Although Sylvia Plath is best known for the cutting lyricism of Ariel (1965) and for her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), her career goal as a writer was threefold: to write poetry, novels, and short stories. As detailed in her journals, she devoted equal time to poetry and fiction, shifting her focus to stories when she felt stalled as a poet, then returning to poetry when she lost confidence in herself as a fiction writer. More than a record of her experiences, the journals document her clear-eyed assessments of her strengths and weaknesses as a writer, her resolve to improve through relentless practice, and, especially for the short fiction, her ongoing study of markets she sought to crack: literary venues such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and …
Although Sylvia Plath is best known for the cutting lyricism of Ariel (1965) and for her autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar (1963), her career goal as a writer was threefold: to write poetry, novels, and short stories. As detailed in her journals, she devoted equal time to poetry and fiction, shifting her focus to stories when she felt stalled as a poet, then returning to poetry when she lost confidence in herself as a fiction writer. More than a record of her experiences, the journals document her clear-eyed assessments of her strengths and weaknesses as a writer, her resolve to improve through relentless practice, and, especially for the short fiction, her ongoing study of markets she sought to crack: literary venues such as The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and The London Magazine; women’s magazines such as Mademoiselle, Woman’s Day, Ladies’ Home Journal; and even pulp monthlies such as True Story. As these last examples suggest, Plath’s objective as a short story writer, beginning in high school when she submitted work to Seventeen Magazine, was to make money, initially to supplement her college scholarships, and then to earn a living as a professional writer—and sustain her career as a poet—without having to teach. To expand her range of genres and contribute to the income stream, Plath also wrote nonfiction. At Smith, she worked for Press Board, getting paid for pieces she submitted to the student paper and covering Smith events for local newspapers; apart from these publications, her most reliable nonfiction outlet was The Christian Science Monitor, where she published thirteen short essays, most of them travelogues, between 1950 and 1959, although she also found a receptive venue in The New Statesman, where, in 1961 and 1962, she contributed five book reviews. Not counting her letters and journals, The Bell Jar, and drafts—now lost—of two additional novels, Plath wrote a remarkable amount of prose, most of it tailored for specific markets, especially the high-paying “slicks” (her term for glossy women’s magazines). Until now, readers could only sample a fraction of that prose—twenty stories and five essays—published by her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1977). With the release of The Collected Prose,[1] which includes all of Plath’s published short fiction, essays, journalism, reviews, and radio scripts, as well as unpublished work drawn from archives, her short prose is on display, arranged chronologically by genre. Although some of the stories and essays shine, enough of the work misses its mark, or, in the case of the journalism, feels routine rather than revelatory, that the book seems designed more for Plath scholars than for general readers, contrary to Plath’s ambitions that her short prose would have broad appeal.
In keeping with Plath’s own priorities, the editor, Peter K. Steinberg, devotes two-thirds of the book to her short stories: 485 pages in “Part I: Fiction,” plus an additional 95 pages of “Story Fragments” in an appendix. Of the 76 stories in the first section, only 18 were published during Plath’s lifetime (and among these Steinberg counts four stories that appeared in Plath’s junior high school newspaper). Altogether, the stories and fragments document Plath’s progress as a fiction writer: how she learned her craft on the way to writing The Bell Jar. From this perspective, Steinberg’s chronological arrangement makes sense, yet it also does Plath a disservice, given that it forces readers to wade through her juvenilia—stories written in grammar school, junior high, and high school, and stories produced for college creative writing classes—where Plath still has a lot to learn. To be fair, she did gain early commercial success, publishing four stories in Seventeen (one that she wrote in high school) and one in Mademoiselle before she graduated from Smith in 1955, and many of the stories she wrote there, especially during her senior year for a class taught by Alfred Kazin, are quite polished. Nevertheless, enough of the early stories have similar problems—especially lack of plot and external conflict—that placing the stories in reverse chronological order would better serve readers who are not already die-hard Plath fans; starting The Collected Prose with the accomplished stories that Plath produced toward the end of her life would hook readers and give them reason to sample the early stories and the nonfiction prose.
On the way to those more engaging stories, Plath struggles, though it’s instructive to witness her honing her craft. Whether on her own or as part of an assignment, Plath practices writing from different points of view (mainly first and third person, though she also tries her hand at second person, a radio script, and a philosophical, late-night dormitory debate), learns how to manage flashbacks, and how to balance a character’s inner life against a story’s action and dialogue, and she grows more adept at these staples of fiction over time. For example, at age 16, in “In This Field We Wander Through” (1948), she ham-handedly represents a protagonist’s interior thoughts in parentheses, exposing how the main character, Joyce, looks down on her friends but pretends otherwise when interacting with them—a solid theme to explore in a high school story, but the parentheses call attention to themselves and mar the story’s pacing. The gulf between a female protagonist thinking savage thoughts about everyone around her yet conforming to social pressure to be nice is, of course, one that Plath exposes in The Bell Jar, and stories in The Collected Prose show her inching her way to mastering the nuances of that disparity, although none of her story protagonists is as satisfyingly snarky as her novel’s alter ego, Esther Greenwood, nor do the story protagonists’ thoughts rise to the level of feminist social satire as in The Bell Jar. Instead, Plath’s stories often explore how the contrasts between a protagonist’s internal and external responses raise ethical challenges for her, even though she may fail to act on them, as in “The Perfect Setup,” published in (1952), in which Lisa, a live-in summer babysitter, befriends another sitter, Ruth Jacobs, on daily trips to the beach, and is shocked when her employer insists she stay away from Ruth, due to Ruth, and the children she watches, being Jewish (or, at least, being one of “those people,” a different social class to whom the mother does not want to expose her children). Rather than quit her “perfect setup” of a summer job, Lisa complies, though she admits at the end of the story that her summer has soured. The situation typifies Plath’s approach in too many stories: a passive protagonist encounters a situation that makes her rethink her place in the world, yet the change tends to be internal, prompting an epiphany rather than something she acts upon. Rarely does Plath offer a scenario in which the protagonist faces open, let alone heightened, conflict or makes consequential decisions whose results lead to narrative complications. One of the few such stories is “I Lied for Love” (1953), aimed at the steamy “true confessions” market, in which the protagonist, Jenny, working-class daughter of a farmer, lies to him about dating Phil, a rich boy from her high school. The story’s plot and moralistic warning to the reader are predictable: though his family scorns her, and he makes only vague promises of marriage, Jenny sleeps with Phil before he ships off to Korea. She gets pregnant and, after he is killed in action, must confess her folly to her father, who promptly keels over, dead from a heart attack, but she is “saved” by an offer of marriage from farmhand Ivan, who loves her despite her shunning him in favor of Phil (and to whom her father has conveniently left the farm). Despite the clichés (“It took a long hard struggle to make me finally realize that home is where the heart is”), this story is the first—after 200 pages—that depends on a causal chain.
Plath’s strengths are consistent throughout her short fiction: befitting a poet, she excels in description, whether of settings, character mannerisms, or to evoke a mood. From an early age, she crafts striking similes and—even when nothing much happens in a story—ends with a flourish that makes the final sentences feel earned, the linguistic equivalent of a gymnast sticking a landing. Plath’s most common approach is to finish a story with an epiphany, a lesson the female main character learns from interacting with people whose values differ from hers. As story conclusions, Plath’s metaphors mark the turn in a protagonist’s resolve, as in “Initiation,” written in July 1952 and published six months later in Seventeen, in which the heroine undergoes hazing in her quest to join a high school sorority and then, after surviving the challenges, decides to spurn the club. The ending contrasts the sameness of sparrows, who flock in conformity like the dull sorority girls, against the freedom of heather birds, whose song and joyful flight inspire her to be herself:
But just then, from somewhere far off, Millicent was sure of it, there came a melodic fluting, quite wild and sweet, and she knew that it must be the song of the heather birds as they went wheeling and gliding against wide blue horizons through vast spaces of air, their wings flashing quick and purple in the bright sun.
Within Millicent another melody soared, strong and exuberant, a triumphant answer to the music of the darting heather birds that sang so clear and lilting over the far lands. And she knew that her own private initiation had just begun.
Despite the flurry of adjectives, the ending resonates not only through the emotional lift of the language, but also through the implication that Millicent will experience worse hazing from the sorority—the girls will shun and disparage her—than she did through the cruel humiliations of initiation week, yet she will endure. Although some of Plath’s endings don’t correspond as well to a story’s theme, or else arise suddenly (an epiphany that comes out of nowhere), she excels at tying off a story with metaphors, or twists of dialogue, that feel conclusive.
Underscoring Plath’s strengths as a story writer, Steinberg quotes two sentences from her journal as an epigraph to The Collected Prose: “Write to recreate a mood, an incident. If this is done with color and feeling, it becomes a story” (October 4, 1959). Yet, as Plath knew, a good story depends on much more: character, plot, pacing. Although her journals reflect the extreme emotional swings she experienced during her life, and her tendency to berate herself when she was feeling low, she was astute in assessing her writerly weaknesses. Over time, she recognized that her obsession with matching a story to a particular market hobbled her progress. Thus, the epigraph Steinberg features starts, in the journal, with a sentence he cuts: “Now, forget salable stories. Write to recreate a mood, an incident.” Five days earlier, feeling blocked, she admits, “I must be so overconscious of markets and places to send things that I can write nothing honest and really satisfying. .** . **. I write as if an eye were upon me. That is fatal.” She also knew that she struggled with plot. In July 1951, she resolves, “I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue—rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story.” Six years later, finishing her Fulbright term in Cambridge, and planning an autobiographical novel, Falcon Yard, about her whirlwind marriage to Hughes, she craves time to revise: “it’s not a novel now. Just straight blither. But the [protagonist] will have to get through a year of life in 3 months of mine. And then, two months this summer to re-write, carefully, knowing what I’m trying to do. I might as well be glad of the plot. I really don’t know much but that. And plot’s hard for me, so good” (March 1957). Here, she feels relief that she won’t have to construct a plot, because, drawing on her life, she already knows what happens. Yet, as she also sometimes admits in the journal, her stories often fall flat—or don’t get beyond mere re-creation of moods and incidents—because she sticks too closely to her life experience and doesn’t veer from it enough to shape it into a satisfying, well-paced narrative.
Readers familiar with Plath’s letters and journals will recognize “material” from her life that she repurposes, sometimes in multiple versions, as fiction and nonfiction, throughout The Collected Prose: incidents drawn from her summer employment as a farmworker, baby-sitter, waitress, and recognizable “characters” whom she only lightly, if at all, fictionalizes: the Estonian immigrant farmhand, Ilo Pill, who reappears as “The Latvian,” as Ivan in “I Lied for Love” and in a non-fiction piece, “The International Flavor”; men she dated in college; the nosy landlady who exploited Plath and Hughes on their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain (Plath uses her real name in the resulting story, “That Widow Mangada”); Plath’s family, Hughes’s family, Hughes himself. Steinberg proposes that Plath’s commitment to life-writing in her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction is one of her great strengths: “She mined her life and work, exchanging themes and images across all forms of her writing. The result is that the works in this volume exhibit a richness of intertextuality when read in concert with her autobiographical writing and poems. To borrow from poet and Plath scholar David Trinidad, reading Plath’s works together creates a ‘movie of her life.’” That “movie,” however, is much more engaging in the letters and journals, when Plath styles herself as the star, than in the short stories, where she is, ironically, so wedded to the incidents she narrates that she seems unwilling to change them much, or at all, for the sake of plot, or else distances herself from the immediacy of the experience by tailoring the narrative for a specific market, infusing work she intended to submit to women’s magazines, for example, with a gauzy lightness or an end-of-the-story moral. For stories she aimed at more prestigious markets, she sometimes tries too hard to be literary, shaping her experience via techniques she imitates from writers such as Virginia Woolf or Henry James. A long story, “Stone Boy with Dolphin” (1958), about the night she met Hughes at a party in Cambridge, England, is much less intense than her retelling of the events in her journal, due to her casting of the narrative in a semi stream-of-consciousness mode, replete with sudden point-of-view shifts between third and first person, surrealistic changes of scale, recurring symbolism (the statue referenced in the title), literary allusions, and heightened emotion signaled by sentence fragments. In the journals, her version of the Hughes meeting is far more compelling, its narrative immediacy unmarred by literary devices.
Given Plath’s self-imposed constrictions, the strongest stories in The Collected Prose are those that are not autobiographical: stories where she is, indeed, writing fiction. Many of these have a gothic dimension, such as the early “Gramercy Park” (1948), “The Dark River” (1949), and “East Wind” (1949), where Plath takes a break from teen angst and stages hauntings that expand the horizons of adult protagonists. Her turn from personal subject matter fuels a major breakthrough in “Sunday at the Mintons’” (1952), which won first prize in Mademoiselle’s college short story contest. Here, conflict arises from character differences, when an elderly sister returns to keep house for her older brother, and Plath confidently slips between their points of view to dramatize the mounting friction between the man’s fastidious rationalism and the woman’s intuitive resilience, associating him with the precision of clocks and maps and her with the fluidity of the sea. Though the concluding dialogue suggests that the climactic scene of the pair’s drowning off a local pier may be the sister’s fantasy, a variation on the cliché “it all was a dream,” Plath’s sweeping description of the sister’s triumphant riding of the waves resolves the story’s emotional tensions. A year later, in the marvelous “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,”[2] Plath’s tale of a girl on a train ride begins realistically, then unexpectedly turns Kafkaesque: the train’s destination, “the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will,” may be death or, worse, the psychic dead end of an adulthood steeped in apathy, and Mary narrowly escapes. All of these stories show Plath taking leaps as a storyteller, stylistically and thematically, when she risks writing outside her experience. Similar breakthroughs happen in 1958–59, when she grounds stories on incidents from her life, yet changes them significantly enough to prioritize plot and invention, as in the surrealism of “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” the workplace drama of “The Daughters of Blossom Street,” and “The Fifty-ninth Bear,” based on her and Hughes’s camping trip through Yellowstone. Told from the husband’s point of view (the protagonist is female in all but five of the stories Steinberg collects), the story flirts with the uncanny when the husband loses the couple’s bet on how many bears they will see: the fifty-ninth mauls him to death (to his credit, Hughes didn’t balk at reprinting the story in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams).
Unlike The Collected Poems, where Plath’s improvement is steady, culminating in the stunning lyrics she wrote during the last year of her life, The Collected Prose shows her repeatedly lapsing into old habits—sticking too closely to autobiography and marketable formulae, or worse, merging both. The last complete story, “Mothers” (1961–62), drawn from Plath’s efforts to join the parochial social circles of rural Devonshire, where she and Hughes purchased a cottage in 1961, lacks plot and momentum, though it reflects Plath’s frustration at being stereotyped as an American outsider. It’s therefore a shame that The Collected Prose omits The Bell Jar, where Plath solves the problems that bog down so many of the stories. Of course, including the novel would go beyond Steinberg’s goal of collecting every available scrap of her short prose, but would enable readers to witness—and celebrate—the payoff to Plath’s dogged apprenticeship.
In his Preface, Steinberg notes that Plath “shows, ultimately, a determination to write in any genre, to never stop the act of writing, no matter what. This is Sylvia Plath’s achievement.” After years of practice, Plath conquered, in the novel, the twin obstacles she wrestled to overcome in the stories. Rather than yield to the conventions of women’s magazines, in The Bell Jar she satirizes them, in her scathing retelling of her month in New York as a college guest editor for Mademoiselle, exposing the false veneer of the high fashion life the magazine sought to promote: from the ptomaine poisoned crabmeat that sickens the college guest editors at a Ladies’ Day luncheon to the drunken, raunchy nightlife where Esther fends off increasingly malignant men, the glamour wears thin, and the gulf between façade and reality unbalances her, pitching her into a trajectory that Plath models on her own subsequent depression, suicide attempt, and recovery. Although the novel is autobiographical, Plath paces it cleanly and frames her plot as an archetypal “hero’s journey” from folly and false ambition, through psychic death, into the promise and self-assurance of rebirth. Her characterizations of family and friends are unsparing—so much so that the novel was first published in England under a pseudonym, and the U.S. publication was delayed until 1971, eight years after Plath’s death. While Plath’s brutal reconfigurations of real people in The Bell Jar are ethically questionable, the approach annihilates the sentimentality that taints her women’s market stories and bolsters the narrative arc of Esther gaining the confidence to parry the sexual double standards of Cold War America. For example, Plath’s characterization of Dick Norton, a family friend and medical student whom she dated in college, differs significantly from story to novel. In “The Christmas Heart” (1955), she recasts her visit to an Upstate New York sanitarium, where Norton was recuperating from tuberculosis, and where she broke her leg skiing, as a tale in which the protagonist, Sheila, arrives with the intention of breaking up with Michael, her tubercular medical student boyfriend, but by the end, in a saccharine holiday twist, she succumbs to his declarations of love in the aftermath of her skiing accident and, the story implies, will likely marry him (“The dawn-star of a thousand ages shone down on Sheila and Michael, sharers of the Christmas heart”). In The Bell Jar, on the other hand, Norton, rechristened “Buddy Willard,” morphs into an insufferable hypocrite: the kind of “all-American boy” whom Esther’s mother hopes she will marry turns out to be as false as the men who pursued her in the city—or even more of a fraud, due to his pose of purity—for Esther discovers that, though he expects her to be a virgin on their wedding night, he had a sleazy affair with a waitress the previous summer. Plath intersperses the New York narrative with increasingly unpleasant scenes of Esther’s relationship with Buddy. In the New York section’s climax, Esther, nearly raped by an elegant date who turns out to be “a woman-hater,” tosses items from her swank magazine wardrobe off the top of her hotel on the night before she leaves the city. Plath precedes this chapter with a flashback of Esther’s visit to the TB sanitarium, where, after she spurns his offer of marriage, Buddy, who has never skied, presumes to give her lessons and, when she breaks her leg in two places, seems pleased that she, too, will be laid up. Plath aligns Buddy symbolically with a man on the slopes who, precipitating her accident, gets in the way of her liberating, downhill momentum: “‘You were doing fine,’ a familiar voice informed my ear, ‘until that man stepped into your path.’” So much for “sharers of the Christmas heart.”
Among fiction writers, there’s a commonplace that professionals sometimes impart to beginners: along with not letting rejection of your submissions stop you, you should expect to write at least a million words before “finding your voice” and gaining the technical mastery to produce consistently excellent work. Plath’s Collected Prose substantiates that wisdom. While the volume will enable Plath devotees to track the changes between her various representations of her life—how autobiographical incidents in the stories and nonfiction essays differ from her iterations of them in the poems, letters, journals, and The Bell Jar—The Collected Prose may be even more valuable to aspiring fiction writers, as a testament to how the hard work of writing, writing, writing, may eventually bear fruit.
[1] The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, ed. by Peter K. Steinberg. Faber. $39.50.
[2] Published in The Hudson Review, Volume LXXII, No. 1 (Spring 2019).