Seducing the Demon (5 page)

In college, we passionate future writers studied Blake, Keats, and Byron, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Theodore Roethke, John Berry-man, Robert Browning, etc. Yes, we knew there was a Mrs. Browning, but hadn’t she written only one treacly poem—“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”? Emily Dickinson lurked in Butler Library in something called the American Men of Letters series. Edna St. Vincent Millay, a Barnard graduate, whom we had pored over as teenagers, was not on the Barnard syllabus. Dorothy Parker, whom we also adored, was deemed a light versifier, not worthy of academic interest. In fact, the whole era of suffragists and flappers—our grandmothers’ generation—occasionally surfaced as social history, but mostly it was invisible, as was its message that free women could change the world. Later we would call that suffragist generation the First Wave of feminism and ourselves the Second Wave. (Actually Mary Wollstonecraft was the First Wave, the suffragists the Second and my generation the Third—but who’s counting?) Feminism, an Enlightenment ideal, is more honored in the breach than in the observance—like free speech, the brotherhood of man and the ideal of racial equality. Feminism ebbs and flows like the sea. Yet the truth remains that my contemporaries and I would have to ride our own wave—whatever number we dubbed it—to believe in ourselves as writers.

Here’s whom we did not read in college (in addition to Millay and Parker): Amy Lowell, Anna Wickham, Edith Sitwell, Stevie Smith, Louise Bogan, Ruth Pitter, Gertrude Stein, Laura Riding, Judith Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Kathleen Raine, Margaret Walker, Carolyn Kizer, Ruth Stone, Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Sara Teasdale, May Swenson, May Sarton, Grace Paley, Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton—though all these women were published then. We do not like to admit that politics plays a part in literary reputations, but without politics we would still be invisible. Our daughters cannot even imagine female invisibility. We raised them telling them they could do anything and everything. We told them God might well be female. We told them we wanted them
because
they were girls. We filled their heads with female goddesses, women poets and women’s history. (Dear Goddess, don’t make me call it
herstory or womyns’ history
—I may break out in hives.) The point is: We taught them to love themselves.

They are still condemned to the ghetto of chick lit, and reviewed poorly for writing about things women care about—proof of second-ctassness—but at least they are no longer silent.

When my daughter Molly started to write, it never occurred to her to write in a male persona. She knew she could be a writer. Her mother was a writer, her father was a writer and her grandfather was a writer. She did not doubt her right to a voice.

What a change we have wrought. When I see all these young women writing chick lit, I’m proud. They may be writing about sex and shopping and dumping Mr.Wrong for Mr. Right or Mr. Right for Mr. Wrong. They may have the white weddings and diamond rings we scorned as hopelessly bourgeois, but at least they’re writing. They have their own voices and their voices are loud and insistent. We were afraid to stamp a tiny foot against God for fear that the guys would laugh. And laugh they did. Paul Theroux called Isadora Wing “a mammoth pudenda.” Even intelligent writers were male chauvinist pigs in those days. Reviewing
Fear of Flying in The New Statesman,
Theroux must have had a full-scale panic attack. What else would explain his calling my heroine, and by extension her author, “a mammoth pudenda”? What was he afraid of? Obviously a huge
vagina dentata
. I hope he’s gotten over that. I think I have, but I’m still bitching, so maybe not.

What would happen when women told their side of the story? Would the world split open? In a way, it
did.
And most of the results were sanguine. Fatherhood was liberated. Men can now admit they like being close to their kids. Women can admit they don’t always. Life is less rigid. Women earn money. Men cook. Women say how much they hate housework. They are not ashamed to order out. They are not afraid of fantasy. They admit to having sexual dreams and feeling pure lust. They have sex with the occasional demon just for the fun of it. They have sex with their girlfriends and don’t make a federal case out of it. Even the ones who want to stay home with their babies know they have choices.

I survived to have the last laugh. Keats notwithstanding, book reviews can’t kill. Many of the men and women who were terrified by
Fear of Flying
have either gone silent or convinced themselves they always loved the book.

Now the girls of my daughter’s generation have size-twelve feet and booming voices. They all have BlackBerries and Treos. They text-message their funky desires to their lovers. They read my books and think:
Why did my mother hide this from me? It’s not that raunchy at all.

 

 

We conveniently forget that Sylvia Plath was not known until 1963, when she was already dead. Her entire public career was posthumous. Had she lived, would her poems have had the same appeal? Or was the bloody fingerprint on the page part of the allure? An unanswerable question. We want to know great poems have great consequences—for their authors and their readers.

When I was at Barnard, my writing teacher, the poet Robert Pack, used to talk about our response to works of art with this parable: “Suppose you see a canvas with a red slash across it and nothing more. You look at it and wonder what you think of it. Then suppose someone tells you that the artist cut off his right hand and made that crimson gash—does it change your view?”

 

 

In
The New Yorker
magazine of August 3, 1963, a remarkable sequence of poems appeared. They were by a poet whose name was not yet familiar to readers but whose voice sounded like no other. Under these poems was the intriguing attribution: Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). Since there was no Contributors section in Mr. Shawn’s
New Yorker,
readers had no idea who the author of these astonishing poems might be. Her name was followed by the ominous double dates confirming that the author was no longer on this sad planet. She had gone, like Alcestis, to the Land of the Dead.

The sequence began with “Two Campers in Cloud Country” and ended with “The Moon and the Yew Tree.”

No one reading these poems could doubt that their author was more than “half in love with easeful death,” as Keats had it. But then young poets are always in love with death and in love with love. This one was only thirty when she died.

The impact these poems had is almost unimaginable now. In 1963, we still had a literary culture.
Reading
poems to oneself was not as rare as it is today (despite all the poetry slams and hip-hop jams). To young women who wrote poetry, these poems were galvanizing. Sylvia, whoever she was, had a fully evolved voice. Not wry and reeking of the bittersweet twenties like Dorothy Parker’s or romantic/ironic/transcendentalist like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s. Perhaps some of its confessional candor was nudged by Robert Lowell. Perhaps Anne Sexton had contributed something of her own dark menstrual madness. Nor was the voice influenced by the hymnal rhythms of Emily Dickinson’s meditations on death and love. It was incomparable.

The poems were hypnotic—as Robert Lowell, her sometime teacher, later said in his introduction to
Ariel
(which appeared in 1965 in England, 1966 in America). They were unapologetically female. An Amazon wrote them riding bareback. She had cut off one breast and dipped her quill in her blood. We would never know precisely why she killed herself. Nor could we ask.

Why did she die? Who was responsible? How could she have left these driven, hurtling lines and, as we later learned, two helpless children? What did her husband, the rugged, seemingly heartless poet Ted Hughes, have to do with it? (Of course I never dared to ask him when we met.) He was her widower, executor, the father of Frieda and Nicholas (to whom her second book, when it appeared under the title
Ariel,
was dedicated).

We like our poets better when they’re dead—especially our women poets. Sylvia knew this. She knew a lot about the suppression of women poets in the Age of Eliot and she was determined to overcome it—whatever the cost.

 

After three decades of fearless female writing, it’s hard to credit how male-dominated the literary world was then. For my generation (which graduated from college in the midsixties, before they became “The Sixties”), poetry was a men’s club. Sylvia Plath definitively broke open the territory to women. She made it possible to strip the female mind naked in print.

Anne Sexton had begun this journey with To
Bedlam and Part Way Back
in 1960. Sylvia Plath’s extraordinary voice took us further. These two poets embodied the first surge of the Second Wave. Not surprisingly, poetry, which comes blood-warm straight out of the unconscious, led the way.

Of course I don’t mean to imply that there were no earlier women poets who broke ground. Louise Bogan, Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov, Marianne Moore, Ruth Stone, Muriel Rukeyser, Judith Wright, May Sarton, Carolyn Kizer and Adrienne Rich had all published extraordinary poems. And Marge Piercy, Margaret Atwood, Diane Wakoski, Joyce Carol Oates and others were beginning to appear in the sixties. But perhaps it was the flamboyance of Plath’s and Sexton’s suicides that thrust their work into the larger public consciousness. Poetry was so important you would
die
for it. And in those days you had to. The gentlemen’s club of poetry in the early sixties is well evoked by Carolyn Kizer’s “Pro Femina,” a poem I went back to again and again for courage:

Kizer perfectly analyzed the problem of a craft in which the practitioners were all suicides and spinsters, even if they were married (a problem I have with the myth of Woolf—who often seems to be worshipped for her sexless married spinsterhood).

“From Sappho to myself, consider the fate of women,” Kizer writes. “How unwomanly to discuss it!”

Kizer was our diagnostician, but Plath and Sexton provided the cure. No apologies. No analyses. No tea and sympathy. Instead, we heard a voice speaking straight from the female gut. Though death-bound, Plath’s voice was already exultant. “Hardly a woman at all, certainly not another ‘poetess’ but one of those . . . great classical heroines,” Robert Lowell wrote. “These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder.” We had found our sixties Sappho—just after she leapt from the Leucadian cliff.

Now the brilliant, bipolar Lowell is dead and so is the fierce, sexy Ted Hughes. Now the children he raised are grown. Frieda is a painter and poet who somehow survived her childhood. She gets to tell her mother’s tale, as is only right. The edition of
Ariel
published by her father was not identical to the manuscript her mother left, so at her publisher’s suggestion Frieda Hughes resurrected that manuscript, even giving us facsimiles of the poems in typed and handwritten form (
Ariel : The Restored Edition,
2004). We immediately see that Plath nearly called her second collection
Daddy and Other Poems instead of Ariel.
We feel Frieda Hughes’s restraint in trying to be fair to both parents yet tell the truth as she sees it. “My father had a profound respect for my mother’s work in spite of being one of the subjects of its fury,” she writes.