A PORTRAIT OF PLATH
Literary biography goes some way toward giving the pained poet her due
“Perfection of the life or of the work”: Yeats posed this dilemma. It's a question central to Sylvia Plath, a poet who meant to resolve this choice, at its toughest for a gifted woman growing up in Eisenhower's ultra-conformist United States of the 1950s.
Plath tried to invent a way of life that would make it feasible for a woman, as well as a man, to have everything. One achievement of Red Comet, Heather Clark's terrific biography of Plath, is to document, without taking sides, Plath's choice of Ted Hughes as a revolutionary who was true to his instincts.
Plath asked Hughes to marry her soon after their explosive meeting: a famously violent kiss, leaving tooth marks on Ted's cheek, at a Cambridge party in 1956. This was a unique marriage to a fellow poet who could tap into the lasting force of nature, and free her to gallop into “the red/ Eye, the cauldron of morning” — the fierce sun of all our days.
Clark detects the model for Plath's vision in D.H. Lawrence, who imagined a sexual union as a semi-sacred transformation, unlike the casual affairs of Bloomsbury, who made friendship instead the be-all of human existence. In the era before second-wave feminism, Lawrence's Women in Love, with its balanced marital union, was an ideal for the Cambridge students Plath joined at Newnham.
Red Comet also puts forward a new norm: to read Plath as surreal rather than confessional, for the confessional approach limits her to a mind on course for suicide.
Yet feminism does exist in her “song” of empowerment as a woman. She told her mother, “my poems and stories I want to be the strongest female paean yet for the creative forces of nature, the joy of being a loved and loving woman; that is my song.”
Hughes saw Plath's potential, and Red Comet fills out the 2004 revelations of Diane Middlebook's Her Husband, with the evidence of their mutual and wonderfully creative mentoring. Sadly, after six years of marriage, Hughes had writer's block in the spring of 1962. Clark is persuasive in marking this as a turning point in the tragic breakdown of the poets' union. She suggests jealousy.
Careful to set down the facts without the rancour of earlier feminists and to preserve as fully as possible the complexity of the situation, Clark quotes Hughes's cruel words that cut through the assurance of Plath's public image: Her looks and ways in bed were inferior, he told his wife, to those of his mistress, Assia Wevill.
Plath reports that when he left her and their two children, it occurred to him she might conveniently kill herself. She alleged earlier domestic violence resulting in a miscarriage. In the latter half of 1962, she lifted her head in loud bursts of crying in their dream home in Devon.
Mitigating allegations against Hughes is Clark's evidence that he continued to uphold Plath's writing. She showed him her outpouring of poems, at its peak in October 1962. Hughes backed the blazing originality of the collection she called Ariel, which he published posthumously, to her huge acclaim.
Hughes tried to deflect blame elsewhere (most successfully in his late-life collection Birthday Letters), but there remains a crucial fact: Plath said repeatedly that what shocked her more than infidelity was lying. The lies broke her faith in her husband, in the sacredness of their union, so it was impossible for her ever to live in the same way again.
In the last months of Plath's life, Al Alvarez — the influential poetry editor for The Observer — replaced Hughes as a figure of heartening trust, a mentor and possibly (this book reveals) lover for one night.
It seems that when Alvarez backed off at the start of 1963, Plath's fuel diminished. Her last letter, to her U.S. psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, confides her frozen will — the same mental state as in 1953, when she attempted suicide as a student at Smith College.
In the run-up to that, Plath had turned her freeze into a marvellously imagined allegory, Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom. On a train hurtling toward the frozen kingdom of death, a young woman exerts the will to get off at the last stop.
Alvarez said the two U.S. poets who thrilled him most were Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. The Plath cult stress her poems about the doomed Medea and Electra, but Clark sidelines these in favour of those about Ariadne, who makes the thread to lead a way out from the lair of the monster, the Minotaur.
Red Comet is a portrait of a maker who is resilient and seething with creativity in her maternal and domestic as well as writing life, together with a record of this maker's setbacks and struggles from day to day. The inward force of the poet does surge through the nets that held her back.