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     Sylvia Plath was a writer, or she was nothing. Literally. The complete texts of her (so far as we know) existing journals, unlike the intimate revelations of other famous diarists, are not so much records of a life as desperate verbal lifelines. “My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing. My writing. Nothing matters but Ted, Ted’s writing and my writing.” Written in March 1958, when Plath was teaching Freshman English at Smith College, lines like these recur too often to be dismissed as reflections of a passing mood. Though the (stolen?) journal covering the last two full years of her life is still missing, enough is revealed in 674 pages of transcription from the Smith manuscripts to convince us – as if we needed convincing – that Plath was no ordinary, ambitious American writer. Intelligent, superbly gifted as she was, she identified the “demon” in herself (“only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into”) with the writer she had to be, and so was unable to stop its taking her over completely. Her journals show her wrestling with her word-demon as she willed herself into its power. A fascinating tale, a Faustian myth, a tragedy that left reality behind, together with two real children.

     In a fine fantasy novel recently published in Australia (1),  two boy heroes watch as their poet-mother is carried away in a word cocoon spun by an insidious word-spider, Dr Homely-Sage. This excerpt from it throws some light on what may have happened to Sylvia Plath:

     John...pulled out his knife and flicked the biggest blade open. Then he hacked at the thread about her head. The cocoon jerked about sluggishly, but the thread was too tough to be cut... “Mummy,” said Charles,  “what’s happened to you? How did you get into this thing – these horrible sticky-slimy threads?”

     “Dreams,” said Emer. “Beautiful dreams. Dreams of being someone else.”

     Charles peered at the shimmering strands. Then he used the magnifying-glass attached to his Swiss Army knife. “This stuff is weird... it’s crawling with words, words all moving about. It’s not made of silk at all, but of letters writhing in and out of each other. What on earth is it?”

     “Glittering words,” said John, “the glittering words she spoke of. What else is to come?”

     “Departure,” said the voice of Doctor Homely-Sage from somewhere near them. “I am taking her away, of her own free will. Away from this dreary place full of dreary anxious people. I am taking her to my Institute, where her special needs will be understood, and where she will receive the treatment and professional care she deserves.”

     “You’re not taking our mother away from us,” said Charles. “You can’t.”

     “You are quite right,” said the Doctor, his eyes glittering like a spider’s from behind his pebble-thick glasses. “I can’t, but she can. She is leaving you. Don’t try to interfere with us.”

     In the novel the children have all kinds of adventures in illusion-land, searching for their lost mother, but in the end they free her from her word cage and defeat Doctor Homely-Sage by opposing a painfully acquired language of reality to Homely Sage’s shimmering cage of what turn out to be not dream-worlds but nightmares.

     Whether or not John Dutton had Sylvia Plath in mind when he wrote his Dreamguard Trilogy, its relevance to her story hardly needs pointing out. Except that Plath, ready as she was to throw herself into the power of every spirit doctor – male or female – who promised her self-fulfilment, in the end has to be recognised as a word-spider sans pareil who, in her repeated efforts to remake herself after every apparent failure, tragically wound herself up in her own language. When words failed her – that is to say, when she herself became aware that her mythologies were as much a cage as a passage to a better world – she was stranded. And she had no other faith to put in their place. Word skill. Words kill. On the first day of February, 1963, eleven days before she died, Plath wrote a poem called ‘Words’ – one of her greatest and saddest – as a cryptic testament to the closed options she perceived to lie ahead of her before she finally summoned up the “guts” to take her own life. Courageous she had always been; her journals bear witness to that, all right. But they also give evidence of a frantic, desperate inability to live through difficult periods of life – painful growing periods – without fiction-making, without writing them up. The result of this dependence upon written language to get her through, as it were, was that immediate impressions were inscribed on paper as on stone. Fears, speculations, enthusiasms, accusations, love affairs, hate affairs (the latter, mostly with regard to people she hardly knew) together with the “dreams, directives and imperatives” she described in her journals as a “litany”, or sometimes a “Sargasso”, were crammed, helter-skelter, into words. Except during periods of acute depression and breakdown, or in rare times of relaxation from self-obsession (as in the summer of 1959, when she was pregnant and travelling with Ted Hughes around the American West), Plath enslaved her life to serve the tyrannical demands of her writing.

     And, of course, Plath’s journals are a riveting read! Even I, who before writing Bitter Fame had read almost all of them in the Smith College Library, can hardly put this published collection down. Sylvia Plath was not only a phenomenally gifted writer, she was a close observer, a true artist, a perceptive critic (not least of her own work) and a virtuoso of description. Read , for example, the notes on Cambridge and Grantchester she made in 1957 when she was first married to Ted Hughes and living in Eltisley Avenue. Or even more entertaining, turn to her often hilarious account of the couple’s honeymoon in Benidorm the previous summer and her description of the dubious housekeeping of the Widow Mangada. As Tim Kendall stressed in his review for the TLS, some of Plath’s finest and most objective prose can be found in her notes on her Devon neighbours and the on birth of her son, Nicholas, early in 1962, about the time she was writing Three Women and ‘Crossing the Water’.

     Much of Plath’s objective reporting, to be sure, was selected for the American edition of the Journals, tactfully edited by Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes in 1982. The chief advantage of that selection is its chronological arrangement, whereas this new, complete edition consigns any loose notes that were not part of the bound journals to fifteen appendices. The earlier selection, too, balances the writings of a perceptive, self-centred, self-critical but more or less cheerful Sylvia Plath with some of the resentful passages that indulge her aggressive terrors and dislikes. Nor is this new edition the first to reveal that Plath considered hating her mother to be an important stage of her psychotherapy with Dr Ruth Beuscher during the winter of 1958-59. Most of the sealed material that Ted Hughes unsealed before his death consists either of sharp, cruelly acid character sketches (Hughes obviously wanted to spare the feelings of living people who might have been hurt by Plath’s remarks) or of whole pages taken up with accusations hurled at her parents, particularly at Aurelia Plath, whose misfortune it was to be Sylvia’s long-suffering mother.

     A propos of Dr Ruth Beuscher, a recent article by Norman Elrod, an eminent Swiss psychoanalyst, (2) draws attention to the probable damage done by Dr Beuscher when, in December of 1958, she gave her weeping and vulnerable poet-patient “permission” to hate her mother. We already knew what that permission meant to Sylvia; it appeared plainly on page 265 of the 1982 edition after a note from Aurelia Plath herself explaining her reasons for consenting to release passages from the “therapy journal” for publication.

Ever since Wednesday I have been feeling like a “new person.” Like a shot of brandy went home, a sniff of cocaine, hit me where I live and am alive and so-there. I am going to work like hell. Better than shock treatment: “I give you permission to hate your mother.”

The difference between the 1982 selection and the full text published by Faber is that entries in the latter go on in this vein for ten and more pages at a stretch. As you read it becomes clear that Plath’s fantasies – how her “Nazi” father hated her mother, how her mother had to marry “an old man” after failing to attract a young one, and so forth – gave her just the impetus she needed to throw out the inadequate figure of poor Mrs. Plath and replace it with that model mother-substitute, her psychotherapist. According to Dr Elrod, this is a normal and often health-restoring development between analyst and analysand, but in Plath’s case, he suspects that Dr Beuscher may have found gratification herself in winning Sylvia’s love away from her mother. I am not qualified to comment on Dr Elrod’s thesis, but it is clear from the journals how utterly and uncritically Plath came to depend on Dr Beuscher for guidance. We know, too, that when, in the autumn of 1962, Plath’s marriage with Hughes finally did come to grief, that Beuscher wrote to Plath “as a friend”, advising her to divorce and cut her losses rather than wait and see what a temporary separation might do to save the marriage.

     The complete text of these journals, then, is a valuable contribution to Plath scholarship, not only because it proves beyond doubt that Hughes edited them with her protection in mind, but because it is full of brilliant writing that tells us a great deal about how the poet in waiting became the poet we know. In Karen V. Kukil the Plath Estate found an ideal editor. Informative, unopinionated, discreet, scholarly, she is everything Hughes (and Plath) would have approved. Especially useful is a comprehensive index which means that a reader can find out in a matter of seconds what Sylvia Plath thought of Henry James or Virginia Woolf or any other writer that impressed her. In the event that this review gives a negative impression of Plath through her journals, let me end by quoting a passage that makes me positively love her. It’s from the Northampton journal, dated March 1, 1958:

This morning after Ted left I blest his diminishing black figure – turned to chanting verses & got magnificent sense of power: learned the brief “call for the robin redbreast & the wren,” “Thou art a box of wormseed,” and began “Hark, now everything is still” – how to describe it? – The surge of joy and mastery as if I had discovered a particularly effective,
efficacious prayer: some demons & geniis fuse, answering when I chant. I will learn Eliot, Yeats, Dunbar – chanted the ‘Lament of the Makaris’ on the toilet. I will learn Ransome, Shakespeare, Blake and Thomas and Hopkins – all those who said to words “stand stable here” and made of the moment, of the hustle and jostle of grey, anonymous and sliding words a vocabulary to staunch wounds and bind up broken limbs...

     That’s our poet! Thank you, Sylvia.