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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Novelist Kate Moses on her portrait of Sylvia Plath during the grim London winter when she changed literary history -- and then killed herself.
Feb 18, 2003 | Feb. 11, 2003, marked the 40th anniversary of an event that has become the center of often heated and poisonous debate: the suicide of poet Sylvia Plath. Plath's marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes had fallen apart in July 1962, after she discovered his affair with Assia Wevill, the wife of yet another poet. She left the couple's home in the countryside of Devon, England, to winter with her two young children in London. During the last months of her life she wrote dozens of poems with an uncharacteristic speed and fluency; they became the book that cemented her reputation as a major American poet, "Ariel."
Like many people, Kate Moses (a former editor at Salon) found Plath's tragic story fascinating. But what interested her most about the poet's final weeks was not whether Plath was a self-destructive, monomaniacal harpy (as Hughes partisans have insisted), the victim of a callous and manipulative Hughes (as some have claimed), or was, according to an increasingly prevalent theory, a casualty of neurochemical imbalance. Instead, what Moses found most intriguing was the nature of the internal alchemy that enabled Plath to write the "Ariel" poems, the fulfillment of her artistic promise, even as the life she had longed for and cherished lay in ruins. "Wintering," the novel Moses has just published, takes place mostly in December 1962, with a few flashbacks to earlier times. Each chapter takes its title and substance from one of the "Ariel" poems, arranged in the order Plath originally intended for them. It reveals, as Moses feels the poems themselves do, a surprising new view of the poet's life.
Sylvia Plath was known for keeping extensive journals. Is there a lot of material concerning this particular period of her life that you used as the basis for "Wintering"?
Listen in on Laura Miller's conversation with Kate Moses
Not really, but the story behind that is interesting. Plath kept journals since she was a little girl and used them as a springboard for developing herself as a writer and recording her life. It's interesting that the stuff that she did record was material that she wanted to use as a writer. She never recorded anything about her wedding reception, or parties she went to, for example.
So this wasn't a diary?
No. She was so programmatic in trying to develop her skill as a writer. Everything fed into that, even the domestic details. But for the period of time when "Wintering" takes place there were two journals, one that Ted Hughes said he destroyed. That's from the very last weeks and months of her life. He destroyed it saying that he didn't want his children to ever have to read it. The other journal he says disappeared. I understand that back in the 1970s, the Plath estate, with Ted's sister Olwyn in charge, originally had listed one of those journals as well as Plath's novel manuscript in the inventory of the papers they had in the Plath archive. Clearly one of those journals did exist at one point in time. What happened to it, who knows?
The reason why the loss of those two journals is so important and interesting is that they're the journals she was keeping when her life as a writer was taking real, galvanized shape. We don't have those journals from the time she was writing the "Ariel" poems. What we do have are some journal notes that were included in the unabridged journal publication -- say, observations of her neighbors in Devon in 1962, some of which are very telling. But mostly what we've got are her letters and the poems. And she kept a daily calendar from 1962 which listed things like "Wash hair on Tuesday; take out the trash on Wednesday." I took all of that material and created an enormous chronological database of what information I knew for any given day during the period I was writing about. From that I extrapolated where she would have been in the process of putting the manuscript [of "Ariel"] together.
So you were writing about a life that, even without the journals, is fairly well documented. So many other people have written about it and have strong feelings about it. Anytime someone writes a novel about a real person, you have to decide how much liberty you're going to take. You took some, which you explain in your author's note, but did you feel constrained?
The facts gave me a structure, but I also felt a responsibility to be really careful about where I strayed from the facts because I feel it's dangerous territory to write about a real person -- in this case, a real artist whose artistic legacy is still in flux. What I didn't want to do was add something into the canon of understanding about Plath that would be untrue to her artistically. I did feel I had to be very careful about what I made up. I list in the notes the major detours I made from fact, but most of the book comes from the real facts of her life. I know that she really did go to the zoo on Dec. 10 with Ted and the children, and I know some of the animals she saw. I don't know that she stood in the lion's house and watched them eat, but I do know she was there that day.
You're also guessing what she felt about it, why she went.
That was another reason why I needed to be careful. When you guess about her feelings and make up the experiences, you compound the chances of confusing the real facts of who she was and what she was doing and what it means. I tried to illuminate those facts as best I could.
I was connecting all this to the narrative I see in the "Ariel" poems as she envisioned it. What was exciting to me was to see the story that is embedded almost anagrammatically within the "Ariel" poems if you put them back in their order. You see that there is a narrative drive there and that there was a parallel track in what was going on in her life at the time. Emotionally, a lot of the experiences she was going through were probably expressed in how she put that manuscript together.
