Sylvia Plath

0:00Today's great life is Sylvia Plath, a poet and novelist who, unfortunately, is sometimes better known for her suicide than for her writing. Hoping to extract Plath from her tragic narrative and demonstrate why she deserves her place among the greats is the writer Lucy Jones, author of Matrescence, a book about the metamorphosis of motherhood, which was inspired in no small part by Sylvia Plath's own bold writing about the maternal experience. Lucy, when did you first come across her? Can you remember the moment? I can't exactly remember, but I'm pretty sure it must be something like reading the Belger, her novel, when I was maybe in my mid-teens.

0:44And then I did an English degree at UCL and I was very into American poetry, but it was more like Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop. But I was aware of some of her poems and immediately struck by the musicality of her command of language. So her half rhymes, her rhythms and then her startling imagery and the kind of grace and elegance with which she wrote. But it wasn't until really the last eight years or so that I studied her work with a lot more concentration and attention. And I think when I became a mother, I started to search really desperately for literature about the physical and the psychological experience of pregnancy and childbirth and early motherhood.

1:42and that's when I happened upon this long poem Three Women which I'd never heard about before it's a poem that she wrote for BBC Radio and it's three women in a maternity ward one is giving birth one is miscarrying and one is giving birth to a child that will be adopted and in this poem even though it was written in 1962 the words were just like the words that people around me were saying if they felt brave enough to say them so you know words like it is terrible to be so open you know how will i protect this this being people say becoming a mother is like your heart walking around outside your body you know that's like this kind of meme that gets It's kind of a cliche about motherhood.

2:31And actually it's from three women. It is a terrible thing to be so open. It is as if my heart put on a face and walked into the world. The kind of the shadow side of the maternal experience, which you just, you don't see much of and which is often pathologised and made of a taboo. So she was breaking these taboos, which provided for me a lot of relief and consolation and also creative inspiration. Can a man find these things in her work? Absolutely. Absolutely. The maternal experience, pregnancy, and she writes about pregnancy loss and childbirth and nursing and looking after children, is so underwritten and under-recorded in our literature and culture.

3:20having read and researched and written in this area for quite a while now the lack of maternal stories is associated with a kind of crisis that women sometimes have when they become mothers and the the maternal ideal is so romantic and pastel huge and like mary when actually it's a very um psychological uh and sometimes disturbing experience to bring a child into the world and And Plath subverts this idea of the kind of benign mother figure and she kind of extracts from herself the truth of it, which is that it's wonderful and tender, but also you're meeting with chaos and cruelties of life in a new way.

4:07I think absolutely men can connect with that. We're all of mother born, of women born. Yes. We were all dependent on someone at the beginning of our lives. I think it's strange that we're so disinterested in the drama and the theatre of birth. I'm curious about your own book published in 2023, Matrescence. Could you explain what the term Matrescence means and what made you write it? So Matrescence means quite simply the process of becoming a mother. It was a word coined by the late American anthropologist Dana Raphael in the 70s. So it's kind of similar to adolescence. So she, in her anthropological work, found that in most societies in the world, becoming a mother is seen as a traumatic life crisis, which, you know, not in a kind of intense way, but which requires rituals and rites and support and a sense of the newborn mother.

5:07and today we know that the brain now changes shape in multiple areas affects our bodies in multiple areas and also psychologically and emotionally and and very much politically it's been the most socio-political experience of my life and since publishing matrescence a couple of years ago I've been in quite a privileged position to hear from a lot of people who are becoming mothers today and motherhood is an area in which feminism is unrealised and there's still so many taboos around the maternal body, the postpartum body, even postnatal depression which is possibly what Sylvia Plath was suffering from at the end of her life.

5:54She has a reputation, am I being fair, perhaps not, as a depressing writer. I don't find her depressing at all. She did suffer from depression throughout her life. As someone who has also experienced that, I find her poems about depression actually kind of the opposite of depressing. Very much, very consoling and a kind of relief to be able to connect with someone over an experience which can be, well, you know, as if you're behind a glass pane or a bell jar. she does you're right she does have this kind of story about her her experience of mental illness but I don't think that's not everything of her life and I mean certainly her treatment by certain psychiatrists and in psychiatry is an important part of her life but I don't think she's depressing I think she is so full of life like so enlivening she's one of those poets who the way she describes things they feel even realer than they actually are and she's so highly sensitive to her surroundings and then she manages to put those observations into this these often very strange fresh unusual words I think that she makes the world alive and that's partly why she's still so popular, because her work is so vital and visceral and living.

7:28Our expert, Professor Heather Clark, is the author of the most recent and most comprehensive of Plath's biographies, Red Comet, the short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath. Do you agree with Lucy that she is to some degree misremembered? Yes, I do. Often when I was telling people that I was writing a biography of Sylvia Plath, you know, the first comment would be, oh, she's that crazy lady who put her head in the oven. I mean, I'm being blunt, but this really upset me that this was often the first thing that came to people's minds, that the suicide, which I think has been sensationalized and hystericized.

8:13Sylvia Plath was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century for the reasons that Lucy just laid out so articulately. And I mean, I think her legacy has suffered in the wake of that. Was she fun? She was. She was hungry for life. She had an enormous appetite, figuratively and literally. Her friends would always talk about how she was just always hungry and she was able to eat these enormous meals and not gain any weight. And, like, she just, she was somebody who wanted to experience everything. But, yeah, I mean, she was warm and open and fun and so smart, so incredibly smart. She was very clever, wasn't she, just in terms of IQ?

9:06Yeah, she actually had a genius IQ. It was measured at one point. She was something of a literary prodigy. She published her first poem when she was eight in a Boston newspaper. And if you read her childhood poems, they show a wonderful facility with rhyme and meter. I mean, she was writing limericks and quatrains with perfect rhyme schemes, stanzas with regular iambic and dactylic meter when she was, you know, a child. So she was really, yeah, I would say almost a prodigy. Where was she born? When was she born? She was born in Boston in 1932, and she was raised in a German-Austrian family with a very strong work ethic.

9:48Her father was a professor of biology at Boston University. He was convinced he had some form of terminal cancer and had this sort of fatalistic sense of denial that nothing would help him. And so he simply refused to see a doctor. and he finally, near the end of his life, agreed, but it was too late by then and he died of complications of diabetes. So she had this sense moving forward in her life that it was almost like a shadow suicide, that her father maybe could have lived if he had gotten help. And after he died, the family lost their breadwinner. So there were practical ramifications in addition to emotional ramifications.

10:35Her mother had to work. She shared a bedroom with her mother until she was a teenager. Her grandparents moved into the family home. They moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts. And she had all kinds of jobs during high school. She babysat, she dusted offices in schools. I mean, money was a big issue in the family after Otto died. But, you know, she had a good life there. She had very influential teachers who encouraged her to write. And she ended up winning a scholarship to Smith College, which was one of the most prestigious colleges in America. Her most famous poem, Daddy, was recorded in October 1962.

11:13Daddy was sort of taken up by the women's movement in the 1970s as almost like their anthem, right? Because in it she seems to be responding to all fathers with a capital F, patriarchy in general. But, you know, there are autobiographical seeds. But what I love about that poem is that she's making these really complex connections between totalitarianism, patriarchy and submission. And I think it's really a brilliant and actually sort of politically underappreciated poem. I can't strip out from that a kind of personal bitterness. Well, this is the thing with Plath's poems, right? She's a quote-unquote confessional poet, but she also plays with this idea of confession.

12:00She's actually a master of performance and irony. Could you describe her, Heather, if she was here in the studio with us? What, who would we see? You would see a beautiful, elegant, slender woman, probably wearing a Liberty print blouse or scarf and a camel hair coat. She was tall. She was about 5 '9", and moved very gracefully. The word elegant came up many times in these interviews. And she was a listener. She took things in, but she was also a very witty conversationalist. Would you have liked her personally, Lucy? Would you have liked to know her? I think I would have liked her intensity. It seems like she could sometimes be kind of nasty.

12:59I don't know if that's correct, Heather, but there was maybe a ruthlessness. She could be, especially to other women who were in competition with her. Yeah. Literary competition, yes. It's interesting how extroverted she was, although she had these periods of depression. I'm not an extrovert at all, but she was always dating, wasn't she? And she was always kind of out and about. And I think I would have liked to be friends with her if we could have hung out on the coast or in woods looking for mushrooms. I never thought of her as a nature poet. That's wonderful, isn't it, Lucy? It is. And she absolutely was.

13:34And what was so brilliant and startling about her kind of conception of the natural world was that she was breaking with a romantic, with a capital R tradition. You know, it's not romantic Morkish tree at all. It's frogs, it's spiders, it's mushrooms, it's rooks and mist. And there's always a kind of hint of menace or the chaos that is the world. And often there's a kind of surrealist element as well. Sylvia Plath's novel, The Bell Jar, is based on her own experiences. The protagonist, Esther, is also a high flyer who wins all the scholarships, including an internship at a fashion magazine in New York.

14:16So tell us about Mademoiselle, Heather. So Plath won a guest internship at this fashion magazine in 1953. and she thought that she would be meeting Dylan Thomas and Truman Capote and living this very glamorous literary life. And in a way, it was glamorous, but I think she became quite disillusioned early on because she was immersed in this world where women were seen as objects. She complained a lot about the materialism and commercialism that seemed to animate her relationships in New York and everything seemed to revolve around power and money. So she began to slide into a very dangerous depression at the end of that June of 1953.

15:05I recently reread The Bell Jar and I don't think I'd quite realise it's actually very funny. It is. She's so self-knowing and self-aware and kind of sends herself up. There's one bit where she's at some fancy dinner and she ends up drinking the finger bowl because she thinks it's a kind of Japanese soup. It's got like cherry blossoms in it. She eats the cherry blossoms too. Yeah, it's funny. It's satirical and it kind of zips along. I think it's remembered the bell jar as being, you know, a story which appeals to people in angst and alienation in their teenage years. But she's kind of flattened into this kind of depressive suicide case.

15:47She's so neutered by her image, I think. But there's so much more going on there. And part of that is her humour, which people don't really talk about. Yes, and I wanted to add, it's a very political novel. And I think Plath, as a political writer, she is so underappreciated. The first sentence of The Bell Jar is, it was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs. Right off the bat, she's making a political statement about the Eisenhower era and repression and the Cold War. Heather, you said that after her time at Mademoiselle, she went into a deep depression. Take that forward for us.

16:26What happened? So her mother brought her to a psychiatrist who prescribed electroshock treatment. So Plath received a series of electroshock treatments that were very badly administered. And she decided, as she later told a friend in a letter, to end her life while she still possessed free will and while her family would remember her as a success rather than a mental patient. So in August of 1953, she hid herself in her basement's crawl space and swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills. And after three days of frantic searching, her brother found her still alive in the basement. Actually, so much of her life was affected by the failures of kind of mid-century psychiatry.

17:07That electric shock therapy was administered in a way which traumatized her. And it sounds as though she had possibly a sort of PTSD. It's tragic. Yes, she told a friend after that experience that if it looks like this will ever happen to me again, I will kill myself. It was like a form of torture. I mean, they didn't use any anaesthetic. They just basically electrocuted her. But she did go to McLean Hospital then and got much better in late 1953, early 1954. She later came to study at Cambridge. It was here she met Ted Hughes. and here they both are in January 1961. I'd read some of Ted's poems in this magazine.

17:53I was very impressed and I wanted to meet him. And I went to this little celebration and then we saw a great deal of each other. Ted came back to Cambridge and suddenly we found ourselves getting married a few months later. I'd saved some cash. I'd been working and everything I'd saved. I blew it in on a courtship which lasted about three months. What was the actual form of this proposal? We kept writing poems to each other and then it just grew out of that, I guess, the feeling that we both were writing so much and having such a fine time doing it, we decided that this should keep on. It's sad, Lucy, isn't it, knowing what happened in the end, to hear the optimism there.

18:38Yeah, you can really hear their happiness and love. Yes. I think, I mean, they did obviously, in a kind of symbiosis, they created poems together or, you know, reacting to the other's poetry. But I think it's also good to remember that some of her very finest poems were written after he'd left her. There was something about the leaving which created some of her finest art. I do think that his leave-taking unlocked something. Heather, what happened? Why did it fall apart? Well, Plath had a miscarriage in February of 1961. And this is a time when she writes about a physical assault that came from Hughes.

19:25And so things begin to really go downhill from that point. I think the birth of Nicholas in January of 1962 was another turning point. It had been the case that she and Ted had split the child minding. Hughes would take Frida during the mornings and Plath would write and she said, if I have my mornings, everything is fine, right? I can get through the rest of the day. After Nicholas's birth, she didn't have her mornings anymore because she was now in charge of two children and she did the majority of the housework. And then there was Asia Wevel. Yes, the marriage began to really unravel in the spring of 1962 after Asia and her husband came to visit them at Court Green.

20:09And that's when the affair really, really began. And Plath was devastated. I mean, she was she was absolutely devastated. She really started to question everything that she had sacrificed for him. Because, of course, Sylvia Plath was Ted Hughes's agent, right? She typed all of his poems. She sent his work out to literary magazines. There's an argument to be made that he never would have become the poet he did without her. It was a particularly cold, miserable winter, wasn't it, Heather? Yes. Plath moved to Yates's house in December of 1962. She called it Yates's house. Yates had lived there as a child and she was so excited about this move.

20:56It was a real fresh start for her. It was a new beginning. She was full of optimism moving to London. but this winter was horrible and and she's not sleeping and she's breastfeeding and the pipes froze there was filthy water in their bathtub she was alone with two toddlers um she was always grubby her kids were sick she got sick she's possibly suffering from postpartum depression and she was lonely and she missed ted ted would come around to visit the children and there were moments where they thought maybe they would get back together but then he was also seeing two other women. So all of this is sort of weighing on her in that winter of 1962-63.

21:38I think there's obviously so much complexity to the kind of unspeakably tragic end of her life. But it kind of astonishes me in some way that, you know, a woman being left alone with two children is kind of seen as normal. I mean, anyone who's been alone with two young children for a long time, not slept, sick, the children are sick too. This is quite a strange thing to expect one woman to be able to carry, especially when you look at our evolutionary history, where for 99 % of it, we have raised young collectively. So there's a maternal health angle to it, which has possibly been ignored. I mean, I think Nicholas was very young baby.

22:26Yeah, I mean, he was just over a year when she died by suicide. Yeah. Tell us about the suicide, Heather. Well, Plath was due to go into a psychiatric ward. And I think she was terrified. You know, it's important to see that as context around her suicide, which occurred in the early morning hours of February 11th. and she died by carbon monoxide poisoning through her gas oven and she left bread and milk for her children who were in the room upstairs and she opened their window and left Dr. Horder's number said please call Dr. Horder and that was it and I always trip up on that word please that just that gets to me sort of genteel I think in her final poems she talks about a child who she wants to fill their eye with colour and ducks, not this wringing of hands, this dark ceiling without a star.

23:37and I find in that a kind of the desperate horror of being responsible for children and not able to give them what they need and that's just such a horror. We are quite disturbed and frightened by maternal suicide even though the first year after a baby is born is the time when a woman is most at risk of suicide. so I think we've kind of focused on Plath's tragic death but also not really seen what was behind it it's kind of so shocking and taboo that we kind of close our eyes I think to the context but I think we can learn from her death which I don't think should overshadow her life that maternal mental health is a thing, a real thing that we don't think about, look after, support, acknowledge still Yeah.

24:37The original edition of the collection Ariel, published two years after her death, was not published in the order she intended, was it? No. The version of Ariel that Plath left on her bedside table when she died had a very different trajectory. Plath's Ariel was hopeful. The first word of her Ariel was love. The first poem was Morning Song and the first line, love set you going like a fat gold watch. The last word was spring. So she wanted the book to move in a more optimistic trajectory and Ted Hughes changed the order. So it had a huge influence on the way Plath was read and her legacy. Is Sylvia Plath's legacy secure, do you think, or are people beginning to forget?

25:31I think that her poetry is so fine and audacious and powerful that it has a kind of timeless, modern quality to it, that it won't age. I mean, if you look at the arrangement of her words and her language, the kind of percussiveness of it, her really kind of weird imagery. I think this is art that will be appealing to humans forever and could be life-changing forever. Because she's writing also about the human condition. I mean, it's such a cliched phrase, but she's writing about melancholy in the mind and birth and love and spring and rebirth. and looking to the natural world for one of her phrases, one of her lines is, what solace can be struck from rock to make heart's waste grow green again?

26:32I think people will always need to try and grow green again and her work can help us to do that. My thanks to Professor Heather Clark and to you, Lucy Jones, Jones for bringing Sylvia Plath alive like this and I must say persuading me to understand and appreciate her work a little. I've always struggled but after this discussion I'm I'm beginning to fall a little bit in love with her myself so thanks to both of you and goodbye.