The Journals of Sylvia Plathreviewed by Guy Gauthier
This is one of the greatest journals ever written, and I feel like a lifetime wouldn't be enough to absorb it. Sylvia Plath holds nothing back. Her journal is her confessional: here she confesses her most negative thoughts and feelings. And Sylvia Plath had a genius for expressing bad feelings. January 22: Wednesday: [1958] Absolutely blind fuming sick. Anger, envy and humiliation. A green seethe of malice through the veins. Plath had very little time to devote to journal writing. Her life was a constant struggle to find the time to write poetry. The journal was written very fast, in a highly condensed form. She writes in a kind of shorthand, leaving words out, as if she didn't have time to write them down. But there is no denying the expressive force of her language. Wednesday: August 21, 1957 A low, sultry day. The sky a luminous white glower of light. She had an unerring eye for visual detail. Here is her impression of a hot day in June: Thursday, June 26: [1958] The first day of swelter: grey, wet, warm rain making a slither of the streets. A dog barks far off. The milk bottles sweat drops, the butter slumps. Or how about this rainy day at the beach? We stop for ice, and drive to a beach where there is a parking lot by sanddunes, and a view of witchgrass, and the rain coming down hard on a dirty, sodden, gray green sea. The beer tastes good to my throat, cold and bitter, and the three boys and the beer and the queer freeness of the situation make me feel like laughing forever. So I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can. But these crisp, sharp images are only a sidelight in her journal, which revolves obsessively around her inner moods and fears. Here is something she wrote in the early 1950’s: This morning I am at low ebb. I did not sleep well last night, waking, tossing, and dreaming sordid, incoherent little dreams. I awoke, my head heavy, feeling as if I had just emerged from a swim in a pool of warm polluted water. My skin was greasy, my hair stiff, oily, and my hands as if I had touched something slimy and unclean. The thick August air does not help. I sit here lumpishly, an ache at the back of my neck. I feel that even if I washed myself all day in cold clear water, I could not rinse the sticky, untidy film away; nor could I rid my mouth of the furry unpleasant taste of unbrushed teeth. The things she says about her mother are among the harshest she ever wrote. And yet we know how attached Plath was to her mother. One part of her loved her mother, and yet the other was able to put these words on paper: So how do I express my hate for my mother? In my deepest emotions I think of her as an enemy: somebody who “killed” my father, my first male ally in the world. She is a murderess of maleness. I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world. And then, a few paragraphs later, she adds: What to do with her, with the hostility, undying, which I feel for her? I want, as ever, to grab my life from out under her hot itchy hands. My life, my writing, my husband, my unconceived baby. She’s a killer. Watch out. She’s a deadly cobra under that shiny greengold hood. Some find this anger and hostility hard to take. But without it, the journal would have the kind of sweet, feminine gentility we used to associate with women poets. Sylvia Plath has shattered forever the old, genteel image of the woman poet. The miracle of the poetry repeats itself in the journals. Without this negative charge, her journal would be diminished. It would lack the intensity, the searing truth that burns itself into every page. When Sylvia Plath ended her life in February 1963, her husband Ted Hughes became her literary executor. He devoted the rest of his life to editing and publishing her poetry, journal, letters, etc. But unfortunately, he destroyed the last notebook of her journal. In a critical essay entitled Sylvia Plath and her Journals, Hughes writes about the two missing notebooks that covered the period from 1959 until her death. “Two other notebooks survived for a while after her death. They continued from where the surviving record breaks off in late 1959 and covered the last three years of her life. The second of these books her husband destroyed, because he did not want her children to have to read it (in those days he regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The earlier one disappeared more recently (and may, presumably, still turn up).” The notebook which Ted Hughes destroyed covered the last seven months of her life. It “contained entries to within three days of Plath’s suicide”. This is a great loss to literature. What wouldn’t we give, we lovers of Sylvia Plath, to read the journal pages she wrote in the last days of her life. I feel that the last notebook would have brought the journal to its natural climax. Though I respect Hughes’ concern to protect his children, I think he has deprived us of a great document. He would never have considered destroying one of her poems, no matter how painful it might be to read. So what made him think he had a right to destroy parts of her journal? Why not grant her journal the same rights, the same inviolability as her poetry? In her journals, perhaps without intending to, Sylvia Plath has created one of the most convincing portraits of a woman ever put on paper. The best thing I can think of saying about her is this: you could never put her words in a Hallmark Card. ReferenceThe Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950–1962, edited by Karen V. Kukil, Faber & Faber, London, 2000. |