Update September 29, 2021. I am my most happy when at my desk working on book. It’s an uphill climb but worth it. Cannot underestimate the soul catcher of purpose. Distractions as everyone also has, but here goes October 2021. Calendar pretty clean, quiet space, up to me to keep to work ritual.
Just finished Heather Clark’s (yes, massive long) Sylvia Plath biography Red Comet. (Since I began to read, I’ve loved life writing…biography, autobiography, memoir, journals, letters, all of it. When I was studying for my doctorate at USC in Los Angeles and really low on cash, I saved for quite a while to buy all the volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries at the feminist bookstore on Westwood. Still among my most precious things.)
I’m understanding Plath’s anger, yes, anger, and exhaustion and just plain fed-up-ness with hope that doesn’t happen, despite all effort one can make, what betrayal feels like, when she ended her life.
(Oddly enough I’m something degrees of separation sort of, from Plath. At my YMCA I knew a professor from the English Department at UT where David Wevill taught. Wevill was the husband of Assia Wevill, whose affair with Ted Hughes broke up Hughes’ marriage with Sylvia Plath. We’re all connected.)
(And I’d always been curious to wonder whether Plath ever met with the Beat poets…they were contemporaries, and very different but also kind of alike as her work transformed. According to the bio, apparently she and Hughes actually did meet, maybe dinner, with Ginsberg and Corso, at the Plath/Hughes apartment in Boston overlooking the Charles River. Can’t even imagine that conversation, gosh.)
(My husband and I saw one of Ginsburg’s last public readings in New York…he was terrifically amusing… and one of my cherished books, in storage, unfortunately for now, but not forever, is his edited manuscript for Howl.)
(I did bring the book of Plath’s edited manuscripts for Ariel with me when I came back to Texas. So that’s a satisfaction until I get my Ginsburg back.)
The actual process of writing just fascinates. Making, crafting, fixing, perfecting…and each writer doing in one’s own best way, using the method that somehow works.
Plath was only 30 when she died and the reductionist version is of that suicidal poet who gassed herself in the oven. All its reviews have noted how this new biography gives a far fuller interpretation. I’m no professional reviewer, just a reader, but yes.
Clark’s work also seems to add nuance to the unfortunately sometimes simplistic assumptions about Plath’s and Hughes’ marriage. Passionate relationships…as theirs was…can be complicated. But he did cheat on her, more than once. Those are facts.
Heather Clark suggests that Plath did not kill herself over her husband’s infidelity, as is assumed. Rather, because Plath was terrified of involuntary confinement just for something so simple as not having the energy to make herself look sunny all the time as she’d been taught to do…she was raising a baby and toddler on her own while her husband was with one or more mistresses, doing her best to pursue her own creative work, and going through a horrible winter that year in England.
Plath had been through barbaric (“mental health”) (“treatments”) which I’m not sure, but hope, no longer even still exist. People closest to her, surely meaning to do well, but ignorant, in uninformed times, might have contributed to the death of one of the most stellar literary voices of the last century. What loss.
It seems anyone who’s done no crime and just needs the right kind of support, should not have their autonomy taken.
As a writer I’m all non fiction, “don’t know much about poetry.” But I’m reading Plath’s words in the last few months and that kind of craft comes only to a few. Gosh what a talent. Her writing sparkles, charges, just jumps with phrase, in a way Hughes’ did not. But he got be poet laureate and hang out out with Spender and Eliot while she got to change babies’ nappies.
Red Comet makes so clear how vibrant and productive Sylvia Plath was in her too-short 30 years, now frozen in time. (If still alive, she would be the age of my parents, now in their eighties.) By age 30 she’d worked harder and accomplished more than most of us could do with twice or three times that, in midst of huge professional and personal stress…publishing her own work, obviously some of which has become literary canon, the rest maybe less well known but still where she got acceptance to the most competitive and respected places, working on her continuing creative vision, doing a boatload of chores to support her husband’s, having babies, running households. Humbling. So glad I splurged a little to buy and use some summertime to read this book.
Dayna Finet 