Good vile words

In 1977 Ted Hughes published the first selection of Sylvia Plath’s prose in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Two years later he added a new cache of her work to an expanded second edition. Twenty-two of Plath’s short stories appeared there, as well as some of her later essays and a few evocative journal excerpts. Hughes chose wisely: the stories and essays in Johnny Panic are among Plath’s best. But he revealed in his introduction that his selection represented only a fraction of her “extant” oeuvre: he estimated that she had written “about seventy short stories”. So it was never a secret that there were reams of unpublished prose in Plath’s American archives – work that spanned her childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Bringing together these far-flung pieces, housed at Indiana University, Smith College, Emory University and elsewhere, was no small feat. The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath was nearly thirty years in the making.

Scholars who have worked in Plath’s archives will be familiar with most of the material in the Collected Prose. Yet to see so much of her surviving fiction and journalism, so many of her essays and reviews, finally published under one cover is to be surprised all over again by the breadth of her vision, ambition and talent. Much of the work here has been published for the first time and will give any reader a fuller understanding of her thematic preoccupations, her development as a writer, her facility with different prose genres and her passionate dedication to her craft. Writing was Plath’s life work, and anything that redirects our attention to this plain truth is a welcome addition to her canon and story. As Hermione Lee has noted, women writers with a history of mental illness and suicide are often regarded “biographically, as victims or psychological case-histories first and as professional writers second”. The Collected Prose reminds us that Plath’s greatest ambition – one she fulfilled – was to be a professional writer.

The book is divided into three sections: fiction, nonfiction and newspaper pieces that she wrote as a student at Smith College (newly attributed to her by the collection’s meticulous editor, Peter K. Steinberg). The book is more than 800 pages long, but there is still more prose in Plath’s archives that remains unpublished: her academic papers from Wellesley High School, Smith College and Cambridge; her adolescent diaries from the 1940s; and her Smith senior honours thesis. Then there is her last, unfinished novel, Double Exposure, which disappeared after her death and may someday resurface.

Steinberg’s selection contains a wealth of nonfiction. The best of these pieces – “Context”, “A Comparison”, “Snow Blitz”, “The All-Round Image” and “Landscape of Childhood” (published as “Ocean 1212–W”) – appeared in Johnny Panic, but most will be new to readers. Some may ask whether her short, expository pieces about summer camp, junior high assemblies, girl scouts or Smith College concerts merit republication. But even the most unpolished of these pieces provides important historical and literary context. Articles such as “Youth’s Plea for World Peace” (1950) and “The Atomic Threat” (1948) remind us that she came of age during the Cold War and was haunted by the spectre of apocalypse. Small feminist rebellions in “From the Memoirs of a Babysitter” (1946), in which a teenage Plath calls children “bothersome” and “a nuisance”, look forward to her poem “Lesbos” (1961), where the kitchen is filled with the “stink of fat and baby crap”. Her droll exposé of sexism at Oxbridge in “A Cambridge Letter”, published in the Isis in 1956, still has some bite:

The most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both […] A debonair Oxford PPE man demurred, laughing incredulously: “But really, talk about philosophy with a woman!” A poetic Cambridge chap maintains categorically: “As soon as a woman starts talking about intellectual things, she loses her feminine charm for me.”

Plath fantasized about a future when Oxbridge men accepted a woman as “an intelligent human being” rather than just “a girl […] and, alas, not much more”.

The highlight of Collected Prose, however, is Plath’s fiction: seventy-six short stories written between 1940 and the early 1960s. Although the strongest have already been published (“Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”, “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit”, “The Shadow” and “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” among them), fifty-four are presented here for the first time. Fifty-four unpublished stories by Sylvia Plath! This alone would make Collected Prose a major literary event and an invaluable scholarly resource.

Approaching this writing as archaeology, a reader can see traces of themes that later found their full expression in The Bell Jar (1963): ambition, depression, male cruelty, suicide, apocalypse, the Cold War and, above all, the perils of womanhood in mid-century America. Plath’s early stories are uneven, but they served as an important apprenticeship. Many show her wrestling with what it means to be a young woman who wants to fit in, but who also burns with literary and intellectual ambition in a culture that caters almost exclusively to the interests and intentions of men. This gendered tension runs through much of her early fiction; she watches, almost helplessly, as her female characters make themselves small to snag a man. “You had to sacrifice part of your identity”, she writes in “Den of Lions” (1951). “You had to compromise things that were intangible, yet terribly important.” Secretaries and spinsters populate her early stories too: they are “weary”, “numb”, “lonely”. “The same work, day in, day out”, Judith Anders says in “Heat” (1948). “Filing letters, pounding typewriters. So dull, so dull.” These women want more from life, but they won’t get it: “There was no escape”. Characters such as Judith are versions of Plath’s widowed working mother – and a nightmare vision of her own future if she did not write, study or marry her way out of the lower middle class.

Plath’s early fiction shows that even as a teenager, and well before the dawn of second-wave feminism, she was troubled by the mental and physical toll that sexism took on women’s lives. In “The Attic View” (1948), a young woman living in a shabby boarding house embarks on a “free secretarial night course for working girls” in the hope of leaving her miserable, dead-end job. But as soon as the course begins she comes down with a mysterious fever and dies. It’s as if she is punished for her ambition. When another starry-eyed young woman moves in to take her place in the attic room, with its ocean view, there are ominous signs that the pattern will repeat itself. Here we see Plath developing her trademark feminine gothic, where female autonomy comes at a cost. But there is a cost, too, that comes with living life on someone else’s terms. In stories that pit “career women” against wives and mothers, such as “The Visitor” (1948) and “Day of Success” (1961), the wives and mothers triumph, but their victories ring hollow. Plath’s early experimental stories of interiority, like “Heat” and “The Brink”, written in the late 1940s, are more powerful. They show women on the verge of a breakdown, or a breakthrough: we don’t know which.

Not surprisingly, these stories about lonely, depressed or independent women were rejected by the popular magazines to which Plath sent them. But she believed in them, and wrote to her friend Eddie Cohen in 1950 that her rejected stories were “better, less trite, less syrupy” than “the usual ‘Seventeen’ drivel”. She studied the market, learnt what sold and became adept at penning both literary fiction and plot-driven stories. By the mid-1950s she was writing small masterpieces such as “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit” (1954), a superb study of quiet malice and paranoia, as well as True Confessions-style melodramas such as “I Lied for Love” (1953). This skill would serve her well when she came to write The Bell Jar, with its nods to both James Joyce and the tabloids. She called her novel a “potboiler” and told a friend it was “so funny, but so serious”.

Male violence – physical, psychological and sexual – is distressingly common in Plath’s stories, beginning in 1946 with “On the Penthouse Roof” and running right through to “Stone Boy with Dolphin” (1958), which contains a powerful depiction of what the writer Melissa Febos has called “empty consent”:

Hamish began kissing her mouth, and she felt him kiss her. Nothing stirred. Inert, she lay staring toward the high ceiling crossed by the dark wood beams, hearing the worms of the ages moving in them, riddling them with countless passages and little worm-size labyrinths, and Hamish let his weight down on top of her, so it was warm. Fallen into disuse, into desuetude, I shall not be […]

“Please scold me.” Dody heard her voice, strange and constricted in her chest […] “I am a bitch,” Dody heard her voice announce from out of the doll-box in her chest, and she listened to it, wondering what absurd thing it would say next. “I am a slut,” it said with no conviction.

Sexism, class, financial anxiety and male violence are closely tied to another recurring theme in Plath’s work: depression. Stories such as “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom”, “Tongues of Stone” and “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams” show her mining her own experience of breakdown, determined to make art from despair. But by the time she wrote The Bell Jar, with its condescending boyfriends, manipulative admen, dismissive male doctors, predatory dates and life-threatening sex, her field of vision had widened. There Plath underscores the interconnected relationship between mental illness and the body politic in the novel’s first sentence: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York”. Is the novel’s heroine, Esther Greenwood, really sick, or is her breakdown a consequence of living in a “sick”, repressive, conformist society? Both the Rosenbergs and the ambitious Esther will be punished, through electrocution, for their dissidence. After Esther receives her first excruciating shock treatment at a mental hospital, she says: “I wondered what terrible thing it was I had done”. Plath’s earlier stories show that she had been preoccupied by the intertwined themes of punishment and female ambition for at least fifteen years before she made their connection explicit in this famous, harrowing scene.

Some of the most startling pieces in the Collected Prose are previously unpublished story fragments that make art of Plath and Hughes’s relationship. In “Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags” (1956), for example, the fictional Gerald and Olwyn have a spat. The story fragment is based on Plath’s visit to Hughes’s West Yorkshire family home, the Beacon, with her new husband in September 1956. Her description already contains the acidic notes of Ariel (1965):

Daylong he sat tousled in his mother’s parlour in his old RAF sweater, writing poems about water drops and martyred bishops and playing his battered, cracked Beethoven records over and over. […] She had married a genius.

Olwyn saw him famous and suave in a tuxedo, roaring sestinas in a royal godly voice over the BBC, in a dither of actresses, ballet dancers and Italian countesses with a literary flair, while she skulked about choking on cheese rinds like a tear-blind mouse.

When Plath wrote these words, she and Hughes had been married for about three months.

“Venus in the Seventh” (1957) may have been a draft chapter of Plath’s lost novel Falcon Yard, based on her Cambridge years and marriage to Hughes. (Plath’s mother, Aurelia, said she watched Plath burn the manuscript in Devon in 1962, in the wake of Hughes’s infidelity.) “Venus in the Seventh” was inspired by Plath’s trip to the continent in the spring of 1956, and her return to Hughes, fictionalized as Ian, in London: “She just wanted Ian: very simply. She could swim in him: that incredible violent presence of his: leashed. Too much man for this island”. Plath’s protagonist, Jess, romanticizes Ian’s violence in a troubling passage that shares details with Plath’s journal entry from March 1956 about what she called her first “sleepless holocaust night with Ted”:

“If you hadn’t come back, I would have come to Cambridge to find you again. To make up for that last time …”

Jess shivered, holding herself up against him, their toes touching. “Oh,” she laughed ruefully. “It was terrible, that. I went to Paris all scarred. Black and blue …”

“But you liked it?”

“Yes.”

“I was furious with myself. I don’t know what happened to me …”

“It wasn’t right, somehow, then. I felt it. You didn’t even know my name, really.”

She couldn’t help coming back to that, finishing it off.

“I do now, though.”

Violence, both real and performative, was a part of the couple’s relationship from the night they met in 1956. As was strength. In her journal from the 1950s Plath often spoke of Hughes as being “strong enough” for her, and she for him. In “Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags”, Gerald says to Olwyn, as they walk across the moors, “I like the way you don’t cry to be carried over the rough places”. Plath and Hughes wanted to shock British poetry, and each other: “You love one-syllabled words, don’t you?” Ian says to Jess in “Venus and the Seventh”. “Squab, patch, crack. Violent.” She answers: “Yes. I guess I do. I hate ‘ation’ words. They’re so abstract. I like words to sound what they say: bang crash. Not mince along in sing-song iambic pentameters”. Jess, sounding very much like Plath, declares Ian’s poem “an altar to spill blood at”. But she did not learn this preference for banging language from Hughes. She had written about her desire to use taboo words as far back as “A Dialogue” (1953): “Euphemisms […] That’s what I can’t stand either. Why not use the good vile words. Damn. Dung. Hell. God, they sound great. Scrawl them on the sidewalks and fences and shock the ladies and the gentlemen”. It wasn’t until she went to Cambridge in 1955 that she began to write poetry that reflected her aesthetic iconoclasm. (“Pursuit”, which she wrote shortly after she met Hughes, was a turning point.) “Venus in the Seventh” shows her poetic philosophy crystallizing.

The last piece of short prose Plath saw published during her lifetime was her review of Malcolm Elwin’s Lord Byron’s Wife, “Suffering Angel”, which appeared in the New Statesman on December 7, 1962. It was written in late November, about six weeks after Hughes had moved out of their home in Devon. That autumn Plath was writing the poems of Ariel, and the review is an obvious, if coded, commentary on the devolution of her marriage. She begins by quoting Byron’s mother-in-law: “Who could see that Suffering Angel Sinking under such unmanly and despicable treatment, and not feel?” Yet she refuses to offer up self-pity or vitriol to London’s literati, or to Hughes. On the contrary, she professes little sympathy for Byron’s wronged wife: “Annabella’s refusal to grant her spouse an interview (she never saw Byron again), let alone try to make a second go of it, seems due less to his cruelty, adultery, incest and the rest than to the ‘formidable apparition’ of that consistency Byron had observed in her before their marriage – a consistency fixed by the ego-screws of pride and a need to be for ever, like Milton’s God, tediously in the right”. Though Annabella was “reduced to a Skeleton – pale as ashes” after Byron left her, Plath ascribes her state not to his humiliations, but to Annabella’s “killing dybbuk of self-righteousness in possession!”

Plath wasn’t just reviewing a biography – she was extending a tentative olive branch to Hughes. She wouldn’t make the same mistake as Annabella; she would grant him another interview. Maybe they could “make a second go of it”. According to Hughes, the two spoke of reconciling after Plath moved back to London in December 1962. But Hughes was seeing two other women at that time, and Plath’s last letter to her former psychiatrist, Dr Ruth Beuscher, written a week before her suicide in February 1963, suggested little hope for such a reconciliation.

By then she was depleted and depressed, and had begun to blame herself for the breakdown of her marriage – for never having grown up, as she wrote to Beuscher in her last surviving letter. One recalls lines from her story fragment “Hill of Leopards” (1957), probably also part of the Falcon Yard manuscript and printed in the Collected Prose for the first time: “I am his mistress, she thought. And damn proud of it. And will be, until he takes another. But then. Then. Her mind blacked itself. She could not go on”.

Heather Clark is the author, most recently, of Red Comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath, 2020

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