Cast a cold" eye, on life, on death
Frances Spalding
BITTER FAME: A LIFE OF SYLVIA PLATH by Anne Stevenson
Viking, f15.95, pp. 413
Not many novelists, sitting down to write a 'pot boiler' as Sylvia Plath did with The Bell Jar, would begin with an elec- trocution. Her famous opening sentence, with its reference to the Rosenbergs, places the narrative in the summer of 1953 and establishes its wry, edgy voice. 'I couldn't help wondering what it would be like,' continues Plath's fictional counter- part, Esther Greenwood, 'being burned alive all along your nerves'. Further on in the novel Esther undergoes electroconvul- sive treatment, as Plath herself had done after an abortive suicide attempt. It was an experience she later transferred to nature. The elm, in her poem of that name, has suffered 'the atrocity of sunsets./ Scorched to the root/ My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.' Elsewhere the moon snags in a wych elm's 'intricate nervous system' and 'trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves'.
Anne Stevenson suggests that ECT may have permanently affected Plath's perso- nality, 'stripping her of a psychological "skin" she could ill afford to lose'. Here as elsewhere Stevenson's approach is mea- sured, mature and a tinge monitory. The Plath industry has up till now been prone to myth-mongering, with the poet pressed into the role of the doomed genius, mar- tyred wife or proto-feminist. Last year's biography of Plath was publicly denounced by Ted Hughes because, among other things, its author, Linda Wagner-Martin, portrayed him as a male chauvinist who did little to assist with household chores. Anne Stevenson sets the record straight: Ted is here frequently found holding the baby, of which there were two, and is somewhat henpecked. Plath is presented as less vic- tim than predator, difficult not only to live with but also to befriend.
She was by nature contradictory and omnivorous: she bubbled with optimism and wrote poems about isolation, anger and hurt; a model student, academically, she was also an assiduous reader of slick women's magazines; she abhorred com- promise and yet spared no pains in acquir- ing the 'all-around' image of American womanhood. Her avidity, for food, men and experience, was marked. One of her boyfriends complained of her exigency: felt as though I were being cross-examined, drained, eaten. . . . I could not seem to hold my own with her.' At her first meeting with Ted Hughes, at a literary party in Cambridge, Plath bit him on the cheek, leaving blood running down his face.
This dramatic meeting is admirably handled by Anne Stevenson. She parries Plath's account of the demon lover, who stamps and shouts, rips off her hairband and earrings and kisses her 'bang smash' on the mouth, with the remark, 'This was Sylvia's Ted'. She then proceeds to de- scribe the essentially quiet, shy, equable character whom his friends knew and also throws in Hughes's own assertion that Plath's account was ridiculously exagger- ated. It was indeed written in the throes of a hangover the day after, Plath recalling at one point sloshing the brandy Hughes had given her 'at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it'. But if the details are questionable the momentous- ness of the episode cannot be denied. The problem that confronts any biographer of Plath is how to reconcile the differing perspectives, provided by family and rela- tions, with the high-voltage reality that she herself experienced.
`What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?' asks Plath in one of her early poems. The pressures upon her came from within and without. Whereas Linda Wagner-Martin dealt more with external factors, notably the powerful 1950s ideals of marriage and motherhood, Anne Stevenson stays close to the immediate relationship in Plath's life and the themes that obsessed her. Certain felicitous phrases display a poet's grasp of words. She also writes revealingly about Plath's creative process. And though she is alert to Plath's neuroses, arguing that the loss of her father left Plath, then aged eight, psychologically injured, Stevenson avoids the lengthy psychoanalytic interpretations with which Edward Butscher freighted his biography, published in 1976.
But this careful, compassionate, beauti- fully written book is not as balanced or as objective as its blurb claims. Unlike her predecessors, Stevenson has been greatly helped by Plath's sister-in-law, Olwyn Hughes. She has also obtained access to friends and acquaintances who, mindful of the suffering Plath's suicide inflicted, seem intent on redress. Stevenson dutifully cata- logues Plath's posessiveness, irrational or self-interested behaviour. Opprobrium accumulates and off-sets Hughes's 'deser- tion. Numerous small social occasions are described at which Plath silently directed an 'inescapable blast of active hostility' at each individual who had displeased her. What is saddening about this catalogue of errors (`These are the isolate, slow faults/ That kill, that kill, that kill') is that we cannot set it against Plath's viewpoint: the journals covering the last years of her short life are no longer available, Ted Hughes having destroyed one, the other apparently missing. We catch glimpses of Plath's dilemma in Letters Home, but it was her custom, when writing to her mother, to replace inwardness with the outgoing cheeriness that she knew would please. When she finally admitted hopelessness it was dourly matter-of-fact: 'I am seeing the finality of it all, and being catapulted from the cowlike happiness of maternity into loneliness and grim problems is no fun.' One cannot help wishing that the persistent denigration of her character had been balanced with more insight into the mea- sure of her loss.
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