"I have experienced love, sorrow, madness and if I cannot make
these experiences meaningful, no new experience will help me".
--Sylvia Plath, November 15, 1959.
In the decades that have followed the suicide of Sylvia Plath in
February 1963, much has been written and speculated about her
life; most particularly her marriage to fellow-poet Ted Hughes
and her last months spent writing the stark, confessional poems
that became Ariel and that posthumously made her name. The myths
surrounding Plath were intensified by the strong grip her
estate--managed by Hughes and his sister Olwyn--had over the
release of her work. Sylvia Plath kept journals from the age of
11 until her death at 30. Previously only available in an
abridged American edition, with heavy black scorings out of
passages that Ted Hughes did not at the time want read, The
Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 is the first unabridged
publication of Plath's diaries, scrupulously transcribed (with
every spelling mistake and grammatical error left intact) and
annotated by Karen V. Kukil, curator at Plath's US alma mater,
Smith College.
The Journals show the breathless adolescent obsessed with her
burgeoning sexuality, the serious university student competing to
get the highest grades while engaging in the human merry-go-round
of 1950s dating, the graduate year spent at Cambridge University
where Plath's auspicious first meeting with Ted Hughes took
place; their marriage a few months later ("He is a genius. I his
wife"). Plath's documentation of the two years (1957-1959) the
couple spent in the US teaching and writing highlights explicitly
the dilemma of the late 1950s' woman--still swaddled in
expectations of domesticity, yet attempting to forge her own
independent professional and personal life. This period also
reveals in detail the therapy sessions in which Plath lets loose
her antipathy for her mother and her grief at her her's death
when she was eight--a contrast to the bright, all-American
persona she presented to her mother in the correspondence that
was published as Letters Home. There are some notable omissions
in terms of chronology. Plath's breakdown during the summer of
1953, attempted suicide and hospitalisation are not covered in
any great detail in her journals, but she recorded the events
minutely in her one novel, The Bell Jar. Fragments of diaries
exist after 1959, which saw the couple's return to England and
rural retreat in Devon, the birth of their two children, and
their separation in late 1962. An extended piece on the illness
and death of an elderly neighbour during this period is
particularly affecting and was later turned into the poem
"Berck-Plage". Much has been made of the "lost diaries" that
Plath kept until her suicide--one simply appears to have
vanished, the other was burnt by Hughes after her death. It would
seem rapacious to wish for more details of Plath's despair in her
final days, however. This was crystallised in the poems that
became Ariel, and this is what the voice of her journals
ultimately send the reader back to: Plath's life has for too long
been obfuscated by anecdote, distorting her major contribution to
late 20th-century literature. As she wrote in "Kindness": "The
blood jet is poetry. There is no stopping it". --Catherine Taylor