Plath

 I was a bit afraid when I read the byline: Patricia Lockwood. Who, perhaps unfairly, I have defined as the London Review of Books putdown artist.

She is reviewing Sylvia Plath’s prose.

Or that is the excuse. As we know from Lockwood’s other reviews, the book at hand is a skelton-key to all the books and the life

And we all know that Plath’s life is a pinata, everybody has a whack at it.

Nobody seems to be at all fascinated by John Berryman’s suicide. Or Randall Jarrell’s, if, as some of his friends assert, the accident (a car, he was walking by the side of the road, apparently) was no accident. But Plath’s suicide, with the gas, the door to the children’s room stopped up with some cloth to make sure they didn’t breath in the gas, the milk and bread for their lunch – this is a scenario that keeps floating out there, as though the poems were simply adjuncts to the story.

I have a lot of sympathy for Plath, and for the poems: basically, I heart those poems, and not just the Ariel poems. Janet Malcolm’s telling of the Plath tale was oddly numb to the poems; although it was really a telling of the Plath story as told by others. Malcolm is upfront: she is with the Hugheses.

I’m not.

So I was a bit afraid that this would be a takedown, a tackle, once again, of the “poet-ess” supposedly loved by Coeds in their Ivies. With such an audience, suspicion falls on the author. Or so goes the usual rant.

However, Lockwood twisted herself from her own grip, her own take down routine. And her essay about Plath is one of her best essays, I think.

She does some likeable things, Lockwood. For instance, she starts writing poetry herself. Yes! The academic grin about Plath, all her nonsense, becomes especially sardonic about people writing like Plath. That form of grin does not, of course, form on the mouth when regarding all the poets who started writing like Eliot. But Plath!

Lockwood writes:

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath, edited by Peter K. Steinberg.

Faber, 812 pp., £35, September 2024, 978 0 571 37764 0

Aseries of haphazard walking errands led to me wandering downtown, lugging a tub of CBD gummies, a multipack of ultra-absorbent tampons and a 10 lb biography of Sylvia Plath. That seemed correct, a spontaneous piece of performance art. I had heard Heather Clark, the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, speak at a conference on biography the previous spring. I thought then that she seemed too normal for the task. I chafed against the setting down of the facts, as if they could yet be changed. Now, having cast my eye across the charred landscape of Plath-Hughes scholarship, it seems about time for something normal.

The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy.

The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a three-dimensional space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.

If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around the shoulder, that need to shelter someone who has proved almost frighteningly enduring. People pass out of the narrative while still she stands. Her death seemed to drive people back on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar:

I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems – ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Fever 103°’ – were ‘beautifully’ read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerising cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. ‘I have done it again!’ Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying: ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap!’

I’m not sure whether it was fast or gradual. The assignment was The Collected Prose, released by Faber last year and clocking in at around eight hundred pages. I read that first and then her journals; they are especially rich to read in the mornings. Then The Bell Jar, as good as I remember; then a glance at the smoking crater of the Plath-Hughes myth; then The Collected Poems, fresh as fish, and arrayed in shining scales. The rhythm of my notes changed, went in threes, lapped, lengthened.

“One day in metalsmithing class, I picked up a book called Dynamarhythmic Design: A Book of Structural Pattern, first published in 1932. It is about everything that can happen in a rectangle. The rectangle was the page. I thought of Plath’s poem ‘Stillborn’. I read ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ in the courtyard of the coffee shop, where two students at the next table were having a loud conversation about whether it was ethical to bring children into the world. I wrote, very quickly, a poem called ‘Dynamarhythmic Design’. For some reason, for the next three weeks, it kept going. Three, four or five poems a day. There were rules, seemingly handed down from her; I followed them. Write the poems straight through from beginning to end, and tell people you’re doing it. It felt strangely joyful, propelled by its own velocity. I was not solving the problem of the death, the life, but I was remembering the real thing, insoluble for anyone who has not done it.

We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early delights. Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, with a few ‘immortal’ love poems between them. ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell’s response to Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’) is instrumental, since it includes the poet as part of a blasted landscape: the hell of its heaven and earth, or the god. She is part of it as a woman in a painting – a blank reclined space, sketching everything around her. Eventually the blank must be filled in totally: it completes the scene, but is fatal. This is why hospitals were fruitful for Plath. It is clear what is happening in them: a visceral tableau, with attending flowers, and a stripped human form at the centre. You could write, perhaps, as if every room were a hospital room, but it would not be very comfortable.”

This gets Plath in a way that escapes Janet Malcolm, who is a often mentioned presence in Lockwood’s essay, making it almost a counter-argument, the kind of exorcism of a strong writer that some – for instance, Harold Bloom – posit as the royal path to becoming a strong writer. Malcolm is who Lockwood – and indeed, me myself – would like to be: the observer who, starting out from some maxim like a slap in the face (instead of building to a moralizing tag line), understands how, in the light of that shock, we are able to trace the shadowplay of dramaturgy of those around her subject and her subject around his or her crew. At the same time, she is aware of, and represents herself as, the woman in the painting, off to the side. Reversing Susanna and the Elders, it is she who spies on their naked old flesh. Lockwood builds up to the confrontation with Malcolm over Plath – which makes this a more interesting essay, but one that reconstructs the usual sidedness of all essays about Plath. Like Plath, who in the anecdotes is often the silent, burning presence (rather like Plath’s poem, The Courage of Shutting Up, which could have been inspired by Ted Hughes sister, Olwyn) observers are not simply and always observers – because the line between observer and subject is dirty, tainted with unconscious desires, thematic dreams, bigotries, the higher morality, and everybody’s striving to be the teacher.

Perhaps there are such sides to the Plath story because she generated sides. It was her poetic. Sidedness.

It shows my age, but I was entirely surprised with Lockwood’s notion that Hughes big poetry book is Birthday Letters. I have bits of Crow memorized, and any poetry loving guy of my generation would probably list this as Hughes contribution to the great Wheel of poetry.

“God tried to teach Crow how to talk

'Love,' said God. 'Say, Love.'

Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea

And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.”

To those with austere tastes, this might sound like the Doors. But I’ve never had austere tastes.

Plath, too, is stunt royalty, but she doesn't make her play against the old English Anglican Gnostic, to which Hughes, after her death, tried to reduce her. She makes a play against the schoolroom, the style page, the influencer, the types of totalitarian shallow that she had to ram her head against every day.

“Of winged, unmiraculous women,

Honey-drudgers.

I am no drudge

Though for years I have eaten dust

And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,

Blue dew from dangerous skin.

Will they hate me,

These women who only scurry,

Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover ?”

I open to this. It is bad news, the worst news, and I am its admirer beyond the daily tasks that make me not want to deal with it now, or tomorrow, or tomorrow, procrastinating my own deathdrive.