Writing and Language

In the spirit of passing on what has been useful to me I want to recount how I became engrossed in one book, and read the same book several times, as well as reading individual parts separate from those complete rereadings. It's a book that reads differently after one has read other books, or after having done one's own writing.

The book: The Haunting of Sylvia Plath, by Jacqueline Rose, Professor of English and Drama at London (England) University, published by Harvard University Press 1991.

It's unlikely that I'd have read this book if I had not earlier read a book-length article on Sylvia Plath, later published as a book, but first published in two installments in The New Yorker written by Janet Malcolm who concentrated on the soap opera elements of Sylvia Plath's life, especially her suicide in London during a severe, two weeks long winter storm so severe water froze in the pipes. This book, and its author are never mentioned in the extensive bibliography printed at the end of the Jacqueline Rose book.

It's as if the Rose book tries to make sense out of the calamity of the Plath suicide. And, it succeeds, but only within the strict rules of rigorous academic high standards. It's worth noting that in America we settle for the soap opera, and tend to be blatantly suspicious of grownup analysis. (For example, noone will read this journal entry since there is no PR associated with it.)  Janet Malcolm wrote in a scurrilous style, and had lost a law suit for defamation of a NY Psychiatrist, a suit resulting in a huge fine, partly paid by The New Yorker.

The Rose book is actually about Plath, and about Linguistics.

Here is a list taken verbatim from the book, separate quotes scattered throughout the book.

1. Language is anti-phobic

2. All writing is fantasy

3. All language is metaphor

4. Writing is violence

5. All writing is unstable as to meaning

6. Writing is aggression

 

Sylvia Plath's writing can still be found in her Journal, held at Smith College, her letters, short stories, a novel: The Bell Jar, a play, and her poetry in two volumes.  

For me personally what I respond to in her poetry is her willingness to self-express, explore her own heart, and speak to us in many different voices. My favorite poems are:

The Rabbit Catcher

The Arrival of the Bee Box

Tulips

When I become a better reader I'll learn to appreciate much more of her oeuvre. In the meantime I'm fascinated by still unanswered questions about her lived existence.  My first wife was an undergraduate with her at Smith College. I asked her, "What was she like?" She replied, "Very nice; she always smiled, and said hello." How American: pleasantness over valued. Maybe Sylvia went to London, married the worst possible man, the Poet Laureate of England, was cruelly betrayed, and caved from lack of human contact and support. Her two daughters flourished, and one reads her mother's poems to American college audiences. Before she gassed herself with a kitchen oven she sealed her children's bedroom from the gas, and left milk for them to drink.

Barry