The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath Paperback – 21 Dec 2002

When one is a fan of Plath (1932-1963), one feels one has to issue a disclaimer that it isn't the sensationalized, soap opera of her life that appeals and compells, but rather the sheer force of her talent that attracts. I think there is no technical virtuouso like Plath in poetry, no one with her emotional compass and her intuitive impact. The woman was a stunningly brilliant poet (and her novel The Bell Jar is a fabulous evil twin Skippy to Bridget Jones).

I have just finished reading the 670-some pages of her unabridged journals, published in the United States in 2000 for the first time. I had read her abridged journals during college, and I remember nothing like the impact that comes here. And now that I am done, I feel kind of grieved in a new way for the loss of her, a fresh hurt.

The book is divided into sections based on her notebooks or journals that include Plath's adult journals from 1950 to 1962, and is an exact transcription of her writing, including errors and notes on edits she made or that her husband, the late British Poet Laureate Ted Hughes may have made, in the original manuscripts. The unabridged version comprises sections from the following years: July 1950 to July 1953; November 1955 to April 1956; July 1956; July 1956 to August 1956; January 1957 to March 1957; July 1957 to August 1957; August 1957 to October 1958; and December 1958 to November 1959. The 15 appendices contain journal fragments and entries starting from October 1951 to 1962. And the phases of her life included are some of her years as an undergraduate at Smith, her time at Newnham College, Cambridge, as a Fulbright Scholar, her honeymoon in Spain with Ted Hughes, her married life with Hughes in Cambridge, her life with Hughes as university instructors in Massachusetts, her life with Hughes as freelance writers in Massachusetts, and some of the appendices include journal entries made when they lived in England before their marriage ended. Shortly before he died, Hughes unsealed two of her journals, which are published here for the first time, that contain her notes on her therapy in Massachusetts shortly before they moved to England. (Two journals from the end of their marriage and written at the end of her life are not included. One, according to Hughes has been missing since Plath's death, the other he destroyed after her death to spare their two children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes.)

I think it's important to note what is missing here before I write about what is included. Those looking for "G" on her college-age suicide attempt won't find it. While some of Plath's dark mood shortly before her attempt in August 1953 is recorded, nothing specifically about that event was written, and Plath didn't keep a journal for up to two years after that. The missing and destroyed journals mentioned above were written during the time of the discovery of Hughes's affair, the end of their marriage and the months she lived in London shortly before her suicide there in February 1963. The one Hughes destroyed contained entries up to three days before her suicide.

And what is missing isn't missed, I think. What you get instead of the sensationalism and scandal are the real workings and pressures of the ambitious, 1950s coming-of-age, conflicted, smart, needy woman that Plath was. Her ambitions are tremendous, and the pressures on her internally and externally match them. Her mother's pressure to find a secure job conflicts with Plath's need to be free of such constraints to really try to write. But when she has the time, she is scared of writing because she fears failure. And so on.

Aside from seeing how she works, processes ideas, plans stories, copes with challenges and rejoices over triumps, Plath is interesting for the time in which she came of age in the 1950s -- a spectacularly Smith-and-Cambridge educated young woman who knows that a role is wife and mother is dictated to her. Her marriage means an immeasurable amount to her -- she recounts how lucky she feels that she could meet someone she admires so much as Ted and marry him. And she wants him to succeed first; she thinks it will be easier at home if he does, but one can see the tension that causes her, as she so deeply wants to succeed as well. "Dangerous to be so close to Ted day in day out. I have no life separate from his, am likely to become a mere accessory. Important to take German lessons, go out on my own, think work on my own. Lead separate lives. I must have a life that supports me inside" (p. 524).

There is a constant theme in the later journals, curiously, of her writing that she needs to learn German. She is constantly instructing herself to study German. Learn German. Read German. It's bizarre to the reader of the journals who cannot connect that with her overarching goals of being a prize-winning, published successful writer of both poetry and prose. But she constantly reminds herself of what she has yet not succeeded at and what she must do to meet her goals. (And her father spoke German and died when she was 8, and one cannot deny that obvious connection.)

The chronological sections each have their own definite characters, as Plath becomes more independent and more skilled. One that really stands out with what I term Plath's "psychotic verve" is the December 1958 to November 1959 journals that she wrote as a means of working through her therapy sessions and making the most of them. The first entry is the reaction to her therapist telling her, "I give you permission to hate your mother." One can see the roots of some of her later, famous poems in these paragraphs as she slogs through the family sacred things and norms, challenges them and tests her own strength against those mores. An interesting journal entry from this time includes the day on which she was FINALLY finished teaching at Smith and could be free to write creatively nearly full-time, and cannot find Ted, who was supposed to meet her. At last she saw him, walking up from a pond with a young, flirty Smith student. She was furious. What is fascinating about the entry is how she takes the time to completely set up the situation, writing about the whole day with purposeful foreshadowing incidents, building up the suspense of the moment so that the reader may experience her disappointment, suspicion and anger, too.

The final section, Appendix 15, includes character sketches of her neighbors in North Tawton, Devon, England, and recounts her and Ted's and the children's lives as far as they come in contact with the people with whom she interacts there. The section includes a detailed description of the birth of her son, Nicholas, and the story of the death of one of her neighbors. As the last entry, it is poignant.

And to spend this much intimate time with Plath, and then to get to the end, see that the marriage broke up shortly after the last entry, and that she was dead not long after that is a new, and painful experience, because one gets to know her in a real, time-consuming way through these pages. It seems even more of a regret.

When Plath's journals were first released fifteen years ago in highly abridged form (thanks to the cuttings of her husband, Ted Hughes), the ellisions seemed as tantalizing as what remained. It has long been recognized that Plath was one of the most articulate minds of her generation, and her life story (in particular, her first breakdown in college, and then her courtship and later break-up with Hughes) has been the source of fascination among scholars and the general public for decades.

Hughes's death made possible the restoration of many of the lost passages concerning him--and Plath's other portraits of friends and her mother--for the first time. Clearly she emerges as a ruthless observer of the human condition, and a fantastic wordsmith: her description of something as mundane and disgusting as picking her nose becomes something of a revelation through her linguistic gifts. She also emerges as something of a monster: although it does much to excuse her spiteful caricatures of her acquaintances--and her almost Euripidean fury towards her poor mother--by remembering that the journals served as cathartic self-therapy, still the venom within them remains deeply disturbing.

The greatest handicap of this edition is its strange chronological sequencing: Kukil often positions appendices in very odd places, disrupting the narrative of the artist's life.

Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) is an icon of the alienated poetic soul confronted with a world of potentially numberless Auschwitzes and Nagasakis, the soul who chooses self-destruction in the face of this existential crisis.

These unabridged journals, edited by Karen V. Kukil, are a vast improvement over the perniciously edited version published in the 1980s (for too long the only one available), whose preparation was supervised by Plath's ex-husband the poet laureate of Britain, Ted Hughes.

Hughes has been cast as the villain of the piece vis-a-vis Plath's life, having been blamed (rather wrongfully) for her suicide at age thirty, and having been accused (more rightfully) of effectively censoring Plath's work, both poem and prose, following her death, whether by legal process, blue pencil, spontaneous rearrangement, or outright destruction of material.

Comparing the Hughes edition to the Kukil edition JOURNALS is an eye-opening education. Hughes slashed vast amounts of material from Plath's daily record, and bowdlerized much of the rest. He extensively editorialized the text. The Sylvia Plath of Hughes' creation strikes the reader as remote and too measured---as if she was writing even her journals for an audience.

The unexpurgated Sylvia Plath who appears in the Kukil JOURNALS is a far more vulnerable, wistful, soft, tough, gritty, obscene and sexualized person---in short a real woman.

Unlike Hughes, Kukil avoided editorializing the text, but perhaps too zealously, thus losing sight of something important. Unless Plath speaks to specific issues, the reader is left unanchored in the 1950s, an era of vast changes whose roil and turmoil unquestionably had subtle (if not always journalistically noted) effects upon Plath. Kukil's edition is purely Plath's voice, wholly on her own.

We see Plath struggling with her inner creative processes, her emotional needs, her fears and doubts and certainties, her boyfriends' demands for sex (1950's style), her warring desires for order or chaos, the daily and mundane realities of a husband, children, career and travel, and paying the electric bill, all this in the face of her underlying lifelong flirtation with suicide.

THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH are an absolutely essential adjunct to Sylvia Plath's writings. They gift the reader with an intimate view into the mind and creative processes of this brilliant, unbalanced, creative and self-destructive woman.

I wish I could have given this book 5 stars, the content is riveting, but I decided to give it four because of the editing by Karen V. Kukil.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath as we all know are incomplete, they were edited (sanitized) by her husband Ted Hughes. No doubt whatsoever that the material he 'lost' was detrimental to him. The only thing he allows in the book is her account of his dalliance with a student, after which she begins to see him in a different light. It leaves you at the end of the book feeling very sorry for this woman, and wanting to find out more. (Which one can't help feeling was a marketing ploy by Hughes, who sold the rights to her book the Bell Jar to the Americans after her death in spite of her mother's objections, so that he could raise the money to buy a third home).

Sylvia Plath was brilliant, sexy, vivacious and sociable. She was also completely obsessed with analyzing the working of her mind, her emotions and sensitivities. She was narcissistic, selfish and critical to the point of meanness. The rawness of her emotions is hard to take sometimes. What a normal person would consider to be a rough sea of life and cope accordingly, she turns into a force 10 hurricane. One cannot help feeling that the journals were written to be published, that the author KNEW someday they would be discovered and read by everyone. The writing is beautiful. The very first entry July 1950 is a delight:-

"I may never be happy, but tonight I am content. Nothing more than an empty house, the warm hazy weariness from a day spent setting strawberry runners in the sun, a glass of cool sweet milk, and a shallow dish of blueberries bathed in cream......"

Once started, it is hard to put the book down.

A word now about the editing. I think the book could have been better organized for the general reader, it is formatted like a text book. All the cross-referencing! I had to use two bookmarks all the way through the reading of the book. The 'Notes' could have been at the bottom of each page instead of hidden at the back of the book. The Appendices could have been Notes at the end of each appertaining journal section, and the Index could have been better arranged. The section on Sylvia Plath (which takes up 5 1/2 pages of the index) should have been separated from the rest, to make it less confusing.

"From the moment I was born---I was doomed to sprout breasts and ovaries rather than penis and scrotum." -entry from SP journals-
I thought I knew everything about Plath, but I was mistaken. This book paints a new an unexpected picture of her. Somebody fun, totally insecure (imagine SP being insecure), outrageously goal-oriented, quite child-like at times and sugar sweet. But her unbearable lonliness seeps in also and the depression and the loss of control. This is the SP that most of us think we know.
"Whom can I talk to? Get advice from? No-one. A phychiatrist is the God of our age and I won't take advice, even if I want it. I'll kill myself. I am beyond help." -Jounal entry-
The journals begin with entries from 1950-1953...
When SP was only 18-her insight, vocabulary, knowledge about the universe, and fluid sentences were evident...even then.
In one of her journals she describes rain as she does many times in the book---
"listening to it spurting and drenching and all the different timbers of tone and syncopation-hard maetallic."
A cleansing of one's mind? A small baptism for one who hates God? The washing of the soul? We shall never know. But look for all the metaphorical images of rain in her writings. Beautiful.
Reading the journals-I felt deliciously naughty, as if I were invading somebody's private letters. And I felt a sense of sister-hood with SP for the first time...as she was experimenting and despartely trying to find the right date, man, soul-mate and equal.
"I have at best three years in which to meet eligible people."
She was only 18 or 19! Did she know she was going to kill herself then?
In an entry about Ted Hughes (her husband) she writes...
"He is the perfect male counterpart to my own self."-journal entry-
How wrong she was.
What pissed me off was SP is continually irritated about the women's role in the 50's...
"Waking to a new world with no name, being born again, and not of woman." -journal entry-
But then she turns around and writes this...
"I am at bottom, simple, credulous,feminine, and loving to be mastered."
And this mastering she allowed Ted Hughes to do...And I hate her for it.
Personal stuff aside. SP gives the reader superb advice and imformation about the writing life...
" Write. You have seen a lot, felt deeply and your problems are universal enough to be made meaningful. Write."
"I must write without glazing."
"If writing is not an outlet-what is!"
"Writing is a religious act."
"The worse thing, worse than all of them, would be to live without writing."
"I must write every morning, recapturing, embroidering."
"Taste the phrases,tough,knotty, blazing with color and fury."
"Writing, feeling the colors, words joining, moving patterns that please my ear, my eye."
Etc...Etc...Etc...
The journals are 700 pages of lessons, insight, what-not-to-do's,what-to-do's, and the fragmented story of a life.
Too short...Too brief. Too sad for most.
"What horrifies me the most is the idea of being useless." -SP-
"I feel helpless when I think of my writing being nothing." -SP-
If I could talk to SP this moment, I would say,
"You're a genius. A poet among poets. Brilliant. People love you. Your mother loves you. You're husband is a jerk. Leave him. Your children need you. You will probably win the Pulizer one day. Live. Live. Live. "
But it probably wouldn't be enough.
It was never enough for Plath.