Sylvia Plath and the Failure of the Tribe

Talking about suicide is not so much talking about death as it is about life, about the pain of living, about existence and about those left behind by the person who takes their own life—in other words, about the failure of the tribe. Sylvia Plath, who described suicide as an art, cultivated this discipline as much as the literary one and graduated cum laude in both, but it is unfair for one dimension to overshadow and contaminate the other. Janet Malcolm, the brilliant author of The Silent Woman, sets out to navigate between the two without drowning in the attempt, and survives the challenge. She manages to make us feel that Sylvia Plath’s failure cannot be told in the singular but in the plural, because it touches everyone who loved her.

Those around the person who commits suicide are left without words, without the possibility of making amends or receiving forgiveness. They are forever guilty, condemned to a lake of fire. If we feel resentment towards those who commit suicide—writes Nelly Arcan, another brilliant writer who took her own life—it is because they always have the last word. Whoever leaves does so with that privilege, and this is the thread running through Janet Malcolm’s essay, which can be situated within the genre of metabiography, or biography of biographies, and is a jewel of literary journalism. The book is not limited to the memory of the ill-fated poet; it is also a chronicle, an investigation with detective-like overtones. It has the spontaneity of a work in progress, filling its pages with encounters with surviving witnesses to the life of the author of Ariel, taxi and train journeys laden with reflections, conversations, letters and domestic meetings over tea and biscuits, as well as mechanical, defensive interviews. What is never absent is the portrait of how Sylvia Plath and her legacy shape every face, every memory and every heart that remembers her.

Her much-publicised suicide prevented her work from developing to full maturity but, above all, it forever challenges the reader of her writing: it turns her into the poet who put her head in the oven, allowing her real self, the “true self” referred to by Ted Hughes, that dark and predatory self, to swallow up every other way of seeing her. And yet it is to that same self that she owed the creative impulse that made The Bell Jar a brilliant first novel and Ariel a masterpiece, but which, paradoxically, ultimately destroyed her. It allowed her to speak from the wound and connect with the collective imagination, with those deep waters from which all tensions arise, including creative tension. The real world, the B-side of those beautiful young American women of the 1950s, angelic and blonde, with plastic bodies and Technicolor smiles, was a terrible grimace. The American poet’s early death will forever hover over her work because the two are inseparable, just as every work is bound to the fibres of its creator and the vicissitudes of their life.

The couple were going through an ordinary, mundane crisis, far removed from anything extraordinary, and no one could have suspected that their small yet profound drama would crystallise and remain frozen for posterity. It would make Hughes forever guilty of the orphanhood in which both children and readers were left. Malcolm, however, does not set out to take sides, but rather to act like a sports journalist: she provides a running commentary on a contest, a struggle between opposing camps, genuinely probing the motives of each side, apportioning blame and offering absolution in equal measure. She gives an account both of Hughes’s detractors and of the poet’s own clan, barricaded inside their bunker, under siege, trying to prevent their pain from being compounded by those who pass off gossip as an academic pursuit.

Reality is multifaceted, and every point of view inevitably leaves something out. Even writers of autofiction must submit to rigorous questioning when the object of invention is themselves. For any writer, personal memory, however elusive, functions as a “pantry” (as Lorrie Moore puts it in See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary) from which the raw material for writing is selected.

If that raw material is as sensational as depression or transgression—Nelly Arcan experienced this twice over with her Whore and Madwoman, both drawn from her experience as an escort—and if the author is a woman, the world will not be ready to easily admit her into the canon of Literature with a capital L: it will be easier to slip into gossip, banality and the baying pack incapable of separating life from work.