The Voices of Sylvia Plath
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
On Poetry THE VOCES OF SYLVIA PLATH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL OUTLINING A NOVEL she never finished about a young American woman living in England in the mid-1950s, Sylvia Plath wrote a note to...
...Quite a few of these were taken from preliminary observations in the journals...
...The minutely described external world often allowed her to summon a feeling—usually of panic and emptiness—through the back door as it were...
...This is what she finally did achieve, after a long and painful labor...
...When the fury abated, she seems to have again turned in on herself: Six days before her suicide she wrote in "Contusion," "The heart shuts,/The sea slides back,/The mirrors are sheeted...
...After her first suicide attempt, a recovered Plath threw herself even more voraciously at life...
...Yet all this merely raised her old nemesis...
...Her outlook was limited to one not always mature perspective at a time...
...They admired each other's work, and he inspired her first mature poems...
...my writing, my desire to be many lives...
...The earliest entries, though full of schoolgirl philosophizing, are obsessed with Plath's perennial concern—the relationship between life and art...
...The existing journals confirm our impression, however, that anger liberated her writing...
...Plath understood her own mythic potential, once to the wishful extent of dreaming that Marilyn Monroe was her fairy-godmother...
...And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence...
...Now that Plath's poetry has been around for nearly two decades, she may be assessed more fairly than heretofore...
...On Poetry THE VOCES OF SYLVIA PLATH BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL OUTLINING A NOVEL she never finished about a young American woman living in England in the mid-1950s, Sylvia Plath wrote a note to herself in her diary concerning the autobiographical heroine: "Make her enigmatic: who is that blond girl: she is a bitch: she is the white goddess...
...I will be a little god in my own small way...
...One encounters this sketchy protagonist in The Journals of Sylvia Plath (Dial, 361 pp., $16.95) with a shock of recognition, for she is the surprising voice that controls the poems of Ariel...
...The main flaw of the early work is the absence of a firm voice...
...She may remain for us an enigmatic person, an archetype of the doomed poet, but her voice will continue to be heard...
...The Journals confirm that her subjects picked her long before she had the experience to choose them...
...Hughes believes that throughout her life Plath was consumed by "a craving to strip away everything from some ultimate intensity, some communion with spirit, or with reality, or simply with intensity itself...
...The Journals cover the years 1951-62, from the time Plath entered college to just after the Hugheses decided to leave their jobs in America and resettle permanently in England...
...Now, to round out the portrait of this still elusive woman, he has edited The Journals...
...The selections culled by Hughes (roughly one third of the material extant, according to co-editor Frances McCullough) have been chosen mostly for the light they cast on her poetic apprenticeship...
...Make her a statement of the generation...
...The almost mystical process of regeneration, conveyed so vividly through the poetry, has been the source of her immediate appeal to many readers (especially women) who identify with the elemental emotions she expressed...
...Hughes destroyed one, and the other disappeared...
...Blackberrying," for example, twists down an enclosed lane where nature is both beautiful and repulsive, to an unexpected hill above the sea "That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space/Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths/Beating and beating at an intractable metal...
...nonetheless, it was technically superior to most college efforts and concerned pretty much the same themes as her subsequent poetry...
...So I am not worth the really good boys____If my poems were really good, there might be somechance, but until I make something tight and riding over the limits of sweet sestinas and sonnets, away from the reflection of myself in [a boyfriend's] eyes, and the inevitable narrow bed, too small for a smashing act of love, until then they can ignore me and make up pretty jokes...
...For someone who spent much of her time trying to satisfy the expectations of others, this was a daring request, terrifyingly answered in the last few months of her life...
...So it is reasonable to suggest that the collapse of her marriage released the voice of the abused daughter of "Daddy," the vengeful harpy of "Lady Lazarus," the abandoned mother of "By Candlelight...
...The second time she attempted suicide, at age 31, she succeeded...
...The child of German immigrants, she attended Smith on a scholarship, won all sorts of literary prizes, received a Ful-bright to study in England, made the perfect marriage with a brilliant young British poet, and had two beautiful children...
...The unconventional part was her refusal to compromise: She wanted everything at once, no matter how incompatible her desires...
...A skeptic might wonder how often poems actually win strong men...
...He has not always received the credit he deserves for his work as Plath's editor (that it must have been a painful task is evident from the length of time it has taken The Collected Poems and The Journals to appear...
...On the dark side, she suffered from a self-destroying, schizophrenic perfectionism that drove her relentlessly and led her to reject her triumphs...
...Seen objectively, she was a gifted lyricist at every stage of her career, who wrote a handful of unforgettable poems right before the end...
...No doubt this is why during her marriage to Hughes, when she was still groping painfully toward a true self, many of her best poems were landscape word-paintings...
...The Moon and the Yew Tree," after serenely invoking the clouds "flowering blue and mystical over the face of the stars," concludes bleakly, "The moon sees nothing of this...
...She dyed her hair platinum, devoured boyfriends like chocolates, played the American coed abroad to the hilt in England, and continued to write prize-winning verse...
...THE PUBLICATION of diaries is a dubious business—they can be boring, inchoate, too intimate, or cruel (Plath, for instance, frequently caricatured her friends, made catty remarks, or recorded her private grievances against family members...
...Plath kept diaries from childhood until her death in 1963...
...Critics need no longer be put off by Saint Sylvia/Bitch Goddess, a figure first mockingly created by her, then seized upon with deadly earnestness by her worshippers...
...But the very night after this entry was made she met Ted Hughes for the first time at a wild literary party...
...We can only guess, therefore, at the means of the ultimate transformation that allowed Plath to write the poems of Ariel and Winter Trees...
...How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print...
...They were married four months later...
...Writing of a pen pal she has never met, she effuses, "I love you because you are me...
...Although these are strong, somber poems, they still represent an inhibition of Plath'strue gift...
...She felt the need " to sacrifice everything to the new birth," says Hughes...
...Still, at her best she conveyed feelings of chaos with a sense of absolute mastery and control few can equal...
...In late 1981 her husband, Ted Hughes, finally published her Collected Poems—the work from her four books of verse, plus all the mature uncollected poems and 50 examples of juvenalia...
...high polish stifles emotional immediacy...
...the making and remaking of herself...
...But 1 think Hughes was fully justified in giving us "the daily struggle of her warring selves...
...Which is you...
...Her poetry drew its images from the mythology of the era, exploring such themes as the Freudian family drama ("Electra on Azel-ea Path," "Medusa," "Daddy"), ritual mother-goddesses ("The Moon and the Yew Tree," "Lady Lazarus"), the woman fulfilled through sex and childbearing ("Two Sisters of Persephone," "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "Nick and the Candlestick"), and the competitive bitchery as well as the repressed fury against living in a man's shadow ("Lesbos," "Purdah," the cutting "Kindness...
...Shortly after her October 1962 separation, Plath became possessed with a manic spell of creativity and, in Hughes' words, "it was as if a dumb person suddenly spoke...
...The negative phase of it, logically, is suicide...
...Some reviewers have criticized the number of omissions and ellipses in the text, yet rarely have I seen such a sensitive or tasteful presentation of diaries that were, after all, the most secret thoughts of their author...
...She is bald and wild...
...Grub-white mulberries redden under leaves," she noted sarcastically in the midst of a self-loathing tirade against her tendency to efface herself in groups...
...Unfortunately, we do not have the last two diaries Plath kept...
...But the positive phase (more familiar in religious terms) is the death of the old false self in the birth of the new real one...
...In 1959, near the end of The Journals, and just before another one of her poetic metamorphoses, she prayed "To be true to my own weird-ness...
...Her journals, in common with her poems, testify to a progression of startling transformations...
...she dreamed of a satisfying career in some prestigious field...
...As with the nymph stages of some insect who breaks through the dried up husk into a shining metamorphosis, so Plath cast aside one style for another that suddenly seemed more authentic—sometimes with violence to herself and others...
...she longed to become a successful writer published in all the right places, from the New Yorker to the high-paying women's magazines...
...Plath's goals tended to be the conventional ones: She sought fulfilment in devotion to her man and children...
...Plath certainly set out to be an archetype...
...How can I tell [a current boyfriend] that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper...
...Plath despised her juvenalia...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 10
