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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Is that what inspired this novel, the illumination that you got from looking at that original order?
Yes, it was partly the moment when I realized that the "Ariel" I had understood and that most people have read and felt to be the work of Sylvia Plath was really something entirely different from what she intended.
Even though the poems themselves are the same?
Listen in on Laura Miller's conversation with Kate Moses
The poems are the same but what's really interesting about Plath is that her poems don't exist in individual vacuums. They're very resonant to each other, and when you place them in different orders you pick up nuances and meanings and reverberations that you don't necessarily get in another format.
I think that's definitely true of the way we see "Ariel" as it was published. Almost anyone who reads it feels that it's an almost inexorable slide toward self-destruction, especially because the last poem in the book is "Edge." What's interesting about that is that she wrote two poems on the day she wrote "Edge." One was the poem "Balloons," which was about observing her children playing with balloons they got for Christmas, and the other is "Edge." If you assume that "Edge" is the last poem she wrote in her life, you get a particular picture of her. But if you consider the possibility that she may have written "Balloons" last, it puts her in a completely different emotional and psychological state as an artist. And the fact is we don't know which of those poems came last on that particular day. It was a decision by Ted Hughes as the editor to put "Edge" last.
This is charged territory because there is so much contention about that marriage and so much blame being dished out, but do you feel that he was imposing a narrative on those poems?
Anytime you put any poetry in any kind of order, you're imposing some sort of form on it. He definitely imposed a form. "Ariel" as it was published is largely chronological and he extracted a few poems that were particularly distasteful to him that she had wanted to have published. So on one hand you can argue that he just put it in chronological order. On the other hand he was too sensitive a reader of Sylvia Plath's work to have missed the fact that in chronological order the poems told a certain story about who she was and where she was emotionally as she was moving toward her death.
And that story was about her becoming more and more determined to kill herself?
Yes, that "Ariel" was an extended suicide note. It suggests that she was obsessed with her own mortality and that her death was inevitable. Of course, that's the story that he continued to tell, and that he elaborated on for many years. Early on, right after her death, he didn't make the claims that her death was inevitable, but as he moved on in his own career as a poet and as her reputation grew because of his stewardship, it is interesting to observe that the statements he makes were more and more sure in that assertion. But if you look at the poems in the order that Plath arranged them, clearly she was trying to tell a different story, to herself if not to her readership. She was taking these poems that were in some way chapters from her own mythology and putting them in an order so that she could place herself in the position of imagining a future. What you have, then, are two completely different books using the same elements.
You don't attempt in "Wintering" to describe her frame of mind when she did decide to kill herself.
I very pointedly did not want to write about her death. Her death has been written about so many times. We all know more detail than any of us needs to know, or probably has the right to know. My feeling was that if I felt internally charged with revealing the story of "Ariel" as she had envisioned it, then it was a story of her survival and her struggle to remake her life. It wasn't a story of her death. So imagining and then writing out her death seemed a gratuitous nod to the fact that we all know about it. In fact, this is really a story about her artistic process and how after years of worrying over the possibility that the facts of her life were going to make it impossible for her to be an artist, it turned out that the opposite was true. Her life gave her her greatest material as an artist. Ultimately, she turned the whole idea on its head by using her art to imagine her way into a new life.
Nevertheless, you know that she didn't manage to achieve this in a lasting way. That puts you in conflict with this huge fact about her life, which is that she killed herself.
One of the questions I asked myself is that if she was trying to right her life and doing it by writing her life, then how did she get from that one point to the other? Was there a moment when I could capture her still thinking that she was going to be all right? That was the moment I wanted to leave her on. Because I think that the myth and the legacy of Sylvia Plath is so weighted toward her death that it often puts her work in shadow. I wanted her relationship to her work, and how her life and her work seemed to be all of a piece, to be the primary focus of this book. It's obvious, yes, that she didn't make it. And she in some way was perhaps gambling on something that ultimately failed her.
