{"id":132640,"date":"2019-01-14T09:00:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T14:00:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=132640"},"modified":"2019-01-14T11:59:49","modified_gmt":"2019-01-14T16:59:49","slug":"against-completism-what-if-sylvia-plaths-prose-just-isnt-very-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2019\/01\/14\/against-completism-what-if-sylvia-plaths-prose-just-isnt-very-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Against Completism: On Sylvia Plath\u2019s New Short Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Elisa Gabbert\u2019s new column Mess with a Classic, she revisits canonical works of literature and addresses the anxiety of confronting the art of the past (and the past in general).<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Sylvia Plath in April 1954, as a student at Smith College (Photo: JUDY SNOW DENISON)<\/p><\/div>\n

When I heard that a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath short story would appear in January 2019, I requested an electronic galley and then let the file sit unopened in my inbox for several weeks. I felt apprehensive, even frightened of it. I love Plath\u2019s poetry, but what if I didn\u2019t like this story? I read The Bell Jar<\/em> so long ago, when I was fourteen or so, that I couldn\u2019t remember anything about it. But I read The Catcher in the Rye<\/em>\u00a0at around the same time, and I remember that book clearly. Had I only meant to read The Bell Jar<\/em>, and never finished it? Oh God, I thought, what if none of Plath\u2019s fiction is good?<\/p>\n

I decided to read The Bell Jar<\/em> again before addressing the new old short story. The first, striking sentence\u2014already suffused with death\u2014gave me hope: \u201cIt was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn\u2019t know what I was doing in New York.\u201d By the end of the first paragraph, I was nervous again: \u201cIt had nothing to do with me, but I couldn\u2019t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.\u201d Then, a hard return and a single-sentence paragraph: \u201cI thought it must be the worst thing in the world.\u201d Plath\u2019s journals and letters are often unintentionally funny in their absurd dramatics\u2014in 1956, after lending some books to a friend who returned them with underlining in pencil, she wrote in her journal, \u201cI was furious, feeling my children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien.\u201d (I actually threw back my head laughing, alone on my couch.) The silliness of calling being executed \u201cthe worst thing in the world,\u201d a kind of understatement by overstatement, is rendered sillier by giving it its own paragraph. Oh God, I thought, Sylvia Plath doesn\u2019t understand how paragraphs work.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Having read the whole novel, I can confirm that Sylvia Plath doesn\u2019t understand how paragraphs work. Regardless, The Bell Jar<\/em> is justifiably a classic. I had feared it would feel adolescent through and through. There are certainly plenty of cringe-y moments\u2014Plath was very of her time, a sheltered WASP<\/small>\u2014and over and over she uses foreignness as a metaphor, to represent the exotic or dangerous or wrong. Esther Greenwood \u201ccollected men with interesting names.\u201d For \u201cinteresting,\u201d read not American<\/em>. When she loses her tan, she looks \u201cyellow as a Chinaman.\u201d I cringe to even type that\u2014it\u2019s unforgivable by today\u2019s standards, reminiscent of Mickey Rooney\u2019s horrifying yellowface in Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s<\/em> (released the year before Plath turned in her manuscript). But if you can get past that, The Bell Jar<\/em> shimmers with insight, is very funny, and does those wonderful things that poets\u2019 novels do\u2014it moves unpredictably, with the kind of I\u2019m-not-entirely-sure-what-I\u2019m-doing quality that can make for very good dancing. At one point, a brute of a man forces Esther to tango, despite her protests that she doesn\u2019t know how; he says, \u201cYou don\u2019t have to dance. I\u2019ll do the dancing \u2026 Pretend you are drowning.\u201d And though the book can feel naive and sheltered, it\u2019s about<\/em> how women are sheltered, how their lives are so proscribed (or were, at least, in the fifties) that even making a choice is just choosing between different levels of passivity, between being dragged across the dance floor or remaining in your seat. (Later, the woman hater throws Esther into the mud and tries to rape her. \u201cIt\u2019s happening,\u201d she thinks. \u201cIf I just lie here and do nothing it will happen.\u201d)<\/p>\n

The Bell Jar<\/em> is also not just autobiographical but meta, which may be the defining characteristic of the poet\u2019s novel, a category I\u2019ve been thinking about since reading Eleanor, or, The Rejection of the Progress of Love<\/em>, by the poet and translator Anna Moschovakis, early last year. The Bell Jar<\/em>, like Eleanor<\/em>, and like 10:04<\/em>, the poet and critic Ben Lerner\u2019s second novel, is about someone writing a novel. (Lerner\u2019s begins with a young writer celebrating his massive advance.) Moschovakis said on a podcast<\/a> that she likes only those novels that are aware they\u2019re made of language. A meta-novel necessarily calls attention to the fact that it\u2019s a written thing, constructed out of words, and not a rubric for something nonlinguistic, the way some novels feel like novelizations of the movies they hope to become. Meta-novels, like poetry, are always reminding you they\u2019re made of language\u2014a line break that creates an ambiguity, a non sequitur, an eye rhyme or even a regular rhyme that halts the way your brain tries to visualize the story and makes you look at words as symbols again. It may be, too, that poets are self-conscious about writing novels, and hide that self-consciousness by highlighting it (one train of self-consciousness may hide another).<\/p>\n

My favorite meta-moment in The Bell Jar<\/em> is in chapter 10, when Esther sits in her mother\u2019s breezeway with a typewriter and endeavors to begin her novel: \u201cFrom another, distanced mind, I saw myself sitting on the breezeway, surrounded by two white clapboard walls, a mock orange bush and a clump of birches and a box hedge, small as a doll in a doll\u2019s house.\u201d She creates a \u201cheroine\u201d (\u201cMy heroine would be myself, only in disguise\u201d), names her Elaine, and makes of Elaine her own doll, as Plath has done with Esther\u2014nested dolls. \u201cElaine sat on the breezeway in an old yellow nightgown of her mother\u2019s waiting for something to happen,\u201d Esther types. She notes that Elaine<\/em> has six letters, like Esther<\/em>\u2014and, of course, like Sylvia<\/em>, although Plath originally published the novel, because of its potentially hurtful nature, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. My other favorite moment seems almost accidentally meta. Esther goes skiing with her annoying boyfriend Buddy Willard, and she knows she\u2019s not ready to go down the big slope yet, but Buddy insists; \u201cIt never occurred to me to say no.\u201d She hasn\u2019t learned how to \u201czigzag,\u201d so she aims \u201cstraight down.\u201d She, as her real-life doppelg\u00e4nger did, is about to break her leg in two places: \u201cI plummeted down past the zigzaggers, the students, the experts, through year after year of doubleness and smiles and compromise, into my own past.\u201d This so beautifully encapsulates Plath\u2019s whole life it stabs me in the heart.<\/p>\n

By this point I was excited about the short story, \u201cMary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom.\u201d And then my expectations were subverted again\u2014it\u2019s disappointing. At the level of the action, there\u2019s not much going on: a girl gets on a train, she meets a woman, the woman is mysterious, the train is mysterious. Eventually we, and Mary, understand that it\u2019s a train toward death, if not literal then metaphorical: the bleak, non-chosen future. At the level of the prose, too, there\u2019s not much going on: a lot of flat descriptions, a lot of ROYGBIV<\/small>: \u201cShe took the seat by the window, slipping out of her red coat first and hanging it on the brass hook next to the windowframe \u2026 A lady in a blue jacket, carrying a baby wrapped in a soiled white blanket, paused at Mary\u2019s seat for a minute, but then continued to the back of the car.\u201d Then comes another woman \u201clurching down the aisle,\u201d \u201can earth-colored brown satchel in her hand,\u201d \u201cher blue eyes crinkled up in a mass of wrinkles.\u201d The two walk to the dining car and order ginger ale and coffee. The older woman warms her hands with \u201cthe cup of steaming brown liquid.\u201d They go back to their seats and the woman buys a bar of chocolate; Mary helps herself to \u201cthe flat brown candy.\u201d All these color words do create a fantastical atmosphere, like that of a children\u2019s book (Plath described the story as a \u201cvague symbolic tale\u201d), but it\u2019s boring, and just bad writing. It was written in 1952, ten years before The Bell Jar<\/em>, while Plath was at Smith, and it reads like an unpublished story that someone wrote in college.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s curious to read her journals from the same period in which she wrote the story, in the late fall and early winter of 1952. She exhibits the wild mood swings of the depressive. In one entry she describes a luscious meal in detail (\u201cSwordfish and sour cream broiled \u2026 Hollandaise and broccoli. Grape pie and ice cream, rich, warm. And port, sharp, sweet \u2026 Good scalding black coffee\u201d); she loved food. She\u2019s so optimistic and impatient for the future that \u201ca lifetime is not long enough.\u201d In the very next entry, she despairs: \u201cIf ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now.\u201d In mid-November, she\u2019s writing images that reappear in \u201cMary Ventura\u201d:<\/p>\n

I had lost all perspective; I was wandering in a desperate purgatory (with a gray man in a gray boat in a gray river: an apathetic Charon drawing upon a passionless phlegmatic River Styx \u2026 and a petulant Christ child bawling on the train \u2026). The orange sun was a flat pasted disc on an [sic<\/em>] smoky, acrid sky. Hell was the Grand Central subway on Sunday morning.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The next paragraph begins, \u201cTomorrow I will finish my science, start my creative writing story.\u201d In that story, Mary Ventura, a name Plath borrowed from a real friend, rides a train to hell; outside the air is \u201cthick and smoky\u201d from forest fires: \u201cThe train had shot into the somber gray afternoon, and the bleak autumn fields stretched away on either side of the tracks beyond the cinder beds. In the sky hung a flat orange disc that was the sun.\u201d She\u2019s the same writer as in her journals, but the writing is totally different.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always thought of some writers as\u201ccold\u201d and others as \u201chot,\u201d my classic examples being Plath versus Anne Sexton, Plath the controlled ice queen and Sexton the sexy, messy one. But it\u2019s only Plath\u2019s poetry that\u2019s chilly; her journals and letters are lusty and overabundant with feeling, with overabundance. (In a funny but mean review of her recently published volume of letters, Jeffrey Meyers describes the \u201cawkward\u201d size and binding of the \u201cmassive volume,\u201d just one of two, the second of which will appear \u201cto stupefied readers next fall.\u201d) It\u2019s hard to square Plath\u2019s prose with her poetry, the way it is hard to square her image in photographs\u2014the beaming, teacher\u2019s-pet cuteness\u2014with her deep, resonant voice on those spellbinding BBC recordings<\/a>, where she sounds absolutely merciless, a dark sorceress. But her icy poetry is still intense, still burns to the touch\u2014\u201cblack and glittering,\u201d as she writes in \u201cBurning the Letters,\u201d from Ariel<\/em>; \u201cMy veins glow like trees.\u201d In comparison, \u201cMary Ventura\u201d feels lifeless, lukewarm.<\/p>\n

Over dinner the night I read the story, I told my husband regretfully that I hadn\u2019t liked it. He reminded me of The Original of Laura<\/em>, the unfinished work that Nabokov wanted destroyed but that his son published anyway. Dmitri Nabokov claimed that his father appeared to him as an apparition and \u201csaid, with an ironic grin, \u2018You\u2019re stuck in a right old mess\u2014just go ahead and publish!\u2019\u2009\u201d The \u201cmanuscript\u201d was actually a stack of 138 handwritten index cards, so they subtitled it A Novel in Fragments<\/em>. Nobody liked it. In a review for the Guardian<\/em>, Martin Amis wrote, \u201cWriters lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature\u2019s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.\u201d In the Wall Street Journal<\/em>, Alexander Theroux wrote, \u201cIt is a pity that [Nabokov\u2019s] instructions were ignored and the novel survived in such a form. English professors may assign The Original of Laura<\/em> to their students someday, but it is really better suited to a college ethics class.\u201d One thinks, of course, of the hated Go Tell a Watchman<\/em>, too. I saw an article about a couple who had named their child Atticus and were considering changing it, although he was five or six.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to get too deep in the weeds of the ethics of posthumous publishing here\u2014most of Plath\u2019s work was published after her death. (I\u2019m not sure what should happen to our desires after we die. I\u2019d like my corpse to be plundered for organ donations and the rest of it cremated, but if I die before my mother and she wants me buried, fine\u2014grant her that measure of happiness.) In the introduction to Plath\u2019s Collected Poems<\/em>, Ted Hughes notes that toward the end of her life, she was in the habit of saving and dating her drafts:<\/p>\n

I have resisted the temptation to reproduce the drafts of these last poems in variorum completeness. These drafts are arguably an important part of Sylvia Plath\u2019s complete works. Some of the handwritten pages are aswarm with startling, beautiful phrases and lines, crowding all over the place, many of them in no way less remarkable than the ones she eventually picked out to make her final poem. But printing them all would have made a huge volume.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

We now have huge volumes of Plath\u2019s life output, both what was intended for publication and what was not. I don\u2019t mind that it exists, but I don\u2019t want to read it, not all of it. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath<\/em> is over seven hundred pages, including a twenty-five-page index, an index that renders it useful, accessible. I would never read the book from cover to cover, but I love to dip into the index and scan for compelling entries, of which there are many. What did Plath think of tarot cards, tattooing, Elizabeth Taylor (which one, the writer or the actress?), Dylan Thomas, To Catch a Thief<\/em> (\u201cMotion picture\u201d), Leo Tolstoy, the Eiffel Tower, Harry Truman? Thanks to this index I can read everything she wrote in her journals about her father, about her mother, about Jane Baltzell, later Jane Baltzell Kopp\u2014an old classmate of Plath\u2019s when she was at Cambridge on a Fulbright. She\u2019s the one who wrote in Plath\u2019s books so enragingly, and she\u2019s \u201cthe blond one\u201d at the fateful party where Plath gets \u201cvery very beautifully drunk\u201d and meets Hughes and bites him on the cheek. I can read everything she wrote about the real Mary Ventura: \u201cI knew I would never have a friend quite like her \u2026 I love Mary \u2026 Mary is me.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are eight citations for Marianne Moore, but just one for Marilyn Monroe. I don\u2019t know what Plath thought of Moore yet. (In his review of the letters, Meyers writes that Plath went from \u201chero-worshipping\u201d \u201calmost every published author\u201d in college, calling Auden \u201cthe perfect poet,\u201d to \u201ctrashing the competition\u201d while at Cambridge, including \u201cher hated and more successful rival\u201d Adrienne Rich\u2014I guess this is supposed to reflect badly on her, but it sounds like every poet I know.) But I read the one entry on Monroe, who, in October 1959, came to Plath \u201cin a dream, as a kind of fairy godmother\u201d: \u201cI spoke, almost in tears, of how much she and Arthur Miller meant to us, although they could, of course, not know us at all. She gave me an expert manicure \u2026 She invited me to visit her during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.\u201d Monroe killed herself, overdosing on barbiturates, in August 1962, while Plath was finishing The Bell Jar<\/em>. That Plath felt connected to Marilyn Monroe\u2014as I\u2019m sure Monroe would have felt connected to Plath, if she\u2019d had a chance to read her\u2014has magic. This dream sparkles, like Pinocchio\u2019s blue fairy godmother, floating in through the window. This is the magic that\u2019s missing from \u201cMary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom.\u201d<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t read Plath\u2019s journals in full because I don\u2019t want to exhaust these discoveries\u2014a protective gesture. I\u2019m saving something of her for myself, but also from myself.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of\u00a0<\/span><\/em>The Word Pretty<\/span><\/a>\u00a0(Black Ocean).\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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