This review was published in the Winter 2023 issue of the Ver Poets members’ newsletter, Ver Poets Poetry World. To join Ver Poets and receive a free copy of the newsletter together with the other benefits of membership visit their website here.
Archive on 4: My Sylvia Plath (BBC Radio 4)
The Essay: Journeys to the Grave: Helen Mort on Sylvia Plath (BBC Radio 3)
Sixty years after Sylvia Plath, depressed by the breakdown of her marriage to Ted Hughes, committed suicide in the kitchen of her London flat, during one of the coldest winters on record, the BBC have made two radio programmes about her. (Both are available on BBC Sounds.)
The hour-long My Sylvia Plath was broadcast on 11th February, the anniversary of her death. It’s presented by Emily Berry, herself a poet and until recently the Editor of Poetry Review. Although part of the Archive on 4 Series, the primary focus is on more recent interviews—with Ruth Fainlight and Jillian Becker (both friends of Plath), Heather Clark, her latest biographer, Sarah Corbett, the organiser of the Hebden Bridge Festival, and award-winning, American poet, Shane McCrae. The interview with Fainlight is something of a coup, given her previous reluctance to talk publicly about Plath. They met in 1961 at a literary awards ceremony, where her husband, the novelist Alan Sillitoe, was presenting an award to Plath’s husband, Hughes. Both were American, both poets and both had small children. They were kindred spirits.
The archive material itself is often bitty, sometimes offering little more than the soprano vocalise above the sound of breaking waves that also punctuates the programme. We dip in and out of a joint interview with Plath and Hughes, a bad-tempered free-for-all in which Plath’s biographer, Anne Stevenson, ‘faces her critics’, a recording of Plath’s mother speaking about her letters home and clips of Plath being interviewed alone and reading her poems.
Inevitably, the programme is haunted by death—not only Plath’s suicide, but also her father’s death from diabetes, when she was eight, as well as the suicide of Berry’s mother, when she was seven. Having lost a parent at a young age and being the child of a suicide are reasons why Berry was attracted to Plath (whose two small children were asleep in the flat when she died). We also hear about the recent suicide of the man who reinstated Plath’s married name on her Heptonstall gravestone each time it was erased by fans who blamed Hughes for her death. We learn of this from another local man, Stuart Burn, who has taken on the task of directing people to Plath’s grave—done at the request of his friend, Jessica, whose dissertation on Plath, he says, describes the opposing camps as ‘Plathites’ (mostly but not exclusively women) and ‘House of Hughes’. (The critics that Stevenson faced thought her biography, Bitter Fame, was too sympathetic towards Hughes.)
To the programme’s credit, it doesn’t seek to reopen these old wounds. There’s no mention of Hughes having left Plath for Assia Wevill, who later killed not only herself but also her young child in a gassing reminiscent of Plath’s. Nor is there any mention of the possibility that Plath, who had made previous suicide attempts (‘I have done it again, / One year in every ten / I manage it—’), may have expected to be discovered in time. Instead, the programme draws a distinction between those who are attracted to Plath’s life and those who are drawn by her work. Corbett, who first encountered Plath when a teacher gave the class “Mushrooms” and “Elm” to comment on without identifying the author, was sure that the person she encountered in the poems was not the same as she later met in Bitter Fame. Clark, who in true New Critical fashion had been taught to ignore biography, didn’t want Plath’s death to define her own approach and framed her biography as a life moving forward. Fainlight, who’d been sent all the biographies but not read them all, said she used to have a general contempt for the form as ‘higher gossip’ with little or nothing to do with the work. On the other hand, Berry herself was initially drawn to Plath by her story, as was McCrae, who was rescued from a skateboarding obsession by seeing a made-for-TV film, called Silence of the Heart, in which a teenager commits suicide and his sister reads to the school, as her own poem, an excerpt from “Lady Lazarus”. As Corbett says, everyone has their own Sylvia Plath.
Berry quotes the Canadian poet Anne Michaels’ view that poetry should be personal, but lead to the reader’s not the poet’s life. We also hear Plath’s mother, Aurelia, recalling how in Letters Home she wrote of poetry being a manipulation of experience, a rearrangement of the truth. Plath told the critic, M. L. Rosenthal, who invented the term ‘confessional poetry’, that ‘you have to get beyond the personal’, although—as Clark points out—this did not prevent her from writing about intimate experiences: she was one of the first writers in English to deal with childbirth, post-partum depression and abortion. She read “Parliament Hill Fields”, a poem about miscarriage, on the BBC.
Plath was clearly a very complicated person (one friend never saw her happy; another never saw her sad) and this programme presents a more rounded picture than most people have of her. Berry quotes from Clark’s biography, in which she says: ‘The promise of spring would remain a resilient theme in her work. She never abandoned the idea of resurrection.’ We hear about her love of food (‘I am desperate for apple recipes’) and the fact that she could be very funny (for instance, mocking the eccentricity of the English in an anecdote about being offered the choice between a hot-water bottle and a cat). The programme ends with an excerpt from an interview with Plath in which she speaks of the profound personal fulfilment that writing gave her: ‘I couldn’t live without writing poetry.’
It’s a very interesting programme with a good range of contributors, although a couple of Berry’s own observations didn’t quite ring true with me. To say that an unhappy life is as valid as a happy one is undoubtedly right, but given that an unhappy life may also be harder to bear, it seems rather beside the point. And paraphrasing “Edge”—one of Plath’s last poems, about a dead woman—which begins, ‘The woman is perfected’, Berry says: ‘But the dead woman is not perfect yet. If she were, we wouldn’t still be raking over her bones. The alive woman, though, she was perfect “at one with the drive” as she writes in “Ariel”’. Again, although the first part may be true, ‘perfect’ seems an odd description of someone as badly damaged as Plath seems to have been. That apart, my only criticism is of the frequency with which the programme dots around among different voices. It may be my age, but there were times when I wasn’t sure at first who was speaking.
There is only one voice in the Sylvia Plath episode of “Journeys to the Grave”, which filled The Essay slot on BBC 3. It was broadcast on 7th June and lasts for 15 minutes. It’s one of a series in which ‘writers go in search of the final resting places of their literary heroes’ and the voice in this case belongs to the aptly-named Helen Mort. An award-winning poet and novelist, Mort paints word pictures of a walk from Hebden Bridge to Plath’s grave in Heptonstall (‘Every good pilgrimage should start like this: slant, afternoon sunlight, uneasy crows startling from a tree, the bold, crimson door of a pub. I’m not going in …’). Describing the Heptonstall cemetery as ‘a cache of mythology, ancient and contemporary’, she notes that it was used for a scene in the BBC TV series, Happy Valley, in which the main character, Catherine Cawood, visits the grave of her daughter, who also committed suicide. Mort quotes from Plath’s poem, “Walking in Winter” (‘I can taste the tin of the sky—the real tin thing. / Winter dawn is the colour of metal, / The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves’), as well as from “November Graveyard”, though noting that it was inspired by the Brontës in nearby Haworth (‘At the essential landscape stare, stare / Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: / Whatever lost ghosts flare, / Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor / Rave on the leash of the starving mind / Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air’).
Mort, too, thinks that ‘everyone has an idea of Plath’ and says that she didn’t approach her work for many years, because she’d met so many people who felt they had ownership of her. It was seeing the 2003 biopic, Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig, when she was 17, that prompted her to explore the poetry. She was particularly struck, she says, by Plath’s ability to make the known world strange.
Although, like Berry, Mort doesn’t delve into the Plath-Hughes debate, she finds the repeated defacing of the headstone (the way people ‘enact their complex idea of retribution’) appropriate in the sense that ‘this image of the wording of the grave being changed’ reflects Plath’s ‘overwritten history’, seldom considered in isolation from Hughes’s, until the publication of more recent, exhaustive biographies such as Clark’s. Picking up on the poet Don Paterson’s description of poetry as ‘a singular art’ in the way ‘it can be carried in your head in its original state, intact and perfect’, it strikes her that we have tried to treat Plath herself as a poem, ‘to swallow her completely as if she might live in all of us.’ Although I’m not sure I agree with that either, it does seem closer to Plath’s own view in “Edge”.
Stephen Claughton
Stephen Claughton 