Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2003. How the child, “plump and golden in America,” became the woman, thin and white in Europe, who wrote poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy” and “Edge,” remains an enigma of literary history—one that is at the heart of the nervous urgency that drives the Plath biographical enterprise, and of the hold that the Plath legend continues to exert on our imaginations. Another poem, "A Life," in which a woman drags her shadow around the moon but has been exorcised of "grief and anger," was completed on Nov. 18, 1960, and so was written during the week in which Plath (according to the dates she gave her mother) must have ovulated and become pregnant for the second time. The cycles do not necessarily coincide, and in some phases the woman may have "pure" PMS/PMDD while at other times she has premenstrual worsening of her mood disorder. She could not do so, of course. The book has a surface puerility, a deceptive accessibility: it reads like a girls’ book. Kidman, of course, has been heaped with praise for simultaneously 'doing her own drowning' whilst sporting an ugly, bulbous prosthetic nose. To spare feelings! Time heals all wounds, smooths, cleanses, obliterates; history keeps the wound open, picks at it, makes it raw and bleeding. She is the divided self par excellence. They move onto the living because they can no longer feel the difference between the living and the dead. The contrast between the omniscient narrator of “Bitter Fame,” whose mantle of pallid judiciousness Anne Stevenson was obliged to wear, and the robustly intemperate “I” of the Merwin memoir is striking. Interestingly, this was never a theme for Plath. A very tall man with graying hair, dressed in black, comes through the doorway, having to duck his head, and stands watching the players.

Some of us, however, have thicker atmospheres than others, and a few of us have an atmosphere of such opacity that it hides us entirely from view—we seem to be nothing but our atmosphere.

The Hughes passage was the one that interested me most. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.

Plath’s not-niceness is the outstanding characteristic of the “Ariel” poems, it is what sets her apart from the other so-called confessional poets of the fifties and sixties, it is the note of the “true self” that Hughes celebrates.

But in spite of this, I do like her. For a person to be corrupted in that way is to be genuinely corrupted. Paltrow, single, pampered multimillionairess, has been over in the UK enjoying a bit of larking about in fake snow whilst filming Plath's final scenes in Primrose Hill (well, Gwynnie's always been partial to a bit of coldplay). . In some secret way, Thanatos nourishes Eros as well as opposes it. The biographer’s business, like the journalist’s, is to satisfy the reader’s curiosity, not to place limits on it. I have never felt so inadequate in my life. “On which day was it?”, “It happens to be today,” she said. Unfortunately, Mrs. Plath was ashamed of the mental illness—it has never been made clear, for instance, just how very ill Sylvia was with her first breakdown. mental breakdown, neurotic collapse, domestic catastrophe—which in the past have saved us from several travesties of this kind being completed. After the reading of the poetry and Alvarez’s criticism of it, the talk would become more personal. The film starred Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff and Merle Oberon as Cathy. In each case, the reader knows that he is hearing only one side of a quarrel, and, as with the Dido Merwin memoir, is arrested by the innocence of the narrator’s belief in her power of persuasion. By perhaps fateful coincidence, Plath's Feb. 24, 1956, period is the first she mentions specifically in her entire journal; the next day, she met her future husband, Ted Hughes, at a party. Consequently, this biography contains less of Plath’s writing than I had intended. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. By beginning his second version with the boulder in place, he is able to propose ways of getting around it: by acknowledging difficulty, by resisting the temptation to minimize it, by moving sideways. I thought it was valid, and good. The first version (the one that appears in the book, published in 1982) is a short, lyrical essay constructed on a single Blakean theme—the theme of a “real self” that finally emerged from among Plath’s warring “false selves” and found triumphant expression in the “Ariel” poems, which were written in the last half year of her life and are the whole reason for her poetical reputation. After reading this book I came to understand her words a bit more than one wanted to for personal reasons. The power stations, overloaded by million upon pathetic million of hopeless electric fires, broke down continually; not that the fires mattered, since the electricians were mostly out on strike. Using both the unabridged journals to assess cyclical patterning and Plath's calendars from 1952 and 1953 (housed in the University of Indiana's Lilly Library), in which Plath recorded her periods through July 1953, it seems overwhelmingly likely that Plath was, as Thompson contended, in either the luteal or the perimenstrual phase of her menses at the time of her 1953 suicide attempt. Although Alvarez is extremely discreet and gives no details of Hughes and Plath’s separation—about which, in fact, he knew a great deal—it is not hard to read his self-castigation as a veiled accusation against Hughes, whose rejection of Plath was, after all, much more profoundly final and unforgivable. Howe, for example, extends his criticism of “Daddy” to the whole of “Ariel.” “What illumination—moral, psychological, social—can be provided of either [extreme situations] or the general human condition by a writer so deeply rooted in the extremity of her plight?” he asks. When he made his confession at the end of his first version, it was as if he had suddenly rolled an impassable boulder into the reader’s path. I feel as though I am learning so much about a person who I have been fascinated with for quite some time. I have never known anything like it. If the journals of this period, which Hughes destroyed or lost, are out of their reach, there remain the crazed letters that Plath wrote to her mother and to friends in her misery and jealousy and fury over Hughes’s faithlessness. One month later, in an irrational fit of jealous rage, Plath destroyed her husband's most precious possession, his leatherbound copy of the Oxford Collected Shakespeare, as well as all of his papers and works in draft on his desk; a few days later, Plath miscarried. The passage affords another glimpse of Plath’s alienation in England. It gives excellent insight into the world of Plath. Freud speaks in one of his technical papers of how the analytic patient’s secrets leak out from every pore without his knowledge. Who knows. But I did write from an honest place. In 1933 "The Vessel of Wrath" was included in his book Ah King. Given the task of reviewing a book whose declared object was to dismantle the narrative that he himself had set in motion, Alvarez could hardly have been expected to look upon it favorably.

Small talk becomes desperate. While the controversy rages, the medical establishment has accepted PMS as a bona fide condition. In addition, she breast-fed both of her babies for lengthy periods (10 months for Frieda, about eight months for Nick, according to letters to her mother) and probably experienced very few normal menstrual cycles during that time. But it is a second narrative, a sort of sub-allegory, that gives Alvarez’s memoir its high verve and also its status as a foundation text of the Plath legend. The biographer is portrayed almost as a kind of benefactor. The New Yorker may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. Feelings are going to be hurt. The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP, All articles and content Copyright © 2013 The Spectator (1828) Ltd | All rights reserved. . The notorious 1958 incident with Hughes and a female university student on Plath's last day of teaching took place, as Thompson had earlier suggested and the unabridged journals now confirm, during the luteal phase of Plath's cycle; so did the memorable "button quarrel" between Plath and Hughes. The pitiless voice of the “Ariel” poet was a voice that had rid itself of its American accent.

“For goodness sake, stop being so frightened of everything, Mother!” she wrote to Aurelia Plath in October, 1962. But by so doing, by restoring Plath to the status of the living, they simply achieve a substitution: they send the Hugheses and Mrs. Plath down to take Plath’s place among the rightless dead. It chronicles the breakdown and suicide attempt and “recovery” of its heroine, Esther Greenwood, and is narrated by Esther in a voice that has all the disdain of the voice of “Ariel,” if not its chilly beauty and authority. Hughes has been extremely reticent about his life with Plath; he has written no memoir, he gives no interviews, his writings about her work (in a number of introductions to volumes of her poetry and prose) are always about the work, and touch on biography only when it relates to the work. If an artistic mode is flagging, if it’s weighed down by cliches of its own design, if it makes for uninteresting and unentertaining reading, it should be taken down. In a letter to the publisher she wrote: Practically every character in The Bell Jar represents someone—often in caricature—whom Sylvia loved; each person had given freely of time, thought, affection, and, in one case, financial help during those agonizing six months of breakdown in 1953. . She was seen as having been used by Ted and Olwyn Hughes to put forward their version of Ted Hughes’s relations with Plath. Before the publication of “Letters Home,” the Plath legend was brief and contained, a taut, austere stage drama set in a few bleak, sparsely furnished rooms. Will be used in accordance with our Privacy Policy. Olwyn began to tell me how to get to Plath’s house on Fitzroy Road, but the directions were complicated, and when she learned that I had no street guide with me she said, “Oh, all right—I’ll walk with you.