Read Online Sylvia Plath: A Biography by Linda Wagner-Martin - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Linda Wagner-Martin
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people’s inhumanity to each other, her identity, whether she could become the writer she now dreamed of being.
Her thoughts about what it means to be a writer, to depersonalize feelings so that they can be recorded, take up much of this summer journal. Her obsession with this one subject suggests that she was not comfortable with her ambition. Sometimes she felt that she was being opportunistic because she wrote about the people in her life, boyfriends included: “At home on my desk is the best story I’ve ever written. How can I tell Bob [Riedeman] that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print?”
Had Sylvia made this entry public, perhaps someone would have assured her that her ambitions, her emotions, needed no justification. But whenever she wrote, she expressed a need to be “justified,” to be reassured that this activity was acceptable. From the first her private journals seemed to contradict the picture of confident mastery she was adept at projecting.
Her summer journals include a moving passage about Mary Ventura, her friend who had moved from Wellesley to Natick during their senior year. Always looking for role models, Sylvia admired the more experienced girl, whom she described as “something vital, an artist’s model, life.... Mary is me ... with her I can be honest.” Aside from Phil McCurdy and Mary Ventura, there were few people Sylvia felt she could be herself with. In the course of her life, her deepest friendships were with people with whom she could show a frankness that was often discouraged in “polite” society.
Plath’s journal relates other summer events. She and Warren had full-time jobs at Lookout Farm, a truck farm where fruits and vegetables were raised for the city markets. Every morning they biked as far as Wellesley College where they caught rides with other workers. It was a long day of hard labor, setting out strawberry plants, cutting asparagus, weeding corn. What was satisfying to Sylvia was that she could do the work and that she was accepted by her coworkers. (Almost accepted. There was one day when the boys in the group planned to throw her into the washtub, but Warren stood them off.) Sylvia’s hunger to know people led to her romanticizing the farm workers, as in her poem “Bitter Strawberries” and an essay, “The Rewards of a New England Summer,” both of which were published that fall in The Christian Science Monitor .
There was a sexual dimension to the farm experience as well. Ilo, a Latvian immigrant, was working there before going to New York to start a career as an artist. He had been studying art in Munich. Sylvia’s interest in drawing led to friendship, but she was frightened when Ilo French-kissed her and she realized how attracted to him she was. One of her college stories, called “The Estonian” and, in a second version, “The Latvian,” describes that attraction. So too does “Den of Lions,” which she wrote about another summer date, and which was published. The tension between fear of the sexual and fascination with it gave these stories a sensuality, which she also caught in “A Day in June,” a story about adolescent girls. Her journal, however, presented a much more caustic Sylvia, who described dating as “this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying.” She wrote with wicked humor about “the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in,” but she also described, perceptively, the real sexual conflicts she endured: “I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disastrous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who dispel sexual hunger freely ... and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always
Her thoughts about what it means to be a writer, to depersonalize feelings so that they can be recorded, take up much of this summer journal. Her obsession with this one subject suggests that she was not comfortable with her ambition. Sometimes she felt that she was being opportunistic because she wrote about the people in her life, boyfriends included: “At home on my desk is the best story I’ve ever written. How can I tell Bob [Riedeman] that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print?”
Had Sylvia made this entry public, perhaps someone would have assured her that her ambitions, her emotions, needed no justification. But whenever she wrote, she expressed a need to be “justified,” to be reassured that this activity was acceptable. From the first her private journals seemed to contradict the picture of confident mastery she was adept at projecting.
Her summer journals include a moving passage about Mary Ventura, her friend who had moved from Wellesley to Natick during their senior year. Always looking for role models, Sylvia admired the more experienced girl, whom she described as “something vital, an artist’s model, life.... Mary is me ... with her I can be honest.” Aside from Phil McCurdy and Mary Ventura, there were few people Sylvia felt she could be herself with. In the course of her life, her deepest friendships were with people with whom she could show a frankness that was often discouraged in “polite” society.
Plath’s journal relates other summer events. She and Warren had full-time jobs at Lookout Farm, a truck farm where fruits and vegetables were raised for the city markets. Every morning they biked as far as Wellesley College where they caught rides with other workers. It was a long day of hard labor, setting out strawberry plants, cutting asparagus, weeding corn. What was satisfying to Sylvia was that she could do the work and that she was accepted by her coworkers. (Almost accepted. There was one day when the boys in the group planned to throw her into the washtub, but Warren stood them off.) Sylvia’s hunger to know people led to her romanticizing the farm workers, as in her poem “Bitter Strawberries” and an essay, “The Rewards of a New England Summer,” both of which were published that fall in The Christian Science Monitor .
There was a sexual dimension to the farm experience as well. Ilo, a Latvian immigrant, was working there before going to New York to start a career as an artist. He had been studying art in Munich. Sylvia’s interest in drawing led to friendship, but she was frightened when Ilo French-kissed her and she realized how attracted to him she was. One of her college stories, called “The Estonian” and, in a second version, “The Latvian,” describes that attraction. So too does “Den of Lions,” which she wrote about another summer date, and which was published. The tension between fear of the sexual and fascination with it gave these stories a sensuality, which she also caught in “A Day in June,” a story about adolescent girls. Her journal, however, presented a much more caustic Sylvia, who described dating as “this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying.” She wrote with wicked humor about “the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in,” but she also described, perceptively, the real sexual conflicts she endured: “I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disastrous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who dispel sexual hunger freely ... and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always
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