1932-1963
Sylvia Plath
A postwar poet unafraid to confront her own despair.
BY ANEMONA HARTOCOLLIS
She made sure to spare the children, leaving milk and bread
for the two toddlers to find when they woke up. She stuffed the cracks of the
doors and windows with cloths and tea towels. Then she turned on the gas.
On the morning of Feb. 11, 1963, a Monday, a nurse found the
poet Sylvia Plath in her flat on Fitzroy Road in London, an address where W.B.
Yeats had once lived. She was “lying on the floor of the kitchen with her head
resting on the oven,” according to a local paper, the St. Pancras Chronicle.
Plath had killed herself. She was 30.
Because the death was a suicide, Plath’s family did not much
advertise it, said Peter K. Steinberg, an editor, with Karen Kukil, of “The
Letters of Sylvia Plath,” the second volume of which is to be published this
year. And although she was a published poet who had received good reviews, and
had determinedly made her way in a literary world dominated by men, the press
did not pay much attention.
There were eight-line death notices in tiny print in The
Boston Globe and The Boston Herald. To find them, a sharp-eyed reader had to
look under “H,” for Plath’s married name, Hughes. The notices were almost as
terse as a headstone: of London, England, formerly of Wellesley, Mass., wife of
Ted Hughes, mother of Frieda and Nicolas (her son’s given name mysteriously
missing its “h”), daughter of Aurelia, older sister of Warren.
Plath’s hometown paper, The Townsman of Wellesley, falsely
reported that she had died of “virus pneumonia.” It nodded toward her literary
career, “as poet and author.” But it did not name her poetry collection, “The
Colossus,” first published in 1960 to positive reviews in the British press, or
say that her poems had been printed in prestigious magazines like The New
Yorker.
In its Fleet Street sensationalism, the St. Pancras
Chronicle’s report was more satisfying, and more truthful.
“Tragic Death of Young Authoress,” the headline blared, before
subordinating her reputation to that of her husband. “Found with her head in
the gas oven in the kitchen of their home in Fitzroy-road, N.W. 1, last week
was 30-year-old authoress Mrs. Sylvia Plath Hughes, wife of one of Britain’s
best-known modern poets, Ted Hughes,” the article said. It went on to say that
her doctor had arranged for her to see a psychiatrist, “but the letter was
delivered to the wrong address.” It ended with the coroner’s verdict that Plath
had died of carbon monoxide poisoning and, to leave no doubt in the matter,
“that she killed herself.”
At that moment in time, it was easy to see why she might have
wanted to. She was estranged from Hughes after discovering that he was having
an affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. On Dec. 28, 1962, just weeks before
her death, Alfred A. Knopf, which had published her poetry, had rejected her
novel “The Bell Jar.” Judith B. Jones, the editor who sent Plath the rejection
notice, did not try to soft-pedal it.
“To be quite honest with you, we didn’t feel that you had
managed to use your materials successfully in a novelistic way,” wrote Jones,
who has been credited with rescuing the diary of Anne Frank from the reject
pile and with discovering Julia Child. Jones said she had found the attitude
expressed in the first half of “The Bell Jar,” about the young heroine’s
adventures as a magazine intern in New York, “perfectly normal,” and had liked
it well enough. As for the second half, Jones wrote, “I was not at all prepared
as a reader to accept the extent of her illness and the suicide attempt.”
An editor at Harper & Row concurred with Jones’s
assessment. In a letter addressed to “Mrs. Ted Hughes,” this editor wrote, a
little more charitably, that the first part of the novel was “arresting, a
fresh and bright recreation of a girl’s encounter with the big city — universal
and individual.” But she added, “With her breakdown, however, the story for us
ceases to be a novel and becomes more a case history.”
As she grappled with the rejection of editors and her husband,
Plath spent her last months writing the poems that would secure her literary
reputation.
Six days after she died, her friend, the literary critic A.
Alvarez, predicted in The Observer that those poems, many of which were later
published in her best-known collection, “Ariel,” would establish her as “the
most gifted woman poet of our time.”
Thus it was in death that Plath found her literary due.
The public fascination with her death has hovered over her
family. One of Warren Plath’s two daughters, Susan Plath Winston, recalled the
surprise that she and her sister would feel when their aunt’s name appeared,
for instance, in a snippet of “The Simpsons.”
Worse was when Plath’s son, Nicholas, a fisheries biologist in
Alaska, hanged himself in 2009, at 47. Because of who his mother was, his death
received front-page treatment. “Your family pain being literary/celebrity news
is a bizarre place to be,” said Winston, a lawyer in Oklahoma City who
represents victims of domestic violence.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston on Oct. 27, 1932. Her father,
Otto Emil Plath, a German-born professor at Boston University, died when she
was 8, and her mother, the former Aurelia Schober, made ends meet teaching in a
university secretarial program. Biographers have linked Plath’s bouts of
depression to the childhood trauma of losing her father, as well as to her own
perfectionism and her mother’s smothering nature.
As a student at Smith College, Plath won a “guest editorship”
at Mademoiselle magazine in New York in 1953, an experience that became the
basis of “The Bell Jar.” Later that summer, she had a breakdown after being
rejected from a writing course at Harvard. She received shock treatment, and
then swallowed most of a bottle of sleeping pills.
She met Hughes, a future British poet laureate, at a party in
1956 while studying at Cambridge University on a Fulbright grant. (In
describing the encounter in her journal, she wrote of biting his cheek so hard
she drew blood; he pocketed her earrings.) They married within four months, a
romantic union that was also a literary partnership.
It was after their separation in fall 1962 that Plath —
jealous, feverish, addicted to sleeping pills and writing at dawn while her
children slept — produced poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” that helped
make “Ariel” an exemplar of confessional poetry.
“The Bell Jar” was not published in the United States until
1971. (It had been published in England a month before Plath died, under the
pseudonym Victoria Lucas, for fear, Kukil said, that its resemblances to real
life would attract libel suits.) In 1982, she was awarded a posthumous Pulitzer
Prize.
“Lady Lazarus” has been quoted so often it has become a kind
of epitaph for Plath.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
Gloria Steinem, who was a year behind Plath at Smith College,
published Plath’s BBC radio play, “Three Women,” in an early edition of Ms.
magazine — “probably one of the reasons she was taken up by second-wave
feminism,” said Kukil, the associate curator of special collections at Smith.
“The Bell Jar” has risen from the ashes of rejection to become a perennial favorite
of high school and college students. It spent 24 weeks on the New York Times
best-seller list in 1971, and had sold nearly three million paperback copies by
the 25th anniversary of its publication in 1996.
“I like to think she somehow helped to open up and legitimate
female anger,” said Gail Crowther, author of “The Haunted Reader and Sylvia
Plath,” among other books about the writer.
Plath made the object of much of that anger clear elsewhere in
“Lady Lazarus.”