Between
the Covers:
This morning I finally finished a biography of Sylvia Plath, Rough Magic, by Paul Alexander [Penguin, 1991]. As is often the way with my reading, when I came across the title in a magazine article, the unexpected word combination of it appealed to me. Remembering some tenuous childhood connections between Sylvia and me, I was impelled to borrow the book from the library.
The story isn’t perfectly told. Quite numbing are the repetitions of poem titles, poem submissions, and rejections or publications. I tired after a while of the litany of Plath’s various dates in college and her health problems.
But I did learn more than I expected about Plath’s childhood, her constant financial woes, and especially about her psychological makeup and even pathology.
Plath’s father Otto was a German biology professor, a renowned specialist in bees, at Boston University during some of the years when my father taught English at the liberal arts college. My parents both knew the Plaths and attended faculty parties with them.
Sylvia was born in 1932. I was 7 years old then, so when we went to faculty picnics, she and her younger brother were little kids. I remember when Otto Plath died. I remember my mother talking to Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia. And somewhere in my archives I still have Christmas cards and a note or two from Aurelia to my mother.
The biography crystallizes childhood impressions I picked up: a dictatorial father, a daughter who both adored and feared him, a mother trying to keep things smoothed. And Alexander describes the sexual climate of those times, the repression, the curiosity mixed with guilt, and the underlying belief that if you don’t talk about something bad, it really is not that bad. I grew up in the same climate.
Plath suffered from an inner instability that allowed no forgiveness of others who, intentionally or not, interfered with her. Yet she also carried a lifelong morbid sensitivity about her own talents. She was capable of enormous rage, as Alexander describes from the views of friends and family who felt its force. But she was driven from childhood to write poetry, fiction, book reviews and essays, anything that would earn money. Although Alexander lists all the acceptances for her poetry in many national magazines, Plath still bore the weight of many rejections by editors.
After she married Ted Hughes, a young British poet, she chose an abortion rather than to give up her writing life. This surprised me. Later Plath was determined to have children and she had a daughter and a son with Hughes.
Some of the details of the marriage also surprised and repelled me. Hughes declined to bathe regularly and his fingernails were often dirty. He seemed to love his daughter, but to dislike his son. Hughes replaced her tyrant father in Plath’s life. He introduced Plath to hypnotism and controlled and directed much of her writing for a while. And Hughes did not remain sexually faithful to his wife. She overlooked his friendships with young students, but when he took as mistress one of their mutual friends, the marriage disintegrated.
Even after that traumatic development, Plath pulled her life together, found a house for herself and her children, continued to write almost frantically, but the inner dissolution, not at first visible even to close friends, led her to commit suicide at the age of 30. She closed off the children’s bedrooms, left bread and butter and milk by their beds, stuffed the kitchen cracks airtight, turned on the gas stove and laid her head on a towel on the over door.
Soon after her death, her writing began to attract widespread attention and for a while, her life and works were the center of almost a cult of admirers who demonized her husband. She became subject of a popular college course.
Now almost 50 years later, Sylvia Plath’s writing is still studied and admired. Her life stands as a reminder of the perils of talent, the difficulties of balancing a creative life, and the challenges inevitable in all human existence.