The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

"The Journals are, in their unabridged state, an astonishing body of work. We talk about how poets are born, not made, but what I always take away from every page of the Journals —and it’s a serious slab of a book—is the extent to which Plath was both born and self -made. They are a testament to the determination and sheer force of will that drove her to become the writer that she knew she was capable of becoming. She fought and fought and fought against all those things we’ve talked about—both social, patriarchal pressures and her own demons—in order to break through to become the kind of writer she knew herself to be. Before picking out a particular section from the Journals , I want to say how well edited they have been. This is true of the Letters as well. Much has been written about how Plath’s work has been brought to a public audience through the decades, not all of it complimentary, but in recent years she has been exceptionally well served. Karen Kukil and Peter Steinberg have both done a fantastic job. I mention that because I want to talk about a part of the Journals that could easily have been omitted altogether by a less attentive editor: Appendix 15. Nobody reads appendices, so I don’t know how many people will even have noticed what’s there. Appendix 15 is a selection of character sketches of Plath’s Devon neighbors written in 1962. So these are very late—much later than The Bell Jar , obviously. We might look at them even more closely for that very reason, to find clues about the kind of novelist that Plath might have gone on to become. “To me, this is Plath’s gift and her duty: to record, no matter what the cost to self” I always come back to the ‘Rose & Percy Key’ sketch. Percy, Plath’s neighbor, is sick in the first half of 1962, and his illness is mentioned in several of Plath’s poems. But the journal more closely records his decline, with moments of fantastic candor on Plath’s part. For example, she writes at one point that Percy has had a stroke. Ted runs out to help; Plath stands by the doorway and hesitates, not knowing what to do. Ultimately, she goes across to Percy as well: “I thought I would stay and wait, and then something in me said, now, you must see this, you have never seen a stroke or a dead person.” That’s the writer’s compulsion. She forces herself to go over and have a look—to record in graphic detail, not necessarily for the audience but for herself, because she needs to see it. A couple of pages further on, Percy is even more ill. Plath goes over again and she looks at him, fascinated and disgusted, and she writes, “His eyes showed through partly open lids like dissolved soaps or a clotted pus. I was very sick at this and had a bad migraine over my left eye for the rest of the day.” She experiences the pain of looking, but she has to look. She has to go. She has to dwell on these things. She not only witnesses them—she dwells on them in her journals subsequently. And she dwells on the cost of this witnessing: she’ll have a migraine the rest of the day. To me, this is Plath’s gift and her duty: to record, no matter what the cost to self. You find proof of this all the way through the Journals , but especially in those character sketches. You’re absolutely right. It goes straight back to The Bell Jar , doesn’t it? To Buddy Willard trying to show her fetuses in the jars, showing her the picture of the woman with a tumor who’s going to die soon. Buddy is of course showing off, but Plath herself absolutely wants to claim that ability to look, for herself and for her art. It reminds me of a moment in Kipling’s autobiography Something of Myself (1937). He’s growing up in India, and a vulture has flown over from the nearby Towers of Silence and dropped a child’s hand in his garden. His mother is distressed and keeps him away, but all Kipling reports is “I wanted to see that child’s hand.” It’s exactly what Plath’s describing: the sense that, no matter how horrific, she needs to see it and know it. Absolutely. The character sketches of 1962 are exercises; they’re not a typical daily journal entry. Hughes admits to having destroyed her very last journal, and the penultimate one is missing. The belief is that it was deliberately taken from Hughes’s possession by someone. So, it may still be out there, and it may turn up one day. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . There’s been endless speculation and grievance over Hughes’s treatment of Plath’s manuscripts after her death. He confesses to destroying the final journal, in order, he says, to protect his children. Well, we can’t read it, and it’s hard to judge when we don’t know what he was protecting them from. Of course, we all wish that the journal had survived, but we can at least understand the dilemma. Absolutely. When we made the BBC documentary, we couldn’t have done it without Frieda Hughes’s blessing—and not merely blessing, but active support. The whole media circus tends to forget that Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath were more than a scholarly debate; they were real people who still have loved ones alive today. Plath was someone’s parent, someone’s sister, someone’s friend. That has been ignored too often through the decades; there is a callous voyeurism about so much that is written."