Books Of The Times
Published: April 21, 1982
By Le Anne Schreiber THE JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH. Foreword by Ted Hughes. Ted Hughes, consulting editor, and Frances McCul- lough, editor. Dial. 370 pages. $16.95.
IT has been almost 20 years since Sylvia Plath gassed herself in a London flat and became a myth of uncertain meaning. Martyr to some. Bitch goddess to others. To most, a patron saint of pain to be placed on the dashboard of our battered notions about what it is to be a woman and a poet. For two decades we have made her memory serve our purposes. Now perhaps, with the long delayed publication of her diaries, we can begin reckoning with the woman herself.
I say begin, because these journals - made available by Miss Plath's husband, the poet Ted Hughes - are a very truncated and no doubt censored version of the diaries Miss Plath began keeping as a child and continued to keep until three days before her death on Feb. 11, 1963. In his curiously impersonal Foreword, Mr. Hughes notes that this selection of entries contains only about a third of ''the whole bulk'' that is now in the Neilson Library at Smith College. Of the two notebooks that covered the last three (and most productive) years of Miss Plath's life, he writes: ''I destroyed'' one ''because I did not want her children to have to read it (in those days I regarded forgetfulness as an essential part of survival). The other disappeared.''
Still, as maddeningly incomplete as they are, these journals are a revelation. Most strikingly, where one expects morbidity, one finds instead an almost pagan relish for life. In the earliest entries here, made the summer before she entered Smith, Miss Plath writes of her ''consuming desire to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars'' - ''I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.''
Her enemies are time - ''the mocking tick: A Life Is Passing. My Life.'' - and men, because both would rob her of experience. ''My greatest trouble,'' she writes as a college freshmen, ''is jealousy. I am jealous of men - a dangerous and subtle envy which can corrode, I imagine, any relationship. It is an envy born of the desire to be active and doing, not passive and listening.''
Her weapon against time and men will be her writing. ''I cannot live for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux.'' And: ''I will not submit to having my life fingered by my husband, enclosed in the larger circle of his activity, and nourished by tales of his actual exploits. I must have a legitimate field of my own.''
The problem is, as Miss Plath posed it to herself, ''CAN A SELFISH ECCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGINATIVE FEMALE WRITE A DAMN THING WORTHWHILE?'' And can she mate? These are the two question that dominate these journals.
One is answered when she meets Mr. Hughes during her Fulbright year in England. The spirit of grudging compromise that marked her earlier calculations about finding a husband are entirely absent from her descriptions of her ''man of black.'' Although the editing of these journals may have been self-serving, the fact remains that through six years of entries Miss Plath refers to Mr. Hughes as ''my savior,'' ''my magnificent handsome brilliant husband,'' ''my perfect male counterpart,'' ''a man whom I miraculously love as much as life'' and, most stunningly, ''the buried male muse and god-creator risen to be my mate.''
She is harder on herself, and on her writing, which she continued to regard as the justification of her existence. Her effort always is to find ''my true deep voice.'' Her fear is that it has been permanently misplaced. Jan 14, 1959: ''Something deep, plunging, is held back. Voice frozen.'' Feb. 19, 1959: ''What inner decision, what inner murder or prison break must I commit if I want to speak from my true deep voice in writing and not feel this jam-up of feeling behind a glass-dam fancy-facade of numb dumb wordage?''
She uses the diary as a whip, accusing herself of indulging in ''bland ladylike archness,'' ''archaic cutie tricks'' and ''exoticoromantico glory glory slop.'' The irony is that the voice she was looking for, the deep true voice that was not heard until the posthumous publication of the poems she had written in the last months before her death, is present in these diaries from the beginning. In a raw state, to be sure. And only fitfully. But while she was looking to D.H. Lawrence, Dylan Thomas, Theodore Roethke and, of course, Mr. Hughes, and practicing a kind of ventriloquism that made her doubt her talent and even her existence, her own voice was pouring itself out in these journals.
Their publication makes one feel more keenly the loss of a woman who would have been 50 years old this fall. One last thing. Among the sundry unexpected pleasures of these diaries is a brief account of a dream in which Marilyn Monroe appears to Miss Plath as ''a kind of fairy godmother.'' Marylin Monroe gives Sylvia Plath ''an expert manicure,'' offers her advice on hairdressers and then invites her for a ''visit during the Christmas holidays, promising a new, flowering life.''