defend the indefensible: sylvia plath

calling berryman confessional is selling him short

otoh the same is true of plath and probably also of everyone called 'confessional' ever

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jun/05/sylvia-plath-rage-laughter/

I posted this on the LRB thread. It's compelling, but...

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n24/joanna-biggs/im-an-intelligence

re-reading Bell Jar and i think i will always stan for Plath

i dont know if i’ll articulate this the way i think of it but in her poetry and the bell jar there’s something i love about the way her direct, vivid-yet-blunt (& often grotesque) descriptions are presented so unapologetically in very refined, calm settings and she never belabors them or refers back to them, she just lets them, sit, & moves on


she’s not drawing attention to a “gloomy” mindset, or indicating it with any kind of moody gothy setup. like rooms and places and landscapes are always pleasant or inoffensive — she really captures the way weird or ugly thoughts and similes just land & fly away in one’s thoughts without necessarily being shown outwardly?

idk if that makes sense but anyway i love her

i recently read part of the recent Heather Clark “Red Comet” bio of plath and while i annoyingly didn’t get to finish before i had to return it, it is so impressively comprehensive and human and demythologizing, i am going to reborrow & finish it

i highly recommend

I read The Bell Jar in February 20121 and whooped at every other sentence -- a hilarious, scary novel.

I recommend the book published last year about Plath and Sexton meeting for martinis at the Ritz.

xp great post

also i never knew ~insulin~ shock therapy was a thing until rereading bell jar this time

horrifying https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_shock_therapy

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

omg at this thread's early exchanges

the bell jar is monumental, her poetry...i've not encountered anything that isn't great

the holocaust imagery in daddy and lady lazarus always offended me. today i realized that it is supposed to. she is reveling in her solipsism, the rawness of her experience, not framing it in a way that is easily consumed and digested by someone like me. at her best when she is transgressive, uninhibited, and uncomfortable.

i think ariel is my favorite.

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

the same rawness and uninhibited openness to changing experience that permits TBJ's terrifyingly seamless fall from hilarious social satire to the case against life under medical abuse :(

right. even in the social satire parts of the bell jar, she permits herself to be mean. she often laments the burden of living up to other people's expectations -- especially gendered ones -- but in her writing she doesn't seem to do that at all and this is her genius i think

i re-read Ariel again after Bell Jar - one of my new old favorites is ‘Letter in November’

the rat-rail pods of the laburnum
golden apples, red autumn, all the wintery colors in the mist

i enjoy her visuals a lot. and i love how her word choices uh “feel”? in yr mouth when you say them out loud

I read Elm just before I went to sleep last night. Sweet dreams.

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

I think about Tulips, often. I find Plath too raw sometimes. Maybe I mean too real. I think (late) Stevens aimed at the real in a similar fashion, but it never felt this flayed.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free——
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

xp absolutely haunting poem. I think about it all the time.

and the final couplet:

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

Yikes at the early parts of this thread.

I finally read The Bell Jar. I enjoyed the shit out of it, reader! It's one of those books that, when you read it in public, you imagine people around you can see and hear the prose so loudly does it jump off the page: lines that wound, lines audacious and hilariously funny, lines that make you wince.

On that last point, it's kind of gauche or clumsy in places and I couldn't decide if this was a deliberate aspect of the narrative voice. She clings to similes too readily (on some pages there are five or more) and I found myself highlighting lines of excess, or where she personifies herself - things like 'I shivered' or 'my eyes sprang with tears'. It's something you pick up in a lot of student writing.

that tendency feels absolutely part of the excoriation. it's a celebration of and a final judgement upon her life and the forces that broke it. i'm p sensitive to overdoing similes and here it feels wry rather than gauche

that central chapter where it flips from being a humorous satire to sheer horror is still one of the most haunting chapters in literature imo, it's so sudden and brutal

Yeah, gauche is unkind. I think I'm so attuned to marking clunky student writing, seeing it in the wild like that is jarring and unsettling. Even the satire is brutal, though. Some of it made me think of Ballard - how dead-eyed everything is, how stark.

And yeah, passages like:

I thought the most beautiful thing in the world must be shadow, the million moving shapes and cul-de-sacs of shadow. There was shadow in bureau drawers and closets and suitcases, and shadow under houses and trees and stones, and shadow at the back of people's eyes and smiles, and shadow, miles and miles and miles of it, on the night side of the earth.

Holy shit.

the most metal writing, gonna throw some horns 4 sylvia, reign in power

I can take or leave Bell Jar.

From a search it doesn't look like the letters to her mother have been mentioned. That's my favourite collection of her writing besides some of her poetry.

Imago otm.

Somebody (I think Camille Paglia?) Said of Emily Dickinson that she had a mean streak a mile wide.

Where I love Plath the most is when she just fucking lets loose. Rage, despair, hunger, madness. Bring it on

this piece (sub needed i think) is very funny on emily dickinson's mean streak: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v43/n11/joanne-o-leary/bitchy-little-spinster

Thanks for that, mark s. Yeah ED was pretty layered, even sneaky, and that's part of the fun.

Read Janet Malcolm's longish NYer piece (or the shortish book) on Plath and you get the same sense.

I try to mainly focus on the work (as opposed to the soap opera aspects of their lives) but with some writers, it's hard to separate. Do NOT get me started on Woolf.

Yeah the Malcolm book is superb. I had never heard of it until I was telling xyzzzz__ about my English class’s absolute hatred of Ted Hughes, he was like, you need to read this book. We discussed it a bit here

Now the year is turning and the eeriness comes: what are you reading in autumn 2021?

I'm debating whether to re-read the Malcolm book post-Bell Jar. I think I will. Also want to read the Heather Clark biography.

That Malcolm book is an eye-opener.

But even those who admired Dickinson’s work have been put off by the demands she places on the reader. Denise Levertov found something chilling about her command on the page, an ugliness in her aristocratic self-assurance: ‘You know, actually those dashes bother me,’ she wrote to Robert Duncan in 1961. ‘There’s something cold and perversely smug about E.D. that has always rebuffed my feeling for individual poems ... She wrote some great things – saw strangely – makes one shudder with new truths – but ever and again one feels (or I do) – “Jesus, what a bitchy little spinster.”’

iirc Plath hated the public's interest in her personal life and in her relationship with Hughes. She called us onlookers the "peanut gallery."

I enjoyed the LRB piece but also felt a little queasy afterward about having any interest whatsoever in Emily's brother's lover's husband, as it's not necessarily relevant to poems.

Then I got over it, because once you are into this shiznit you may as well get the whole package. Purity is for soapmakers.

Also, for Alfred:

Bitchy little spinster I know, I know, it's serious...

The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot-
The big strip tease.

I've nearly finished the Clark biography, Red Comet. I don't see what else one could ask from a biography. It's meticulous, clear-eyed, compassionate; Clark has no framing narrative to follow, so - this far at least (October 1962) - there's no apportioning of blame, no sense that everything is heading for the vortex of her suicide (even if, well). Clark is a good critic, too - especially of Plath's short fiction and the later poems.

It's clear that 1950s New England was perfect in some ways but a hellscape of gender norms and expectations in others. The central event of her life was her post-New York depression and the disgraceful treatment at McLean. The suicide attempt and her subsequent internment are superbly recreated. It's a brutal and maddening indictment of patriarchy and institutional care.

Hughes doesn't come out of it well. How could he? I have a full sense of why Plath was so obsessed with him and a better understanding of the power of his early poetry; also, that he was an utter shithead but he's a believable shithead if that counts for anything. I don't think the punishment fits the crime but that's an ugly, glib and probably stupid way to frame it.

There's something, as ever, to be said about the limits of biography. Cleaving so close to the journals and the letters gives an illusion of an inner life but who of us is ourselves in our private journals and letters? Even if Plath more than anyone *seemed* to be building a version of herself in her private communication.

Obviously, the premise of the thread is bollocks. The price she paid is indefensible, but The Bell Jar and the later poetry are fucking astonishing.

yeah i loved Red Comet

the only thing i didn’t love was the critical analysis of her childhood poems: that felt like a bridge too far for me.

Good posts.

I can see the logic of looking at the juvenilia though. Clark doesn't have a project, as such, but one thing she is trying to do is to give Plath complete integrity. The through line from her early poems is clear inasmuch as she inhabits and inscribes landscape with meaning from the very start.

yeah i can see that, it just feels unnecessarily invasive. like, just as a human being? like once you embark on a career publishing poetry that’s one thing, but to treat her childhood output with the same kind of critical rigor is a bit much. at least to me. i just kept thinking “if Sylvia read this part she’d be rightfully annoyed or upset by it” idk

I finished the book. It's great. A couple of things.

1) The chapter on the 'afterlife of a poet' is a bit workmanlike after the immense rigour of the rest of the text. It's outside the scope of the book but it felt a bit loose after everything else. I guess after 8 years (!) of working on it, Clark wanted rid.

2) Al Alvarez doesn't come out of it well. Another 'how could he?' I suppose, but god, what a self-serving arsehole.

3) Olwyn. Christ, Olwyn.

4) There's a critical thread running through the text positing that Plath stood 'too close to the fire'. It goes something like the following. There's a well of poetic inspiration, Yeats had access to it, Lawrence too, Nietzsche, some of the Romantics. Freud and Jung mapped it, to some extent. Plath, who'd come up under a New Critical framework, was also drawn to it and knew it in her bones. When she met Hughes, he embodied the essence of it, was poetic inspiration made flesh - he, and the darkness they summoned together, were the missing pieces of the puzzle that enabled her to fall through her own trapdoors fully into that dark thought-cave, or word-hoard or whatever Romantic bullshit you want to call it. And, being a woman, she wasn't able to handle it. After her death, Alvarez wondered 'if all our rash chatter about art and risk and courage, and the way we turned rashness and despair into a literary principle, hadn't egged her on'.

5) Might as well call it the 'Lady Macbeth Gambit'.

The Janet Malcolm bio is so good about those matters.

I need to go back to it. Having engaged so closely with the poetry, it'll be like a new book.

I've got Jacqueline Rose's book too. Have you read that Alfred? Anyone else?

I just read Red Comet thanks to seeing this thread come up.

3/4 of the way through it, my bf walks past me one afternoon and says "HAS SHE STUCK HER HEAD IN THE OVEN YET".

But no, this book was good - I'm actually very suprised how comprehensive its sources were. Was she only able to do this because most of the people involved are dead now?

ETA: it certainly is a contrast to Bitter Fame, which I regret even bothering to read, since I found more out about its biases (esp Dido Merwin's rank essay).

I think about how I'd hate it if certain ppl I knew for 10 minutes in my youth jumped on the bandwagon to wax vicious about me. Olwyn and Dido hardly knew her, and yet.

100%! i think about that a lot, like some bitchface who’d shove me into a locker as soon as look at me saying “mm yes VegGrrl was very troubled, we were worried about her”

LOL exactly, and I can think of a specific person I know who would do exactly that.

I have some sympathy for Stevenson after reading The Silent Woman, and I remember liking her bio when I read it in 1994 (!); but that was a lifetime ago.

Y'all should check out Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz.

great piece on Plath by Tricia Lockwood & the new Plath Collected Prose in the London Review of Books - excellent read

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n12/patricia-lockwood/arrayed-in-shining-scales