In Which We Flay Ourselves Into Poets

Sylvia Plath: Red and Blue

by JESSICA FERRI

Sylvia Plath’s favorite color was red. When Ted Hughes left her for another woman, Plath installed a red rug under her writing desk. But she also loved red’s opposite, blue — and other polarizations. Upon Ted’s abandonment, she wrote to her mother:

It’s as if my life were magically run by two electric currents: joyous positive and despairing negative — which ever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it. I am now flooded with despair, almost hysteria, as if I were smothering. As if a great owl were sitting on my chest, its talons clenching and constricting my heart.

Plath’s duality — as a happy-go-lucky American girl and a deeply depressed, deathly ambitious writer — stirs up the darker parts of her audience. We either revile Plath for her cowardice or we celebrate her for her bravery. It depends on whether you look and see blue or red.

Born in Boston in 1932 to a German biology professor and his former student, Plath entered the school of hard-knocks at the young age of eight, when her father passed away. The day he died, she told her mother, “I’ll never speak to God again.” His absence would lead to poor choices in men and eventually to Ted Hughes. The disintegration of their marriage would confirm the first abandonment by her father. In “Daddy,” she writes, “Daddy, I have had to kill you . . . . If I’ve killed one man I’ve killed two / the vampire who said he was you / and drank my blood for a year / seven years, if you want to know.”

with her brother warren
Reading Plath is a bipolar experience. The Bell Jar’s depiction of Plath’s nervous breakdown in the summer of 1953 is certainly horrifying, but Plath’s observations on her peers both in and out of the mental institution are quite funny. The poems of The Colossus, her first collection, are traditional and revelatory. Her lyricism is beautiful but her diction is alien. Her personal writing seems like it was written by two distinct and separate women: the Plath that writes home to her mother that she’s doing fine and the real Plath — the blood red Plath of her journals. This is a woman who, after coming upon two teenage girls destroying a garden (the subject of her poem "The Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers”) she writes in her journal "I have violence in me that is hot as death-blood. I can kill myself or — I know it now — even kill another."

This is the Plath that will change you, the author of Ariel, and the author of these journals. In reading her journals there is no doubt of Plath’s talent, her ferocity and her courage. She is so close to the reader, you can hear her whispering and giggling in your ear, crying on your shoulder; you look behind you as you read the journals, sometimes in fear, sometimes in hope. There’s an ongoing struggle: Plath wants to be a mother-goddess, she wants to cook and clean and provide a safe-haven for her husband and her babies, but the poet in her can’t stand being in the shadows. Standing aside while Ted receives praise from T.S. Eliot and his ilk, being simply “the wife.” Meanwhile, Plath can’t find a publisher in the states for her novel, The Bell Jar. Her anguish in the journals is palpable.

The Lilly Library at Indiana University has about half of Plath’s materials—the other half belongs to Smith. If you are a student there, or a visiting academic, you can visit. Take a look at Plath’s manuscripts: fifteen drafts for one poem, “Wuthering Heights,” witty Valentine’s Day cards written to her mother when she was ten, letters and poems stained with coffee and spaghetti sauce. You’ll also find a box marked “HAIR.” In it, you will find about eight braids, thick and long, of Plath’s childhood hair. You can smell it. It smells like hair. The experience of opening this box must be similar to the experience of opening a tomb. 

Hughes’ last collection of poetry, Birthday Letters, is about his relationship with Plath. In the poem “Red” he describes his resentment of the ‘red’ side of Plath: ‘red was your color,’ and he tells us Plath insisted on decorating their bedroom ‘as red as a judgment chamber,’ or ‘a shut jewel case,’ with fabrics ‘ruby corduroy blood’ and curtains ‘sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.’ Red was the dangerous side of Plath, the powerful side Hughes could not control. “The blood jet is poetry,” she famously wrote, “there is no stopping it.”

her self-portrait Plath was torn between this side of her personality and the call to the calmer, domestic existence: the role of the wife and mother, Plath needed the right man to have both lives. She wanted the babies, the cooking. She wanted to be both muse and artist. Hughes prefers Plath’s blue side, her ‘guardian, thoughtful,’ and he ends this poem, the last in the collection, telling Plath ‘the jewel you lost was blue.’” It’s no surprise, then, that Plath wrote “Daddy,” her most recognizable poem, from her most celebrated collection, Ariel, when she was finally able to escape all the ties that bound her to her blue self: her mother, her bleach blonde hair, her husband.  

Plath terrifies many because, through her legacy, she remains very much alive. Thinking or speaking of Plath, relating to her, brings her immediately to life. Like many writers, she struggled, and like many of us, she wanted much out of life — so much that she found herself burning alive. In “Lady Lazarus,” she tells us “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” Her dramatic ending, if anything, is an honest answer to the promise and threat of power and violence throughout her work, the best of which was created in the struggle between two halves. Picture her, in the morning at 5 a.m., before her children were awake, floating on a concoction of ineffectual sleeping pills and coffee, bleary-eyed and exhausted; picture her typing away at the Ariel poems, watching the sun come up — watching the morning change from blue to red.

Jessica Ferri is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. You can find more of her writing here. She last wrote in these pages about babysitting.

"Killed By The Morning Sun" - Ed Harcourt (mp3)

"Lachrymosity" - Ed Harcourt (mp3)

"A Secret Society" - Ed Harcourt (mp3)

In Which We Want To Be Important By Being Different

The Abridged Journals

by SYLVIA PLATH

The following selections chronicle the period at Cambridge when Sylvia Plath met the man who would be her husband, Ted Hughes. Plath began keeping a diary when she was 11.

February 19th, 1956

To whom it may concern: Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thunder-crack of judgment. There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that the circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear. Yesterday, walking quite peacefully over the Mill Lane bridge, after leaving my bike to be repaired (feeling lost, pedestrian, impotent), smiling that smile which puts a benevolent lacquer on the shuddering fear of strangers' gazes, I was suddenly turned upon by little boys making snowballs on the dam.

They began to throw them at me, openly, honestly, trying to hit. They missed every time, and with that wary judgment that comes with experience, I watched the dirty snowballs coming at me, behind and in front, and, sick with wonder, kept walking slowly, determinedly, ready to parry a good hit before it struck. But none struck, and with a tolerant smile that was a superior lie, I walked on.

sylvia & ted at cambridgeYesterday night: coming in to the party at Emmanuel (ah, yes) they were hypnotizing someone named Morris in the dark, crowded room, lit with conscious bohemianism by candles in old wine bottles. The fat, yet strong, ugly boy was saying with commanding mastery and power: "When you try to go through the door there will be glass in the way. You cannot go through the door, there will be glass. When I say 'gramophone' you will fall asleep again." Then he brought Morris out of the trance, and Morris tried to go through the door, but stopped. He could not go through the door, there was glass in the way. The fat boy said 'Gramophone', and two laughing, nervous boys caught Morris as he fell. Then they made Morris become stiff as a steel bar; he seemed to know just how stiff that was, and went rigid on the floor.

Chris then sat a red-dressed girl on his lap, and then they went to dance. Meanwhile, Win and I talk very wisely and the appalling easiness of this strikes me down: I could throw everything away and make a play for John, who is now making a play for the earliest and easiest. But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says, "I'm important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am."

I too want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same. Far off, I go to my coat with Win; he brings me my scarf as I wait on the stair, and Chris is being red-cheeked and dramatic and breathless and penitent. He wants to be scolded, and punished. That is too easy. That is what we all want.

February 21st, 1956

Crash! I am psychic, only not quite drastically enough. My baby "The Matisse Chapel" which I have been spending the imaginary money from and discussing with modest egoism, was rejected by The New Yorker this morning with not so much as a pencil scratch on the black-and-white doom of the printed rejection. I hid it under a pile of papers like a stillborn illegitimate baby. I shuddered at the bathos in it. Especially after I read Pete DeVries' recent scintillant "Afternoon of a Faun." There are ways and ways to have a love affair. Above all, one must not be serious about it.

with ted's parentsFebruary 25th, 1956

So I am, however, not worth the really good boys; or is it me? If poems were really good, there might be some chance; but until I make something tight and riding over the limits of sweet sestinas and sonnets, away from the reflection of myself in Richard's eyes and the inevitable narrow bed, too small for a smashing act of love, until then, they can ignore me and make up pretty jokes. The only cure for jealousy that I can see is the continual, form positive forging of an identity and set of personal values which I believe in; in other words, if I believe it is right to go to France, it is absurd to feel pangs because Someone Else has gone to Italy. There is no compare.

February 26th, 1956

A small note after a large orgy. It is morning, most sober, with cold white puritanical eyes; looking at me. Last night I got very drunk, very very beautifully drunk, and now I am shot, after six hours of warm sleep like a baby, with Racine to read, and not even the energy to type; I am getting the dts. Or something.

Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes. I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: "most dear unscratchable diamond" and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, "You like?" and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert, looking as if he had delivered at least nine or ten babies, and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.

We shouted as if in high wind, about the review, and he saying Dan knew I was beautiful, he wouldn't have written it about a cripple, and my yelling protest in which the words "sleep with the editor" occurred with startling frequency.

And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn't I, and I stamped and screamed yes, and he had obligations in the next room, and he was working in London earning ten pounds a week so he could later earn twelve pounds a week, and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never find again, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked.

And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem, "I did it, I." Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh to give myself crashing, fighting, to you.

I shall never see him again, and the thorny limitations of the day crowd in like the spikes on the gates at Queens last night: I could never sleep with him anyway, with all his friends here and his close relation to them, laughing, talking, I should be the world's whore, as well as Roget's strumpet. I shall never see him, he will never look for me. He said my name, Sylvia, and banged a black grinning look into my eyes, and I would like to try just this once, my force against his. But he will never come, and the blonde one, pure and smug and favored, looks, is it with projected pity and disgust? at this drunken amorphic slut.

You can buy the book here.

Sylvia Plath reads her poetry (Side 1)

Sylvia Plath reads her poetry (Side 2)