There is a voice within me/That will not be still

Re-Visiting Sylvia Plath

I’m about half way through reading Heather Clark’s magnificent biography of Sylvia Plath, Red Comet. (Excellent review here) and do buy it from the magnificent Poetry Pharmacy: here.

I highly recommend it. Though you will need strong wrists and hands to read a hard copy, it’s about 950 pages, plus notes. I’d been itching to read it for a while, but the sheer size of it put me off; I knew it would take me about a month to get through at my rate of reading. I’ve been carrying it around with me, sitting it in my lap like a hefty child at the hairdresser’s, slinging it into the passenger seat of the car as I travelled to York to take part in an author panel session titled ‘How to Get Published’. (Spoiler alert, there is no simple answer). The book has been a friend to me, I shall miss it when I finish it, and its presence by the bed, by the sofa, on my desk.

Plath was one of the first poets I discovered on my own terms, without instruction. I was in my mid twenties and completely lost in my own life, not knowing who I was or what I wanted. In the high ceilinged calm of the local library, down on the bottom shelf of the poetry and plays section, I picked up Ariel, and opened it at ‘The Hanging Man’ with no previous knowledge of Plath, her life, her myth, the story of her complex personality, her intense light.

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

I’d never read anything like it. Something like an incantation, so bold, so big, those metaphors! Those similes! Along with a few other poets found in my local library, among them Ted Hughes, she was my gateway drug to reading and writing poetry. Because I’d read these poems I began exploring how to think about myself, my own life, my own complexities in creative writing, and I discovered how poetry is a transformative device, how pain can be described in beauty.

I had a migraine last week that took some recovering from. I took a rare day off work and simply went to bed. Like a child, I stayed in my PJs and ate the chocolates I’d got for my birthday the week before, drank tea and read the book, all day, without doing anything else. It was wonderful, even if I was feeling rotten, to have a day with Sylvia. I’ve read a few biographies of her, and her letters and journals, some of them skewed towards the myth of Plath and the demonisation of Hughes as a scapegoat for all things wrong in the fifties and sixties when Plath grew up in the claustrophobia of pure, undiluted cultural misogyny. When Hughes was able to simply be - be a poet, be an intellectual, be big and powerful, be a bit of a womaniser, be a bit brutal - but Plath had to fight, fight, fight to be a writer and not be forced into the sausage making machine of wife and mother. In a letter home to her mother in 1956 Plath said:

…everyday, one has to earn the name of “writer” over again, with much wrestling.

In Red Comet, you can feel the pressure and strain fizzing through Plath as she pushes and pulls against herself as woman and writer, trying to amalgamate the two. She thought she’d done that with Hughes. He thought she had too: a new way of living, of working, of being writers, a new way of being married. Alas, the marriage was perhaps too intense. Perhaps they were just too intense for each other.

I’m so pleased to find that the focus the book is Plath’s work, her complex interior life, her personality, her life and not her death, not the myth of the romanticised version of this woman. Heather Clark keeps her distance, she doesn’t pull or push Plath into a form to suit. It’s balanced. I do think sometimes she sees something in Plath’s poems that is perhaps not as world changing as she thinks, but perhaps that’s more about subjective analysis. Poetry is very much a medium of opinions. Even in the forensic detail of Plath’s life, dissected and laid down piece by piece, even with the balanced viewing of her life within the context of the time she was alive, I’m pleased that the biography is not lacking in compassion for the strange, wonderful, frightened girl, this crashing poet, this incredible talent.

I once went to Heptonstall, years ago now. I think I’d been doing a poetry reading in the area, it was probably around the time when my second full collection, Gifts the Mole Gave Me, came out. We climbed up to the cemetery there and looked for her grave. It was in the newer part; overlooked by some new builds with gardens full of trampolines and playing children. The old, 13th century church ruins were there too, with its roof open to a suitably brooding sky. I even wrote a poem about it. The poem was Yorkshire Times poem of the week, many moons ago. You can read the always excellent Steve Whitacker’s take on it here: Yorkshire Times

Heptonstall Graveyard

God, the wind. It peeled the stones
from the skull of St Thomas' church,
left its mouth slacked to a yawn or a scream,
sounding vowels through the nave, through
the clock-eye, the altar stones, the flat-backed
flat-packed dead in their wedding gowns.

I couldn't have placed you here, in this wind.
You are not even in the Gothic ruin, where you might
have met your curse head on, but in the bleak
modern field where the new builds' bathrooms
back onto you, and children squeal on trampolines.

They have bitten a hole in the ground
for you, and mouthed you into the soil,
smaller than the giant I'd imagined,
with both your surnames finally intact.
You're sandblasted by the wind,
here where nothing grows
and the votives left to you cling
like limpets in your dark.

There are things about this poem, which is at least six years old; probably older, that I would change. But mostly I’m still happy with it, still happy I caught something of the big bold metaphors and similes, those poems that crashed into my life that day in the shush and hush of the library. Again, I’m drawn to the idea of the overlapping of time and connection. I own a second hand copy of Ariel, from the seventies, inscribed To Peter, from Becky, Christmas 1979. I wonder what Becky’s intentions were, what Peter thought of the poems. This particular copy ended up in a charity shop in Scarborough. I wonder what the story is there.

Plath would have been 90 last year, and perhaps dead of old age, or illness or traffic accident or any number of ways in which the human body is susceptible to death. I wonder, if she hadn’t become so completely lost, if she hadn’t feared lobotomies and electric shock treatment so much, after the terrible, terrible experiences she had, experiences that must have caused PTSD or at least a long lasting trauma, I wonder if she would have remarried, gone on, been recognised in her own life. She was only 30 when she took her own life. I wish I could tell her the impact she had on my life, that I picked up her last poems and they set the poet in me in motion, they ignited something in me. I wish I could tell her that she is still impacting my life now, at 45, that I am still learning things about her short life, about her, and finding new work of hers to read.

There is something magical about books. They are shelter, they are refuge, they are paths that one may follow, they are connections, they are friends, they are respite from the world.

If you want to read more about and by Plath, this Guardian article has some interesting suggestions: The Guardian

A Reminder

Don’t forget that the Books from the Margin bookclub begins in April, there are two pay what you can events and our first book is the wonderful Liz Berry’s The Home Child. Links to the events and a bit more about the bookclub here:

Books from the Margin April Book: The Home Child by Liz Berry

I’ll leave you with Sylvia herself, talking about her influences (that voice! What sort of an accent is that?) and her reading her own poems.

Until next time.