The Goth Goddess Of Devon

Johnny Panic And The Bible Of Dreams
By Sylvia Plath
Harper Perennial, 327 pages
Available at National Book Store

Try to imagine the state of mind of American poet Sylvia Plath, age 31, as the final incendiary poems started popping out, often at a rate of two to three a day. It must have seemed like bats escaping from a belfry.

I admire the poems in Ariel, Plath’s final collection, published shortly after her suicide in 1963, a lot. Married to British poet Ted Hughes, living in Devon, England, she was said to be a neurotic mother who must have pushed out these last poems like giving birth – they seem full of the same rage, urgency, and sweaty madness. Poems like "Daddy," "Lady Lazarus," "The Applicant" and "Lesbos" signaled the emergence of a self-created, almost vengeful feminine persona, a goddess of Goth, if you will. Poet Robert Lowell was astounded by Ariel’s final cry: "In these poems… Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created – hardly a person at all, or a woman, but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines."

Behind the scenes, though, Plath was leading a fairly ordinary and conventional life. Evidence of this can be found in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a collection of Plath’s prose, short stories and journal entries, all written well before Ariel.

What we encounter here is a woman writer still hiding behind (or being oppressed by) existing social conventions; and we see perhaps how literary conventions can be as stifling and shackling as the conventions of marriage or success. It’s a mistake to equate Plath with Ester, the aspiring writer who attempts suicide in Plath’s novel The Bell Jar. But so many of the same neuroses, inner fears, and obsessive attention to fashion details lurk in Plath’s journal entries and short stories, that you begin to wonder: Was she trapped under a bell jar, not of madness, but of ordinariness? All in all, the short stories contained in Johnny Panic are so plain, mannered and derivative that you wonder whom she was trying so hard to please. (They did in fact please magazine editors, who published most of the stories while she was still alive.) She displays some of the same writing vices – such as breathy alliteration – that lent incantatory power to her poems, but fell flat in essays and short stories. Plath’s journal entries, and the introduction by Ted Hughes, make it clear she was aware of her weaknesses and felt trapped by her own prose voice: she didn’t like imitating Frank O’Conner (one of her short story idols) or even J.D. Salinger (whom she praises and from whom she borrows certain italicizing habits), yet she was struggling to break free. Into what? Perhaps into madness.

Eleven hours later. I am down to apple core and seeds and in the month of May, 1931, with a private nurse who has just opened a laundry bag in her patient’s closet and found five severed heads in it, including her mother’s…

The title story of this collection (quoted above) is the closest Plath came to her later poetic voice, the voice she would eventually master. Finished in 1958, it reflects her experiences cataloguing patient records at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Flying off into hallucinatory passages about her imagined patient’s dreams, either in imitation or in anticipation of William Burroughs, it still possesses Plath’s steely urgency, an almost mundane sense of order behind her breathless prose. Joyce Carol Oates, for one, was no doubt paying attention.

Ted Hughes, who regards his deceased wife’s legacy in a curiously clinical manner (judging from the introduction), believes that Plath was too attached to the objective world: she found it hard to rely strictly on her powers of image and imagination. But I’m not so sure. Plath’s strict attention to details (she seems to notice every detail about men’s and women’s clothing) would perhaps be insufferable in a novelist, but it’s essential for poets, those who can coax a single image into a universal truth.

Strangely, her journal entries reveal Plath’s coolest voice: an ironic, distanced tone that made Ariel such a disturbing, powerful read. An account of her meeting with a beekeeping group in Devon formed the basis for the poem "The Bee Meeting." She seemed to stumble upon her most concrete poetic images in writing these journal entries; some phrases are lifted straight into the final poems.

What is sad about reading this collection, though, is hearing strains of desperation, fear, jealousy and rage that the author herself didn’t seem capable of expressing in real life. She reveals jealousy toward the 16-year-old daughter of her Devon neighbors in a 1959 journal entry, for instance; the theme of a wife threatened by a flirtatious younger woman comes up again in the story "Day of Success." It’s clear that this was one of Plath’s preoccupations, yet one feels outside convention – society, marriage, motherhood, material success – pushing it back down, holding it in reserve, making it all seem silly and unimportant.

For too long, college girls have romanticized Sylvia Plath’s death, taking the brilliance of her final poems as proof that one can go out in a blaze of glory. But the real truth, as evidenced by the mundane details and conventional stories contained in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, is that it was never so easy to break free. Even for a Goth goddess.