When I first saw Dave Haslam’s new book ‘My Second Home: Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956,’ I became irrationally irritated. I wondered what perspective a middle-aged man could offer on a ‘new’ biographical element of Sylvia Plath’s life.
In an interview with The State of the Arts, Dave Haslam talked about how he “really got a sense of the complete person, and absolutely definitely so much more than a damaged, doomed figure.” Through researching the ‘real’ Sylvia Plath, he detaches the monolith of the author’s work from her life. His revelation comes as she emerges as a ‘complete person.’
A Compulsion for Despair
We have an undoubtedly morbid fascination with this ‘damaged, doomed figure,’ as Haslam framed her. I am not above it. I used to turn to the early pages of her diaries, looking to see what wisdom teenage Sylvia Plath could offer me at the same age. Whilst at university in West Yorkshire, I visited her grave on a wind-battered, raining day, high on the moor. If the weather had not been so inclement, if we’d shared that time with any other fans paying homage through the winding, cobbled pilgrimage, my own trip would have felt corrupted. If I’d seen someone thrust another broken biro amongst the flowering tulips on the grave, I’d have felt my unease sooner.
“She spoke to the split between the poet and the woman, in a society that boxed women in.”
And yet she, the monolith resonating through her legacy and memory, eluded her modest grave.
Her popularity has not waned over the long course of time since her death in 1963. She was a rallying cry in Second Wave feminism. Her infamous suicide is synonymous with herself. She spoke to the split between the poet and the woman, in a society that boxed women in. Her poetry is visceral and dark and demands attention.
I idolised her for years. I wanted to write like her. Her vision of white middle-class womanhood resonated with me as it does with hoards of other young women. I wrote my dissertation on her. We are just as obsessed and intrigued by Sylvia Plath and her work as ever.
And yet there is an undying focus on every fragment of her short life. Her extensive diaries and letters have their own volumes, carefully edited and prefaced by academics. The combination of her profession as a poet, being one half of a famous mid-century poet couple and the eve of her death dawning at the start of the Second Wave all meshed perfectly for her lasting legacy. There are countless biographies, published correspondences and long academic books that traced her around the places she visited.
What was left out of her collected diaries had been carefully inspected, observed and recounted to track down her daily steps. Like Haslam’s new book, in Elizabeth Winder’s book on Plath’s time in New York in 1953, she is framed intimately as ‘Sylvia.’ In it, she becomes the relatable ‘complete person’ through the eyes of her friends; the teenager taking her opportunity, wanting to be a writer and struggling with her mental health.
Art versus the Artist?
“I had consumed so much of her life that any more would be cannibalistic.”
After finishing my dissertation on Plath, I felt that I was ready to leave the minutiae of Sylvia Plath alone. I had consumed so much of her life that any more would be cannibalistic. What more could I gain by following her further through every year of her short life?
Wishing to know more is not inherently bad. It’s human to wish to understand the great lives of great artists. The very nature of biography is a kind of accepted, formalised obsession. The biographer weaves the ordinary details of someone else’s life into a bemusing narrative, plotting out their successes and downfalls as we boggle at their art. We wish to know where that genius came from, so we can connect it to the work and bring it into the realm of understanding. It is damagingly prevalent in the work of women writers whose work is often read biographically, therefore discounting their imagination.
“Instead of following her around her romantic trip to Paris in the late 1950s, we must now come to terms with our outpouring of love for a poet who held abhorrent views.”
Plath’s legacy has been laden with her biography to the point where her work cannot be separated from it. Her work needs to be read independent of our perpetual need to dive back into her life to join the dots. This separation leads to the only conversations that should happen around Plath’s work now, for the new, modern audience. She appropriated the persecution of Jewish people in the Holocaust to understand her own suffering and her racism is prevalent in her poetry and her prose, where she relied heavily on racist stereotypes of Chinese and Black people. Very rarely in academic and cultural discourse around Plath are these deeply harmful parts of her work raised. Instead of following her around her romantic trip to Paris in the late 1950s, we must now come to terms with our outpouring of love for a poet who held abhorrent views.
I’ve come to realise that the art is integral to the artist. Ideally, the work should be read with little knowledge of the author’s life or intentions. Yet the artist shapes the work. Therefore the art cannot be selectively joined to the author’s real life where it is convenient, leaving out the whole of the person and their views that we must discuss as much as we discuss our admiration. Authors like Haslam and Winder seeking to uncover the parts of Plath’s life that we do not yet know, feeds into the unhelpful obsession with her biography. To continue to revere the genius of Plath, we must discuss the issues that have plagued her work.
Holly Miller
Instagram: hxlly.m
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