The Books: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I’ve written a lot about Sylvia Plath. It’s rare that you have a relationship with a writer that lasts so long. I first discovered her when I was 16. I have gone through many phases in my relationship to her writing, and in talking to others (I mean the die-hard fans) my trajectory with Plath is in line with theirs. I first got into her through The Bell Jar (my review here), her only novel, published posthumously. Largely autobiographical, it describes the events of the summer of 1953 in the life of a girl named Esther Greenwood, who eventually swallows a bottle of pills and ends up in a mental hospital. Plath had also tried to take her own life in the summer of 1953, after a prestigious internship at Ladies Home Journal. When she returned home from New York City, the abyss of the summer yawned before her, and she began to tailspin into depression and psychosis. What called to me in the book was its chilly prose, its accurate depiction of a good girl trying to shed her good girl role (one of Plath’s main problems, it was such a huge division in her it could not be bridged), and also – the mesmerizing descriptions of what depression actually feels like. How it has nothing to do with being sad. It has to do with experiencing nothing-ness, emptiness, listlessness. It wasn’t until I read it again in my 20s that I really caught onto her social critique, biting and vicious. In many ways, the book isn’t about clinical depression and suicide at all. It is about the ingrained double-standard in the culture at the time (and hell, still true now) – where boys are free, and girls are free but only with huge consequences. The sense of unfairness about that runs through the book like an electric current. Good girls don’t do such-and-such. I have written before about this in my various posts about Plath. Plath’s mother is often portrayed as the bogey-man of Plath’s life, a prudish judgmental unhappy woman who put unrealistic expectations on her intense daughter. Plath’s desire to please her mother ran so deep that it paralyzed her, infantilized her. She had to metaphorically “kill” her mother in order to be an artist, which she finally did, in the poem “Medusa”, written in the terrible (yet groundbreaking) year of 1962, months before Plath killed herself. But The Bell Jar is really an uncanny and acute criticism of the pressures put on young women to behave themselves (sexually, emotionally). Now some women would not split apart under such pressure. The character of Doreen in The Bell Jar seems to live her life the way she wants to live, and doesn’t give a hoot about the old prudes who judge her. But Esther can’t take it. And neither could Plath. She wasn’t healthy enough to withstand the pressure.

After The Bell Jar I moved onto her poems, and that’s when the obsession really kicked in. I obsessed over her Collected Poems (my review here), and I still have the copy I had back then. It is falling apart, filled with notes – which actually makes it an annoying volume. I think I need a clean copy, because my own marginalia is distracting. I went CRAZY with obsession, which lasted a good 2 years. I remember researching Sylvia Plath in my college library, not for a paper, but just for myself. I read critical studies, unsatisfactory biographies (I would only learn later, when reading Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman the challenges biographers faced when writing about Plath, dealing with her Byzantine estate, run by her widow Ted Hughes and his sister Olwyn Hughes), and I poured all of my amateur analysis into the poems. For a while, I saw them ONLY as autobiographical statements. Later, though, when I went back to the poetry in my late 20s, I started to see them as works of art, separate from the revealing autobiographical details. I still love reading her poems. They never fail to startle, and actually frighten.

Now about her journals. Her journals were published originally in 1982. That was the copy that I originally read. In an explosive foreword, Ted Hughes said that he had destroyed her final journals because they were too painful and too damning. There were also a lot of edits, to protect people. The original published journals were filled with suspicious ellipses. Frustrating for those of us who wanted to know more. What the hell was in those last journals? Had he really destroyed them? Also, not for nothing, but perhaps her estranged husband and widow was not the best person to be making such decisions about an important document? I understand his position, I understand why those last journals had to have been horrible to read … but with her death, Sylvia Plath became a public figure, no longer belonging only to him. Was it fair that Hughes would edit the journals, leaving out the mean things she probably said about him? The fact that Hughes even admitted that he destroyed the journals is pretty extraordinary, leading me to believe that he might have wanted to throw people off the real trail. This may be wishful thinking, I realize. But still: it was a stunning admission to make. Hughes couldn’t please anyone. By admitting that, he entered into his new role as Public Enemy #1 for the more rabid Plath fans. Now I loved her writing, but I never had a “J’Accuse Ted Hughes” feeling about him. I think the man was devastated by what had happened. He should not have been in charge of editing those journals. That was a poor choice. So, for 20-plus years, it was common knowledge that her journals were truncated, edited, to protect Ted Hughes. You could feel the edits, too. You could feel when explosive things were chopped out.

And let’s not even talk about those final “missing” journals.

Those missing journals are the Holy Grail to Plath fans. As you can see here, a brilliant international thriller written by my good friend Cara – starring me, her, and Tracey … Anyway: If you want a treat, just go read it. That pretty much sums up how we feel about the missing journals. I still hold out hope that they will turn up one day.

In 2000 came a giant “literary event” (quote from Joyce Carol Oates): an “unabridged” version of Plath’s journals were published. I cannot sufficiently describe the excitement that went off at the news. It was like a bomb detonating, the publication of the long-awaited “unedited” journals. HOWEVER: while much of the edited material had been put back in (the entries are all longer, more detailed, more in-depth) – the journal STILL did not include the last 2 years of her life (the final journals). What happens in the published version of the journals is that we get introspective diary entries up until 1961, until all of that finally stops, and then what we get is just descriptive passages, describing her neighbors. There is no introspection, no narrative, just long lists of what the neighbors were like, what their yard was like, their garden. But apparently, these were her writer’s notebooks, where she put down writerly sketches of things she might be able to use later. All of that is quite interesting, but the years 1961, 62, brought about the dissolution of Plath’s marriage to Ted Hughes (he had an affair), and she killed herself in February, 1963. Apparently, she kept a real journal right up to the end. Perhaps Hughes is to be believed, that he destroyed them. I maintain that I have my doubts. So while it was wonderful to read extended entries, (and I knew the original published version as well as I knew anything, I practically had it memorized) – those missing two years were still frustrating to a reader. It’s like Plath goes plummeting off a cliff in 1960, if you believe the journals. Everything STOPS, when actually those next two years were her most harrowing as well as her most productive.

I still hold out hopes that those journals will turn up.

In the meantime, though, for those only familiar with the original edited version of the journals published in the 80s, this “unabridged” version has a wealth of new material. You get a fuller picture of Plath, definitely, because she is allowed to follow her own train of thought, without all of those pesky ellipses reminding us that she was being edited (silenced) from beyond the grave.

Whatever the case, the journals are riveting reading. She was precocious, self-conscious, sentimental, and obviously had a writer’s bug. She is creating “narratives” of her own experience from the get-go. A simple date becomes a metaphorical experience of something much larger. A moonrise is dwelled upon and elaborated upon, Plath going off the deep end into romantic descriptions. She is flexing her muscles. That’s what she used her journal for (or, one of the reasons). I look at my own journal entries from when I was a teenager (Ahem), and while I had a similar NEED to write down my own life as though it were a story (something that continues to this day), I certainly don’t sound like SHE did.

For example, the extraordinary entry below (this was highly edited in the original published version of the journals). Here, Plath is 18 years old. It’s kind of long, and all one paragraph, so it may be difficult to read, but I recommend taking the time to get through it. Her analysis of the pressures on her, the influences on her, and also the “writerly” second-person narrator device she chooses – shows her to be a writer in training. It’s self-conscious, sometimes annoyingly so, but hey, she was 18. She was trying to work things out. She is writing her life like it is a story, distancing herself from it – not only by writing it down, but also by choosing the “you” narrator. It’s also amazing how aware she is, not only of what was happening in her life personally, but about the societal pressures that seemed to be shaping her against her will.

She totally knew everything that was happening to her. She diagnosed the situation: lack of a father, unhealthily close relationship to mother, desire for male attention, and yet – in the 1950s world – terrified of what that would mean. Ambition, desire, need … all struggling to express itself in a way that would not topple her delicate house of cards.

18 years old? Get outta here!

Excerpt from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

June 15, 1951

The rain comes down again, on the indecently big green leaves, and there is the wet hiss of drops splashing and puckering the flat veined vegetable surfaces. Although the rain is neutral, although the rain is impersonal, it becomes for me a haunting and nostalgic sound. The still air of the house smells of warm stagnant human flesh and of onions, and I sit, back to the radiator, the metal ribs of it pressing against my shoulders. I am in my old room once more, for a little, and I am caught in musing — how life is a swift motion, a continuous flowing, changing, and how one is always saying goodbye and going places, seeing people, doing things. Only in the rain, sometimes, only when the rain comes, closing in your pitifully small radius of activity, only when you sit and listen by the window, as the cold wet air blows thinly by the back of your neck – only then do you think and feel sick. You feel the days slipping by, elusive as slippery pink worms, through your fingers, and you wonder what you have for your eighteen years, and you think about how, with difficulty and concentration, you could bring back a day, a day of sun, blue skies and watercoloring by the sea. You could remember the sensual observations that made that day reality, and you could delude yourself into thinking – almost – that you could return to the past, and relive the days and hours in a quick space of time. But no, the quest of time past is more difficult than you think, and time present is eaten up by such plaintive searchings. The film of your days and nights is wound up tight in you, never to be re-run – and the occasional flashbacks are faint, blurred, unreal, as if seen through falling snow. Now, you begin to get scared. You don’t believe in God, or a life-after-death, so you can’t hope for sugar plums when your non-existent soul rises. You believe that whatever there is has got to come from man, and man is pretty creative in his good moments – pretty mature, pretty perceptive for his age – how many years is it, now? How many thousands? Yet, yet in this era of specialization, of infinite variety and complexity and myriad choices, what do you pick for yourself out of the grab-bag? Cats have nine lives, the saying goes. You have one; and somewhere along the thin, tenuous thread of your existence there is the black knot, the blood clot, the stopped heartbeat that spells the end of this particular individual which is spelled “I” and “You” and “Sylvia”. So you wonder how to act, and how to be – and you wonder about values and attitudes. In the relativism and despair, in the waiting for the bombs to begin, for the blood (now spurting in Korea, in Germany, in Russia) to flow and trickle before your own eyes, you wonder with a quick sick fear how to cling to earth, to the seeds of grass and life. You wonder about your eighteen years, ricocheting between a stubborn determination that you’ve done well for your own capabilities and opportunities … that you’re competing now with girls from all over America, and not just from the hometown: and a fear that you haven’t done well enough – You wonder if you’ve got what it takes to keep building up obstacle courses for your self, and to keep leaping through them, sprained ankle or not. Again the refrain, what have you for your eighteen years? And you know that whatever tangible things you do have, they cannot be held, but, too, will decompose and slip away through your coarse-skinned and death-rigid fingers. So you will rot in the ground, and so you say, what the hell? Who cares? But you care, and somehow you don’t want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch = “She was the sort of girl ….” And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can … you’re a capitalist from way back … and because you’re eighteen, because you’re still vulnerable, because you still don’t have faith in yourself, you talk a little fliply, a little too wisely, just to cover up so you won’t be accused of sentimentality or emotionalism or feminine tactics. You cover up, so you can still laugh at yourself while there’s time. And then you thin of the flesh-and-blood people you know, and wonder guiltily where all this great little flood of confidence is getting you. (That’s the pragmatic approach — where are you getting? what are you getting? Measure your precepts and their values by the tangible good you derive from their use.) Take the grandparents, now. What do you know about them? Sure, they were born in Austria, they say “cholly” for “jolly” and “ven” for “when”. Grampy is white-haired, terribly even-tempered, terribly old, terribly endearing in his mute and blind admiration of everything you do. (You take a bitter and rather self-righteous pride in the fact that he’s a steward at a Country Club.) Grammy is spry, with a big fat bosom and spindly arthritic legs. She cooks good sour cream sauce and makes up her own recipes. She slurps her soup, and drops particles of food from her plate down the front of her dresses. She is getting hard of hearing, and her hair is just beginning to turn gray. There is your dead father who is somewhere in you, interwoven in the cellular system of your long body which sprouted from one of his sperm cells uniting with an egg cell in your mother’s uterus. You remember that you were his favorite when you were little, and you used to make up dances to do for him as he lay on the living room couch after supper. You wonder if the absence of an older man in the house has anything to do with your intense craving for male company and the delight in the restful low sound of a group of boys, talking and laughing. You wish you had been made to know Botany, Zoology and Science when you were young. But with your father dead, you leaned abnormally to the “Humanities” personality of your mother. And you were frightened when you heard yourself stop talking and felt the echo of her voice, as if she had spoken in you, as if you weren’t quite you, but were growing and continuing in her wake, and as if her expressions were growing and emanating from your face. (Here upon you ponder, and wonder if that’s what happens to older people when they die contented — that they feel they have somehow transcended the wall of flesh which is crumbling fatally and forever around them and that their fire and protoplasm and pulse have leapt over bounds and will live on in off spring, continuing the chain of life … ) Then there is your brother – 6 feet four inches tall, lovable and intelligent. You fought with him when you were little, threw tin soldiers at his head, gouged his neck with a careless flick of your iceskate … and then last summer, as you worked on the farm, you grew to love him, confide in him, and know him as a person … and you remember the white look of fear about his mouth that day they had all planned to throw you in the wash tub – and how he rallied to your defense. Yes, you can outline the people you’ve lived with these eighteen years in a few sentences … yet could you give an account of their lives, their hopes, their dreams? You could try, perhaps, but they would be much the same as yours … for you are all an inexplicable unity – this family group with its twisted tensions, unreasoning loves and solidarity and loyalty born and bred in blood. These people are the ones most basically responsible for what you are. Then there are the teachers – Miss Norris, the principle of grammar school; Miss Raguse, the tall, hideous 7th grade English teacher who loved poetry, and read it aloud to the class, even to the little boys destined to be garage mechanics; Mr. Crockett, the man through high school who fostered your intellectual life, along with that of your circle of classmates who took the three year advanced English course; Mrs. Koffka, this year at Smith, who took up the torch and made you want to know, to think, to learn, to beat your head out against the knowledge of centuries. And there are the girls, who have come singly in a strange continuity to grow more and more intensely, to meet your growth, from the summers of camping and fern-hut building with Betsy Powley, to the tennis and talks with Mary Ventura and the pretty black-haired wit of Ruth Geisel, to the sweet sentiment of Patsy O’Neil, to the synthesis of these in Marcia. And the boys, from Jimmy Beal, who drew you pictures of pretty girls in fifth grade, and rollerskated along the beach and planned to get married in a little white house with roses on a picket fence – (you remember, absurdly now, how his little sister was drowned on the beaches while walking on ice cakes, and how you didn’t know just how to react to his white, drawn face when you saw him back at school. You wanted to say nice things and how sorry you were, and then you felt a sudden hardening and strange anger at him for his weakness which intensified yours. So you stuck out your tongue at him and made a face. And you never played with him again.) There was tall gawky John Stenberg who printed “Sylvia loves John” on his printing press and scattered little slips of paper all over the streets and in every desk at school. Mortified, yet secretly excited by such attention, you scorned his gifts of a rabbit’s foot and a date to the carnival. (Later years would have found you infinitely grateful for any of his attentions whatever.) A blank of several awkward and ungainly and ugly adolescent years ended suddenly with a brief mental infatuation, and then a slow awakening of physical relationships with boys, from the first time, at the traditional age of sixteen, that you found that a kiss was not as distasteful as once imagined. And so you could list the thirty or forty boys you’ve gone out with in the last two years of your dating existence – and append a brief, if not astringent, note of gratitude to each one for an increased education in conversation, confidence and — so on. Till now you comb your hair with practiced casualness and go downstairs to greet the man of the hour with a careless sparkle in your eyes born of years of “faux pas” and blunders. Gone are the days where a date began in the afternoon, with an agony of nervousness prickling the back of the neck, making hands slippery and cold with sweat – sicking nausea that wouldn’t let you eat supper – or do anything besides wait tensely, ready for at least half an hour before the boys came, and able only to check and re-check for slip-showing or hair-uncurled. And you look now at your reflection on the window and smile – for all your fat nose, you’re quite a presentable long and lithe piece of tan flesh. And your mirth congeals on your full mouth as you think of yourself growing used to your reflection after year on year of mirror-glimpses. If you had a wen on either cheek, you’d get used to that, too. And the rain is still coming down, and it is getting later and later … and you aren’t the sort of human being that can write till four in the morning and stay whole, so you trail off …