Plath Profiles 15

Reviving the Journals of

Karen Kukil, Smith College

Editor's note: The following essay was excerpted from talks given in 2000 by Karen Kukil at the International Writers' Day program of English PEN in London, as well as at Williams College, Emory University, Smith College, Boston Public Library, and New York Public Library. Quotations are from The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962 (New York: Anchor Books, 2000), by permission of Random House, Inc. Page numbers appear in parentheses following quotations. The essay is appeared in a slightly different version in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly (Spring 2001) and it reprinted with their permission.

On February 13, 1921, Virginia Woolf wrote Katherine Mansfield: "It seems to me very important that women should learn to write" (128). I would add: It is also important that women should learn to speak. Nearly forty years after her death, Sylvia Plath, one of the most interpreted poets of the past century, is finally being allowed to speak for herself, in her own voice. The unabridged edition of her journals, which I have just edited for the Hughes family, is as faithful as possible to the original manuscripts at Smith College. As an editor, I did not tidy up Plath's words or make her behave. She is a real human being, as feisty and fresh and alive to the reader in the published journals as she is when one has the luxury to read her original manuscripts in the Mortimer Rare Book Room. By giving the world direct access to her exact words, a reassessment of Plath will undoubtedly take place. We all know about her zest for death. She committed suicide at the age of thirty on February 11, 1963, and there are many poignant allusions to death in her poetry and prose, particularly in and . But I believe the Unabridged Journals, more than the selected Journals published in 1982, also reveal her zest for life. She savored it all: "children, sonnets, love and [even] dirty dishes"(225). Kukil 16

I came to this general assessment of the Unabridged Journals after employing Woolf's method of "after-reading" in which the reader must leave the dock and mount the bench to judge a book as a whole. My mind was hot after living intimately with Plath's words for the past year, a year in which I did not judge, at the request of Frieda and Nicholas Hughes, who own their mother's literary copyrights and asked me to edit the edition. In fact, it was the primary concern of both Frieda and Nicholas that their mother be presented in her own words, without any editorial emendation or interpretation. Instead, I accurately transcribed the journals, factually identified people and places mentioned in the text, and provided as much access as I could through an extensive index. My nose was always two inches from the page. After delivering the revised page- proofs to the publishers—Faber in London in February 2000 and Anchor Books in New York in July 2000—I was suddenly asked by everyone I met to summarize the overall architecture of the Unabridged Journals. What new information do they reveal? As I sat in my studio a few months ago, I let the journals "float to the top of the mind as a whole" (to use Woolf's metaphor for "after-reading" in her essay "How Should One Read a Book?"). The familiar ghouls from the selected Journals appeared first: images of a head packed so hard with mucous when Plath was in the infirmary at Smith, causing her to groan, "[sinusitis] plunges me in manic depression" (533). This was followed by Plath's fantasy before her first suicide attempt in 1953, of hurling herself in a rabbit fear under the wheels of a car "because the lights terrify me, and under the dark blind death of the wheels I will be safe" (184). I thought of her brutal descriptions of her own appearance: "nose podgy as a leaking sausage" (457). Her fascination with blood and gore is reflected in many passages, like the following description: "Pulled a piece of skin off my lip & my lips began welling blood, lip-shape—my whole mouth a skinless welling of brilliant red blood" (398). I recalled her incredible anger, which seems to seethe just below the surface of her journals. On one occasion, Plath confronts a spirited student from Northampton High School stealing rhododendrons from Child's Memorial Park, and she says, "had a flash of bloody stars in my head as I stared that sassy girl down, and a blood-longing to fly at her & tear her to bloody beating bits" (395). (Plath, of course, had a stolen rosebud of "orange velvet" in her pocket.) I remembered Plath Plath Profiles 17 prowling the streets of Northampton and Boston wishing to test her "eye and fiber on tragedy—a child crushed by a car, a house on fire" (357). New passages in the Unabridged Journals also contribute to this dark silhouette of Plath. Her uncharitable assessments of people now include fellow Cambridge University poet Christopher Levenson whose reliance on accessible facilities of speech, according to Plath, "show up like a sagging hemline on a really good dress" (208). She thinks 's friends are half-drowned compared to him, "their demons formless and pale like grubs under turned stones" (330). Her female colleagues at Smith, when she came back to teach in 1957, are "pleasant as razor-blades" (356) or "cold as dry-ice" (385). But Plath's self-absorption and lack of compassion for those around her is perhaps best illustrated by the following description of Percy Key's death on June 27, 1962, in North Tawton, England: His eyes showed through partly open lids like dissolved soaps or a clotted pus. I was very sick at this and had a bad migraine over my left eye for the rest of the day. The end, even of so marginal a man, a horror. (672)

This and other candid descriptions of her Devonshire neighbors, written in 1962 near the end of her life, illustrate the goal of her journal writing: "to be honest [even if] what is revealed is often rather hideously unflattering" (165). Only one third of the manuscript journals at Smith were published in the selected Journals edited by Frances McCullough in 1982. Since most of the important events in Plath's life were included, little space was left for the more ordinary journal entries, the ones in which Plath is gentle and funny or lusty and vigorous. For example, the Unabridged Journals include a tender description of Wellesley neighbors Peter and Libby Aldrich arranging petunias in Plath's hair: "I closed my eyes to feel more keenly the lovely delicate-child-hands, gently tucking flower after flower into my curls" (18). There are many new descriptions of her early experiences with men before she married Ted Hughes, such as tying a red silk scarf over her hair in 1952 and driving Bob Cochran's sports car on Cape Cod. Plath was nineteen when she wrote this passage: She gets used to the feel of the little car, good little red shiny MG. And her foot goes down on the accelerator. By now his head is on her shoulder and his feet up on the door, knees bent, dangling over. He is drinking beer and sharing it with Kukil 18

her, feeding her potato chips, and sleepily singing on her shoulder" (126). [He tells her:] "You're funny as hell, and cute." (127)

It is perhaps ironic that the selected Journals included most of Plath's thoughts about her creative writing, but discarded some of her best writing. The journals, after all, are notebooks in which Plath practiced her craft. Many of her entries are sheer poetry, such as a description she wrote at Yaddo of two woodpeckers in the tall pines, "tapping crisp as thimbles on a window pane" (526). Plath and Hughes lived at the artist's colony in Saratoga Springs for nearly three months before moving back to England in December 1959. Plath's subsequent description of giving birth to her son in 1962 is some of her most powerful prose. She delivered both children at home in England with midwives in attendance, but during Nicholas's birth she received no treatment for pain, which is probably why she was able to remember the process so vividly. Plath writes: "Instead of the mindless crawling about and beating my head against the wall as with the worst cramps with Frieda, I felt perfectly in possession of myself (645) [. . .] in three great bursts, the black thing hurtled itself out of me, one, two, three, dragging three shrieks after it [. . .] The afterbirth flew out into a pyrex bowl, which crimsoned with blood. It was whole. We had a son. [. . .] It felt like Christmas Eve, full of rightness & promise" (647). The Unabridged Journals are absolutely packed with vibrant, sensual passages. They illustrate, for example, Plath's love of clothes. Getting ready for class one morning, she says: "I dressed, conscious of color and the loveliness of being thin and feeling slink, swank and luxurious in good fits and rich materials" (379). On her honeymoon with Ted Hughes in 1956, she trips through the hot, dusty streets of southern Spain in what she calls "wicked black heeled toeless shoes" (254). Two years later she still delights in sex: "Good lovemaking today, morning & afternoon, all hot and hard and lovely" (363). She particularly relishes all kinds of food: "We came home ravenous, to devour seared steak, quenching chef salad, wine, luxurious lucent green figs in thick chilled cream" (338). In 1959, she records her enjoyment of women friends and domestic crafts, such as making a braided rug, which she describes as "a lovely thing, the rich new blues and reds and red- and-black weaves I got with Shirley. Looks like a stained glass window" (483). She wears "a touch-of-genius red lipstick" (314), "tigress perfume" (329), and cools her Plath Profiles 19 lemon meringue pies on the "cold bathroom window sill, stirring in black night & stars" (310). She is also athletic and enjoys hiking Skinner Mountain and fishing for flounder with her husband in Winthrop and Gloucester Harbor: "the gulls hanging, voracious, tugging at the fish-guts he tossed, wolfing a foot-long intestine in a few flying gulps" (493). Plath's taste is eclectic. She loves the Swedish films of Ingmar Bergman (522), is entranced by traditional Japanese dance (499), and learns about Sanskrit poetry and Indian fairytales when she works part-time for Professor Ingalls at Harvard in 1959. She appreciates modern art, such as "the hot reds & blues and yellows spurting from [the] fingertips" of Nicholas de Stael (317). She is an artist herself and on a sketching holiday in France in 1956, learns the vistas of Paris, as she says, "through the fiber of my hand" (554). She admires contemporary literature—the writing that influences her work rather than paralyses it (231)—including the "dense irrefutable structure of Iris Murdoch's novels" (516) and the "tough" phrases of Robert Lowell's poetry "blazing with color & fury" (379). The Unabridged Journals also reveal a woman who is deeply concerned about social issues. During her junior year at Smith, Plath admits that she is no longer "the crackpot idealist who will eat red beans in a tenement all her life" (173). She craves all the things money can buy, such as "theater, books, concerts, paintings, and travel" (173). Nevertheless, she worries what would happen "if the planes came, and the bombs" (32), is anxious about the affects of nuclear fallout (46), and becomes physically ill when the Rosenbergs are executed in 1953 (699). She supports a scholarship fund in 1958 that will aid victims of apartheid in South Africa (380). She reads everything from newspaper articles about the radium-dial painters of the 1920s to mental health stories in Cosmopolitan and resolves to write a novel "about a college girl suicide" (495). Like many passages in her subsequent novel The Bell Jar, the Unabridged Journals document Plath's extreme loneliness and the pain of being an outsider. She does not fit the mold of a typical Smith graduate in the 1950s, the role everyone expects her to fill brilliantly. As an undergraduate, Plath wonders if she should "whittle my square edges to fit a round hole" (102). By the end of her therapy with Ruth Beuscher in 1959, Plath realizes that she must be true to what she calls her "own weirdnesses" (521). As Kukil 20 many feminist scholars like Jill Ker Conway have noted, Plath rebels against the role of the good girl that her mother prescribes for her and is determined to have as much experience as her male counterparts. She rejects the life of a typical career woman, such as a telephone operator, which she imagines would be "shallow" and "lumpy as a pallid pudding" (44). She wants the life of a Willa Cather, a Lillian Helman, a Virginia Woolf, a world of "color rather than black-and-white" (44). She will not submit to having her life "fingered" by her husband (98), but eventually comes to accept the possibility of a new kind of creative marriage, particularly after she meets Ted Hughes. Although she is a master of masks, she knows that unless she can be herself, she will not stay with anyone for long (53). She is genuinely amazed that Hughes can stand her when she lets down her façade (517). She calls him "my male muse, my pole-star centering me steady & right" (365). Since they are both writers, the main challenge for Plath and Hughes is earning a living. Both bristle against poets who they feel have sold out. On March 17, 1958, they attended a lecture by George Abbe on "The Poet as Novelist" in the Neilson Library Browsing Room at Smith College: In that dark-wooded and antique room, with its dim light and worn, deep comfortable chairs and darkened oriental rugs, with the hollow-coffined grandfather clock ticking its sepulchral ticks and the oil-portrait of Mary Ellen Chase leaning forward, as if out of the gilt restraining frame, her white hair an aureole, a luminous nimbus, George Abbe garbled his bible of crudities to the literary Mademoiselle Defarges of Smith knitting his slick and commercial words into cable-stitched sweaters and multi-colored argyles. (354-55)

After spending a year as an instructor in the English Department at Smith, Plath realizes that she cannot work professionally and write because she finds teaching kills "the juice, the sap" (346). She must sequester herself "to produce lyrics & poems of high pitch intensity" (371). Although the financial insecurity of a writer's life scares her, she is determined to walk the world "with every pore open" (271) and to write with "unselfconscious brazenness" (518). In her class with Robert Lowell at Boston University in 1959, in which her poems are measured against the work of Anne Sexton and at home against the poetry of Hughes, Plath realizes that her "voice must change to be heard"; it must be "brash" and "concrete" (320). Thus, Plath's creativity emerges in the journals as her ultimate concern, her religion. She says that composing a good poem affects her "like Plath Profiles 21 a celestial love-affair" (346). According to Plath, there is no God, no life after death, just "mind living on paper and flesh living in offspring" (45). Plath's complex relationship with her husband and family is the other central theme of the Unabridged Journals. Restoring the omitted passages about Ted Hughes and Plath's parents adds dimension to our outlines of them. When Plath met Hughes on February 26, 1956 they experienced an intense attraction to each other. We all know from the selected Journals that Plath bit Hughes on the cheek at their first meeting, causing blood to run down his face. According to Plath in the Unabridged Journals, this act was precipitated by Hughes: he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. (212)

On April 16, 1956, just two months before they were married, Plath writes: "you will never find a huge derrick-striding Ted with poems & richness—he makes you feel small, too-secure: he is not tender and has no love for you [...] glory in the temporary sun of his ruthless force" (570). Whether it is true or not, Plath also did not feel loved by her mother. Plath writes: "I feel her apprehension, her anger, her jealousy, her hatred. I feel no love, only the Idea of Love, and that she thinks she loves me like she should" (432). "I want, as ever, to grab my life from out under her hot itchy hands. My life, my writing, my husband, my unconceived baby. She's a killer. Watch out. She's deadly as a cobra under that shiny greengold hood" (433). These passages from 1959 may explain why Plath did not consider returning to the family home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, when Hughes left her for in 1962. Even Plath's father who died from complications of diabetes when she was eight, and whom she adored, did not escape some criticism: "He wouldn't go to a doctor, wouldn't believe in God and heiled Hitler in the privacy of his home" (430). Even though she thought her father was an "ogre," Plath misses him (431) just as she cries with love for her imperfect mother and grandmother one summer afternoon in 1951 when they are parked together in a rain storm overlooking the harbor at Marblehead: "you were of their blood and bone, and no barriers were between."(70) Kukil 22

Other restored passages give us a taste of Plath's over-enthusiasm which she constantly tried to subdue. Of Hughes she wrote in 1958: "All day I have run about, a hundred times, to kiss him in his niche or in his bath, to sniff his smell of bread & grapes and kiss his delectable places" (337). On March 4, 1958 when he gave a reading at the University of Massachusetts, she writes: "Ted shone: the room dead-still for his reading—he came third: and I felt the genuine gooseflesh, the tears filling my lids, the hair standing like quills: I married a real poet, and my life is redeemed" (345-46). And like an oracle, she describes him in Leonard Baskin's garden the following summer throwing small, green apples at Baskin's sculpture "The Laureate." Hughes, who would become Poet Laureate of England, hit Baskin's laurelled, rotund bust "square on the chin"(407). Thus, reading Plath's Unabridged Journals after the selected Journals—once all the poetic descriptions and multifaceted personalities of the central characters are restored—is like reading a full-blown novel after a true confession story. The essence of Sylvia and Ted's life together is more romantic and more tragic than the plot of any invented piece of fiction. Props like red silk scarves are woven into the fabric of Plath's journals. Repetition of images, such as rabbits, gives the journals the unity of a richly nuanced novel. We see live rabbits, for example, crouching in their wire cages in the open air markets of Benidorm, Spain, and on August 17, 1956, Plath makes Hughes a rabbit stew for his twenty-sixth birthday (258). On Easter morning in 1958, Plath fills Hughes's slippers with a "chocolate rabbit & ten tiny chocolate eggs"(362), and later that same year, when Plath sneaks into Hughes's reading of Oedipus the King (translated by Paul Roche), she notices a rabbit like a beacon in the bushes behind the botany building at Smith near Paradise Pond. Plath and Hughes subsequently have one of their worst fights on this site. When they move to Boston in September 1958, Plath is drawn to a tattoo parlor in Scollay Square where she admires a tattoo of a rabbit hunt (423). That Halloween Hughes wears a homemade wolf mask to a costume party. Finally, when Plath and Hughes are trying to conceive their first child in May 1959, Plath writes: "the chicken, raw, wrapped in paper in the icebox, dropped a drop of blood on my pristine white cheesecake. Dreamed of catching a very tiny white rabbit last night: a menstruating dream?" (486). Because of its very repetition, rabbits become an important symbol in Plath Profiles 23

Plath's journals. They also appear in the subsequent poetry of Plath and Hughes. Each wrote a poem, for example, entitled "The Rabbit Catcher" about the dissolution of their marriage. Hughes inherited Plath's papers when she died in 1963. He destroyed her last journal. Another bound journal from the early 1960s disappeared and is still missing. Before Hughes sold Plath's remaining manuscripts to Smith in 1981, he had the journals transcribed. As consulting editor and Plath's literary executor, Hughes then helped Frances McCullough select passages from this typescript copy for the selected Journals, just as Leonard Woolf published extracts from Virginia Woolf's diaries after her death. Thus in the early 1980s when Hughes's mind was filled with Plath's story once again, scholars think he probably wrote some of the poems about her published in Birthday Letters. Plath had finally become his "Dream Woman Muse" (301). When Frances McCullough edited the selected Journals, she worked from the typescript supplied by the Plath estate and not with the original manuscripts. This fact alone probably best illustrates the difference between the two editions. All of my decisions for the Unabridged Journals were based upon the original manuscripts. They were my ultimate authority in the absence of the author. Two of my colleagues and I began transcribing the 933 pages of Plath's journals in September 1998. Ted Hughes unsealed the two previously sealed journals on September 14, and gave me permission to transcribe them with the understanding that all the original journals would be available to the public when the Unabridged Journals were published. This was a full thirteen years ahead of schedule, as the two journals written between 1957 and 1959 were originally sealed by Ted Hughes until 2013 (fifty years after Plath's death). In the transcription of the Unabridged Journals, my two colleagues (Barbara Blumenthal and Susan Barker) and I preserved Plath's punctuation, capitalization, unusual spellings, and errors as well as all her diacritical marks and her practice of underlining certain passages. The result is a complete and historically accurate text. Each of the twenty-three journals and fragments were kept separate and intact so that I could describe their unique physical characteristics in notes. Thus, Plath's words are always Kukil 24 presented in their original context. To preserve the flow of the text, my notes are presented at the end. The index supplements the notes as a reference tool. For reasons of economy, many terms are identified in the index rather than in the notes. The reader learns, for example, that Plath's "blessed Rombauer" is her copy of the Joy of Cooking and that the observation: "There was a force working" is a quotation from Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, which Plath was reading when she wrote: "All I want to say is: I made the best of a mediocre job. It was a good fight while it lasted" (149). When Plath read A Writer's Diary in 1956, she was attracted to the human Virginia Woolf, the woman who cooked "haddock & sausage" and cleaned out her kitchen to work off a depression over rejections from Harper's (269). I believe we, too, are drawn to the human Plath in the Unabridged Journals. The woman dressed in hot blacks who slowly follows the high, spider-wheeled cart carrying Percy Key's corpse up the hill to the cemetery in North Tawton on June 29, 1962, past the "uplifted faces of children in the primary school yard." The woman who leaves the open grave to walk home to Court Green over the back hill and stops to gather "immense stalks of fuschia foxgloves" in the heat (673).

Plath Profiles 25

Works Cited

Plath, Sylvia. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Frances McCullough. New York: The Dial Press, 1982. Print. Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor Books, 2000. Print. Woolf, Virginia. Congenial Spirits: The Selected Letters of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Joanne T. Banks. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989. Print.