And Summer Will Not Come Again Summary
nonfiction
Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath's Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life
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RED COMET
The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
By Heather Clark
What becomes a legend most? Equally suggested past the onetime black-and-white Blackglama fur ads, featuring Lena Horne, Diana Vreeland and Cher, among others, legends are people who have soared beyond fame or celebrity into a more rarefied, inaccessible stratosphere.
Today's media-fixated, Kardashian-dominated earth is filled with all sorts of legends, from the elevated to the base, but I can think of few poets who fit into this category. The exception is Sylvia Plath, who, with her perfect blond pageboy, wide smile and cinched-waist dresses, looked less like a proper poet and more like Doris 24-hour interval.
Past now, many of us are familiar with the rough outlines of her saga: the shining promise; the death of her adored father when she was eight; the titanic ambition and extraordinary persistence (in 1950, the summer before Plath started college and later on more than l rejections, Seventeen mag accepted her short story "And Summer Will Non Come Again"); the attempted suicide during her time at Smith; the Fulbright to Cambridge, where she met the broodingly handsome Yorkshire-bred poet Ted Hughes ("my blackness marauder," equally she chosen him), whom she soon married; the birth of their two children, Frieda and Nicholas; the couple'due south unmarried-minded devotion to their art and conviction well-nigh their respective talent, followed by Hughes's affair with Assia Wevill and Plath's taking her life in February 1963 at the age of 30 during what was famously London's coldest winter of the century. In the intervening decades she has become a protean figure, an emblem of dissimilar things to different people, depending upon their viewpoint — a visionary, a victim, a martyr, a feminist icon, a schizophrenic, a virago, a prisoner of gender — or, peradventure, a genius, as both Plath and Hughes maintained during her lifetime.
1 would think at that place is piddling to be added, if only considering of the avalanche of books — biographies, meta-biographies, pathographies (to borrow Joyce Carol Oates's term), memoirs, disquisitional studies, letters, journals, novels — that have been published about Plath since her suicide (which, for some people, is the only thing they know about her). In the last few years alone, two fatty volumes of her correspondence take been published and parsed by a whole raft of reviewers (including me). And yet, just as one is wondering whether there can possibly exist annihilation new to be said, hither comes Heather Clark's "Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath" hurtling downwardly the chute, weighing in at more than 1,000 densely printed pages.
My response to receiving the galleys during this grim and surreal season was a mixture of fatigue — non her over again! — and anticipatory pleasance at the thought of losing myself in the issues the volume was probable to bring up rather than the ones being repetitively posed past the glaring dilemmas of our 24-hour interval: the merging of creativity and pathology that informed Plath's character; her evolving artistic style, which began, in the poems that make up "The Colossus," her starting time drove, as formal, meticulously crafted and owing much to influences such equally W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot and culminated in the shockingly direct, fifty-fifty raw voice that defines the posthumously published "Ariel," which derived some of its free-associative and vernacular immediacy from D. H. Lawrence, Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton; and the way in which her marriage with Hughes first bloomed and and so imploded.
[ This book was one of our most anticipated titles of October. See the full list . ]
Indeed, as Plath and her complex, much analyzed legacy fade with the passing of successive generations, and her work grows more removed from the cultural mainstream, at present seems a prime moment to revive her tale and attempt to bring all of its elements together, without a preconceived agenda, as in, for example, Anne Stevenson'south "Bitter Fame."
Every bit Clark, a professor at the University of Huddersfield, in England, and the author of a book about Plath's and Hughes's verse, explains in her poignant and closely argued prologue, she believes that Plath's "life has been subsumed by her afterlife" and that depictions of her as "a crazed, poetic priestess are all the same with us." Cartoon upon unpublished material, including Plath'southward diaries and calendars, all-encompassing archival holdings, and "previously unexamined constabulary, courtroom and hospital records," Clark is at pains to see Plath clearly, to rescue her from the reductive clichés and distorted readings of her piece of work largely because of the tragedy of her ending. "I promise to gratuitous Plath," she writes, "from the cultural baggage of the past fifty years and reposition her as ane of the most of import American writers of the 20th century."
This last is a sizable merits for a biographer to brand on behalf of her bailiwick and I imagine that non everyone volition agree with information technology even later on reading this scrupulously researched, tirelessly detailed account. And nevertheless, there is no denying the book's intellectual power and, merely equally important, its sheer readability. Clark is a felicitous author and a discerning critic of Plath's poesy, though once in a while she leans toward the overly generous in her cess of a specific paradigm or the effectiveness of a given poem.
And then once again, it would be impossible for a work as voluminous and all-embracing as this 1 not to accept its flaws. Despite its majority and extensive scholarship, which Clark carries lightly, there are a few sections that lag — peculiarly the discussions of Plath's juvenilia, none of which sounds especially remarkable, and the blow-by-blow reconstruction of her rather manic dating life earlier meeting Hughes. I was also struck by Clark'south strange disinclination to credit earlier accounts, such as Diane Middlebrook'due south "Her Husband" (2003), which was the first book to examine Plath and Hughes's union as an initially propitious (albeit ultimately damaging) 1 for both of them. That said, "Red Comet" (the title is taken from a poem of Plath's called "Stings") is nothing short of mesmerizing, bringing the reader within a much-told but uncommonly intriguing narrative that has all too often been the object of vehement partisanship. Instead of depleting my interest in Plath, the book stimulated it farther; I found myself going on to read two books of critical essays about her right after I was done reading information technology.
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Clark has divided her biography into three parts, each of which takes up a significant portion of Plath's life and is in turn subdivided into chapters with titles that are picturesque ("O Icarus") or thematic ("The Problem of Him"). Although Plath'south male parent is famous — or, peradventure, infamous — every bit the abandoning and tyrannical parent in what is her signature poem, "Daddy," which the critic Helen Vendler once derogated as a "tantrum of style," this is the first time he comes into view as something other than a blurry, demonized character in his daughter's psychological and poetic landscape.
Otto Plath was of German origin but therein whatsoever similarity to the Nazi figure he is transmuted into in "Daddy" ends. (Plath would be much criticized in the years to come for appropriating Holocaust imagery for her own use, although, as Clark points out, "the theme was in the air by the early 1960s, finding its style into poems by Geoffrey Colina and Anthony Hecht, among others.") He was "a committed pacifist who renounced his High german citizenship in 1926," Clark recounts, "and watched Hitler's ascent with trepidation." Those looking for biological cues to Plath's mental bug might annotation that Otto's mother, Ernestine, was remembered by him as "a rather melancholy person," and that she was committed in 1916 to the decrepit Oregon Hospital for the Insane for depression or perchance senile dementia; she died there, alone and neglected by her family, iii years afterward.
Otto immigrated to America in 1900 at the age of fifteen, where he would somewhen pursue his early interest in entomology, obtaining a doctorate in biology at Harvard in 1928 and becoming a popular professor at Boston University. Forth the manner, he had a short-lived beginning marriage, which seems to have left him securely embittered about women. (According to Aurelia, Otto's second wife and Sylvia'due south mother, his first wife "had left him after only iii weeks for sexual reasons.") Plath, who wrote a series of poems well-nigh bees, including one chosen "The Beekeeper's Girl," described her father to her psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, every bit "a brilliant professor" and a "groovy man" earlier turning on him in her dire belatedly poems.
Aurelia Schober was the demure girl of a German immigrant and "had hoped to become a writer once," as she told an interviewer. She met Otto, already in his mid-40s, in ane of her graduate German classes. When they married in January 1932, Aurelia was a teacher of both English language and High german at Brookline Loftier School, simply she gave upwardly working at her hubby's request, the better to devote herself to being a homemaker.
Plath's birth that Oct was followed by the nascence of her brother, Warren, three years subsequently. "Sylvia sought out Otto's attention," Clark writes, "in an endeavor to become his 'pet,' simply as she believed Warren was Aurelia'southward." Even so in the last four years of Otto'due south life, which were plagued by sick health for which he refused to see a dr., Plath had little direct involvement with him. "She would play the piano, describe and recite poems she had memorized or written herself." (Plath was reading and writing at 5.) "Sometimes she would leave poems nether his napkin at dinner. Her dying father was her first audience."
Aurelia, who was vilified both during and afterward her daughter's life, is another beneficiary of the evenhandedness that is one of this book's singular virtues. Clark envisions Aurelia with both empathy and clarity, salvaging her from the virtually uniformly negative portraits that appeared in the wake of her dearest "Syvvie"'s death, and which were contributed to by Plath herself, especially in the fictionalized rendition of her mother in her but novel, "The Bell Jar." Although Aurelia was undoubtedly a complicated and thwarted person, Clark does not buy into the view that she was Medusa-like, the source of both Plath's overweening drive and her lethally cocky-destructive impulses: "Aurelia, the story goes, put so much pressure on her daughter to excel that Sylvia felt the just mode to win her mother's dear was to outperform herself once more and over again; because she could not sustain this cycle, she had no choice simply to surrender."
This is non to say that Plath's human relationship with her mother was without deep-seated conflicts, as Aurelia tried to reshape information technology in the volume of unfailingly sunny correspondence from her girl she collected in "Letters Home," which was published in 1976 and quickly attacked as a misrepresentation. Clark is too subtle a psychological interpreter to unilaterally come to Aurelia's defence, noting the pious and sugary streak in her grapheme and the "mixed bulletin Plath had heard since she was a child: Excel, but accommodate."
But there is no doubt that Plath wasn't simply a studiously groomed stand-in for her mother's "unfulfilled literary ambitions," as certain critics would have it; although she may have had a "penchant for martyrdom," Aurelia did indeed make continuous sacrifices on her girl'southward behalf, from her unstinting fiscal generosity to her consequent solicitude. To make this into an unconscious bargain that was struck between the 2 of them, in which Aurelia expected huge returns on her investment — the perspective that Dr. Beuscher instilled in Plath and to which she readily responded, describing Aurelia as "a hideous parasite" in a letter of the alphabet she wrote her psychiatrist later Hughes had started his matter — is to fail to run into the mode in which symbiotic relationships work with the connivance of both parties, something Plath herself intermittently realized. "It was such a relief to get back and feel the responsibleness slide off my shoulders on to my family's," she wrote to a higher friend during a Christmas vacation in 1950. "I realize now, though, that mother can't be the refuge that she was before, and that hitting me hard."
Every bit one might expect from a book as comprehensive as this 1, it is stuffed with heretofore untold anecdotes that illuminate or extend our understanding of many aspects of Plath's life, non to the lowest degree the sense of desperation she conveyed in the months after Hughes left her for Wevill and she was living lonely with 2 young children in a flat in Yeats's one-time business firm in London. I'm not sure, given everything, that Plath was a particularly likable sort, beauteous in many ways and extraordinarily brave as she may take been. A proficient friend of hers remembered her every bit a "networker" who went later on influential literary men like the poet and critic A. Alvarez, with whom, in one of the book'southward numerous revelations, she had a cursory affair. (Alvarez acknowledged that he had a close relationship with Plath just e'er claimed that information technology was ideal.) She seemed to have few friends and her evident neediness alienated those to whom she hoped to ingratiate herself. Doris Lessing, for example, who had inscribed a copy of "The Golden Notebook" "to Ted and Sylvia," "spurned" Plath when Plath visited her a calendar month or and so before her suicide, "put off by Plath's effusive praise and American gushiness," and asked the mutual friend who had brought her past "non to bring Sylvia back."
Clark'due south talent for scene-painting and inserting the stray but illustrative detail ("By Jan 31, the engagement of her last surviving check stub, she had merely 59 pounds") contributes to create a harrowing picture of the narrow confines of the London that Plath had moved to with such loftier hopes, and the mushrooming loneliness and despair — besides as "the stigma she surely felt as a unmarried mother" — that marked her final days. "She was condign an object of compassion — a hard position for a woman with such pride."
In her uninsistent merely persuasive fashion, Clark offers her own theories about the events that led up to Plath'due south determination to kill herself, which included a hazardous mixture of medication and Plath'southward fears of being hospitalized and given electroshock therapy once more (every bit had happened afterward an before suicide attempt).
Still, it remains something of a heartbreaking mystery that a woman this disturbed (her longstanding clinical depression seems to accept shifted into a psychotic low in her concluding days) was also able to produce the outburst of crystalline last poems in the short period she did — poems filled with an icy rage only also possessed of a quite amazing control. Plath herself felt, as she wrote Beuscher, that these poems were "written on the edge of madness," and Clark astutely observes that "Edge," the last poem Plath wrote, "gives the uncanny impression of having been written posthumously." But there was also the "fe will to live," as Plath described it to Clarissa Roche, a friend from Smith who visited her at Court Green, the business firm in Devon she had shared with Hughes for less than two years. If only that will had prevailed.
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Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/27/books/review/red-comet-heather-clark-sylvia-plath.html
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