The White Heat of Plath's Voice

THERE IS a quality to the voice on this record--the voice of Sylvia Plath reading her own poetry--that can only be described as frightening. It is not just the eerieness of hearing a voice from beyond the grave, of listening to a woman expose her obsession with the subject of death three months before she takes her own life. The really scary, chilling thing about this voice is its profound bitterness--a sort of challenge to all comers that commands sympathy at the same time that it defies it, that attracts as it repels, that bores directly at some common core of human experience with a drill of inhuman strength.

It is an extraordinary voice, one that should not have been kept from the general public for so long. Plath taped this reading on October 30, 1962, three days before her thirtieth birthday, during a particularly turbulent and astonishingly creative period of her life. Separated from her husband and living on her own in London with two small children, she would rise at four every morning to work and in the month of October alone spewed forth at least 26 poems. For the past 13 years the tape has been preserved in the Woodberry Poetry Room in Lamont Library, but it was not until this year that the executor of Plath's estate--her sister-in-law Olwyn Hughes--consented to release the tape for a commercial recording.

Plath reads her poems with a relentless intensity. She seems to hurl her words at the listener, each elegantly rounded vowel like a trajectory for a gunshot-sharp consonant. Just as she tried in her poetry to use her craft and skill to "manipulate intense personal experience"--as she says in an interview included on the record--so she uses impeccable diction to give a defining framework to the raw, brute emotion in her voice.

HEARING MANY of these poems--there are thirteen in all--is a completely different experience from reading them. Plath's tone or inflection often brings out a sinister sadness that is only latent in the printed word. The well-known poem "Cut," for instance, can be read merely as a strangely detached, almost innocent investigation of an everyday occurrence; but when Plath reads it, it is savage.

What a thrill--

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of hinge

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

In the more obscure "Amnesiac," the last few lines become a vicious, lingering taunt.

Oh sister, mother, wife

Sweet Lethe is my life

I'm never, never, never coming home.

Sometimes Plath's reading gives these poems a meaning that appears to be unintentional. During the climactic lines of "Lady Lazarus," a poem about the poet's repeated suicide attempts, her usually well-modulated voice seems to shake involuntarily.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call.

Anyone hearing these lines now cannot help being reminded that three months after recording them, their author put her head in a gas oven. But as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, it is a mistake to view Plath's poems in the light of her suicide; like all good poetry, they stand on their own.

The poems on this record were all written to be read aloud, as Plath says in the interview, but there are two in particular--"The Applicant" and "Daddy"--that are so obviously meant to be heard, it's almost impossible to read them without at least whispering them to yourself. And the reading that Plath gives them here leaves them with an indelible echo, so that they are never the same again. Both poems are essentially chants, with hard, driving rhythms, and recurring sound patterns. In "The Applicant" the repetition is clipped:

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook,

It can talk, talk, talk.

But the brooding, steady music of "Daddy" spirals deftly around the sound "oo."

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

The sound of both poems, and particularly "Daddy," is compelling, mesmerizing, and finally, frightening. In them, Plath creates most successfully the new kind of poetic effect she was striving for in her last months, an effect she discusses in the interview with Peter Orr of the British Council.

THE INTERVIEW begins rather inauspiciously, with Orr asking in the stiffest of BBC manners, "Sylvia"--pause--"what started you writing poetry?" But Plath soon takes control of the situation, her conversational voice a little tamer than her reading voice but her imperious, arrogant manner just as fascinating and repellent. She sounds much older than 30 somehow, as if she had reached the last of the nine lives she endows herself with in "Lady Lazarus."

Much of the interview is quite revealing and its appearance on this record is particularly appropriate, because in it Plath talks about the importance of reading poetry, and particularly her recent poetry, aloud. "I have found myself having to read these poems aloud to myself," she tells Orr. "My first book, The Colossus, I can't read any of the poems aloud now. I didn't write them to be read aloud. In fact, they quite privately bore me." Later, Plath seems to be intrigued by the idea of oral poetry:

I feel that the development of recording poems...is a wonderful thing. I'm very excited about it. In a sense, there's a return, isn't there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

Orr: Or to sing to a group of people.

Plath: To sing to a group of people--exactly, exactly.

Plath's song is a dirge, difficult and painful to listen to, but painfully beautiful as well. In those last feverish months of her life, it's extraordinarily fortunate that someone managed to entrap the white hot sparks that Plath was sending off with such dangerously lavish intensity. Now those sparks have at last been released, and Sylvia Plath can "come across" to her audience as she really intended.