Almost eighteen years ago, on my
first day of an A level English Literature course, I was told that we would be
studying: Hamlet, A Streetcar Named Desire, Wuthering heights and Sylvia
Plath's poetry. I didn't think that much of it at the time, but made a note of
the books that I needed to buy.
A couple of lessons later, my
teacher, a homely woman by the name of Mrs. Roberts handed out a poem called
'Daddy' by Sylvia Plath, who at that point was still unknown to me. I read it
silently to myself, I read it out loud under my breath, and we all read it as a
class, stanza by stanza. I was breathless, I had never been touched by poetry
as much in my life as I was then.
"It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly
speak.
I thought every
German was you.
And the language
obscene.
An engine, an
engine
Chuffing me off
like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau,
Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk
like a Jew.
I think I may well
be a Jew."
I was intoxicated by the words, they strangled
me, threatened me and yet comforted me because my life seemed better than she
saw hers to be. Just reading that one poem was like somebody had held a looking
glass before me, and smashed my own reflection under my very gaze. I was
confused, because I loved my own father so much, and yet there was another
person expressing such graphic resentment towards hers, and it was the
graphical language that attracted me most.
We went on to read more, more
poems made up of rich, gothic and morose words that seemed to criticise and
evaluate society and modern life, as well as the poet and those she associated
with. It was her light touch with words that delivered the hardest blows for
me, she could say more in one line than many other writers could in an entire
book. We explored 'Lady Lazarus', 'Ariel', Nick and the Candlestick' and the
gorgeous 'Morning Song', which starts with the evocatively warming opening
line: 'Love set you going like a fat gold watch'. I remember watching Mrs.
Roberts' lips as she read that line for the first time, because some of the
poems we studied she like to read to us before handing out the text. I was
enthralled and captivated by the dark world and gloomy reality of Plath's
vision. Looking back at some of my own work, I can see that I am heavily
influenced by Plath's anatomical imagery.
Mrs. Roberts had mentioned on
the first day she introduced us to Plath, that the doomed poetess had committed
suicide, but it wasn't for another month or so until she told us how or why. My
eyes were wide, and my mouth hung limply open as she explained in the detail
and extravagance that only a literature teacher can. By leaving me the space of
time to get to know the person behind the words and understand the meaning of
her anguish, the cold details of the death of Sylvia Plath really disturbed and
upset me.
On the 11th February it will be
fifty years since the greatest poet I have ever read took her own life, and
condemned herself to a legacy of poetic genius. It was not her lack of success
as a writer which lead to her suicidal depression, but nonetheless, it is an
ironic truth that Plath became far more appreciated and valued as a poet after
her death, being one of the few posthumous winners of the Pulitzer Prize for
poetry in 1982 for her 'Collected Works'.
I think that today is the
perfect opportunity to recall why and how she took her own life, and what the
implications were to the legacy of her work, her estranged husband Ted Hughes
and the literary world as a whole.
Plath had never been emotionally
stable, she had a history of depression and had meaningfully attempted suicide
at least once before, consuming a bottle of sleeping pills and sneaking herself
under the family home in Massachusetts, during the summer of 1953; where she
remained for two days, until her brother Warren heard a groaning noise from under
the floorboards and she was found in a semi-conscious state. It was that
episode that she referred to in 'Daddy':
"At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back,
back to you.
I thought even the
bones would do.
But they pulled me
out of the sack,
And they stuck me
together with glue."
Following the attempt on her own
life she spent a period of time in a psychiatric hospital, where she received
both electroconvulsive therapy and barbaric insulin shock treatments, which
induced a coma like state. She remained under hospital care for over six months
and these 'treatments' would scar her for the remaining ten years of her life.
Plath's discomfort with her
father's death just after her eighth birthday is well documented and cast a
shadow of abandonment that she feared from that point on, and was undoubtedly
what influenced her obsessive attachment to men. The hatred that she expressed
for him in 'Daddy' was not hatred towards him as a person, but because of the
resentment she felt at having him taken away from her at such a young age, a mental
scar that was to be compounded by her absence from not only his funeral, and
also his grave until she was twenty-six. The visit roused old memories and
inspired her to write 'Electra on Azalea Path':
"Small as a doll in my dress of
innocence
I lay dreaming your
epic, image by image.
Nobody died or
withered on that stage...
O pardon the one
who knocks for pardon at
Your gate, father--
your hound-bitch, daughter, friend.
It was my love that
did us both to death."
Plath made a point of expressing
her animosity and malevolence towards her mother, both through the
autobiographical central character of her novel 'The Bell Jar'; and in her own
diary, where she blamed Aurelia for Otto's death, recording:
"I
hate her hate her hate her ... I hate her because he [her father] wasn't loved
by her. He was an ogre. But I miss him. He was old, but she married an old man
to be my father. It was her fault. Damn her eyes."
Her detestation is entirely unreasonable, and a clear
sign of neurosis, as Aurelia was continually supportive of her daughter, having
encouraged her to write from an early age and supporting her through the
painful trails of mental illness. Referring to psychoanalytical theory, it is
regarded that those whom we claim to hate are the very people we associate the
most with; I feel that Plath rejected her mother because she saw so much of
herself in her, as well as using it as a defense mechanism. By convincing
herself that she hated her mother, she became immune to either her disapproval
or eventual death. Plath took great care not to let another parent cut her as
deeply as her father did by passing away before she had fulfilled her use of
him.
It is widely acknowledged that
Plath finally filled the gap left by Otto's death when she married the English
poet Ted Hughes in Bloomsbury, London during the summer of 1956, after meeting
him a year earlier whilst studying at Cambridge. It is worth noting that it is
at this point that the main body of her adult poetry starts in her collected works
(Faber and Faber, 1981). Her happiness was relatively short-lived, and as early
as 1958 she began to doubt Ted's reverence after witnessing him taking intimate
strolls around campus with young female scholars, at the university in
Massachusetts where he was teaching.
They moved back to England and set
up a home in Devon, but in July 1962 she discovered that Ted had been
conducting an affair with an attractive German woman, Assia Wevill, (who
herself had only been married two years to the poet David Wevill). After a
short break in Ireland, an attempt to patch up the cracks in their marriage,
Plath and Hughes separated in September. The following month, she experienced a
powerful bout of creativity, writing over twenty-five poems, that would go on
to make up the bulk of her posthumously published, critically acclaimed
collection, Ariel. In the darkness of the early mornings, she scrawled out:
"Stings," "Wintering," "The Jailer,"
"Lesbos," "Lady Lazarus," "Daddy,"
"Ariel," "The Applicant," "The Detective,"
"Cut" and "Nick and the Candlestick", and many more in a
machine-like haste.
In December, she moved back to
London with Frieda and Nicholas, securing a desirable apartment at 23, Fitzroy
Road in Camden, part of a building that once served as a home to the great
Irish poet W.B. Yeats, something which seemingly gave Plath a brief sense of
positivity towards her future. But, the winter was cold, the worst that Britain
had experienced for over sixty years, her and the children suffered with colds,
but for Plath it developed into a severe bout of influenza in January. Alone,
with two small children in the depths of a crippling winter, and the intermittent support of her friends,
she fell deeper into depression. The publication in Britain of her first novel 'The
Bell Jar', gave Plath little respite, as her American publisher had rejected
the manuscript. On the twenty-seventh of January, Anthony Burgess posted a
positive review of her book in The Observer which should have lightened her
mood, but it appeared next to a poem by Hughes, and hurled Plath deeper into
the furnace of depression. Shortly after this, she called her physician Dr.
Horder, pleading with him that she feared that another breakdown was imminent.
Evidently concerned, he immediately prescribed her anti-depressant medication
and began to search for a hospital bed for her, after learning of her previous
suicide attempts.
On February seventh, she packed
a few belongings and took the children to with stay with friends Gerry and
Jillian Becker, in nearby Mountfort Crescent. Her time there was spent bouncing
between the two extremes she knew so well, dressing immaculately for dinner and
eating with a good appetite, then spending half the night in crisis, relaying
to Jillian her hatred for Ted, her mother and 'she', Plath never referred to
Assia by name. She needed a large quantity of sleeping tablets at the start of
the night, then after resting for just a couple of hours she would lie and call
for Jillian. Her early morning depression was the hardest to surmount,
requiring Plath to consume her 'wake-up' pills at least ninety minutes before
she was capable of lifting herself out of bed. Jillian and Gerry were good to
her, they never complained or remonstrated against what must have been a huge
burden on the normality of their own family life.
Gerry took Frieda and Nicholas
along with his own daughter to the zoo on Sunday, following a peculiar set of
occurrences when Plath had briefly left the house carrying a suitcase that
contained acocktail dress and hair curlers for some mysterious appointment.
Whilst they were out, Jillian fed Plath with a hearty meal before she headed up
to sleep for the longest period in four days. Finally waking at teatime, Plath
declared that she felt quite better, and requested that she be taken home to
Fitzroy Road. Naturally the Beckers tried to dissuade her, but she was
indomitable with her demands. Gerry drove her back, returning home at eight
o'clock and recounting to Jillian how Plath had wept for the whole journey
back, yet refused his pleas to take her back to Mountfort Crescent.
Whilst Dr. Horder claims to have
seen Plath on the evening of the tenth February, it is known for certain that
Prof. Thomas was the last person to see her alive. Shortly before midnight she
knocked on his door and requested a postage stamp, initially refusing to accept
the money she offered him, Plath insisted that she must pay him, and forebodingly
told him "or I won't be right with my conscience before God." She
took her leave, but Thomas did not hear her walk away or climb the stairs; some
moments later he opened his door again to find her standing in the cold, dark
hall. Evidently concerned by her behaviour, Thomas offered to call the doctor,
but Plath dismissed his suggestion, telling him that she had had "a
wonderful vision." Some hours later, the professor was kept awake by her
repetitive pacing backwards and forwards on the floorboards above his room.
At nine the next morning Myra
Norris, a nurse booked by Dr. Horder knocked on the main door of 23, Fitzroy
Road; she initially had trouble entering the house, but was let in by Charles
Langridge, a builder who was working in a neighbouring property repairing a
burst pipe, damaged by the savage temperatures they were still experiencing.
They immediately became choked by the unmistakeable sulphuric odour of gas and
rushed up to Plath's flat on the next floor. Langridge smashed the door down
and they discovered Plath's body sprawled out on the kitchen floor.
"The
woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the
smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek
necessity
Flows in the
scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be
saying:
We've come so far,
it is over..."
(Edge- 5th February
1963)
Frieda and Nicholas were safe,
she had executed the mechanical operation of ending her torturous existence
with the precision of a truly committed person. In the small hours of the
morning, at the time most common for suicides, she climbed the stairs to the
top floor of her flat, left a breakfast of bread and milk for her beloved
children, placing it by their high-sided cots, flung the window wide open and
taped up the cracks between the frame and door, using towels to further protect
them from the gaseous poison that would soon be flowing freely around the
house. She returned to the kitchen on the middle floor of the house, lay down
before the gas oven, folded a small towel and placed her head on it, with the
gas taps turned on full.
Plath's death has become
something of a contemporary mythology, it certainly elevated the status of her
work, but also served to divide popular opinion. There is no escaping her
literary genius, but researching this piece I have found great swathes of blame
towards all involved. Some commenters on a recent Guardian article accused her
of being a bad mother, for me it is clear that Frieda and Nick were the only
two people she had ever loved without condition or compromise. The level she
went to to protect them from the fumes illustrates this perfectly. Severe
mental illness does not inhibit your ability to love or care for your children.
The majority of Plath fans point
their finger at Ted Hughes for his part in her downfall, but it is important to
remember that she had attempted suicide before even meeting him. Whilst his
abandonment of her for Assia Wevill, certainly pushed Plath into a very dark
space, countless women have survived such events; it's not pretty and it's not
healthy, and although it was without doubt a contributing factor, his adultery
was not the sole cause behind her manic depression and impeding suicide. I do
not like Hughes, neither as a person, nor as a poet; I find him to be
repulsively arrogant, and his poetic works to be greatly overestimated and
pretentious. His writing benefited from her death just as much as hers did,
except he was alive to enjoy it.
The cause of Plath's suicide
could only be found within her own brilliant mind. She was the victim of the
circumstances that went before her, which all contributed to and deepened her state
of mental illness. Psychiatric 'care' in the sixties was still primitive and
barbaric, Plath was aware of her state of mind, having previously alerted
Horder that she feared the onset of another breakdown, it may have been the
memory of the electroconvulsive therapy that she had experienced a decade
before that drove her conclude that death was a more suitable conclusion.
Regardless of how we hypothesise, we will never understand her frame of mind
during those last few hours. Did she wake up at teatime in the Becker's house
and decide to take her life that night? Was she uncertain, is that why she was pacing
the floor above the professor's flat? Did she find peace on those final moments
as she lay her head in the oven, or was she fearful of what to expect? Was it
always gas, or did she plan to overdose on sleeping tablets again, but changed
her mind for a more definite method? How the tears must have been streaming
down her face when she closed the door on her children for the final time, did
she hold them tightly?
She was buried in the Hughes
home town of Heptonstall, Yorkshire on Saturday 16th February. Her grave is
visited by thousands of people every year.
At nine o'clock on Monday 11th
February, I shall take a few moments to myself and respect the ghastly events which
unfolded in that quiet suburb of north London fifty years ago. I shall picture
the horror that unfolded for the unsuspecting Nurse Norris and Langridge, I
will imagine the traumatic yet seemingly inevitable telephone conversation that
informed Ted of his wife's death, I will cogitate the failings that Aurelia
Plath felt, and the harsh reality of a second great loss. But most of all I shall
think of the woman who suffered so much and yet created some of the most
beautifully illustrative literature that has ever been written in the English
language, one who has inspired me to be a better writer ever since my eyes
first scanned the pages of her work.
"Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally
well.
I do it so it feels
like hell.
I do it so it feels
real.
I
guess you could say I've a call."
(Lady Lazarus-
October 1962)
References:
Anne Stevenson- Bitter Fame, A
Life of Sylvia Plath.
Sylvia Plath- Collected poems.
Gina Wisker- Sylvia Plath, A
Beginner's Guide.
www.sylviaplath.info
www.sylvia-plath.org
The Guardian- Love, Loathing and
Life with Ted Hughes (March 2000)
www.sylivaplathinfo.blogspot.co.uk
