In July, 1947, while at summer camp in Oak Bluffs, on Martha’s Vineyard, a fourteen-year-old Sylvia Plath wrote a letter to her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath. “I am very busy, but not too much to write regularly to you,” she writes. “Last night I had three big helpings of potatoes (mashed) and carrots for supper and a scant helping of meatloaf as well as 2 pieces of bread and butter, 2 apricots & a glass of milk.” Amid the thirteen hundred or so pages of unexpurgated correspondence recently published in “The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1, 1940–1956,” there are dozens more examples of this sort of thing. At a much later point in her life, when Plath is newly married to Ted Hughes and travelling with him in Spain, she is still, in letters to her mother, describing her meals. At this point, she is also responsible for preparing them. “I have one frying pan, and a large boiling pan, and fry most everything in olive oil. Ted is quite pleased with the tasty little tortillas and battered things I make.” The division of labor is stark and unremarked upon. Both poets wrote during this quasi-honeymoon, but only Plath cooked.
Many women who have read Plath’s poetry in the half-century since her death have seen in such domestic toil a partial explanation for the rage that burns through her writing. Plath’s letters aren’t angry, but several of them show her coming up against the boundaries of what was permissible, or possible, and not knowing what to do about it. She worked so hard—at her studies, at her writing, at being a young woman worthy of approval—and wondered about what it all amounted to. “Don’t you agree that one has to see in other people’s eyes that one is appreciated and loved in order to feel that one is worthwhile?” The question is posed in a letter written in July, 1951, to her friend Ann Davidow-Goodman. By “other people” Plath means men (“girls’ company is greatly unsatisfying”), who had the power to make her feel both valued and inadequate.
“Learning the limitations of a woman’s sphere is no fun at all,” she remarks in a letter to Aurelia just a few weeks later. By that point, Plath was a student at Smith College, and working as a nanny through her summer break. Her lament was prompted by a young man who had sized her up while she was on a blind date with his friend. “Oh, I know what you want,” she reports him saying. “Security and someone to tell you adventure stories.” Certainly, many of these letters give the impression of someone who is eager to please. Plath was a scholarship student at Smith, as she would later be at Cambridge, and the letters she wrote while studying there are evidence of a punishing schedule, which she seems to have imposed upon herself not only because she was motivated but in order to prove her worth to anyone who kept an eye on her. She had that perfectionist’s temperament, which other perfectionists will recognize: its foundation is recklessness, even cruelty, toward the self. Even the accounts of her dates read like work, which in a sense they were—the obligation of a capable, and marriageable, college girl.
She was writing not only letters and in her journal but also poetry and stories, which she mailed, assiduously, to magazines. The rate of her creative production is striking, as is the earliness with which it was joined to professional ambition. She wanted to be published, and she was—perfectionists will have their way. In 1952, her story “Sunday at the Mintons” won Mademoiselle’s short-fiction contest; the following year Harper’s published three of her poems. In letters to her mother, she proudly tallies up her earnings; money was not an insignificant consideration. In the spring of 1953, Plath won a student competition to be a guest editor of Mademoiselle, and worked at the magazine’s New York office (“I am constantly reading fascinating manuscripts and making little memo comments”). Afterward, she prepared to study at Harvard Summer School, on a partial scholarship. “Then things started to happen,” as she writes to her friend Edward Cohen, several months after the fact. Exhaustion, insomnia, depression. Electroshock therapy. A suicide attempt in late August, and psychiatric treatment at the private McLean Hospital, in Massachusetts, which was paid for by her college benefactor, Olive Higgins Prouty.
There are only five letters in this volume written by Plath during her hospitalization, between August and December, 1953; the longest is to Cohen. The details she gives him of her breakdown and suicide attempt are familiar, for the same things would surface a decade later in her novel, “The Bell Jar,” which was published pseudonymously just before her death. The tone, however, is quite removed from that book’s sarcasm:
Plath’s sense of vulnerability here is acute. What would become remarkable in her writing is her transformation of this fear into a voice that sounds inviolable and resolute.
Plath’s early poetry, the stuff she wrote at Smith and had published in Harper’s, was awful. Written under the burdensome influence of Dylan Thomas, it was, as Thomas could occasionally be, showy and aimless. (“Go get the goodly squab in gold-lobed corn / And pluck the droll flecked quail where thick they lie.”) A good chunk of her output while at Cambridge wasn’t much better. The shape of Plath’s life and the greatness of her art—neither of these things was preordained. It only seems that way, in part because Plath herself was inclined to think in fatalistic terms. “Last night . . . I had one of my apocalyptic visions: someday, I will be a rather damn good woman writer,” she writes to Ted Hughes, in 1956. She was right, but her vision was born of self-knowledge, not prophecy. Talent and discipline and practice made her a great writer, no gendered qualification required.
The assuredness of Plath’s late poetry, written from about 1961 up to her death, was a thing that she worked very hard to achieve. Her letters, on the other hand, are undisciplined and effusive, running on at length. “Plath wrote and typed to the very edges of her paper,” the editors of the collection, Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil, note in their foreword. One can trace the larger patterns of Plath’s enthusiasms—for particular boys, or pen pals, or areas of study—when considering this correspondence in lots, but, letter by letter, the particulars bore. What’s interesting is to trace the incremental development of her poetics. “Read aloud for word tones, for full effect,” she advises Aurelia, in a letter written in February, 1955, with which she enclosed three poems. A similar instruction was issued thirteen months later, regarding a poem “more in my old style, but larger, influenced a bit by Blake . . . read aloud also.”
The poem was “Pursuit,” which she wrote shortly after meeting Hughes in February, 1956. “There is a panther stalks me down: / One day I’ll have my death of him” (another consummate piece of fatalism). At this point, her letters gain tremendous momentum. “I shall tell you now about something most miraculous and thundering and terrifying,” she writes Aurelia in April. “It is this man, this poet, this Ted Hughes.” He is “hulking,” with a voice “richer and rarer than Dylan Thomas.” His poems are “better than Thomas and Hopkins many times.” (Love blinded her there.)
Her passion and creativity were immediately intertwined. “All gathers in incredible joy,” she wrote again to her mother, on April 21st. “I cannot stop writing poems!” Two days later, to her younger brother, Warren: “am now coming into the full of my power: I am writing poetry as I never have before, and it is the best, because I am strong in myself and in love with the only man in the world who is my match.”
Hopkins, Thomas, and the poet who would, within two months, become her husband: this particular lineage of English-language poetry, densely enjambed, richly consonant, attuned to the natural world—Plath would add her gifts to it, in time. She sent some of her new poems to Poetry (six were accepted), and flagged Hughes’s children’s fables to her friend Peter Davison, an editor at The Atlantic Monthly. She also informed Hughes of a first-book prize for poets, to be judged by W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore, and Stephen Spender (“what queer bed fellows”), and offered to type up his manuscript for entry. “I feel sure you’ll win this; I feel very queer about it.” She was right, again.
But there is also something troublingly servile in the tone of these letters to Hughes. “A woman’s place is in her husband’s bed,” she writes to him on October 3, 1956. Four days later:
Blasted. Plath’s sort of word. Germanic, tactile. Tragic. We know what is to come.
A little less than half the letters written by Plath to her mother, and represented in this volume, have previously been published, albeit in condensed form: “Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963,” selected and edited by Aurelia, was published in 1975. Steinberg and Kukil note that book’s “unmarked editorial omissions,” among its other faults. Given the contentious history of Plath’s posthumous publication record—not least Hughes’s editing and arrangement of both “Ariel” (1965) and “Collected Poems” (1981)—it makes a certain sense to publish her writing without the editorializing that has previously caused such angst. The publication, in 2000, of “The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962,” transcribed from the originals held at Smith, and also edited by Kukil, was similarly motivated.
The belief among many of Plath’s devotees seems to be that if we can get clear of other people’s fingerprints on her texts, allowing Plath to “fully narrate her own autobiography,” as the editors here describe it, we will at last solve the riddle of her. The extremities of her poetry will balance against the circumstances of her life; the latter will equal the former.
But her griefs were ordinary; it is what she did with them that wasn’t. Plath turned her common sorrows—dead father, mental illness, cheating husband—into something like an origin story for pain itself, as if her own pain preceded the world. The moon was her witness, an elm tree spoke to her, or through her. Her poetry speeds beyond the facts of her life and becomes Olympian in its fury. “I am too pure for you or anyone,” she writes in “Fever 103,” from 1962, “Your body / Hurts me as the world hurts God.” What a thrill, to have honed within oneself such contempt for the living world, and then to unleash it. Plath’s voice comes down to us like the will of Hera.
And, amid the imperiousness, a tenderness, too, just as worked at, and as breathtaking. It was directed at her children, also turned into archetypes, as if they were the first children who had ever been. “Love set you going like a fat gold watch,” she writes in “Morning Song,” the poem that opens “Ariel.” “The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry / Took its place among the elements.” Few poets before Plath wrote of motherhood with such attention, or, rather, few that we know of; who can guess how many other mothers wrote but were never read? Plath’s work survives, which is why we have needed her. If only she had, too.
