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persephonora's review against another edition
5.0
Truly stunning. Clark's pacing is incredible, I couldn't put it down (and it's a heavy book). Red Comet is such a comprehensive biography, as Clark had access to materials that previous biographers have not. Sylvia Plath has had a mythology around her since her death, and Clark dispels the reductive or romanticized narratives around her, painting a balanced portrait of an ambitious, prescient, and at times contradictory artist. She challenges the label "confessional," highlighting Plath's exploration of political and cultural themes through a focus on personal and domestic experiences. I was struck by Clark's ability to thread literary analysis of Plath's works (as well as larger literary movements, through her account of Plath's life) while avoiding the narrative that Plath could only write autobiographically. I highly recommend this book. It is illuminating and never dull.
maryncemetery's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
maryclaire92's review against another edition
challenging
informative
slow-paced
5.0
Admittedly I did not know much about Plath, but one 45 hour-long audiobook later and I want to read all of her work. A very in depth, yet empathetic look at Sylvia Plath’s life and how a very of factors shaped her work and personal struggles.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, and Mental illness
Moderate: Miscarriage, Pregnancy, Death of parent, Forced institutionalization, Infertility, and Infidelity
Minor: Cancer, Abortion, and Antisemitism
madeleinegeorge's review
5.0
Sylvia Plath's loss is inestimable to the world of literature; it can never be calculated, redeemed, or understood. In her 30 years, she managed to break through and reestablish more scholarly and creative bounds than most will ever understand in a lifetime. And Heather Clark's Red Comet , Pulitzer finalist, certainly stands up to the task of studying her brilliant life and unparalleled oeuvre.
In an analog century of letters, journals, and paper trails extending well into the psyche of each character, Clark paints a wonderfully complex portrait of Sylvia's life; letters and journals from Plath herself are peppered throughout, from her earliest elementary school days to some of her last correspondence. Acceptance and rejection letters from major publishers, Smith College assignments from both her student and professor days, first drafts of poems, interview transcripts, court orders-- she has expertly compiled lifetimes' worth of material to frame and enhance each movement of the narrative. Sylvia's voice has never spoken more clearly through the decades as it does here. The staggering, electric verse in Ariel and the classic American cadence of The Bell Jar serve as stunted substitutes for the full sound of her character, the serious urgency of her story, and the glorious, aching, triumphant, unbridled, brutalizing hours of her short, short life.
If you read any book this year, this summer, this lifetime, let it be Red Comet . Reading it is one of the most rewarding literary experiences I have ever had the pleasure of embarking upon; and, with the physical heft of the book and the psychic weight of the narrative, it certainly defines itself more accurately as a journey in and of itself.
Sylvia Plath was not a perfect person: here, unlike any conception before, her scathing derision of childless wives and acidic disdain for single women betray a latent misogyny that was likely as much a product of her time as her own insecurities. Journals reveal the scathing excoriation of others she was capable of, an occurrence that others note in their interactions with her. She was intense, anxious, and largely conducted her life on an emotional and intellectual plane that was far above the heads of those who surrounded her; this was as isolating as it was brilliant. She was also, as her friends, family, and colleagues all have to say of her, funny -- bright, and radiantly happy; she sunbathed for hours, believing sunshine to be a critical antidote to melancholy, was an excellent conversationalist both at high-end literary salons in London and college parties alike. She loved brandy and long walks on the beach and road trips. The poet has captivated and stunned audiences for decades, she has been upheld as a feminst icon, an exacting and demanding voice for the urgent consequences of mental illness, and one of the most poetically accomplished writers in the English language. Reading Clark's biography cracks this image wide open, revealing the woman, the artist, the mother, the girl, the poet as a whole and dynamic character. Understanding the nuances of the world she was engaged in, the people she knew, places she went, and circles she ran in expertly colors in the empty margins of her fiction and her poetry, leading us to a complete understanding of the circumstances of her life and times as they continued to shift around her.
On the matter of Ted Hughes: I think he gets entirely too much attention when regarding Plath's professional and personal story. However, it serves to mimic the role that Hughes himself played in her life. He had the unimaginable and exceedingly rare privilege to be loved by one of the greatest American minds; his destruction of the relationship was graceless and fickle. Plath adored him for his writing, his mind, their magnetic connection with each other and the muse-like roles they cultivated within their marriage. She loved him as only a poet could-- only as a woman with the emotional depth and intellectual generosity of a Great Writer could-- she did not love halfway, or in moderation. Her love for Hughes was the beating heart of her work and the metronome of her days; he became her world, and she his, and together they built what is perhaps the greatest literary union the world has known. In the end, however, her brilliance mattered very little to Hughes, it seems, whose wandering (if irrational) fear of domestic entrapment and desire for a peripatetic lifestyle overcame his marital and paternal responsibilities. Like all fathers, parental duty was something he could walk away from: and he did. Plath did not have this option. However, despite all of these things-- I do not think he is evil, a cancer, an anti-Midas, doom and damnation to every woman he touches; those labels give him far too much divine stock. I do, however, think him a remarkably callous and unthinking person, a reckless and failed husband and partner, and a cruel, faithless man.
The fatal cocktail of prescription antidepressant and antipsychotic medications she was on at the time of her death is, surprisingly, still in frequent use today (minus the cocaine); it is extremely effective for severe and chronic Major Depressive Disorder, as well as Seasonally Affective Disorder. However life-saving it may be, we now know the brutal effect that the combination can create; 21st century patients typically undergo a week of suicide watch, as well as blood-pressure, appetite, and heartrate monitoring to make it through the potentially fatal transitional phase of biological adaptation to the prescription. Plath was put through a whiplash-inducing cycle of all kinds of prescriptions, with none of the medical knowledge we have today, nor the emotional support system that is so often essential to the efficacy of the drugs.
To approach the end of this tome is to dig your heels in, to wince at every last , to hope beyond hope that the story will end differently, though we know from the outset that it will not. That is what the disease of M.D.D. does: it robs and it devastates. It is tortuous to imagine what might have happened if any one facet of her last weeks had been different. If the hospital had had an open bed on Friday instead of proposing she wait until Monday. If her downstairs neighbor had not been home the night before to assure Sylvia that he would be there in the morning, presumably to assist in rescuing her children. If her American psychiatrist had not postponed coming to her aid, falsely reassured by letters that would be Sylvia's last. If the new au pair had not been available that final morning, if she could not have had the assurance that Frieda and Nicholas would be found, and quickly. If Trevor Thomas had believed her when she told him, on the last time he would see her alive, that she was going to die, that she was going to die and she was frightened and wanted his assurance that her children would be looked after; if he hadn't been baffled by his own lack of understanding, letting her walk away into the dark. If the Beckers had realized she left her spare set of keys with them after dinner and they had followed her to return them instead of deciding to wait until morning. If the letter from St George's Hospital had not gotten lost in the post. If George Macbeth had more clearly articulated the BBC's interest in her work continued outside of how it related to her husband's. If the workers at her building had turned off the gas to prepare for their scheduled maintenance on the building that day. If the visiting nurse had arrived earlier, smelling the gas and breaking the seal on the kitchen. If any one of her many friends, colleagues, family members, and professional acquaintances had managed to reach out to her in those final weeks, as she increasingly isolated herself. If those she had seen had acted upon their impression that something wasn't right, instead of simply noting it and using it as fodder for gossip. If she had been born ten years later, advancing the medical bounds of knowledge and sidestepping the fatally misunderstood combination of prescriptions she had been given.
If any one single person near her had realized, truly, the deep and excruciating grip her disease had on her and refused to leave her side until the darkness receded. There are a million versions of the story of her life in which she doesn't die, alone, early in the morning as the sun comes up, on February 11th. There is only one where she does; and it is the one we have.
A consuming biography and a brilliant work of research, analysis, and explication, Clark dominates the contemporary world of nonfiction with this powerful masterpiece. Unending gratitude is due to her for her delicate attention to detail, her deft use of original sources, her wonderful composition of chronology and legacy, and her beautiful, redemptive portrait of this amazing artist. She is an exacting critic of Plath's poetry, and her analysis of her entire body of work is complex, generous, and stunning in its erudition. Clark is usurped in her work and her dedication perhaps only by Plath herself.
One of the best books I have ever had the good privilege of reading.
Essentials:
Ted Hughes: "If SP and I managed to get through it all, it was because for crucial years we defended each other, we were a sufficient world to each other: our poetic folie á deux saved us from being isolated, surrounded, and eliminated. I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search."
The origins of her art were not rooted in trauma or supplication, but in confidence, pleasure, and self-satisfaction. Writing was not something Sylvia did to please others, but to please herself-- as necessary as breathing, as she would later remark in a 1962 interview.
SP: "I need so to love a person-- be it girl or boy, friend or enemy. And without being able to, I sort of dry up." Sylvia would at times feel pressure to neutralize her passionate personality to avoid alienating potential friends and dates.
1944, twelve years old: In the coming years, she would fight an increasingly sinister opponent as she matured into a world that seemed to reflect the dark paranoia of her worst sleepless night. Both Plath and the nation were moving toward a different kind of war, one in which the enemy was hidden, out of reach, but armed with an arsenal of annihilation.
SP, 1947: "Perhaps I was doomed always to be on the outside."
SP, 1950, high school graduation: "I will very soon be old," she wrote in her scrapbook. [...] Her usual broad smile was missing, her celebratory, optimistic outlook muted. Half her life was already over.
Sylvia was compassionate toward others but bore herself little mercy. She often mistook her depression for weak-willed complaint.
SP, diary, Freshman year at Smith: My world falls apart, crumbles, 'The center does not hold.' … I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; [...] I can see ahead only into dark, sordid alleys, where the dregs, the sludge, the filth of my life lies, unglorified, unchanged-- transfigured by nothing: no nobility, not even the illusion of a dream.
SP, diary, freshman year at Smith: I am beyond help. No one here has time to probe, to aid me in understanding myself… so many others are worse off than I. How can I selfishly demand help, solace, guidance? No, it is my own mess [...] I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else's shoulder. Masks are the order or the day-- and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair.
SP, letter to Phil McCurdy: "If we could be clairvoyant and see the date of our own door, the bloodclot in the vein of our existence-- how differently we might proportion our time… and yet, perhaps all one can do is go on and on 'making the best of a bad job' … and loving life the more for its individual ephemeral quality."
SP, letter to Gordon Lameyer, 1954: "... but I want to do just that… to keep on learning and thinking and feeling intensely even if it hurts like hell."
SP, letter to Mel Woody, 1954: " the cataclysmic downward gyre I plummeted to symbolic death in last summer, when the center did not hold because there was none, or rather (as your wrote) too many, has given me an understanding of the black and sustained hells a mind can go through… and the enormous insulated loneliness when you feel that no human hand or love could reach you or move you."
January, 1956: (in a letter to Aurelia) "I sometimes despair of ever finding anyone who is so strong in soul and so utterly honest and careful of me," she wrote the night before she met Ted Hughes. She longed to find a "strong" man who could "match" her own strength, who would not be intimidated by her talent and accomplishments, someone who would create art alongside her.
February, 1956: (from SP's journal) "The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: to, to give myself, crashing, fighting, to you. The one man since I've lived"
Letter to SP from Olive Prouty, her long-time benefactor: "Sometime write me a little poem that isn't intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes."
SP, in lecture notes to her class, Smith College 1958: "DEATH IS ONE OF THE MOST MOVING & TROUBLING EXPERIENCES OF LIFE: DEATH-IN-LIFE IS ONE OF THE MOST TERRIBLE STATES OF EXISTENCE: NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM, become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs: Be Right or Wrong, don't be indifferent, do be NOTHING."
Ruth Beutscher, long-time psychiatrist and friend: "[Her suicide attempt] had been an accusation that her love was defective… if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing."
Ted Hughes, for the BBC's Poets in Partnership : "Two people who are sympathetic to each other… who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way, they in fact make up one person, they make up one source of power which you both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from this single shared mind. And I'm sure that this is certainly a source of a great deal of my poetry."
David Compton, on Ted and Sylvia, 1962: "They were always so, so aware of the significance of things. Everything in life was large and important… they lived an exhausting intellectual and emotional life because they cared. [...] It was not hard to be swept away by this intense, erudite couple. I was enormously aware that I was touching the hem of greatness."
SP, journal, summer 1962: "I feel ugly and a fool, when I have so long felt beautiful & capable of being a wonderful happy mother and wife and writing novels for fun & money. I am now just sick."
SP, in conversation with Elizabeth Compton, ibid. : "I gave my heart to Ted. If he doesn't want it, I can't take it back. It's just gone."
Aurelia Plath, in a letter to Warren, July 1962: "I am just holding on to my belief that we each have to live out our many lives in as much dignity & carefulness as possible."
SP to Ruth Beutscher, September 22, 1962: "My sense of myself, my inner dignity and creative heart won't have it… I think when I am free of him my own sweet life will come back to me, bare and sad in a lot of places, but my own, and sweet enough."
Plath's symmetrical, five-lined stanzas just contain the rage expressed within them. [...] Only love deeply felt causes such pain. "Daddy" may appear a dead end of vengeance, but it is nakedly vulnerable. The speaker has been damaged, and the effort to turn her weakness into strength may falter. Plath never reveals whether she admires or pities this little girl lost, wailing for retribution.
SP to Olive Prouty, October, 1962: "I shall forge my writing out of these difficult experiences-- to have known the bottom, whether mental or emotional, is a great trial, but also a great gift."
Al Alverez, 1962: Alvarez wrote: "Suicide, in short, was not a swoon into death… it was something to be felt in the nerve-ends and fought against, an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own." Her poetry, he felt, had finally become true to "the forces that really moved her: destructive, volatile, demanding, a world apart from everything she had been trained to admire… She turned anger, implacability, and her roused, needle-sharp sense of trouble into a kind of celebration."
January-February 1963: Without the patronage of Hughes or, now, Alvarez, Plath's social capital dissolved. Friends remember her during this time as gratingly effusive, desperately lonely, a subject of gossip, a burden. Jillian Becker felt that at the very end of Sylvia's life she was "isolated and denigrated".
SP to Ruth Beutscher, February 4, 1963 (their last correspondence): "I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death. [...] I am scared to death I shall just pull up the psychic shroud and give up. A poet, a writer, I am I think very narcissistic & despair. Just now I feel is torture for me to dress, plan meals, put one foot in front of the other. [...] I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossibles to me, I am incapable of being myself & loving myself."
SP's triple literary dictum (as told to Aurelia): First: The manipulation of experience Second: Fusion of characters (creation of composite characters Third: Her firm belief that "art was a rearrangement of truth"
Epilogue: Sylvia Plath sought always the light of the mind. That light was her lodestar in the face of depression, when all went "cold and planetary." She tried to feed this clarion flame with literature, art, philosophy, drama, travel, love-- anything to prevent its extinguishment. Plath told friends that it was the final dimming of that light, the threat of exile from her own person, that had led to her first attempt in 1953.
Postscript: If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.
P.S. I do not feel particularly bad about writing such a long review: reading this book mattered to me in a way that little else has this year. and it's like a billion pages long, so-- seems fitting
In an analog century of letters, journals, and paper trails extending well into the psyche of each character, Clark paints a wonderfully complex portrait of Sylvia's life; letters and journals from Plath herself are peppered throughout, from her earliest elementary school days to some of her last correspondence. Acceptance and rejection letters from major publishers, Smith College assignments from both her student and professor days, first drafts of poems, interview transcripts, court orders-- she has expertly compiled lifetimes' worth of material to frame and enhance each movement of the narrative. Sylvia's voice has never spoken more clearly through the decades as it does here. The staggering, electric verse in Ariel and the classic American cadence of The Bell Jar serve as stunted substitutes for the full sound of her character, the serious urgency of her story, and the glorious, aching, triumphant, unbridled, brutalizing hours of her short, short life.
If you read any book this year, this summer, this lifetime, let it be Red Comet . Reading it is one of the most rewarding literary experiences I have ever had the pleasure of embarking upon; and, with the physical heft of the book and the psychic weight of the narrative, it certainly defines itself more accurately as a journey in and of itself.
Sylvia Plath was not a perfect person: here, unlike any conception before, her scathing derision of childless wives and acidic disdain for single women betray a latent misogyny that was likely as much a product of her time as her own insecurities. Journals reveal the scathing excoriation of others she was capable of, an occurrence that others note in their interactions with her. She was intense, anxious, and largely conducted her life on an emotional and intellectual plane that was far above the heads of those who surrounded her; this was as isolating as it was brilliant. She was also, as her friends, family, and colleagues all have to say of her, funny -- bright, and radiantly happy; she sunbathed for hours, believing sunshine to be a critical antidote to melancholy, was an excellent conversationalist both at high-end literary salons in London and college parties alike. She loved brandy and long walks on the beach and road trips. The poet has captivated and stunned audiences for decades, she has been upheld as a feminst icon, an exacting and demanding voice for the urgent consequences of mental illness, and one of the most poetically accomplished writers in the English language. Reading Clark's biography cracks this image wide open, revealing the woman, the artist, the mother, the girl, the poet as a whole and dynamic character. Understanding the nuances of the world she was engaged in, the people she knew, places she went, and circles she ran in expertly colors in the empty margins of her fiction and her poetry, leading us to a complete understanding of the circumstances of her life and times as they continued to shift around her.
On the matter of Ted Hughes: I think he gets entirely too much attention when regarding Plath's professional and personal story. However, it serves to mimic the role that Hughes himself played in her life. He had the unimaginable and exceedingly rare privilege to be loved by one of the greatest American minds; his destruction of the relationship was graceless and fickle. Plath adored him for his writing, his mind, their magnetic connection with each other and the muse-like roles they cultivated within their marriage. She loved him as only a poet could-- only as a woman with the emotional depth and intellectual generosity of a Great Writer could-- she did not love halfway, or in moderation. Her love for Hughes was the beating heart of her work and the metronome of her days; he became her world, and she his, and together they built what is perhaps the greatest literary union the world has known. In the end, however, her brilliance mattered very little to Hughes, it seems, whose wandering (if irrational) fear of domestic entrapment and desire for a peripatetic lifestyle overcame his marital and paternal responsibilities. Like all fathers, parental duty was something he could walk away from: and he did. Plath did not have this option. However, despite all of these things-- I do not think he is evil, a cancer, an anti-Midas, doom and damnation to every woman he touches; those labels give him far too much divine stock. I do, however, think him a remarkably callous and unthinking person, a reckless and failed husband and partner, and a cruel, faithless man.
The fatal cocktail of prescription antidepressant and antipsychotic medications she was on at the time of her death is, surprisingly, still in frequent use today (minus the cocaine); it is extremely effective for severe and chronic Major Depressive Disorder, as well as Seasonally Affective Disorder. However life-saving it may be, we now know the brutal effect that the combination can create; 21st century patients typically undergo a week of suicide watch, as well as blood-pressure, appetite, and heartrate monitoring to make it through the potentially fatal transitional phase of biological adaptation to the prescription. Plath was put through a whiplash-inducing cycle of all kinds of prescriptions, with none of the medical knowledge we have today, nor the emotional support system that is so often essential to the efficacy of the drugs.
To approach the end of this tome is to dig your heels in, to wince at every last , to hope beyond hope that the story will end differently, though we know from the outset that it will not. That is what the disease of M.D.D. does: it robs and it devastates. It is tortuous to imagine what might have happened if any one facet of her last weeks had been different. If the hospital had had an open bed on Friday instead of proposing she wait until Monday. If her downstairs neighbor had not been home the night before to assure Sylvia that he would be there in the morning, presumably to assist in rescuing her children. If her American psychiatrist had not postponed coming to her aid, falsely reassured by letters that would be Sylvia's last. If the new au pair had not been available that final morning, if she could not have had the assurance that Frieda and Nicholas would be found, and quickly. If Trevor Thomas had believed her when she told him, on the last time he would see her alive, that she was going to die, that she was going to die and she was frightened and wanted his assurance that her children would be looked after; if he hadn't been baffled by his own lack of understanding, letting her walk away into the dark. If the Beckers had realized she left her spare set of keys with them after dinner and they had followed her to return them instead of deciding to wait until morning. If the letter from St George's Hospital had not gotten lost in the post. If George Macbeth had more clearly articulated the BBC's interest in her work continued outside of how it related to her husband's. If the workers at her building had turned off the gas to prepare for their scheduled maintenance on the building that day. If the visiting nurse had arrived earlier, smelling the gas and breaking the seal on the kitchen. If any one of her many friends, colleagues, family members, and professional acquaintances had managed to reach out to her in those final weeks, as she increasingly isolated herself. If those she had seen had acted upon their impression that something wasn't right, instead of simply noting it and using it as fodder for gossip. If she had been born ten years later, advancing the medical bounds of knowledge and sidestepping the fatally misunderstood combination of prescriptions she had been given.
If any one single person near her had realized, truly, the deep and excruciating grip her disease had on her and refused to leave her side until the darkness receded. There are a million versions of the story of her life in which she doesn't die, alone, early in the morning as the sun comes up, on February 11th. There is only one where she does; and it is the one we have.
A consuming biography and a brilliant work of research, analysis, and explication, Clark dominates the contemporary world of nonfiction with this powerful masterpiece. Unending gratitude is due to her for her delicate attention to detail, her deft use of original sources, her wonderful composition of chronology and legacy, and her beautiful, redemptive portrait of this amazing artist. She is an exacting critic of Plath's poetry, and her analysis of her entire body of work is complex, generous, and stunning in its erudition. Clark is usurped in her work and her dedication perhaps only by Plath herself.
One of the best books I have ever had the good privilege of reading.
Essentials:
Ted Hughes: "If SP and I managed to get through it all, it was because for crucial years we defended each other, we were a sufficient world to each other: our poetic folie á deux saved us from being isolated, surrounded, and eliminated. I see now that when we met, my writing, like hers, left its old path and started to circle and search."
The origins of her art were not rooted in trauma or supplication, but in confidence, pleasure, and self-satisfaction. Writing was not something Sylvia did to please others, but to please herself-- as necessary as breathing, as she would later remark in a 1962 interview.
SP: "I need so to love a person-- be it girl or boy, friend or enemy. And without being able to, I sort of dry up." Sylvia would at times feel pressure to neutralize her passionate personality to avoid alienating potential friends and dates.
1944, twelve years old: In the coming years, she would fight an increasingly sinister opponent as she matured into a world that seemed to reflect the dark paranoia of her worst sleepless night. Both Plath and the nation were moving toward a different kind of war, one in which the enemy was hidden, out of reach, but armed with an arsenal of annihilation.
SP, 1947: "Perhaps I was doomed always to be on the outside."
SP, 1950, high school graduation: "I will very soon be old," she wrote in her scrapbook. [...] Her usual broad smile was missing, her celebratory, optimistic outlook muted. Half her life was already over.
Sylvia was compassionate toward others but bore herself little mercy. She often mistook her depression for weak-willed complaint.
SP, diary, Freshman year at Smith: My world falls apart, crumbles, 'The center does not hold.' … I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; [...] I can see ahead only into dark, sordid alleys, where the dregs, the sludge, the filth of my life lies, unglorified, unchanged-- transfigured by nothing: no nobility, not even the illusion of a dream.
SP, diary, freshman year at Smith: I am beyond help. No one here has time to probe, to aid me in understanding myself… so many others are worse off than I. How can I selfishly demand help, solace, guidance? No, it is my own mess [...] I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else's shoulder. Masks are the order or the day-- and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair.
SP, letter to Phil McCurdy: "If we could be clairvoyant and see the date of our own door, the bloodclot in the vein of our existence-- how differently we might proportion our time… and yet, perhaps all one can do is go on and on 'making the best of a bad job' … and loving life the more for its individual ephemeral quality."
SP, letter to Gordon Lameyer, 1954: "... but I want to do just that… to keep on learning and thinking and feeling intensely even if it hurts like hell."
SP, letter to Mel Woody, 1954: " the cataclysmic downward gyre I plummeted to symbolic death in last summer, when the center did not hold because there was none, or rather (as your wrote) too many, has given me an understanding of the black and sustained hells a mind can go through… and the enormous insulated loneliness when you feel that no human hand or love could reach you or move you."
January, 1956: (in a letter to Aurelia) "I sometimes despair of ever finding anyone who is so strong in soul and so utterly honest and careful of me," she wrote the night before she met Ted Hughes. She longed to find a "strong" man who could "match" her own strength, who would not be intimidated by her talent and accomplishments, someone who would create art alongside her.
February, 1956: (from SP's journal) "The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: to, to give myself, crashing, fighting, to you. The one man since I've lived"
Letter to SP from Olive Prouty, her long-time benefactor: "Sometime write me a little poem that isn't intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes."
SP, in lecture notes to her class, Smith College 1958: "DEATH IS ONE OF THE MOST MOVING & TROUBLING EXPERIENCES OF LIFE: DEATH-IN-LIFE IS ONE OF THE MOST TERRIBLE STATES OF EXISTENCE: NEUTRALITY, BOREDOM, become worse sins than murder, worse than illicit love affairs: Be Right or Wrong, don't be indifferent, do be NOTHING."
Ruth Beutscher, long-time psychiatrist and friend: "[Her suicide attempt] had been an accusation that her love was defective… if you don't love me, love my writing & love me for my writing."
Ted Hughes, for the BBC's Poets in Partnership : "Two people who are sympathetic to each other… who are compatible in this sort of spiritual way, they in fact make up one person, they make up one source of power which you both use and you can draw out material in incredible detail from this single shared mind. And I'm sure that this is certainly a source of a great deal of my poetry."
David Compton, on Ted and Sylvia, 1962: "They were always so, so aware of the significance of things. Everything in life was large and important… they lived an exhausting intellectual and emotional life because they cared. [...] It was not hard to be swept away by this intense, erudite couple. I was enormously aware that I was touching the hem of greatness."
SP, journal, summer 1962: "I feel ugly and a fool, when I have so long felt beautiful & capable of being a wonderful happy mother and wife and writing novels for fun & money. I am now just sick."
SP, in conversation with Elizabeth Compton, ibid. : "I gave my heart to Ted. If he doesn't want it, I can't take it back. It's just gone."
Aurelia Plath, in a letter to Warren, July 1962: "I am just holding on to my belief that we each have to live out our many lives in as much dignity & carefulness as possible."
SP to Ruth Beutscher, September 22, 1962: "My sense of myself, my inner dignity and creative heart won't have it… I think when I am free of him my own sweet life will come back to me, bare and sad in a lot of places, but my own, and sweet enough."
Plath's symmetrical, five-lined stanzas just contain the rage expressed within them. [...] Only love deeply felt causes such pain. "Daddy" may appear a dead end of vengeance, but it is nakedly vulnerable. The speaker has been damaged, and the effort to turn her weakness into strength may falter. Plath never reveals whether she admires or pities this little girl lost, wailing for retribution.
SP to Olive Prouty, October, 1962: "I shall forge my writing out of these difficult experiences-- to have known the bottom, whether mental or emotional, is a great trial, but also a great gift."
Al Alverez, 1962: Alvarez wrote: "Suicide, in short, was not a swoon into death… it was something to be felt in the nerve-ends and fought against, an initiation rite qualifying her for a life of her own." Her poetry, he felt, had finally become true to "the forces that really moved her: destructive, volatile, demanding, a world apart from everything she had been trained to admire… She turned anger, implacability, and her roused, needle-sharp sense of trouble into a kind of celebration."
January-February 1963: Without the patronage of Hughes or, now, Alvarez, Plath's social capital dissolved. Friends remember her during this time as gratingly effusive, desperately lonely, a subject of gossip, a burden. Jillian Becker felt that at the very end of Sylvia's life she was "isolated and denigrated".
SP to Ruth Beutscher, February 4, 1963 (their last correspondence): "I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death. [...] I am scared to death I shall just pull up the psychic shroud and give up. A poet, a writer, I am I think very narcissistic & despair. Just now I feel is torture for me to dress, plan meals, put one foot in front of the other. [...] I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossibles to me, I am incapable of being myself & loving myself."
SP's triple literary dictum (as told to Aurelia): First: The manipulation of experience Second: Fusion of characters (creation of composite characters Third: Her firm belief that "art was a rearrangement of truth"
Epilogue: Sylvia Plath sought always the light of the mind. That light was her lodestar in the face of depression, when all went "cold and planetary." She tried to feed this clarion flame with literature, art, philosophy, drama, travel, love-- anything to prevent its extinguishment. Plath told friends that it was the final dimming of that light, the threat of exile from her own person, that had led to her first attempt in 1953.
Postscript: If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.
P.S. I do not feel particularly bad about writing such a long review: reading this book mattered to me in a way that little else has this year. and it's like a billion pages long, so-- seems fitting
mmaguire's review
dark
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Suicide attempt, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Antisemitism and Cancer
Minor: Abortion