How To Be A Heroine

by Samantha Ellis

  Most of all, Clara taught me to always try to find my own way. Clara tells her father, ‘All my life, you’ve wanted me to think as you thought and do what you wanted and made me feel guilty if I didn’t. Why shouldn’t I live as I want to?’ Yes, and why shouldn’t I eat prawns? I don’t know. I can, but only sometimes, when I’m feeling particularly robust. But not always. Not usually.

  Despite valiant efforts, Clara never quite ditches the guilt. Nor did White; after she left the asylum, she had a roller-coaster life, including many tempestuous affairs and more than one flirtation with madness. She suffered terrible writer’s block (she called it ‘The Beast’, and because of her, so do I) which years and years of analysis couldn’t break, and which she traced back to what had happened to her at the convent, the story she’d told in Frost in May. But in her fifties, having reconverted to Catholicism, she found out the truth. She hadn’t been expelled. The nuns had read her manuscript and summoned her father, who really did say that if her mind was such a sink of filth and impurity he wished she’d never been born. (Fathers! Do not say this to your daughters.) The nuns had been willing to let her stay. But her father, who had wanted to tutor her at home instead, to try to get her into a good university, used her disgrace to force the issue – and never told her. It blighted her whole life. Even after she got the truth, she never managed to continue Clara’s story, to get her beyond being 24, just out of the asylum, to show her breaking free from her father’s unforgiving, hypercritical (and, if you ask me, hypocritical) glare, let alone from God. In 1977, though, when White, in her seventies, was still tormented by this failure, Carmen Callil read Frost in May and loved it so much that she started a whole new imprint, Virago Modern Classics, to get it back into print. Her edition is the one I first read, and when I found out how it came to be, I was glad to find that I was reading the evidence of White’s late bloom.

  Even truncated, Clara’s story, like Franny’s, helped me see that staying with my boyfriend would mean going from the Iraqi Jewish community to an Orthodox community, from the frying pan into the fire. It also made me see that I needed to hang on to my freedom so I could see who I could be by myself before I hitched a ride with anyone else, and that a heroine should keep believing in herself (and not in anything else).

  6

  ESTHER GREENWOOD

  SYLVIA PLATH WAS the whole reason I went to Cambridge. My Plath obsession had started when I’d bought her Journals in a bookshop in Florida. I was sulking my way through a family holiday (the Velveeta one), dressing only in black, wearing my Stygian eyeliner down to a stub, and generally casting as much gloom as I could on the sunshine state. Plath gave my wordless misery a voice. My copy of the Journals is a mess: battered, obscurely stained (with tears? with wine?) and frenziedly annotated. Every line felt ripped from the heart. Here was my guide to being a woman and a writer. And although she did her first degree at Smith College in Massachusetts, Cambridge was where Plath’s poetry took off, and where she met Ted Hughes, so of course I had to go there too.

  My parents and brother drove me up on my first day. We lugged my stuff up to my room, in an ugly Seventies concrete box named after the manufacturers of Velcro. They helped me unpack and still they didn’t leave. And suddenly, the door opened, and my whole family – uncles, aunt, cousins, grandma, even my baby second cousin – were there. Surprise!

  They’d brought many Pyrex dishes of food, as though I was in imminent danger of starving, or being besieged. We couldn’t squeeze even one into the tiny freezer shelf of the shared fridge. And we couldn’t fit into my tiny room. We were spilling out on to the staircase. A porter came to see what the commotion was. He was wearing a bowler hat.

  We tipped out, all fourteen of us, got lost, got laughed at for pronouncing Magdalene how it looks instead of ‘maudlin’ (still one of those quirks of the English language that makes me feel foreign) and celebrated with pizza. It was wonderful, it was awful, it was overwhelming. When they left, I locked my door, and leaned against it. It was a room of my own! I blew a kiss to Virginia Woolf. And then I put on more mascara and emerged: it was Freshers’ Week.

  We were told the college was founded in 1448 and to bring our own Blu-Tack and never walk on the grass. We were told Newton didn’t really build the Mathematical Bridge without any bolts. We were told May Week was in June. We were told to mind our apostrophes – Queens’ for the college, Lane and Green, named after two queens, and Queen’s for the Road, which was Victoria’s alone. We were told the food was bad because our college had supported Richard III and paid the price after Bosworth. We were told it was so cold because there was nothing between us and the Urals. We were told when to wear our gowns, and which way to pass the port. We were told that only John’s students could eat swan, and only once a year. We were told cleaners were bedders, rowers were boaties, scientists were natscis, computer scientists were compscis, comedy gigs were smokers, parties were bops or squashes, the Porters’ lodge was the Plodge and the terms were Michaelmas, Lent and Easter.

  That first night there was a party in a room with mullioned windows set into walls that were two feet thick and four hundred years old. Clutching sherry schooners, we talked about God and children’s TV and what A levels we’d done. Suddenly, a deep, plangent voice declaimed, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.’ It was a blue-eyed second-year in a white shirt and battered cords, sitting, lit by a moonbeam, in a wingback chair. He paused for laughter – ironic laughter, because we didn’t really think we were ‘the best minds’ – and then he recited the whole of Howl, off by heart. What a rush! Allen Ginsberg’s rhapsodic, rangy epic poem was written in 1955, the year Plath arrived in Cambridge. It felt perfect.

  For a while I didn’t really see the city, just ran around recognising places she’d been. My college had the bridge she’d climbed over late one night. At Pembroke I saw the cobbled court and Gothic keyhole windows that made her feel she should be wearing Elizabethan silks. At her pubs – the Anchor and the Eagle – I drank whisky macs, which were red and gold, just like she’d said. When it rained, I bought chips and, like her, I sprinkled them with vinegar and warmed my hands on the paper bag. I went on the same walks, following the river through meadows and fields to Grantchester, noticing the rooks and hawthorn hedges she had told me would be there. I can’t recite Howl but I could probably have a stab at Plath’s description of the party where she met Hughes, with someone playing the piano and lots of people talking poems, and boys in turtlenecks and girls in blue eyeshadow and the ‘big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me’ taking her off into another room. After he kissed her, she bit his cheek, and drew blood. I wondered what the callow first-year boys would say if I tried biting them.

  Not that I was planning to. My boyfriend and I were still together, just. Our letters had started flying back and forth again. And anyway, I was still a good Iraqi Jewish girl. In that hectic first week, very late one night, a boy passed out and hit his head. There was blood everywhere. The medical students took charge. Lectures hadn’t started yet, so they knew as much about medicine as I did, but I didn’t have the nous to do what they did, administering water and painkillers, making up a bed for him on someone else’s floor, putting him in the recovery position so he wouldn’t choke. I was shocked. I’d never been drunk before. It was only because of Plath that I even recognised ‘that strong, silted-up force that makes one move through air like swimming’. Everyone else was so confident and capable. I was frozen in his doorway, the room full of blood and vomit like a crime scene.

  Then all at once I knew what to do. I got the bucket of cleaning products my mother had packed – enough bleach and antibacterial spray to deep-clean a hospital – and set to work. I cleaned the blood off the walls. I stripped the bed and scrubbed the headboard. I mopped the floor, and cleaned the mop, and washed out the bucket. I boil-washed the sheets. Dawn found me sitting in the hot, empty laundry, waiting for the dryer to finish its cycle. I was so totally my mother�
�s daughter. When in doubt, clean.

  Plath would have understood. She articulated, more than any other writer, how the pressure to be perfect can break a girl. Maybe Fifties America – her crucible – was not so different from Iraqi Jewish London in the Nineties. I’d had so many good girl heroines. In her novel, The Bell Jar, Plath gave me a heroine who was anything but. Esther Greenwood could even be called an anti-heroine. And The Bell Jar is the girls’ Catcher in the Rye, the stroppy teens’ manifesto. It’s the book Julia Stiles’s truculent Kat curls up with in 10 Things I Hate About You, and in Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Melissa Joan Hart’s Sabrina pulls her baseball cap down low and gulps the book down in the school cafeteria, along with the three puddings she’s eating instead of lunch.

  Esther wants to be a poet and she has a dream summer job, interning at a New York magazine, but she hates the fashion, the make-up, the martinis and the men. She wants to be ‘wise and cynical as all hell’, she wants to feed her writing with extreme experiences. She’s avid for car crashes, street fights, babies pickled in jars. When she sees her first fingerbowl, with cherry blossoms in it, she assumes it’s some kind of Japanese soup and drinks it down, blossoms and all. As she starts losing her mind, and her inhibitions, things go grotesque. Esther feasts on caviar and crab and gets violent food poisoning. She dates a misogynist who growls ‘Pretend you are drowning’ as he sweeps her into a rough tango, tries to rape her and, after she punches him in the nose, smears her face with his blood.

  Her medical student boyfriend (cruelly named Buddy Willard) has slept with a waitress but he wants Esther to be pure. She meets his hypocrisy with withering second-wave feminist scorn. When Buddy takes his clothes off, she sees ‘turkey neck and turkey gizzards’. When he predicts she’ll stop wanting to write after she has children, she decides marriages must be tiny dictatorships where women are brainwashed and enslaved.

  As she gets suicidal, she also gets mean. She releases her inner bad girl – she picks up sailors, reads scandal sheets, howls at her father’s grave. She gives up trying to be perfect, or pretty, stops washing her clothes, stops washing her hair because it’s all too much effort, and anyway she doesn’t care. After a black comedy of failed attempts to end it, she does what Plath did: leaves a note that she’s gone for a long walk, swallows a bottle of sleeping pills and waits for death in her house’s basement crawlspace. Plath was found two days later. She was hospitalised and given electroconvulsive therapy.

  In hospital, Esther is nastier still. She kicks a nurse, smashes a box of thermometers, doesn’t bother to hide her yellow, flabby, stubbly legs from visitors, throws her mother’s roses in the bin. And her psychiatrist is pleased. It’s as if meanness is part of the cure. Maybe when the pressure to be perfect makes you crazy, the only way to get better is to be as imperfect as you can.

  Plath recovered from this first serious depression, emerging a few months later to return to university and to life. The Bell Jar ends with Esther about to leave the hospital too:

  My stocking seams were straight, my black shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit as flamboyant as my plans. Something old, something new . . .

  But I wasn’t getting married. There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice – patched, retreaded and approved for the road.

  I thought this was a brilliant twist on the marriage plot. Instead of the heroine going through trials and being rewarded with a ring on her finger, she could be reborn as her real true self. To find out what happened to Esther next, I read Plath’s poetry, her Journals, her letters, and every biography I could find. I thought Esther would probably have married someone ruinously gorgeous and off-the-scale talented like Hughes. I don’t know why some Plath fans chip his name off Plath’s tombstone; I read so much about her falling in love with him that I was besotted too. I revelled in his poetry, so different from Plath’s, so huge and rugged and mystical. I started to wish my boyfriend was more like Hughes. The idea of becoming an Orthodox Jewish wife was losing what small appeal it had had. I got a poem accepted in The May Anthology. It would be in print; people would read it. And living in the city where Plath and Hughes had fallen in love, I couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like to fall for a poet and build a life on ‘Books & Babies & Beef stews’. If he was fanciable enough, I might even stop being a vegetarian. And if it fell apart, I could become Lady Lazarus, the fearsome virago of Plath’s late poem who rises out of ash, with flame-red hair. My hair was brown, but no matter. Plath was a brunette too, but for most of her adult life she was a bottle blonde.

  Her picture disappointed me. I thought a poet should be a severe, wan beauty, but Plath was laughing, voluptuous, scarlet-lipped, with masses of platinum hair. Towards the end of her life, she looked more as I imagined her; Al Alvarez described her, then, as resembling a priestess, her hair unbleached now, long, dark, pungent and unwashed.

  It wasn’t just Plath’s hair that had changed. She’d left behind her early, mannered villanelles for the wild freedom of Ariel where she stopped painstakingly looking up every word in her thesaurus and let rip. In ‘Fever 103°’ she wrote about ‘My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats’, just like Esther in New York, standing on the roof of her hotel and throwing all her fashionable clothes into the night wind, where they scattered like ashes over the city.

  Hughes also thought Plath had transformed. In his 1982 foreword to the Journals he describes how she destroyed her early work, and her early self, to become new. He calls it a violent, primitive sacrifice that might lead to suicide but might also lead to the birth of one’s real self. In his poem ‘The Minotaur’, he describes his savage admiration as Plath smashes up his desk, cheering her on with ‘That’s the stuff you’re keeping out of your poems!’

  I wanted to cast off my false self too, to ditch my old whore petticoats and find the real me. I could leave behind the girl who felt maladroit in pretty dresses, the girl who argued sullenly with my family, the girl flirting with Orthodox Judaism, the girl in the college laundry. None of these girls were the real me.

  I don’t know if The Bell Jar has a happy ending. Esther is cured, by a maverick lady psychiatrist who bans Esther’s mother from visiting and breezily sends Esther off to get a diaphragm so she can go forth and have sex. ‘I was my own woman,’ says Esther, before wrecking it: ‘The next step was to find the proper sort of man.’ The problem’s right there; she is barely herself before she latches on to a man. And she’s a bad picker. The professor who plies her with wine and carries her into his dark bedroom is no good. She loses her virginity with a sharp, sudden pain, and starts to bleed. At first she feels part of a great tradition of brides and their bloodied sheets. But then she’s haemorrhaging dark, sticky blood and she’s almost more pleased, proud to be extreme, glad to find this happens to one in a million women. She’s worse off than all those brides of history. She’s unique because she suffers.

  This is, above all, what I got from The Bell Jar: the idea that you had to suffer to be a woman. I’d written lots of poems about exquisite suffering, but I hadn’t really suffered. I arrived in Cambridge waiting for the harrowing, transfiguring experience that would make me a woman. Like Esther, I courted suffering. She has a warped relationship with pain from the start. She’s obsessed with the Rosenbergs being electrocuted, she interprets her skiing injury as punishment for being mean to Buddy, and his TB as punishment for his hypocrisy. Plath, too, seemed to dive headfirst into her own pain.

  I wondered how much I’d have to suffer, how far I’d have to go. Plath’s poem ‘Edge’ suggested that only death would suffice. In a play I saw in my first term, a woman played Plath in smudged mascara and lots of black. She leapt off a table shouting that she was ‘perfected’ and threw a black shoe at the actor playing her father, who stepped smartly aside to reveal (of course) the actor playing Hughes. Angst was everywhere. That same year, Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted came out, a memoir set in the mental hospital Plath went to. In 1994 came Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Pr
ozac Nation, with the author on the cover, hair tousled, pouting sulkily, fenced in by barbed wire made of pills. Courtney Love’s band Hole released Live Through This that year too, just after her husband Kurt Cobain had killed himself, and I was stunned by her anguished performances and her train-wreck interviews. These women wore their suffering like fairy princesses wore tiaras. They were beautiful and sad and angry and liberated. Who wouldn’t want to be them?

  It looked as if I was getting there. My boyfriend and I broke up. It was my decision, and it was awful. We tried to work things out by letter – we had always been best on paper – but now it seemed the worst form of communication. I braved the college computer room to read my first ever email (it was 1993!) and it upset me so much that a compsci took me to the college bar for my first whisky. A lot of firsts that term. Finally, my boyfriend came to visit, and we agreed that it was over.

  At home, my parents were in conflict – by my Finals they’d be getting a divorce. Iraqi Jews didn’t really get divorced, so the usual shock, anger and distress were magnified by everyone judging and gossiping like mad. I hated seeing my parents so unhappy, and I felt that all my certainties were disintegrating; I had never imagined they wouldn’t stay together. An early casualty of the divorce was The Cake, saved from my bat mitzvah. No one knew how it happened, but in the chaos of things the freezer door was left open, and it defrosted. It was unsalvageable. It ended up in the bin. And even though I’d hated it, for years, it still seemed that something had ended.

  So suddenly there was suffering, and plenty of it. And then I started to reel.

  It came on suddenly, halfway through my second term. I’d feel heady, spinny, as if I was tipping back into a void, or deliquescing. I’d grab a chair, a bed, a friend’s arm, and wait for everything to come back into focus.

  Ever the romantic (eat your heart out, Cathy Earnshaw) I diagnosed heartbreak. My heart was broken and I was reeling and melting. My heart was broken so I was reeling and melting. Maybe this was it, the moment I’d been waiting for. But by the end of term I was trailing off mid-sentence, my eyes going dead, slurring my words and falling. It wasn’t heartbreak.