← The History of Literature
The History of Literature
691 The Making of Sylvia Plath (with Carl Rollyson) | My Last Book with Cheryl Hopson
01:04:05
Loading summary
Transcript81 lines
- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio. Have you ever had the urge to sneak behind the cordoned off areas of a museum or roam the halls after closing time? The Smithsonian's flagship podcast, Side Door, will sneak you behind the scenes of the world's largest museum and research complex. Come learn about the ghosts that supposedly walk the museum halls after dark, how a train robbery gave rise to criminal forensics, why leeches are actually the coolest thing ever, and how to get away with murder in the Arctic. Maybe you'll discover stories of history, science, art and culture you won't find in a display case you can listen to Side Door wherever you get your podcasts or find us online at si.edu sidedoor. This is a message from sponsor Intuit TurboTax Taxes was getting frustrated by your forms. Now Taxes is uploading your forms with a Snap and a TurboTax expert will do your taxes for you. One who's backed by the latest tech which cross checks millions of data points for absolute accuracy. All of which makes it easy for you to get the most money back guaranteed. Get an expert now@turbotax.com, only available with TurboTax Live full service. Seek guaranteed details@turbotax.com guarantees hello. For something like 60 years, Sylvia Plath has impressed us with her poetry and intrigued us as a person. We've been so dazzled by her as a brilliant arrival on the scene, seemingly fully formed, that we've often overlooked the influences on Plath's life and and work. What movies did she watch? Which books did she read? How did media shape her worldview? America's serial biographer Carl Rolison is here today to discuss his exploration of the intricate web of literature, cinema, spirituality, psychology and popular culture that influenced a poet and her poetry. All that plus a my last book with Zora Neale Hurston's biographer, Cheryl Hopson Today the History of Literature. Okay, here we go. Hello everyone. This is Jack Wilson, your host, still managing to eke out a living here in the supernova that is Washington D.C. an exploding inferno, all self inflicted, and I alone am left to tell the tale. It seems me and hundreds of thousands of others disgruntleds call us Ishmael's. But enough about that. Let's retreat into the world of literature and Sylvia Plath in particular. It's always good to have Carl Rawlison here. We've talked to him about Faulkner and Sylvia Plath's diaries and he's always insightful and don't you just love it when History of Literature guests are fans of one another? It's like mom and dad getting along. A happy household. Today is one such day. Here's Emily Van Dyne, who was here to talk about her love for Plath and her reclaiming of Plath from biographers who have distorted the record or misused the record to serve an agenda. If anyone is likely to be protective of the record when it comes to Sylvia Plath, it is Emily Van Dyne. And here she is taking stock of this new contribution by Carl Rolison. Quote. In the Making of Sylvia Plath, Carl Rolison takes a deep dive into the intellectual and popular culture of Sylvia Plath's time to see how she was shaped by cinema books and the fashionable ideas of her day. Once more, Ralison helps to rehabilitate our bad ideas about Plath as a grim, deadly serious writer into a woman who loved movies, fashion, and the world around her and who wanted to help shape that world. In turn, Ralison's breezy treatment of movies like Cynthia and his joyful approach to Plath's interior development turn heady subject material into a page turner. Never sacrificing intellectual, rigorous. Every time we think we've learned everything we can about Sylvia Plath, Carl Rawson changes our minds. End quote. So that sounds like someone we should talk to, doesn't it? Let's do that right now. Okay. Joining me now is serial biographer Carl Rawleson, who's been here before to discuss his books, the Life of William Faulkner and Sylvia Plath day by day. Today he joins us to discuss his new book, the Making of Sylvia Plath. Carl Ralison, welcome back to the History of Literature.
- [05:05]
Carl Ralison
I'm happy to be here with you and still on the loose.
- [05:08]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So let's start with the title. I mean, it's a very intriguing title. Who made Sylvia Plath? It seems like some candidates here might be Plath herself or others who influenced her critics and poets and teachers and people she knew. It could be the public creating a legend. Just let me ask you, what does your book's title tell us about the approach you took to telling her story?
- [05:37]
Carl Ralison
Sure. This book really originated in my 2 Sylvia Plath day by Day books. I began to see things about her, about her childhood, but then also later about what her interests were. Obviously, she was interested in poetry and reading and that sort of thing, and literature. But she had this really strong interest in the movies, all kind. Hollywood movies, foreign movies, Jean Cocteau's Movies, French movies. And she grew up also watching, you know, Ronald Colman films, Marilyn Monroe films, classic Hollywood films as well. And I began to see. And she read Gone with the Wind three times and then went to see the movie and was not disappointed in the movie and saw herself as a kind of Scarlett O'Hara character. And that's partly where the title comes from about all these things, these movies. And the other thing I haven't mentioned is her deep, deep interest in psychology and how those things about her really shaped the way she looked at herself in her world. She really was someone who projected herself into the things that she read, and so they helped to make or shape her character in that sense. There are people involved, too, obviously, teachers. And her husband, Ted Hughes, and her therapist, Ruth Beuscher, were key, significant figures as well. But I began to look at, just to give you a quick example, she mentions, and I recorded this in one of my Day By Day books, the first volume, going to see Elizabeth Taylor in the film Cynthia. Well, Cynthia is about a teenager. It's about a young girl growing up. And Plath essentially says in her diary, yeah, I identify with her. I have many of Cynthia's problems. So I began to think about that. And one of Cynthia's problems was overprotective parents. And that's a kind of theme throughout Sylvia Plath's life, with her mother kind of hovering over her in ways that were helpful and ways that were hurtful.
- [07:55]
Jack Wilson
Right. Maybe you could talk a little bit more about the Day By Day books and the source material that you were able to draw upon. Because I think for a lot of biographers, it's been very difficult to kind of claw through the legend and the controversy and everything and get access to materials that would let us see Sylvia Plath that maybe doesn't come through the. The lens of Ted Hughes and some of his supporters and all of the other biography that went on after Sylvia Plath died. So what were you going toward in order to find how Sylvia Plath was made?
- [08:38]
Carl Ralison
That's right. That's what I was trying to do. And that's why the Day By Day books were so important to me. What I began to do is. And every biographer does this, but they have to. To create any kind of story with Sylvia Plath or anybody else, you have to make selections. And so there are lots of things you learn about your biographical subject that don't go into the book, because the book takes on a certain momentum, a certain nature and everything. If the book's any good, it's going to have some kind of unity. It's going to have coherence. And what coherence means, just like editing a film is some things are left on the cutting room floor. And so what the day by day books allowed me to do is take that stuff from the cutting room floor that didn't make it into the Plath biographies, including my own, and put them back in there so that the reader could see, you know, could get excerpts from her journals and her letters and see, get much closer to the raw data, so to speak, you know, what she herself is saying rather than filtered through, as important as that can be too, more than filtered through a biographer's consciousness, the reader is kind of looking at this informing his or her own biography of Sylvia Plath, really.
- [10:00]
Jack Wilson
Now, relying on the raw data also could have some dangers if the person is not writing about certain topics or is misleading or for some other reason. Did you find. What were the areas where you found her words to be the most useful and where, if at all, did you find them to be lacking or potentially misleading?
- [10:27]
Carl Ralison
Well, one of the most interesting things are her childhood diaries. She began keeping a diary at the age of 11. And what's interesting about that is her father dies when she's eight. And throughout these early diaries from, say, the age of 11 to 16 or 17, there are no references to her father. If you read any Plath biography, you know, one of the first things you learn is what a powerful impact her father's death had on her.
- [10:56]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [10:56]
Carl Ralison
And what I came to realize by just looking at what she's saying and not saying is that I'm not denying that there was such an impact on her, but it was a delayed impact. It doesn't come until late adolescence. And so we have both, I think, in the making of Sylvia Plath and also in volume one of Sylvia Plath, day by day, we recover a different kind of Sylvia Plath. Sylvia Plath, who was very sociable, had lots of friends, boyfriends, interest, stamp collecting, for example. A real enthusiast, her high school teacher, Wilbury Crockett said, and he is quoted in biographies, but I don't know what readers can make of those other biographies when he says, you know, I didn't see any problems with Sylvia Plath. You know, the sort of the glib Internet biographies of Sylvia Plath is that she was depressive, you know, and certainly she had her periods of depression, especially after the age of 20. But we get a very different story if we really hone in on that child and what she was like.
- [12:10]
Jack Wilson
Why do you think that is? I mean, it seems like the natural course would be kind of the opposite, that the death of a father would impact you immediately, and then maybe you would learn to come out of that shell a little bit, or with the passage of time, it would be improved. And when you first said it, that we didn't see her father listed, I thought maybe it was repressed. But it sounds like you're saying something slightly different, that it didn't affect her, or we can't see the effects of it on her until later. Was there a reason why it impacted her later?
- [12:45]
Carl Ralison
I think there is. The reason it doesn't impact her sooner is her mother did such a splendid job, truly splendid job of surrounding Sylvia Plath with loving grandparents, with the early teachers who encouraged her, sending her to camp, socializing her in a really, a very profound way.
- [13:09]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [13:10]
Carl Ralison
And you can see this in Plath's letters. And you don't. And I think this. Well, we'll stick with Plath. With Plath, the problem becomes, as she's becoming an adult in the adult world, they don't send us off to summer camp. It's not enough to have loving grandparents. We're Sylvie Plath leaves home. I've had many people have had this experience. You go off to college. You know, I was living on a campus, and there. There's a kind of. Even if you adjust well to campus life, it's so different from that earlier family life. And if you're sensitive, as Sylvia Plath was, there can be periods of acute loneliness and depression. And she was a high achiever. So she gets to Smith College. And I remember this, my own experience at Michigan State University. I had done okay in school, high school, and suddenly there was something about college that raised the level of what I had to do in terms of performing, and it raised the level of my expectations. And I think one of the things that connects me to Soviet Platt is this extraordinary, ambitious desire to exc. And once that's built into you, it's not enough to have a family or a home or all those supportive things. You can be really hard on yourself. And even when you're successful, as Sylvia was, winning prizes and getting published early and all that, it's always the next thing. The last thing wasn't enough for you. You have to go beyond that. And that's when, in a sense, both the joy and the problems occur in her life.
- [15:03]
Jack Wilson
Right. So you have a quote from Peter K. Steinberg, who has been on this podcast, a wonderful guest, and your quote of him is saying the world doesn't know really how truly amazing and interesting Platt's pre Smith and pre Cambridge days are. And you also point out another previous guest on our podcast, Heather Clark, wrote a thousand page biography of Plath, but had to leave 300 pages from Plath's earliest years on the cutting room floor. So what approach does your book take to Plath's first couple of decades? And what discoveries did you make from this period that maybe confirmed what Peter Steinberg was telling us?
- [15:49]
Carl Ralison
Right. One of the things I do that I think someone who doesn't know Sylvia Plath, let's just say they picked up the making of Sylvia Plath. You know, Sylvia Plath died 30 years old. And yet when you look at the structure of my book, it says the early years, the middle years and the late years.
- [16:08]
Jack Wilson
Right. It's like the Beatles.
- [16:09]
Carl Ralison
And people say, what? You know, you write a biography of someone who maybe lived to be 80, right. You know, or someone like Henry, Henry G. In fact, I had Leon Adell, James's Henry James, biographer of mine, quite deliberately thought, well, people are going to. What are they going to make of this?
- [16:26]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right.
- [16:27]
Carl Ralison
And what people are to make of this, I think, is to think more about the stages of life. When a life is so concentrated into 30 years in which the childhood really is such a powerful learning stage, basically a happy stage, and you get to the middle of period. And I remember sensing this myself as you're moving, by the time Sylvia was 27 or 28, she's thinking about the fact that she's going to be turning 30, she's married, she's beginning to have children, and yet she's already thinking of that as another stage of life. She even writes a joking letter to an editor in England saying, you know, I'm going to be turning 30 and I don't know in a year or so. And she says, and that's the last time we'll mention that because her sense of time galloping along things speeding up and moving the trajectory of a life. Gail Sheehy talks about this in her book Passages. It's one of the books that I use as a source in my book to talk about someone who achieves early on or marries early and then realizes five, six years into a marriage, something is missing or the other partner, they're no longer compatible, you know, which is part of what happens with Plav and it's earth shaking to them. So the fact that people say, oh, she died so young. Well, if you look at it from Sylvia Plath's point of view. That's not so true for her. She was. I used this phrase in my Ronald Coleman biography. You might say she was an old soul. She had already lived several lives. One of the things, for instance, she mentions in the last year of her life is every year I've had to move. She had been living in England and marries Ted Hughes, and then they moved to Smith, and they only spent a year at Smith, and then they moved to Boston because she finds the teaching interferes with her writing and he hates the United States. So then they go back to England and they live in a flat in London, and then that doesn't last a year, and then they're out in the country. So she's moving and moving and moving, painting furniture and having kids. And it's a really intense kind of life that makes her stand out. That makes her. That makes Sylvia Plath in ways that perhaps people haven't quite understood, in spite of everything that's been written about her.
- [19:05]
Jack Wilson
Mm. And what about those pre Smith days, for example? That are what makes them amazing and interesting.
- [19:13]
Carl Ralison
Yeah, what makes them amazing and interesting is the kind of elementary school education she had, which for younger readers today, would amaze them. She was. She was reading a textbook, for instance. I went back and reread it, see what it was like for her. It's called the Rise of Our Free Nation. Imagine a textbook being named that way today. You know, with the whole questions about diversity and racism and slavery and all the rest of. Was such a. Patriotic isn't exactly the word for it. Nationalistic, I guess, sort of feeling about things. And what she was doing as a child, for example, is. And I wonder how many listeners will even know what this is. The Albany Plan of Union. It was a plan that Benjamin Franklin devised in the 1750s to unite the colonies. This is 20 years before the American Revolution. And he realized that we better start cooperating for all sorts of reasons. Well, she studies this and she draws a map, rather. She was quite a cartographer. There's a lot of drawings in her diaries, but there are also maps. She studies the Monroe Doctrine. You know, President James Monroe was telling the European power, stay out of our hemisphere. This is America's land. So she has all that manifest sense of destiny. And for someone like her, the manifest sense of destiny is not simply for her country, it's for herself.
- [20:51]
Jack Wilson
Right. And she also was the daughter of immigrants, so.
- [20:56]
Carl Ralison
Yes. Who come to America with precisely that in mind. That we can make and remake ourselves here, that this is a new Land, a new opportunity. And in some ways it's kind of scary learning a new language. And you know, the First World War comes along and she's of Austrian German parentage and there are a lot of bad feelings about the Huns, as they were called the Germans in World War I. She's acutely conscious of all that and what it means to be the child of immigrants. I'm the child of immigrant grandparents, so I have some feeling, some understanding of what's expected of you. We came to this country for a reason. And I don't want to make it sound like it's an instruction, but I think the child absorbs it as you better perform.
- [21:50]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [21:51]
Carl Ralison
And so I think there's that. And then in the childhood reading, if you want to talk about the pre Smith years, it's her reading about, not just about American history, it's reading about the world. She's reading children's biographies and histories, for instance, of medieval Krakow of Poland. She's reading about slavery in the ancient world. I don't know that elementary schools provide this kind of curriculum anymore. You could teach a whole children's literature course if you went to my volume, Sylvia Plath, Day by Day, you could teach a children's literature course just using the books that Sylvia Plath read.
- [22:30]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, that's so interesting. And I'm sure we can also see all of this coming in through her poetry, which it is kind of astonishing where you think, where did a 24 year old or a 26 year old, where did she have time to learn all of this? But it makes sense if you're going back that far into childhood.
- [22:54]
Carl Ralison
That's right. And that's what became almost overwhelming for me in terms of the making of Sylvia Plath when I went back and I read her poem, Cut. One word, Cut. And it's essentially about her slicing her thumb while she's cooking. This is when she's in England, last couple years of her life, and then writes this poem. Cut. And she's looking at her. It was quite a deep cut, the flowing blood. And it becomes a poem not only about domesticity and being at home, but when the blood is flowing, she talks about the Red Coats, and then when she wraps her thumb, she talks about the Ku Klux Klan. But when I say talk about, she alludes to it. She uses these words. And I began thinking, this goes right back to school.
- [23:41]
Jack Wilson
Yeah, right, yeah.
- [23:42]
Carl Ralison
This goes right back to her reading about the American Revolution, the British Redcoats and the rebels and so on. And her last poetry is in many ways iconoclastic, rebellious, sometimes very angry, but a kind of controlled anger. There's a kind of revolution of feeling going on in that poem, even as she's just, you know, it's such a mundane thing. Who hasn't cut their. Their thumb or their finger while cooking or being in the kitchen for some reason? And she makes it almost like a world historical event. It's mind blowing.
- [24:20]
Jack Wilson
Well, in some ways in her mind it kind of was. I mean, it sounds like what's populating her mind are these images and these historical references. It's not just an illusion, the way a professor might drop an illusion in kind of a, you know, let me adjust my necktie before I say this kind of way. But. But that this is who she's thinking about and what's parading through her mind based on those early childhood experiences with. With the history.
- [24:54]
Carl Ralison
That's right. She's often called a confessional poet, which is very misleading because it makes it sound like she's just interested in her own experience and what she's interested in. And this is why, going back to her child, what I'm interested in is right from the beginning, she was taught that her feelings are connected to what's happening in the rest of the world. That she is not just herself, that what she's seeing. People often are upset about the fact that she writes about the Holocaust. She's not Jewish, you know that, you know, the current can't buzz term. You know, someone, you're appropriating somebody else's experience. It's such a fundamental misunderstand of her. What she's doing is trying to connect with the Holocaust, to understand what people went through, not, oh, I'm saying, you know, my feelings are just as terrible as the Holocaust. That's a real misreading of her poetry.
- [25:52]
Jack Wilson
You also write that she was made sick by her keen awareness of what the Cold War was doing to her country and to the world. What in particular alarmed her and how did that play out in her poetry?
- [26:06]
Carl Ralison
Yeah, one of her first real awarenesses of this comes after World War II. She's a child of World War II. She grows up listening to the radio. There are reports about the war. She sees the war in newsreels. She sees Japanese detention camps and eventually photographs of the Holocaust cost and so on. And she knows as a young girl, just entering her teens, what an evil, terrible world it can be. And then she's graduating from high school and she's going to go off to Smith College. Now the family did not have a lot of money. She did have a scholarship. But even with a scholarship, you know, there are things you want, you want a little bit of spending money, for example. And the way she does it is she works on and nobody of her. She came from a wealthy community, Wellesley. No one did what she did. She went and worked on a farm. I'm talking about hard physical labor. Every day she'd come home, she'd ride her bike to the farm and come back and be absolutely exhausted, you know, and sleep very soundly. And one of her early poems written in 1950 is called strawberries. It's about picking strawberries. And she's out in the field picking the strawberries. And for some reason, somebody it's again, it's in my everyday plant, day by day book. Someone makes a comment about the war and about, oh, you know, this is the cold war, you know, the rivalry with the Soviet Union, so on. And someone makes a very casual comment about, well, let's blow them up, you know, and she's just horrified by how someone in a field, on a farm would have this kind of malevolent level of anger toward people who they've never met and don't know.
- [28:00]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [28:01]
Carl Ralison
And that's how the bell jar begins with the execution of the Rosenbergs and how one of these mademoiselle interns, one of these young women who's working at the magazine sort of yawns and, and it says, you know, I hope they burn them. You know, it's the same feeling that she had 10 years earlier when she wrote that poem.
- [28:27]
Jack Wilson
Right. Okay, let's take a quick break and then come back with more from Carl Rawlison Foreign. Make your next move with American Express business Platinum. Earn 5 times Membership Rewards points on flights and prepaid hotels booked on amextravel.com and with a welcome offer of 150,000 points. After you spend $20,000 on purchases on the car card within your first three months of membership, your business can soar to new heights. Terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Platinum AmEx Business Platinum Built for business by American Express. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever find yourself playing the budgeting game? Well, with the name your price tool from Progressive, you can find options that fit your budget and potentially lower your bills. Try it@progressive.com Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. If your job at a healthcare facility includes disinfecting against viruses, you know, Prevention is the best medicine. And maintaining healthy spaces starts with a healthy cleaning routine. Granger's world class support supply chain helps ensure you have the quality products you need when you need them, from disinfectants and cleaning supplies to personal protective equipment so you can help deliver a clean bill of health. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click granger.com or just stop by Grainger for the ones who get it done. Okay, we're back. So Carl, if we could shift gears a little bit here. You said something that really interested me in the author's note, and you were talking about the Plath Hughes relationship, and you suggested that Plath might have created her own version of Hughes. And you compare it with the movie Gaslight where idolatrous love blinds Ingrid Bergman to her husband's desire to dominate every aspect of her life and drive her mad. How close was this to what you see in the Plath Hughes relationship?
- [31:03]
Carl Ralison
I've been thinking about this a lot through different beginning with American isis, the Life and Art of Sylvia Plath that I published in 2013, how to Talk about this marriage and what this marriage meant. Part of the problem is he never really leveled with us, that is he except for birthday letters which he wrote over several decades but published the last year of his life. And even there, it's all about her. It's not about the implications of his actions. He never seemed to be able to objectify or get outside himself to see how the way he spoke to her, the way in many ways he manipulated her, he wasn't aware of. He seemed to simply shy away from that to make it her pathology, her problem with her dead father and so on.
- [32:04]
Jack Wilson
And anything that he did was just him doing his best to respond in a way that any person would have if they had been faced with this kind of a challenge, right?
- [32:15]
Carl Ralison
So toward the end of her life, when he's unfaithful to her and he's left her, she writes some very bitter letters and she begins to talk about things which she didn't talk about when they happened. An incident where he hits her. In an early biography of Celia Plath by Paul Alexander, he talks about their honeymoon and about this strangling incident which Emily Van Dyne, in her recent book Loving Sylvia Plath, is the first biographer to really unpack this, to treat it seriously. What I try to show in the Making of Sylvia Plath, and I say this at the beginning, is how controlling he was in his letters. He makes it sound like she's the controlling one. He has no freedom. It's like he can't breathe because she's so possessive. But if you look at, particularly his treatment of other women, one of whom he tried to strangle, if you look at what he did after she died, which was essentially to control everything, to say, I'm the only one who really knows Sylvia Plath. And all these biographers are just. They're interlopers. They're people trying to make money. It's always when people talk about making money off biography, it's hilarious. If I put in all the. The hours I spent writing my biographies, I wouldn't be making minimum wage. I mean, you. You know, I'm not living in some palace because I wrote these books, you know. But he would make it sound like that. You know, these people are just opportunistic.
- [33:48]
Jack Wilson
Carl, sorry to interrupt. I think you might be discounting the glamour of appearing on the History of Literature podcast multiple times.
- [33:56]
Carl Ralison
Yeah, there is that. I was. I was thinking about that. That's true. And I certainly like the att. So to that extent, it's true. Yes, There are other rewards other than money, for sure. But he makes it sound. The classic that people read is the Silent Woman by Janet Malcolm, in which she really makes the biographer sound like they're the villains. Anyway, he was very. What he did was, well, he destroyed some of her work. And then what he did release was in dribbles and often expurgated, you know, taking things out. Her mother wanted to publish her letters. And the mother did publish the letters, but only after she agreed to take out certain passages about him. And he would say things like, the woman he was married to, Carol. Oh, Carol's very upset about these things. She doesn't have that, doesn't want that in the book. Well, that's no reason to take them out. From my perspective, from the perspective I think of trying to tell the whole story. But Sylvia's mother wanted to show what a loving daughter she was, so she went ahead and published those expurgated letters. It's a book called Letters Home. So what I'm saying is he did such a disservice to Plath biography for over decades. He. In restricting material and even the way he presented her. For instance, when he presented her Collected Poems, he divided in between the poems she wrote after she met him. Those were the good poems. Any poems that she wrote before that he called Juvenilia. And he put them in the back of the book. And in many cases, he didn't publish the poems. The wonderful poem first called Mad Girl's Love Song that's not in the column Collected Poems. And in fact there are two scholars now, Amanda golden and Karen Kukul, who are doing a complete annotated edition of her poetry. I've just written a piece called Sylvia Platt's Pursuit of Happiness, which is one of the things it discusses is a poem called the Stoic, which she wrote in 1949, which is just listed as a title in her Collected Poems. You don't have the poem itself, so you get such a truncated, foreshortened view of her life. And a lot of this is the responsibility due to the manipulation of Ted Hughes and his sister Olin Hughes.
- [36:30]
Jack Wilson
Right. Now that we have some other sources that let us kind of triangulate this a little bit and see these people sort of from the close up, but from the outside as well. Did you find yourself thinking that Plathe had a good conception of herself, that her self conception was accurate, or did you think that she was blind to certain things and maybe a little bit deluded about her relationships with other people? And maybe did she see herself in a way that was accurate?
- [37:04]
Carl Ralison
Yeah, she often did. But like most of humanity, she could be self deluded. And one of the things I still probably will never know is when she married Ted Hughes and she started talking about America, he was quite excited. He had been planning to leave England and join his brother in Australia. And he completely changed his plans after he married her. And they went to Smith where she taught for a year and he was really enthused. But within a year, I mean, if you look at his letters, he's so critical of this country and unhappy and goes through periods when he can't write. He has as many, and I say this in the making of Silly, but he has as much mental distress as she does. Not just during that period, but other periods. One of the things that she never came to terms with to go back to this gaslighting business and why it's so shocking to people when they read her last letters is that she didn't level with herself as to how manipulative he was. She'll talk about his black moods, but she'll often write in her letters or her journal as if she mentions these black moods and how she's got to be very careful that she doesn't make it worse. But she never really analyzes him the way she analyzes herself. It's like he's her hero for a good part of the marriage and she doesn't want to tear that apart and it's buried so deep in Her. It's what it looks like to me. It's what I can't know or can only speculate on that. It would just be terrifying to admit it. There's. When she's at Cambridge, 1956, she watches Cocteau's movie the Beauty and the Beast, and she says, in effect, Ted is the beast, but I'm going to tame him. It's like some of your listeners may have had this experience of divorce, and in retrospect, one realizes that actually those problems that led to the divorce were apparent in the first year of the marriage, but neither partner wanted to face them. I think to some extent that's true with her because you can see the incipient, incipient problems that she's identifying. But they have these fights and they make up. They have fights and they make up. They have fights and they make up. And sometimes she treats this with bravado. She writes to her brother Warren and says, we had this big fight and Ted is missing an earlobe and I have bruises and. Ha, ha, ha. And then she goes on in a cheerful way, and you're thinking, well, she wrote one of these letters to one of her mentors, Olive Higgins Prouty, who is the author of Stella Dallas and who funded scholarships at Smith. And Plath had one of these scholarships and was grateful to Prouty. And when Plath meets Hughes and begins to talk about him, Prouty writes back to her and said, I'm not sure about this guy. Not certain. And then another friend of hers, actually a woman who had been with her at McLean Hospital when they both had breakdowns and suicide attempts. And this woman, Jane Anderson, visits Plath at Cambridge shortly before she marries Ted Hughes. And Plath says, you know, he's. She doesn't use the word monster, but essentially she says, I'm gonna. He's a rough case, but I know I can handle it. And so there are these warning signs that she doesn't choose not to quite overlook, but she thinks she can. There's almost something heroic in her desire to shape him or reshape him in a way.
- [41:07]
Jack Wilson
So there is an archive at Smith College of Plath's therapist, Ruth Boucher, if I'm pronouncing that correctly. Did that open any doors for you as a biographer, trying to understand what Plath was going through and how she saw herself and how it may have looked to her therapist?
- [41:27]
Carl Ralison
Yeah, I think so. I think this therapist was. For instance, she had grown up in Europe. She had seen the coming of fascism and what that was going to mean she had difficult problems with her mother and father and was able to talk to Plath about those things. She had such a powerful sense of what it would mean for this young intellectual woman and poet to develop. And they developed such a rapport together. And the therapist talks about that rapport, that connection that the two of them had. I mean, Ruth Boisher did things like she went shopping with Sylvia Plath. She did things which were unorthodox, that therapists weren't supposed to do. It reminds me a lot of Marilyn Monroe's therapist, Ralph Greenberg, who invited Monroe into his home and made her part of his family. There's a kind of. The technical term is transference, where the patient, in effect, falls in love with the therapist, in some sense becomes a part of the family. And then that can work to heal the patient. But obviously you can also develop a kind of dependence on the therapist. And as a result, Ruth Beuscher has been criticized by many of Plath's biographers. I take a very different view. I wouldn't say that she's immune to criticism, that she shouldn't be criticized. But when you look at what shape Plath was in after her suicide attempt, how all these male doctors didn't have a clue as to how to treat her, and Ruth Beuscher did. And I'm convinced that it's because she had gone through some of the same experiences that Plath had gone through. And because they were women, because they bonded in a particular way that would have been almost impossible with a male therapist.
- [43:19]
Jack Wilson
And women, especially in those years, had the kind of intellectual background that the two of them had, would have found company in one another. I mean, Plath is in a world of Good Housekeeping magazines and Ladies Journal and that kind of thing. And for her to find someone else was probably very important to her. So you mentioned Marilyn Monroe. I wanted to ask you about these three women that you've written about. Marilyn Monroe was born in 1926, and Sylvia Plath was born in 1932. And Susan Style Sontag was born in 1933. If you look at those three women, do their lives and work, tell us anything about American culture in that era. Can you draw any parallels or see any trends there? Or are they just too distinct in order for you to make that kind of a comparison?
- [44:20]
Carl Ralison
No, there's a real overlap. Sylvia Platt was very much aware of Marilyn Monroe and wrote about her in her journal, a dream she had about Marilyn Monroe. She actually wrote a poem about Monroe Figures that New Yorker published But they took out the lines about Marilyn Monroe, so no one know it unless you look back at the original poem and the archive. So she was very aware, I think, think of Marilyn Monroe. Susan Sontag's diaries have now been published, and she writes about Sylvia Plath. So she was very aware of Sylvia Plath as a model. These were all groundbreaking women. They were. None of them would have used the term feminist because of the time they grew up in, really, the idea of someone declaring themselves as a feminist, you might go back to the 1920s, or you might go to the 1970s, but the years in between, working women. Another one of my subjects. Martha Gellhorn never called herself a feminist, but she did all the things that feminists wanted women to do. She just didn't like the label. She didn't want to be separated. She wanted to be, you know, treated as equal with men, to be able to do all the things that men did. What all three women had in common, it's interesting, I think, is they were all attractive and all attractive to men, and they had to deal with their sexuality and figure out how to deal with that sexuality and their ambition and their desire to write and their desire to succeed. And with Sontag, there's another layer in that she was. I don't know what else to call her except bisexuals. She had, you know, affairs with men and women. It's been rumored that Monroe did, too, but I've never been able to pin that down. But they had that kind of cross sexual appeal. You might say that was important to them, but that was difficult to negotiate in the culture of the 1940s, 50s and early 1960s.
- [46:29]
Jack Wilson
Right. So we often, I like to quote you in how you describe yourself as a serial biographer. You've written about so many different people, and you've really become kind of a scholar of the art of biography. When you approach these subjects, do you go in with kind of a checklist? Like, I'm going to have to cover their early years, and I'll have to talk about their parents, maybe their grandparents. I'll have to talk about their education. And you kind of have in mind a set of things that you'll, you know, boxes you'll have to check, or do you kind of approach each one as well? This person is going to be as unique as a snowflake, and I will just go with wherever the topic takes me and where I think it's most important to focus and to contribute that way.
- [47:25]
Carl Ralison
There's definitely no checklists. In fact, someone once asked me, well, how do you organize your work? And I said, I'm too busy writing to organize what happens with all of these subjects, and it doesn't matter whether they're men or women. What happens for me as a biographer, when someone said, well, you've written about so many different people. Is there some connection? And I say, of course there is. Well, what is that? Well, the connection is me. The connection that I make with all of my subjects is. And this may be an illusion on my part, but it's. What I've often said is I feel I know something about those subjects that hasn't been written about. Maybe somebody else knows it. But if there have been other biographers of the subject, as far as I'm concerned, they haven't touched it, they haven't seen it, and I think I see it. And then I have to deal with all the other stuff, like the childhood and the marriages and the education and the rest of it. But I'm intuitive. I work intuitively. I just did a podcast about a subject of mine that most people don't know about. Her name is Jill Craigie. She's British. She was married to the Labour Party leader Michael Foot, and she's also significant in the history of British documentary. And I interviewed her when I did my biography of Rebecca west, because she was a friend of Rebecca West. And one day I Woke up in 1999, in late December, and there was Joe Craigie's obituary. I hadn't lost contact with her in the last five years of her life. And within the first paragraph, I looked at that first paragraph, and to myself, I said, I've got to write her biography. I didn't know if she had an archive. I didn't know if her husband would be cooperative. I didn't know what I would find. It didn't matter.
- [49:16]
Jack Wilson
Right. And are there any subjects that you've turned down or that you've started and then you realized you had some antipathy toward them or you didn't have the level of insight you wanted to have, or does that ever happen? Or is it basically you're so interested in other people's lives that you always find something that you can latch onto and. And make worthwhile?
- [49:42]
Carl Ralison
Well, I always do find something. But there is one project that I did abandon, actually had a contract for the biography, and then I didn't do it of Herman Melville. I done a reference book with my wife, Lisa Paddock, called Herman Melville A to Z, and I got really interested in Melville, and particularly the last 40 years or so of his Life in New York City when he was a customs inspector. And that's what I would have. I would have written about his whole life. But I would have started there, actually. Yeah, for all sorts of reasons. But what happened was I was supposed to write a short, relatively short, under 100,000 words, maybe 300 page book on Herman Melville. And I signed this contract not long after I had published my two volumes of William Faulkner, and I started to work on Melville. And I consider Melville, you know, the breadth of his work, the number of significant things he did right up there with Faulkner. And I realized I simply did not have the psychic energy. It was just too much. I probably should have just laid off and done Melville later. But I've gone on to other things. So now I think it's probably not going to happen. And I told the editor it was for a series of short biographies. And I said, I just. When I think of Moby Dick, when I think of the great work that Melville did, and when I think about what it took in a comparable case with Faulkner, with the Sound, the Fury and Absalom, Absalom. And As I Lay Dying in late August and all these wonderful works of literature, and then to do it all again in my retirement, it seemed. It just seemed too much. Also, I need some variety. The thing I did is I turned to Ronald Coleman because I could watch all those old movies, and he was a very different kind of subject. He didn't leave diaries, he didn't leave a lot of letters. I had to write biography in a very different way. And that's refreshing for me, for somebody else to say, well, where's the archive? Where's this? Where's that? That doesn't matter to me. As long as I have a sense of the person, I'm going to find the material I need to tell my particular kind of story.
- [52:03]
Jack Wilson
Right. That's so fascinating, and it says a lot about you as a biographer, I think, because a lot of biographers would probably deal with a life like Melville's by saying, well, okay, the Customs House years, we'll give those a couple of pages. But we got to spend all of our time on the meetings with Hawthorne and the writing of Moby Dick and all of that. But if you're planning to tackle that, if you find that interesting, we're probably talking about a book like Leon Adele's volumes of Henry James, where it would stretch out over multiple volumes, because how could you write about, you know, the Custom House years, but then only give the writing of Moby Dick a page or two. That would probably not please your publisher either.
- [52:52]
Carl Ralison
Yeah, I'd have to do some kind of, like, slice of life, you know, Herman Melville in New York, and just allude to those other works.
- [52:58]
Jack Wilson
Mm, right. Well, that, you know, never say never. I will be an eager reader of that book if it ever comes to pass. But in the meantime, I'll take all of the other biographies we can get. This book is called the Making of Sylvia Plath. Carl Ralison, thank you so much for joining me on the history of literature.
- [53:17]
Carl Ralison
Oh, it's been a pleasure. Good questions.
- [53:20]
Jack Wilson
Okay, thank you. And finally today, let's hear from Cheryl Hopson, who joined us for an episode on Zora Neale Hurston. After she and I discussed Hurston's life and works, I asked Cheryl a special question. Okay. Joining me now is Cheryl Hopson, whose works include Zora Neale Hurston, A Critical Life. Cheryl, this question comes from a listener who asks, what do you want your last book to be? This will be the last book you will ever read. You can either choose one that exists or describe one that has not yet been written.
- [54:18]
Cheryl Hopson
I love this question. I thought I wanted to be a collection of poems by poets yet to be born, and I think I still want that, But I also want my Mother's Day voice in it. So I think it would be a combination of a memoir that tells my mother's story, but also poems from others about their relationship with their mothers and grandmothers, et cetera. So I like a mix of voices with my mother's being the heartbeat of the book.
- [54:52]
Jack Wilson
Oh, yeah, right. Other people have responded to this question, and they've said, I want such and such books, and I want my mother to be reading it to me.
- [55:03]
Cheryl Hopson
Oh, that's lovely.
- [55:05]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. So maybe there's something there you could wish for. Right. And be such a comforting thing. So for the poets, it sounds like you just want to mix. You don't have one particular poet in mind.
- [55:19]
Cheryl Hopson
I know. I want Jericho Brown in there for sure. And Ada Limon and Yusuf Kumayaka. I love these poets. And Terrence Hayes and Gerald Stern and Maya Angelou and June Jordan, Alice Walker and Cheryl Hobson. But I'm listening for the voices that are coming along, you know? So I want to hear them. I want to hear what they have to convey. I'm excited about that.
- [55:47]
Jack Wilson
That's really interesting because I think a lot of writers, they take kind of an opposite approach, that they're happy to have the writers who came before them and the ones that they kind of grew up admiring and the ones that they always measured themselves against and so on. But they feel like the younger writers, they view them more as a threat and more of, who are you to sort of replace me? But you seem very generous in thinking that these are voices you want to hear.
- [56:18]
Cheryl Hopson
Oh, I can't wait to hear them. I think. Yes. Come on, come on, Replace me. But let me be in that race with you. Let me be in there with you. A cacophony of sound. Yes.
- [56:31]
Jack Wilson
Yeah. What gives you optimism about the younger voices? Or is it just that they'll be unusual and new? Or do you think they'll have some kind of energy or wisdom or something that will be able to. To benefit from?
- [56:46]
Cheryl Hopson
I think they'll add perspective. Yeah, absolutely. Teaching makes me aware of that. Every day I'll come in with an idea, and then I'll get a response to that idea, and it's.
- [56:58]
Carl Ralison
Whoa.
- [56:59]
Cheryl Hopson
It's kind of like jazz. We're all going. And there's that familiar drum beat, and it's just music. That's what I love. I love that dynamism of the new.
- [57:10]
Jack Wilson
You know, I'm a parent, and my kids are. One is a senior in high school, and the other one is a third year in college. And I'm feeling that kind of shift where, you know, it used to be my wife and I would kind of set the agenda, you know, at the dinner table. We'd be. The conversation would kind of be going through us, and we'd be asking questions or we'd be bringing up topics and so on. And. And as my kids get into their early twenties. Ish. And soon to be mid twenties and so on, I can kind of feel it that they and their friends and their generation are sort of the ones who are kind of teeing things up for the conversation. The balance of power in the conversation is kind of shifting, and I can feel it. And I can remember that happening when I was around that age, that it. You start to, you know, and the older people starting to take a bit of a step back. And it does seem like a very natural progression that as we age, it can be time to, you know, work on our listening skills as much as our speaking skills.
- [58:19]
Cheryl Hopson
Oh, definitely. Or as Alice Walker says, look both ways, looking to the side and back. I'm always listening for the ones who came before me and the ones who are just ahead of me. Right. They're on their way because I learned from both. And then I'm at that Gen X middle ground, just trying to feel my way through it. Yeah, I think it's dynamic and I prefer it. I prefer to be surrounded by that.
- [58:49]
Jack Wilson
Okay. Cheryl Hopson, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [58:54]
Cheryl Hopson
Absolutely. Thank you, Zach. It was a pleasure.
- [59:01]
Jack Wilson
Okay, there we go. That's going to do it for this episode of the History of Literature. Wasn't that fun? Cheryl Hobson is such a delight. My thanks to her and to Carl Rawson for being our guest today. We'll be back soon with some classic Indian literature and some f. Scott Fitzgerald, D.H. lawrence and Ralph Waldo Emerson and his changing views on what to do about slavery. We have John Ruskin on the horizon and a reimagining of the Great Gatsby as told by Daisy, as reimagined as a 90s era feminist poet. We'll talk to Australia's queen of the Regency romance and a man who immersed himself in the literature of atrocity. What did he have for us when he came back up for air? All that coming up, so please do stay tuned. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time. Hi, I'm Rick Rebecc. And I'm Royce Yudkoff. Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur.
- [60:37]
Carl Ralison
Owning your own business and being your own boss?
- [60:40]
Jack Wilson
Our new podcast from Harvard Business School, Think Big, Big Buy Small, explores becoming an entrepreneur through the acquisition of an enduringly profitable small business. In this series, we guide listeners how to buy their own small business, including determining if this path is right for them, evaluating prospects, raising the capital they'll need to purchase a small business, closing the deal, and more. Follow Think Big, Buy Small wherever you get your podcasts.
- [61:07]
Carl Ralison
How are business leaders working to confront climate change?
- [61:10]
Jack Wilson
For that answer, listen to the award.
- [61:12]
Carl Ralison
Winning Climate Rising podcast produced by Harvard.
- [61:15]
Jack Wilson
Business School and hosted by me, Mike Toffel, a professor at hbs. Each episode we share a behind the scenes view into how startups and the.
- [61:23]
Carl Ralison
Biggest businesses like Microsoft, Google and seventh.
- [61:26]
Jack Wilson
Generation are tackling the central issue of our era. Check out Climate Rising wherever you get your podcasts.