This month features Ariel by Sylvia Plath, Faber and Faber, ISBN 0571086268 £ 8.99 |
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I bought the wrong book.
I was in the Sixth Form at school, and one of the English teachers had set up a bookshop: a limited selection of fiction and poetry on display in one of the classrooms during lunchbreak.
I’d somehow heard of Sylvia Plath, and wanted to read something by her. I panicked and bought Winter Trees when I should have bought Ariel.
I think my subsequent relationship with Sylvia Plath has suffered; I’ve never liked her as much as I feel I should.
Ariel is a book whose status, now, is indeterminate. It is not the version of Ariel that Plath herself constructed. (The contents of Plath’s Ariel are listed on page 295 of the Collected Poems - which is the place to go if you want to get really serious.) Ariel was selected by Ted Hughes from all she had written ‘between the publication of [her] first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.’ However, it is the way the world first read Plath’s extraordinary late (as it turned out) poems, and for that it is still valuable.
The book contains a number of quite distinct styles. There is the dense and ornate Plath of ‘Tulips’ - a manner that goes all the way back to her juvenilia. There is the angry, ballady Plath of what you might call her greatest hits, ‘Lady Lazarus’ and ‘Daddy’. There is the simultaneously brittle and liquid final voice of ‘Edge’ and ‘Words’.
For once, I can quote in full:
SHEEP IN FOG
The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.
The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,
Hooves, dolorous bells ———
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,
A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.
They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.
Ariel is a fractured autobiography. It tells a number of stories. Of daughterhood, pregnancy, birth and motherhood. Of illness, attempted suicide, recovery, relapse. Of beekeeping. Of love and betrayal.
A comparison with Kurt Cobain isn’t fatuous. Like Cobain, Plath was fascinated with varieties of pain, with the insides and outsides of bodies, and with the myth of the self-destructive artist. Both Plath and Cobain inspire an almost monomaniacal devotion in their fans; and the lives, relationships (Plath with Ted Hughes, Cobain with Courtney Love), suicides and legacies of both are the subject of vicious disagreements.
A further parallel is the disastrous effect that they both had upon those who followed them: Nirvana gave us NuMetal and all things post-grunge; Plath gave us generation after generation of women writers entirely in thrall to her manner. This was perhaps inevitable. Plath seemed if not to discover then to colonize such vast areas of female experience. In this she was both indebted to and influential upon the continuum of feminist thought. Every subsequent generation has had their own Sylvia Plath. She was for a long time a convenient martyr. Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters was an attempt to demythologize (or some would say remythologize) her 1990s version. His success was partial and, probably, temporary.
Plath was a romantic. The interlacing of life and work, death and myth, was, on her part, quite deliberate, quite controlled.
One of the appeals made by all writers to their readers is, ‘Love me intensely; love me personally; love me most.’ That Plath’s appeal is accepted and delighted in by so many readers should not be held against her.
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