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Mad Girl's Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, by Andrew Wilson
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Drawing on exclusive interviews with friends and lovers who have never spoken openly about Plath before and using previously unavailable archives and papers, this book focuses on the early life of one of the 20th century's most popular and enduring female poets.
- Sales Rank: #2939731 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-09
- Released on: 2016-01-09
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.00" h x 1.00" w x 6.00" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 392 pages
Review
“Wilson makes a convincing case that we can learn more about Plath and the pressures that shaped her by paying attention to her “life before Ted”—the high school and college years…Wilson is able to bring this phase of Plath’s life into sharper focus than before…yield[ing] significant insights.” (New York Times Book Review)
“Likely to become the definitive account of Plath’s early years.” (Boston Globe)
“Wilson is insightful on Plath’s tormented attempts to forge an identity in this oppressive environment…[he] fashions riveting scenes.” (Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
“This is a rare biography whose narrative style is artful enough that its appeal will range from those who're utterly unfamiliar with Plath's work to those who've inundated themselves in it.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))
"Insightful...this portrait has much valuable new material about her early years." (Kirkus)
"There’s a tragic ordinariness in this version of Sylvia Plath’s American girlhood—here she is, daughter, student, and lover, desperately trying to create a perfect self. Andrew Wilson’s fresh combing of the Plath archives and interviews with Plath’s classmates and boyfriends show how economic frustration, sexual craving, and fierce ambition shaped the poet long before she met Ted Hughes, and even longer before her suicide made her famous." (Carol Sklenicka author of Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life)
“Mad Girl’s Love Song is a compelling work that makes rich use of unseen material. Wilson renders the young Plath vividly and sometimes unsettlingly present on the page.” (Belinda McKeon author of Solace)
“A comprehensive pictureof a young Plath with an electric mind, a cultural omnivorousness and asinister dark side…Wilson has written what is sure to become the officialbiography of young Sylvia.” (The Economist)
About the Author
Andrew Wilson is an award-winning journalist and author. His work has appeared in a wide variety of publications including the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Daily Telegraph, the Observer, the Sunday Times, the Independent on Sunday, the Daily Mail, the New Statesman, the Evening Standard magazine and the Smithsonian. The author of three acclaimed biographies, he is also the author of one previous novel The Lying Tongue.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
On February 25, 1956, twenty-three-year-old Sylvia Plath stepped into a roomful of people and immediately spotted what she later described in her diary as a “big, dark, hunky boy.” She asked her companions if anyone knew the name of this young man but she received no answer. The party was in full swing and the free-form rhythms of the jazz—the “syncopated strut” of the piano, the seductive siren call of the trumpet—made conversation difficult.1 Sylvia, in Cambridge studying on a Fulbright Fellowship, had been drinking all night: a lethal line of “red-gold” Whisky Macs at a pub in town with her date for that night, Hamish Stewart. The potent combination of scotch and ginger wine had left her feeling like she could almost walk through the air.2 In fact, the alcohol had had the opposite effect; as she had been walking to the party she had found herself so inebriated that she had kept banging into trees.
On arrival at the Women’s Union—the venue in Falcon Yard chosen to celebrate the first issue of the slim student-made literary journal the St. Botolph’s Review—Sylvia saw that the room was packed with young men in turtleneck sweaters and women in elegant black dresses. Counterpointing the jazz, the sound of poetry was in the air: great chunks of it being quoted back and forth like rallies in a game of literary dominance and seduction.
Sylvia was in a bullish mood that night. One of the contributors to St. Botolph’s Review, Daniel Huws, had sneered at two of her poems that had appeared in another Cambridge literary magazine, dismissing her work as too polished and well made. “Quaint and electric artfulness,” he had written in Broadsheet. “My better half tells me ‘Fraud, fraud,’ but I will not say so; who am I to know how beautiful she may be.”3 Plath felt justifiably angry; after all, she had been writing for publication since the age of eight and she had already earned sizable sums for poems and short stories from Harper’s, the Atlantic Monthly, Mademoiselle, and Seventeen. She walked up to Huws, a pale, freckle-faced undergraduate at Peterhouse, and said in a tone of “friendly aggression,”4 “Is this the better or worse half?”5 Huws, who later regarded the words as a “fair retaliation” for his “facetious and wounding” remarks, did not know quite how to respond.6 From Sylvia’s point of view, Huws looked too boyish. She was equally as dismissive of the rest of the St. Botolph’s set, describing Lucas Myers, who was studying at Downing College, as inebriated and wearing a “satanic smile,” and Than Minton, reading natural sciences at Trinity, as so small-framed you would have to sit down if you wanted to talk to him (in Plath’s world a short man was about as useful and attractive as a homosexual).7
By this point, Sylvia had knocked back another drink, emptying its contents into her mouth, down her hands, and onto the floor. She then tried to dance the twist with Myers and, although her movements may well have been less than smooth, her memory was razor sharp. As she danced, she proceeded to recite the whole of Myers’s poem “Fools Encountered,” which she had read for the first time earlier that day in St. Botolph’s Review.8 When the music came to a temporary halt, she saw out of the corner of her eye somebody approaching. It was the same “hunky boy,” the one who had been “hunching” around over women whom she had seen earlier.9 He introduced himself as Ted Hughes. She recalled the three poems he had published in St. Botolph’s Review, and in an effort to dazzle him with her vivacity, she immediately began reciting segments of them to him. In retrospect, it’s ironic that one of the poems she declaimed, “Law in the Country of the Cats,” addresses the violent, irrational sense of enmity and rivalry that can often exist between individuals, even strangers.10 On first meeting, the attraction between Hughes—who had graduated from Cambridge in 1954 and had a job in London as a reader for the J. Arthur Rank film company—and Plath was instant. But Sylvia sensed something else too. “There is a panther stalks me down: / One day I’ll have my death of him,” she wrote in “Pursuit,” a poem that she composed two days later.11
Plath recorded this encounter—now one of the most famous in all literary history—in her journal the next day. Suffering from a terrible hangover—she joked she thought she might be suffering from the DTs—she described the sexual tension that had flared up between them. After she had quoted some lines from his poem “The Casualty,” Hughes had shouted back over the music at her, in a voice that made her think he might be Polish, “You like?” Did she want brandy, he had asked. “Yes,” she yelled back, at which point he led her into another room. Hughes slammed the door and started pouring her glassfuls of brandy, which Plath tried to drink, but she didn’t manage to find her mouth.12 Almost immediately, they started discussing Huws’s critique of her poetry. Hughes joked that his friend knew that Plath was beautiful, that she could take such criticism, and that he would never have attacked her had she been a “cripple.” He told her he had “obligations” in the next room—in effect, another Cambridge student, named Shirley—and that he was working in London and earning £10 a week. Then, suddenly, Hughes leaned toward her and kissed her “bang smash on the mouth.” As he did so he ripped the red hair band from her head and ravished her with such force that her silver earrings came unclipped from her ears. He moved down to kiss her neck, and Plath bit him “long and hard” on the cheek; when the couple emerged from the room, blood was pouring down his face.13 As Plath bit deep into his skin, she thought about the battle to the death that Hughes had described in “Law in the Country of the Cats” and the perpetrator’s admission of the crime: “I did it, I.”14 Hughes carried the “swelling ring-moat of tooth marks” on his face for the next month or so, while he admitted that the encounter and the woman remained branded on his self “for good.”15
Hughes left his mark on Plath and her reputation too. After her suicide, in February 1963, as her estranged, but not divorced, husband, he became Plath’s literary executor, the guardian of her writings and, in effect, responsible for how she was perceived. A great deal has been written about the way Plath’s posthumous journals were edited; since they were first published in abridged form in 1982, questions have been raised about Hughes’s influence and motivation. At what point did editorializing (the understandable deletion of information because of repetition or legal problems) mutate into the altogether more sinister act of censorship? What part did he take in excising certain sensitive parts of the diaries? Why did he destroy one of the later journals? In his defense, he said he did so because he didn’t want his children, Frieda and Nicholas, from his marriage with Plath, to read them. “In those days,” he claimed, he “regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival.”16
Sylvia viewed Ted as something of a colossus, and to this day his enormous shadow obscures many aspects of Plath’s life and work. The sensational aspects of the Plath-Hughes relationship (from that intense first meeting, through to their marriage only four months later, to the birth of their children, followed by Ted’s infidelity, their separation, and then Sylvia’s death at the age of thirty) have dominated the cultural landscape to such an extent that their story has taken on the resonance of a modern myth. In addition, Hughes’s determination to market Ariel—a volume of poetry that was published in 1965, three years after Plath’s death—as the crowning glory of her poetical career has caused her other work to be marginalized. In Hughes’s view, the poetry she wrote toward the end of her life was the most important; anything that came before was a mere dress rehearsal. Stories, letters, journal entries, poems—hundreds of them—were nothing more than “impurities,” “by-products” of a process of transformation.17 Hughes cited the backstory of Shakespeare’s The Tempest to draw an analogy between Plath’s long-imprisoned creative talent and its sudden liberation during the writing of the Ariel collection. Her poetry, he said, was the “biology” of Ariel, the backstory of the airy spirit who was once trapped in the pine until she was set free by Prospero.18
The implication is clear. Plath, as a poet (perhaps even as a woman), did not exist—so the argument goes—before she created these late poems. During the process of crafting them, she finally becomes, in the words of Robert Lowell, who wrote the introduction to the American edition of Ariel (published in 1966), “herself.”
Lowell’s essay set the tone for Plath studies for the rest of the twentieth century. In writing Ariel, Plath “becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created—hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another ‘poetess,’ but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines . . . The voice is now coolly amused, witty, now sour, now fanciful, girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire—a Dido, Phaedra, or Medea.” The work is distinct because of its “controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever. She burns to be on the move, a walk, a ride, a journey, the flight of the queen bee. She is driven forward by the pounding pistons of her heart . . . She herself is a little like a racehorse [the collection’s title is a reference to the name of a horse Plath used to ride], galloping relentlessly with risked, outstretched neck, death hurdle after death hurdle topped . . . Suicide, father-h...
Most helpful customer reviews
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
A New Look at the Life of Sylvia Plath
By Leah
Sylvia Plath is a literary icon known for her confessional poetry, her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, her tumultuous relationship with her husband and fellow poet Ted Hughes, and her tragic suicide at the age of 30. In this new biography of the poet, released to coincide with the 50th anniversary of her death, Andrew Wilson tells the story of Sylvia Plath's early life.
Before she met Ted at the age of 23, Plath led a complex, creative life full of the highest highs and lowest lows. Her father died when she was eight, and she had a complicated relationship with her mother. Intensely bright (she had an IQ of 160) and fiercely ambitious, she faced mental illness and instability from an early age. She knew the pain of rejection and the thrill of acceptance from frequently submitting her stories and poems to national magazines.
This biography centers upon what Wilson considers to be the main obstacles that shaped Plath's life, mind, and writing:
- Her father's death: Lacking a father figure, Sylvia sought to fill his void with a constant stream of men. However, she had a habit of projecting her fantasies onto the men she dated, creating high hopes and visions of her beaus that had little bearing on the reality of their personalities.
- Her mother's lack of money: Aurelia Plath raised Sylvia and her brother Warren on a single salary, and money was often tight. Sylvia was frustrated by the way her financial situation limited her; instead of focusing on her classes and her writing during college, she was under constant financial strain and had to work to aid her mother.
- The hypocrisy of society regarding gender roles: Coming of age in the 1940s and '50s, Plath was subject to a sexual double standard. Although it was socially acceptable for men to have sexual relations, women were expected to be chaste until marriage. Women of Plath's generation were also expected to marry right out of college, crank out babies, and become homemakers. Sylvia, on the other hand, wanted more than a life of caring for children; she wanted to work and create and travel the world. She felt angered by the double standard and stifled by the expectations.
Mad Girl's Love Song seems to be well researched. Wilson draws his information from Plath's diaries, exclusive interviews with friends and lovers, letters to and from people who knew her well, and previously unavailable archives. He also colors the facts with quotes from her poetry and episodes from her stories, essays, and novel.
This is a fascinating look at Sylvia Plath's early life, but it doesn't paint a flattering portrait of her. She is portrayed as manic, manipulative, narcissistic, and blind to the needs of others. She is described as having had a fractured, unstable personality and an identity that was "about as sturdy as a soap bubble." It definitely plays up the mental illness she constantly battled, from her manic highs to her depressive lows.
Although this book made it hard for me to really like the character of Sylvia Plath, it was a very interesting read about a complex woman, and I certainly learned a lot about the her life, her struggles, and the factors that shaped her writing. I would highly recommend this book to readers who are interested in Plath's life and want to learn more about the iconic writer.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review on Books Speak Volumes, a book blog.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Ms. Mojo Risin'
By RMCCane
This review is titled "Ms. Mojo Risin'" because there is a fairly obvious parallel between Sylvia and Jim Morrison. Like Morrison, Sylvia Plath's true identity has been obscured by the mythical status surrounding her public persona. Anyone who studied Plath in college (or independently) has undoubtedly been subjected to legions of feminist scholars who projected their own beliefs (and neuroses in some cases) onto Sylvia and flaunted her work as a champion of their cause, focusing solely on Plath the feminist and ignoring any aspects of the famed writer that contradict those assertions. In many respects, Sylvia Plath is most certainly a feminist icon. Of course, anyone who has read The Bell Jar can tell you that she chafed against a woman's intended role in a male-dominated society; but too many are content to focus only on that particular aspect of Plath. The latter is just that: only one aspect of Sylvia Plath. Andrew Wilson does a splendid job detailing the many contradictory aspects of Sylvia herself that shines through in her work and in her private journals.
Plath the person has been largely obscured by her iconic status and it has been to her detriment. She was a very complex, driven, and intelligent person with a sense of self-awareness that was so acute, one might even call it scientifically detached at times. Wilson's biography wades through the myriad of misinformed and selectively highlighted aspects of her image and looks at Plath the girl and Plath the woman with both an empirical and subjective eye.
One review of this book states that Wilson acts as a psychological hack, flippantly diagnosing Sylvia's mental state. I fear that this assessment misses the point of Wilson's biography. Wilson's intention is to knife through the aura surrounding Plath and present the reader with anecdotes from her life which he carefully connects to her journals and her literary work to display the varied components of her later writing. The concept that Plath not only existed, but underwent her most critical personal developments prior to marrying Ted Hughes is clearly demonstrated throughout the book.
While Wilson offers his own analysis, the reader is given a sufficient amount of leeway to assess Plath his or herself. Many will condemn this book because the picture of Plath that Wilson provides does not fit into the parameters they have created for her and this is, likely, one of Wilson's objectives. Early on, we are shown that even at a very young age, Plath feels slightly marginalized by her femininity as it relates to her younger brother. Yet, we are also shown that, as an adolescent, Sylvia was quite concerned with being liked by her male classmates. The contradicting ideas presented here are both intentional and necessary.
Sylvia Plath was an immensely complicated person and, at its core, that is what this biography means to show. She cannot be characterized by any one, sweeping generalization - mental illness included - and the matter of analyzing her personality should not be taken lightly. Much of her adult work is colored by experiences from her youth and Wilson admirably connects incidents from her childhood to themes in her later poetry and those experiences are quite varied.
Though not a perfect biography, Wilson has created a sturdy argument and a well organized narrative that traces Sylvia's development while simultaneously deconstructing the mythical persona which has been unfairly heaped upon her memory.
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Lucid Account of a Complex Person"s Early Life
By Dr. Laurence Raw
In terms of what we found out about Plath's early life, however, perhaps Hughes represented something more - a father-figure, a protector, or someone who could invest her life with a sense of stability. Born to an immigrant family in 1932, Sylvia Plath was profoundly affected by her father's early death, when she was only eight years old. Although her mother Aurelia labored tirelessly to bring up the family, Sylvia was plagued with depression, as well as sense of her own inadequacy - in spite of a glittering academic career festooned with awards.
This was the major issue behind Wilson's biography: how could such a brilliant woman, whose poems were endorsed by major journals such as the Atlantic Monthly, be affected by depressions so great that she frequently contemplated suicide? Plath's university career at Smith College was interrupted by a long spell at a mental institution; after six month she was pronounced 'cured,' but Wilson suggested that this was only superficial. Throughout her short life Plath endured similar bouts of depression; no one, it seemed, could help her deal with them.
The other major theme running through the biography was Plath's struggles with the constraints imposed on women in America in the early 1950s. Whereas men were allowed a limited amount of freedom of self-expression, it seemed that women had no opportunity to contemplate their sexualities; they were expected to conform to certain pre-determined roles as the submissive girlfriend (and subsequently the dutiful wife). Plath had her fair share of relationships, but never experienced any satisfaction until she met Yale graduate Richard Sassoon, whose bohemian lifestyle and uninhibited view of sex appealed to her.
Wilson argues that Plath's instability could be traced back to her early life - which might perhaps exonerate Ted Hughes somewhat as one of the major causes of her suicide. On the other hand his book shows how difficult it was for any woman - especially someone trying to develop her personality through writing - to survive in the patriarchal world of 1950s America.
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