LETTERS HOME
by SYLVIA PLATH
Edited with preface by AURELIA PLATH
512 pages. Harper & Row. $12.50.
When Aurelia Plath told her eight-year-old daughter Sylvia that her father was dead, the child said, "I am never going to speak to God again." When she came home from school that day she presented her mother with an oath to be signed: "I promise never to marry again."
Sylvia took all of life with terrifying seriousness; the words "never again" came only too quickly to her. She was capable of emotional fixity that makes the poems written just before her suicide in 1963 nearly unbearable: pictures of rage and despair drawn virtually in words of one syllable. Her novel The Bell Jar, while written in quasi-Salinger style, is a remorseless account of adolescent breakdown.
Little Bayonets. The book was also a painful blow to Aurelia Plath. Like all the other characters in The Bell Jar, the narrow-minded, hard-working mother is ferociously cartooned. Shortly before trying to kill herself, the heroine watches her sleeping, "the pin curls on her head glittering like a row of little bayonets."
Partly to adjust the image that the novel created of both mother and daughter, Mrs. Plath is publishing an edited edition of Sylvia's copious letters home, from the time she entered Smith College in 1950 until her death. The correspondence will not erase The Bell Jar —those caricatures are indelible. But they do give a different, lively, poignant picture of Sylvia.
The Smith letters are the frankest.
Sylvia arrived trailing three scholarships and several writing prizes. The Plaths had no money, and she worried continually about it. She owed her "charmed Plathian existence" to her schoolteacher mother's efforts, and she was driven by gratitude. "You are the most wonderful mummy that a girl ever had," she wrote, "and I only hope I can continue to lay more laurels at your feet."
It also appears that Sylvia took to heart every bit of propaganda ever put out by the Protestant ethic, college deans of admission and the slick fashion magazines of the '50s. In addition to grinding out straight A's and submitting potboilers to True, "to keep our pot of caviar boiling," she wanted desperately to be "well-rounded." Thus during weekends at Yale or Princeton Sylvia undertook her blind-date excursions cheerfully, and tried to include them in her mother's vicarious life. "Picture me then," she gloats, "in my navy-blue bolero suit and versatile brown coat, snuggled in the back seat of an open car."
With her blonde good looks and long legs (which she considered her best feature) Sylvia was popular, but none of the dates measured up. She wanted a "colossus." She thought such a man might be found in England and applied for a Fulbright grant ("If only I get accepted at Cambridge! My whole life would explode in a rainbow!").
Mental Agony. Sylvia was accepted, and in 1956 found her colossus in the young British poet Ted Hughes. Even in her first ecstasies, there are forecasts of trouble: "I have fallen terribly in love, which can only lead to great hurt. I met the strongest man in the world, a large, hulking, healthy Adam with a voice like the thunder of God."