Sylvia Plath

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Today's great life is Sylvia Plath, a poet and novelist who, unfortunately, is sometimes better known for her suicide than for her writing. Hoping to extract Plath from her tragic narrative and demonstrate why she deserves her place among the great is the writer Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, a book about the metamorphosis of motherhood, which was inspired in no small part by Sylvia Plath's own bold writing about the maternal experience.

Lucy, when do you first come across her? C can you remember the moment? I can't exactly remember, but I'm pretty sure it must be something like reading The Belgiar, her novel, when I was maybe in my mid teens. And then I did an English degree at UCL and and I was very into American poetry, but it was more like Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop. Um but I was aware of of some of her poems. Um

and immediately struck by the kind of the musicality of her l her command of language, so her half rhymes, her rhythms, um and then her startling imagery. Um and the kind of grace and elegance with which she wrote. But it wasn't until really the last time.

eight years or so that I studied her work with a lot more concentration and attention. And I think when I when I became a mother I started to search really desperately for literature about the physical and the psychological experience of of pregnancy and childbirth and early motherhood. And that's when I happened upon this long poem Three Women, which I'd never heard about before.

It's a poem that she wrote for BBC Radio and it's three women in a maternity ward. Um one is giving birth, one is miscarrying, and one is giving birth um to a child that will be adopted. And in this poem even though it was written in nineteen sixty two. the words were just like the words that people around me were saying if they felt brave enough to say them. So, you know, words like It is terrible to be so open, but you know, how will I protect this this being?

people say becoming a mother is like your heart walking around outside your body. You know, that's like this kind of meme that gets it's kind of a cliche about motherhood. And actually it's from three women. It is a terrible thing to be so open. It is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world. The kind of the shadow side of the maternal experience which you just

you don't see much of and which is often pathologized, um, and and made of a taboo. So she was she was breaking these taboos which um yeah provided for me a lot of relief and consolation and also creative inspiration. Can a man find these things in her work? Absolutely. Absolutely. The maternal experience, pregnancy, and she writes about pregnancy loss and childbirth and nursing and and looking after children.

is so underwritten and under recorded in our literature and culture. Having r read and researched and written in this area for quite a while now. The lack of maternal stories. is associated with a kind of crisis that women sometimes have when they become mothers. And the the maternal ideal is so romantic and pastel hued and like Mary, when actually it's a very um psychological uh and sometimes disturbing experience to bring a child into the world and pla

subverts this idea of the kind of benign mother figure and she kind of extracts from herself the truth of it, which is that it uh wonderful and tender, but also you're meeting with chaos and cruelties of life in a new way. I think absolutely men can connect with that. We're all of of mother born, of women born. Yes. We were all dependent on someone at the beginning of our lives. I think it's strange that we're so disinterested in the drama and the theatre of birth.

I'm curious about your own book published in twenty twenty three, Matrescents. Could you explain what the term matrescence means and what what made you write it? So matrescence means quite simply the process of becoming a mother. It was a a a word coined by the late American anthropologist Dana Raphael in the seventies.

So it's kind of similar to adolescence. Um so she uh in her kind of anthropological work found that in most societies in the world, becoming a mother is seen as a traumatic life crisis which um you know, not not in a kind of in intense way, but which requires rituals and rites and support and a sense of the newborn mother. And today we know that the brain now changes shape in multiple areas.

affects our bodies in in in multiple areas and also psychologically and emotionally and and very much politically. It was it's been the most sociopolitical experience of my life. Yeah, I've been in quite a privileged position to hear from a lot of people who are becoming mothers today and motherhood is an area in which feminism is unrealised and there's still so many taboos around the maternal body, the postpartum body, even postnatal depression which

is possibly what Sylvia Plath was suffering from at the end of her life. She has a reputation. Am I being fair? Perhaps not. uh as a depressing writer? I don't find her depressing at all. She did suffer from depression throughout her life. as someone who has also um experienced that, I find her poems about depression actually kind of the opposite of depressing.

very much very consoling and a kind of relief to be able to connect with someone over an experience which can be, well, you know, as if you're behind a glass pane or a bell jar. She does, you're right, she does have this kind of story about her her experience of mental illness. But I don't think you know that's not everything of her life and

I mean certainly her treatment by certain psychiatrists and in in psychiatry is an important part of her life. But I don't think she's depressing. I think she is So full of life, like so enlivening. She's one of those poets who the way she describes things. they feel even realer than they actually are. And she's so highly sensitive to her surroundings. And then she manages to put those observations into this these often very strange, fresh, unusual words.

I think that she makes the world alive and that's partly why she's still so popular because her w her work is so vital and visceral and living.

Our expert, Professor Heather Clarke, is the author of the most recent and most comprehensive of Plath's biographies, Red Comet, The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath. Do you agree with Lucy that that um she is to some degree misremembered? Yes, I do. Um often when I was telling people that I was writing a biography of Sylvia Plath, you know, the first comment would be Oh, she's that...

crazy lady who put her head in the oven. I mean, I I'm I'm being blunt, but this this really upset me, that that this was often the first thing that came to people's minds that the suicide, which I think has been sensationalized and hystericised. Sylvie Plath was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, um, for the reasons that Lucy just laid out so articulately. And I mean I think her legacy has has suffered in the wake of that. Was she fun? She was. Um she was hungry for life.

She had an enormous appetite, um, figuratively and literally. Her friends would always talk about um how she c she was just always hungry and she was able to to to eat these enormous meals and not gain any weight and like the she just She was somebody who wanted to experience everything. But yeah, I mean she was warm and open and fun and so smart.

So incredibly smart. She was very clever, wasn't she, just in terms of of IQ. Yeah, she actually had a genius IQ. It was it was measured at one point. She was She was something of a of a literary prodigy. She published her first poem when she was eight. in a Boston newspaper. And if you read her childhood poems, um

They show a wonderful facility with rhyme and meter. I mean she was writing limericks and quatrains with perfect rhyme schemes, stanzas with regular iambic and dactylic meter when she was you know, a child. So she she was really Yeah, I would say almost a prodigy. Where was she born? When was she born? She was born in Boston in nineteen thirty two and she was raised in a German Austrian family with a very strong work ethic. Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University.

He was convinced he had some form of terminal cancer and was it had this sort of fatalistic sense of of denial that nothing would um would help him. And so he he simply refused to see a doctor. And uh he fi finally, near the end of his life, agreed, but it was too late by then and he died of of complications of diabetes. So She had this sense moving forward in her life that that it was almost like a shadow suicide that her father maybe could have lived if he had

gotten help. And after he died, the family lost their breadwinner, so There were practical ramifications in addition to emotional ramifications. Um her mother had to work. Um she shared a bedroom with her mother until she was a teenager. Her grandparents moved into the family home. They moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts. And she she had all kinds of jobs during high school. She babysat. She dusted offices in schools. I mean, money was a big issue in the family after Otto died.

But, you know, she had a good life there. She had very uh influential teachers who encouraged her to write, and she ended up winning a scholarship to Smith College.

which was one of the most prestigious colleges in America. Her most famous poem, Daddy, was recorded in October nineteen sixty two. Daddy was sort of taken up by the women's movement in the nineteen seventies as as almost like their their anthem, right? Because in it she's resp she see she seems to be responding to all fathers with a capital F, patriarchy and in general. But you know, th there was there are autobiographical seeds.

But what I love about that poem is that she's making these really complex connections between totalitarianism, patriarchy, and submission. And I I think it's it's really a brilliant I can't strip out from that a kind of personal bitterness. Well this is the thing with Plath's poems, right? She's she's a quote unquote confessional poet, but she also plays with this idea of confession.

She's actually a master of um performance and irony. Could you describe her, Heather? If she was here in the studio with us, what what who would we see? You would see a beautiful, elegant, slender woman, probably um wearing a Liberty print. blouse or scarf and a camel hair coat. She was tall. She was about five nine um and moved very gracefully. The word elegant came up many times in in these interviews.

And she was a listener. Um, she took things in, but she was also a very witty conversationalist. Would you have liked her personally, Lucy? Would you have liked to know her? I think I would have liked her intensity. Um It seems like she could sometimes be kinda nasty. I don't know if that's correct, Heather, but there was maybe a

a ruthlessness. She could be especially to other women who were um in competition with her. Yeah. Literary competition, yes. It's interesting how extroverted she was, although she had these kind of periods of depression. I I'm not an extrovert at all, but you know, sh she was always dating, wasn't she? And she was always kind of out and about and I think I would have liked to be friends with her if we could have like hung out

on the coast or in woods looking for mushrooms. I never thought of her as a nature poet. That's wonderful, isn't it, Lucy? It is and and she absolutely was. And what was so brilliant and startling about her kind of conception of the natural world was that she was kind of breaking with a romantic with a capital R tradition, you know, it's not romantic morkish tweet at all. It's frogs, it's spiders, it's mushrooms, it's rooks and myth.

And there's always a kind of hint of of menace or um the the chaos that that is the world. Um and and often there's a kind of surrealist element as well. Du, jag skulle ju köpa några nya palstrält i lagret. Det kanske blev lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt, skribord, jag köpte en sån här, och kontorstolar, och så hade de en skitsnygg till. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till AGR. Snö överallt! Kiland biter. Då gäller det att vara redo. Svedå har vi inte kläderna.

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Sylvia Plath's novel, The Belgiar, is based on her own experiences. The protagonist, Esther, is also a high flyer who wins all the scholarships, including an internship at a fashion magazine in New York. So uh tell us about Mademoiselle Heather. So Cloth Won a guest internship at this fashion magazine in 1953. And she

thought that she would be meeting Dylan Thomas and Truman Capote and living this very glamorous literary life. And and in a way it it was glamorous, but I think she became quite disillusioned early on because she was immersed in this world where women were seen as objects. She complained a lot about the materialism and commercialism that seemed to animate her relationships in New York and everything seemed to revolve around power and money. So she began

to slide into a very dangerous depression at the end of that June of nineteen fifty three. I recently reread the Belljar and I don't think I'd quite realise it's actually very funny. It is so self knowing and self aware and kind of sends herself up. There's one bit where she she's at some fancy dinner and she ends up drinking the finger bowl because she thinks it's a kind of Japanese soup. It's got like cherry blossoms in it and she eats the cherry blossoms too.

Yeah, it's funny, it's satirical and and it kind of zips along. I think it's remembered the Beljar as being, you know, a a story which appeals to people in angst and alienation in their teenage years, but she's kind of flattened into this kind of depressive suicide case. She's so neutered by her image, I think. But th there's so much more going on there. And part of that is is her humour, which people don't really talk about.

Yes, and I I I wanted to add, it's a very political novel. And I think Plath as a political writer is so she is so underappreciated. The first sentence of the Beljar is It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs. Right off the bat, she's making a political statement about the Eisenhower era and repression and the Cold War. Heather, you said that after her time at Mademoiselle, she went into a deep

depression. Uh take that forward for us. What happened? So her mother brought her to a psychiatrist who prescribed electroshock treatment. So Plath received a series of electroshock treatments that were very badly administered, and she She decided, as she later told a friend in a letter, to end her life while she still possessed free will and while her family would remember her as a success rather than

a mental patient. So in August of nineteen fifty three she hid herself in her basement's crawl space and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. And after three days of frantic searching, her brother found her still alive in the basement. Actually so much of her life was affected by the failures of kind of mid century psychiatry. that electric shock therapy was administered in a way which traumatized her and it sounds as though she had um possibly a sort of PTSD. Um it's it's tragic.

Yes, she told a friend after that experience that if if it looks like this will ever happen to me again, I will kill myself. It it was like a form of torture. I mean they they didn't use any anesthetic, they just basically electrocuted her. But she did go to McLean hospital then and and got much better in late nineteen fifty three, early nineteen fifty four. She later came to study at at Cambridge it was here she met Ted Hughes, and here they both are in january nineteen sixty one.

I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine. I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. And uh I went to this little celebration. And then then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and and uh suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later. I'd saved some cash. I'd been working and everything I'd saved I blew it in on a court chip which lasted about three months.

Uh what was the actual form of this proposal? We kept writing poems to each other, and uh then it just grew out of that. The feeling that that we both were writing so so much and and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on. It's sad, Lucy, isn't it, knowing what happened in the end? To hear the the optimism there. Yeah, you can really hear their their happiness and love. Yes. And I think I mean they did obviously, um, in a kind of symbiosis they

they created poems together or, you know, reacting to the other's poetry. Um but I think i it's also good to remember that some of her very finest poems were written after he'd left her.

there was something about the the leaving which created some of her finest art. I do think that his leave taking unlocked something. Heather what what happened? Why did it fall apart? Well Plath had a miscarriage. in February of nineteen sixty one. And this is a time when uh she writes about a physical assault that uh th that came from Hughes and So things begin to really

go downhill from that point. I think the the birth of Nicholas in January of nineteen sixty two was another turning point. It had been the case that she and Ted had split the child minding. Hughes would take Frida during the mornings and

Plath would write and she said, If I have my mornings, everything is fine, right? I can get through the rest of the day. After Nicholas's birth, she didn't have her mornings anymore because she was now in charge of two children and she did the majority of the housework. And then there was Asia Weville. Yes. The marriage began to really unravel in the spring of nineteen sixty-two after Asia and her husband came to visit them at Court Green, and that's when the affair really really began. And

Plath was devastated. I mean she was she was absolutely devastated. She really started to question uh everything that she had sacrificed for him because of course Sylvia Plath was Ted Hughes' agent, right? She typed all of his poems. She sent his work out to literary magazines. There's an argument to be made that. He never would have become the poet he did without her. It was a particularly cold, miserable winter, wasn't it, Heather? Yes.

Uh Plath moved to Yates' house in December of nineteen sixty two. She called it Yates' house. Yeats had lived there uh as a child and and she was so excited about this move. Um it was a real fresh start for her. It was a new beginning. She was full of optimism moving to London. But this winter was Horrible. And and she's not sleeping. And she's breastfeeding. And the pipes froze. There was filthy water in their bathtub. She was alone with two toddlers.

Um, she was always grubby. Her kids were sick. She got sick. She's possibly suffering from postpartum depression and she was lonely and she missed Ted. Ted would come around to visit the children and There were moments where if they thought maybe they would get back together, but then he was also seeing two other women. So it all of this is sort of weighing on her in that winter of of nineteen sixty two, sixty three.

There's obviously so much complexity to the kind of unspeakably tragic end of her life. But it kind of astonishes me in some way that, you know, a woman being left alone with two children is kind of seen as normal. I mean, anyone who's been alone with two young children for a long time, not slept, sick, the children are sick too. This is is quite a strange thing to expect.

one woman to be able to carry. Um, especially when you look at our evolutionary history where for ninety nine percent of it we have raised young collectively. So there's a maternal health angle to it. Um Which has possibly been ignored. I mean, I think Nicholas was very young baby. Yeah. I mean he was he was just over a year when she died by suicide. Yeah. Tell Tell us about the suicide, Heather. Well Well Plath was due to

go into a a psychiatric ward and I think she was terrified. Um, you know, it's important to to see that as context around her suicide. which occurred in the early morning hours uh of february eleventh. Um and she she died by carbon monoxide poisoning, um, through her gas oven. And she left bread and milk for her children who were in the room upstairs, and she opened their window and left doctor Hoarder's number.

said, please call Doctor Hoarder. Um and that was it. And I I always uh trip up on that word please. That just that gets to me sort of genteel no. I think, you know, in her final poems she talks about a child who, you know, she wants to fill their eye with colour and dust. Not this ringing of hands, this dark ceiling without a star. And and I find in that a kind of pressure.

kind of the desperate horror of being responsible for for children and not able to give them what they need and you know, that that's just that's that's such a horror. We are quite disturbed and frightened by maternal suicide, even though the first year after a baby is born is is the time when a woman is most at at risk of suicide. So I think

you know, we we've kind of focused on on Plath's tragic death, but also not really seen what was behind it. It's kind of so shocking and taboo that we we kind of close our eyes, I think, to the context. But I think we can learn from her death, which I don't think should overshadow her life.

Mae'n ymwneudol ymwneudol ymwneudol ymwneudol ymwneudol ymwneudol ymwneudol ymwneudol Still. The original edition of the collection Ariel published two years after her death. was not published in the order she intended, was it? No. The version of Ariel that Plath left on her bedside table when she died had a very different trajectory. Um Plath's aerial

was hopeful. The first word of her aerial was love. The first poem was morning song and the first line, Love Set You Going like a Fat Gold Watch. The last word was Spring. So she wanted the book to move in a more optimistic Trajectory and Ted Hughes changed the order. So it had a huge influence on the way Plath was read and and her legacy. Is Sylvia Plath's legacy secure? Do you think? Or or are people beginning to forget?

I think that her poetry is so fine and audacious and powerful that it it has a kind of timeless ymwneud â'r modd ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r kind of weird imagery, I think these are this is art that

w will be appealing to to humans forever and could be life changing forever because she she's writing also about the human condition. I mean it's such a cliched phrase but She's writing about melancholy in the mind and birth and love and spring and rebirth and you know, looking to the natural world for um one of her phrases is, one of her lines is

what solace can be struck from rock to make heart's waste grow green again. I think people will always need to try and grow green again, and her work can help us to do that. My thanks to Professor Heather Clark, and uh to you, Lucy Jones, for uh bringing Sylvia Plath alive like this and I must say, persuading me uh to understand and appreciate her work a little. I've always struggled, but

After this discussion I I'm I'm I'm beginning to fall a little bit in love with her myself. So so thanks to both of you and um and goodbye. Vi på Dansk bank vet att relationen med tonåringar kan kosta på. Bian, vad är det för resor du har lagt in i kalenden? Det är ju bara sa och ni grabben sommaren, tänkte vi att det. Ja, och vem ska betala för det? Nej, jag plucker ju. Dags att sätta lite rimliga förväntningar.

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