The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1950 – 1962) Review Pt. 1

Read part two – Plath as Introvert | Read part three – Difficulties of being a writer

Over the years I have read a number of editions of Plath’s journals. For a long time, the only version available was an American edition edited by Francis McCullough and tellingly, Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes (who excised certain passages he felt were too intimate about their marriage), which was originally published in 1983 and quite difficult to get hold of in the days before Amazon. I managed to find a copy in a second-hand shop, published in 1991 with a lurid yellow cover, blood-red lettering and a ghostly tree, which I devoured during my English degree as I was writing a long essay on Plath’s autobiographical style of writing. In 2000, a new edition was published with Karen V. Kukil at the editorial helm, a near complete collection of Plath’s journal writings from the archives. It was published in a beautiful hardback and cost a staggering £30 (more than I had ever paid for a book at the time) followed by a paperback edition in 2001 which was no less big in size. In January, Faber finally published a new portable edition of the journals, a reasonable sized book that could easily be carried around and which, compared to the first copy I owned, has a much more handsome cover.

Plath’s journals are a great wonder to anyone interested in her writing, a vital part of her canon that helps us better understand both the poet’s life and her work. Even though Plath only lived until she was thirty, her diaries, letters, poems, short stories, children’s books, and her one novel, The Bell Jar (1963), represent a surprisingly large corpus of writing, an indication of just how prolific she was as an artist. The journals not only document shimmering moments of her life between the years of 1950 – 1962, they also demonstrate how she developed as a writer over the years. Dramatic moments are perfect material for the young poet to transmute into lyrical passages, melodramatic romance stories, or surreal streams-of-consciousness – all attempts at becoming better at her craft and often fictionalising events in her life within days of them happening. Her journals are full of writing exercises and indeed, the florid, over-descriptive style she adopts in her early to mid-twenties can sometimes grate on the reader’s nerves, but the triumph is seeing in how she ‘burned away all the peripherals’ to get to the style of writing she is known for in her late work. As she says about poems she wrote in Yaddo, a writing colony, “The absence of a tightly reasoned and rhythmed logic bothers me. Yet frees me.” We see this poetic development as she prepares for the most fruitful period of her writing life.

As we move through the years with Plath, this florid writing is eventually dropped in favour of a more colloquial style adopted for short stories like ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,’ her only novel, The Bell Jar, as well as many of her late Ariel poems. One can even see the idea for The Bell Jar slowly being conceived, turned over as good material for a story. She uses the title early on in her journals, clearly intrigued by the concept and how it might be expanded as a theme across a piece of writing. Plath develops the idea, pushing it along at a distance, even while bemoaning the fact that she does not have a decent subject for a novel (there were a number of false starts, like her lost novel Falcon Yard about her life in Cambridge). It took her a number of years, while living in Chalcott Square in London, before she could even get near the material, perhaps sensing that this painful episode in her life was just that, too painful to write about. But she used her journals to get to the subject – there are indeed instances of lines that Plath has lifted straight from her journals into her novel, showing how she could rework raw material into her fiction.

Plath’s greatest tragedy was her suicide in her thirtieth year, but equally tragic is the loss of her last two journals, covering the end of her marriage to Hughes, the intense writing of Ariel, and the terrible winter of 1962-63. As Hughes admitted in the first edition, he destroyed the very last journal written up to three days before her death ‘because I did not want her children to have to read it’ (one can only guess at the private excoriating account of her husband and her marriage), while the penultimate journal from ’59 onwards ‘disappeared’. Thus depriving literature of a rare insight into how the poetic mind works and how one of the most remarkable partnerships of poetry came to an end. Perhaps this is the most unforgivable act by Hughes on behalf of Plath. What if Plath had lived? It is likely that having gone so far in her poetry, she would have concentrated on prose, having written two-thirds of a second novel called Doubletake or Double Exposure detailing her husband’s affair with Assia Wevill and the destruction of her marriage (this unfinished novel, rumoured to be around 130 pages long, also conveniently ‘disappeared’). Plath admired Iris Murdoch, and one could very much imagine Plath writing the same kinds of novels as A Severed Head (1961) or The Sea, The Sea (1978). Sadly, her tragic suicide stopped short one of the poetic geniuses of the twentieth century.

The journals are vital for anyone interested in Plath’s work but should not be read in isolation. As Plath said herself, “I only write here when I am at wits’ end, in a cul-de-sac. Never when I am happy.” Thus we get a warped view of the woman and the writer, but read in context with her poems, letters, and prose, we get an unprecedented insight into the singular mind of an individual who could not imagine a life without pen, paper, and the release of imagination.

Buy The Journals of Sylvia Plath (Amazon UK)