Die to Tell: the Last Days of Sylvia Plath

I’d had my suspicions after reading The Bell Jar for lit class that much of Sylvia Plath’s fame was thanks to her garish suicide- how tragic when the wicked witch of the woods fattening you in your cage is actually you. Like Hansel and Gretel’s captor, Plath stuck her head into an oven and bid farewell to this cruel world. I’d found her poetry perhaps a bit too tumultuous and heavy handed, but in a certain era its brutal comparisons of her personal struggles against men to Holocaust victims was de rigueur. Without Plath’s actual suicide, these works may never have seen the light of day or been taken seriously, and though I’m sympathetic to the depressed and the mentally ill,  having issues of my own, I can’t accept the kind of personal aggrandizement that is necessary to see your own suffering on the scale of a genocide. Still, it was a fashion then, and may still be, to dream of some room of your own.

Giving Up: the Last Days of Sylvia Plath is little book is a mere 73 pages so you can read it on a subway ride. According to Jillian Becker, in the last days of Plath’s life, she uttered repeatedly “I feel terrible” and took her kids and some belongings to the author’s house, where she spent a few days emotionally draining her kind hosts. Scholars on the Plath saga may find the minutiae of events a bit different from previously published accounts. Becker said she couldn’t read the poetry or think about it for many years. The memoir resounds with fury at Ted Hughes: it is insinuated that he was vicious and demeaning and always cheating- it is public knowledge that he had moved out on Plath and the children and in with another woman at the time of the suicide, making him an easy scapegoat for the ‘reason’. I can’t agree with Becker, though I am not Team Hughes by any stretch: if the straying male were reason enough for suicide, every woman would be shoving her head into the kitchen stove, and doing it barefoot, too.

Details are tasteful but the whole incestuous literary circle of its time, with its in-vogue struggle between ‘art and commerce’ and so on, makes for salacious reading. According to conversations the author had with those involved, The Bell Jar was supposed to be Plath’s exorcism of suicide, her desire to conquer the impulse. It didn’t pan out that way. This book is elegantly written, but on its own, is not especially significant- its importance is regenerating an interest in the poetry and the scandals of the chaotic inner world of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. For example, later on Hughes’ affair du jour also committed suicide- and killed her child, too. It’s time to dust off that forgotten landmark release of his poetry Birthday Letters and hunt for clues. Who says poetry is not as dramatic as Flowers in the Attic?

Finally, all roads lead to Camille Paglia, and this was yet another reason to pull Break Blow Burn off my shelf. Paglia’s rigorous and vigorous study of the poem Daddy places Plath’s poem among the world’s best and dissects the difficult passages so that we can understand them. “Garish, sarcastic, and profane, Daddy is one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman,” Paglia begins. “With driving power of voice, it marries the personal to the political against the violent backdrop of modern history.”

Interestingly, Paglia says Plath’s peers are not poets per se but folk punk musicians like Pat Benatar, Marianne Faithful, and Chrissie Hynde. Indeed, it’s time to dust off Patti Smith’s Horses and Plath’s Ariel, and see what I can find in Plath outside of academics, here inside my own world with her in it.

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