Poetry and Private Lives
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing POETRY AND PRIVATE LIVES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Though reviewers continue to complain that everyone is tired of hearing about the brief, bright careers and tragic deaths of Anne...
...She missed her husband, who often was away on business, and felt confused in her role as a mother of two small girls...
...Besides, if there is one lesson we are beginning to learn from the spate of biographies, it is that she is not a person easily understood...
...He thus assumes the poet's life is an inextricable midrash on her texts...
...Like Ezra Pound, Sexton was a great encourager, unafraid of aiding those who might surpass her...
...Sexton's personal life remained chaotic, though, and mostly unhappy...
...We're talking "confessional poetry" here, where love affairs, mental breakdowns, domestic distress, and every other skeleton the emotional closet can hold become the stuff of art...
...Meanwhile her patient husband, mother and mother-in-law raised her children...
...I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night...
...Her position is not very different from that of the relentlessly private T. S. Eliot, who did everything he could to discourage readers from hunting for autobiographical confessions in his work...
...In the autumn of 1974, Sexton put on her mother's fur coat, took a glass of vodka, and went out to the garage...
...A young woman finds herself betrayed, feels she is an outcast, and commits suicide, only to return from the grave as powerful as once she was helpless...
...I suspect I am not the only reader to feel like the proverbial friend of two families blaming each other for the demise of their children's marriage...
...Middlebrook's volume has received the most attention...
...I have been her kind...
...Previous studies could only hint at some of the savagery of the breakup of Ted and Sylvia's once idyllic marriage, but the story as revealed is rather typical of the ugly turns marital strife can take...
...2) the mad genius consumed by creative fires...
...Vincent Mil-lay," but now recognized that Millay had become unfashionable...
...That is not to minimize her work...
...In Rough Magic: A Biography of Sylvia Plath (Viking, 402 pp., $24.95), Paul Alexander follows number one, with a soupcon of three for spice...
...She undoubtedly helped Plath (a fellow classmate in that Lowell workshop) break through clever imitations of accepted models into the expression of dark, powerful images...
...Of the Plath biographies done to date, Alexander's is definitely the deepest and most balanced...
...Sexton was a narcissist who shamelessly used those around her, yet she possessed an uncanny knack for inspiring lasting friendships and was capable of enormous generosity...
...As Middlebrook demonstrates, Sexton played an important role in the development of her art...
...dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: Lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind...
...Readers avidly consume the latest details as quickly as biographers supply them...
...Sexton's first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (I960), captured the attention of critics and readers alike with its vivid depictions of psychological and feminine angst, best typified by the oft-anthologized "Her Kind...
...Ronald Hayman's The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (Birch Lane Press, 235 pp., $19.95) combines a little of all three...
...Both authors are also good critics, able to give intelligent readings of the verse and prose...
...There her psychiatrist shrewdly removed her from that environment...
...Still, there is something troubling about the escalating battle between Plath and Hughes supporters...
...Diane Wood Middlebrook's Anne Sexton (Houghton Mifflin, 488 pp., $24.95) subscribes to the second...
...Near the end, Middlebrook notes, she had "the drunk's fluency, but not the artist's cunning...
...Each of a trio of recent works about these figures echoes one or more of the categories...
...Troubled childhood memories and fantasies tormented her...
...W. D. Snodgrass had just published the first confessional manifesto, Heart's Needle, and Robert Lowell, whose Boston workshop she attended, was then writing the poems that were to make up Life Studies...
...She had always considered herself "the reincarnation of Edna St...
...JL ONALD HAYMAN AND PAUL ALEXANDER'S books are the fourth and fifth exhaustive biographies of Sylvia Plath...
...In addition, both writers fit a number of classic stereotypes particular to poets: 1) the doomed youngster too sensitive to survive in a corrupt society...
...Adept at mimicry, she easily mastered current forms and emerged at the perfect time for her particular brand of self-revelation...
...Beautiful and sexy, with the hysteric's acting ability, she mesmerized audiences at readings...
...From then on her career soared off on its own broomstick: Her third book, Live or Die, won the Pulitzer in 1966...
...On a different level, I was reminded in the course of reading the three books discussed here that too much commentary on the life of a writer can be as misleading as none at all...
...She may fail to attain the prestige accorded more original writers, but her service to poetry should not be dismissed...
...But the terser account by Hayman has its strengths, too, and either would provide a good introduction to readers unfamiliar with a story that continues to be compelling...
...Hayman maintains that because we are "inevitably drawn into making connections between the words on the page and the texture of her daily life, readers need more help than they have been given" by Plath's estate...
...even Plath's diaries cannot quite let us into the secret of what she was really like...
...Biographies are to such poetry what some thought Eliot's notes to The Waste Land were—ostensible keys to its meaning...
...He tried to get at her hidden disorders and build her sense of self-worth by encouraging her to write verses about her feelings and experiences, pointing out that the poems might help those with similar emotions realize they were not alone...
...relevant to larger things, the bigger things, such as [world events...
...Is there anything new to say...
...While this is largely due to the ethical controversy stirred up over her use of transcripts from Sexton's psychiatric sessions, the book is deserving of special notice for other reasons...
...Sexton began to enroll in poetry workshops, rapidly made friends with more practiced writers, and learned something about the contemporary literary scene...
...A woman like that is not a woman, quite...
...No wonder Eliot actually used his notes to The Waste Land to deflect attention from the poem's personal references...
...Yes, both writers argue, since those who wrote before them could not avoid the censorship hitherto imposed by the estate—administered by the late poet's husband, England's current Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes...
...Read merely in the context of her life and death, Plath's writing seems superficial, too revelatory...
...Writers & Writing POETRY AND PRIVATE LIVES BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Though reviewers continue to complain that everyone is tired of hearing about the brief, bright careers and tragic deaths of Anne Sexton (1928-1974) and Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), don't you believe it...
...The author slights neither side, bringing to life a dynamic, charming, impossible woman who, despite her faults, was immensely likable...
...Even the information about Assia Wevill, the woman whose affair with Hughes engendered the separation and who later committed suicide herself, is not exactly new...
...and, in a more topical twist, 3) the female victim of patriarchal tyranny...
...My own answer would be yes, and no...
...Hayman and Alexander each wish to counteract Anne Stephenson's Bitter Fame (1989...
...In terms of our evaluation of Plath's work, does it really matter whether she killed herself because of spousal cruelty or untreatable depression...
...I can invade my own privacy,'' she declared to those shocked by her exposure of matters generally considered shameful...
...We see facets of a hidden and contradictory personality that never add up to a whole...
...In 1955 Anne Sexton, a suburban housewife whose early marriage had cut short her schooling, had no notions of a career...
...The turbulence, however, took its toll on family, friends and, eventually, even her writing...
...Middlebrook is able to capture the essence of Sexton...
...When depression led to a breakdown, she was hospitalized and diagnosed as a hysteric tending to ape the symptoms of fellow patients in her ward...
...All of this, of course, made grist for her poems...
...moreover, she frequently felt suicidal...
...I am more convinced by a quotation Alexander highlights in which the poet insists that "personal experience is very important, but certainly it should be...
...Written with the cooperation of Plath's estate, it contains her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes' contentions that Sylvia was so hopelessly neurotic, if not psychotic, she drove Ted away, and that her suicide was unavoidable given her psychological makeup...
...Critics too often shut out fresh appreciations of Sexton's and Plath's poetry by dwelling on the mythic overtones of their careers...
...The two books refute those claims quite effectively...
...She also captivated such poets as George Starbuck and James Wright (with whom she had affairs), as well as W. D. Snodgrass, Anthony Hecht, James Dickey, and C. K. Williams...
...Nonetheless, as the passing years provide a greater perspective on Plath's verse, it continues to look strong, while Sexton's sounds dated—the product of a dead-end movement that, like Imagism or Beat Poetry, has lost its momentum...
...The lives of Sexton and Plath inspire fascination in part because they follow a fairy-tale pattern...
...Sitting in the seat of her red Cougar, listening to the radio, she asphyxiated herself in a last gesture that mixed pathos and showmanship...
...Her psychiatrist was right: She did possess the ability to show others how universal private emotions can be...
...Plath was surely disturbed, yet no more than many young people who manage to adjust...
...Gone are the days when the New Criticism loftily assured us that writers' lives were immaterial to their work...
...Middlebrook is the first to detail the poet's life in a full-length study, and she has done so comprehensively and compassionately...
Vol. 75 • February 1992 • No. 2
