The Books: Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, by Susan R. Van Dyne

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry. Next book on the shelf:

Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, by Susan R. Van Dyne

I’m not big on literary criticism, and not big on autobiographical readings of works of literature. However, Revising Life manages to transcend both of those categories. It is a fascinating book. While, yes, Sylvia Plath’s life is examined (especially her life in 1962, when she wrote most of her most famous poems), Susan Van Dyne also analyzes the complex layers of influence and potential inspiration behind many of these poems, based on the many drafts each poem went through, not to mention (most interestingly) the paper it was written on. This is where this book is special. She wrote on the back sides of other manuscripts, sometimes manuscripts of Ted Hughes’ poems (a fascinating example of possible defacement, and also transfusion: did some of his words on the other side of the page inform her words?), or of her unpublished novel The Bell Jar. Revising Life is an obsessive book, openly, and that is why I like it. The author has pored through the existing drafts of all of the Ariel poems, and analyzed what Plath left in, what Plath left out (why she might have decided to delete certain lines), and speculated on what it might have meant that she wrote it on the back of a typescript of this or that Hughes poem. Reading Revising Life makes you feel that you are touching each scribbled draft from Plath, on the pink Memo sheets she loved, you can see her markings, her crossouts. The Ariel poems have finally been re-released, in the order that she wanted – but also with facsimile pages of her drafts, so you can see her markings, her edits. I love this stuff anyway. Drafts are important. I suppose you need to really be obsessed with an author to care about earlier drafts, and with Plath I am obsessed. Even the lines she omitted burn with some kind of weird fire.

And I found Van Dyne’s speculation on the paper itself, the possible levels of imitation and influence flowing through the page (was Plath reading her manuscript of The Bell Jar and, at a certain point, did she turn the page over and start a new poem? was Plath reading one of Hughes’ poems, and then have to turn the page over to start her own? There are many examples of how the images – on both sides of the page – are similar. This is speculation, but it is certainly very interesting speculation).

It also puts to rest the mistaken assumption that Plath was in some sort of otherworldly ferocious state in those last months of her life, beyond reason or intellect. That the poems poured out of her in an unstoppable flow, and that the only possible result would be suicide, because who could keep up that pace? That is a very seductive image – However, when you see how many drafts she managed, of each of these eventually famous poems – how hard she worked these poems, wrestling them into shape (and remember: she was, in some cases, in the fall of 1962, writing up to three poems a day – so yes, her pace was incredible) – you realize that she was not at all in some sort of transcendent state of grief and rage. She may have been that as well, but on the other side, she was a ruthless clear-eyed artist, looking down at what she had just created, and then whipping it into shape. That is hard work. It takes guts. You have to look at something that has been created, and decide: “Okay, this doesn’t work, must cut that, must rewrite that.” She was able to do that. She was not just a raging lunatic of emotion in those last months. You can’t do what she did, in those meticulous drafts (each one dated, each one typed up), in an insensible state of raw emotion. You have to be somewhat in control.

Here is an excerpt from Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems, by Susan R. Van Dyne. This is about the writing of the extraordinary “bee poems”.

In less than a week in early October, Plath completed a sequence of five poems about keeping bees at her cottage in Devon. At the end of January, she gathered and ordered the poems for her second collection of poetry and set these poems last. When Plath chose to conclude Ariel with this group of poems (an order Hughes did not honor in his ordering of the volume), she recognized that the series pointed, at least figuratively, toward survival. She remarked that her selection “began with the word ‘Love’ and ended with the word ‘Spring’.” Nevertheless, the bee poems look backward to the unfinished emotional business of childhood and her relationship to her father as much as they respond to immediate betrayals or optimistically claim a certain future. In the earliest versions, Plath’s notations indicate that she conceived of the group as an ordered sequence. The five separate poems are numbered consecutively in both her handwritten drafts and her typescripts, beginning with the draft of “The Bee Meeting” and concluded with “Wintering” five days later. The first typed draft of “The Bee Meeting” is dated October 3, 1962. “The Arrival of the Bee Box” came the next day. “Stings,” “The Swarm”, and “Wintering” arrived at one-day intervals on October 6, 7, and 8. All but “Stings” evolve from the first draft to a clean typescript of what would become the final published version mostly within a single day. During the week of composition, Plath tried several working titles for the group. “The Beekeeper” was her initial choice, self-consciously echoing a change in her role since the poem “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” in The Colossus. By the time of “The Arrival of the Bee Box” on the following day, Plath had substituted “The Beekeeper’s Daybook”, and when she was typing “Stings”midway in the cycle, she settled simply for the running title “Bees”. She mailed the completed sequence to The New Yorker on October 10; by January 25 she had successfully placed all but “The Swarm”.

The unerring drive with which Plath composed the sequence is further substantiated by her habit of drafting her first handwritten copies and earliest typescripts of each poem on the back of a typed draft of The Bell Jar, itself composed on the reverse of Smith College memo paper. Whether dictated by frugality, a rage for order, or a desire for sympathetic magic, Plath’s earliest drafts are recorded on the reverse of The Bell Jar papers with hardly a page skipped or used out of its numbered sequence. Almost without interruption, Plath worked her way through a stack of the novel’s pages from back to front. Her worksheets begin with the conclusion of chapter 6; by the time she typed “Wintering,” she had worked down to within five pages of the beginning of chapter 4. About half the total of what Plath and subsequently Hughes preserved, some twenty-six of fifty-seven pages of the manuscripts for the sequence, including each of her handwritten drafts and her first heavily revised typescripts, appears on The Bell Jar. For later typescripts she used clean bond. The novel had been safely in the hands of her publisher since November 1961; it would be published in England in January 1963. Meanwhile she had collected a quarterly stipend from the Saxton grant during 1962 for this already completed work. Nothing gave Plath such a sense of security and conviction of her own generativity as the tangible evidence of past success. The impressive stack of novel manuscript was at once satisfying proof of her productivity and a familiar stimulus to feelings of creativity. The determination with which Plath apparently used each page in sequence may indicate too that she felt a challenge to match her earlier prose output with her current poetic activity. Her choice was more likely emotionally overdetermined than accidental. It seems too neat to be coincidence that Plath began composing these poems that respond so immediately to the breakup of her marriage at the point in the novel that marks Esther Greenwood’s discovery of Buddy Willard’s sexual infidelity. Chapter 6 contains Esther’s devastating comment that Buddy’s proud display of male flesh reminded her of a “turkey neck and turkey gizzards”. In drafting “The Bee Meeting” on the reverse of chapter 6, Plath’s indelible image reappears parodically in the speaker’s vulnerable overexposure: “I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me?” Although the three Bell Jar chapters make up the bulk of material Plath reused during this week, she drafts smaller sections on equally significant scraps borrowed from other sources. Four versions of an earlier aborted attempt at “Stings” begun in August each appear on the reverse of several versions of a poem Hughes wrote in May 1960 marking Frieda’s birth. At the very end of this cycle of composition, on October 9, Plath types the final poem on another Hughes manuscript, this time a handwritten scene from his play The Calm, significantly a deadly quarrel in which a wife accuses her husband of fraudulent artistic ambition.