A clean slate, with your own face on
Talking to my son about Sylvia Plath
Hello,
You came home last week and told me, ‘We did a really good poem at school today,’ and I dropped everything to pay attention. This doesn’t happen often. Your announcements, when they come, are usually about a new season of Fortnite, or news of a YouTuber I haven’t heard of. Today, though, you said, ‘I think it was called You’re.’
‘You’re,’ I said, ‘by Sylvia Plath?’
‘Not sure.’
‘Clownlike, happiest on your hands…’
‘That’s it!’
‘Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled…’
‘I didn’t think you’d know it!’
‘I do! It’s a riddle.’
‘Yes,’ you beam, proud. ‘I was the only one who got it! I said, “It’s a baby!”’
‘That’s right!’
‘The Mexican jumping bean - a living thing inside something else.’
‘And it describes the baby kicking.’
‘And that.’
‘Right, like a well-done sum,’ I said.
I don’t think I got the riddle the first time I read it. Like you, though, I was in class, and the teacher handed out the poem, and we all had to guess what it was about. It took me back to those lessons when you would decorate a poem in underlines and circlings and annotations, leaning in close to the breath of each word. I could still do it, alone, I suppose, but I never do. There are so many habits we drop when we’re unobserved.
I told you that I love Sylvia Plath, that I studied Ariel for my English A-Level, and that I still run over the poems in my head sometimes, each one engraved there by all that annotation. I tell you that she was so very sharp, so very feeling, and I am about to go on to the one fact that everyone knows about Sylvia Plath, the tragic, dark fact; but then I stop myself. You are - you’re - still blissfully unaware that she took her own life, and I suddenly find that I want to keep it from you for just a little longer.
Someone will tell you soon enough, I’m sure of it. And then I will probably have to explain something that I don’t want to explain, about sharp, feeling women then and now, and how hard it is to move through this world. But for now, I hesitate, not because I want to keep you from knowing about death, but because I want you to enjoy the rare privilege of reading Syliva Plath without tangling it up with the end of her life, and how it rebounds and echoes back through all her work so that we read her differently in the aftermath.
Most of all, I want to keep from you, just for a little longer, the image of the doomed girl, and how inevitable she once seemed to me.
I am still a little embarrassed of how intensely I identify with Plath; it feels like a teenage skin I have yet to shed. ‘She always appeals to a certain kind of girl,’ said my school English Lit. teacher. She didn’t mean it kindly. That certain kind of girl was, of course, me: gloomy, morbid, at odds with all the bright, serious values that my school wanted me to embody. In the days before we started to take teenage mental health seriously (and immediately felt engulfed by the level of need we found), it was more likely to be the subject of ridicule than sympathy. Still now, you hear people hankering after the good old days, when they could pretend not to see.
Presented with Plath and her life story, I felt grateful to see what a girl like me might achieve. The problem was that I felt grateful for the ending, too; it gave me a sense that a grand narrative arc was playing out in my life, one of valiant literary struggle and posthumous recognition. With everything so murky, it seemed at least like an answer, a dark pathway through.
You’re was far from my favourite poem anyway; I hated the condescending nursery vowels of ‘Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.’ I preferred Daddy, the poem that made me think of my stuttering relationship with my own father, the way that distance and obsession entwine; the way she captured anxiety under glass in Resolve, where she sits ‘with hands/ unserviceable’ and vows, ‘today I will not/ disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners’. I promised myself that every day.
In class, we were taught to admire her literary flourishes - the way that she could write ‘yew trees’ and have us hear ‘uterus’; the meaning she could convey just by the sound of words - but not, dear God, to actually like her work. Poetry was not read for its own sake, anyway. It was read, instead, to be picked into fragments, and those fragments quoted in a way that was clever and original, but never, in itself, generative.
I was forever straining against those bounds, pushing to be allowed, for once, to bring my own self into the classroom, instead of being my own constricted ghost. One particular day stands clear in my mind, when our teacher asked me to read aloud Plath’s poem Ariel, and to tell the class what I thought it meant.
I read that breathless tangle of lines, the ‘pivot of heels and knees’, ‘the neck I cannot catch’; ‘how one we grow.’ Afterwards, I paused and saw the smirk on her face as she asked, ‘So, what is the poem about?’ I said it anyway: ‘It’s about sex.’
The smirk widened. This girl had given herself away, out at night, doing things that her own children, who played solemn violin in the school orchestra and entered debating competitions, did not do. What a coup it must have felt to her, what a glorious trap. ‘No,’ she said steadily. ‘It’s not about anything like that. It’s about riding a horse. Sylvia Plath’s horse was called Ariel. She liked riding it. That’s all.’
That night, I went home and took the poem apart, line by line, to see if I could remove the scent of sex from it. I couldn’t, and still cannot. I wanted to go into school the next day and prove my point in underlines and annotations, just as I’d been taught. The horse is a metaphor, I wanted to say. It always is.
But now, the part of that poem I think about more than the ‘black sweet blood mouthfuls’ and the ‘child’s cry’ is the line that none of us mentioned, but which only I had to speak aloud - a racial slur that is dropped into the poem as though it is merely a colour. I remember gulping over it, wondering whether it was a different kind of word back then, whether, like the entirely innocent horse, my contemporary ear rendered it lurid. I wanted to ask, but after one public takedown, I didn’t dare. It was not mentioned. We moved on.
I know now that it was a racist word in Plath’s time, just as it was in mine. Perhaps, to my teacher, it didn’t seem worth mentioning, but I find that hard to believe. All the other words had such underlined weight, after all.
There were people in that room who must have been pierced by that word, but no matter. We were not in the business of truth. We were busy taming the world, clinging hard to the bars on the nursery windows, even until our fingers bled.
If we do not speak to our children about the realness of life, then we do not speak to them at all. I now think how much I could have learned from an honest unpacking of Ariel, if anyone had the courage to do it. Instead of a doomed girl who liked riding horses, I might have glimpsed a woman who seized her right to carnal pleasure and defied the sedated image of the good housewife to capture it in verse. I might also - if we had been truly brave - been invited to think about the ways in which adults, who should know better, cling to ideas that shame them. I might have been helped to look clear-eyed at the flaws of my heroine, and to start the life’s work of pulling at the ensuing knot. But instead I learned shame at having such an earthbound idol, so sordid in her intensity. I learned that women like Plath cannot sustain the heat of their own burning. I learned that it’s polite to look away.
All the wrong lessons are taught in the conversations we do not, and will not, hold. We live in an HD age, all the flaws of those we admire enlarged across our screens. What do we learn about these people now: that we should have no heroes? Or that heroes were never supposed to write roadmaps for our lives in the first place?
But I will not tell you about Plath’s suicide just yet, because you do not need to know, and because I want to give you something else: her dancing, clever riddles, her acrobatic language, the way you can turn an emotion on the point of a pin, using sound alone. You will not yet understand the towel packed against the crack in the door to keep her children safe, the quiet desperation with no help in sight. I hope you never do, and that, when you come to learn the details, you will know enough to sympathise rather than condemn.
I hope that, before then, the world will show you a hundred bright, brittle women who lived despite it all, who thrived and generated, who reproduced themselves into the centre of our culture, unashamed.
The UK paperback of Enchantment comes out on 5th March, and I already got my box. They are GORGEOUS - so shiny and spring-like.
I’ve teamed up with my local indie bookshop, Harbour Books, for a special offer: if you pre-order your copy by the end of February, I’ll sign and dedicate it to a name of your choice, before it’s shipped directly to your door (UK addresses only, sorry).
I’ll also be appearing at a handful of UK bookshops if you’d like to say ‘hello’ in person - dates in Whitstable, Margate, Dulwich, Oxford, Bath and Brighton coming soon, but for now, you can book to see me Backstory Books in Balham on 13th March.
As you may already know, I also run a Retreat Tier for people who’d like to take part in four online retreats per year. These three-hour sessions are slow, calm, nourishing moments for us to gather together, shut out the world, and rest. I provide some gentle reflective exercises, but the deepest value lies in the discussion that comes up as we meander our way through the session. It’s all about being in community for a while, and I really look forward to them.
If you’d like to join us this year, you’ll need to upgrade to the Retreat Tier. The 2024 dates will be:
Saturday 24th February, 4pm - 7pm UK / 11am - 2pm ET / 8am - 11am PT
Saturday 8th June, 4pm - 7pm UK / 11am - 2pm ET / 8am - 11am PT
Saturday 5th October, 4pm - 7pm UK / 11am - 2pm ET / 8am - 11am PT
Saturday 7th December, 4pm - 7pm UK / 11am - 2pm ET / 8am - 11am PT
That’s quite enough from me for one week!
Take care,
Katherine
If you think a friend or loved one would enjoy The Clearing by Katherine May, gift subscriptions are available here | Website | Buy: Enchantment UK /US | Buy: Wintering UK / US | Buy: The Electricity of Every Living Thing UK / US
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Such a wonderful, nuanced essay, and so generous: "I want you to enjoy the rare privilege of reading Syliva Plath without tangling it up with the end of her life."
‘She always appeals to a certain kind of girl,’ said my school English Lit. teacher. She didn’t mean it kindly.
I was that kind of girl too, and I have a special place in my heart for all those girls. Looking forward to revisiting Plath when I have some time this weekend.