Pantechnicon; Aurelia Plath

I think my poems come immediately out of the Senshi was an emotional experience as I have. But I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except you know a needle or a knife or whatever it is I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences even the most terrifying like madness being told should this sort of experience and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind. I think that personal experiences is marrying Portland but certainly it shouldn't be a kind of shut box and sort of Mira looking narcissistic experience I believe it should be relevant. And relevant to. The larger things the bigger things such as. Femur and done. Sylvia Plath is the well-known author of The Bell Jar and a poet so enjoyed the 12 years after her suicide her legend is still strong. A celebration of Sylvia Plath

with her mother or Rilya. Tonight on time technic on the nightly magazine on entertainment the arts and ideas made possible in part through a grant from the Korea corporation of Lowell Massachusetts. I now understand. An attractive well educated and extremely talented writer. Sylvia Plath has been heralded in recent times for her ability to express haunting emotion through her poetry. However to understand and gain further insight into her complex nature one must look beyond her published works to discover the bright person behind the tormented poet. This often unrecognized Dimension of Sylvia Plath is revealed in her letters home to her family which have been compiled by her mother. Really. Really the plot is with us tonight to talk about her daughter and the book title letters home published by Harper and Row. We asked her recently how she came to put the book together. I felt that to have her letters showed and sit through them I had informal autobiography of life an

unconscious autobiography of her life totally unconscious of course she never knew that I even kept them and I had hoped that in time I could hand them to her to use in a novel or to just relive the happy experiences in her life to look back upon those that she thought were very difficult and to be able to evaluate them from the point of view of maturity and all of this came through in many of her letters and in her letters. Oh yes her letters there are so absolutely confessional if one wishes to call them that I don't like that word too well but they certainly does because she was completely uninhibited when she did write to me. It was as though she were talking to me most of the letters are included in the book. Or did you have to do a great deal of editing. Yeah I had I AM original manuscript was one thousand eighteen pages long

and then. Very long. No no publisher would publish anything that long so they were edited. And I don't know if you understand what happened when one wishes to publish someone else's letters I did not have the copyright to these letters the copyright was held by a husband who was her heir. She left no where she left no will and so I had no right to publish anything without his permission even though the letters even though than I remember the I own I had physical possession of the letters I physical possession of many of the poems of the manuscript of her early diaries. I cannot publish anything without permission of her husband who is her heir and who owns the copyright. He very graciously gave me permission to publish these but he did make exclusions. There was a recent review that I read in The New York Times which commented on the fact that even though your daughter has been dead now for over 12 years people are still fussing around with religion and how

sad it is really that they keep doing this. Do you feel that she was a legend. She is a legend because of her suicide. I regret that aspect of it that emphasis very much. Sylvia did suffer too deep depressions. One in one thousand nine hundred fifty three when she attempted to take her life because she was convinced that she would never be well again never be capable of creating or learning again and she wished to spare her family the burden of a person who would be incapacitated when she was first door to consciousness her first words were. It was my last act of love. That's what she referred to what she meant. We talked about it afterwards. And it's also embodied in a letter that she wrote to a friend and never sent and one time tossed in my lap saying well if you want to know how it felt here it is. So that is in the book.

Well of course it's all in here the final jar to her Yes problem. Yes but it's written from a very different point of view it's not fictionalized at all. And after those two depressions took six months of a 30 year life six months 12 one year space of time a 30 year life. And that was an affirmative for life. Joyously fully lived with many adventures and I will say that her emotional graph might be something like an outline of the Alps there were no valleys but nevertheless it was on the whole a very affirmative life. Her poems had been called very searing. Do you go along with that. Do you think they are. Yes probably yes. Do you find these sushi hating life so did you find this surprising in your daughter. Was this something that you had not been aware.

Well I realize she was writing out of her own agony. She and her first experience of the breakdown of psychological hell wrists. I have done it again one year in every ten I manage it. A sort of walking miracle. My skin bright is a Nazi lamp shade my right foot to paperweight my face a featureless find Jew linen. Peel off the napkin. Oh my enemy. Do I terrify. Yes Yes Herr Professor it is I. Can you deny the nose the eye pits the full set of teeth the sour breath will vanish in a day. Soon soon the flesh the grave cave will be at home on me and I as smiling woman. I am only thirty and like the cat I have nine times to die. This is number three.

What a trash to and who late each decade what a million filaments. The peanut crunching crowd shoves in to see them unwrap me hand and foot the big strip. Gentlemen ladies these are my hands my knees. I may be skin and bone. I may be Japanese. Nevertheless I am the same identical woman. The first time it happened I was 10. It was an accident. The second time I meant to last it out and not come back atoll Iraq shut as a See show. They had to call and call and pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. Dying is an art like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like Hill. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I have a cold. It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it in state court.

It's the theatrical comeback in broad day to the same place the same face the same brute amused shout a miracle that knocks me out. There is a charge for the eyeing of my scars. There is a charge for the hearing of my heart it really goes and there is a charge a very large charge for a word or a touch or a bit of blood or a piece of my hair on my clothes. So so head doctor so him and me. I am your opus. I am your valuable the pure gold baby that Milt's to a shriek. I turn and burn. I do not think I underestimate your great concern. Ash Ash you Pope can still flesh bone. There is nothing there. A cake of soap but wedding ring a gold

filling. He had gone to his new sister but where. But where out of the ash on a rock is with my red hair. And I eat men like him. And when she wrote the disquieting muses she was describing that feeling that came over her when she had to go down into the cement tunnels to face shock therapy. And that was was what she thought I didn't understand when I came to visit her and I exhibited a cum exterior because my doctor had advised me to do so that I couldn't let my terror and my fears surface because otherwise I'd be no help to her and therefore she gave me that little. Figure of being light hearted and floating on a cloud. And she said you had.

I felt that when you visited me you had no idea of the hell I was going through. Well I shared that hell. Of course she couldn't understand and she couldn't understand that in my control I had to pay for a year later when I had to undergo a gastric to me. Richard was a direct cause of it. It certainly comes through in the book that she had very much of a sunny disposition. It's sort of a paradox it seems that she even with some suicidal tendencies was very very sunny in love life a great deal. If you speak to any of those who were teachers or her friends or neighbors or close friends and neighbors and certainly her family they would agree with that completely. We knew her as a very optimistic philosophical. Affirmative person when she was successful she was very very very confident she might have 10 successes and one failure and that one failure would make her feel very insecure for a time being.

She ricocheted In the Heights and the depths. You you bring out in your book that at one point she had said that she is a girl who wants to be God. Yes but that has been quoted out of context and I regret now having put it in because it's been quoted out of context down below she said. As I look back upon what I've just written I see how overdramatic it all is. So even in her diaries she was fictionalizing and dramatizing herself as the central figure. Why do you suppose that what she was all about has been so exaggerated I wonder again if it isn't because of the romantic aspect of death you know people's reaction when when Marilyn Monroe died. How much of a cult she became. Do you suppose that has anything to do with the romantic aspect of death. I wonder if it wasn't that she dreaded it so that she had to rush toward it. I don't

really know but I do. After all when we do read poets there's hardly a poet in his early years who hasn't written about death and hasn't romanticized it one way or another. Did you discuss all her concerns with you. Did you have a close relationship with a very. And yes she discussed these things many times. I guess picked up her literary interest because of because of you. Well as an English major I love poetry. And before the children who'd even speak I either recited it or saying it to them so I think the rhythms were familiar ones with which they grew up. And right from the time that they heard nursery rhymes. Both my son and daughter would invent their own. A very casual thing nothing outstanding about it. Her initial ambitions were extremely modest considering what

she achieved she thought that she might someday write rhymes for greeting cards and someday she might get into this mix with the story of hers. It was not until she was about a junior in high school and under the fine influence of an outstanding English teacher Mr. Crockett Wellesley High School that she began to take literature and her own writing seriously. And she didn't get a great deal of writing when she was a smith. Yes. Oh yes. Yes of course she was terribly. She was greatly encouraged by the final acceptance is by 17 after 45 rejections. And then when she did have this she won the first prize in short story writing and Mademoiselle and then had poems accepted after her breakdown poems accepted by Harpers which were very very encouraging.

Her book The Bell Jar came out when was in the 60s when she was living in London I guess. Yes it came out just at the end of her life. Was she surprised at the success of. Yes she was a surprised and very young love. You see she had assumed a pseudonym Victoria Lucas. She never wanted it to be published in the United States. She had written repeatedly to her brother about that. She had written to me about it and she said oh forget it it's only a potboiler. I've been accused of calling it a puppet. It was not she. But she also wrote a sequel to that. The sequel had begun earlier than the bell jar. She had started a novel when she went over to England on a Fulbright recounting her adventures and naturally fictionalized fictionalized form that she carried through. Then came. Then she wrote the bell of job leaving the first novel and because chronologically it would fall after the

events in the bell. This she gave the provisional title of the hill of Leopard's she dedicated it to her husband. She kept the project secret more or less. He never realized that she was seriously considering her random writings as a novel. But when I went over there in 1962 and we were alone one of the very first evenings that I was there in England in Devon. This was after the birth of her second child. She brought down a manuscript and read to me from pages of it. However that was in June the 10th of July. She had the greatest blow of her life. She found that her marriage was not in regard to her husband a monogamous marriage any longer.

She did fly into what Erica's young and her perceptive review of letters home called an exquisite rage. She built a tremendous bon fire in the courtyard of the Devon home. I had no idea just what she was about. And then I saw her carry out the folds of manuscript. I learned later not only her own but papers from my husband's study. Her daughter Frieda wanted to run up to the mother who was feeding material into the bonfire. I had to stand in the doorway holding on to the child I had the baby Nicholas in my eye. And I had to watch or tear that manuscript apart few pages at a time and feed it into the flames. This was to be the balance to the Bella job it was to be the view of life seen through the eyes of Health where the bell jar was the symbol the metaphor of the Depression and the convex

lens of The Bell Jar through which the isolated victim of the depression viewed life distorted everything. The hill of leopards that probably wouldn't have been the final title she always changed titles was to show the emergence from the bell job and life beyond that it was to lead from her years in Cambridge to her great romance. And that was to be the central part of it. And her husband was to be the central figure it was dedicated to him and the teaching in America and then the return to England and with the birth of freedom. She stayed on in the Why did she stay on in England after she and her husband said she felt that all opportunities were much greater for her in England. There was the bee as well as a poet there where she hadn't been recognised in America. Up to that time was really not until after her death that she was recognized as a marriage as a major poet

in America and the BBC offered so many opportunities through which she could make a living. Support herself and the children. What kind of a you mentioned that you and she had a very good relationship I wonder what kind of relationship she had with her father. Of course he died when she was very young that she greatly exaggerated that again is an illustration of what she called the three elements in writing the first. The manipulation of experience the second the fusion of personalities and the third that it is a rearrangement of truth. And in her writing she whether consciously or unconsciously fused the figure of her grandfather and her father constantly Her father was an invalid. Most of her life had very very little contact with the children I had to spare him that the children saw him half an hour before bed time each night after they'd had supper and been bathed they'd have a half an

hour with daddy and that was the extent of their relationship. Well her died when she was eighty eight years old. Her poem daddy certainly spelling a poem daddy is largely fictionalized in regard to daddy. True her father hadn't had to suffer an amputation because of a diabetic neglected diabetes that is the reference there. He did he she did have a picture of him standing in front of a blackboard and he had a cleft in his chin but he never was a Nazi he was a tender man who who was a naturalist and who shouted when one stepped on an ant and whose whole life was dedicated to promoting freedom of the individual and freedom of will. He didn't even wasn't even aware of what was happening in Germany as far as Nazi ism was concerned he was desperately ill and died in 1940.

You do not do you do not do any more black shoe which I have lived like a foot for 30 years poor and white barely daring to bring you the Choo Daddy I have had to kill you. You died before I had time. Marble heavy a bag full of God. Ghastly statue with one great toe. Big as a Frisco see you. And ahead in the freak you should learn to wear pull one's big green over blue in the waters off beautiful no suit. I used to pray to recover you do in the German tongue in the Polish tongue scrape flap by the roller of wars wars wars. But the name of the town is common by Polack friend says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you put your foot you will root. I never could talk

to you. The tongue stuck in my jar. It's stuck in a barbed wire snare. I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene and engine and engine cheffing me off like a Jew a Jew to Doctor how Auschwitz Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew. The snows of the tear rolled the clear beer of Vienna not very pure true with my gypsy and sisters and my weird luck and my terror aka packing my towel pack. I may be a bit of a Jew. I have always been scared of you with your love for your gobbledygook and your need to miss stash in your area and I am bright blue. Pens a man pens a man. Oh you not God but a swastika so black no

sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist the boot in the face the brute brute heart of a brute like you. You stand at the blackboard daddy in the picture I have of you a cleft in your chin instead of your foot. But no less a devil for that. No not any less the Black Man Who bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die and get back back back to you. I thought even the bones would do. But they pulled me out of the sack and they stuck me together with glue and then I knew what to do. I made a model of you. A man in black with a mind can through luck and a love of the rack and the screw. When I said I do I do. So daddy. And finally through the black telephone's off at the root the voices just can't work through.

If I've killed one man I've killed two. The vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year seven years if you want to know daddy you can lie back now. There's steak in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy daddy you bastard I'm through. Did she. Do you think that she wrote mostly from personal experience a personal experience was always the nugget was always the kernel from what she read from which she began. But then and in the act of writing in the poem would take over and other things would enter in and take over it. And again that fusion again I go back to the disquieting muses way she describes her being almost

immobilized where she was to dance the Firefly dance in a ballet but she never took ballet lessons and I was the one who was the Firefly and told her the story and I adored the whole performance. My parents were sitting out front right in their eyes I was the star of the performance even though I was only one of perhaps 30 performers at the time. And so he made you realize that you see she does that constantly sometimes you take an episode in her brother's life and make it her own. That's why it's so very difficult to pinpoint what is autobiographical and what is the magic what is action. Is this continual fusion in the mother of Esther in The Bell Jar. I found five people sharing the conversations that were attributed to the mother. And I inquired each time my son I said you remember who said that and he théo Yes Mrs. So-and-so but it was

estas mother who said it each time and it's consistent more consistent than life. How close was she John Sexton. As she had met and at some poetry meetings and then she and both took a course at Boston University that was conducted by Robert Lowell and often at the end of the class they would go over to the Ritz Carlton and have a cocktail and compare notes. It that their association physically was brief but I think that they probably corresponded I have no proof of it. What what what poetry do you think Sylvia was the proudest of that gave you the most satisfaction to write. I'm sure she was proudest of the last poems in her life because she had discussed these without. Who gave a great encouragement and meant a great deal to her those last weeks of her life.

And she discussed these with you at all know her letters no no no. From the time she married her husband she discussed poetry with him and then after their separation she discussed aerial poems with Alvarez's I have read in the savage god that she and her husband help each other in terms of creating. I think they did I'm quite sure they did. I'm quite sure they learned a great deal from each other and her great joy in meeting him was that at last she met someone whom she felt she could never surpass and therefore that would never be any jealousy. She had many loves in her life each time hoping that it would be the last and the permanent one with whom she could share most of herself. And each time finding that there was jealousy in regard to either the time that her writing demanded of her or the very success she was beginning to achieve how did she feel about being a mother. She motherhood

was her great joy and she wrote I think I think her most beautiful poems are other poems written about her children and written about motherhood themselves. I I treasure those of course I care for there's one that I have excerpted a few lines from. I think it tells a great deal about Sylvia's attitude toward her feeling at times separate from other people because she wrote this after the birth of Nicholas. I should meditate upon normality. I shall meditate upon my little son. I do not wish him to be exceptional. It is the exception that interests the devil. It is the exception that climbs the sorrowful Hill. Or sits in the desert and hurt his mother's heart. I will him to becoming to

love me as I love him. And to marry what he wants and where he will. Thank you for being with us tonight. We've been talking with a really good Plath in celebration of her daughter poet Sylvia Plath. Join us every weeknight at 6:30 and weekends at 5:30 p.m.. But than technical This is Eleanor stout. This program is made possible in part through a grant from the current corporation of Lowell Massachusetts.