Given that my examination of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land drags me into déjà vu in terms of modernist fragmentation and obscurity, it seemed appropriate to share again the following sequence about Sylvia Plath.
What I need to test out now is the darker side of her intensity. I need to see, if I can, whether it translates into the poetry, and to some extent explains, for example, the Holocaust imagery of some of the poems. This might hopefully pave the way later for an examination of those and other poems to see whether they warrant the adulation they have received or whether there is something more toxic about them that might undermine their quality. To do so I will be drawing in due course, for constructive comparisons, on Robert Hayden’s life and poetry. His style is at least as modern as Plath’s, and some of his themes are at least as dark, but for reasons I will explore at the time he manages to transcend the solipsistic darkness of the trap that Plath all too often falls into, in my view.
She certainly drew on darkness in some of her poetry as Feinstein points out:[1]
Ted’s unqualified admiration for the sheer quality of the poetry is unmistakable and he felt a binding duty towards the poems . . . even though the image of himself so purveyed was of a jailer, a torturer, or a Nazi, none of which was in the least apposite.
He was keen though that this not be used to attack her mental state in a way that undermined a reader’s perception of her poetry:[2]
Hughes was specific in his initial letter to Stevenson that he was unwilling to have Sylvia’s poems seen as the product of psychosis, stressing that the writing in them was coherent and lucid.
In looking at the inspiration for her poem ‘Pursuit’, Jonathan Bate has an interesting take on the relationship between her imaginative and her real life, with implications for her poetry:[3]
Ted as panther, animal force, sexual marauder; Sylvia willing her own death of him. In mythologizing their relationship from the start, she was in some sense creating the conditions for her own tragedy – and laying the ground for the posthumous dramatization of her story, his story.
A Rose-Tinted Perspective
I think it’s time to bring Jacqueline Rose back into the fray with her more positive take on Sylvia Plath, not that she’s blind to her more testing side.
I want to draw attention to the points Rose makes that resonate most strongly with me in a positive way. However, I can’t resist, in the light of the earlier quote from Feinstein about how damaging the psychoanalytical approach might have been to Plath in stoking up her anger against both parents, to point out that Rose is talking from both a feminist and Freudian perspective.
Most of that I’m going to avoid mentioning, in the case of feminism because I think glorifying or demeaning Plath as a crusader would cloud the picture of the real value of her poetry for reasons I hope to make clear later, and in terms of Freudian psychoanalysis I’m a bit too much of a sceptic about that approach, for reasons explored elsewhere on this blog, to want to give it much air-time. All these can become biasing factors as well as potentially illuminating perspectives, again as explained in detail elsewhere.
In respect of Rose’s main thesis she’s very much grounded in the kind of pragmatic reality I met and admired in William James. I concluded a sequence on uncertainty with the following accolade:
. . . he was indeed a kindred spirit [which] explains satisfactorily why I got such a buzz out of finding . . . these words:[4]
‘For James, then, there are falsification conditions for any given truth claim, but no absolute verification condition, regardless of how stable the truth claim may be as an experiential function. He writes in The Will to Believe that as an empiricist he believes that we can in fact attain truth, but not that we can know infallibly when we have.’
Right from the start almost she sets out this same stall:[5]
. . . it is that the provisional, precarious nature of self-representation which appears so strikingly from the multiple forms in which Plath writes. . . .
Inside her writing, Plath confronts us with the limits of our (and her) knowledge. . . . This book starts from the assumption that Plath is a fantasy.
Although it is part of her possibly overstated attack on Stevenson, she fleshes this out describing the processes that lay behind the creation of Bitter Fame:[6]
[Hughes] had advised Stevenson and her informants ‘to stick to observed fact, and to make clear at every point that opinion is opinion’, to ‘avoid interpreting my feelings and actions for me, and to beware how they interpreted Silvia’s’.
. . . As Hughes himself puts it: ‘I know she told many different people many different things, and different things at different times.’ . . . Confession, with all that implies by way of redeeming honesty, would not of course exist as a concept were it not that we constantly use of language to deceive others as well as ourselves.
We’re moving into the cathedral of pragmatic scepticism.
She moves closer to defining her perspective:[7]
The unintended effect… is that it is impossible to read Plath independently of the frame, the surrounding discourses, through which her writing is presented.
And with complete clarity, speaking still of Bitter Fame, she unpacks the perspective more fully in the context of information about Plath’s life:[8]
One of the strangest effects of reading this book, especially if you have read the unedited letters and journals, is that it precisely becomes impossible to know whom to believe.
. . . If the only sane position is finally to conclude that you do not know, then we should nonetheless note that this form of sanity is a position which can also drive you mad. And madness, we find, is in fact the condition or wager that Hughes lays down for anyone trying to write about Sylvia Plath.
Perhaps I should stop this sequence right now, if insanity lies ahead. If in the end also:[9]
. . . at the most obvious level, to try to construct a single, consistent image of Plath becomes meaningless, not just because of the vested interests that so often appear to be at stake in the various attempts to do so that we have seen, but far more because the multiplicity of representations that Plath offers of herself make such an effort so futile.
Where I Might be Heading
Stopping would indeed be the best policy if I were intending to come to some clear and convincing conclusion about Plath and her poetry. That, however, is more or less the opposite of my conscious intention.
I don’t want to join the chorus of vilifiers or idolisers, each totally convinced of the correctness of their assessment. If I can manage to I would like to draw a provisional picture of where the interaction between her life and her art leaves me as a reader of her poetry. I want to learn more about what I really value about what impacts me about great art, even if I change my mind again in six months time.
If what I am doing seems to her admirers to be a disservice to Plath by turning her into some sort of Guinea pig in the laboratory of my aesthetic explorations, I apologise and advise them to stop reading now before I move onto her poetry in the next phase of this already too long sequence.
To give some sense of where I will be taking up this challenge next time I’m turning back to Feinstein’s biography.
She flags up the risks Plath’s poetry is taking:[10]
Despite all the assurance language at the heart of her poetry, there is always a sense both of danger and some price to be paid for aspiration. What makes her poetry overwhelming is the way she ruthlessly exposes her own terrors. . .
Now writing was becoming her only religion – confession, discipline, consolation and immortality. It is a dangerous faith, which Ted shared and encouraged.
There would be much to explore in terms of Ted’s shared responsibility in the whole enterprise of her poetic journey, not least what the more demonic aspects of his spiritual perspective might have contributed, but there’s too little room for that here just now.
There’s no doubt though[11] that ‘they had both worked very hard to get her poetry airborne, but he was nonetheless horrified when he saw in “which way [her imagination] wanted to fly.”’ Concerning Event for example[12] Ted ‘was appalled to see an intimate quarrel used as subject matter.’
As Bate points out, when Ariel was about to hit the headlines, Ted flagged up the irony of it all:[13]
‘What an insane chance’, [Ted] wrote to Richard Murphy on the eve of [Ariel ‘s] publication, ‘to have a private family struggles turned into best selling literature of despair and martyrdom, probably a permanent cultural treasure.’
Al Alvarez in the Observer writing about Ariel based on a BBC broadcast, shared his own forceful angle on the matter:[14]
. . . The poems written in her last months tapped the ‘roots of her own inner violence’ (‘violence’, that word which was so often applied to Ted’s work). ‘Poetry of this order’, he had ended the talk, ‘is a murderous art.’
Critics argue that the conditions of this period justify art that focuses almost exclusively on the darkness, as Bate illustrates with a quote from another reviewer, Rosenthal, who felt that ‘the true professional poet embodies the trauma of the age within their own psychological torment,’ a view that Robert Lowell also endorsed:
. . . The first American edition appeared in the summer of 1966, with the forward in which Plath’s genius was hailed by no less a figure than Lowell himself. ‘Her art’s immortality is life’s disintegration,’ he wrote.
I intend to take odds with this nihilistic perspective when I start to grapple with her poetry. None the less, this darkness undoubtedly contributed greatly to her fame:[15]
. . . It was this image [of her suicide] combined with the venom of ‘Daddy’ that laid the ground for the cult of Plath, what Ted call the Sylvia Plath fantasia.
Given my desire for poems to lift us higher, Feinstein’s next caveat carries considerable weight and warrants careful examination:[16]
. . . the sheer theatricality of the poem [Daddy], and the throwaway, colloquial tone of many of the crucial lines, work against a sense of transcendence. These are poems which invoke the power to avenge.
Bate makes an astute point about this poem:[17] ‘Daddy is a poem that yokes father and husband, under the influence of Sylvia’s psychoanalytic journey.’
I’ll be looking at Daddy in far more detail probably sometime in the next two posts. It’s a key poem in determining what kind of poetry brought Plath the fame she thirsted for. It may not, in fact, be anywhere near her best.
Feinstein’s conclusion does not bode well though:[18]
She feared abandonment all her life but now she knew how to use the experience. Alvarez put it memorably: ‘She turned anger, implacability and her roused, needle-sharp sense of trouble into a kind of celebration.’
And also[19] ‘what she wrote exposed too much, both of her need and of her hatred.’
I’m not looking forward to tackling the thorny questions I have now set myself!
References
[1]. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet – page 147.
[2]. Op. cit. – page 222.
[3]. Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – pages 105-06.
[4]. William James and the Metaphysics of Experience by David C. Lamberth – page 222.
[5]. The Haunting of Sylvia Plath –page 5.
[6]. Op. cit. – page 67.
[7]. Op. cit. – page 69.
[8]. Op. cit. – page 97.
[9]. Op. cit. – page 104.
[10]. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet – page 112.
[11]. Op. cit. – page 115.
[12]. Op. cit. – page 125.
[13]. Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – page 236.
[14]. Op. cit. – page 239.
[15]. Op. cit. – page 240)
[16]. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet – page 133.
[17]. Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life – page 189.
[18]. Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet – page 137.
[19]. Op. cit. – page 146.
Everybody Means Something 