Heather Clark - Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

In December 1962, Sylvia Plath moved into William Butler Yeatss old house. Yeats was one of Plaths greatest literary heroes, and she had been thrilled to discover the vacant townhouse in Londons Primrose Hill after the breakdown of her marriage. She was starting over, and she felt the move to Yeatss house was propitious. My work should be blessed, she wrote her mother. She offered a years rent to secure the two-story maisonettenearly all the money she had. Three months before, she and her husband, Ted Hughes, had traveled from their home in Devon to the west coast of Ireland, where they had collected apples from Yeatss garden at Thoor Ballylee and climbed the famous winding staircase to his towers roof. Plath threw coins in the stream below for luck. The couple hoped that the trip to Ireland and the pilgrimage to Yeatss sacred tower would rekindle their marriage. But Plath returned to Devon alone. There, and in Yeatss house, she would write some of the finest poems of the twentieth century.

One of Sylvia Plaths favorite short stories was Henry Jamess The Beast in the Jungle. The story concerns a man, John Marcher, who spends his life waiting for an extreme experiencethe thingwhich he likens to a beast crouching in the jungle. It will be, he says, natural and unmistakable. It may be violent, a catastrophe. Only too late does Marcher realize he has lived a passionless existence awaiting the thing. He has instead become the man to whom nothing on earth was to have happened. The story ends as he flings himself at the tomb of the woman he should have loved. When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure, James wrote. It wouldnt have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.

Sylvia Plath dreaded the prospect of such failure. In 1955, before setting off for England and Cambridge University, she wrote to her boyfriend Gordon Lameyer, the horror, to be jamesian [sic], is to find there are plenty of beasts in the jungle but somehow to have missed all the potshots at them. I am always afraid of letting life slip by unobtrusively and waking up some fine morning to wail windgrieved around my tombstone. She was as fluent in Nietzsche as she was in Emerson; as much in thrall to Yeatss gongs and gyres as Frosts silences and snow.

Sylvia Plath took herself and her desires seriously in a world that often refused to do so. She published her first poem at age eight and later vowed to become The Poetess of America. In the years that followed, Plath pursued her literary vocation with a fierce, tireless determination. She hoped to be a writer, wife, and mother, but she was raised in a culture that openly derided female artistic ambition. Such derision is clear in the speech Democratic presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson gave at Plaths 1955 Smith commencement, titled, A Purpose for Modern Woman. The best way these brilliant graduates could contribute to their nation, Stevenson said, was to embrace the humble role of housewife, which, statistically, is what most of you are going to be whether you like the idea or not just nowand youll like it! Stevenson, the liberal darling of his day, went on:

This assignment for you, as wives and mothers, has great advantages. In the first place, it is home workyou can do it in the living room with a baby in your lap, or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hands. If youre really clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while hes watching television.

Stevenson acknowledged the sense of contraction, the lost horizons these women would feel in their new domestic roles. Once they wrote poetry, he mused. Now its the laundry list.They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age. But what they do is wash diapers. He hoped this view was not too depressing but concluded that women never had it so good as you do.

Plath was determined to play her part, but, as Stevensons speech suggests, the odds were against her. She lived in a shamelessly discriminatory age when it was almost impossible for a woman to get a mortgage, loan, or credit card; when newspapers divided their employment ads between men and women (Attractive Please!); the word pregnant was banned from network television; and popular magazines encouraged wives to remain quiet because, as one advice columnist put it, his topics of conversation are more important than yours. Anything to evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized. Plath spread her wings, over and over, at a time when women were not supposed to fly.

The Oxford professor Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolfs biographer, has written, Women writers whose lives involved abuse, mental-illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated, biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second.

Since her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become a paradoxical symbol of female power and helplessness whose life has been subsumed by her afterlife. Caught in the limbo between icon and clich, she has been mythologized and pathologized in movies, television, and biographies as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death. These distortions gained momentum in the 1960s when