The publication of the complete edition of Ariel (Galaxia Gutenberg) has drawn our gaze back to Sylvia Plath (1932-63), if we had ever truly set her aside. It is the collection that appeared two years after she took her own life, the one that made a myth of a tormented writer who devoured her fragile but living happiness, and the one that was subjected to a reading befitting its legend. The complete edition is bilingual, with a facsimile of the manuscript and with the notes that Plath wrote for the BBC about some of her poems. A delight for word-lovers.
To crown it all, it comes preceded by a prologue by her daughter, Frieda Hughes (1960), in which she clarifies that «the Ariel that first came to light under my father’s care was a quite different collection from the original that my mother had left behind». Ted Hughes, her father, had suppressed twelve poems from the American edition and thirteen from the British edition, which he replaced with others selected by himself from among the unreleased. He had stolen verses such as «and when he takes another step/ I will release/ -from the jeweled doll/ that he keeps like a heart-/ to the lioness, / the scream in the tub, / the mantle of the holes», from Confinement.
The troubled relationship the couple endured is well known, soap-opera material and cinema-worthy, the two handsome, with character and talent, as well as the deep depression that always pursued her. They had met in Cambridge, where Plath had travelled from Massachusetts thanks to a Fulbright scholarship. The two were poets. They married in 1956 and moved to live and work in the United States.
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
When the author became pregnant, specifically with Frieda, they returned to Europe. London first and North Tawton, a village in Devon, afterwards. At that time, Sylvia Plath learned that Ted Hughes was cheating on her: «Following his work trips to London, my father began a relationship with a woman who had stirred my mother’s jealousy a month earlier. Upon learning of the affair, my mother exploded». So she ended up moving with her two children -Nicholas had been born in 1962- to a rented apartment on Fitzroy Road, which had been the home of another poet, the Irishman William Butler Yeats. For Sylvia, a huge paradox, it was a good omen.
Gwyneth Paltrow portraying Sylvia Plath in the film Sylvia (2003).
In the foreword to the new Ariel, translated by Jordi Doce, Frieda Hughes recounts that «while they lived together, my mother shared with my father all the poems she wrote, but, starting in May 1962, when tensions between them arose, she stopped doing so». That winter, the poem Event was published in the Observer and «he was astonished to see his marital problems turned into the subject of a poem». After all, Sylvia had attended seminars in her native Boston with Robert Lowell, just like Anne Sexton, both Pulitzer Prize winners. Lowell had given wings to confessional poetry.
The Ferocity of Ariel
At Plath’s death, her still-present husband, despite the de facto separation, faced a work like Ariel and a dilemma. «He was very aware of the extreme ferocity with which some poems in the book ripped apart the people close to her: her husband, her mother, her father, my father’s uncle, Walter, even neighbors and acquaintances». Frieda Hughes cites the case of Lesbos, which was left out of the British edition, because «the couple described so maliciously in its verses resided in Cornwall and would have been very offended by its publication». And the same happened with Stopped Dead, which alluded to the aforementioned Walter. While others, like Barren Woman, Stopped Dead or The Courage to Silence, she considered them less accomplished than their substitutes. The controversial Papa, however, did include.
Hughes was heavily criticized for not respecting the Ariel original. Here Frieda Hughes makes an effort to restore the denigrated paternal figure: «After my mother’s suicide and the publication of Ariel, many cruelties were written about my father that had nothing to do with the man who, discreetly and lovingly (though sometimes strict and fallible) took care of me, alone or with the help of my stepmother». Against the prevailing view, she says that «he never ceased to keep alive the memory of the mother who had left me, so that I felt she protected me and that she was a constant presence in my life».
The Real Sylvia Plath
The matter grew complex when the intimate crossed its walls. In Frieda’s words, «the extreme anguish that led my mother to commit suicide was appropriated by strangers who seized that moment and reshaped it». The complaint expands: «It was as if they could possess my real, authentic mother, transformed now, in those other minds, into a woman who had ceased to resemble herself». It was not her suicide, but her life, that made the author of The Bell Jar an icon of feminism. And the fame of Ariel cannot be attributed to the manuscript that was on her desk at the moment of death, but to constitute «her extraordinary achievement, suspended as it was between a volatile emotional state and the edge of the precipice».
The complete edition of the Ariel poetry collection, as Sylvia Plath conceived it.
Against the fictionalization of her life, «which only results in a parody of the life she truly lived», stand the poems of Ariel -all of them, without exception-, which «describe her better than anything or anyone», with «the complexity of the many layers that make up her intimate self», Frieda emphasizes. She insists that, after her death, «my mother has been dissected, analyzed, reinterpretated, reinvented, novelized and, in some cases, completely falsified».
From Love to Spring
At another moment, regarding the plaque placed on the façade of the house where she lived for the longest time and not on the one where she died, as was intended, she writes that «I did not want my mother’s death to be commemorated as if she had won a prize. I wanted the object of celebration to be her life, the very fact that she had existed, living a life in full possession of her faculties, joyful and sad, tormented and ecstatic, and giving birth to my brother and me».
Sylvia Plath wished to open Ariel with Aubade and the line «love gave you wind as for a solid gold clock». «Love, love, my season», she would say in The Messenger. But also «the wind muffling my mouth with my own hair» from The Rabbit Hunter, which was removed. As Barren Woman, Stopped Dead or The Courage to Be Silent. To conclude, she chose Wintering, one of the bee-poems, behind which lay the memory of her father, Otto, who died too soon: «Bees are already flying. They savor spring». Earlier she had asked herself: «Will the hive survive, will the gladioli/ safeguard their fires/ to enter the new year?»
