And it’s worse for women.
Plath is a far more gifted, refined and elegant poet than Sexton, pushed as she was into painstaking and exacting use of language at the hands of the British literati who surrounded her when she moved to England with husband Ted Hughes. Sexton is more confessional and Plath is more conventional, but it seems inevitable that the two would be paired within the pantheon, as if in a high-concept sitcom noir, the New England poetry babes, girls who would go for a drink at the Ritz Hotel after a workshop at Boston University with Robert Lowell (can you imagine?), the women who seem stuck in the wrong era, lost in America with no magic carpet to ride. And like Marilyn Monroe, they invite speculation about feminism as salvation: dark and down during the postwar boom when the world was bright with I Like Ike, Sexton and Plath are to the fifties what acid casualties are to the sixties—victims of the times who were also given their best material by the times. Sexton, uneducated, often sloshed and slutty, is the bad girl, while Plath, the A student with all the prizes and awards and degrees who is quiet and sweet, the good girl: Sexton’s overbearing crazy woman is balanced by Plath’s submissive, sympathetic depressive.
Now, as far as I know, there is no such creature as a “submissive, sympathetic depressive.” Of course, there are people who suffer with the ailment who are quiet and polite and gentle—often enough, that’s how they got depressed in the first place—but this is not a disease that plays itself out quite so pleasantly as that. And it’s a disease that sucks you so deep into your own needs that rudeness becomes inevitable, as is the case in people’s recollections of feeling put upon by Plath in her indifference to good manners. Dido Merwin, erstwhile wife of the poet W.S., wrote in a brief memoir, quoted as an appendix in Anne Stevenson’s Plath biography Bitter Fame, that on a visit the Hugheses paid to the Merwins’ farmhouse, Sylvia “used up all the hot water, repeatedly helped herself from the fridge (breakfasting on what one had planned to serve for lunch, etc.),” and worst of all, devoured a foie gras “for all the world as though it were ‘Aunt Dot’s meat loaf.’ ” Now, there are certainly worse sins than an insatiable appetite—and there are harsher crimes than being an American accustomed to long, steamy showers and large plentiful meals without persnickety, nitpicky hostesses keeping track. On the other hand, it is very annoying to have a guest lick pâté off her fingers as she digitally digs it out of the serving platter; among other things, it’s gross to watch. This behavior is both self-centered and unselfconscious, and despite the petty nature of the ire it arouses, the end result is a less than sympathetic Sylvia—not sad and sweet, but depressed and demanding. Perhaps because, as Woody Allen pointed out in Annie Hall, Sylvia Plath is an “[i]nteresting poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic, by the college-girl mentality”; perhaps because these same starry-eyed English majors have mistaken all depression for something intense and sweet and feeling and Byronic—and not something violent and obnoxious and bitchy and trying and exasperating; or perhaps because The Bell Jar’s cover art, since the day it was published in the United States by Harper & Row in 1971 (it had been released in Great Britain in 1963 under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, to protect the guilty, as it were), has had this faded rose painted in dots by some aspiring Monet with that certain look that paint-by-numbers done in art therapy has, which would seem to suggest that sorrow and suicide are like a red, red rose drooping in its vase, and blah blah blah—perhaps it is for all these reasons that people don’t realize that Sylvia Plath was a maniac and depression is simply not a pretty thing.
This mistaken assumption not only reveals a failure to grasp the cult of the madwoman; it also betrays an ignorance about the process of the cult of personality as a whole. Where women are concerned, nobody gets noticed just because of early death or quiet desperation or haughty mystique (Jacqueline Kennedy is the exception, a marvel of the power of playing hard to get). The women who inspire wonder with a longevity that is greater than their own life span, the women who become subject to and of many biographies that take sides in arguments and situations that are only nominally about the woman herself, the women who become a pretense—a woman like Sylvia Plath—did not get into this predicament by being sweet and sad while still alive. Unfortunately, Plath is more likely to be remembered for her emotional hell and her shock treatments than for her precision as a poet in Ariel or for the remarkable achievement of The Bell Jar, which is very funny, smartly detached and often nasty in a voice too honest to be unsympathetic. And though interest in the work itself has kept it all solidly in print, with HarperCollins publishing a twenty-fifth anniversary hardcover edition of The Bell Jar in 1996, interest in Plath herself and her jam-packed, truncated life is such that it gave Janet Malcolm a pretext for studying the nature of biography—hagiographers and pathographers, critics and propagandists, Plath has all aplenty—in her cover-to-cover New Yorker piece. Even after death, Sylvia holds sway.
This frenzy of biography is fueled both by the posthumous rescue possibilities invited by the ambiguous circumstances of Plath’s death and by fascination with her and Hughes as the last really glamorous literary couple, the last attempt to mate genius before all the brilliant poets figured out it was all too much trouble, best to just settle in with an accountant or practical nurse or carpenter. It is this coupling that overhauled Plath’s appearance as a nice American gal with Samsonite luggage in a camel-hair coat, arriving in England to study poetry, prim and proper as any girl enrolling in her mum’s shorthand class, the very thing that became a metonymy for all Sylvia snubbed and disparaged Stateside. It is through Hughes that she says goodbye to all that, it is with him that the Sylvia Plath persona was invented at the same time her person was destroyed. The hot-blooded madwoman with red hair and bloody red lipstick emerges on the night Sylvia met Ted, at a party in Cambridge, when, drunk out of her mind, she recited two of Hughes’ poems to his face from memory, and after much groping around, bit his cheek with vampiric intent, drawing blood. As she recorded in her journal: “the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it … And I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth … And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room blood was running down his face. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself, grasping, fighting, to you.” Of course, it is easy to see that it was at this party in 1956 that the intriguing, alluring Sylvia Plath came into existence, but it is the fact of this literary merger, as well as the separation at the end of Plath’s life, that invites endless and unanswerable speculation: Would this suicide have happened if they hadn’t broken up? Would they have gotten back together had she lived? In light of the Hugheses’ marital collapse, should the future fate of Plath’s work—by dint of a legal technicality that made Ted next of kin at the time of Sylvia’s death—be controlled by a man who betrayed her?
Sylvia Plath provokes such disproportionate speculation on the lost possibilities because, in fact, they are so numerous. There may have been other husbands, more children, better poetry, bigger novels, academic appointments: if Courtney Love, once thought to be just a Nirvana groupie whose best songs were really written by her husband (remember?), has managed to construct a life that places Kurt Cobain as a mere footnote, imagine what Sylvia Plath could have done (especially when you consider that Hughes, in spite of his ascension to Poet Laureate of Great Britain, is still, in some sense, a footnote in his dead wife’s life). In contrast, Anne Sexton, while certainly a fascinating woman, has not been claimed and clawed at quite so hungrily in her corpse form, because we know the dreary development of her life only too well, we know the story—it is a whole story and it is a common story—and it reads as one miserable version of what Plath’s life might have become: by the time of her death, Sexton had quite thoroughly exhausted all possibilities, had been married for a long time and found that wanting, had a multitude of me
n and women for lovers and was never satisfied, had years of therapy, was on many drugs, and lithium seemed possibly promising, but evidently not promising enough. “The woman is perfected. / Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment,” wrote Sylvia Plath in “Edge,” which seems a prescient epitaph for Anne Sexton. “Her bare / Feet seem to be saying: / We have come so far, it is over.”
Plath died young, died without, died a world still waiting to be born.
Of course, dying young with possible Prozac beckoning at some vanishing point off in the future, the blunt chemical corrective to the dark side of genius, may romanticize the futility of suicide. But to be a beautiful body living among the ruins of a ravished, zapped-out mind is almost as compelling. In other words, even someone who forgets to commit suicide—who in all the hysteria of being so miserable somehow never manages to fit her own death into the schedule—can end up in the cult of the crazy woman. Frances Farmer, who made her home in Seattle before it was suicide central, did not have a particularly memorable film career. Not because Farmer wasn’t talented or marquee-famous in her day, but—like Linda Darnell and Jeanette Mac-Donald and Jean Arthur and Joanne Dru and so many other movie stars whose names mean nothing to noncinéastes today—Farmer somehow failed to be legendary, to be a Garbo or a Bacall, a Marilyn or a Rita. But in spite of Farmer’s career obsolescence, her life’s extended resonance made it the subject of the movie Frances in 1982. Starring Jessica Lange and her beau, playwright Sam Shepard, this film is a variation on losing one’s mind, Hollywood style. Starting with the tedious stereotype of the miserable and misunderstood actress who just wants to be taken seriously and talks about longing to return to the true grit of the theater and blah blah blah, Frances quickly twists into something inexplicably hellish and harrowing. It is a loony-bin trip in which the inmates at the asylum are so knocked out and neglected that Nurse Ratched would be a welcome presence, and one wonders why the doctors don’t just let them kill themselves, let them be dead instead of just deadened. (The offscreen antics on this film set were a drama all their own, with Lange already the mother of Mikhail Baryshnikov’s child and now seducing Shepard away from his own house and home; she ultimately saw a prodigious professional payoff amid all this personal upheaval when she was nominated for two Oscars in one year—for a supporting role in Tootsie and a lead role in Frances—taking home the trophy for the former, and Shepard from the latter.)
But before things descend into this institutional squalor, Farmer is portrayed as a precocious beauty, her movie-star future is shellacked with the high gloss of destiny, it’s all so lovely and hopeful and inevitable that nobody bothers to notice that the poor girl is too naively and pathologically honest—just too damn sensitive—to play the Hollywood shuffle. She becomes one of those “difficult” women whom the studio system tolerates with about as much enthusiasm as Winston Smith facing the rats of Room 13 in 1984. Their resistance fuels Farmer’s obstinacy. She goes to a party where her presence is expected, but then sneaks upstairs into the master bathroom, fills the tub with hot water and fluffy bubbles and spends the evening taking a bath; when Clifford Odets turns out to be a cad who just happens to play the liberal party line—and just happens to be Hollywood’s screenwriter darling for the moment—she calls him a hypocrite to his face. She can’t fake it, she can’t even try to fake it—the problem after a while is not that she has too much integrity, but that the self-destructive nature of her integrity is such that she will only know that she’s succeeded in respecting it when it has ruined her. So it does. Psychiatric wards, shock, medicated somnambulance: this is the price.
But as Frances falls apart, the movie Frances has her defiance and sorrow serve only to make her prettier, her madness acting as a beauty elixir. Of course, after the frontal lobotomy things are not so lustrous—after all, it takes some ability to focus to comb your hair—but the indelible impression of what she once was seems to be a constant. At the end of the movie, we watch Jessica Lange shuffle listlessly along, a wiped-out waif reduced to work as a celebrity guest on game shows. But we also see Sam Shepard in the part of Harry, Farmer’s long-suffering sweetheart, a fantastically romantic character, the man who found her when she was still in high school, fell in love with her idealistic moroseness and rescued her from stupid dates with stupider boys. All these years later, Harry still loves Frances, pays her puppyish attention and follows her around adoringly, as if, even with a chunk of her brain excised, she’s still the same girl. And it starts to look like maybe a lobotomy is better than suicide. At any rate, Frances Farmer has lived on, not as an actress, but as a symbol of the systematic destruction of the difficult woman. She has been particularly cultic since the whole grunge thing turned the Pacific Northwest into an American dystopia, even lending her name to the Nirvana song “Frances Farmer Will Have Her Revenge upon Seattle,” and to Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love’s daughter, Frances Bean.
Zelda Fitzgerald, too, has had her internationally acclaimed schizophrenic tendencies outlive almost all other facets of her thwarted, distorted—but still somehow thrilling and riveting—southern belle turned literary babe’s existence. So much so that in the movie Manhattan, when Woody Allen is trying to describe the maddeningly frustrating and fickle Diane Keaton character, he refers to her as “the winner of the Zelda Fitzgerald Emotional Maturity Award.” And for a woman who functioned strictly as a figure and fixture of a certain smart set—a party presence, a fabulous flapper—Zelda has achieved great renown, almost all of it predicated on her problematic mental health, and almost all of it infusing her with more intrigue and inquiry in the afterlife than has been enjoyed by her drunken, brilliant, middle western (as they’d have said back then) mess of a husband, the writer F. Scott.
The particular twist that Zelda’s legend offers up for those looking for an ideology to attach their curiosity to is her function as a Jazz Age artist manqué, a writer of great natural gifts, a woman who thought in the peach-pulpishly rich metaphors of the southern mind—as becomes clear to the reader of her short stories or her 1932 novel Save Me the Waltz—whose literary ambitions were alternately dismissed, discouraged and, some say, plagiarized by her possessive, protective but, most importantly, insecure husband. When Zelda sent the manuscript of her novel, completed during one of her many institutional interludes, to her husband’s own Scribner’s editor, Maxwell Perkins, Scott was apoplectic, resentful that for four years he had been “unable to proceed [with his own book] because of the necessity of keeping Zelda in sanitariums … her novel is an imitation of it, of its rhythms, materials …” One can’t completely blame Scott for feeling the fatigue of having a mentally ill wife—but surely he must recognize how his own alcoholism was an equally likely culprit for his four-year lag. Just the same, Scott’s books—particularly The Great Gatsby—are taught, almost uniformly, in English classes all over America, while Zelda’s novel, only intermittently in print at all, is the kind of thing that you might read in a women’s studies course as a female work of literature worthy of resuscitation, but one read more as a document than as a novel. In fact, I would guess that few people even realize that Zelda wrote a novel, or even wanted to write a novel, or that she was an artist whose paintings were exhibited and collected—that she even took temporary leave from a psychiatric hospital upstate to come down to her opening at a gallery in New York City. Her fame is both frivolous and gruesome, based not on her accomplishments but on an intrinsic beauty and an intractable sorrow.
Denied the writerly right, Zelda was reduced to being a combustible showpiece, with her husband very much a part of her mythology, acting as her alcoholic accomplice, an aider and abettor just barely balancing on the edge himself. Together, Scott and Zelda were self-destruction’s power couple. Shuttling their unstable household and unhinged personalities around from St. Paul, Minnesota, to Montgomery, Alabama, to Paris, France, to Rome, Italy—with odd moments in Africa and Delaware and Hollywood thrown in between—the Fitzgeralds only managed to remain in any given place
long enough for people to remark on their charismatic charm. “There have been dozens of memoirs written, wherein one catches glimpses of Scott and Zelda sleeping in each other’s arms at a party,” writes Nancy Milford in Zelda, her definitive 1970 biography. “Everyone wanted to meet them, to have them for dinner guests, to attend their parties, and to invite them to their openings. The youthful handsomeness of the Fitzgeralds, their incandescent vitality were qualities they possessed jointly and effortlessly.” Milford goes on to quote personages no less esteemed than Dorothy Parker, H. L. Mencken, Ernest Hemingway, Edmund Wilson, John Peale Bishop and so many others, all paying homage to the Fitzgeralds’ striking gorgeousness, which was enhanced by their talent for mise-en-scène.
But when it came to public displays of affectation, Scott was more the motionless maypole while Zelda created the brilliant hues of long rope and ribbon spinning all around him: she was known to dance on tables at the Etoile in Paris (upstaging Isadora Duncan); was remembered for taking a thirty-foot dive, during low tide, late at night on the Riviera; was credited with jumping into the fountain in New York City’s Union Square while completely sober; and the couple together were said to have celebrated a move from one hotel to another by spinning in the revolving doors of the lobby for half an hour. As seems to be the pattern with emotionally disturbed women, the frightening lightning flash of Zelda’s madness was coupled with a delightful, infectious sparkle at other times, something that Scott understood, as he wrote in The Crack-Up: “I was in love with a whirlwind and I must spin a net big enough to catch it.” But captivating as they were, many of Zelda’s displays were more troubling than entertaining, several predating her life with Scott: once, while still a teenager in Montgomery, she got mad at a date and kicked in the storefront window of a photography studio (the boy had been staring at a picture and not paying enough attention to her); at a fraternity party not long thereafter, she got drunk and broke Victrola records over her date’s head; and later on, she was caught taking a bath in her hostess’ private chambers while a large gala was going on in the ballroom below. (This echo of the film Frances would seem to suggest that perhaps a major symptom of emotional instability is a desire to bathe at inappropriate times.)
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