On One

Patricia Lockwood, in her “Arrayed in Shining Scales,” in the current London Review of Books, writes,

The Silent Woman has everything: psychoanalysts puking because they found Hughes too attractive, Dido Merwin writing an entire essay about how Plath was a foie gras pig, Stevenson palely loitering, thought-foxes, chipped gravestones, poetic tribunals, lesbian readings of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, and Malcolm being perhaps more on one than any journalist before or since.

What does “on one” mean? Is it a misprint? Maybe not. Google provides this definition: “Acting crazy, stirring the pot, causing trouble, being a menace in any capacity.” Does that describe Malcolm in The Silent Woman? I don’t think so.

If you ask me, Lockwood is the one who's on one. Her "Arrayed in Shining Scales" is as wild and strange as its subject (the life and work of Sylvia Plath). I devoured it. 

10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #6 Joanna Biggs' "Sylvia"

Sylvia Plath, letter to Aurelia Plath, November 22, 1962

This is the fifth post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is Joanna Biggs’ brilliant “Sylvia.” It first appeared in the December 20, 2018, London Review of Books under the title “ ‘I’m an intelligence.’ ” A revised version called “Sylvia” is included in Biggs’ excellent 2023 A Life of One’s Own. That's the one I’ll consider here. 

“Sylvia” is a review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vols. I & II (edited by Peter Steinberg and Karen Kukil). It’s one of the most passionate, intensely personal book reviews I’ve ever read. Biggs uses Plath’s life and work to understand her own life. And she uses her own life to understand Plath’s life and work. Her identification with Plath is near total. It began when she was seventeen:

At seventeen, she had told her journal: “I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’ ” And she would retain this intensity across her whole career. I’m sure this is one of the things I found liberating about her when I was seventeen, that she wanted so much and so baldly, so unashamedly. I looked at my own depressed English coastal town, and I wanted more, and didn’t want to feel so guilty about it. Plath’s ambition, though it was stranger and wilder and more antique than mine, legitimized the things I wanted. I uselessly longed and hoped and wrote instead of dating, writing fiction and applying for summer schools. I didn’t think I was allowed to live the life of a writer, although that was what I wanted. Who did I think I was? I should aim for something I could get. But in reach were things I didn’t want. My longing was punctuated with bursts of desire that lasted long enough to complete the form for Oxford. In those moments, I had some Plath in me. I wasn’t waiting for permission that would never come.

Biggs also remembers feeling at seventeen that “I was liking something it was a cliché for me to like. I thought she was for girls like me who were told that they thought too much, who scribbled their feelings in a spiral-bound notebook they hid in the drawer of their bedside table. As well as a reminder that being like that was dangerous.” 

Why dangerous? Because Plath’s life is psychologically fragile, and her attempts to deal with it “take her to one mental hospital after another, one psychiatrist after another, and finally to the electroshock chamber, where they grease her temples and let blue volts fly.” Biggs reports that on August 24, 1953, Plath attempted suicide “and was found barely alive, two days later.” 

Plath recovers. The following summer finds her on the beach at Cape Cod. This, for Biggs, is a key moment in Plath’s life. She calls it Plath’s Platinum Phoenix Summer: “blonde hair, red lipstick, and white bikini on creamy Massachusetts sand, alive when she could have been dead.” There’s a photo from that summer, showing Plath and her boyfriend Gordon Lameyer walking the beach. It figures centrally in Biggs’ piece:

In summer 2021, Plath’s daughter Frieda put a tranche of her mother’s possessions up for auction, including the tarot deck Ted gave Sylvia, their love letters, and their wedding rings. I was tempted by nothing – those are charged objects – apart from one thing: a snap from July 1954, right in the middle of the Platinum Summer. It is mostly of the sea and sky, but Sylvia is in the bottom left corner, smiling out of her blonde bob. She is walking toward Gordon in a halter-neck, high-waisted white bikini, and her left hand swings out loose. She really does look happy. I planned to frame it in white wood under conservation glass and hang it above my desk. Rise again, rise again, rise again. And I bid on it, and even seemed to be winning on my own birthday in July. I don’t know that I’m sad, really, to have lost it (it went for multiples of what I could afford) but I know that if I was ever guardian of a part of Plath’s life, it would be something from that summer, that Platinum Phoenix Summer. 

“Rise again” echoes through Biggs’ piece. She says it when she describes her return to Plath’s writing after her own marriage ends: “This time around, her efforts to rise again seemed clearer to me.” And she says it regarding Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar, and Ariel, the collection of poems she completed before her death: they are “as much about rising again as they are about oblivion.” 

For me, the most absorbing part of Biggs’ intricate review is her analysis of the Plath-Hughes relationship. It begins, “When she meets Ted – which is not the same as saying it is his fault – her death comes into view.” She calls the marriage “fusional”: “Theirs was a fusional marriage: emotionally, physically, editorially.” She says, “They were mutually nurturing in their shoptalk, on which we can eavesdrop in the letters.” She says that Hughes’s affair shattered Plath’s idea of herself. But she also says this:

With the blow came exhilaration, and electroshock The Bell Jar-era imagery: “It broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. I feel elated.”

Biggs mirrors off the Plath-Hughes break-up. She writes, “The idea of a shared life, a place I could live, where I would be believed in and valued, crumbled. After twelve years together, my marriage was over in less than a year of raising the questions. I was thirty-four, stunned and exultant.” She says, “During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary? Sylvia’s late poems suggest: always both.”

Biggs quotes Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and says,

The Lazarene woman is a Jewish survivor of the Nazi slaughter, a sinner-survivor of Lucifer’s fire, but mostly I like to think of Sylvia steeling herself against coming face to face with her rival, her ex, and all the gossipers, with the drumbeat of these fuck-you lines in her head: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.” 

Biggs’ piece ends unforgettably. She imagines that Plath still lives. She imagines meeting her:

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, 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 are you looking at?”

That “still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet” is inspired! The whole essay is inspired – one of the most creative critical pieces I’ve ever read.  

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).