Dillard and Plath Growing Up
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing DILLARD AND PLATH GROWING UP BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL AN Nie Dillard's concern as a writer is to recreate experience as we feel it within ourselves—not as conventionally...
...It chronicles her growing up in Pittsburgh during the 1950s...
...Because this recognition of our self-consciousness, our invincible innocence in bumbling through the world is as American as Emerson, Henry James, Jack Kerouac, Buster Keaton, Grade Allen...
...It is high time to take a fresh look at her poems, and put her story on hold...
...An American Childhood (Harper &Row, 255 pp., $17.95) is Dillard's sixth book, and to me her most satisfying work since Pilgrim...
...Onesimply comes away with the impression that Plath's psyche was too fragile to withstand much reality...
...Surely, too, a literary biography should pay more attention to what Plath studied, what books she read...
...In the 1960s, she was considered a revolutionary artist, crushed by a conventional establishment too timid to appreciate her "confessional" poetry...
...Most childhood autobiographies are told from a nostalgic perspective, as if the adult were looking backward through time toward the younger self approaching the present...
...Our parents would sooner have left us out of Christinas than leave us out of a joke," Dillard relates...
...Dillard is interested in the way a child goes from living entirely in the present to developing the reflectiveness that makes both memory and anticipation possible...
...Twentieth-century wisdom has made us too sophisticated to bother with metaphysical conundrums, having taught us such speculations are futile...
...The role of straight man has also been Dillard's stock-in-trade as a writer...
...Up to now, Dillard has been the only real character in her books...
...This is all the more regrettable because Wagner-Martin does not lack critical gifts...
...Her discussion of The Bell Jar illuminates the novel's indebtedness to Catcher in the Rye, pointing out that many of its incidents are not autobiographical but are intended as an homage to Salinger's work—including the lesbian episode that recently featured in a well-publicized libel case...
...Although sympathetic, Wagner-Martin characterizes Plath as a narcissist who never quite managed to outgrow a star's conviction that other people existed as her supporting actors...
...On the one hand, the biographer sees the young poet's neurotic perfectionism driving her toward the brink despite love and support from family and friends...
...she played the part of an innocent abroad in the cosmos...
...the Adlai Stevenson committed liberal...
...Hughes' literary role in Plath's life gets short shrift, even if WagnerMartin does convey disapproval of his suggesting subjects for Plath to write about on the grounds that he thus repressed her true voice for a while...
...But Pilgrim was not a naturalist's field journal...
...Dillard behaved as though no one ever told her that...
...Is the universe indifferent to us...
...When we got the first Tom Lehrer album in 1954...
...She recalls noticing, as a very young girl, how loosely adult skin hangs compared to the taut epidermis of children (something most of us had forgotten...
...An occasional child has encountered her on a footpath or entered her meditations—as with the overly symbolic "Julie Norwich" of Holy the Firm (1977...
...Dillard does not try to formulate a statement about generations by trotting out evocative cultural tags: what it felt like to dance the Charleston, survive the Depression, go to war, dig rock-and-roll...
...Ostensibly it recorded the cycle followed throughout a year by nature—the trees, pond creatures, birds, the slant of the sunlight—around the author's home in rural southwest Virginia...
...Unfortunately, little new or significant is said about Plath's poetic development or her poems themselves...
...No doubt a more enlightening biography will come along eventually, assuming the poetry wears well...
...She remembers that to a five-, six- or seven-year old, sidewalks, alleys and yards are as full of awe and excitement as mountains, rivers and woodlands to an adult...
...With the more recent revival of Romanticism, many critics—men and women—have studied her indebtedness to the English poetic tradition, praised her craftsmanship, and tried to dissociate readings of her work from the sensational drama of her brief life...
...These two interpretations might with skill have been dovetailed, but here they seem toclash...
...In fact, Wagner-Martin was unable to obtain permission to quote Plath's journals and letters at length, yet I doubt this contributed to the weakness of the book she has produced—thestory of an American golden girl done to death by fantasy...
...Her interests are both simpler and less obvious: "What does it feel like to be alive...
...Writers & Writing DILLARD AND PLATH GROWING UP BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL AN Nie Dillard's concern as a writer is to recreate experience as we feel it within ourselves—not as conventionally described from the outside...
...Plath showed greater cleverness than most of her interpreters when she claimed it was only "light verse"—an ironic statement about the psychoanalytic imagery that controlled her life...
...They sound like Nick and Nora Charles...
...Eliot...
...Loving...
...Instead, we hear a rehash about the influence of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, and their breakdowns, and the familiar recap of psychobiographical verses such as "Electra on Azalea Path" and "Lady Lazarus...
...Her husband, Ted Hughes, now England's poet-laureate, controls her estate, and has not cared to encourage the use of himself and their children as characters in someone else's book...
...Linda W. Wagner-Martin's Sylvia Plath (Simon and Schuster, 282 pp., $18.95) stands as something of a throwback in the light of the latest trend...
...Surprisingly, given all that has been written about Plath's career and personal tragedies, it is only the second full-length biography to date, and the first to have had access to her journals...
...Different eras have studied her as a mirror of their own concerns...
...She still does things like that as a writer...
...Why the title...
...A? A merican Childhoodprovides a parable as one kind of answer...
...nor was it a pastoral exercise...
...her husband, Gary, turned up briefly in one of the essays in Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982...
...By the '70s, she had become the archetypal feminist, lashing back at the patriarchal literary world...
...But so long as Plath is portrayed as a symbol of her age, her work will continue to be read as a gloss on her tragedy, and she will emerge as the 20th-century equivalent of the Victorian poet L.E.L...
...Rather, it portrayed Dillard's quest for answers to ultimate questions: Why are we here...
...Who could ever tire of this heart-stopping transition, of this breakthrough shift between seeing and knowing you see, between being and knowing you be...
...An American Childhood, though, introduces her parents: a father who quit his executive job to take a boat down the great rivers to New Orleans in imitation of Mark Twain, a mother who told her, "With your taste for natural disaster, you should try to arrange a marriage with the head of the International Red Cross...
...Sylvia Plath wanted badly to embody the spirit of her times, however contradictory: the feminine ideal of Ladies' Home Journal...
...From then on, the angry poems she wrote before her death have attracted readers so strongly that her writings have received the kind of reverent, hagiographical attention once accorded to the works of T.S...
...but mostly she has appeared alone, because the life of the mind is solitary or peopled through what one reads...
...Remembering jokes was a moral obligation...
...Wagner-Martin's failure raises the question of whether it may be too early to see Sylvia Plath's life in perspective...
...Increasingly, as I read Plath and what has been written about her, it seems to me that both her life and her writing suffered from vulgarized Freudian notions, which permeated the culture of the '40s and '50s...
...This biography emphasizes Plath's identity as a writer," Wagner-Martin insists...
...People who said, ? can never remember jokes,' were like people who said obliviously, ? can never remember names, or ? don't bathe.'" The invaluable lesson Dillard and her two sisters absorbed was that "The straight man's was an honorable calling, a bit like that of the rodeo clown: despised by the ignorant masses, perhaps, but revered among experts who understood the skills required and the risks run...
...An American Childhood centers around vignettes illustrating the dawning awareness of self, surroundings, others, and especially time—which creeps so slowly when we are children and (hen begins to accelerate, until by middle age we feel il racing like a runaway horse...
...She remains most closely associated with her first book, Pilgrim al Tinker Creek (1974...
...They explained a joke to us while they were still laughing at it: They tore astili kicking joke apart, so we could see how it worked...
...On the other hand, as a feminist Wagner-Martin wants to believe that Plath's self-image was destroyed by the 1950s' warped image of women...
...Besides, too many survivors have feelings to be spared...
...Does our suffering serve some purpose...
...Plath's unresolved conflicts repeat themselves in WagnerMartin's own aims...
...When small, she used to bury a penny, leave clues leading to the spot, and wait, bursting with excitement, for someone to discover her hidden treasure...
...Malign...
...Her insatiable ambition to excel at everything drove her to unreasonable expectations, followed by depressions when she felt she had failed...
...Mother went through the album with me, cut by cut, explaining...
...Over and over, she paints herself as naive, overenthusiastic, dense about catching on to the joke she set up for her readers...
...Her good looks, poise and "responsiveness" to people from whom she wanted to learn masked this to a degree, we are told, but those closest to her found themselves alternately cast in the role of savior and betrayer...
...the bohemian rebel against society...
...This, of course, was the best possible training for upper-middle class manners—learning to offer a friend "a gift-wrapped, beribboned gag line he can claim for his own, if only he will pick it up instead of pausing to contemplate what a nitwit he's talking to...
...Unable to reconcile herself to life, she committed suicide in 1962, at 30...
...And will a generation less obsessed with the Oedipus complex find the poem "Daddy" as magnetically powerful...
...No wonder there lies such a gulf between her hard-working, concerned parents and the monstrous caricatures of them in her writing...
...Poems take flight from other poems, not from whom the poet got drunk with or invited to dinner...
Vol. 70 • November 1987 • No. 16
