The Letters Of Sylvia Plath Vol 1 1940

the letters of sylvia plath vol. 1: 1940 - 1956 edited by peter k. steinberg and karen v. kukil faber and faber, £35, 1388 pp revie

The Letters of Sylvia Plath
Vol. 1: 1940 - 1956
Edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil
Faber and Faber, £35, 1388 pp
review by Erica Wagner
On February 10, 1956, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother Aurelia from
Cambridge, where she was -- as most readers of this volume of her
collected letters will know -- a Fulbright Scholar, having graduated
from Smith College the year before. During the summer of 1953 she had
suffered from insomnia and exhaustion, as the editors here describe
it; electro-shock therapy had been administered. In August she had
attempted suicide, taking an overdose of sleeping pills and hiding in
the basement of the family home in Wellesley, Massachusetts. Her
disappearance was reported in the papers, under headlines such as
“Brilliant College Girl Disappears” -- for she had already made her
mark not only as a student, but as a published writer in Seventeen
magazine and the Christian Science Monitor. But she recovered, and the
scholarship which took her to England opened up a whole new world: she
relished it.
“It is cold, biting, with blizzard flurries, and I bike home from
classes and market, laden with apples, oranges, nuts, and daffodils,”
she wrote. “I am grateful for all the uncertainty, and all the horrors
of suffering when I thought I was doomed to be mad for ninety years in
a cell with spiders; I am solidly, realistically joyous; I like living
in hope of publication; I can live without the actual publication. I
write, however poorly, or superficially, for fun, for aesthetic order,
and I am not poor or superficial, no matter what I turn out.” [1102]
A paragraph like this seems a perfect encapsulation of the qualities
inherent in much of Sylvia Plath’s epistolary writing. There is the
crystalline observation of the sensual world, the weather, the wind,
and her love of food and bright colours, her desire to make a home for
herself anywhere she was. Especially in writing to her mother -- to
whom she was very close, her father having died when she was a little
girl -- she acknowledges her own suffering but determines, with a
brittle brightness, to overcome it. Is it because the reader knows the
end of her story that her solid, realistic joy seems more wished-for
than attained? By setting it down on paper did she hope to make it
true? How much of what was she wrote was a self presented especially
to her mother, who had worked so hard to raise her children after the
death of her husband, Otto Plath? As Sylvia Plath wrote to her younger
brother Warren in May, 1953: “You know, as I do, and it is a
frightening thing, that mother would actually Kill herself for us if
we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an abnormally
altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight
against her selflessness as we would against a deadly disease.” [621,
upper-case K is correct in the letters]
And it is letters to her mother that dominate this first volume of
Plath’s collected letters -- a book which comes in at over 1300 pages
(not counting the index) and ends in the autumn of 1956, a few months
after Plath married Ted Hughes in London. It is to Aurelia Schober
Plath that she directs the most idealized portraits of her life,
whether she is at summer camp, at college, or abroad, in Cambridge or
Paris or Spain. Her mother is the eager audience who will always
devour the tiniest detail of her daughter’s doings; her mother is
allowed glimpses of her daughter’s unhappiness, but never sees the
black pit into which Plath falls when she confides in her journals.
“Oh, mumsy, I’m so happy here I could cry!” she writes to her mother
of her first term at Smith. [221] But her journals from this time tell
a different story. “God, who am I? I sit in the library tonight, the
lights glaring overhead, the fan whirring loudly... There is a date
this weekend: someone believes I am a human being, not a name merely.
And these are the only indications that I am a whole person, not
merely a knot of nerves, without identity. I’m lost.” [Journals, 26]
But who does not show many faces to the world? One of the fascinations
of reading these letters is seeing Plath present varied accounts of
the same events to different correspondents: mother, brother, whatever
young man (or young men) were the object of her attention at the time.
As the tome’s meticulous editors, Karen V. Kukil and Peter K.
Steinberg note: “She was so conscious of her audience that even when
her experiences were repeated there were subtle variations of emphasis
aimed to achieve a maximum response or reaction.” [xx] While in
Cambridge she fell for a fellow student a few years her junior, J.
Mallory Wober; writing to her friend Elinor Friedman Klein she called
him “this boy: tall, raven-haired, scarlet-cheeked, husky, Jewish,
strong as ‘the giants of the earth’ in the days of the old testament
prophets”; she was only sorry he was so young. But “perhaps I shall
burn my birth certificate & learnt to give birth at the plow in
israel”. [keep lower case israel, 1040] But she described him to
Gordon Lameyer -- whom she’d dated for a couple of years -- rather
differently: “My mother-impulses are brought out like mad.” [1044]
Aside from the fact that, in the internet age, we’ll be lucky if
future scholars have any letters by today’s writers to peruse, one of
the tragedies of Facebook is that posts must be crafted to be read by
all and sundry, and every voice is rendered anodyne, insipid.
It is impossible to read these letters without their author’s fate in
mind. The letter to her mother describing her freezing excursion to
buy apples and daffodils was written almost exactly two weeks before
she met Ted Hughes, a promising young poet, at a Cambridge party to
launch a new literary review. Their encounter shadows this whole long
volume, and not not simply because it appears in the useful chronology
printed at the front of the book. These unedited letters -- allowing
both a broader and deeper view of Plath’s correspondence than is
offered by Letters Home, the edited selection of her letters published
in 1975 -- display, over and over again, her search for a mate to
match her. She accepted, in part, the destiny that postwar America
determined for her: that of a wife and mother, a homemaker, a bearer
of children. More than once, in Cambridge, she remarks on how much she
despises most of her women supervisors at Newnham College,
“bluestocking grotesques who know about life second-hand”. [1115]
Without a man, she is unbalanced and incomplete: “oh how agreeable I
am but I need fifty blazing brutes to tell me so,” [832] she writes to
Lameyer in 1954. Part of Hughes’s appeal is that “he is arrogant, used
to walking over women like a blast of Jove’s lightning,” she tells her
mother; [1166] and when they are married, but living apart while she
continues her studies, she writes to him that “away from you my own
judgments are all out of kilter”. [1291] One always wonders, when
reading Plath’s private writing -- her letters, her diaries -- just
what her life would have been like had she been born in 1942 rather
than 1932, if the arguments and conversations of second-wave feminism
had been cresting when she was still in her early twenties. These
what-ifs seem inevitable when writing about Sylvia Plath, who killed
herself in 1963, the same year that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine
Mystique was published.
The publication of these complete letters offer more pieces in the
puzzle of Plath’s life. The earliest letters date from 1940, and
include some of her earliest, and previously unpublished, childhood
verses. Often her journals, where they exist, are undated: accounts
given in letters of events described in the journals will enable
accurate cross-referencing. And, as Steinberg and Kukil note, there
are no journals at all from the period autumn 1953 to autumn 1955: the
letters here fill in that gap, at least to a certain extent. And no,
not every letter -- describing her dreadful sinus colds, the mending
of clothes, the courting of boys -- is fascinating. Why should they
be? This is one young woman’s life, in all its quotidian variety. Many
of them, however, have an extraordinary narrative flow: you can feel
her practicing, like a pianist doing her scales, for her poetry and
prose. But what the reader comes away with is a renewed sense of
Plath’s wonderfully powerful appetites, for literature, for love, and
indeed for food -- though I’m not sure that everyone will share
Plath’s excitement over “deluxe peanut-butter sandwiches spiced with
onion, mayonaisse, bacon”. [786; that’s her spelling of mayonnaise]
And how hard she worked! That’s no secret -- but it is striking to see
over the course of more than a thousand pages. Rejection never
dismayed her. She would sit back down at her desk and start again. She
was published, she won prizes, would carefully account for the money
she’d earned writing, but still there was so much to achieve, and she
knew it would only be achieved by industry as much as inspiration. Her
life had so many facets -- she calls these letters “slices of my self”
[1059, the gap between my and self should remain, it’s hers] -- but
this aspect of her young life, her determination, is never less than
inspiring for the reader privileged to see these letters so long after
her death.