Plath continued
(Continued from Page 9)
Alvarez suggests that Sylvia’s
abandoning this formal academic
limitation on her poetry is bound
up in her decision to quit the path
she had been so brilliantly ad
vancing on, namely her career in
the university:
“The decision to abandon
teaching was the first
critical step toward
achieving her identity as a
poet, just as the birth of her
children seemed, as she
described it, to vindicate
her as a woman.”
Secondly, the example of her
old professor, Robert Lowell, in
his Life Studies, gave Sylvia
courage to investigate and
deliver her magic, her naked
often destructive truths of inner
self. It is at this point that her life
and her art converge.
In the Autumn of 1962, Sylvia
and her kids left Devon and Ted
Hughs and returned to London,
renting a flat which had once
been the home of Yeats. There,
tending house and kids during the
day and too exhausted to write at
night, Sylvia would wake in the
crisp, gray mornings around four
and write until stopped by the
“glassy music of milk bottles and
children’s cries.”
/AlVdlCL, wiium a
frequently read such poems as
“Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,”
“Death & Co.” as she progressed,
has written that out of her sudden
breakthrough where she as poet
became practically in
distinguishable from her poems
“her private horrors steadily and
without looking aside (were
faced), but the effort and risk
involved in doing so acted on her
like a stimulant; the worse things
got the more directly she wrote
about them, the more fertile her
imagination became . she now
wrote almost with relief, swiftly
as though to forstall further
horrors . Her poetry acted as a
strange, powerful lens through
which her ordinary life was
filtered and refigured with ex
traordinary intensity.”
Her themes began to focalize.
I do not stir
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell
Somebody's done for
(Death & Co.)
The winter of 1963 was one of
the most brutal in years in
London. The ice and cold bit
persistently. There was no
escaping its raw nag. Sylvia had
just finished with the details of
The Bell Jar and had seen it
published And while the events
of that first serious suicide at
tempt were surely fresh in her
mind, she was writing more
feverishly than ever No event in
her life was too small to let go by:
wnat a tnrui
My thumb instead of an
onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush
(Cut)
The flat was always cold, the
plumbing never worked, kids
pestered An easy depression set
in In spite of the hard times
Sylvia moved closer and closer
into the arena she had been so
long cultivating Her life and her
imagination were precisely
identical Her opposing themes of
childbirth (life' and death were
merging The boundaries were
breaking down Far from being
therapy, how her art acted as a
dredge, making the material of
her imagination so accessible to
her life that she began living out
her creations.
The details of her last few days
are significant. Balking initially
at psychiatric help which had
been recommended to her, Sylvia
finally sent a letter to a therapist
arranging a consultation. The
letter was somehow lost in the
mail.
On Monday morning, Feb. 11, a
newly hired au pair girl was
supposed to arrive. Sylvia got up
early or perhaps never went to
bed, too feverishly pounding out
her poetry. In any case she left
food for her children in their
room in case they woke before
the au pair girl arrived. Then she
went into the kitchen, sealed the
door with towels and turned on
the gas jets of the oven.
When the au pair girl arrived
and did not have her knocks
answered, she went away. The
man in the flat below who would
have responded to the knocks and
probably investigated fpr the au
pair girl was drugged himself by
the gas. When the girl came back
she was finally let in by some
workmen and they found Sylvia
dead.
It is important to recognize the
distinction between this suicide
attempt and the first serious one
at 18. At that time a deliberately
misleading note was left, a well
disguised place was found for the
act and a huge quantity of
sleeping pills was taken. Sylvia
was found by her mother when
Mrs. Plath was doing laundry—a
somnolent groan from the wood
pile.
So death at 18 was averted by
sheer accident. Sylvia must
surely have been aware of the
necessity to attend to masking
the trivia if her last attempt was
at all serious. The events above
suggest quite the opposite. She
had every reason to believe she
would be rescued Near her body
was a note telling which doctor to
notify, a sure sign of hesitation.
Alvarez is convinced this final
attempt was not a serious one,
but merely a risk she took and
lost That being true, Sylvia Plath
dot's not fit the myth of the poet
as sacrifical victim of her art:
“In these terms, her
suicide becomes the whole
point of the story, the act
which validates her poems,
gives them their interest,
and proves her
seriousness. So people are
drawn to her work in much
the same spirit as Time
featured her at length: not
for the poetry but for the
gossipy, extraliterary
‘human interest.’ Yet just
as the suicide adds nothing
at all to the poetry, so the
. myth of Sylvia as a passive
victim is a total perversion
of the woman she was. It
misses altogether her
liveliness, her intellectual
appetite and harsh wit, her
great imaginative
resourcefulness and
vehemence of feeling, her
control.”
I have quoted Alvarez at length
because he was probably closer
to Sylvia at the end of her life
than anyone else and he un
doubtedly knew her best His
conclusion is important because
it suggests that this was going to
be the last suicidal ritual or
initiation rite that had to be en
dured Death and life having
begun as separate and opposite,
having slowly converged
throughout her life until their
individual identities were in
separable, were now going to
part again, cleansed, and a new
life begun
In the Zen anecdote, before
Zen. men are men and mountains
are mountains, during Zen. men
and mountains are confused,
after Zen, men are men and
mountains are mountains. One
need only substitute life and
death in those comparisons to
grasp the thrust of Sylvia Plath’s
imaginative and real journey.
We may very well wonder then
what to make of all the
vehemence, the disgust, the
violence of Sylvia’s poetry. If, as
Alvarez has convincingly argued,
the facts of Sylvia’s life bring
little to bear on, indeed often
obscure the real importance of
her art, what can be made of it?
What lessons or applications or
signs appear?
Looking over the reviews tnai
appeared soon after the
publication of Ariel, I con
sistently found the same lines of
the same poems quoted by
reviewers. These lines were
presented either out of a real
belief that they succinctly em
bodied what was central to the
whole collection of poems, or just
for their thrilling, attractable
extremism. Whatever the
motivation, it points to something
about the alluring nature of
Sylvia Plath’s poetry. The ex
treme language is so brutal that
it is irresistable to our egregious
appetites. The words are so up
front, so smashing that we glance
off. If there is any real weakness
in the poetry it is in its
illusiveness. Its superficial ac
cessibility to our senses tends to
constrict our access to its in
teriors. Getting a grasp on cer
tain poems is difficult because of
the grotesque, exposed language.
Yet, it is not impossible to
break through the language and
indeed we must if we are to go
beyond the rather limited artistic
returns of the form of the poetry
itself. What we find, I think, is the
poet dredging up the roots of her
own inner violence (Daddy, for
example) and projecting that
personal, violent stock into
something culturally symbolic.
The vision of Sylvia Plath is
apocalyptic.
In London Magazine in 1962,
there appeared an interview with
Sylvia in which she made the
following comment:
The issues of our time
which preoccupy me at the
moment are the in
calculable genetic effects
of fallout and . . . the
terrifying, mad, om
nipotent marriage of big
business and the military
in America . . . Does this
influence the kind of poetry
1 write? Yes, but in a side
long fashion. I am not
gifted with the tongue of
Jeremiah, though I may be
sleepless enough before my
vision of the apocalypse.
My poems do not turn out to
be about Hiroshima, but
about a child forming itself
finger by finger in the dark.
They are not about the
terrors of mass extinction,
but about the bleakness of
the moon over a yew tree in
a neighboring graveyard.
A great deal of Sylvia’s poetry
is preoccupied with physical
pain. Nerve endings and blood
are real enough concerns for
female sensitivities. TTiere is
evidence suggesting that she had
to endure more than the usual
female hurts which might only
make more understandable the
"new Woman" image she was
trying to project in the male
world But, as has been pointed
out, the persona of the last poems
is not “new woman,” instead it is
androgynous and transcendent.
In her last months when the bitter
cold of London magnified every
fniin. Sylvia projected her own
inner violence and physical
torture of the menstral cycle
into a symbolic life-death cycle.
The once a month ritual em
bodying the prior feelings of
endurance and sacrifice,
together with the later emotions
of "new life" and “cleansing,” is
projected to a periodic death rite.
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it—
Dying
Is an art, like everything
else.
I do it exceptionally well.
(Lady Lazarus)
In the Ariel poems the images
of Hiroshima, and Auschwitz and
blood and vomit are used to
capture the transcendence of her
theme. The poet has taken her
death-in-life perceptions of
middle class America and in her
drive inward to examine the
details of that violent and brutal
life, has brought herself face to
face with the precariously thin
boundary between life and death.
Just as victim and torturer
become indistinguishable in the
poetry so does death and life.
The haunting voice in Sylvia’s
last poems comes from the
grave. It is as if she has tried to
imitate the journey to the grave
that Shakespeare’s Juliet makes,
to imitate it imaginatively since
the awful paradox of examining
life from the point of view of
death is that there is no return.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to
you.
I thought even the bones
would do.
(Daddy)
More than any other poem,
“Daddy” embodies the thrust of
Sylvia Plath’s vision. With its
battering cadence, its love and
violence, its psychic tran
scendence, “Daddy” is a poem of
life caught between the forces of
brutality and love. And in the end
the poem only resolves itself in
images of violence, in image of
our age:
There’s a stake in your fat
black heart
And the villagers never
liked you.
They are dancing and
stamping on you.
They always knew it was
you.
Daddy, daddy, you
bastard, I’m through.
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