A fresh voice on Sylvia Plath from those who knew her
The Sylvia Plath story has been reheated so often, and from so many competing perspectives, that it has acquired the patina of a campfire myth. Does it really need another iteration? You’d think perhaps not. Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar (BBC Two, Saturday), a deeply researched and shrewdly selective addition to the canon of Plath studies, persuaded me otherwise.
The clue was in the title. The Bell Jar, published just before Plath’s death in the big freeze of 1963, fictionalised her descent into suicidal depression as a younger woman. The bulk of Teresa Griffiths’s documentary measured the roman-à-clef against her letters and journals, and the memories of those who knew her at the time. A large cast of witnesses from Plath’s childhood, school, college and her internship on a New York fashion magazine untapped an intriguing trove of testimonies.
Old boyfriends in particular recalled trying to persuade her into bed. “I have to consider the possibility of pregnancy,” Plath explained to one. One of Plath’s friends wasn’t so lucky, and wept as she recalled giving a baby up for adoption a lifetime ago. Even if you were married, pregnancy got you sacked from your job. “That was the Fifties,” said another friend mordantly.
Thanks in part to a stylish montage of period imagery, this portrait was a psychological profile of an era for which President Trump’s base is apparently nostalgic. It was great for white men, and women fed off scraps of the American Dream. Plath would have stood a better chance now. Also, a mental illness like hers could stigmatise whole neighbourhoods then, which presumably felt judged that someone would rather die than stultify among them.
There was something desperately poignant about the gathering into one documentary of so many contemporaries whose faces she knew when they were fresh and youthful. Onto the many photographs of Plath, your mind’s eye had to stencil the wrinkles and the white hair. One friend tearfully quoted the bronze plaque mounted at their school’s 50th anniversary reunion: “I write because there is a voice within me that will not be still.” Not bad for 15. It still feels like a fresh calamity that half of her life was already over.
There was an eye-popping sequence in Lost Boys? What’s Going Wrong for Asian Men (BBC Two, Sunday) when reporter Mehreen Baig visited a supermarket car park in Bradford. There, every week, young British-pakistani men convene to show off semi-flashy cars in which they perform screeching handbrake turns. As a testosterone outlet for young males, it all looked weirdly bathetic.
The bank of mum and dad pays for the hatchbacks. If the premise of this film’s title is to be credited, there’s your crisis right there: third-generation princelings falling behind in education, living off doting parents and not learning how to fend for themselves. “I’m a spoilt type,” conceded one such boy, the owner of four cars. That said, four cars is nothing to the nine owned by another, who had gone back to Mirpur in Kashmir to marry, live in palatial splendour and work in the family retail business.
Who needs nine cars? (Or even four.) Baig was too polite to ask. But her amicable, non-judgmental stance bore fruit as she attempted to unpick the complicated mystery of young British Pakistani men falling behind not just British Indians, but also their sisters who identify education as an escape from domestic drudgery.
There is perhaps more nuance to this issue that Baig was able to illustrate in a selective schedule of encounters. In this account, Gujaratis from Leicester who were expelled from Uganda in 1972 are all selfemployed go-getters who drink in pubs and marry outside their ethnic group, while lads from Bradford are unmotivated, mollycoddled and perilously isolated from wider society.
Her trip back to Pakistan, and especially to the nightspots of Lahore, did lead her to a fascinating if unprovable theory: that Britishpakistanis in Bradford feel compelled to hold on to cryogenically preserved traditions that have less cultural relevance in modern Pakistan itself.
In Pakistan, argued one smart young man, no one has to spend time thinking about being Pakistani. Meanwhile, back in Blighty, how many of Baig’s perfectly nice boys think about their Britishness? This crucial question went unasked in an otherwise spry and eye-opening tele-essay.
Sylvia Plath: Inside the Bell Jar
Lost Boys?: What’s Going Wrong for Asian Men