Shadow Book

Discarded material from Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation

As I was working on the sample chapter for my new book proposal, I came across a series of essay-like pieces that I wrote, and discarded, for Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation. This one seemed worth sharing. It begins with a long quote from Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, which was never far from me, then.

“108. Think, for example, of Leonard Cohen’s ‘famous blue raincoat,’ whose principal attribute is that it is ‘torn at the shoulder.’ Perhaps it is even the tear that makes it famous. The song features Cohen at his most lugubrious and opaque, which is saying a lot, but I have always loved its final line-- ‘Sincerely, L.Cohen’-- as it makes me feel less alone in composing almost everything I write as a letter. I would even go so far as to say that I do not know how to compose otherwise, which makes writing in a prism of solitude, as I am here, a somewhat novel and painful experiment. ‘When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object,’ wrote Thoreau during his bitter falling-out with Emerson, unwittingly offering a cogent explanation of how and why so many songwriters have personified blue as the one friend they can count on. It ‘loves me when I’m lonely/And thinks of me first,’ sings Lucinda Williams. But really this is very strange--as if blue not only had a heart, but also a mind.” -Maggie Nelson, from Bluets

By the time I read these lines, the time on my twice-extended deadline for this book is running out. I have about 7 weeks left, and one of those weeks is going to be spent in DisneyWorld, another is Thanksgiving. At night, I read Maggie Nelson until my eyes close of their own accord. She writes in Bluets about her friend who, in the agonizing pain and paralysis she endures from a terrible accident, is “like an oracle.” Nelson seems like an oracle to me, but as soon as I either think or write that, I get irritated with myself and imagine Nelson irritated with me. Nelson writes about ideas the way I want to write about ideas-- they flow in and out of her personal experience, with one illuminating the next and so I think it makes more sense to try and write like Maggie Nelson, not just fangirl over her being a genius. I also notice that when people do the latter, in interviews, she seems to recede.

Which brings me to the point, but already, I see I want to precede the point again. The idea for this section came to me as I walked the baby to daycare this morning, and I had one of those visionary moments when each idea lit up the next. I still know each idea, and the writing is the stitching together of the lights, fastening one bolt to the next until the idea beneath, if I’m lucky, carries a general glow. I try to reproduce the thrill of the moment. The compression. What it is to see ten years of one’s life light up like a switchboard, and everything makes sense. But I’m the only one living that life and the only one having the moment as I walk the baby to daycare, so what’s the fucking difference, as it is.

As the days close in, I’m looking for any escape hatch-- how can I finish this, which translates itself to, how do I get out of this alive? Which translates itself to change-- this is nothing new, for me. Every time something gets hard, right before I really dig in and fucking do it, I try some kind of radical alternation. As I read Bluets, I think, A letter. For about ten minutes, lying in bed, I convince myself this is the answer. Rewrite everything I have-- what, 100,000 words? More?-- in the epistolary. I imagine the start-- Dear Sylvia… but I’m displeased by the sound. Instead: Sylvia. As though we’re old friends.

Except we are not old friends, we are not friends at all. She is a stranger to me, despite my possessing an absurdly detailed knowledge of her life from her birth onward. She died 17 years before I was born. But my contrary brain is alight with this stupid concept, and, as always, the thought of starting fresh seems easier than digging into what exists. So I start to write it in my head:

Sylvia,

People think we’ve heard enough of you, and from you. The opening of this book is based on that concept-- No More Plath Please…

I get no further. I fall asleep. The baby wakes at 6:20 in the dark, and I cuddle and kiss him and watch him crawl around his nursery until it is time to wake the big kids. He barfs up some milk. I clean it up. This is life.

Part of the allure of the epistolary was some Twitter-sized writing advice bullshit: Write what you’re afraid of, or whatever. None of these turd-like nuggets of advice ever mean a thing to me, but they do manage to get me into a state each time I read them, like I’m failing twice. First, by not finishing the book on time. Second, by not doing whatever pat thing I’m being told to do. I look around in a panic-- am I not afraid enough? Should I feel fear when I open my laptop? When the idea for the epistolary came to me-- or rather, when I stole it from Maggie Nelson and Henry David Thoreau in tandem-- I thought, No, that’s stupid. Then I thought, Do the hard thing, do the thing you’re afraid of, so for a hot minute, it sounded good.

Walking the baby to daycare, wide-awake in the salt October air, I take the idea apart for real. It’s a bad idea (for me, anyway, not generally). This is not a love letter to Sylvia Plath. I don’t know Sylvia Plath. In fact, she remains at a remove. Her poems are aliens (this is why I love them). Oh my god, what am I/That these late mouths should cry open/In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers. Oh my god, what am I? Plath was willing to be an alien to herself. She hung herself over that edge and lived there. That’s why I love her. That’s why I fear her. That’s why I write the way I do, everything so laden with me, me, me, I infect every comma, each word. I drown in the terror of losing myself. Plath jumped in the same sea, and swam.

In Bluets, Maggie Nelson writes that she is comforted by the Leonard Cohen song “famous blue raincoat,” which ends with, “Sincerely, L. Cohen.” It makes her feel less isolated, since all of the writing she does is essentially in epistolary form-- at its inception, anyway. For a brief moment, I consider rewriting the entirety of this book as a letter-- Dear Sylvia… I imagine the call and response (or, rather, the hollow echo-- she isn’t going to talk back), the way I can circle the ideas back to Plath as if we’re in conversation. I am briefly lulled into thinking this is a good idea.

This is a terrible idea. I am not writing to a dead woman. I am writing about a dead woman, but I am writing to the living. I am, I hope, writing to at least some living women stuck in the throes of a dangerous place, who might eventually get out of that dangerous place.

But this isn’t the only reason I’m not writing to Sylvia Plath.

Sylvia Plath died in those aforementioned throes. She was still in love with Ted Hughes. She recognized the danger he represented, but she was stuck. I have been stuck. Maggie Nelson quotes Thoreau in the same passage about the Cohen song: “When our companion fails us we transfer our love instantaneously to a worthy object.” There was never a time when my ex wasn’t failing me in some way, but it wasn’t until many years after the fact that I realized that failure. And when I did, I transferred my love to a worthy object-- to Sylvia Plath, who in death became, for me, a particular kind of object. More like a house, actually-- one I could move around in and explore. In reconstructing her life and her afterlife, I move closer to understanding my own. This is a case without a body, Plath wrote in her poem, “The Detective.” It is still a case without a body. In the absence of a body, I construct a house.

One thing I understand-- we can’t hear it until we can hear it. By it, I mean the truth about the companions who fail us. The last letter we have from Plath is dated February 4, 1963. It is written to her psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher. Plath died exactly one week later. In the letter, all of her bravado from the fall is gone. She is alone and she is going mad again. She laments that she should have had a love like the one she had with Hughes, and then lost it. You can hear the despair. It is evident. She closes with a single line: Now the babies are crying, I must take them out for tea.

I came to the end of Plath’s second volume of letters, to that line, alone in my bed, and wept. Madness and duty. Warped ideas of love.

If I were to write a letter to the woman who wrote that letter, she wouldn’t hear it. A letter to October 1962 Plath-- that would be a thing. She would inhale it and we would plot to escape the bastard. But the Plath who died in London wanted Ted Hughes back. The magic had worked, again.

In talking with one Plath critic for this book, she described her own mother, who is still living with an abusive spouse. I want to shake her! She said. I startled when she said it. A few years earlier, I was talking with a close friend about another, mutual friend who kept returning to her son’s father, a man who cheated and lied, and sometimes hit her and knocked her down. I want to SHAKE her, I said, to my friend, raising my voice.

We wanted to shake you, she said.

What an argument! A continuous chain of smart, writing women, who want to do a violence to women who are being done a violence, to end the violence. We don’t do the violence. Instead: we listen. After a while, we can’t listen anymore. We stop talking. Some of the women survive. Some don’t. Some die. Some just wither until they die. It can take a long time.

What would have happened to Sylvia Plath?

I couldn’t stop writing prologues for this book, so eventually, I stopped trying to stop. I wrote prologue after prologue. Each was grounded in the present moment-- As I came to the end of this, As I write this, As I wrote that, Last night I was reading… Somehow each thing led back to Sylvia Plath: I leaned back on a wall I’ve leaned back on one thousand times, but this time, the latch slipped, the door in the wall opened its mouth and I discovered the hidden staircase, the secret chamber. I stopped dismissing the things I had to say. I stopped asking for permission to enter the rooms. I deserved to be in the rooms. The rooms had always been there (maybe I had always been in the rooms?), but I was afraid to enter, or else afraid to write down the details. Afraid to say the things that needed saying. So, fine. Endless prologues. Endless starts to love her, the woman to whom we only ever gave an ending.

*

My ex loves the hospital. The hospital is theater to him-- a place to perform, have the performance assessed, and take his reward, which is attention and some potent combination of drugs. Drugs they inject him with while we’re there, and drugs he takes home. Drugs or a script, usually one I have to bring to the 24-hour CVS up the road from the emergency room he prefers, in the suburban hospital by the water, rather than the one in midtown Atlantic City. We went there once-- two nurses took one look at his bullshit, mentally drop-kicked him, and released him without drugs.

In the scant year he is in NJ with me, we go to the emergency room at least 20 times. Once, he claims his foreskin ripped. Once, he claims to have been mugged by strangers, despite the fact that my parents have never locked our front door in my then-31-years on the earth. Once he steals a bottle of my sister’s dog’s Xanax that she has because the labradoodle has nuclear meltdowns during thunderstorms, takes the entire thing, and calls the ambulance, telling them he plans to kill himself. Once, I have him committed. Once, I try to have him committed, but fail. Once, he cuts himself with a butcher knife in the kitchen. Once, he tells me his temperature is too low-- 97.5-- this could mean something really serious. Once.

Once, about 20-weeks pregnant, I come down with a kidney infection so severe and so sudden, I run a fever that makes my teeth chatter. He is driving us to the ER when I make him pull over so that I can vomit into the street, the passenger side door open. Once settled into a room at the ER-- the suburban one overlooking the water-- I threw up again. My kidneys were so weak by that point, I peed everywhere, soaking the floor. I put my head on the bowl and wept. A nurse helped me into a clean gown, wrapped me in a blanket. When the doctor came in, he brusquely ordered me to take narcotics for the pain. I’m 20-weeks pregnant, I said, my voice hoarse from vomit. How would I have known that? He said. He glanced at the chart. Oh, you are 20-weeks pregnant, he said. Well, that changes everything. You pregnant gals, Christ-- it’s like veterinary medicine.

Once, when our baby is 8-weeks-old, my ex gives him liquid Benadryl. His hands are so shaky, he dribbles it down his little white onesie and I see it, think, What the fuck is that? Since the baby is still only drinking breast milk. I make demands; he makes denials. I know instinctively I will find the Benadryl inside the toilet tank, and I do. I rush the baby to the same ER (water, suburbs) and my aunt comes with me.

There are heart monitors placed on the baby’s little white chest. We wait for hours while they make sure he is alert and awake and not in danger of the unspeakable. I have little to say about the experience of hoping to Christ my infant son didn’t die. It was horrible. What else is there?

What else is there? When the doctor comes in to tell us we are safe to go-- which is after my ex calls me over and over and over again to tell me how fucked up and crazy I am until finally my aunt takes the phone and says, Listen, motherfucker… and then unleashes a torrent of rage at him and then hangs up and then says, quietly, to the nurse staring at her, Oh my god. I’m so sorry, and the nurse says, Nah, sounds like somebody needed to hear that, and walks away--it is the same doctor who told me I was like an animal. When I felt like an animal, puking and pissing myself on a cold linoleum floor, the maniac whose child I carried in the next room, doing whatever he was doing, which was not caring for me. I recognize him, I recognized him the first time he came in to examine the baby, but of course, I say nothing. He explains that Benadryl is ok in tiny doses, but too much can be bad. He points to the image on his pin-- the twin snakes around the staff-- he says, Here, these represent medicine, which is good up to a point but-- I interrupt him, I say, Like Plato’s Pharmakon. The sickness and the cure. He say, Right, that’s exactly it, that’s right. My aunt says, She’s so smart, and glows with the approval I always produce in my family when I know things. I’m 31, I’m a mother, I have an MFA, I teach at two colleges, when will it cease to be a novelty that I know things? I feel at that moment that I know nothing. I think of the paper I wrote in college-- Derrida and Plato and the sickness and its cure and Rossetti: Come Buy, Come Buy. Lizzie, Lizzie, did you miss me? Come and kiss me. How I preened at my professor’s praise. Star pupil again. You’ll go far. The doctor winks at me. He may as well pat my empty head. I’m a lapdog. Praise me. Give me my medicine: the sickness and its cure.

Will & The Crickets

For the longest time, this story, or this story particle, was just that-- a fragment I had scribbled down once: Will & The Crickets, which also sounds like a 1960s Britpop band. Is this a story?

There is a moment in The Silent Woman that has always grated on me and embarrassed me. Janet Malcolm is visiting Anne Stevenson at her house in Durham, England, to discuss writing Bitter Fame. Stevenson is making lasagne. The lasagne is in the oven, and while they wait, Steveson tells Malcolm about how unhappy she was with the way the book went into the world. But by the time it debuted, it was too late to do anything about it; she just had to live with it. As they talk, Stevenson realizes she forgot to add the white sauce to the lasagne, but it’s too late to do it; they just have to eat it. “I recognized her dilemma, and felt for her,” Malcolm adds, likening the lasagne to the biography.

In a book full of genuine emotional and intellectual crises and weights, the lasagne metaphor sticks out like a sore thumb. In my original copy of the book, which my best friend now has, I wrote in the margins, “Over lasagne?! Come on.” It’s one of the great examples of bathos in contemporary literature. I wanted to cry, and not for Stevenson. Malcolm works overtime to garner sympathy for Stevenson from her reader, and most of the time, it works. Here, it fails, and not even one of those spectacular fails where you want to watch the YouTube reel of the journalist getting knocked over by the guy on the sled 100 times in a row. You just want to turn away and eat your own Italian take-out in peace. Or read a different book for a while.

How to write this book? Every time I sit down and do, I hate what I put on the page. This is not typical for me. I feel like I have no right to do this. I am an intruder and an imposter. I don’t know enough and the things I do know, I somehow lied about the knowledge? Lied to whom? I sound insane. I can’t do it.

Will & The Crickets. No Britpop band, but instead, a grim curiosity. In our old bathroom, there was a closet facing the sink. A small hole in the tiled floor of the closet, under which you could hide things, a place where he hid bottles of pills, a place where I found them. Crickets wandered up out of the hole-- we lived across the street from the bay, the marsh, a fecund place. And sometimes at night, or in the early morning, I would see them, dead, and missing legs. I would see the legs, too-- right next to the crickets. The crickets bodies were never harmed, always whole. If one killed a cricket, I would think, in a daze, woken from sleep by my pregnant bladder, one would kill the cricket, right? As in, stomp it? Smush it? Swat it? The way you do a bug… If it’s not already obvious, the things I was worrying about without ever saying aloud (I have still never said this aloud): Is Will torturing crickets? Don’t people who want to harm other people harm animals first, or harm them in an attempt to abate the urge to harm others?

Ted Hughes never tortured animals and in fact stopped shooting animals when he realized how much the idea of his shooting a grouse, the “heather bird,” upset Sylvia Plath. Plath even begins her poem “Pheasant,” You said you would kill it this morning./Do not kill it, in what seems like a nod to this conflict the couple had. Hughes grew up trapping and shooting animals on the West Yorkshire moors with his brother, Gerald; Plath grew up in suburban America, a place divorced from wildness. But the instinct and interest in predation never left Hughes and was never far from his work. In a letter to Ruth Beuscher, Plath noted that Hughes had begun behaving like the bird in one of his most famous poems, “Hawk Roosting:” I kill where I please because it is all mine. Plath stops her quotation there, but the next lines of the poem seem equally apropos: There is no sophistry in my body./My manners are tearing off heads -

It must be the dog, I would think. We had a small white mutt named Tom Dooley. He was Will’s before he was also mine. And before he was also mine, he was also L’s. And before he was also L’s, he was also T’s. The back staircase of other women. Why this sense that I am standing at the top of it, about to be punted down? Remember, Will sometimes says, laughing, when you thought I was trying to poison you? I don’t laugh. I say, That wasn’t crazy. How can I say that and remain living with a person I was afraid was trying to murder me? Eventually, he did try to poison me. No, he didn’t try, he poisoned me. It is a very strange thing to know the person who tried to kill you is just out in the world, walking. And teaching children.

I ask Vincent-- do dogs dismember crickets? He says yes, he says he has seen dogs play with crickets until they die. But this is not what I’m talking about, I’m talking about dismemberment-- legs snipped clean off and left lying next to the dead thorax. During my waking hours, I watch Tom Dooley to see if he hunts crickets or plays with them, but I never see it happen once. I have cats now. Cats are nocturnal. If someone told me my cat was dismembering crickets, I would be like, I have no doubt that is true. But Tom Dooley slept with us every night.

I Google “Do dogs dismember crickets?”

It turns up nothing.

Regardless, the simple experience of hearing Vincent say, Yes, it might have been the dog, shuts down my writing cold. How do I write through this doubt, this ever-present sense that nothing I say matters? I have never had this feeling before. I have always believed that what I had to say mattered. But now, the sense that conflating my story with Sylvia’s is the worst possible idea, that it will falter and flail and fall flat on its face. And other words that begin with F, Emily. Christ.

This could be a good book if I could write it every day.

She would have been a good woman if she’d had someone around to shoot her every minute of her life.

But it’s my sense that my story matters to Sylvia’s story and vice-versa that fills me with the desire to write.

I Google, “Do humans torture crickets?”

If this makes it in the book, it will be my failed lasagne. I know it. It will be the moment of bathos-- we were with her until the legless crickets and then we left.

But they were there. Another thing in front of my face, my eyes, which would not forget. Another thing I saw and couldn’t say.