THE POET AS CULT GODDESS
Maloff, Saul
THE POET AS CULT GODDESS SAUL MALOFF Sylvu Plath became a cult goddess not because she was a great poet- indeed her achievement as a poet is highly problematic-but because she committed suicide at...
...That's what it appeared to be and that's what it was: little more can be made of the life...
...She and Hughes, full of a sensed power, were driven by ambition-to make poems, to develop, to be recognized, to rise above the horde of quivering poets, their contemporaries...
...Two years later, following the whirl of the most dizzying triumph of her life to that point (the big prize itself, the Mademoiselle stint as college editor) and the subsequent crash related in the novel straight from life, Sylvia waited until she got home, the deepest recesses of home, the farthest bowels of its cellar, and crawling into it, stuffed with pills she had "saved," waited for death, only to be saved at the last minute and taken to a psychiatric hospital for extended treatment, including electric shock...
...For most of her thirty years she was the girl next door-the one who "wrote," who had talent and won prizes and went to a "good" college...
...and what might an in-authentic novel about the etcetera be...
...Yet always, she assures her mother, darkness, a temporary aberration, will soon yield to light, and is probably nothing more than one of those things, a nuisance, or a touch of her old devil, sinusitis, in the ruinous depredations of which she and her mother are great believers...
...As criticism, this is scandalous, a travesty...
...In short, he provides us with a depressing example of what can only be called classroom criticism, by which all works, "closely read" according to the ex-egetics and hermeneutics of the antiquated current academic orthodoxy, come out looking surprisingly alike, if not actually identical...
...THE POET AS CULT GODDESS SAUL MALOFF Sylvu Plath became a cult goddess not because she was a great poet- indeed her achievement as a poet is highly problematic-but because she committed suicide at an early age...
...In literature we are not inclined to press the point beyond the terms of the work itself, beyond the reaches of its metaphors...
...and it is gone just as quickly, and unaccountably, and in its stead there is its other face-utter misery...
...The small cracks in the column appear very early, and persist...
...Everything carefully excluded from the letters went into the work- as if having been nice too long she could now be horrid a while...
...In one of her more interesting and revealing letters, written from England four years later, she's back to whistling in the dark: "I am most grateful and glad," she tells her "Dearest of Mothers," "that I banged up all at once . . . for I can't tell you how my whole attitude to life has changed...
...wnting before the children wake up, under the whip of Hughes's growing reputation...
...But of course there is no way of fending off the world...
...She would be remembered by some as bitchy, manipulative, a "user" of people...
...In any case, she decides she just doesn't "care what people think about me as long as I'm always open, nice, and friendly...
...Before confessing all this to Sylvia the girl's "usual gaiety had been getting brighter and more artificial as the days went by" but now she could think of nothing better than to commit suicide, though she thought it would be "more convenient...
...I am occasionally depressed now, or discouraged, especially when I wonder about the future, but instead of fearing those low spots as the beginning of a bottomless whirlpool, I know I have already faced The Worst (total negation of self) and that having lived through that blackness, like Peer Gynt...
...in it, madness and suicide are random events, forms of tantrum, self-indulgent, excessive-so to speak, unearned...
...The least "Siwy" could be was perfect in every way- as student, as friend and companion to her widowed mother, as elder sister to her brother...
...The euphoria bursts all previous restraints...
...Causeless-uncaused-in the literary sense...
...The book yields nothing of the kind...
...each day of not-writing made me feel more scared" and adds: "I would smother if I didn't write...
...I'm living like mad," she tells her brother...
...By then, she had won a Fulbright and was embarked on a two-year stay at Cambridge...
...In the glow of her radiance we know there can be no failure, no disappointment, no grief, no death...
...The pipes froze, the tub filled with muck and slime, the flu was terrible, there was always trouble with the au pair, the children ran high fevers: nothing went right...
...Sylvia, betrayed, is furious, demonic: the emotion is akin to that reserved for her father in the famous poem...
...her dinner set cracks in half...
...Now we have a full-scale biography, and memoirs of those who knew her, and there will be further memoirs, and God help us other biographies...
...if she killed herself at home...
...and she was a girl who had everything...
...The melancholy truth is she can scarcely be said to have lived a "life" at all...
...Her smile and lilting laughter tells us the only sin is not to feel good-quite good enough, good all over...
...Nothing was so radically wrong that it couldn't be righted by another prize...
...He will reappear, of course, explosively, as "Daddy" or as a felt presence, in the late poems, to be blasted by his daughter's ferocious vengeance, loathing, maimed and thwarted love...
...The light little references to killing herself, to death, to suicide-the kind we all make and never "mean"-give way early (in 1950) to an odd strategy...
...Au-relia Plath too will appear in the work, most notably in the nasty, scurrilous portrait in The Bell Jar, and so too with everyone else who crossed her path: the novel is full of venomous little sketches...
...Weeks later she was dead...
...the reader, appalled by the flatness of narration, may even find himself thinking that had the madness and self-burial occurred before the reported antecedent events, the latter, by that device, might have assured a power and awesomeness they do not otherwise possess, though only for those acolytes most disposed to invest them with magical properties...
...But soon that too has spent itself, and the tone of the letters does not really change-it becomes more intense, more extreme, more strident, desperate, violent in the expression of its two modes, euphoria and despair...
...Earlier, she had told her mother: "I'll spend my life making you . . . proud of me...
...and she was about to meet her redeemer, Ted Hughes...
...Amid the flow of her daily life as it appears in the letters there's a vast empty space, a cemetery occupied by a single tombstone, her father's: Otto Plath is virtually never mentioned in these nearly seven hundred letters, as if by a pact between mother and daughter...
...I would have run into trouble sooner or later with my very rigid, brittle, almost hysterical tensions which split me down the middle, between inclination and inhibition, ideal and reality...
...Siwy addresses her as "Dearest - Mother - whom-I - love - better -than-anybody" in reporting her numerous triumphs...
...To do otherwise was an act of betrayal...
...The events are chronological, monochromatic, sequential...
...the girl with the magical glands who can grow from child to teenager (the word entered the vocabulary when she appeared on the historical scene, dressed in saddle shoes, cashmere sweater, pleated skirt, in the Eisenhower Fifties) to wife and mother and grandmother without ever ceasing to be a child...
...The winter of 1962-3 was dreadful, the worst in decades...
...Even her "beloved bees" attack her when she inadvertently upsets their sugar feeder...
...Now, as if sensing that time was running out, she was lashing herself against a deadline...
...From that euphoria she plummets four days later to the abyss upon seeing how much better than she are the other student-waitresses in the college dining hall...
...Bovary's suicide, say, or Karenina's, is a necessary and sufficient act-as we say: inevitable...
...No biography: the oeuvre is simply not of that magnitude by the most generous reckoning...
...She's fun...
...Above all else, she hopes she "can continue to lay more laurels at your feet," the feet of "the most wonderful mummy a girl ever had . . ." Between "supreme despair" and "dizzy joy"- the intensities and fevers of adolescent malaise between which she is always "ricocheting"-there is nothing, a blank...
...Muteness is sickness," she writes, quoting Richard Wilbur...
...I am writing," she tells her mother, "with my old fever of 101° alternating with chills back...
...and the driving engine behind all that cannibalism, or necrophilia (as opposed to its ostensible justification: the final burst of vivid poems) is the suicide and the prurient fascination it exerts upon us...
...and the least she could do was show it in everything she did and said, all the time...
...The plausible fiction of Sylvia Plath's life is transparent as a windowpane...
...Some established writers who were her teachers (Lowell, Kazin, Robert Gorham Davis) remembered her dimly, if at all-another bright Smithie, with some talent...
...there are, of course, numerous other examples of how our strange fascination with violent death overpowers our rational faculties...
...A man who can write that the book accurately characterized by Sylvia Plath as "a mere apprentice work," "a pot boiler really," is "a solid, if flawed, minor masterpiece of sardonic satire and sincere protest, an authentic American novel about the disintegration of the American Dream, comparable to Mm Lonelyhearts and The Great Gatsby, particularly the former, in direction and theme"-the man who can write such dismaying rot can tell us nothing about the novel's author either, and can make no other claim on our attention...
...and as something like a distress signal...
...What are we to make of her life...
...Chills and fever: her emotional and psychological as well as physical condition...
...Throughout the high school years she had been and done all that...
...Ecstasy-and it was a kind of ecstasy, a doomed ecstasy...
...Supreme joy is occasioned by the smallest success-a prize, a high grade, some other token of recognition...
...Gratuitous...
...Both extremes, of course, are widely incommensurate with outer circumstance...
...and two days later she tells "Mum" she can make a story of the experience and the "ending would be very positive and constructive...
...disconcertingly trite, a perfect period piece, a caricature of the American girl and woman-child, the manufactured product, milk chocolate and honey in a heart-shaped box tied with yards of pink ribbon...
...Of good art we say: life is thus and not otherwise...
...Berry-man's posthumous "novel," which is scarcely that in any sense, is another striking example of a work whose interest lies in what it tells us of the poet's harrowing battle-to-the-death with alcohol...
...unmotivated, motiveless...
...Commenting on this in a footnote, Aurelia Plath, in a moment of rarest candor, notes that the "girl" was in fact not suicidal and that "perhaps Sylvia's . . . depression was influencing her words here...
...and to her mother: "I'm so struck full of joy and love I can scarcely stop a minute from dancing, writing poems, cooking and living . . . I have written the seven best poems of my life which make the rest look like baby-talk...
...Then, after their American sojourn, and their return to England and the arrival of the children, after what is portrayed in the letters as a perfect idyll, in tones of exhilaration and high excitement-Hughes walked out for that stoned creature, the "other woman," who is never the reason why...
...She is the girl you knew you could bring home to mother and Dad...
...I am learning and mastering new words each day, and drunker than Dylan, harder than Hopkins, younger than Yeats in my saying...
...Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better, in this best of all possible worlds...
...fun to know, fun to be with, fun at a party, fun to have around...
...and some remember the bounce, energy, drive, smile, ambition, cheeriness, zip-with revulsion, as if the girl hadn't since died...
...Recognition came, but more for Hughes than for her...
...Of all people...
...Her "Prussian" father died when she was eight, and that went hard with her (though this is a treacherous lead for the amateur symptom sleuth...
...there is no middle voice...
...Edward Butscher's hideously subtitled "critical biography" (Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness, Seabury $15.95) is bad biography-trivial, gossipy, injudicious, and sodden with the vulgar-est sort of pop psychoanalysis riddled with its predictable palaver about the Oedipus complex and "Freud's pivotal father figure...
...both for a linear progression of events moving toward a fated end and for a surprising concatenation of occurrences that contains any number of conflicting possibilities but in which one, and only one, makes better "art" than the others...
...and in due course married an Englishman, had the usual two children, and after years of strenuous struggle and self-flagellating work won some modest recognition as a writer...
...Sylvia Plath's "letters home" (all save a handful written to her mother Aurora from the time she left home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, in 1950 for Sylvia Plath's "letters home" (all save death in 1963) are truly appalling...
...In Plath's schoolgirlish novel nothing is imagined...
...madness and suicide are facts like any other...
...The most melancholy truth is that there should be no "life" of Sylvia Plath-none at all, not this one, and surely no "authorized" one, which could only be a dismal exercise in family self-justification, which would be both embarrassing and wholly unnecessary...
...But all that was over now...
...Art as revenge...
...Yet when Sylvia found herself in a similar state two years later, razor blades and sleeping pills were her first thoughts...
...She smiles and smiles and smiles, a fixed expression signifying an emotional range no wider than a mouth, the American Girl as recruiting poster for immortal bliss in the here and now...
...Earlier, she had been terrified that "if I wasn't successful writing, no one would find me interesting or valuable...
...but, she says, "I need time...
...She felt, she writes, "like the princess on the glass hill" waiting for her "knight"-the role she cast Hughes in: the "extraordinary male counterpart" to herself, as her mother says-whether or not he was, as Sylvia plaintively says, the "intelligent, loving, liberal father I have always longed for...
...What, in this context, is insincere protest...
...She is our sunshine...
...Only one is necessary...
...in fact, the most glittering prizes were followed by the bleakest inner weathers...
...and her "relationship" to her mother was "ambivalent" in the standard way, a paradigm and caricature of the "sensitive," anguished adolescent and the "inadequate" parent...
...and now, thanks to her mother's sacrifices and the benefactions of a patroness, she was going to Smith, and it went without saying that a brilliant future awaited her there, and thereafter...
...and worse criticism- for Butscher, The Bell Jar is a major work of literary art, for gnostic reasons which must remain forever impenetrable to all other critics...
...Ted reads in his strong voice...
...Self-pity excepted, spite-fulness is the only powerful running feeling...
...Beneath the sugary blandness, the dark themes of madness and suicide appear in two guises: as a "way of speaking" which is deeply embedded in the general language and therefore seems "innocent" enough...
...No insight, no illumination, no irony, no following wisdom...
...the health inspector says the cottage is beyond salvation...
...She's running on sleeping pills and coffee...
...there's never a way...
...She tells her mother of being "rather worried about a friend of mine" a Smith girl in "such a state of numbness that she didn't feel any emotion except . . . this panic" and who had taken to saving sleeping pills and razor blades...
...and the life is not inherently interesting...
...B. is responsible for making me a rich, well-balanced, humorous, easy-going person, with a joy in daily life, including all its imperfections: sinus, weariness, frustration, and all those niggling things we all have to bear...
...But something was "wrong" with her, badly wrong, though you'd never know it by just looking at her...
...Certainly it released a surging flow of feeling, of poems...
...She "dated" nice boys and had the usual affairs...
...Always a prize-collector, she went right on collecting them, publishing story after story in such magazines as Seventeen until she hit the jackpot, the Mademoiselle prize: "ME...
...Her life does not lend itself to a "life...
...In life, we look for a plausible fiction...
...That she was at the time living in an alien land, bereft, desolate, sick-all these are significant components in the construction of that iconic figure-the poet as victim and martyr...
...she speaks of a "growing horror at my inarticulateness...
...Like an excess of the confection, she can be sickening...
...My whole session with Dr...
...is my best critic, as I am his...
...and so too the fact that she was the mother of two small children and had recently been abandoned by her husband, the uncommonly gifted poet Ted Hughes...
...in life, which is cumbersome, inconvenient, contrary, murky, we are at a loss to account for the complex act and settle, because we cannot tolerate uncertainty, for the season's platitudes or the casebook's compendium of clinical "causes" or, far less often, a decent reticence in the presence of mystery...
...some classmates at Smith have never quite forgiven her for walking off with all the prizes- for having "everything...
...I can enjoy life simply for what it is...
...It would have required no penetrating vision to see that all the prizes in the world would not have sufficed...
...We can construct a plausible fiction, all we need know, out of the published letters augmented by the unpublished letters, if they should ever be made available...
...In the last letter but one she ever wrote her mother, she's still dreaming of becoming a self-supporting writer...
...Mademoiselle seems quite unreal, and I am exhausted, scared, incompetent, unenergetic and generally low in spirits . . completely uprooted and clumsy...
...Her doting, demanding, purblind mother-a classic instance of the woman who reigns by "sacrificing everything" for her husband and children-got just the letters she required, as if by implicit understanding...
...Her collapse, degree by degree, following Hughes's desertion, is palpable in letter after letter, as the world presses in on her unbearably...
...Fire and ice...
...writing in a literal fever, the fever which she records in another famous poem...
...is unlimited, illimitable...
...That she was an attractive woman helped elevate her to that curious pantheon...
...the events come straight out of the life, untransfigured...
...If only she can get to London . . . From London, she writes, she is so "happy I can hardly speak," deliriously happy to be living in a house once occupied by Yeats, and she is writing the best poems of her life, the poems on which her reputation now rests...
...Countless other girls lived her life and then disappeared in the great void of American life, which would surely have been her fate had she not written, near the end, a thin sheaf of remarkable poems...
...Other elements contributed to her canonization: that her actual death seemed a literal enactment of the ritual suicide of the poems and a consummation of the earlier failed attempt which was solemnized in her posthumous novel, The Bell Jar, a novel of considerable biographical though small or no intrinsic literary interest-and hence a numinous object for undiscriminating cultists though it is really part of the juvenilia...
...It might have been otherwise, but it was not...
...and this theme appears again and again, a powerful motif in her deepest life...
Vol. 103 • June 1976 • No. 12
