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Reviving the Journals of Sylvia Plath

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Reviving the Journals of Sylvia Plath Plath Profiles 15 Reviving the Journals of Sylvia Plath 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 Ariel and The Bell Jar. 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 Ted Hughes'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).
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