Linda Wagner-Martin - Sylvia Plath: A Biography

Sylvia Plath

A Biography

Linda Wagner-Martin

Copyright Linda Wagner-Martin 1987

The right of Linda Wagner-Martin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

First published in 1987 by Simon and Schuster.

This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

To Andrea and Bob, Doug and Tom

the loss of it, the terrible loss of the more she could have done!

Anne Sexton, letter , 1/20/67

Table of Contents

Preface

Sylvia Plaths Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982, nearly twenty years after her death on February 11, 1963. This was a rare event: the Pulitzer is almost never given posthumously. But the poems Plath wrote in the last five years of her life, leading to those she wrote during 1962, the year of her Ariel poems, were so distinctive such virtuoso performances in technique, such spellbinding expressions of emotion that the Pulitzer jury could award the prize to no other book.

Plath would have relished both the prize and the reasons it was given. She believed in her poetry, and she knew her craft thoroughly. In her poems, she wrote about the crucial issues of her life, but she made expert art from those issues. She voiced anger as well as hope; she spoke of sorrow as well as joy. She wrote scathingly about people of whom she disapproved and about the husband who angered her. She wrote peacefully, with a calm lyricism, about her children and their daily activities. And she wrote politically: Plath cared intensely about the arms race, nuclear power, and peoples injustice to others.

Plath was a feminist, in a broad sense of the term: she never undervalued herself or her work. She insisted that she be recognized as the talented writer she was even while her children were infants and she was spending more time as a mother and a wife than as a writer. She sought out women as friends and mentors and long admired the writing of Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth Bishop, and Anne Sexton. Yet, product of the American fifties that she was, Plath knew that, because she was a woman writer, her work would be judged by standards different from those used to judge the work of male writers. She knew that becoming successful would be difficult, if she were to remain true to her artistic convictions and to her own poetic voice. That knowledge angered her, as did other circumstances of her life in 1962, when the pressures of caring for an ancient house and two children in diapers seemed relentless. Her October poems, written in part to release that anger, formed the heart of Ariel , the first book published after her death. There were a great many other fine poems from the 1960s; some were published in other posthumous collections, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees ; others did not appear until The Collected Poems in 1981. Even the so-called Collected Poems is not complete, and it is possible that other of Plaths poems will be found.

Although her writing in the final year of her life has gained the most attention, Plath wrote well from early in her career. She considered herself a professional writer beginning in 1950, when at the age of seventeen, she published nine pieces of writing in Seventeen , The Christian Science Monitor , and The Boston Globe , all for payment. In college, her publications appeared in Harpers , The Atlantic , the Monitor , Mademoiselle , and Seventeen , as well as campus magazines. Several years out of college she was appearing as well in British magazines, and had added The New Yorker , Kenyon Review , The Nation , Partisan Review , Ladies Home Journal , and other American journals to her credits. Her first poetry collection was chosen the alternate to the winner of the prestigious Yale Younger Poets book competition. In 1960 this revised collection, The Colossus and Other Poems , was published in England. It appeared in 1962 in the United States. In 1961 The New Yorker gave Plath a first reading contract, which meant that that magazine chose first from all her new work and paid her for the privilege. In early 1963, her novel The Bell Jar was published in England.

This biography emphasizes Plaths identity as a writer. Her life was shaped by her ambition to be a writer, and the consequences of her important personal choices are clear in her work. Because much of the life of a writer appears in one way or another in the work, I have used every known fragment of Plaths writing, the manuscripts and work sheets of her poetry and fiction, her journals, and her correspondence. Most of these materials are now housed at either the Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, or the Rare Book Room at Smith College. At the estates mandate, one group of Plaths papers at Smith has been sealed until the year 2013; another is closed until after the deaths of both her mother and her younger brother. Publication of the Plath materials in these libraries is controlled by Ted Hughes, Plaths husband, from whom she was estranged at the time of her suicide.

Unfortunately, the draft of her last novel, Double Exposure , disappeared somewhere around 1970, in Ted Hughess words. And, as he explained in his 1982 introduction to The Journals of Sylvia Plath , a collection which is less complete than its title suggests, Two more notebooks [the journals] survived for a while, maroon-backed ledgers like the 57-59 volume, and continued the record from late 59 to within three days of her death. The last of these contained entries for several months, and I destroyed it because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The other disappeared. The other notebook is, of course, the one that would chart Plaths life during the period of her greatest accomplishment as a poet, the fall of 1962 when she wrote many of the poems that would comprise Ariel .

So far as possible, I have used available materials in these collections as well as those held privately by Plaths friends. I am grateful for access to this wealth of information, and to the more than two hundred people who agreed to be interviewed or otherwise helped so graciously and with such keen interest in Sylvia Plath and her work. The notes include a complete listing of sources, personal and published. As is his usual practice, Ted Hughes would not allow interviews.

*

When I began researching this biography in 1982, I contacted Olwyn Hughes, who is literary executor of the Sylvia Plath estate. Olwyn was initially cooperative, and helped me in my research by answering questions herself and referring me to others who could be of assistance, As Olwyn read the later chapters of the book, however, and particularly after she read a draft of the manuscript in 1986, her cooperation diminished substantially. Olwyn wrote me at great length, usually in argument with my views about the life and development of Plath. Ted Hughes responded to a reading of the manuscript in draft form in 1986 with suggestions for changes that filled fifteen pages and would have meant a deletion of more than 15,000 words.

Of necessity I continued to correspond with Olwyn Hughes in order to obtain permission to quote at length from Plaths works. But on every occasion Olwyn objected to the manuscript, frequently citing Ted Hughess comments (although, as mentioned earlier, Ted Hughes refused to be interviewed directly for the book). I did make many changes in response to these comments. However, the requests for changes continued, and I concluded that permissions would be granted only if I agreed to change the manuscript to reflect the Hughes points of view. When I realized that this tactic would continue indefinitely, I had to end my attempt to gain permission to quote at length if I was ever to publish this book. As a result of this circumstance, I have had to limit quotations. Consequently, this biography contains less of Plaths writing than I had intended. The alternative would have been to agree to suggestions that would have changed the point of view of this book appreciably.