Joanna Biggs on Sylvia Plath's Letters

Sylvia Plath, Letter to Aurelia Plath (November 22, 1962)

I’ve just finished reading Joanna Biggs’ “I’m an intelligence” (London Review of Books, December 20, 2018), a review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. What an impressive piece of critical writing! Quoting extensively from the letters, Biggs reconstructs Plath’s life, blending it with her own personal history and her love of Plath’s writing. For example:

And I had married in a Sylvia dress, with ‘love set you going’, the first half-line of ‘Morning Song’, which begins Ariel, engraved inside my wedding ring. My idea of marriage was a Plath-Hughes one: meeting at Oxford, honeymooning in Venice, sharing a study, writing a book each, painting our North London living room French grey, babies in view. It broke down even so. During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary? Sylvia’s late poems suggest: always both. The speaker of ‘Lesbos’, ‘The Jailer’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ couldn’t be more of a victim, but she expresses herself as if no one has told her that. The Arielvoice makes something glorious of a woman’s always abject – divorced or not – position in the world. ‘Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff!’ Sylvia wrote to her mother ten days after Ted left the marital home. ‘What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like.’ 

Describing Plath’s state of mind after Hughes left her, Biggs says,

The lowest point came when she found Ted’s poems about Assia, ‘describing their orgasms, her ivory body, her smell, her beauty, saying in a world of beauties he married a hag, talking about “now I have hacked the octopus off my ring finger”. Many are fine poems.’ It was torture:

I am just frantic … I still love Ted … I am drowning, just gasping for air … I have no one … How can I tell the babies their father has left them … How and where, O God do I begin? … Frieda just lies wrapped in a blanket all day sucking her thumb. What can I do? I’m getting some kittens. I love you & need you. 

At the end of this letter I was in tears, and had to stop reading. Plath received a reply from Beuscher before she posted the letter and added a postscript: ‘PS Much better. The divorce like a clean knife. I am ripe for it now. Thank you, thank you.’

The piece’s final paragraph is amazing; Biggs imagines Plath is still alive:

I sometimes like to imagine that Sylvia Plath didn’t die at all: she survived the winter of 1963 and she still lives in Fitzroy Road, having bought the whole building on the profits of The Bell Jar and Doubletake, her 1964 novel about ‘a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter & philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect’. She wears a lot of Eileen Fisher and sits in an armchair at the edge of Faber parties, still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction earlier this year, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet. She is baffled by but interested in MeToo. She still speaks Boston-nasally, but with rounded English vowels. She stopped writing novels years ago, and writes her poems slowly now she has the Pulitzer, and the Booker, and the Nobel. She is too grand to approach, but while she’s combing her white hair and you’re putting on your lipstick in the loos, you smile at her shyly in the mirror and she says: ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’

That “still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction earlier this year, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the most absorbing, memorable reviews I’ve read in a long time. 

Postscript: Biggs’ piece has at least four New Yorker connections: (1) the magazine published twenty-eight of Sylvia Plath’s poems, including “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” (August 9, 1958), “Water Color of Grantchester Meadows” (May 28, 1960), and “Tulips” (April 7, 1962); (2) Biggs has written two New Yorker pieces: “We,” a review of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (January 27, 2014); and “He’s Gotta Have It,” a review of Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana (July 30, 2018); (3) Dan Chiasson, in his excellent “The Girl That Things Happen To” (The New Yorker, November 5, 2018), reviewed the second volume of Plath’s letters; (4) and, of course, Janet Malcolm’s brilliant The Silent Woman, a critical analysis of writings about Plath, originally appeared in The New Yorker (see here and here).