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| Wednesday, 10 March 2004 |
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'Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment' For the first time, Indian academic KEYA MAJUMDAR gives to the world an honest appraisal of Sylvia Plath's poetry - from biographic, thematic, stylistic and spiritual perspectives. CARL MULLER joins her in considering this unique poetic voice - the true "evolution" of Sylvia Plath. (SYLVIA PLATH: THE COMPLETE POET by Keya Majumdar, Prestige Books, India, 2002, pp. 272 Sylvia Plath has become a legend in the 41 years since her death. In fact, it is hard to disentangle the skein that has been woven by propaganda and counter-propaganda especially with the new film of her and in which she is being played by Gwyneth Paltrow. Keya Majumdar is right in calling her "The Complete Poet" and, as she says in her preface, the poet - a very important poet of American Literature - held for her an extraordinary positive urge where "the howling waves of dissatisfaction and frustrated rage found the shore of peaceful spiritual realisation in the form of artistically realised poetry." In truth, Sylvia Plath was no crusading feminist; nor was she a helpless victim of male tyranny. To read Majumdar is to realise that Sylvia was webbed, encased in one of the world's great tragic love stories - a young wife with a genius for intellect, and as committed to shining as a writer as she was deeply committed and wholly in love with Ted Hughes, her husband. Together, to all who saw them, they were like birds of Paradise. Nicola Tyrer, who knew them well, said they were a glamorous couple: "Their distinctive and unfamiliar voices - Sylvia's emphatic East Coast drawl, Ted's slow deep Yorkshire rumble, memorably described by Sylvia as sounding 'like the wrath of God' - only added to the glamour." Sophisticated Yet, as we know, Sylvia was of a sophisticated, high-strung nature, high-octane intellect, a lover of the sun and beaches, who accepted a sense of equality with her husband. Majumdar's book invites us to wrestle with many questions: Was Sylvia really a feminist? True, the Plath myth has cast her as the supreme feminist standard-bearer and the genius-victim of male greed and brutality. But reading between the lines, we see that Sylvia was not at all "sisterly" with other women. She actually saw women - even teenagers and schoolgirls - as "competition". In female company, she chose to be intense, uncompromising and high-brow, never frivolous or funny, quite intimidating. But we need to also understand that all her young life she had been under intense pressure to be academically successful from her ambitious mother. She could be surely forgiven for being fiercely proud of her award-winning track record. Genius In trying to understand and present a genius of such mettle, Keya Majumdar has probed with surgical precision. Was it the threat "other women" had on her husband and her own fierce competitive spirit that finally led her, in one deep-breathing morning, to gas herself - taking in the vapours of death with a sort of monumental indifference just as Socrates did as casually sip, then quaff the hemlock? She exchanged a lifetime of incandescent dreams for that slow-draw of another kind, that would scorch her lungs, then carry her away with one great, soothing pain that would end all the hurts of a life of many mental conflicts - themes of desertion and desolation; many upheavals, the love for and loss of her father; journeys into frightful nihilism. "The shadow in my mind lengthened with the night blotting out our half of the world; and beyond it; the whole globe seemed sunk in darkness....'I don't think there is any God then' I said dully, with no feeling of blasphemy. Not if such things can happen." (from "Ocean 1212-W" Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams" - Faber, London 1977.p.123). It is so easy for the unintelligent, the empty-headed lobbyists, to lay her death at Ted Hughes' door. What Majumdar has to say is electric. Death rode upon Sylvia's shoulders for a lifetime before she found an even-keeled kind of happiness with Ted. But death would not be denied. Listen to the author: "A psychologist's delight, her (Sylvia's) personality poses all the problems of schizophrenia, manic depression, narcissism, Electra complex, et al. She herself has projected her so-called Electra complex in poems like "Daddy", "Electra on Azalea Path", etc. In Greek mythology, Agamemnon's death had been depicted by drowning; and the daughter Electra was to retaliate her father's death. Sylvia takes a fancy to this image which she uses in many of her poems. Her untoward love for her father led her to the feeling of 'guilt' - a secret guilt and exasperation thereof to her mother, which she expresses in her novel "The Bell Jar" and in poems like 'Medusa' and 'The Disquieting Muses.' She was tortured so much by a feeling of imagined incest that she had to give it an outpouring once for all in that much discussed poem 'Daddy' and get done with it." Brutal Ted Hughes has been branded by the feminists as the most brutal of husbands, yet the truth remains that they were a couple deeply fond of each other - two exceptionally intelligent people who tried to complement each other, yet so different - so very different. In her own assessment, Nichola Tyrer writes: "(Ted) remained the focus of my teenage dreams. He spoke in his slow, deep voice about things. I'd never heard or thought about - paganism and country rites, wise women and ley lines and the survival of ancient races in young features...he was gentle with those whose engines ran on cruder fuel than his own..." And yet, there was a togetherness in the couple's use of language. Tyrer goes on to say: "....'Henry V' and the First World War poets seemed unbearably fusty compared with what Ted and Sylvia were doing with language." What a setting this is! Keya Mujamdar has immersed herself in it all - personality, passion, the plunge, pattern and perspective - every "P" a Plath - discovering the rare fuel that ran the poet's engine until the time when a so-ordinarily vile and cruder fuel brought her complicated life to a compassionless close. This book is a scholarly quest. It is not biography in any real sense and it is not a life retold. Rather, it takes us, and with little remorse, into a world where genius walks that thin, worn line as it drives for perfection, for golden achievement, while dark doubt and fear like a witch-bitch keeps snapping at the ankles. This is a stunning book - a marvellously sympathetic portrayal not simply of Sylvia Plath but of the evolution of Sylvia Plath. Suicide was something the poet thought of as a way of living and writing. The author sees this as "the escapist attitude which snuggled side by side her courageous, challenging attitude to life. And this is the mystery and beauty of her dual personality: when the lonely woman gives up in utter exasperation and exhaustion, the artist takes over and wringing out masochistically the last drop of blood, writes exquisite poetry. It is not for nothing that 'blood' becomes a recurring image in her poetry". Psychic war How does one come to grips with a person, as the author describes, is the theatre of a "perpetual psychic war between two paradoxical forces - self-destruction and self-enjoyment; the fear of being non accepted and the joy of being celebrated"? It was her need for perfection that impelled her to be perfect wife, perfect mother. Here rises the most intriguing situation that is handled with exquisite delicacy by the author. The iconic Sylvia and her poet-laureate Ted. Could such a relationship last? As readers know, Ted began an affair with a woman named Assia Wevill. While the domestic shock reverberated, Ted moved out to London to be with his lover. Sylvia took her children, Frieda and Nicholas to a flat in Primrose Hill, North London. "I'm fighting now against odds and alone", she told friends. It was there, in February 1963, ill and impoverished, that she committed suicide in her kitchen. She was only 30 years old. Six years after, Assia Wevill also killed herself as well as her young daughter by Ted. It was true Greek tragedy that began years ago when Sylvia lost her father and began to weld the past with the present, giving us an astonishing record of all her painful failures which is her poetry. Majumdar offers us an absorbing journey from life to life-and-life, life's-end. What is more, the author defines as she proceeds, and this gives us succinct appraisal of the poetry and the two "abandonments" - first of father, then of husband, that brought on the "gloom-oriented doubtful facet" where "neither self-pity nor depression but an omnivorous anger at everything ruled her psyche". The author quotes Suzanne Juhasz ("The Blood Jet: The Story of Sylvia Plath): "The poems of those final years render in symbolic action her personal battle between life and death. It appears that in committing herself to her artistic and bodily creativity, she had not alleviated the struggle but rather heightened it". The author tells us of her last poems, written, perched on the last edge of life: The woman is perfected Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment. None, she says, can sit back complacently after reading Sylvia Plath... "...and this is how she forces the mystery of tragedy upon us - the solemn mystery that defies definition and solution". Poetic sensibility The book goes on to study Sylvia Plath's early poetry when, in the beginning, she shackled her own poetic sensibility with conformist and traditional chains. But, with the era of post-modernism, she was soon to emerge, writing verse of grotesque power and originality, dipping as it were, her pen with the blood of her bruised soul. She modelled herself on Auden, then was influenced by Emily Dickinson, Thomas, Roethke, Yeats. Scholars will find "The Passion" (as this section of the book is titled) a feast, especially when he or she begins to see how well even ugly death can be transformed and translated into artistic ramifications that proclaim a will to transcend. As Majumdar says: Tendency "This tendency on her part invites psychological understanding of her poetry.... (but) Mentally stable or not, she was a committed poet, both technically as well as theoretically...." Her later poems swept away all artistic, moralistic and social pretensions, plunged her into - "that vortex of confusing elements of both her psyche and the cosmic circumference as such to resolve the bewildering questions of existence, terror and alienation" In her later poems there is the need to discover a novel dimension - a more personal form. She takes on "the senseless superficialities of society and the rotten strings of relationships". The language is hard, sharp, aural and carries in it the sound of a soul that "continuously jumps from one cauldron of suffering to another". We also have an in-depth study of the structure, style and diction as well as Sylvia Plath's Life-View as expressed in her poetry. All in all, a complete story of a truly complete poet and her incomplete life. The author teaches at the Department of English, Jamshedpur Women's College, India and received her Ph.D, from the University of Bhagalpur in 1991. Her book offers a spell-evoking approach to the poetry, the life of Sylvia Plath. She calls Sylvia's poetry "inspired ecstacy" and I would, in turn, call this book "inspired passion" - scholarly, academic (and this well shrouded in language that inspires) and wholly human writing at its best. **** Back **** |
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