Arrayed in Shining Scales

Aseries​ of haphazard walking errands led to me wandering downtown, lugging a tub of CBD gummies, a multipack of ultra-absorbent tampons and a 10 lb biography of Sylvia Plath. That seemed correct, a spontaneous piece of performance art. I had heard Heather Clark, the author of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, speak at a conference on biography the previous spring. I thought then that she seemed too normal for the task. I chafed against the setting down of the facts, as if they could yet be changed. Now, having cast my eye across the charred landscape of Plath-Hughes scholarship, it seems about time for something normal.

The Plath-Hughes mythology presents a problem if the first glimpse you had of Plath’s life was the one she lived while making her poems. That life, those mornings, is never to be pitied. Asked what she found most surprising about Plath as she worked, Clark responded: ‘Her force.’ This in turn surprised me, since I thought that was all there was of her. I had come to her differently. I read the poems in childhood and have a memory of reciting ‘Daddy’ aloud to my father as he tried not to laugh. Next came The Bell Jar, then the unabridged journals, published in 2000 and edited by Karen Kukil, who in the acknowledgments thanks her acupuncturist for keeping her healthy.

The chronology at the beginning of Plath’s Collected Prose attempts to raise her into a three-dimensional space where bare facts are set next to intangible desires, ambitions and influences. She is born in 1932 to Otto and Aurelia Plath. Her father dies in 1940 of an embolus in the lung after his leg was amputated due to gangrene; she begins a journal, ascends into a kind of golden American girlhood; she’s published in Seventeen, wins the Mademoiselle contest for her story ‘Sunday at the Mintons’; she attends Smith, meets her benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty; she breaks her leg skiing, works at Mademoiselle as a guest editor, breaks down and attempts suicide; she’s electrocuted, administered insulin shock therapy and begins analysis with Dr Ruth Beuscher; she wins a Fulbright scholarship; she meets Ted Hughes and marries him. Two roses, Frieda and Nicholas.

If we could read it all simultaneously – journals, letters, stories, poems – a truer picture would emerge: of her doing and her desiring at the same time. It would create, as David Trinidad is quoted as saying in Peter Steinberg’s introduction, ‘a movie of her life’. Still, in the end, we must take a point of view. The penultimate line of the chronology reads: ‘11 February 1963: Protects children then dies by suicide.’ It is revealing, that textual arm around the shoulder, that need to shelter someone who has proved almost frighteningly enduring. People pass out of the narrative while still she stands. Her death seemed to drive people back on themselves: do I matter? It is a reaction to the totality presented in the poems. This is what Elizabeth Hardwick heard in Plath’s 1962 BBC recordings, and we must trust the diamond-hardness of Hardwick’s ear, sending out its ray like Marco’s stickpin in The Bell Jar:

I was taken aback by Sylvia Plath reading. It was not anything like I could have imagined. Not a trace of the modest, retreating, humorous Worcester, Massachusetts of Elizabeth Bishop; nothing of the swallowed plain Pennsylvania of Marianne Moore. Instead these bitter poems – ‘Daddy’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Fever 103°’ – were ‘beautifully’ read, projected in full-throated, plump, diction-perfect, Englishy, mesmerising cadences, all round and rapid, and paced and spaced. Poor recessive Massachusetts had been erased. ‘I have done it again!’ Clearly, perfectly, staring you down. She seemed to be standing at a banquet like Timon, crying: ‘Uncover, dogs, and lap!’

I’m​ not sure whether it was fast or gradual. The assignment was The Collected Prose, released by Faber last year and clocking in at around eight hundred pages. I read that first and then her journals; they are especially rich to read in the mornings. Then The Bell Jar, as good as I remember; then a glance at the smoking crater of the Plath-Hughes myth; then The Collected Poems, fresh as fish, and arrayed in shining scales. The rhythm of my notes changed, went in threes, lapped, lengthened.

One day in metalsmithing class, I picked up a book called Dynamarhythmic Design: A Book of Structural Pattern, first published in 1932. It is about everything that can happen in a rectangle. The rectangle was the page. I thought of Plath’s poem ‘Stillborn’. I read ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ in the courtyard of the coffee shop, where two students at the next table were having a loud conversation about whether it was ethical to bring children into the world. I wrote, very quickly, a poem called ‘Dynamarhythmic Design’. For some reason, for the next three weeks, it kept going. Three, four or five poems a day. There were rules, seemingly handed down from her; I followed them. Write the poems straight through from beginning to end, and tell people you’re doing it. It felt strangely joyful, propelled by its own velocity. I was not solving the problem of the death, the life, but I was remembering the real thing, insoluble for anyone who has not done it.

We can know her preparations. The ones who were useful to her: Robert Lowell (her teacher and the author of the introduction to the US edition of her posthumous collection Ariel), Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Stevie Smith. Adrienne Rich, envied and wrestled with as an equal artist. Eliot and Yeats, her early delights. Anne Sexton and George Starbuck, with a few ‘immortal’ love poems between them. ‘Skunk Hour’ (Lowell’s response to Bishop’s ‘The Armadillo’) is instrumental, since it includes the poet as part of a blasted landscape: the hell of its heaven and earth, or the god. She is part of it as a woman in a painting – a blank reclined space, sketching everything around her. Eventually the blank must be filled in totally: it completes the scene, but is fatal. This is why hospitals were fruitful for Plath. It is clear what is happening in them: a visceral tableau, with attending flowers, and a stripped human form at the centre. You could write, perhaps, as if every room were a hospital room, but it would not be very comfortable.

It’s not always rewarding to read poems in order, but in the case of Plath’s Collected it is. There are fits and starts of little breakthroughs, fallings-back. ‘Stillborn’, for instance, comes after the swift stroke of ‘The Hanging Man’, which instead of belabouring she confines to six lines. It takes a whole life to learn to leave it – the seeming mistake or incompletion, the absolutely ordinary word. We will never learn precisely what ‘Her blacks crackle and drag’ means, or what she meant by it – the last line of her probable last poem, ‘Edge’. It remains. The poems are better than people estimated then, particularly if read as one long work of experience, interwoven with the story of their efforts and evolutions – her ‘moults of style’, as Hughes called them. If he failed to understand her, Hughes understood the poems. He was – perhaps even more primarily than being her earthly husband – their reader. And he writes finely of how she did it, with the clear eye that knows. She was always having a big coffee idea of what to name a collection or one of her characters and it was always terrible; this is perhaps her most relatable aspect. That and her love of stews.

Why could she not, why could the poems not, move, she asks in ‘Stillborn’. (‘O I cannot understand what happened to them!/They are proper in shape and number and every part./They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!’) Why could her stories not happen; with certain exceptions they all take place in a kind of stasis. Some of her shifts in register can be attributed to writing for markets – the Saturday Evening Post, in those days, still reigned – and that is something she would do to the end. Her 1963 description of the Big Freeze was intended for Punch. In that bygone world, the postman was of paramount importance. Fat envelopes were fatal, thin ones ecstatic. Plath and Hughes stared through the blinds and accosted him when he came. Had they won an oatmeal-naming contest? Had a poem been taken?

I caught the very tail end of this life. It was important – we can no longer imagine it – to believe in this way. In a dream she recounts in the journals, Plath describes her brother, Warren, ‘discovering me about to bed with someone whose name was Partisan Review’. You may believe these institutions create your ambition; they do not. It is inherent, or inborn, or created in you by adversities, luck, love or the lack of it. The real document is already written: her diaries, a biography of aim.

In her Journals she wished, with great prophecy, for what she got: ‘a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love’. Plath and Hughes were married on 16 June 1956 at St George the Martyr in London, less than four months after they met at the St Botolph’s Review launch party at Falcon Yard in Cambridge. (You can watch Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig attempt to re-create this clash of violence, cheek-biting and red-hairband stealing in the 2003 biopic Sylvia. ‘Mine,’ Hughes barked. ‘I keep.’ This is the way Plath renders it in the journals, and Craig delivers the line like an actual German shepherd.) Two descriptions of their in-ness, of the enclosed nature of their marriage, strike me. The first is this recounting of a fight from April 1958:

Then saw his figure striding down Woodlawn under streetlamps and raced after, paralleling his course hidden by the row of pines edging the woods. He paused, stared, and if he weren’t my husband I would have run from him as a killer. I stood behind the last fat fir tree & wagged the branches on each side till he came over.

The second is the fable of the rhododendron stealers from an entry on 11 June of that year. This episode has some of the same shape, movement and self-sufficiency as Plath’s account of the St Botolph’s party; it even provides a natural closure to the first phase of Plath’s dazzlement. She had suspected Hughes of a flirtation or liaison – Clark writes in Red Comet that in this case he was most likely innocent. But she knew of his reputation as the biggest seducer in Cambridge. A shagger, walking rubberless through a rain of women. ‘What a man. You could drink his blood,’ a woman says of him in Red Comet.

‘I have avoided writing here,’ Plath begins,

because of the rough & nightmarish entry I must take up from – but I take up & knit up the ravelled ends. I had a sprained thumb, Ted bloody claw marks, for a week, and I remember hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room; instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars – for the first time – blinding red & white stars exploding in the black void of snarls & bitings. Air cleared. We are intact.

She goes on to describe a walk she took with Ted later in the day:

The evening was dim, light grey with wet humid mist, swimming green. I took a pair of silver-plated scissors in my raincoat pocket with the intent to cut another rose – yellow, if possible – from the rose garden (by the stone lion’s head fountain) just come into bloom – a rose to begin to unbud as the red, almost black-red rose now giving out prodigal scent in our living-room … I leaned to snip a pink bud, one petal uncurling, and three hulking girls came out of the rhododendron grove, oddly sheepish, hunched in light manilla-coloured raincoats. We stood regnant in our rose garden and stared them down. They shambled, in whispered converse, to the formal garden of white peonies & red geraniums, stood at a loss under a white arbour. ‘I’ll bet they’re wanting to steal some flowers,’ Ted said … We came up slowly with evil eyes. I felt bloodlust – sassy girls, three of them – ‘O, here’s a big one,’ a girl ostentatiously said. ‘Why are you picking them?’ Ted asked. ‘For a dance. We need them for a dance.’ They half-thought we would approve. ‘Don’t you think you’d better stop?’ Ted asked, ‘this is a public park.’ Then the little one got brassy & fairly sneered: ‘This isn’t your park.’ ‘Nor yours,’ I retorted, wanting strangely to claw off her raincoat, smack her face, read the emblem of her school on her jersey & send her to jail. ‘You might as well pull up the bush by its roots.’

A blown rose in her pocket, and the marriage somehow mended. Two weeks later Howard Moss at the New Yorker would take ‘Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbour’ and ‘Nocturne’ for the magazine. Plath sets the date aside in stars.

They probably killed a few too many animals together. Another scene drew them close, in the aftermath of this rehearsal: the gassing of the baby bird. This is from 9 July 1958:

Ted fixed our rubber bath hose to the gas jet on the stove & taped the other end into a cardboard box. I could not look & cried & cried. Suffering is tyrannous. I felt desperate to get the sickly little bird off our necks, miserable at his persistent pluck & sweet temper. I looked in. Ted had taken the bird out too soon & it lay in his hand on its back, opening & shutting its beak terribly & waving its upturned feet. Five minutes later he brought it to me, composed, perfect & beautiful in death. We walked in the dark blueing night of the park, lifted one of the druid stones, dug a hole in its crater, buried him & rolled the stone back. We left ferns & a green firefly on the grave, felt the stone roll of our hearts.

You are​ 17 years old in 1949, and it falls to you to lay bare the fiction of the century: that the sun has risen on the morning of the world, and it is your job to set a breakfast table for your husband. This postwar narrative was so pervasive and powerful that even Salinger’s characters, in the midst of mythical breakdowns, had to go on dates to football games. Plath’s account of meeting Hughes at the St Botolph’s party is fictionalised in a story called ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’, and makes an attempt to transcend this milieu:

Tracking across the snow-sheeted tennis courts back to Arden, the foreign students’ house with its small, elect group of South Africans, Indians and Americans, she begged, wordless, of the orange bonfire-glow of the town showing faint over the bare treetops, and of the distant jewel-pricks of the stars: let something happen. Let something happen. Something terrible, something bloody. Something to end this endless flaking snowdrift of airmail letters, of blank pages turning in library books. How we go waste, how we go squandering ourselves on air. Let me walk into Phèdre and put on that red cloak of doom. Let me leave my mark.

I was under no illusion that The Collected Prose would solve the mystery, or lay to rest the lie, of how Plath was absolutely ordinary up to the point that she wasn’t. If anything it deepened that mystery. There is no specific moment to point to. You do feel her gathering, burgeoning, learning. ‘I know, even as I wrote last fall,’ Plath said in June 1958, ‘that if I face & command this experience & produce a book of poems, stories, a novel, learn German & read Shakespeare & Aztec anthropology and the origin of the species – as I faced & commanded the different demands of teaching, I shall never be afraid again of myself.’ Learn German, Italian. Read dictionaries, exhort yourself in your journal to WRITE ABOUT THE THINGS OF THE WORLD WITH NO GLAZING. These are no longer our preparations but they are as good as any. Hughes spoke disparagingly of her thesaurus, but it meant that all the words would be there when she needed them, when she was ready.

Her gift for images is instantly apparent: rays of the sun are already fingers, baby tadpoles already black commas. She circles back to certain touchstones: a visit to a tattoo shop in Boston, summers working as a nanny, a brief teenage encounter with an Estonian man, the widow Mangada. ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ is based on the ‘Hospital Notes’ Plath took down when she ‘worked part-time as a secretary in the adult psychiatric clinic at the Massachusetts General Hospital in autumn 1958’. But, as she laments in her journals, she cannot make the scenes move; she wonders if she is interested in other people at all, if she can imagine their inner lives.

She knows her material, but not yet how to use it. ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’, a story that reproduces the facts of an encounter Plath and Hughes had with a bear while camping in Yellowstone National Park in 1959, ends with the husband dying of a fatal bear attack – I mean, what else to do? ‘All the Dead Dears’ and ‘The Wishing Box’ are both suicide stories; the second almost mocks the question of why someone would do it. In this version, it is because the husband lives a lyrical life in dreams and the wife herself does not dream anymore. She takes pills and dies with a smile on her lips. There are flickers, flexes of animal muscle, here and there: ‘the blue heron-hover of smoke’. A hunter’s green skirt ‘close-cloven as frog skin’. A woman ‘waiting with the large calm of a cow’. You think, she’s getting good.

If I had been asked the question – what surprised you most – I may have answered that it was her early determination to get experience in. ‘Tea With Olive Higgins Prouty’, dated July 1955, concludes with this paragraph: ‘A trip to the grocery store could seem as colourful as a jaunt to Tibet. The difference was only in a way of looking, in developing a sense of drama and daily adventure. Writer or not, the secret could be learned. From that day forward, whenever I was discouraged or dull, I remembered Olive Higgins Prouty’s words: “Take life! Think of the material you have there!”’ This is Plath at her most fawning, that ‘gushing’ side that the British most distrusted; Prouty was her benefactress, so the portrait must be flattering. In her journals, she is more straightforward, even castigating, but the substance is the same: ‘Read COSMOPOLITAN from cover to cover. Two mental-health articles. I must write one about a college girl suicide. THE DAY I DIED. And a story, a novel even. Must get out SNAKE PIT. There is an increasing market for mental-hospital stuff. I am a fool if I don’t relive, re-create it.’

The Bell Jar, begun in the spring of 1961, is quite suddenly, perplexingly, free of this creaking immobility. Her grand ambition had been to be in the magazines. Now she is in those very offices, watching everyone around her puke up the contents of their alligator pears; ‘chock-full of ptomaine’. This is how the onset of madness is sometimes described: an odd, out of place detail, and at once you are seeing things as they are. It takes so little to disorder the arrangement. The world emerging from its war, building its illusive paradises, knew a rake left on one of those pristine lawns could throw off the whole picture. Those identical crackerbox houses, and someone stuffed with sleeping pills under the porch. How did it happen to a suburban girl raised by a stack of Seventeen magazines?

She leaves aside most of her previously attempted Salingerian slanginess and the voice becomes a direct line. You cannot write this unless you have experienced that period of unwashed hair, each strand of you separated from the next. The sense of humour is different on the ward – it is black and mocking and very, very clear. The patients both share it and use it against one another; it is their coinage and their only weapon against outsiders. The absolute falseness is what the suicide sees. When confronted with a sister’s tears, or a doctor’s soapy admonition about ‘a parent’s worst nightmare’, the impulse is not to comfort them, as custom would dictate; the impulse is to laugh.

The rhythms of The Bell Jar are poetic – you can tap dance to the chapter about the baby being born. It is partly to do with the way Plath reproduces distances between private thoughts and the self in conversation. ‘Wonderful,’ Esther Greenwood says to Buddy Willard after this exhibition. ‘I could see something like that every day.’ She allots one paragraph for perception, the next for the assertion of personality and then one for a scent from the past. That is the way the novel moves forwards, when none of the stories really could. New York somehow helps too – we are propelled along its sidewalks, 43 blocks on foot. Her acquaintances of the Mademoiselle days spoke of their shock at being put into the novel wholesale, though Janet Malcolm’s talk about ‘cruel’ caricatures in The Silent Woman (1994) seems to misunderstand what the novel is doing. Plath was dressed down immediately, on her first day, for gossiping about the editors in the elevator. Ann Burnside was so shocked by her eating a whole bowl of caviar that she ‘avoided her for the rest of the month’. The portrait of Prouty (who underwent her own breakdown) is described by Malcolm as uncharitable, but that stark staring eye is on a swivel. It sweeps Esther too, knows she is mad before she does. Madness hates custom, lies, the proprieties. Drinks out of the fingerbowl and eats the flowers. Prouty, so generous to Plath in other ways and when it really mattered, would have understood.

Later in the novel, a woman asks Esther why she ended up on the hospital ward: ‘I turned her my full face, with the bulging purple and green eye. “I tried to kill myself.”’ Madness loves the flat, pure telling, which the sane cannot abide. This was the power Plath had discovered – towering, revolving, in brass feathers and fire. It was not that she really flew. It was that she had gone underground but did not stay there.

Chasing​ after some inconsequential biographical fact, I clicked a New Yorker link, skimmed past the byline, and began reading something so crazy that I knew it had to do with The Silent Woman. (All praise to our AI overlords, who now preview this piece with a picture of Janis Joplin.) As Malcolm’s book must grapple with the previous biographies, and particularly Anne Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, which she reckons as a real piece of art, so must this essay tangle itself with Malcolm’s investigation. The Silent Woman has everything: psychoanalysts puking because they found Hughes too attractive, Dido Merwin writing an entire essay about how Plath was a foie gras pig, Stevenson palely loitering, thought-foxes, chipped gravestones, poetic tribunals, lesbian readings of ‘The Rabbit Catcher’, and Malcolm being perhaps more on one than any journalist before or since.

Many things can be true at once – that Plath and Hughes seemed to enjoy hopping on each other; that even two people in a big blasting creative marriage can feel stifled; that people can absorb one another’s moods and be swept up in the mood or the madness of an age. You might marry just as the age of free love dawns, that is something. You might become a little famous. Poets are not intended to taste fame, they generally malfunction. It is not that I have no sympathy for Hughes. I have immense sympathy for him when Plath describes her shrimp casseroles. More than anything those descriptions put you back in that time. She writes of him lying on his back and groaning – he’s gonna barf, girl! Just like those psychoanalysts, hiding behind the bushes of his future, waiting to ambush him with their desire.

Malcolm’s interest is in the living, perhaps even in the personality: who makes a good subject, interview or biographical? Lacking the real personalities – Plath and Hughes’s subsequent partner Assia Wevill, who would also kill herself in 1969 – she settles on Olwyn, Ted Hughes’s granitic and charismatic sister, who met Plath a scant six times and went on to help her brother manage Plath’s estate. That does shed some light. To ‘lose’ journals and ‘burn’ novels, as Ted did, is mismanagement. (He had much less regard for Plath’s fiction than her poetry; if we were working only off The Collected Prose this estimation would be warranted, but we are not.) And it goes without saying that most of us wouldn’t want our papers entrusted to a sister-in-law who despised us in our lifetime. Still, Malcolm declares she ‘was already’ on the side of the creepy twin-figure she refers to as ‘The Hugheses’.

Malcolm believed Hughes’s letters would enshrine his reputation; an edition of those was released in 2008, edited by Christopher Reid. I am not sure this enshrinement has come to pass. His reputation still rests on the phrase ‘sudden sharp hot stink of fox’, and Birthday Letters, read at a distance of 27 years, contains too much careful positioning to really count as poetry. I do think the problem is that it is too careful, despite Hughes seeming to assume Plath’s Morse abandon, her acrobatic enjambments and murderous stops, her exclamation points, her use of autobiography. A few break through – the crazy ones – but most don’t stand on their own without Sylvia. Death is a dreadful shadow to work in, and one that hardly anyone deserves. Hughes spoke, after he had left Plath and their two children at Court Green, of Sylvia’s ‘particular death-ray quality’. It’s possible this is true. It’s also true that men say the most insane shit when they’re getting divorced.

Malcolm’s eye for personality also finds Dido Merwin, wife of the poet W.S. Merwin. Dido’s hatred of Plath was born when Plath took the story of her facelift and put it in a poem. Merwin’s essay, included at the end of Stevenson’s Bitter Fame, is a vituperative, fey document, with odd dashes of Lorelei Lee. Merwin does indeed depict Plath ‘grimly downing the Fons foie gras for all the world as though it were “Aunt Dot’s meat loaf”’. I began with a sickened feeling but ended up genuinely entertained. ‘Sylvia’s baleful silence was eventually broken with an announcement that she wished to see a cow milked.’ I understand Malcolm’s joy. It is such pure civet piss that it ends up bottled for perfume. And that’s Plath’s lesson: if you’re going to be a cunt, make an art out of it.

The poet Al Alvarez (a contemporaneous champion of Plath’s work, also a highly problematic biographical spokesman): ‘Sylvia just wasn’t my style – she wasn’t my physical type. She was a big girl with a long face.’ What? ‘And, in all fairness to Alvarez, I should say that Plath isn’t my type either,’ Malcolm rejoins. WHAT?

All the photographs of her disappoint me. Over the years of the photographic archive, she changes, gradually losing the blonde, dark-lipsticked blandness of her college period and the crisp, American housewifeliness of Alvarez’s memoir. But of her ‘Ariel’ persona – queen, priestess, magician’s girl, red-haired woman who eats men like air, woman in white, woman in love, earth mother, moon goddess – there is no trace in the photographs. The fault may be with photography – some people never really appear in their photographs. Or it may be that Plath was only on the verge of showing herself in photographs when she died, her ‘true self’ not available to the camera’s vacant gaze.

There is a real vertigo to reading this, as there is to reading Stevenson’s remembrances. Malcolm: ‘As I read the intense, mannered love letters that Plath wrote to [Richard Sassoon] in the winter of 1955-56, I was taken back to my own youth, and to the Sassoons I was in love with and loved to write ardent, pretentious letters to. Anne Stevenson told me that she, too, had had Sassoons in her life.’ Malcolm makes much of the fact that Sassoon ‘disappeared without a trace’, but a cursory google finds his obituary, with a whimsical picture of him peeping out from behind a tree. He wasn’t burdened by her myth, he just fucked off to Naropa. So much for the mystery. ‘The boys invented themselves out of literary cloth (brooding, Gallic, Byronic, etc.), and the girls “read” them as if they were novels.’ Stevenson and Malcolm were classmates at the University of Michigan, separated only by a year. How can it be that for all their intellect, education, voraciousness, curiosity, these women were still back there, looking for him. They did not make it out of the 1950s.

‘Why doesn’t she say something?’ Olwyn Hughes remembers thinking, grieved, aggrieved, recounting a Christmas visit to Yorkshire when she and Sylvia fought. ‘I say, you’re awfully critical, aren’t you?’ Olwyn had said in response to some anecdote Plath told. Sylvia, falling into a dense silence, stared her out of countenance, then took baby Frieda off Olwyn’s knee and left the room. ‘Looking back, it seems quite aggressive of her to have left at dawn the next day. Taking away from me the opportunity to “make it up”, which I intended to do, and putting me firmly in the wrong.’ ‘She never once asked me what I did,’ Plath’s downstairs neighbour, Trevor Thomas, said. ‘She never asked me if I painted, or if I drew, or was I an artist. I could have done a portrait of her if she had been co-operative.’ This is a startling complaint, from someone who was nearly killed when the gas from Plath’s apartment sank into his own. Why didn’t she tell us? This is what they all mean. But she did, she was trying to.

‘I’m automatically on his side about Sylvia Plath,’ A.S. Byatt said in a 1991 New York Times profile:

When I knew her, it was during her most writing-for-Mademoiselle-ish days, and she had bobby socks and totally artificial bright red lips and totally artificial bright blonde hair, and I remember her as a made-up creature with no central reality to her at all, always uttering advice like a woman’s magazine advice column. She wrote beautiful words, but there wasn’t anybody inside there. I’m sure he behaved very badly, but I regard it as automatic that anyone married to Sylvia Plath would have to find someone else in the end, because I don’t think she was a complete person – you can see that in the letters home. She is a major poet … don’t get me wrong, but I didn’t know she could write like she could write.

This is the sort of thing people felt free to say about her, though in this case it was also a defensive manoeuvre. Byatt had been at Cambridge around the same time and co-opted a few sanguinary details of Plath’s life to give to Frederica Potter. Cyrilly Abels, editor at Mademoiselle and model for Jay Cee in The Bell Jar, criticised Plath similarly, singling out her lack of spontaneity. ‘She was simply all façade, too polite, too well brought up and well disciplined.’ Well, she would buck you later, as you wanted her to do. That strange note of grievance is present here too – of having missed it.

A suicide goes away for ever, Malcolm observes, leaving us for ever in the wrong. The act, totally resolved in itself, cannot be answered. A different motive for suicide will be given every decade, and different questions asked – did she really mean to do it, was it a theatrical gesture gone wrong, does a mother who kills herself abandon her children. Diagnoses will be handed out: bipolar disorder, PMDD, post-partum psychosis.

In London, towards the end, Plath wanted to meet people, make connections; to enter into a literary life. She reached out to writers like Doris Lessing, who rebuffed her, and wrote a fan letter to Stevie Smith, which is excerpted on the back of Smith’s magnificent All the Poems. ‘I am a desperate Stevie Smith addict,’ the blurb reads. Then you open up the collection to find ‘Pearl’ dedicated ‘to an American lady poet committing suicide because of not being appreciated enough’. The poem reads: ‘Then cried the American poet where she lay supine:/ “My name is Purrel; I was cast before swine.”’ It’s printed under an Edenic sketch of a man lying naked on his back under the sun. Below the poem, a naked woman enters a line-drawing of a river like a rainbow.

We’re​ going to solve her finally. A goldfish plopped in smaller then larger ponds … at what point does it become a piranha? How does a sorority girl become Lazarus? It frightens us to think it might be the ordinary ones, that so much could be held in reserve or hidden. That towering figure of the poems, the one that Hardwick heard, presents both a hope and a terror. If it is possible to level up like that, and we haven’t done it yet – is the entire sacrifice required? Did we miss our moment? In one of her children’s stories, Plath writes of the suit in which you can do everything. And people do stare, but IT DOESN’T MATTER.

A great cold settled over London. She took up chain-smoking, the bandage on her cut thumb frayed, she developed her father’s gangrene, she wore the camel Jaeger. She ran high fevers, she rocketed. She worried for her children, told the downstairs neighbour, in an unnatural voice, that she did not want to die. The final chapter of Red Comet is an appalling picture of how need turns everyone away from you.

Let us whisk her away from the Big Freeze and return her to the site of her perceptual gift. You can smell that photograph of her in a white swimsuit on Cape Cod: sun, sand, salt, baby oil and something sour. The cult attaches like barnacles to her physical person; she must be imagined. You construct her backwards: head in the oven, what is in the head, her sinuses, coldest winter, the healed femur, the glistening organs, the big crashing love, the wanting to learn German. In ‘Landscape of Childhood’, she remembers her mother reading Matthew Arnold’s ‘Forsaken Merman’ aloud: ‘I saw the gooseflesh on my skin. I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.’

‘Now and then,’ Plath continues, when she grows nostalgic, ‘somebody solicitous’ will bundle her in the car and take her to the sea. But it is not the right sea, with its sound like the blood in your ears, the brag of the heart: I am. You face the sea as an individual. You are young again there, you are not married. Hughes was the one who took her, who watched her sit in stony silence; it was not the sea she remembered. ‘And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle – beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.’ These lines (now privately owned) are dated 28 January 1963, two weeks before she died.

Biography is on a march, always, to the final page. It is the thing wrong with Birthday Letters – that it casts her death back through her life, sows it through vivacity, makes it inevitable. Any account of Plath’s life must also hurtle, trudge or wander towards her death, and we will always have that wrong, as Richard Quin explains in Rebecca West’s This Real Night. Quin has learned that his mercurial father has died. He does not ask how, which his sister, Rose, cannot understand. ‘I didn’t ask,’ he explains, ‘because if people tell you things it never comes out right … They never get what happens … So, you see, if people at that place in Spain told Mr Morpurgo how Papa died, they’d get almost everything wrong, just because they weren’t Papa, who alone knew how he died his own, special death.’

The triumph of Plath’s poems is the triumph of that privacy. But, in the end, you must suffer the reminiscences of those who had no great claim on you. They may also be the ones who defend you. Elizabeth Compton, Plath’s friend in Devon during the last year of her life, tells Malcolm of the morning she found Sylvia bent over a little nativity: a cat and her new kittens. ‘I can see her now, wearing a pink, woolly dressing gown with a long, brown plait of hair falling into the box, turning her head and saying: “I never saw anything so small and new and vulnerable. They are blind.” What could I do to help and protect this amazing person?’ There is a picture, I think, of this revolving of the head – it is the turn to Hughes and his camera while camping, Plath feeding the deer in cloud country. There was a time she was alive, on the beach, hating Spain, skiing downhill. There was a time when she stood silently behind a tree, waving its arms so that her husband would forgive and come back to her.

When the biographical problem is so serious, you must fight your way back to her mornings, where the poems came with the descent of the coffee vision. We inherited her mornings. Everyone who has had a real encounter with Plath’s poetry will have their own version. We cannot know about one another but we can know about the rectangle: it pulses with plasma, it is holy, anything can happen there, everything.