Published Sunday, August 20, 2000, in the San Jose Mercury News

PLATH: the last word

BY CYNTHIA L. HAVEN

LONDON

This summer, a simple plaque was added to the building's facade:

Sylvia Plath

1932-1963

Poet

lived here 1960-1961

Question: Why has it taken Britain nearly 40 years to offer this first, minimalist postmortem recognition for the American poet who spent her last five years in London?

One answer: The British hardly see the need for it. When it comes to Plath, one of America's most celebrated female poets, the British just don't get it.

Harsh words

Plath's unabridged journals were published in London this spring, and the American edition will be released in October. The English got the first word on the journals in page after page after page of news articles printed at the time of the British release.

And what words they were. Take this entry from the Spectator: ``What she does not deserve, in any way, is our admiration,'' wrote novelist and journalist Philip Hensher. As for the final journal destroyed by her estranged husband, the late British poet laureate Ted Hughes, Hensher said: ``I wish he had burnt the lot. They can do nothing but harm.''

Her poetry is ``tremendously accomplished but repulsive, indeed near to evil,'' said David Sexton in London's Evening Standard. ``She is a horror poet.''

``It's Sylvia Plath Week -- again,'' moaned the Times Literary Supplement. ``These days, it's always either Sylvia Week or Ted Week. As always during Sylvia Week, the festivities dwell on her self-hatred and self-pity, with a few sideshows devoted to hatred of others.''

There is, of course, a different point of view on Plath: the American one. J.D. McClatchy, poet and editor of the Yale Review, has written, ``No poet in the second half of the 20th century made English sound more terrifying or more ecstatic. No poet made her life more convincingly into a new mythology of loss. Her poems remain axes after whose stroke the wood rings.''

And McClatchy is no lone fan. His remarks echo the prevailing American critical opinion.

What's going on? Once again, we are two nations separated by a common language, and the Hughes-Plath controversy shows it. Reading the press clippings and the myriad amateur Web sites and online chat groups, one senses people screaming at each other from both sides of the Atlantic. And the louder we scream, the less we understand each other.

After all, how could Americans not identify with Plath? Generations of Americans were brought up to embrace the qualities she represents: manic industry, indefatigable perfectionism, aggressive competitive urge and ruthless ambition. By age 17, Plath had relentlessly submitted 46 short stories to Seventeen magazine before one was finally accepted.

We know that this American cocktail can be deadly. Smothered by domesticity and crucifying herself on unworthy goals (to write stories for such ``slicks'' as the Ladies Home Journal, for example), Plath was hounded by the myth of the cheerful, well-rounded, confident, all-American girl. She was, as a sympathetic British literary critic Jacqueline Rose put it, ``unredeemed by the feminism which arrived too late on the scene.''

American reaction

She killed herself after her husband left her for another woman. Hughes' leaving proved to her once and for all that their intense life together was anything but perfect. What could be more American than her reaction, more characteristic of a nation where flexibility and compromise cohabit awkwardly with the Emersonian drive for self-perfection? ``Making do'' is what the English do in just such a situation: make a rational adjustment to the real world. For them, ``behaving badly'' -- not imperfection -- is the unforgivable sin. And Plath behaved badly.

So badly that redeeming explanations are almost disregarded. In the current spate of articles, this story from the Guardian hardly caused a ripple: ``New research supports the claim by Sylvia Plath's doctor that an inherited condition led to her suicide.'' The ``new research'' is simply that (surprise!) Plath's paternal family was riddled with severe depression.

Dr. John Horder of London told the Guardian that a few days before Plath's death, he had prescribed antidepressants, which take effect in 10 to 20 days: ``At the time of her death, Horder says, she had reached the dangerous time when someone with suicidal tendencies is sufficiently roused from disabling lethargy to do something about it.'' This, apparently, is news to Britain.

The reason such a story is obvious to me is that I am an American -- and America is a country that gives great credibility to genetics, psychiatry and ``scientific'' theories of all kinds.

Hence I, too, am frustrated by the British insistence on talking about this victim of early electroshock therapy as if she were the normal girl next door -- and with the way the British tack on the proviso of mental illness as if it were some trivial form of sinusitis. Biographies, newspapers and memoirs carp in mean-spirited detail about how awful she was, how difficult to love or even like -- for example, the dinner parties where she would only glare.

I cringe at how Plath's zest for food, clothes and matching luggage roused the contempt of drab, penurious, postwar Britain.

In England, it's one thing to affect artistic mannerisms; it's another to be crazy. Plath was ``terrifying'' (several newspapers use the term) to a nation that prefers women as either managing (Margaret Thatcher) or manageable (Bridget Jones, heroine of recent novels). It's still a country where being told you have a ``complicated'' life is a put-down.

Could England have inspired the crazy West Coast euphoria of the improvisational, experimental Beat movement? (No, the social protest of Britain's Angry Young Men is not quite the same.) Could it have tolerated the psychological extremes and mental illnesses of a Robert Lowell or a Theodore Roethke, or the suicides of John Berryman, Anne Sexton and others? Is it a coincidence that the ``confessional'' poetry movement began in America?

Not bloody likely.

Pressure to internalize

The trouble with stereotypes is they are usually based on some reality. In England, you are still supposed to tuck it in, to cope -- even with adultery, death, mental disintegration. Public discussion of ``innermost feelings'' is still in bad taste.

This fundamental disparity underpins almost all the recent discussion of Plath in a nation where unpleasantness is still muffled. Hughes' relationship with Assia Wevill, the cause for his separation from Plath, was hushed up for years because, people reasoned, it would only cause harm. Hughes, meanwhile, balked at a literary interpretation that focused on the ambivalent sexuality in one of Plath's poems; he asked readers to consider the sensibilities of his children, although they were well into their 30s and presumably able to cope for themselves.

But Hughes himself has vindicated Plath. In a sad, graceful gesture as he was dying in 1998, he released the journals, letters and other revelatory papers that are now collected for publication. And his final book of poems, ``Birthday Letters,'' confirms that the meeting of the poets was as volcanic as Plath records, despite his earlier claims that her accounts were ridiculously exaggerated.

In life, both had labored fiercely for each other's art. Hughes continued to advance and defend Plath's literary reputation ferociously in the decades after her death, even at the expense of his own. With his own death, he affirmed her humanity as well -- even in the face of continued British bafflement.

The first words in this round were England's. Let the final words be Plath's, as she ricocheted between illness, fever, ecstasy and black depression in her final months:

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Your body

Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern . . .

My head a moon

Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin

Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light . . .

-- ``Fever 103'' (October 1962)