© 2012 KATHERINE A. BENGSTON ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE BLOOD JET: THE COMMON HISTORY & NARRATIVE SIMILARITIES OF PLATH & BASKIN A Thesis Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts Katherine A. Bengston May, 2012 THE BLOOD JET: THE COMMON HISTORY & NARRATIVE SIMILARITIES OF PLATH & BASKIN Katherine A. Bengston Thesis Approved: Accepted: _______________________________ _______________________________ Advisor Dean of the College Dr. Michael Schuldiner Dr. Chand Midha _______________________________ _______________________________ Faculty Reader Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Hillary Nunn Dr. George R. Newkome _______________________________ _______________________________ Faculty Reader Date Dr. Jon Miller _______________________________ Department Chair Dr. Michael Schuldiner ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION……………...…………….………………………………...……….1 II. EMOTIONAL CHAOS………………….......................................................................8 III. SHADOWS OF MORTALITY……………….……..……………………………....31 IV. DEATH.………..………………………..…………………………………………...51 V. CONCLUSION……………………………………………………….………………75 LITERATURE CITED………………………………………………………………......77 APPENDICES …………………………………………………………………..………80 APPENDIX A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF SYLVIA PLATH………...…..81 APPENDIX B BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF LEONARD BASKIN……......86 iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION The blood jet is poetry, There is no stopping it. -“Kindness” “Want today to write about our Sunday night with Leonard & Esther Baskin whom, suddenly and well, we met,” Sylvia Plath briskly wrote in her journal on May 6, 1958 (379). On May 4, 1958, Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, had visited Leonard Baskin at his studio and also met his wife, Esther (Feinstein 83). “How I love the Baskins,” Plath continued in her journal on May 20. “The only people I feel are a miracle of humanity and integrity, with no swarm” (485). A few days later, on May 24, Plath sent a copy of her poems “Sow,” “The Earthenware Head,” “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and “November Graveyard, Haworth” to Esther and Leonard (Crowther & Steinberg 131). The original letter, which now resides in the Baskin-Hughes papers in the British Library, exhibits Plath’s “own black inked handwriting” etched “in the top left” corner of the first page of “Sow” (131). The inscription reads: “For Esther and Leonard/May 24 1958/Sylvia Plath” (131). These poems were not inspired by Plath’s visit with the Baskins, but later in 1958 Plath composed “Sculptor,” a poem directly connected with her first interaction with them. 1 In the notes for “Sculptor” in The Collected Poems Hughes clarifies Plath’s inspiration for the poem, revealing, “bronze dead men lay in numbers around the house and studio of the sculptor Leonard Baskin” (287). In his essay “Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems,” which is included in The Art of Sylvia Plath, Hughes further comments that “Leonard Baskin’s work struck [Plath] very hard, as well it might, since some of the gods he was carving at the time were also part of her pantheon—namely, the huge bald angels, the mutilated dead men, the person with the owl growing out of his shoulder” (189). “Sculptor” is the second to last poem in Plath’s first published book of poetry, The Colossus, and is dedicated to Baskin. In “Leonard and Ted (And Me),” Richard Michelson writes that Plath and Hughes’s first interaction with “the already celebrated brash young Baskin” had only two directions to go: very well or very badly (1). Baskin and Hughes, Michelson states, “were destined to clash, or to bond, and, fortunately, it was the latter, each recognizing the others’ seriousness of purpose” (1). Elaine Feinstein agrees with this view in her biography Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, stating: “Leonard Baskin was eight years older than Ted and…already formidably assured and often searingly abrasive in his judgments,” but he “took an instant liking to Ted” (83). Michelson does not mention the presence of Plath in his essay, and Feinstein only alludes to the fact that Plath was there. Even Plath herself did not expand on her impressions of Baskin and his wife that first day in her journal. Yet this encounter, strangely overdue given Plath and Baskin’s consistent proximity to one another at Smith College, formed the basis of a friendship that lasted until Plath’s death in 1963. After her suicide, Baskin and Hughes continued “to collaborate with illustrated books for Baskin’s Gehenna Press” (83). 2 In 1973, some ten years after Plath’s death, Baskin illustrated a rare edition of her poetry. The project, which was commissioned by Hughes, is titled Pursuit. Only 100 copies were made. Given the plethora of Plath material that has been published without illustration over the last few decades, any sort of adornment, outside of the family photos of Letters Home: Correspondence 1950-1963, or the family photographs used most commonly in the many Plath biographies, is particularly noteworthy. Ted Hughes generally only commissioned illustrations for limited editions of Plath’s poetry, however, it is not uncommon for Plath’s own artwork to be included with her prose. Her drawings appear in several editions of The Bell Jar and have been reproduced (largely in the appendixes) in The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Charles Newman’s The Art of Sylvia Plath includes several pen and ink drawings of Plath’s, but there is no critique on the drawings, nor do the various reviews and essays in the book comment on the influence art had on Plath’s writing. Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley’s 2007 essay collection, Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, is the first extensive, printed look at Plath’s artwork. The book includes sketches, paintings and drawings created throughout Plath’s life in her various diaries, journals, sketchbooks, notebooks and letters. Specific illustrations are uncommon because they accent (and therefore interpret) Plath’s poetry. The drawings included in The Bell Jar may or may not have been drawn by Plath for specific use in the novel and were pulled from several sketchbooks from different times in Plath’s life. Baskin’s prints for Pursuit were solely created for presentation with Plath’s poetry. Hughes’s many collaborations and friendship with Baskin make him a logical choice as an illustrator for Plath’s work, but that renders 3 Hughes’s decision too simplistic. Baskin’s proximity to Plath herself and her appreciation and admiration for Baskin’s artistry make him a fascinating choice as the illustrator of Pursuit—especially given the narrative commonalities that highlight their work in their respective art forms. Shortly after Pursuit’s publication, Baskin also contributed a drawing to the Rainbow Press edition of Plath’s Dialogue Over a Ouija Board, which was published in 1974. In “Living Color: The Interactive Arts of Sylvia Plath,” Kathleen Connors observes that “what is not commonly known about Plath is her serious devotion to the visual arts from a very early age” (4). From the time she was a freshman until the start of her junior year, Plath took many classes in art, at first intending to focus on both art and writing (4). Ultimately, after being “judged to be merely ‘good’ and even worse by teachers and critics” Plath decided to focus her energy solely on cultivating her writing (4). She continued, however, to fill her journals and notebooks with sketches and detailed drawings. In November 2011, the Mayor Gallery in London, England, presented an exhibition of Plath’s drawings and several limited editions of her poetry printed by the Rainbow Press. The exhibition included the display of the books Pursuit and Dialogue Over a Ouija Board. One of the artworks included in the show was a “drawing of a pair of discarded ladies shoes, also titled The Bell Jar,” but whether or not Plath truly intended for the drawing to be used in The Bell Jar, or even if she titled the sketch herself, is unclear (Battersby 1). Leonard Baskin was employed at Smith College from 1953-1974. Despite Plath’s interest in art, there is currently no record or reference stating that she came into contact with him during her undergraduate career. It was not until she returned to Smith College 4 to teach during the 1957-1958 academic year that Plath and Hughes’s May 1958 meeting with Baskin occurred. However, Plath had been thinking of Baskin for months before their 1958 introduction, if only in passing. Her journals contain three specific references to either Leonard Baskin or his work in the months leading up to May. On January 21, 1958, Plath noted in her journal that one of Hughes’s colleagues acted “mean, spiteful, bitten & pompous about Leonard Baskin” (Plath 317). A little later, on February 3, Plath wrote in her journal that she “dreamed also I met & somehow loved the unmet & hence unloved Leonard Baskin in some strange house…” (Plath 379). This reference and the fact that Plath found the opinion of Hughes’s colleague bothersome, even before she befriended the Baskins, is made less strange by her interest in Baskin’s work. In March, Plath noted that she saw “…a Baskin wood-cut: huge, mammothed in the hall: a bulbous streaked head, stained, scarred, owl-eyed – ‘tormented man,’ and a great, feathered, clawed, fierce-eyed owl sitting in an intolerable eternal niche of air above the head” at a colleague’s house (Plath 347). Though Plath had not engaged in a conversation or established a friendship with Baskin yet, she was clearly familiar and impressed enough with his work to be capable of identifying it on sight. The thesis identifies three narrative commonalities in Sylvia Plath and Leonard Baskin’s work, analyzing each in a separate chapter. Within each chapter, two of Plath’s poems and one or two of Baskin’s prints are explicated and their respective narratives compared. I assert that Sylvia Plath and Leonard Baskin have overlapping ideas within their work despite their different mediums.