(NB: this essay has nothing to do with Ted Hughes’ poetry collection of the same title, but is rather part of a series of short essays which you can read my introduction to here.)
I have spent the last month making my way through Sylvia Plath’s life as she documented it in her Unabridged Journals. All that time I was, of course, making my way through my own. The time-both hers and mine-slipped past in fits and starts. Weeks passed in flashes and some days stretched out for ages, pages and pages. Emotions, sensations, the psychologies of herself and others – all of these Plath recorded, intricately and with great care and often joy, saving all the scraps she could of her days and making of them a great edifice of memories, creating, in other words, her life.
Plath’s life is probably not what many readers hope to find in her Journals; they go to them looking, instead, for her death. They will not find it. Ted Hughes took it upon himself to burn her last journal, claiming that he did not want their children to have to read it; the second to last, which probably contained her writings from the time of their turbulent separation, he reported missing. What she was thinking in the months before her death we will never know; perhaps that is for the best.
“Suicide,” writes Mark Fisher in Ghosts of My Life, “has the power to transfigure life, with all its quotidian mess, its conflicts, its ambivalences, its disappointments, its unfinished business, its ‘waste and fever and heat’ – into a cold myth.” Plath’s poetry was, in its way, a great project of myth-making. In The Colossus and Other Poems the titular poem makes this quite explicit, its narrator picturing herself as the sculptor of the father-image which underlies much of her poetry. Other poems feature traditional mythological subjects: the Lorelei, the Muses, Persephone, the Maenads. In Ariel, the father figure returns like a familiar demon in ‘Daddy’, accompanied by others: the Magi, the river Lethe, Medusa, Lazarus.
As ‘Lady Lazarus’ obliquely alludes, Plath’s suicide was the ultimate mythologizing gesture. In the moment of her passing-that second split between the planes of life and death-Sylvia Plath the person transformed, in almost Ovidian fashion, into an idea, a myth. Auden wrote that at the moment of Yeats’ death “he became his admirers”. We could say the same of Plath; perhaps, given the ardent self-identification of many with her work, even more truly. Yet her suicide’s sordidness, the strange attraction of someone else’s tragedy, cannot be the sole source of her poems’ power. Perhaps their near-gravitational pull is generated by the way in which they seem, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock, to squeeze her life and death into a ball and roll it towards the reader and their own overwhelming question; they too seem to say, “I am Lazarus, come from the dead / Come to tell you all, I shall tell you all”. For all that we dread death, we are always asking, we want to know, we want to be told. We want to believe that Plath’s suicide gave her poems the power to tell us, as if on her way down she might somehow have jotted down the answer. That, though her poems could not save her, they may save us. Prufrock, who has survived into a melancholic but comfortable middle age, has his doubts as to whether asking the overwhelming question “would have”, after all, “been worth while”. Plath did ask, and we ask her, every time we read her poems: “well, was it?”
The myth of Plath and her poems reminds me, actually-bear with me here-of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. The Hallows are three legendary objects which, when united, supposedly make their possessor master of death: the Elder Wand, the Resurrection Stone, and the Cloak of Invisibility. According to ‘The Tale of the Three Brothers’ by which the reader is introduced to the Hallows, the Resurrection Stone does what it says on the tin. Its first user, we are told, brought his prematurely departed beloved back from the dead, yet she returned to the world only halfway, a shade. “Soon she turned sad and cold, for she did not belong in the mortal world. Driven mad with hopeless longing, the second brother killed himself so as to join her.” Harry is willed the Stone early in the book, but he cannot use it, for it has been secreted away in his first Golden Snitch. When he holds it, the Snitch inscribes itself with a riddle: “I open at the close”. He turns it over and over again in his hand, searching for the latch which he cannot for the life of him find. But that is it, that exactly: for the life of him. It opens only when he sacrifices himself: when he says he is ready to die, and means it. And so, just before he does, those he has lost-his parents, godfather and mentor-appear: “less substantial than living bodies, but much more than ghosts.” He apologizes, tries to explain; they comfort him. He asks if dying hurts, and his godfather tells him not at all: “Quicker and easier than falling asleep.” (Here Plath, with her “I do it so it feels like hell,” diverges just a bit.) And then he tries, really tries to die, in a kind of suicide-by-Voldemort, but just as it seems he has succeeded he wakes up, and triumphs over death. It is truly, as Plath puts it, “the theatrical / Comeback in broad day”.
Plath’s poems are like so many Golden Snitches. Their polished, perfect riddles transform when you feel yourself near the close: their words become the obvious, the only, ones, and summon a shade who has gone before, who perhaps can tell you what it is like to die. Reading them, you feel Plath’s presence: not that of the living person she once was, whom you will never know, nor that of a ghost, for there is too much of her life in her poems for them to simply drift through you. Poetry, at its best, is perhaps the closest we can get to magic, and some of her poems are. Yet I find that, being as they are so intertwined with her death-that dark cold day in that coldest of London winters-I can read them only seldom, and afterwards find myself longing for warmth, for life’s quotidian mess, insulation against the frigid impersonality of death. In the Journals she left behind just such a mess – about nine years worth of it. What a gift.
It is often forgotten that Plath wrote as much prose as she did poetry, if not more, and her journals were a kind of laboratory for her subjects and stylings. There are sharp turns of phrase and sketches of people: “Linda is the sort of girl you don’t remember when you meet her for the second time”; “A psychiatrist is the God of our age. But they cost money”; W.H. Auden’s “burlap-textured voice… and the inconsistent white hairless skin of his legs”. There are incisive, often self-excoriating insights into her own psychology. There are also excellent bits of travel writing: her account of her and Hughes’ honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain, for instance, is so vivid you can almost taste the fresh-caught fish, and feel you too have taken a refreshing mid-day swim (there are hints of darkness too, but mainly you get the sense of a young, ambitious writer thrilled to be embarking on a new life of creating and love; this in stark contrast to Hughes’ depiction in his poem ‘You Hated Spain’.).
Plath’s journals were a repository of experiences, which she stored like a squirrel in fall for (very) direct later use as the stuff of stories and poems. The American publication of The Bell Jar was almost cancelled, and eventually delayed by eight years, by Plath’s mother, who feared (for good reason) the offense it might cause to those characters in it who were, in fact, very much living and only slightly fictionalized people (herself, as Esther Greenwood’s insensitive and contemptuously-regarded mother, included).
Many of those people are immediately recognizable in the Journals, as are a number of Esther’s experiences with them. Almost as soon as anything happened to Plath which she regarded as significant, it seems she took the raw, factual material of it back to her journals to be smelted and forged into something charged with significance, made somehow truer via an almost Proustian process: “I must get them down in print. Make them up in print. Be honest.” Early on, she writes that “I cannot life (sic) for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and stories which relive it perpetually in time.” The journals are, of course, just such a book, albeit one she never entirely realized she was writing.
Writing a journal is deceptively difficult. It is hard enough just to keep it up, day after day, and perhaps even more difficult to return to it if, like Sylvia, you’re the kind of diarist who sometimes skips weeks at a time (or even a year: she kept no journal during her senior year of college, following her suicide attempt in 1953). It is far harder still to keep a good journal, if by ‘good’ we mean one which someone-the author included-could actually stand to read.
Five months ago I began to keep a journal of my own. I write in it briefly each night, jotting down events, images, observations. It is an attempt to claw back a little something from the jaws of time, and a feeble one. Despite my lack of any conviction whatsoever in its quality, I have a vague notion that it will somehow be of use in the future, and so I scribble on, and have yet to miss a day. The prospect of reading it back at the end of the year is dread-inducing. I feel fortunate to have read Plath’s Journals after I began mine; otherwise I might well have been too intimidated. It seems incredible that someone could have both lived so fully and had the time and skill to write so much down, and so well.
The ‘serious’ literary value of the Journals is incontestable, enough to eclipse the potential distraction of her biography. As Joyce Carol Oates writes in The New York Times Book Review, they are indeed “A genuine literary event…” and “contain marvels of discovery.” The lyrical strain in her prose, mostly overshadowed by pithy wit in The Bell Jar, paints many of the pages in full color and makes them a joy to read (that said, there is also a deep purple streak through much of her early, mostly unpublished poetry and prose, which must be a relief for the developing poet: she too had to work at her craft, and very hard indeed; she too was once eighteen, and used the number of adjectives you would expect an eighteen-year-old to use [and that before she began a love affair with her thesaurus.]).
The Journals contain extra-literary marvels of discovery as well: sensuous descriptions of Plath’s dating life, for instance, and a fragmentary and, for myself as a prospective teacher, slightly terrifying account of her year as a lecturer at Smith College. Also of interest, and great comfort to me, was the discovery that Plath, too, made typos and grammatical errors (she mixed up it’s and its far more often than you’d expect). My thanks to the editor, Karen Kukil, for choosing to preserve those – hunting for them was like panning a river and picking out little bits of gold. (Speaking of which, nothing humanizes Plath more effectively than her somewhat revolting [and, admit it, at least somewhat relatable] account of her pleasure at picking her nose [she also recounts a scatological episode from her childhood which I will, and you’re welcome, spare you]). She can also be, as those who have read The Bell Jar will know, very funny. This passage, from her time at Smith, made me chortle:
“3’oclock, half-absent – no doubt because of my whirling words about a quiz yesterday – well, Ill drop a short shocker on them first thing next week. Hoho how quaint is malice.“
If I manage to make the Journals seem scatter-brained and formless, that may be a failing of my writing, but it is also because they are (and that is part of what makes them ‘good’). You cannot criticize a journal using the same criteria you would a novel: journals follow no conventions of plot; their pace is essentially fixed at the rate of the day; they are usually too long; they are guaranteed to be, at times, tedious; they are by definition ultimately self-indulgent; their narrators are often unlikeable and neurotic. Compared to the novel, they are at an inherent disadvantage, but one which can be overcome and, in fact, harnessed, provided the journal is honest. In fact, for a journal to be honest, the above failings are pretty much requirements. Honest novels and poems are praised, the difficulty of producing them is much-emphasized, and yet: is it not more difficult to be honest when there is no incentive of praise, when self-aggrandizement and congratulation will bring no condemnation, when to delve into yourself might well lead you to unwanted revelations? It is so tempting-and easy, without the pressures of plot and character development-to just omit.
I am convinced that journaling to some extent suppresses the reflex for, and relieves the burden of, memory. If I am at all correct, this would imply that omitting, for the journal-writer, can be a form of intentional forgetting, and therefore that choosing not to write down something personally damning is dishonest. Of course this is an impossibly harsh standard to set, and we are not in any way entitled to, nor could we ever, know what Plath, or any other published journal-writer, chose not to set down. Nonetheless, we can, to some extent, sense when something has been left unsaid. Its absence lends what is there an eerie, somewhat askance shape: you can feel this in some of the later entires when Plath discusses Hughes. We can also often sense when a journal entry is disingenuous: its writer knows, and therefore so do we. Naturally the temptation, for journal-writers who want to write honestly and usefully, is to record as much as possible. Of course, trying to guess which events or images will become significant later in life is mostly a total crapshoot. Often we misinterpret, or nearly forget, events until long after they’ve happened, or we unconsciously warp our perceptions of them so that they might fit into our inner narrative. Most of what seems hugely important in the moment turns out to be anything but. The habit of recording can easily tip into a sort of hoarding, hence the sense that every journal-reader has at some point had of sifting through a scrap heap of tossed-off and now nearly meaningless bits of life. I did, at times, feel this way with regard to the Journals; so, apparently, did Plath:
“I want to express my being as fully as I can because I somewhere picked up the idea that I could justify my being alive that way. But if I am to express what I am, I must have a standard of life, a jumping-off place, a technique – to make arbitrary and temporary organization of my own personal and pathetic little chaos. I am just beginning to realize how false and provincial that standard, or jumping-off place, must be. That is what is so hard for me to face.”
Journals are difficult to write; they are also difficult to read. You must somehow try to make sense of that quotidian mess, this heap of the sawdust and shavings of someone else’s life, while at the same time trying to make sense of your own (and how’s that going?). We can only do so by imposing upon the life of another our own schemas, the organizing concepts by which we create ourselves and the world. In doing so, we can begin to better understand ourselves. As social beings, we form ourselves by tumbling like stones against those we meet, particularly by rubbing up against those with whom we become close. Books, for the lonely, can substitute for stones, people, can become a kind of chosen family. Journals are particularly fertile ground for the growth of this peculiar half-intimacy, or friendship, if you like. Of course, as with people, so much depends upon meeting-or reading-them at the right time in your life.
I feel fortunate to have ‘met’ Plath at the right time in mine. It could easily have been otherwise. I can parse the facts of her life with some objectivity, and sift amongst them for the joy and light, in a way which five years ago would have been impossible. Then her life might have seemed to me a path onto which I had somehow stumbled and was already, for better or worse, following; now it is merely a happy coincidence that we have so much in common. I read her reflections on the happiness of her early childhood and know it; I read of her disillusionment after the death of her father and know something of that, too, albeit differently and at a generation of remove; I read her account of her turbulent late adolescence and tumultuous loves and (though I was far less popular with the opposite sex) I know that, too. I know something of the depression of her undergraduate years, and the excitement of her experience abroad. I expect that, sooner or later, I will end up teaching, too, and so I read her account of her time at Smith with trepidation and anticipation, looking for clues as to how I too might make it through. I too am, at this very moment, “feeling depressed from being exposed to so many lives, so many of them exciting, new to my realm of experience.”; “am gone quite mad with the knowledge of accepting the overwhelming number of things I can never know, places I can never go, and people I can never be”; am “finishing the next year here, enjoying the pressure of reading, thinking, while at my back is always the mocking tick: A Life is Passing. My Life.”
If the journals have a throughline, it is Plath’s obsession with that mocking tick, and its intertwinement with her inability to write. Obviously, given that we are able to read, at length, about this inability, it was not the total lexical eclipse which she felt it to be. No doubt this irony was not lost on her; nonetheless, she worried over her perceived incapacity almost constantly. Given that both her financial and mental survival depended on her productivity, this is understandable. She lambasts herself constantly for her tendency to “take the path of least resistance and curl up with a book.” Same. I too am always working on something, and yet, despite having been, by any measure, fairly productive for five years running, the fallow periods are always awful, always feel like the end. Frankly, I have used writing this essay as a way of jogging myself out of just such a slump. I feel relieved to have finished it, to have produced something again, but there is the usual lingering feeling that it could have been better, more inspired, that somehow in my distraction, sloth and scatterbrainedness, I let something profound and meaningful wander off to die neglected in a cold corner of my mind, or a dark cupboard I was too scared to open. Having tired of editing this, and lacking anything more to write about not writing, it occurs to me that there is no reason to subject anyone-myself included-to my account of Plath’s writing troubles when I can spare us all by excerpting her at length. Surely she would have approved.
“For all the writing, for all the invention of engines to express & convey & capture life, it is the living of it that is the gimmick. It goes by, and whatever dream you use to dope the pains and hurts, it goes. Delude yourself about printed islands of permanence. You’ve only got so long to live. You’re getting your dream. Things are working, blind forces, no personal spiritual beneficent ones except your own intelligence and the good will of a few other fools and fellow humans. So hit it while it’s hot.”
“I have such a damned puritanical conscience that it flays me like briars when I feel I’ve done wrong or haven’t demanded enough of myself…”
“What horrifies me most is the idea of being useless: well-educated, brilliantly promising, and fading out into an indifferent middle-age.”
“I felt if I didn’t write nobody would accept me as a human being. Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of experience.”
“The dialogue between my Writing and my Life is always in danger of becoming a slithering shifting of responsibility, of evasive rationalizing: in other words: I justified the mess I made of life by saying I’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it; I justified my writing by saying it would be published, give me life (and prestige to life). Now, you have to begin somewhere, and it might as well be with life.”
You have to begin somewhere, yes, but then you must also end. As I have discussed briefly in a previous essay, what it is to end and what an ending is are two very different things. We take it for granted that a (narrative) book will have an ending. Part of what makes the journal such an interesting form is that it, almost by definition, will not. Occasionally there is a kind of cadence-Tarkovsky’s journal, for instance, tapers off, the entries shortening and dimming as he becomes aware that he is terminally ill and begins to weaken-but often, like van Gogh’s letters, which end with a slightly monotonic letter describing his painting of Daubigny’s garden and enclosing a list of paints to order, they just cut off, almost as if (and surely one or two exist of which this is literally true) in mid-sentence. In Plath’s journals the last entries, from spring and early summer of 1962, consist mostly of quotidian accounts of her and Hughes’ life in Devon: their foray into beekeeping, the death and funeral of their neighbor Percy Key, and various other local goings-on. The tone is oddly impersonal.
On coming to this end, which is anything but an ending, I found myself returning to the beginning: the very first (non-quotation) sentence of the Journals. “I may never be happy, but tonight I am content.” Hemingway’s advice, to himself and every writer who feels they cannot write–”All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.”–has never been better exemplified. If that is not a true sentence, I do not know what would be.
And yet she was, we are not, and never will be satisfied; one true sentence never is quite enough. There is always the need, sometimes suppressed and at other times desperate, for the next. Eight years later, still stymied in her attempts at a novel, Plath wrote “I have no idea how to begin. I shall, perhaps, just begin.” And she did, but she did not write her novel – not that year, nor the next, nor the next. Only in 1961 did she finally finish it. I was quite moved by an editorial note which mentions that, after finishing The Bell Jar, she returned to an entry from 1958 which questioned “Why don’t I write a novel” to respond to herself “I have! August 22, 1961: THE BELL JAR”. Having achieved this lifelong dream, she had, at the time of her death, begun again twice over: she burned most of the half-finished manuscript of a second novel, Falcon Yard, and then began (and completed much of) a third titled Double Exposure (the manuscript of which was also ‘lost’ by Hughes).1
There is one entry in the journals which means more to me than all the rest. It is the one dated September 27, 1958:
I shall end these pages, I hope, in a more placid, optimistic mind than heretofore… like a soldier, demobbed, I am cut loose of over twenty steady years of schooling & let free into civilian life – as yet, newly, I hardly know what to do with myself. I start, like a race horse at the bugle, or whatever, hearing about schools opening – I get weird impulses to rush to Harvard, to Yale, begging them to take me on for a Phd, a master’s, anything – only to take my life out of my own clumsy hands. I am going to work doggedly, all year, at my own pace, being a civilian, thinking, writing, more & more intensely, with more & more purpose, & not merely dreaming, ego-safe, about the magnificent writer I could be. I have worked hard today on my bird story – words come right, rhythms come right, here, there & it is a beginning of a new life.
It means a lot to me to read that Plath wrote well that day, and felt that in doing so she was beginning a new life. Forty-five years later, that same day was again the beginning of a new life: mine.
I have not been able to track down the bird story to which this entry refers, but I presume it must have been something of a retelling of events described in the diary from July of that year. Plath and Hughes, out for a walk, discovered “a baby bird, fallen from its nest, convulsed in what looked like a death-shudder.” They rescued it and brought it home, built it a makeshift nest out of a box, a dishtowel, and shredded paper, and Plath fed it meat and bread from her hand. It survived for a week under their care, but grew too sick to survive, and so they decided, out of mercy, to kill it. In an awful irony, they did so by running a hose from the gas jet of their stove into the taped-shut cardboard box. “It was terrible.” They took the body-“composed, perfect & beautiful in death”-and buried it in their neighborhood park beneath a stone. It is almost certain, given her fiction’s autobiographical bent, that in her story she buried it again. But in order to do so she must also have resurrected it – coaxed it to life on the page and cared for it, fed it food again, with the same hands which held the pen.
The day before I finished this essay, a bird flew into a window at my parents’ home and fell still on the steps. I went outside and stroked its head and chest to see if it might still be alive. It was dead, and I left it where the foxes wouldn’t get it. Unless it is moved, or a hawk carries it away, I will see its skeleton next time I come home.
I don’t know if she ever finished the story. Perhaps, like her journals, she never wrote the ending. Perhaps it just ends – perhaps in mid-sentence. Earlier I quoted Plath’s distressed words about the inevitable arbitrariness and falsity of the “jumping-off place” from which one begins a life. I think she was wrong. The only arbitrary beginning is birth; the rest are necessary, immediate, instinctual: that jumping-off is the reflexive leap for life which we make-because we must-after each and every ending. This reflex manifested in her as the urge to write: not the poems, so sculpted and final, which she fully intended to outlive her-Eliot writes in ‘Little Gidding’ “Every poem an epitaph”, which has perhaps never been more true of any poet than Plath-but her Journals, in which, to quote Eliot again, “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning.” In recording her life with love-this act itself a denial of death-she gave a second life to every person, place, and moment of being which she remade in words. They begin another life again in every reader of those words, we salvagers who incorporate them into our own quotidian messes, to be reshaped and repurposed as we build our own great edifices of memory, in other words, our lives.
Plath never could have known that forty-five years after that journal entry my life would begin in Denver, Colorado. Nor could she have known that one day I would read the book of her life, or that I would write this essay, which, in its own way, is also the beginning of a new life for us both. Having lived, in a month, a nine year span of Plath’s life-and, in doing so, having let her inhabit mine-I feel full, and ready to return to making my way through my own. Off I go, into this life of words giving form to days, days to years, years to a life. My life, which is composed of the lives of so many whom, like Plath, I have never known, but which is also mine alone. In which every word is an end and also a beginning – again, and again and again.
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