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- [00:00]
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Marshall Poe
Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Jane Semeka
Welcome to New Books in Women's History. This is Jane Semeka, professor of History at Brookdale Community College. Today we'll be discussing a new book by Carl Rawleson called the Making of Sylvia Plath, published by the University press of Mississippi. Dr. Rolison is Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Baruch College, City University of New York. He's the author of many biographies, including Sylvia Plath's Day by Day, Volumes one and Two, William Faulkner, Day by Day, the Days of Sylvia Plath, A Real American Character, the Life of Walter Brennan, Hollywood Enigma, Dana Andrews and Marilyn Monroe, A Life of the Actress. His reviews of biographies have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and New Criterion. He also writes a column on biography twice a week for the New York Sun. Carl, welcome to the show.
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Carl Rawleson
Happy to be here.
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Jane Semeka
So this is your third book on Sylvia Plath. So you've spent many years with her. So why did you return to her life for this book?
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Carl Rawleson
Well, it surprised me. I published my first biography of Sylvia Plath, American the Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, in 2013, and I never thought that I would be doing another book. The second book sort of derived out of someone's proposal to me to write a short biography of Celia Plath, which turned out that I was incapable of doing that. That turned into the Last Days of Sylvia Plath. Now, the third book, also a big surprise, really evolved out of my doing the two Coelia Plath Day by Day books. Because one of the things that happens when you do a Day by Day book, and I've done similar books on William Faulkner and Marilyn Monroe, is it really slows you down. Because in my case, I'm really trying to find out what they did on Every Day of a Life. And ultimately with Faulkner and Monroe, I couldn't do that. I mean, there were many days where I couldn't. I didn't have anything to say. Exactly. With Celia Plath, you can document almost every day and what that means for a biographer. I don't care who the biographer is. There've been many biographies of Sylvia Platt. You have to select. You have to choose. And one of the things that I realized when I was doing, particularly volume one of Sylvia Platt Day by Day, is her childhood diaries. It's not that I hadn't looked at them before, but, you know, you can only spend so much time on a person's childhood. So again, you have to have this selection process. And many things pass you by because they don't fit into a book. Biography is a book, it is a life. But it's a book with certain selected details. And as I slowed down, I realized that the drama of her childhood years was so significant, so important, that I wanted to write a book that foregrounded that the Making of Soviet Plev is about her entire life. But the way I decided to divide it really put an emphasis on what happens at the beginning. Not because it's a deterministic book. That is, I'm not saying that everything that happened in her childhood predicts what's going to happen to her as an adult, but simply that many people think of, you know, they think of Plath and they think of her suicide. And people often say to me when they Learn I've written about, oh, what a sad life. And my feeling is it wasn't at all a sad life. It was a triumphant life. And she had a triumphant childhood. And so in the Making of Sylvia Plath, I wanted to show how that childhood really gave her a sense of momentum into the middle and later phases of her life.
- [05:35]
Jane Semeka
So is that the making of. So is that why you chose the tile?
- [05:39]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah, it is. It's. You know, Samuel Johnson once said of writers that you better get your reading done by the age of 18. He didn't mean that you didn't, you had to. You stopped reading. But he just said that for many writers, that is the formative stage. And one of the things that happened in looking at a childhood diaries is she kept commenting on all the children's books she read. She read historical novels. She knew about the Middle Ages in Poland. I mean, she had such a range as a young girl that I thought, you know, sort of the myth about Sylvia Plath is simply the self absorbed person. I wanted to show in the Making of Sylvia Plath that in many ways she's a world historical individual and that when she began to write seriously, she was writing not just about herself, but about, certainly about women and about history and her own confrontation with world history.
- [06:43]
Jane Semeka
Yeah. So can you talk about the research process for this book and the discoveries that you made?
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Carl Rawleson
Yeah, yeah. One again is the childhood diaries. It's not that other biographers hadn't looked at them, but if you read all of the Plath biographies and then you look at my Sylvia Plath Day by Day books or the Making of Sylvia Plath, you'll see there's much, much granular detail about her childhood. And so I'm getting that from her diaries, which are at Indiana University. And for some years she's writing 30, 40,000 words. You know, she's writing like little books. And the diaries, I hope someday will be published in facsimile versions because she draws, the drawings are wonderful. And you learn just, you know. Anyone who knows her famous poem, Daddy, for example, when you're reading the diaries, she talks about this day when she and her brother, younger brother, make a snowman in the figure of Hitler. And that's all she says about it. It's really intriguing. You know, you wonder, did they throw snowballs at it? You know, what did they do? But that's what I mean about her consciousness, you know, that she's growing up during the Second World War. She's listening to the radio, she's watching newsreels she knows about concentration camps, all of the things that people often assume, you know, oh, you know, she's sensationalistic, you know, what does she know about the Jews? What does she know about the camps? Of course, she didn't experience these things firsthand, but she grew up with them. They were a part of her experience.
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Jane Semeka
Yeah. And you talk about her father and being German.
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Carl Rawleson
Yes.
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Jane Semeka
And I think her ancestry, Right. I think is.
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Carl Rawleson
Yes. German, Austrian. Her mother's family was Austrian. Her mother talked about World War I, how difficult it was if you were a German speaker in the neighborhood, how you could be ostracized, certainly looked at askance. So Plath also grew up with that notion of, in that sense, being part of a minority and what that means, what kind of perspective that gives you on the culture and on civilization itself.
- [08:53]
Jane Semeka
It really affects her identity, I think, figuring out who she is. Right. Childhood, period. One of the things set in time. Right. Because she's set in this moment.
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Carl Rawleson
One of the things that people would never use this word for her before, but I'm going to use it. She was a cartographer, she drew maps. When she studied history, the American Revolution, for example, she also studied Benjamin Franklin's proposal called the Albany Plan of Union was the first sort of effort to unite the colonies. This is before the American Revolution, and it didn't go anywhere, but it's an interesting historical artifact, and she sort of mapped it out. What did. The Albany Plan of Union. Okay, now, if you read the Making of Sylvia Plath, you'll come across a poem, one of my favorite poems of hers, which is called Cut. It's about her in the kitchen, and she almost lops off her thumb when she's cooking in the kitchen. And she looks at that thumb, and of course, blood is flowing out of the thumb and she's starting to bandage the thumb. But as the blood flows out of her thumb in the poem, she suddenly starts talking about redcoats. American Revolution, that's what she's talking about, that she studied in elementary school. She's wrapping the hand, and suddenly that gauze on the hand reminds her of a Ku Klux Klan hood. Her thumb becomes. And that's what I mean by her sense of history. She's so domestic. She's so. You know, she bakes, she cooks. She's very happy when her mother gives her the money to buy a Bendix washing machine. A picture of that is the Making of Sylvia Plath. She's very American and very materialistic. And yet there's this cerebral, imaginative part of her that I tried to get across in the Making of Sylvia Plath. It's all part of the mix.
- [10:46]
Jane Semeka
Yeah, it's really a brilliant. She had such a brilliant mind and reactions to things. And so can you talk a little bit about the access that you had to the materials and maybe how prior biographers and prior interpretations of her were controlled by her husband?
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Carl Rawleson
Sure. That's one of the interesting things, when people say, oh, some people say, oh, not another book about Sylvia Plath. What they have to realize is year by year, more material comes out that the original edition of her journals, for instance, were expurgated. There are many things about Ted Hughes, for example, that were taken out. Her mother publishes letters, but those letters are expurgated. You know, we don't have a complete edition of her letters till, you know, five, six years ago. So the Plath people think they know, in a sense, keeps changing, gets altered. Ted Hughes was the controlling authority for many, many years, and his sister, Owen Hughes as well, who was a literary agent. And she acted on behalf of her brother Ted, and the two of them, particularly the husband, Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, had this very scornful view of biographers, that we were interloper sensationalists, making money off of her, while Ted Hughes was making money off of her books as well. And he thought because he was married to Plath, no one could know as much about Plath as he did. Well, that's a common fallacy about biographers, that they come in after the fact, and what could they know? Sometimes they do know the subject. But I certainly did know Sylvia Plath, although she and I were contemporaries in the sense that in England in 1963, when she died, I was there just a few months afterwards. So I have a vivid idea of what England was like, the culture that she was living in at the time. But there were so many things about Ted Hughes. For instance, there were men that she had been involved with that he knew nothing about. Well, doesn't that make a difference in understanding this woman's life? That there were men that he didn't even know about, Particularly a fellow named Richard Sassoon, who Hughes only found, found out about and going through her papers just like a biographer would. So this idea that he's her possession means that anyone who comes along, as I said, as an interloper is someone who's invasive, who is, in the scornful phrase, part of the peanut gallery, you know, they're just being entertained by her sorrows, is such a really wacky outlandish. Idea, biography, but it's one that many people share about biography. The analogy I like to use is, you know, we can look in the mirror, we have a sense of what we look like. We have a sense of the kind of people we are from our wives, if we're married, or husbands or family members and so on. But what I can't do is walk around myself. I can't see certain dimensions of myself that other people, including. No one's going to write my biography. But a biographer would be saying things about me that I'm not conscious of, that I wasn't aware of, and that comes from looking at my papers. I do have papers at the University of Tulsa. It would come from interviewing various people who knew me at various stages of life, some people who I've probably forgotten, and that the biographer contacts and knows things that I've simply forgotten or I have different versions of than those people have. So Ted Hughes understood none of that.
- [14:38]
Jane Semeka
He was trying. Do you think that her mother and Ted Hughes were editing the papers to protect themselves or to protect the legacy, or do you have a sense of that?
- [14:52]
Carl Rawleson
I think it's both. I think that, for instance, when Plath's final book, Ariel, is published, it's not published in the form that she created it. He rearranges the poems because he thinks they're a better order. He thinks they show her off better. Well, that's his interpretation. It would be no different from anybody else. Interpretation.
- [15:17]
Jane Semeka
Very in character with his controlling nature, I think.
- [15:20]
Carl Rawleson
Exactly, exactly. I know better than anybody else, and partly because I'm a great poet, just like she was a great poet. But. So how could someone like Carl Rawlison possibly assess this material? Biographers are at best second raters from the literary figure's point of view.
- [15:37]
Jane Semeka
And wasn't published. You also worked with an unpublished biography, right? That there was research?
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Carl Rawleson
Yes, there were a couple, a little.
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Jane Semeka
Bit, because that's fascinating.
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Carl Rawleson
That's one of the things that went into the making of both the Last Days of Sylvia Plath and the making of Sylvia Plath is there was a really wonderful researcher, she's still alive, Harriet Rosenstein, who interviewed, you know, this was in the early 70s, about a decade after Plath died. She interviewed most of the principal figures in Plath's life and she recorded many of them and she had extensive correspondence with many of them. But because of Hughes, Owen Hughes especially, she threatened a lot of biographers. There were. There were a couple women biographers whose books, including Harriet Rosenstein, who never published their books, Rosenstein finally decided, it's just he's giving me too much grief. And she sat on this material for 50 years, and then she decided, she's still. As far as I know, she's still alive. And she decided to sell this material. And she got a hold of someone who specializes in selling such things. And there was a description of Harriet Rosenstein's collection online. And, of course, libraries were interested. Some private individuals were interested. And who else was interested? Smith College, which already had a Plath archive in that collection. There were letters from Plath's therapist and letters from Plath to her therapist, and these were being sold. And Smith's College said, wait a second. I think we think the archivist thought, these letters belong to us. They don't belong to Harriet Rosenstein. And they sued her. The case didn't go to trial, but they settled it. And what happened is Smith got those letters. So that's something I got to look at something new in those letters. But the rest of the Harriet Rosenstein stuff was bought by Emory University, and it's been a treasure trove. Several biographers, including the most recent, Heather Clark, made excellent use of the archive at Emory, and I did, too, for both the Last Days of Sylvia Plath and the Making of Sylvia Plath. So that's what I mean by saying every year, it seems almost every year something new comes out. It might be a book that Plath annotated that suddenly is up for auction. There's all kinds of material. Also, as the editor, one of the editors, Peter Rose Steinberg, mentions there are probably at least 600 or more missing letters that we know Plath wrote to people. Many of them probably are lost. People didn't keep them. But I wouldn't be surprised if another trove of letters shows up late in the day. It's entirely conceivable. The other thing I want to say about Ted Knowles and Hughes is they were sloppy. They left stuff lying around. And Hughes even says, well, I destroy one journal and another one's lost. And I think maybe someone picked it up when they visited. That's how careless they were with her work. They weren't good caretakers at all. And so I think some stuff was filched. Hmm. Limu imu. And, Doug, here we have the limu.
- [19:12]
Marshall Poe
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- [19:15]
Carl Rawleson
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- [19:21]
Marshall Poe
Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug.
- [19:25]
Jane Semeka
Uh, Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us.
- [19:28]
Carl Rawleson
Cut the camera. They see us, only pay for what you need@libertymutual.com Liberty Liberty Liberty Liberty Savings Very underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.
- [19:38]
Jane Semeka
It's interesting. You never know what you're. And that's one of the things that's fun, I think, about this process of biography is that you become a bit of a detective.
- [19:48]
Carl Rawleson
Oh yeah.
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Jane Semeka
And finding things and making the big discovery. So I'm sure you must have made a discovery every week a different one.
- [19:56]
Carl Rawleson
You make discoveries and sometimes it's simply by asking questions that other biographers didn't think to ask. And suddenly someone says something and leads you in a direction where you do find something that nobody knew about before.
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Jane Semeka
Are her children still living?
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Carl Rawleson
Platt's children. The daughter is very much alive and is, thank God, much more out suburbs with her. But other biographers and scholars have. And she's been. Frida Hughes has been very accommodating in recent years. Especially when her father was still alive. She pretty much had his attitude. She's pretty scornful of biographers, but she has, especially since she discovered the letters of her mother talking about her father. She. She's had to change her view of things. Her. The other child committed suicide. Oh, wow. He was a scholar living in Alaska and was troubled. The suicide wasn't entirely surprised.
- [21:03]
Jane Semeka
Wow, that's so interesting. So I'm interested in the structure of the book. And so the reader is kind of drawn through the early years, the middle years and the later years in the three parts of the book. So can you talk a little bit about why you chose the structure?
- [21:19]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah, it has to do in part with my scholarship as a biographer. Leon Adele wrote a 5 originally. He had condensed it eventually, but to begin with, he wrote a five volume biography of Henry James. And you have titles of the books and sections of the books title things like the early years, the middle years and the later years. Well, Henry James lived a lot longer. I can't remember how old James was when he died, but he lived into the First World War and born in the 19th century. So he had a fairly reasonably long life. So it makes sense to say the early, the middle and the later years. Celia Platt died at the age of 30. And so some people would say what the early years, the middle years and the later years. So it was partly almost a kind of teaser to say this woman lived a full life by the age of 30. It's not that she couldn't have done great things after the age of 30, but my God, in 30 years. And as I say, she lives such a Full childhood. It wasn't. Her father died when she was 8. And you say, oh, poor girl. You read her childhood diaries. There's no self pity, there's nothing that she had a very caring mother. She had great grandparents, she had other relatives in the family. She was taken care of. You know, her descriptions of skating and sledding and building snow houses and child girlfriends. Just really a very full child summer camp. I mean, you name it, she had it. And her mother didn't have a lot of money, but her mother scrimped and saved and did whatever was required to get her. You know, Plath wanted to go to Smith College. She could have gone to, you know, what's the name of the local college? Wellesley. Could have gone to Wellesley for free as a scholarship student. She did have a scholarship at Smith, but she had to work on a hard labor on a farm in the summer to have spending money when she was at Smith College. So she worked so hard. So the early years leader up to Smith College and she's got a big decision to make. One of the decisions is she could just go to an American graduate school. Her grades are good. She's already a published author. She's had teachers like the literary critic Alfred Kazin, who thinks she's wonderful and has a great career as a writer. She could have stayed close to home. And she even says in one of her letters, it's going to be kind of a shock to me, but I have to get to England. She applies for a Fulbright and gets that Fulbright and goes to Cambridge. Those are the middle years. They're only like a year and a half, two years of what I call essentially the middle years. And then she meets Ted Hughes and she really is the spark for him and he is in many ways for her. Although she already is much more accomplished in terms of publishing than he is at the time. But the last six years really of the marriage in her life are those later years. But you really can't understand what's going on there unless you understand the early in middle life, as short as the middle life is, for example.
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Jane Semeka
Yeah. And the early life, her mother was very supportive of her as a writer from. She gives her the blank journal, right?
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Carl Rawleson
Yes. She's the one who introduces her to the idea of keeping a diary. And my God, all she has to say is, Sylvia, here's the diary. And the very first day Sylvia is off writing Dear diaries, sometimes it's just an amazing performance. As I say, I hope someday those diaries are published in facsimile form. People still are so avid for Sylvia Plav. I can imagine it happening. Such a facsimile edition. You could do it in five or six volumes with the diaries each being a nice, neat, compact little book.
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Jane Semeka
It's great that you center the early years, I think, because, you know, I'd like to hear what you think. Those pivotal moments that shaped her as an artist in the early years. What do you think?
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Carl Rawleson
I can talk about pivotal moments, but one thing I want to say, and it's not meant to dodge your question.
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Jane Semeka
No, sure.
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Carl Rawleson
What makes Sylvia Plath exciting and why I have written so many books about her, and I have a new one coming out after the Making of Sylvia Plath and the Day By Day books is because this is what's so dramatic, in a sense, for Sylvia Plath, every moment is pivotal. Every moment is a moment of discovery. It could be tragedy, it could be comedy happening all at once to her, and she's writing about it. Other people may have lived such lives, but how many people have documented them? Starting at the age of 11, when I started the Day By Day books, I told the publisher, well, one volume, maybe a hundred thousand words, at 130,000 words, only, going up to what I call the early years. And I told the publisher, it's gotta be two volumes. You know, it'd just be too big of a book to try to do it all at once. So that gives you some sense of the pivotal personality, really, that she has. So it starts in high school. Well, it starts with her mother, who takes her to a performance of the tempest before she's 10 years old. It starts with her poem being published in the Boston newspaper when she's 8 years old. It starts with her high school teacher, who is a real intellectual and who started his English classes with 30 students. And by the second day or third day, they were looking to transfer to somebody else because he was so demanding, but that's just what she needed. So he would read sometimes her essays, her compositions in class. He's the first person who suggests to her study abroad. So imagine before she's even a teenager, she has a teacher who's telling her that she has the talent and the qualifications to study abroad. So she has that. She has mentors at Smith College, particularly Alfred Kazin. When she walks into Alfred Kazin's class, she looks like any other Smith College students with the knee socks and all the rest of it. And he's thinking, oh, boy, you know, another Smith College, you know. And she turns in the paper and he think, you know, what he says to her, he says, forget about what I'm teaching class. Just continue writing and I'll take a look at it. And he invites her over to his house. His wife is a writer as well, who I actually knew later in New York, became a friend. And they both, you know, just are mentors. Plath finds herself in the company of professional writers before the age of 20. She. She's lucky to live in the World War II era and post war, when you had the beginnings of Seventeen magazine, a magazine written specifically for girls like Sylvia Plath. And her ambition is to write for Seventeen magazine. And she does so that by the time she goes to Smith College and is in Alfred Kazin's class and she starts mentioning these publications, his reaction is, what? Already? You know, it's a.
- [29:31]
Jane Semeka
She's like a prodigy.
- [29:32]
Carl Rawleson
She is a prodigy, and she's treated like a prodigy. And if you knew Alfred Kazin. I knew Alfred Kazin. I interviewed Kazin for several of my biographies. He was not an easy man to please. He was not a man with a lot of patience. And he certainly didn't suffer fools. She idolized him. And she would certainly would have said if he had treated her in any sense as not an equal. He treated her in a sense as certainly a young budding writer, but as his intellectual equal. Can you imagine what that does to a young undergraduate to be told? Yeah, absolutely. Just, you know, this is a man who's not just a. He's not really a college professor. He's doing it for the money. He does enjoy teaching, for sure, but his head is in another world, too. His head is in New York. And I think it's people often talking about Ted Hughes saying, don't be an academic poet. But in a way, you can give as much credit to Alfred Kazin for that, for saying, you know, there's a world out there that's much bigger than the Smith College campus. He probably never said that to her in so many words. He didn't have to. He could just live it. And so she knows when she goes off to Cambridge, this is again, a new stage. And when I use the word stage, I mean that literally. She becomes part of the drama group. She makes a public spectacle of herself. Quite consciously, everyone is aware of this. Some of them reserved English men and women think of her as this very pushy American, and she is. And she's kind of gushing. And so they think maybe she's just superficial. So a lot of that depth is disguised as masked by her sort of social behavior.
- [31:24]
Jane Semeka
Yeah. I think so.
- [31:25]
Carl Rawleson
Those are some of the pivotal moments.
- [31:27]
Jane Semeka
Yeah, yeah. And I think that one of the things that if you don't know anything about Plath and you think just of the suicidal end, which is a shame because it's really not an assessment, I think that you do a great, such a wonderful job of showing her vitality, somebody who just overflows with energy, creative energy. And it's often.
- [31:53]
Carl Rawleson
That's right. It's often the people with vitality, with a sense of the world who sometimes do commit suicide. It's a very conscious, It's a very deliberate act. In our society, in modern life, suicide has been psychologized so that it's some kind of mental disturbance. And I'm not saying she didn't have any mental disturbance. She did. But in many cultures, suicide is a heroic act. It's not a pathetic act. It's not, oh, so sad. You know, when Cassius or Bruce, when they fall on their sword, we don't say, oh, we don't pity them. They're world shakers, they're world movers. And that's what Sylvia Plath is. And she doesn't commit suicide until she has this feeling that the world has stopped moving for her. So it's a very grandiose, in a sense, kind of act. Not the act of a small person, a little person. Quite, quite, quite the contrary.
- [32:58]
Jane Semeka
Yeah. Her candle burned very bright. Yeah, that's really something that you really get through this story.
- [33:08]
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- [33:36]
Jane Semeka
Media and literature, popular culture in the world. And can you talk a little bit about how culture influenced her and comes into your biography?
- [33:47]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah. She listens to the radio when she's a little girl. There's no television yet. And by the time television comes actually in the, in the early 1950s, it's been around for a while, but I mean, it's not until really the mid-50s that it seems like everybody has a television set and they're watching television. So in the 40s, it's radio. And what she listens to on radio is mystery programs for sure. She loves Superman. He's very devoted Listener of Superman. And her sense of humor, in many ways, comes from Jack Benny. Even people who have seen Jack Benny on television, if they're old enough to remember his comedy program, the television is very different from the radio. The radio is really interesting because there's a lot of cruelty in the humor. There are a lot of fat jokes, for instance, not about Benny, but about his sidekick. There's a lot of ridicule of Benny himself. This comes through in tv, too, as parsimony, for example. But I've also done a biography of the actor Ronald Coleman, and Coleman and his wife were frequent guests on Jack Benny's show. It's so funny because Jack Benny lords it over everybody, because he's a friend of this big movie star, Ronald Coleman, and Ronald Coleman can't stand him. I mean, in the show, they were good friends, but in the show, it's always Benny is just this oaf, you know, and every episode is turned against Benny. And so there's just a lot of making fun of people about their tics, about their manners, about their weight, all of this. And there's a lot of that in plass letters. It might be funny to say, but in a way, Jack Benny set her free. She's a lot like Virginia Woolf that way. If you read Virginia Woolf's letters, Virginia Woolf can be very snarky, very snobbish, very contemptuous. And all that's in Plath, too? That's a part of it, too. It horrified her mother, who was a very proper person, and her mother, when her mother saw the bell jar, she thought, oh, my God, here's me, here's all our friends, and we don't look so good. So Plath was merciless. That's the other great thing about her is, boy, was she tough. She was tough on herself, and she was tough on everybody else. And often people miss the humor of it. There's a lot of black humor, but there's also just plain comedy in Sylvia Plath that people somehow seem to miss.
- [36:21]
Jane Semeka
Yeah, so this is a women's history podcast. So can you talk a little bit about what Sylvia Plath's life can tell us about the experiences of women of her era?
- [36:31]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah, it's really interesting. On the one hand, she's a woman of her time. She wants to get married, she wants to have children, just like every Smith graduate did. And she has these really snide things to say about career women. She has these snide things to say about the women dons at Cambridge, how they're sexless how they only have full lives and all this. But what's so attractive about Plath is, although there is that side of her, the other side of it is, you know what? I'm going to be a great poet, and I'm going to have kids, and I'm going to have a great husband. I'm going to have all that stuff. There's no reason why I can't have it all. It's going to be tough. It's going to be hard. There are going to be some really bad patches for me, but I'm going to rule. That's the other thing about it. Sylvia Plath is sovereign. There's a reason why her home is called In England Court Green. It is her establishment. It is her estate. She does preside. She talks many, many times about having a salon. She has a network of women friends. She has some very close male friends, but she has very close women friends. And part of her suicide has to do with the fact that she's in England. It's a very cold winter. She's a single mother. She's got two kids. She's got this American friend, Ruth Fainlight, who's also a poet. And Ruth is in Morocco, which is where you go to avoid those English winters. And so when Ruth comes back, Sylvia Plath is dead. And Ruth Feinlight never forgives herself, really, because she really should have been there. I mean, she didn't know that Plath was going to commit suicide. But you know how it is when someone takes their own life. People afterwards say, what could I have done? Could I have intervened? Would it have been different if I had been there?
- [38:33]
Jane Semeka
And is that a sign, you know, you rethink, you know?
- [38:35]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah.
- [38:36]
Jane Semeka
Did she say something that I should have?
- [38:38]
Carl Rawleson
Exactly. Exactly. And in the last months, I mean, Ruth tries to hook up with Doris Lessing. She tries to interest the poet Stevie Smith. And Plath was very outgoing and could create a very false impression. You know, a little too needy, sometimes a little too gushing. And the English didn't like that. Lessing didn't like it. Stevie Smith, I don't think even ever answered one of her letters. And so she really feels bereft without support. She has a very good doctor who's trying to help her, who himself has suffered from depression, understanding what she's going through. But it's a very, very tough time for her. It's the support system. It's what Gloria Steinem said when she wrote her biography of Marilyn Monroe. What if Marilyn had had what we had in the 70s and 80s, the second wave of feminism, had a support system who didn't see herself as Sisyphus, rolling the ball herself, the rock, the boulder up the hill. What if she had had those people, not just Ruth Feinlight, but Doris and Stevie Smith and others. It might have made a big difference. It's contingency. When someone takes their life, it isn't just because, oh, they were doomed to die. You know, there's some essentialist idea that, oh, it's a suicidal personality. There's nothing like that. It's a much, much more complex situation that she's dealing with. And I think the women who identify with Glass can see that, whether they articulate it or not. They can see here was someone who speaks to us, who was speaking to other women, who right from childhood on, always had very close relationships with her mother, with her grandmother, with other women in the family, with the women she went to school with at Smith. She was still writing to many of these women after she had left. She had a hole in her mind, circle of friends, and she didn't want to go home. She didn't want to depend on her mother. She thought she could do it herself. And it did become overwhelming in the end. But, my God, did she. You know, she put up a fight. Just look at her poetry. I mean, it's so energetic. It's so tough. It's so direct, and it's great. And there are some male heroes here. Ted Hughes, for all his faults, recognized that he was married to a great poet, El Alvarez, who was a poet and also editor of the London Observer. He told her, he said, you know, this. The poems I'm reading in what's going to be your latest collection. It's got to win a Pulitzer, you know, he, he. And she says, finally, she never said this before, only in the last months of her life, she writes her mother and she says, I'm great. I know, I know. I'm a great writer.
- [41:55]
Jane Semeka
I was, you know, I wrote a quote down from the book from page 163. That really struck me that Plath had, quote, a tragic life with a comic face.
- [42:05]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah.
- [42:05]
Jane Semeka
What does that mean?
- [42:07]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah, she pretty much said that in one of her letters home. And what happens is, she's in Paris. She's been very deeply involved with this Richard Sassoon, who was distantly related to the poet Siegfried Sassoon. Richard Sassoon was a very intellectual, very sophisticated gourmand, Took her to fine restaurants. She knew him as an undergraduate at Smith, but then he went to France. She visited him in France. They had a wonderful time. But then he got involved with somebody else. And I think she scared him because she was so powerful. And although he was writing some poetry, I mean, he just, you know, who competes with Sylvia Plath? Ted Hughes would be the only one. Nobody can compete with her. And so Sassoon, in this trip, is gone. He's gone somewhere else. He's not at his Paris flat, and she's wandering around. She makes friends with this Italian who gives her a typewriter, and she starts writing. I mean, that's part of what I mean. She's sad, she's upset, because she really loved Richard Sassoon. She wanted to hold on to him. And he is one of the few men in her life who, in a sense, rejected her. Most of the men she rejected because they weren't good enough for a variety of reasons. And so she's very sad. So she's walking along, and who does she see? She sees this guy who. Carl Shaykin, who she had a shipboard romance with when she was going over to England, traveling over to do her Fulbright year at Cambridge, and she suddenly perks up. And that's why she says, here I am. I'm feeling my life is tragedy. And who comes along, shaken shakin comes along. And so her life is like that. It is a kind of a seesaw. She did say of herself that she was manic depressive. And when you read a poem like Cut, the one I mentioned, with the red coats and so on, it is kinematic because it builds and it builds and builds. There's so much energy. Who has energy when they cut their finger? Sophia Plath, the bloodletting. You know, she has this line, the blood jet is poetry. It is life's blood. That's what poetry meant to her. And she was spilling that blood in her last poems. Alvarez thought that the poems had exhausted her. And my feeling is that's true, or that's a partial truth, that they also exhilarated her. Well, when you're exhilarated, you've got to come down. You know, there's exhilaration, there's exhaustion, there's creativity, there's the downtime, there's the depression. William Faulkner, when he finished a novel, went on drunk and often for weeks at a time. Yeah, he couldn't bear it.
- [45:11]
Jane Semeka
I thought the Sassoon stuff was really interesting. And I almost feel. I felt like my impression from reading the section was that she was almost too big a personality for him.
- [45:22]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah, that's it. Yeah, he Thought he could get bigger. When he said to her, even when he rejected her, he says he doesn't put it quite this way, but this sense of what he's telling her is, I gotta go in the army or I gotta do something to get bigger for you. And he was small of stature, and usually that bothered her. She wanted someone big like Ted Hughes, who was a Superman. And so Sassoon didn't fit her model. But that's what's interesting about her. She found somebody who didn't fit her model, and yet she loved him and she thought he had potential, but he couldn't. Rebecca west has this phrase about her husband, Henry Andrews, who she loved and who was in some ways her intellectual equal. But she said. And what she has in mind there is the early motor car. She says, Henry had everything, but he didn't tick over. He didn't actually. The car didn't actually start. He had all the equipment. Everything was in place. And I think that's what Platt felt about Sassoon. It's all here. Maybe I can prop this guy up. The guy on the other end thinks, well, how could I live with somebody propping me up? You know, I gotta be bigger. And it didn't work, right.
- [46:33]
Jane Semeka
Yeah. She says, he's the one that got away.
- [46:36]
Carl Rawleson
Yeah, he got away. Yeah. And she never tells Hughes. Never tells Hughes about him. And think of that. Think of that tremendous experience that she's had. And he thinks he knows her well. He does. He certainly knows certain ways that biographers don't, because he lived with her day by day. So I can't take that away from him. But there are things that I know and other biographers know that he never knew and that he closed himself off to. For instance, when he edits her poems, not Ariel, but the Collected Poems, he has a section called Juvenilia. And what happens there is he destroys the chronology. We don't see her development. There are two female scholars working on an edition of her poetry. Thank God, because you've got to see the whole thing, just as you do with her childhood. You've got to see all the poems. He was the kind of poet, and there are many writers like this. I only want to be known by my best work and everything else. The best I can do is do Juvenilia for her, because I don't want people to think. But what people want to know, what women want to know, is, where did she get started? Where did this come from? Well, how can you know that if you don't look at the Very earliest poems you got to.
- [47:56]
Jane Semeka
Yeah, yeah. And people fade from public memory very quickly. But Sylvia Plath continues to interest readers and even especially younger generations have continued to be fascinated by her. So do you have any thoughts on how instructors, like in the classroom can capitalize on this with their teaching? Asking for a friend? Yeah, because I want to include her high class.
- [48:21]
Carl Rawleson
Yes. I first learned about Sylvia Plath in 1972. I was teaching at an all girls school on the Main Line in Philadelphia. It's still in existence. It's called the Agnes Irwin School. And I was teaching the 10th grade and I was teaching these young women about poetry. And I used. I don't know if it's still in print or not. It's called Sound and Sense. It's edited by Lawrence Perrin and it's been used by generations of teachers to teach poetry. And he had two Plath poems in it, Mirror and Metaphors. Those two poems, in a sense, tell you everything you need to know about Plath because they're autobiographical. And Metaphors is essentially, she's saying I'm a walking metaphor because she wrote it at the time and she thought she was pregnant. She did become pregnant, but not when she wrote this poem, but she thought she was pregnant. And so it's comparing metaphorically what it's like in a sense to be pregnant, to be pregnant with a poem. So I think it's a wonderful introduction. And this was in 1972. That's decades before I write anything serious about Sylvia Platt. But I was already thinking about her. And the other poem is Mirror. Oh, my God, that is such a wonderful poem. And it's so universal. I mean, does anyone now go through their lives or then when she was alive without at some point in the morning or whatever, looking in the mirror and thinking about, you know, mirror, mirror on the wall. I mean, it's the fairy tale. It suits the fairest of us all. How's. Am I. Am I having a bad hair day? You know, I mean, it's, it's trivial, but it's also. It's also profound and so, and it's chilling. This poem, which is simply called Mirror. I'm just going to read a sentence or two from my book. Sylvia completed Mirror, portraying the self swallowed whole in its reflection, rewarding the eye in quotation marks with tears and an agitation of hands. Anyone, male or female, can relate to this, certainly if you're a woman, because there's so much emphasis placed on makeup, dress, all the things. It's not that a man can't experience these things, but women obviously are acculturated to do this. The eye with tears and agitation of hands in the poem, in the mirror in, and I'm quoting from the poem me, she has drowned a young girl and coming toward her is an old woman surfacing day after day like a terrible fish. I just, I get chills every time I read that poem. It's about a woman's experience, but it's about the experience of aging. It's universal in what she's trying to tell us in this poem. You don't have to know anything about Sylvia Plath to enjoy this poem. On the other hand, I often say biography is an added value. Here's another example of, you know, literary figures thinking of biography is second rate, not important. You know, it's the work that's important, not the biography. Alfred Tennyson once said, the poet Tennyson said, thank God we don't know anything about Shakespeare. We don't know we know anything about Shakespeare, really. I mean, what you know about Shakespeare could be put on a page. Even though that people have tried to write biographies. I mean, the actual facts, there aren't very many. And that's what Tennyson rejoiced in. So he could just have the work and my fantasy. And I wrote this in one of my books about biography is, okay, so one day say I'm alive in Tennyson's period. And I say to Alfred Tennyson, you know, it's just been discovered that there is this letter that Shakespeare wrote. It's really interesting letter, but I know you don't want to see it because you know that that will, that will muck up your, you know, you'll suddenly think of Shakespeare as an actual person. So I'm not going to show it to you. You know, I. You. They could say all they want, the biography doesn't matter, but I don't believe it.
- [53:11]
Jane Semeka
Oh, no. It's a wonderful genre and I think this is a really unforgettable book. I really, really enjoyed it.
- [53:20]
Carl Rawleson
No, thank you.
- [53:21]
Jane Semeka
Thank you so much for coming onto the podcast and joining me today to discuss the Making of Sylvia Plath, published by the University Press of Mississippi. Until next time on new books in women's history, this is Jane Semeka. Keep reading.