What Sylvia Plath taught me

Reading The Bell Jar

For a book club, we read Sylvia Plath earlier this year. Like most people and men, I knew a little about Plath, the bare bones. My lasting impression of her was her suicide, her unfaithful husband and her early death. Most of my thoughts on Plath were unfairly coloured by Woody Allen’s funny but reductive line in Annie Hall.

Sylvia Plath - interesting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college girl mentality. - Alvy Singer (from Annie Hall, 1977)

So, when I picked up The Bell Jar for our reading group, it could be argued that I went in with some presumptions. And I was not ready for what the text gave me.

First of all, briefly, The Bell Jar is a masterful book. That Plath could write so well at such a young age is as dispiriting to me as a struggling writer as it is exhilarating to me as a reader. But her death at the young, young age of thirty (that makes me stop every time I think of that age, not even half a life lived, really) only underscores the magnitude of what we lost by way of future works.

The unanswerable question: If you knew nothing of Plath’s life, what would the book read like?

This post, however, is not a review of The Bell Jar, of which I’m sure there are hundreds of sources by people far more qualified than I. (Or is it me? Do you see what I mean by qualified?)

Reading The Bell Jar, knowing the details of Plath’s life and, importantly, her death, made reading a book a semi-voyeuristic experience. Yes, it is purportedly a novel, but the kindest interpretation would accept that it is highlyautobiographical. As we read about what Esther Greenwood goes through by way of depressive episodes, hospital stays and mental strife, one would have to be thick as molasses not to wonder about Plath and what she went through. I was left with one thought running circles on the track in my head: While it can be said that Plath suffered and was an artist, I am not sure that she suffered FOR her art, as much as she suffered to go on living. And that almost made me feel like an intrusive reader.

When Marcel Proust was an established writer, he wrote a few essays collected in a book called Against Saint-Beuve. The literary critic Charles Augustin Saint-Beuve had argued for a long while that it was essential to know the ins and outs of a writer’s life to appreciate their work. As evidenced by the title of his book, Proust disagreed. He argued that the self that writes is different from the self that lives and that one can gain so little from a writer’s life that will help one appreciate their book. And he made a convincing case. V S Naipaul cites Proust in his Nobel lecture and ends up saying that he is ‘the sum of his books’, which we should be grateful for because Naipaul, the person, was not a patch on Naipaul, the writer, all said and done.

Proust and Naipaul won me over, or rather helped formed my opinion for me about something I had not spent too much time thinking about. I, too, felt that biographies could only be sketches of life, stories in a vague image, which may or may not have anything to do with the writer. Naipaul, the person, is famously absent from most of his books, but Proust, with Proust, his life flows into his work.

And what would Proust have made of Plath? I tried before the book club to see if I knew anyone who was NOT aware of the Plath backstory to help me understand how it would read to them. But sadly, I could not find a suitable person for that. With her, the backstory is the story, almost. Art imitated life, which was painful and the book, while beautifully written, is not a comfortable read, or at least it was not for me. When Esther opens the door to go into her interview at the end, one feels a sense of utmost futility, as one does not feel often in fiction.

Who cares now what happens to Esther? We know what happened to Sylvia.