Velshi Banned Book Club, featuring Sylvia Plath...

& me!

[Image description: Me (Emily Van Duyne) looking Zoom-y, but with a strong eyebrow game, talking with the MSNBC reporter Ali Velshi for his #VelshiBannedBookClub, about Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.]

Dear Readers,

I’m very happy to share that yesterday morning, I got to be a guest on Ali Velshi’s “Banned Book Club” to discuss Sylvia Plath and The Bell Jar. I am always delighted to, as my good friend Ash says, “rep our girl,” but this was surely the widest audience I have ever repped to. I am of the opinion that Zoom does strange things to my generally presentable face, but other than that, I donned my best Peter Pan collar’d dress and hoped for the best! It was filmed live, so I felt quite nervous until the segment began— I don’t watch cable news, so I was unfamiliar with Ali Velshi outside of his podcast on banned books. As soon as he began to talk about The Bell Jar, I relaxed— he said such empathetic, grounded, funny things about the book that I really couldn’t wait to talk with him.

The conversation was a delight, and it reminded me of the different ways censorship has affected Sylvia Plath’s legacy. While The Bell Jar was literally banned by an Indiana school board, a decision upheld by a Federal Court of Appeals in 1977, Plath’s legacy has more frequently fallen victim to reductive stereotypes which steer people away from reading her work, or else glosses their understanding of said work into intensive misreadings. When The Bell Jar debuted in America in 1971, it was generally received as a grim portrayal of pure madness, a desperate harbinger of Plath’s suicide (the book was originally published in Britain on January 14, 1963; Plath killed herself on February 11 of the same year). In 1971, reviewing the novel for The New York Times, Robert Scholes went so far as to say that while Scott Fitzgerald wrote with “the authority of failure,” Plath wrote with “the authority of suicide.” Scholes never quite tells us what means, and god knows I have no idea, but he clues us into his misread of The Bell Jar, and Plath herself, when he tells us that The Bell Jar “[does not] come to us posthumously. [It was] written posthumously. Between suicides.”

In reality, (a very-much-alive) Sylvia Plath wrote The Bell Jar in 1961, completing the book in August, as she and Ted Hughes were finishing out their time in London, in their tiny Chalcot Square flat. She was pregnant with her second child, Nicholas, who would be born in January of the coming year, in the couple’s country home, Court Green, in Devonshire. She worked through revisions with her British editor, James Michie, at William Heinemann, over the course of the winter and spring of 1961-62, and, as I mentioned to Ali Velshi yesterday, received proofs of the book in July 1962. The proofs, she wrote to her former therapist Ruth Beuscher on July 11, made her laugh and “saved the day.” The day in question needed saving because Plath’s marriage to Hughes had blown apart when he admitted to having an affair in London. This affair is the historic reason given for the Hugheses’ marriage ending, and for, in large part, the writing of Plath’s famous poems and her one novel. Actually, though, the writing of both began well before the marriage ended.

Much of what we learned (or thought we learned) about Plath’s writing process and timeline came from Ted Hughes. In various accounts, he claimed that Plath finished The Bell Jaar when she moved, briefly, back to London after their separation in 1962, “giving her time and place to work uninterruptedly. Then at top speed and with very little revision from start to finish she wrote The Bell Jar." The drafts of The Bell Jar reside in the archives at Smith College, Plath’s alma mater. While Plath did write the book rapidly in the spring and summer of 1961, she went through careful revisions with her editor, rearranging chapters, timelines, titles, and character names, like any novelist would. Hughes’s erroneous statement about the timeline of the book’s composition points to his contributions to the mythology of Plath’s writing process, how it went “at top speed and with very little revision,” how it happened “uninterruptedly,” and how it contributed to her suicide. Hughes believed that The Bell Jar was “cursed,” that the writing of it had called up old demons and caused her to kill herself— since he seemed to think she had written it weeks before her suicide, I suppose this makes some sense. And yet, how Hughes, a man who spent his life writing and publishing books, could have believed Plath finished writing a novel in 1962 that debuted a few weeks later makes no sense at all. But a “cursed” Sylvia Plath writing a book at possessed speeds feeds into our image of her as a woman fated to die, one who brought that death about by worshipping at the altar of art, rather than domesticity. Speaking of which, one also wonders how Hughes believed Plath was writing “uninterruptedly” when she was a single mother of two children under the age of three— but to speak honestly of those conditions, of course, would be to speak of his own failings, and the failings of the larger world his wife and children inhabited.

In Sylvia Plath’s mythology, there has been laser-like focus on the last year of her life. In 1962, she gave birth to a son, wrote most of Ariel, and ended her marriage to her famous husband. She didn’t quite live through six weeks of 1963. But in 1961, as she was writing The Bell Jar, her marriage was already in trouble. Plath’s 1961 pregnancy with Nicholas was her second, that year; she had miscarried in February 1961, an event she later attributed to a violent fight with Ted Hughes, in a letter that went unseen and unpublished until 2018. Hughes had long corroborated the story to his close friends and family. Plath’s poems from the spring of 1961 are savvy meditations on marriage that swing between high gothic horror and the kind of wry satire she was perfecting in The Bell Jar. Writing Loving Sylvia Plath with scans of those drafts on hand, I began to wonder if Hughes had seen a single word of his wife’s only published novel, prior to her death. The Bell Jar has long been seen as a criticism of 1950s gender politics, most obviously in the character of Buddy Willard, who acted as an avatar for Plath’s college boyfriend, Dick Norton. But another minor character in The Bell Jar, Lenny Shepherd, strikes me as the first time Plath publicly stuck an acid pin in her husband’s brand of rugged masculinity, dwindling Hughes’s swagger down to that of a spoiled, brash, American boy, the kind Hughes would have hated with a special venom. Hughes and Shepherd appear, on the surface, to share nothing; but a closer look (one I take in Chapter Six of Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation) reveals a common penchant for violence and humiliation.

A famous trope of early Plath criticism put forth by her friend, the critic Al Alvarez, said that she had used her poetry, and suicide, as a kind of “escape hatch.” Alvarez believed Plath’s suicide had been a deliberate gamble; that she intended to be found and saved. Writing her style of “deadly” poetry had painted her into a corner; the suicide attempt, he wrote, would get her out, allow her to escape death and breathe freely, again. This is the kind of mythologized, magical nonsense that disallows for the very real conditions that Plath was trying to escape— in her life, not her death. Writing was, I believe, one way that she sought to escape a crushing marriage to a violent man— not by conjuring death through writing, but by establishing financial and artistic independence from her husband, who was, then, the most famous poet in England. The publication of The Bell Jar, Plath hoped, was the first step toward this goal. She began it when she transformed the conditions of her life into art. Maybe she thought, as she worked alone on those London mornings, This is how I get free. One word at a time.