海角大神

鈥淪ince her suicide in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become a paradoxical symbol of female power and helplessness whose life has been subsumed by her afterlife,鈥� writes Heather Clark in her magnificent new book 鈥淩ed Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath.鈥� 鈥淐aught in the limbo between icon and cliche虂, she has been mythologized and pathologized in movies, television, and biographies as a high priestess of poetry, obsessed with death.鈥� If Clark鈥檚 goal in writing this big book, nearly a decade in the making, was to swap out that tired, overworked symbol for a three-dimensional human, in 鈥淩ed Comet鈥� she has succeeded far beyond the extent of all previous Plath biographies.

Despite the fact that she died by her own hand at the young age of 30 鈥� or maybe because of that fact 鈥� Plath has never lacked for those biographies, and the short story they all tell is roughly the same in outline: Plath was born in Boston in 1932, and she very early聽 set herself on the course of a professional writer, firing off poems and articles even while still a young girl (her first national publication came just after high school, in the pages of the 海角大神 Science Monitor). She attended Smith College, won a guest editorship position at Mademoiselle magazine, but also began to be stalked by depression, for which she underwent electroshock therapy in the early 1950s and which drove her to her first suicide attempt in 1953.聽

As Clark points out, Plath read the writings of British poet Ted Hughes before she met the man himself. Only months after that first meeting they married, in 1956, and the late 1950s found the couple living in Boston, with Plath working as a receptionist in the psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital and, it often seems, feeling estranged from the artistic inspirations steadily growing and complicating inside her. 鈥淧lath鈥檚 desire for reinvention was American, but her transformation could not occur in the United States,鈥� Clark writes. 鈥淚n late 1959, she left America for England with Hughes, never to return.鈥� There followed in 1960 the publication of Plath鈥檚 first poetry collection, 鈥淭he Colossus,鈥� and her novel, 鈥淭he Bell Jar,鈥� in January of 1963.聽

But the depression and suicide attempts continued as well, and Plath took her own life on February 11, 1963 (鈥淭he woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment,鈥� she wrote in 鈥淓dge,鈥� a poem finished just a week before her suicide.) Clark is as perceptive about the work of this final year as she is about the rest of Plath鈥檚 writings: The 鈥渟urreal grandeur of 鈥楨dge鈥� 鈥� and indeed all of Ariel聽and the 1963 poems 鈥� opened up new aesthetic possibilities that would change the direction of modern poetry,鈥� she writes.

Clark has consulted an enormous array of primary sources in order to assemble this life, ranging from unpublished letters and psychiatric records to interviews with virtually everybody who knew Plath or worked with her. The result is a clearer and more comprehensive account of Plath鈥檚 life than any that have appeared before, particularly strong in analyzing the complexities of her evolving relationship with Hughes (who is here given credit as a 鈥渟teward鈥� of her work after her death) but also wonderfully detailed in giving readers a look at the life of a working author.聽

We follow Plath through every submission to places like the Springfield Daily News, The Springfield Union, the Daily Hampshire Gazette, The Nation, The Atlantic, Ladies鈥� Home Journal, Harper鈥檚, and although Clark sometimes succumbs to the biographer鈥檚 curse of over-documentation (we get the point long, long before every single rejection slip is accounted for), this granular picture of Plath the writer is invaluable in dispelling that image of a death-obsessed high priestess. This is a Sylvia Plath who jokes and loves and encourages and horses around. It鈥檚 an intensely human portrait.聽

There鈥檚 an undercurrent of anger to much of this, an undercurrent Plath herself would have appreciated. This poet has become a 鈥渃ultural shorthand for female hysteria,鈥� but as Clark notes with some asperity, 鈥淢ale writers who kill themselves are rarely subject to such black humor.鈥� As Clark puts it, 鈥淪ylvia Plath took herself and her desires seriously in a world that often refused to do so.鈥�

鈥淩ed Comet鈥� takes Plath and her work very seriously, and with a refreshing degree of reserved historical distance. Despite being grounded in all those primary sources from Plath鈥檚 lifetime, 鈥淩ed Comet鈥� feels bracingly free of old grievances and shopworn vindications. It鈥檚 the big, generous biography Plath has always deserved.聽