Craig Raine

A recitation of wrongs

Plath begins a volume of late letters trying to convince herself she’s getting better. But the story darkens after her discovery of Ted’s affair with Assia Wevill

In 1923, a Frenchman, Emile Coué, persuaded millions of Americans to finger a piece of string with exactly 20 knots. It was an exercise in auto-suggestion. At each knot of this secular rosary, the user intoned: ‘Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.’ Sylvia Plath’s letters — until they implode on p.790 when she discovers the affair between Ted Hughes and Assia Wevill — are a similar numbing iteration of optimism and self-improvement. Thereafter, the story changes, darkens.

Up until then, her story is cropped for improvement: she takes her finals at Cambridge but the letters are silent on her degree result (II: i). She explains to her brother Warren that she doesn’t write when her moods are black. There is no mention of her fear of barrenness until she is safely pregnant with Frieda. She resumes consultations with her shrink Dr Ruth Beuscher in December 1958 — a fact disclosed in her journals, but absent from the letters.

Joan Didion famously wrote that we tell ourselves stories in order to live. She should have added that we are all of us unreliable narrators. A trivial but emblematic instance: Plath’s baby son Nicholas has a squint. When he is born, Plath compares his eyes favourably with his sister’s — ‘unlike Frieda, whose eyes crossed alarmingly for a long time.’ In fact, Nick’s eye needs corrective surgery, but she doesn’t see it because she is blinded by love.

Plath was aware of her tendency to distort: ‘Do tear my last one up’; ‘Do ignore my last letters’. Like a Coué-ist, Plath persuades herself that Hughes will love America — its gadgets, its grants, its climate, its opportunities — and become an American citizen. She bangs the drum in letter after letter to her mother, Aurelia Plath, only to concede inevitably that she ‘wouldn’t have Ted change his citizenship for the world’.

Her positions are contradictory: Ted is completely indifferent to his children, ‘hates’ Nicholas, (though he visits them weekly ‘like an apocalyptic Santa Claus’) and yet is planning to steal them from her.

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