hughes' marriage broke down when Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair. According to Hughes' infrequent comments regarding his relationship with Plath, theirs had been a mutually creative, valuable symbiosis from the very start: "Our minds soon became two parts of one operation," he told the Paris Review in 1995.
But things went very wrong, as his 1998 poetry collection addressed to Plath, the international bestseller "Birthday Letters," attests. When they separated traumatically in September 1962 after six years of marriage, the couple were parents of a 2-year-old daughter, Frieda, and an 8-month-old baby son, Nicholas; Hughes moved to London, while Plath remained with the children at their house in the English countryside. With only sporadic childcare and often ill with fevers, flu and infections, Plath wrote the bulk of the "Ariel" poems in a seven-week rush during the pre-dawn hours before her children awoke. When Plath died, she was still legally married to Hughes, and the responsibility of conducting her literary estate fell to him. In 1969, Hughes' lover, Assia Wevill, mimicked Plath's suicide by gassing herself as well as the young daughter, Shura, whom she shared with Hughes. Hughes wrote to Plath biographer Anne Stevenson in 1989, "... I saw quite clearly from the first day that I am the only person in this business who cannot be believed by all who need to find me guilty."
