Thoughts on reading the Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath
The Plath-Hughes story just keeps on giving. An essay in the Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath bemoans ‘the severe limitations of the published editions’ of the Letters so far (this was 2006), eagerly anticipating the publication of an unexpurgated edition. Which, in 2017 (Volume I) and 2018 (Volume II), we got. Both are hugely valuable, but the latter, which takes the story to the brink of her suicide in 1963, is sensational (Faber, £20 pbk, eds Peter K Steinberg and Karen V Kukil).
Reviewing Vol I, I said that we really didn’t need the vast bulk of letters Plath wrote as a girl from summer camp. They did throw an interesting light on the relatively straightened circumstances of the Plath single-parent family, as she reported gleefully back to her mother about how much nutritous food campers were given. Plath’s lifelong weight issue was trying to keep it on, rather than off.
Volume I ended with the cataclysmic arrival on the scene of Ted Hughes, and Volume II charts the spectacular rise and fall of the marriage. Up to that point you lose count of the number of men Plath has ‘dated’. She drops everybody on Hughes’s arrival – the male students go, obviously, but female friendships too largely fall by the wayside. A chap called J Mallory Wober seems absolutely charming and certainly keen on Plath, but he too vanishes abruptly. Hughes is all-encompassing. Plath’s blindness becomes ours, as hers is the only voice we hear.
The previous substantial collection, Letters Home, published in the mid-70s, proved an essential volume, albeit compromised by their editor and chief recipient being Plath’s mother, who had her own, perfectly understandable, agenda. This is the book that ignited my passion for Plath, along with the poems. The young women we find in these pages is passionate, positive, joyous, open to the world and all its opportunities, and demonstrably coping well, until the very end. The Complete Letters is enriched by the other voices Plath uses to various correspondents, in a tone sometimes very different from the ‘approved version’ she presents to Mom.
The Letters, being concerned with the life rather than the work, are not particularly revealing about the poems. It’s a jolt to realise, via the consistently valuable footnotes, that the work has suddenly gone up a gear, around the time Plath went with Hughes to stay at Yaddo, an artists’ colony. Her letters to publishers are disarmingly matter-of-fact and professional in tone, even when the work she is submitting is howlingly intense. She welcomes feedback, even when negative, and it’s amazing to see how editors of publications such as The New Yorker have what seems now the temerity to suggest changes to lines and titles. All of which Plath takes seriously, and with good humour. Of course, as her friend and fellow poet Ruth Fainlight said to me once with a wry smile, ‘She wasn’t Sylvia Plath then.’
One fascinating 1961 letter sets out to reassure the editor of her highly autobiographical novel The Bell Jar: ‘No, I’ve not forgotten about the libel issue.’ One reference – ‘Irwin is fictictious’ – is a magnificent whopper. Andrew Wilson’s brilliant biography, Mad Girl’s Love Song, fills in the gory (literally) details behind the Irwin incident in The Bell Jar.
Attention to the footnotes gives details of what was being written when, especially towards the end of Vol II, when astonishing work was pouring forth, even as Plath was undertaking the mighty task of renovating a large new home, Court Green in Devon. She was also looking after her infant daughter, about whom she writes with loving attention, amusement and joy. The five hours daily writing spree, starting after breakfast, is humbling to read about.
The details are so intimate we almost feel we’re living on the same plane of existence, joining in with the floor-painting, curtain-making and meal-creating; at one point Plath even orders some sets of bras and matching pants. We know her weight, and her cup-size. We rejoice with her when her Bendix washing machine arrives. Before that she was lugging the washing to a launderette in Exeter!
Then the crash comes and it’s absolutely devastating as Hughes rocks off his pedestal and smashes into a million pieces. He managed to mislay, probably destroy, the journals that must have expressed her keenest bitterness, but the letters were sent out into the world, and they are savage in their condemnation. The Hughes version of the suicide – that Plath, having made a previous attempt on her life at college, was bound to try again and succeed one day – seems refuted here. There are letters that express painful agony, sure, but a really worrying note only sounds in the very last missive, to someone who was too far away to help; Plath was probably already dead when it flipped into the mailbox.
On a couple of occasions it would be interesting to learn what if anything came back. How did the poet W S Merwin respond to her dignified and sad letter acknowledging that former friends he and wife Diana were taking Hughes’ side in the split? Did he bother? Hughes’s own letters of the period shed a callous light: ‘You’re right, she’ll have to grow up – it won’t do her any harm,’ he wrote to his sister Olwyn in late 1962. What an extraordinary way to talk about the woman he had deserted to bring up two children, while he breezed back to a bachelor life. The recipient, incidentally, was so resentful of the marriage that she would formerly address her brother’s wife as ‘Miss Plath’.
It’s heartbreaking to read descriptions of the children, especially baby Nicholas, a tender glimpse of whom appears in one of the very last poems. Certain details come freighted with dread, such as the arrival of the gas cooker at the London flat where she’s attempting to build a new life. It’s such a horrifying story, with an ending that seems both inevitable and yet unbelievable. At least she died knowing the poems were sublime. Ted Hughes did well by them. We can thank him for that.