Plath is a genre breaker and a cross-cultural heroine. She bridges cultures like the Isis who eventually became a beloved object of worship throughout the Greco-Roman world. Plath has become the object of a cult-like following, her grave a pilgrimage site like the sanctuaries erected in honor of Isis. The repeated defacing of Plath’s grave marker—so that “Sylvia Plath Hughes” reads “Sylvia Plath”—is more than simply retribution against Ted Hughes. The erasure is an assertion that his very name is an affront to the mythology of Sylvia Plath.
The Isis-like Plath encompasses characteristics that would seem to be at odds. Plath’s suicide—and her poems that flirt with death—have become part of the Eros and Thanatos of her biography. And it is precisely this sort of tension between conflicting elements that transforms Plath into a modern icon, one that will continue to enchant and bedevil biographers. “Another biography of Sylvia Plath?” a reader will ask. Yes, the time to define the Plath myth for a new cohort of readers and writers is now.
CHAPTER 1
PRIMORDIAL CHILD OF TIME
(1932–50)
27 October 1932: Sylvia Plath born in Boston while her family lives in Winthrop, Massachusetts; 1934: Otto Plath publishes Bumblebees and Their Ways, a landmark study in entomology; 27 April 1935: Warren is born; 21 September 1938: The great New England hurricane; 5 November 1940: Otto Plath dies of an embolism after an amputation; 10 August 1941: Sylvia’s first poem is published in the Boston Herald; 7 December, The United States enters World War II; 1942: Aurelia Plath moves her family to Wellesley and begins teaching at Boston University; 1944: Sylvia begins keeping a journal and writes for her junior high school literary magazine, the Philippian; 20 January 1945: Sylvia and her mother attend a performance of The Tempest in Boston; 6, 9 August: Atomic bombs dropped on Japan; 1947: Sylvia coedits the school newspaper, the Bradford, during her last year of high school; 1950: Sylvia is accepted as a scholarship student at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives on campus in Haven House. She publishes a story in Seventeen and a poem in The Christian Science Monitor.
Some writers are born to be perpetual exiles and think of themselves as sea creatures. Sylvia Plath liked to tell the story of her mother setting her infant Sivvy on the beach to see what she would do. The baby scrabbled seaward like an old salt, saved from being submerged in an oncoming wave by a vigilant mother who held onto her daughter’s heels. Held on or held back? Sylvia was always of two minds about her mother. Aurelia would later write scholar Judith Kroll that in fact it was Warren who had crawled into the waves—but such facts did not matter to a poet creating her own mythology.
As the poet wrote in an essay broadcast on the BBC near the end of her life, she spent her childhood where the land ended. She described the swells of the Atlantic as “running hills.” Peering at the kaleidoscopic interior of a blue mussel shell, she imagined the intake of air the earth’s first creatures experienced. Living in a house by the sea, she was rocked by the sounds of the tides. Never again would life feel so buoyant.
Sylvia had eight years of this coastal cradlehood. Then her father died, and the family moved upcountry, sealing Sivvy off from the enchantments of childhood like—to use her expression—“a ship in a bottle.” That vision of a seaworld vanished as abruptly as her father, and both seemed to her a “white flying myth,” fleeting and pure and unreachable and moribund for a child growing up in a world elsewhere. As angry as Coriolanus, a bereft Sylvia Plath went into exile. She would accomplish many great things, but never with the assurance of someone who has arrived. She was always looking back, full of regret and uncertain of the future, even though she met so many moments of her life with high expectations. Her life—beginning with her adoration of Superman—became a crusade.
Siv was six years old when war came to Europe, old enough for a precocious child with a foreign father to realize the world was full of villains. “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men,” the insinuating radio voice of The Shadow asked every Sunday evening, answering, “The Shadow knows.” Siv heard Hitler’s speeches, which Americans tuned into with the same kind of hearty compulsion they displayed when listening to the harangues of their own homegrown fascist, Father Coughlin. Later, images of the Führer and the Holocaust haunted Plath’s poetry, amalgamated in her vision of a hellion husband.
Syl was not alone. She went to school with the children of immigrants who watched their parents—exhausted after a hard day’s work—subside beside the radio, awaiting word about the home country. At school, she stood pledging allegiance not with hyphenated Americans, but with kids still called Irish Catholics, German Jews, Swedes, Negroes, Italians, and what the writer later described as “that rare, pure Mayflower dropping, somebody English.” Hands over their hearts, these children faced an American flag draped like an “aerial altar cloth over teacher’s desk.” Not such a different article, really, from Superman’s cape, part of a sartorial ensemble that protected “truth, justice, and the American way.”
They sang “America the Beautiful,” and Syl was weeping by the time they arrived at “from sea to shining sea,” a line that made a lot more sense to an elementary school student than “above the fruited plain.” Moist sea winds permeated the playground with positive ions, the proverbial breath of fresh air that exuded hope and made them exult—when they were not shooting marbles, jumping rope, or playing dodgeball—“Up in the sky, look! It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Superman!”
The comic book version of Superman had become a staple of Action Comics in the late 1930s, but Sylvia seems to have found the radio serial version especially entertaining. The program premiered on 12 February 1940, opening with an announcer addressing boys and girls, telling them about the Superman clubs being formed around the country. Superman was not only an action hero, he was also the newspaperman Clark Kent, who first got a job on the Daily Planet by promising to return to his editor with a good story. Kent got the stories, even as, in the guise of Superman, he rescued young women and others in distress, foiling crimes involving both corruption in American business and threats to national security. A strange dream during summer camp left Sylvia thinking it would not be surprising to hear Superman knocking at her door. By the time she was ten years old, the idea of a powerful man swooping in to save the day had become a constituent of Sylvia Plath’s imagination. But so had the idea of the independent woman, embodied by Lois Lane, who treated Clark Kent with considerable suspicion and contempt, even as she idolized Superman. Getting the story, getting the man, in a world in which both individual and country were on the verge of destruction would remain crucial to Sylvia’s idea of world order.
For a short while, Sylvia had her own Superman at home: her father Otto Plath. An erudite and imperious entomologist, Professor Plath was old school. He was German, and what he said was law. To his daughter, he was Prospero, a diviner of nature’s secrets. He showed her how to catch bumblebees—nobody else’s father could do that! But he was aloof and irascible. He did not know how to play with children. It was not easy to placate Otto the Choleric. His wife, Aurelia, Otto’s former student, tried soothing words, but her emollients eventually evaporated, and he would erupt with thunderous exclamations, waking Sylvia’s younger brother, Warren. The enraged sounds coming from another room in the Plath home would not have been so different from the sound of Hitler’s rants.