The Selling Of Sylvia Plath
The Age
Saturday April 29, 2000
Normally, reading other people's diaries is considered a furtive activity, something to be ashamed of. An invasion of privacy. Except, of course, when the diaries are published between hard covers, with footnotes and an introduction: then it's not prying, it's bona fide literary activity.
But this doesn't mean that the publication of journals and correspondence has been free of controversy. And few books have been more incendiary and divisive than the diaries of Sylvia Plath.
Her complete journals have just been published in England with the kind of attention usually reserved for cabinet secrets and new revelations about the sex lives of Hollywood stars. They were serialised in three parts in The Guardian. "A life reclaimed: her journals revealed at last." They were also published on the other side of the Atlantic. "Uncensored Sylvia Plath" announced The New Yorker. "Pages from the journals sealed for nearly 20 years."
The Times ran an editorial about the journals. Reviewers hastened to pass judgment. But why should private notebooks, kept by a young woman between the age of 17 and 29, be published in their entirety? With such fanfare? What is it that has made Plath such a household name, the publication of her diaries such an event?
To try to understand this, you have to explore a complicated, messy, impossibly painful story. It's a Pandora's box: open it, and resentment, bitterness, anger and blame come flying out.
In 1956, Plath, a young and gifted American writer, married a young and gifted English writer, Ted Hughes. They had two children, then separated after seven years of marriage. Plath committed suicide in 1963, at the age of 30: at this stage, she had published only one volume of poetry under her own name.
She died without making a will: control of her estate went to Hughes. And the literary estate was a considerable one. In the last months of her life, in particular, Plath was writing some extraordinary poetry.
Her reputation has grown apace: in the decades since her death, poems, fiction, children's stories have been published, as well as edited collections of letters and journals. She is one of the best-selling authors on Faber's backlist: Ariel, a poetry collection, and The Bell Jar, a novel, are widely studied. And she is a celebrity in ways that poets, these days, rarely are: an object of attention in the literary-critical world and the realm of popular culture.
There has been a constant flow of critical studies and a flurry of biographies. And every publication has been accompanied by a chorus of statements for the prosecution and the defence: controversies about editing, selection of material, presentation. Testimony for Plath, against Hughes, and vice versa.
The Plath phenomenon, says Faber publishing director Joanna Mackle, is unlike any other. "One couldn't imagine anything else like it, and it goes on and on."
Some of the interest, undoubtedly, has to do with the fact of Plath's suicide. Not only did she die by her own hand, but she had attempted suicide once before, and used her experience as subject matter. For some critics, she's a cult writer for all the wrong reasons: Michael Shelden (biographer of George Orwell) called her "a desperate figure whose mad waltz with death created a literary cult that keeps growing". But to some extent this criticism of Plath comes itself from being obsessed with death, from a determination to read her as if everything she wrote was directed towards her suicide.
OVER THE decades, she has been cast in many roles: patient, hysteric, priestess, victim, heroine, martyr, bitch. Appropriator of Holocaust imagery. Literary Marilyn Monroe. One of the reviewers of the journals commented that ``Ted and Sylvia are now enshrined as the highbrow Charles and Diana". Above all, she is treated as a symptom, a manifestation of any number of cultural malaises. Her name is often thrown into debate to denote a figure of female instability or a victim of patriarchal attitudes. Her relationship with Hughes is read in a way that corresponds with the current location of the faultline of male-female relationships and collaborations.
Popular culture is full of Plath citings. Elizabeth Wurtzel, young author of the memoir Prozac Nation, was described as ``Sylvia Plath with the ego of Madonna". A woman scientist not given sufficient credit for her work was called ``the Sylvia Plath of DNA". In an episode of the TV show Law and Order: Special Victims Unit a dead young woman was identified through an old library book she had kept - a volume of Sylvia Plath.
Several film biographies have been flagged: Meg Ryan has long been pursuing one of them, although she now considers herself too old to take the Plath role, and would act as producer. Gwyneth Paltrow is another potential Sylvia, although this project appears now to be on hold.
Plath has been construed as a puzzle, an enigma with a possible solution - not only in relation to her suicide (the reason ``why") but also the ``who is Sylvia?" conundrum, a challenge many writers have set themselves: to construct a coherent account of Plath as a writer and an individual. For some of those accounts, Plath has been identified as a literal and literary victim: the body in the library, as it were. The woman who died because of the female mystique, or daddy, or Bluebeard, or because, in the words of a character in one of her poems, ``Dying is an art/I do it exceptionally well."
``Do you keep a diary? I'd give anything to look at it."
``Oh, no. You see, it's simply a very young girl's record of her own thoughts and impressions, and consequently meant for publication. When it appears in volume form I hope you will order a copy."
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
``With Plath dying so young," says Karen Kukil, editor of the new journals, ``it make almost every word she wrote of interest."
The decision to publish the journals in their entirety was made by Ted Hughes, a few years before his death. ``He had already assigned the estate to the children, [Frieda and Nicholas Hughes]," says Joanna Mackle, ``but he consulted them about it and he had their support ... He never discussed why. One can only imagine that he thought the time was right."
The journals, dating from 1950 to 1962, had been at Smith College in Massachusetts since 1981, in the archives of the college's rare book collection. Smith was Plath's alma mater, and it holds a substantial collection of her papers. (The other major holding is at the Lilly Library, at the University of Indiana at Bloomington.) Two items from the journals were sealed until 2013.
But in 1982 a selection from her journals was published in America. The book immediately became a source of controversy. In his introduction, Ted Hughes revealed that there were two further journals that came from the final six months, when, separated from Hughes, she wrote the poems she is most famous for. One of those journals, he said, he destroyed, because he ``did not want her children to have to read it". The other, he wrote, ``disappeared".
Scholars and reviewers asked why he hadn't considered sealing the final journal for a period of time, as he did with other journals. And how had the second one ``disappeared"? (In one version of his introduction, he suggested that it might in time reappear: in another, he made no further speculations. To date, it has not turned up.)
So there were two missing journals, and there were elements excised from the printed version. The editor, Frances McCullough, said in her introduction that there had been necessary omissions, because ``Plath had a very sharp tongue". So ``some of the more devastating bits" were not published, although their omission is clearly marked in the journals. ``Intimacies are also cut," she notes, which has ``the effect of diminishing Plath's eroticism, which was quite strong". All this had the additional effect of drawing people's attention to what was not there, rather than what was.
There was a section that was cut in between galleys being sent out to reviewers and the book's final publication - a section in which Plath described her first meeting with Hughes. It was a dramatic, heightened scene, and reviewers made much of the cuts.
Now, all the omissions have been restored. Hughes also decided to release the sealed material.
``The decision to publish them complete meant that you couldn't edit them - they had to be published as they were, with as little editorial intervention as possible, so that they could speak for themselves," Mackle says. ``I think that the history of feminism, or of a certain strand of feminism, meant that it's a very problematic publication, and this is the only possible solution."
Kukil, associate curator at the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, was given the task of editing. She prepared two 10-page samples for Frieda and Nicholas Hughes. ``They were very keen to have it complete," Kukil says. ``We had a very clear understanding from the start, which made the editing very easy. If the reader wanted more information, they wanted there to be a way that the reader could go and get that information, but their primary objective was to let the reader have direct access to Sylvia Plath's journal."
Even though she wasn't required to make editorial interventions, there was a great deal of work for Kukil to do: the organisation and structure of the journals, research and writing for the notes and index.
``I sent Faber a list of all the living people about whom Plath had said anything negative ... And they elected to print everything, which surprised me. It's wonderful for scholars to know that every word of our manuscript is being printed, you're getting everything."
This includes misspellings, numbering, sketches, underlinings and various marks on the manuscript, ``even the odd breaks between entries ... We tried very hard to keep everything that would give the reader information."
What does Kukil value about the journals? Partly, it's their art. ``It really seemed to me that they're polished writing in some way, creative writing," she says. ``I had the sense when I finished working on the journals that they had almost a novel quality." It's also their additional range. ``You get a lot of new facets of her personality," Kukil says. ``She is more politically aware than she was portrayed in the past.
``She's a much more complicated person than a lot of people realise. We often associate her with suicide and death ... but the journals reveal her zest for life, her relish for living."
``The biographer at work, indeed, is like the professional burglar, breaking into a house, rifling through certain drawers that he has good reason to think contain the jewellery and money, and triumphantly bearing his loot away. The voyeurism and busybodyism that impel writer and readers alike are obscured by an apparatus of scholarship designed to give the enterprise an appearance of bank-like blandness and solidity."
Janet Malcolm, The Silent Woman
When Malcolm wrote this fierce excoriation of literary biography in her book The Silent Woman, she had a striking case study to explore: the writing and reception of biographies of Sylvia Plath. It was an influential book which showed dramatically how much emotional energy was invested in the Plath phenomenon.
When I was doing some research for a thesis on Plath, I went to the Lilly Library and the Mortimer Rare Book Room to see the archives for myself. To become, if not a burglar, then a voyeur, perhaps.
I was familiar with the secondary sources, the biographies and literary-critical studies and the material they quoted. I had immersed myself in the poetry and the prose, but also in the abridged Journals and Letters Home, the compulsively cheery missives to her mother: I was used to the idea of going through her correspondence and felt an illusion of familiarity with the way she expressed extremes of love and despair. But reading correspondence in a printed book doesn't prepare you for holding the letters in your hand. And it didn't prepare me for the moment when, out of one of the folders, I took out a letter from Ted Hughes, written soon after they met. A single page, in the elegant, stylised, difficult handwriting I would soon become familiar with - a letter about the smoothness of her body. What on earth was I doing reading this? What business was it of mine?
This was in the Lilly Library, which has a huge and wide-ranging manuscript collection. I worked alongside a man looking at 18th-century drama, and another studying the scripts from Star Trek: Voyager. The Plath collection consists mainly of material from the earlier part of her life - mostly acquired from her mother, in 1977. It includes family correspondence dating from 1938 (when Plath was six), poetry manuscripts dating from 1940, diaries and calendars from 1944 onwards, published and unpublished short stories, scrapbooks, drawings, self-portraits, clippings, high-school and college memorabilia. Family photographs. Her baby book, meticulously kept by her mother, Aurelia Plath - noting everything from her christening presents to the arrival of her baby teeth. A folder with clippings of her hair: not stray curls, but substantial hanks of her hair - one almost a ponytail.
In both archives, there are many drafts of poems. Here, and even more strikingly at Smith, which has the later works, including almost all of the Ariel poems, you can see the raw material. There's something extraordinary and exhilarating about seeing them taking shape - sometimes draft after draft, rewritten, crossed out, pared down, distilled, sometimes scrawled on to the page virtually in their finished form, as if they had come to her directly, in their wholeness.
Gradually, I became more comfortable with my activity of reading other people's letters, Plath's and those of other people, and began to have a sense of how to deal with the range of material and its hierarchies. One of the things that the archives gave me was a sense of how hard Plath worked, how many different kinds of writing she was involved with, how many demands there were on her life and her time. The question still arose for me: how do I read this? What kind of material is it? Plath put her life, in many different ways, into and across so many forms of her writing: how can you account for this? Scholars, readers, reviewers and writers will go on asking this question, constantly - about Plath, and about writing in general. There is no easy answer.
The journals should be Exhibit A in the defence of Ted Hughes, but I suspect that the same people who've always hated him should go on hating and will not let this work stand in their way.
Michael Shelden
Part of the story of Plath and Hughes has been a narrative of blame, retribution, revenge. Plath has been described as a feminist icon, Hughes as the target of feminist ire - the Times editorial spoke of ``the baying pack of feminists who hounded him throughout his life".
There's no doubt that feminist writers and scholars have found much to write about in Plath's work. Her relationship with Hughes - his role as editor and executor, as much as husband - came under scrutiny. So did her relationship with her mother: feminist criticism has given a great deal of attention to the mother-daughter bond, perhaps even more than it has given to that of husband and wife. Her father, who died when she was eight, is also an important figure in her life and her work. As feminism has changed and developed, so have Plath studies.
It's also true to say that some critics and reviewers - male and female - have treated her primarily as a pathological figure. Not surprisingly, there is a strand of this in the reviewers' response to the journals. ``It is here in her diaries that Plath reveals what she really thinks - about her depression, about her sexuality and about Hughes," says Katharine Viner, in The Guardian. ``Her unexpurgated journals do, indeed, make more plausible the view that she was, sooner or later, bound to kill herself," said Daniel Johnson in The Daily Telegraph.
The journals reveal Plath ``as a much better prose writer than Hughes gave her credit for ... the woman writing here can be feisty and funny as well as maudlin and self-indulgent," according to Jonathan Bate. Jacqueline Rose, author of the influential The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, suggests that, ``if they should be read as revelation, it is not so much for the life as for the writing - what she asked of it, what it did for her, where it failed".
There's never a sense of completion with Plath, there always seems to be something about to be written on her - more to be said, more to be speculated about, more to be produced. Faber has another children's book on the way - Mrs Cherry's Kitchen, a story of household appliances run wild. A minor work, to say the least.
So far, no new work - although who would bet that there is nothing more to be recovered? There is a missing Plath novel, Double Exposure, said to be an account of a failed marriage. Opinions are divided about it: how much of it was written, how far Plath had proceeded with it.
Ted Hughes's papers, at Emory College in Atlanta, Georgia, are now publicly available to scholars: biographers and scholars are at work there, and there is Plath material there, to be incorporated anew into the story.
``The blood jet is poetry,/There is no stopping it," said Plath in Kindness, one of her Ariel poems. It's the same for the Plath industry.
The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962, edited by Karen Kukil (Faber and Faber, $60) will be extracted next weekend in Good Weekend and The Sunday Age.
© 2000 The Age