In this blog I have explored some of the challenges of modern poetry, including brick-wall and puzzle variants. In looking at literature more widely I have sometimes found the bleakness of a perspective that seems to find existence meaningless particularly dispiriting. What I don’t think I have previously registered is the trap that our Western narcissistic society, so deeply rooted in materialism, can cause an artist to fall into.
In my attempts to decide which books to keep and which to donate to the local Oxfam shop, I have been finishing books that I started but gave up on in the past. One such was Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame: a life of Sylvia Plath. Even though I found its almost unremitting negativity hard to wade through, something held me in its grip and I finally managed to finish it, at what cost to my peace of mind I’m not quite sure.
It raised a critical question for me. Poetry surely should be about helping us understand reality more deeply, not about selling us a self-serving myth, yet Plath is seemingly admired as a great poet while apparently using her poetry to promulgate a mythical version of herself and many of those closest to her.
Assuming of course that Stevenson is to be believed.
That set an unexpected ball rolling, or was it a bell ringing? There are at least two myths in circulation in this context. Who is the real villain here – Sylvia or Ted (or neither)? Which of them should we demonise or canonise? Different people at different times from different perspectives seem to have vilified them both. Where does the truth lie? (That expression captures part of the problem.) If Sylvia is not the ogress some believe her to be maybe her poems are more straightforwardly creative, rather than powerful but corrosive. But if Ted is the ogre, what implications might that have for his poetry?
If Plath is neither saint nor demon, victim nor persecutor, then what is she that might make her none the less of great significance? Is she more like a canary caged in the coalmine of our broken Western culture, our soulless so-called civilisation – her life, death and poetry of huge importance to us if only we could them read correctly?
The First Obstacle in the Way of an Answer
I’m not sure I’m up for a challenge of this magnitude, given all the other demands upon my time at the moment, but I simply can’t resist giving it a go.
Given my recent wrestling with issues around creativity, such as the relationship between the art and the artist, Myers’ idea of ‘subliminal uprush’ and why do labels like depression keep cropping up, this attempt was almost inevitable. She’s such a divisive icon and the puzzles standing in the way of an explanation of that keep nagging at my mind. Also Hughes described her as the greatest female poet since Emily Dickinson, who is a favourite of mine. So, I need to spend some time trying to work out why Plath never clicked with me and what all these competing versions of her reality add up to, if anything.
The first problem I will have to deal with is how trustworthy are the differing accounts of her life, relationships and poetry. Finding a method might leave me in a slightly better position to judge which descriptions of her life and Ted’s I can trust, if any and how much. All that ground, I feel, needs to be covered before I dare set foot anywhere near any of her poems.
As an example of the kind of conundrum I am likely to have to deal with, and one that resonates particularly strongly with me because of my background working in mental health, is an ethical question, one of many raised by Plath’s poems. It’s not just their alleged exploitation of events that involve publicising what she regarded as other people’s villainy to sanctify her own image; objections have also been made to her ‘appropriation of the imagery of the death camps’ to convey her own misery and suffering.[1] More on that later.
For now, let’s take a look at the reliability of the material I am going to have to draw on for this sequence. Just beware. Even though I am only entering a literary rather then a literal minefield here, mind where you tread.
To begin with what seems a minor point, Feinstein describes[2] how, after Ted’s first volume of poems, The Hawk in the Rain. won the Harper first publication contest both Ted and Sylvia ‘were excited enough to let their breakfast burn while they phoned their mothers with the news: Ted’s in Yorkshire as well as Sylvia’s in the United States, although Anne Stevenson only mentions the need to phone Aurelia Plath.’
So, what’s the big deal? Well, if it were true that only Sylvia’s mother was contacted with the good news, it would add fuel to the fire of the theory that it was her egotism that dominated the marriage.
Alvarez, an early admirer of Plath’s poetry[3] in his review of Bitter Fame ‘opened the attack on the grounds it was rare to read a biography about any subject so plainly disliked by the author.’
It doesn’t take many quotations from her book to apparently demonstrate the possible reality and depth of Stevenson’s dislike. Take this brief sample:[4]
[Plath’s] ambition to produce a publishable story or poem seemed to cancel out any normal regard for people’s sensibilities, however dear to her that people were. It was a blind spot of Sylvia’s . . .
. . . She repeatedly chose to see those close to her as doubles and soul mates: . . . When such doubles showed their autonomy, as they inevitably did, they became hated rivals, causing Sylvia immense anguish as they threatened the frail construct of her ego. They, of course, recoil from what appeared to be monstrous egotism, a self-absorption that negated the reality of their own lives.
Sylvia seemed egotistical, however, not because her ego was strong, but because it was perilously weak. Between her rigid genteel-mother construct, on the one hand, and that the suppressed Medean furies of a ‘real self’, on the other, her ego was ground between upper and nether millstones, allowing her only two options for action. Easy she could remain a pathetic victim, a homunculus with barely any chance of survival, or she could fight back with all the bitterness of deeply aggrieved injury – which in her writing is mostly what she did.
I accept that the last section borders on empathy but the overall picture definitely does not seem positive.
Given that Bitter Fame is where I started from, I think I need to share a bit more of her voice before giving her critics the stage and then looking at some of the factors that make writing an objective biography of Plath almost impossible.
More on that next time.
References:
[1]. Elaine Feinstein’s Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet – page 133.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 73.
[3]. Op. cit. – page 224.
[4]. Bitter Fame – pages 161-165.
Leave a comment