Sylvia Plath's Inferno

There is a myth that needs unmaking, and if we are to believe A. Alvarez's "Sylvia Plath: A Memoir" published in the New American Review 12, there is a hope that needs establishing. Sylvia Plath's life is closed to us, and so, therefore, is the truth about her life; we are left with some incomplete facts, a few more every day, her poetry, and the hope with which we construe the tale.

The myth is that she fully intended her suicide in 1963 to succeed; the hope is, as A. Alvarez allows it, that the suicide succeeded far better than she planned. She turned on the gas at an hour titillatingly close to the time at which she knew the Australian babysitter was to arrive. She knew that the babysitter would knock at her door, get no response, that she would knock on the door of the apartment below and that the tenant below would come to her aid. What Sylvia did not count on was that the neighbor's bedroom was directly below her kitchen and that the fumes would descend into his apartment and knock him out.

As it was, the babysitter knocked on her door, got no answer, knocked on the apartment below, got no answer, looked frantically for help, but it came too late. Sylvia was the winner of a lottery she had only perfunctorily entered. Her most ambitious attempt at suicide was at nineteen; she swallowed fifty sleeping pills and hid in the back of a cellar, an act whose authenticity she patronizes and flaunts in The Bell Jar (1971). Her two later attempts wind down with less conviction, but sadly, with greater efficacy. While she was still living with her husband. Ted Hughes, and her two children in Devon, England, she drove off the road, on purpose.

None of this is to say that Sylvian Plath did not want to die. Death possessed her more than life. But that in 1963 she intended only to flirt with death, to retreat from it, absolved by it, clears her poetry of much of the bitterness her suicide read into it, and allows the poetry an inkling of self-love in all the self-hatred. It means that it is no longer possible not to read her anymore, especially her last and most fleshless skeletons, now that there is the slender reed of her self-love to sustain the reader. Her last poems. "Daddy," "Edge," and "Words," are her best. English publishers found them so unbearably confessional that for a long time these last poems found no outlet. She did not intend these to be swansongs, but new flexings, higher bets for higher wins and losses. If they have a flaw, it is that they are honed to infinity; she had to stay there or return; on the way back she found fate a testy S.O.B.

Crossing the Water is a collection of poems written in between her first publication Colossus (1960) and her posthumous collection Ariel (1966). The poems are readable, clean, and expert; they deal with her obsessions. Like Monet's cathedral she insists in reviewing each in all lights, under all conditions: the death of her father, her widowed mother, her husband indistinguishable from her father, her suicides, the accidents, the hospitals. She uses her standard lynch pins sparingly and precisely: poppies, mouths, Jews, Germans, the black boot, reptiles, the small animal, the color red, and fire.

The title piece "Crossing the Water," is the best, though not representative. It is precariously one-dimensional and dangerously silent, but for these reasons it has presence:

Black lake, black boat, two black cut-paper people.

Where do the black trees go that drink here?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

Canada: there is geography in her poems, and by inference she builds a tension around her expatriation. She mentions Canada again in her "Two Campers in Cloud Country," a what-I-did-last-summer-vacation-poem; her "Sleep in the Mojave Desert" harks to Joan Didion's feelings for the deserts of Southern California. One poem "On Deck" opens with "Midnight in the Mid-Atlantic," and in several of her poems the landscapes are interchangeably Massachusetts, Wales, and Ireland. Of the last of these "Wuthering Heights," the most remarkable as a poem, betrays here ambivalence to the wilderness most strongly: "The grass is beating its head distractedly. It is too delicate. For life in such company." If New England was refuge from the American wilderness, then England, where she came to her artistic maturity, was greater refuge, but still too much wilderness.

In two poems, "Witch Burning," one of the better works in the collection, and "Whitsun", an unimpressive piece, she sees herself as an American heroine with a Scarlet Letter on her breast. At times she rings of Emily Dickinson, "A bodiless soul could pass another soul. In this clear air and never notice it--", from the "Widow" a poem of the fantasies of grief clearly about her mother. A much less proficient poem "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" recalls in tone and subject to Robert Frost's "Dust of Snow" about the crow and the saving of a day he had rued, which in turn sounds like Aesop's fable of "The Fox and the Crow"--the same simpleminded experience.

Although Sylvia Plath said to A. Alvarez, a whiskey in hand with one clinking ice cube in it, that she only missed the States for the clinks its abundant ice provided her drinks, clearly there was a tension in her, an almost geographical tension, created by her expatriation. This tension is only one of the ambiguities, the reticences, that stays her newly published collection from the calibre of her late and last poems contained in Ariel.

In the first of Sylvia Plath's poetry the reader watches the poet watch herself. As her work matures, her inward eye rotates ever more outward into clairvoyance, where her experience becomes transparent to her and she is able to project it into its utmost mythological and symbolic limits. In Crossing the Water, "Who" is the lifeline to the clairvoyant "Daddy" in Ariel. Not amazingly, the poem addresses her other parent, her mother. In "Who" her voice comes into its own momentum; it is aggressive and unencumbered, and her concerns are elemental.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

There were such enormous flowers.

Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.

She remembers quitting her mother, and being born. Other than this prophetic poem, and "Crossing the Water," there is no poem in this collection, in its entire, that is sterling. There are lines, however, here and there, and verses which strike a silence to which the knowledge of having found something lovely returns on mute feet, and meekly; as Sylvia Plath would have it. "This is the silence of astounded souls."