How Sylvia Plath dissected her pain

In 2003, the film Sylvia, starring Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath and Daniel Craig as Ted Hughes, told the notorious and troubled story of Plath’s seven-year marriage to Hughes and her suicide in 1963. She was 30. That is Hollywood fame, a glamorised biography, her name known to an audience who would likely never address her sometimes difficult poetry – poetry which is autobiographical but adept in its many disguises.

AS Byatt once said, “Geniuses are not nice people.” Sylvia Plath was not a nice person. Of her parents-in-law, she wrote: “They are inhuman Jewy working-class bastards.” Kathy Kane, a supporter, she compared in the poem “Lesbos” to a “Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat”.

 Is she a genius? Not on the strength of the expanded juvenilia added by Amanda Golden and Karen V Kukil in this new, longer, conscientiously edited collected poems. Nor, actually, in The Colossus (1960), her debut collection, which is only, at its best, promising with gifted touches. She is in training still. Her real subject matter has not yet happened to her, the break-up with Ted Hughes, that hurt her into great poetry and liberated her self-destructive impulses, “The dew that flies/Suicidal”. The body of work from roughly 1961 to 1963, when she killed herself, is where the claims of genius find justification, or not. Two years.

The poet and critic Ian Hamilton, attempting an overview in 1965, made the mistake of treating the poems as a continuity, porous at their borders: “The bell jar links up with all the coffins, the morgues, the beehives, the wombs, the refrigerated babies, and so on, that swarm throughout her work…” A fudge of particulars. Turning to “Sheep in Fog”, he reads it as if it were continuous with two very different poems, “Daddy” and “Words Heard, By Accident, Over the Phone”. Another fudge.

You have to read the poems individually.

Sheep in fog are invisible – that image is an objective correlative for Plath’s desire for extinction, though you would never guess this from her anodyne BBC introduction: “the speaker’s horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep.” Kapok. You can’t say “this is a poem about wanting to kill myself”. Not on the Third Programme. Meanwhile, “Words Heard” is about something else entirely, Plath overhearing Assia Wevill, Ted’s lover, on the phone. “Daddy” is famously about her father conflated with Hughes – and her subjection to both. Two Nazis, as she figures it, to her assumed Jewishness.

Hamilton worries that “it was impossible for her not to see herself as the volunteer arch-victim of all the torments of this century”. Is she entitled to appropriate the Holocaust? I think so. It is difficult to write about pain. It is difficult, actually, to experience pain. The pain threshold varies, even in individuals. Doctors ask us if the pain is sharp, dull, intermittent, constant. For unbearable pain, Plath chooses the transgressive figure of the Holocaust. She wants to shock us.

However, her work is not monochrome. Not all the pain is unbearable. “Lyonesse” uses the myth of the undersea kingdom to evoke the sensation of being annihilated, deserted by God (or Hughes) and yet improbably, eerily surviving underwater. Like suddenly being in a silent film. An unreal quiescence. There is a spectrum of pain in these poems, accurately, expertly recorded. Plath discriminates.

What is the subject of the poem “Cut”, from her first posthumous collection, Ariel (1965)? Basically, it’s an account of Sylvia Plath cutting her thumb. Anything else? In Red Comet, her biography of Plath, Heather Clark says the poem is a “fascinated description of a nearly severed thumb”. This is misleading; it is the top cushion only of the thumb. Here is Plath’s own summary: “I also badly cut my thumb and the country doctor here, fool that he is, botched it, so the top is dead, did not mend, and it is septic, so I have an appointment with my old London doctors next week, to see if I will need anything drastic.” Bad enough, but hardly a near-amputation.

The poem has been misrepresented. Clark co-opts it to her feminist thesis: “A cascade of violent, male metaphors set within a feminine interior”; “a fantasy of release from oppressive feminine roles… and an aesthetic manifesto.” By “aesthetic manifesto”, Clark means Plath’s determination to resist aestheticising the ugly aspects of reality.

Other critics have identified a subtext of American history: in order, Puritans scalped by native Americans; redcoats from the War of Independence; Thanksgiving (at a push); the attacks sabotaging the US Navy at Pearl Harbor; the Ku Klux Klan. And all these things are to be found in the poem, but it is a partial list, much to be expected as the author is American. There are additional images that do not conform to this US historical template: “Babushka”, for instance, which is the Russian word for grandmother.

Above all, the images are visual. The top of the thumb, hanging by a hinge of flesh, spouting blood is like “a hat”, a turkey’s wattle, a red carpet, pink champagne, “a million soldiers… Redcoats, every one”.

The initial excitement, the crisis, is succeeded by shock: “I have taken a pill to kill/The thin/Papery feeling.” What we have here is interior sensation, something non-visual, the internal self (“O my/Homunculus”). Then we are returned to the visual. The thumb is bandaged. Kamikaze pilots wore ceremonial white scarves. The Ku Klux Klan wore white hoods. The word “Babushka” morphs to mean the headscarf worn by Russian grandmothers, which looks like a bandage. Finally, bandage removed, the healing wound is like a “Trepanned veteran”. It is a brilliant, inventive, virtuoso aria of images. In a later, quite different poem, “Kindness”, Plath writes: “The blood jet is poetry”. Meaning her pain is direct, unmediated poetry. Here, though, the blood jet is imagery. And playful imagery at that, full of itself.

I would compare this to Emily Dickinson’s poem about dying: “’Tis so appalling – it exhilarates”. The open-eyed stare of the dead person is set before us:

The Soul stares after it, secure –
A Sepulchre, fears frost, no more

Once the struggle is over, the dead body, the empty sepulchre, has nothing to fear. It is Dickinson at her most unsparing. That first line, “’Tis so appalling – it exhilarates” tells us a great deal about Plath’s poem, which is full of appalled exhilaration. Plath is alive, intensely alive. The opposite of Mr Bean nodding off to sleep on the rollercoaster.

So what, ultimately, is “Cut” about? Michael Hofmann writes, inexplicably, that he finds it “easy to think of Sylvia Plath without and apart from her suicide”. I can’t think of a poet whose biography is more important for understanding the poems. There is a subtext to “Cut”. It is a psychological parable, of bipolarity, of the high displaced by the low. It’s also about the break-up of Plath’s marriage – a parting of the one flesh – and the strange euphoria induced by violent emotion, followed by the unforgiving aftermath, when you confront the scarring, the aftershock.

And “Dirty girl,/Thumb stump”?

The actual damaged, ugly truth. “Thumb stump” is the perfect image for the PTSD being described here. Yes, genius. No surprise it became a signature, a characteristic abrupt aural rubber bounce, employed like a tight Championship snooker pocket: “Blood flood”, “match scratch”, “black sack”.

Sylvia Plath was the archetypal golden girl – down to her peroxided hair – the star student encumbered with honours and plaudits. The playwright Michael Frayn has recorded his experience of meeting Plath when he was guest editor of Granta, then a Cambridge student magazine. Confident, attractive, she made an impression. He accepted two of her poems, and kept her letter to him. (The letters make no mention of her Cambridge degree, a 2:1, a disappointment swiftly effaced.)

The unsleeping, vertiginous ambition encompassed her marriage, so its collapse was the more catastrophic:

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?
Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,
Not a toe, not a finger, and used
Used utterly… What is the remedy?

                                                            (Mystic)

It is a powerful, original analogue – the mystic overpowered by an unforgettable, ineradicable visitation. There are other striking analogues, taken from everyday transactions – for example, Sunday lunch. “Mary’s Song” begins with a lamb roast, “cracking” in its fat, which “Sacrifices its opacity”. A thing we have all seen, brilliantly transcribed. The lamb swiftly takes on a variety of identifications (“A window, holy gold./The fire makes it precious”) until it arrives at the predestined telos, where it is the Lamb of God, the son who will be sacrificed: “O golden child the world will kill and eat.” Jesus and Plath are conflated, confronting her darkest impulses to self-destruction; like Christ, she is chosen, exceptional and doomed.

In the same poem, she also identifies with Empedocles, who ended his life by throwing himself into Etna, whose “ovens glowed like heaven, incandescent”. Fire in the poem is the constant agent in the rapid turnover of analogues. It melts “the tallow heretics”. The Jews who go “up the chimney”, as Primo Levi reports, are co-opted: “Their thick palls float/Over the cicatrix of Poland”. Not the cliché, war-torn Poland, but scarred Poland – “cicatrix” meaning “scar”. Only with the final stanza do we realise the implication of the title:

It is a heart
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.

The pain and sacrifice are Mary’s, hers the helpless, pre-ordained burnt offering. And “eat” – more cannibalism than communion wafer. Meat.

The great poems first arrived shorn of the biographical details. The English poet and critic Al Alvarez announced her death as a tragedy and a great loss to poetry. The suicide was occluded. Not much was known about the still disputed details of the marriage, except among intimates. And when the details were finally broadcast, the poems themselves chose analogues, they chose art, distance, a kind of indirection. At the same time, the tone was one of authority, of poetic certainty, directness. Composed on the very edge, they are a miracle of control.

Craig Raine is a poet and emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford

[Further reading: The clever female baby boomer]