We have art in order not to die of the truth. — Nietzsche
Apparently this quote from The Goldfinch caught my eye ten years ago. I took a picture of the page and posted it to Facebook, as the platform kindly reminded me the other day in its quest to constantly reorient me to the swift, merciless passage of time.
I am currently reading Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, the latest Plath biography and by far the most expansive and granular of all the ones I’ve read. At 1,000 pages, and based on way more source material than any other Plath bio before it, Red Comet paints a very rich portrait of a complicated proto-feminist artist, mother, and wife who was in many ways quite ahead of her time and in others, entirely trapped by it.
Sylvia would certainly have known this 1910-ish Neitzsche quote* and understood it on a deep, visceral level. She was almost pathologically well-read and had a habit of quoting people’s poetry back to them after just one reading. At points in her life she made it a practice to memorize several poems a day, and she also seriously considered getting an advanced degree in philosophy. From a very early age, she wrote poems for Seventeen Magazine, hoping to pander to a young female audience and monetize her art.
I have long been fascinated with Sylvia Plath since reading The Bell Jar in my teens. I imagine this work of autofiction serves as the entryway to Plath for many girls. For my generation, The Bell Jar was the female version of Catcher in the Rye and in the great company of another favorite Salinger novel of my GenX youth, Frannie and Zooey.
. . . . .
My appreciation for poetry lingers somewhere in the liminal space between “that poem touched me to my soul” and “I really don’t get poetry at all.” But I do get Sylvia. She was nearly my grandmother’s age and of that era, and looked a lot like my grandmother as a young woman, in fact. When I read about Sylvia and her charm and wit and brains and struggle against conformity, I think of my grandmother and the world she lived and started a career and family in: the ‘50s. This was a time when even the most brilliant woman was expected to put her husband first. And she was expected to have a husband. Full stop.
The day after I reached the part of Red Comet where Sylvia Meets Ted (Hughes, who became her husband and her downfall), I was walking into my favorite local bookstore-coffeeshop, Duchess, when I noticed a handful of books for sale just out front.
The rapscallion.
At least according to this biography, Ted Hughes would never have become an internationally known poet if it weren’t for Sylvia Plath. His genius was well-known among his inner circle in Cambridge, but he lacked the executive functioning skills to actually market himself professionally. He was known as a dark, brooding artist type who grew up on the moors in rural Yorkshire like the Brontës; Sylvia thought of him as her Heathcliff, a foreboding nickname.
Sylvia, in all her polished, sunny Americanness, was not just a genius poet herself, but a woman who had successfully marketed herself as a professional writer while still in college and made quite a bit of money submitting her work to magazines. In fact, she published her first piece at age eight. “Someday,” she told Hughes early in their marriage, “I will be a rather good woman writer.” A good woman writer! Meanwhile, she had multiple poems in print — and at this point, he had none.
And there we have it, the age-old gender divide, incarnate.
Sylvia lived to the wise age of 30 before dying more famously (if not yet famous) than perhaps any other poet. She left the manuscript of her genius collection of poems Ariel on the kitchen table, right next to where she lay cold and gassed on the floor. It wasn’t to be published for two years. Ariel is known as a great diversion from all her poetry to that point — much darker, more rawly honest, less a classical exercise in form. “What she did write about,” recalls Erin Blakely in JSTOR, “motherhood, identity, despair—ensured Plath a posthumous place in the canon of great American poets.”
For a time, she made art in order not to die of the truth.
She was a complicated, messy, brilliant, vibrant person of chaotic moods constantly trying to find her place and her person. She lived in an era when hot water and indoor plumbing were not guaranteed luxuries, and still turned up wearing bobby socks and flawless red lipstick most of the time. She grew up poor in wealthy Wellesley, Mass, to a single mother with great ambitions for her children, and spoke in a haughty mid-Atlantic accent (this is a recording of her made for the Library of Congress a few years before her death). She attended Smith on scholarship and was later invited back to teach, which she tried for a year but hated because it took time away from her writing. She dated legions of potential husbands, but only settled for the one that would not expect her to stay pinned to kitchen detail for the rest of her life. She wanted a career in a time when women were not expected to want much more than babies. She also wanted babies, and love, and adventure, and everything else.
Sylvia Plath is infamous for being depressed and suicidal, but that was just one small aspect of her life. In the end, motherhood, a maddening partner, and a moody, bleak winter in London undid her. But here we are, over 60 years later, still talking about her.
