Publication of a complete edition of Plath’s letters has been long overdue. Until now, apart from fleeting quotations in biographies and critical studies of Plath, the only letters available to readers outside of archives appear in Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975). Edited by Plath’s mother as a corrective to the negative portrayal of the mother-daughter relationship in The Bell Jar(U.S. publication 1971), Letters Home is terribly flawed. Consisting primarily of letters from Plath to her mother, the book offers fascinating glimpses of Plath’s daily life but a cartoonish view of her as a person. Ellipses pepper every page, and, as comparison to the originals in The Letters of Sylvia Plath shows, Aurelia Plath made extreme cuts throughout, rarely reprinting full versions of anything but postcards (and she often severely redacted those, too). The book perplexed readers, for neither the letters, in which Plath strives to maintain a pose of peppy optimism, nor Aurelia Plath’s often defensive editorial commentary, reflected the Plath readers thought they knew from the poetry and fiction. Gone were the barbed emotions, the volatile wit, the interior darkness. Instead, Plath appears as the ambitious Smith “all-around” girl, rewarded for her hard work with prizes, publications, and a dream-come-true marriage—with only a few negative blips along the way to mar her fighting spirit and positive attitude, even after her marriage crumbles.
Accurately foreseeing the book’s mixed reviews, Ted Hughes wrote to Aurelia after reading the manuscript and urged her to rethink her approach, not for the sake of protecting him, he claimed, but because “all these letters exist within a single relationship, and this entails, eventually, beyond a certain critical mass of text, a feeling of monotony and narrowness,” which he attributed to Plath’s “constant and growing and very understandable need to reassure you that the life she had chosen was not a mistake, that writing was succeeding financially etc.” He also suggested cutting “the repetitiousness of mood and response” in Plath’s depiction of life at Smith, and the overabundance of enthusiasm throughout the letters that, he warned, while characteristic of Plath, so suffuses them that “the book begins to produce the opposite effect to what I’m sure you must have hoped. So even much of this evidence of her good spirits must be cut” (16 July 1974, Selected Letters of Ted Hughes).
It’s hard to know how much of this advice Mrs. Plath took. But the points Hughes makes about Letters Home also ring true for large swathes of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Reading through the letters to her mother, which Plath wrote at great length and with great frequency, is a slog, due to the monotony of cheerful affect and the obsessive recounting of what she did when, where, and how. Frank O’Hara’s wry appraisal of his poetry—“I do this, I do that”—applies equally well here—except that O’Hara’s poems are inherently interesting because they happen in New York City, whereas Plath’s letters, until she moves to Cambridge, England, reflect her teen and collegiate life in suburban America. But the difference in reading Letters Home and The Letters of Sylvia Plath, whose first half is dominated by letters to mom, is that the unabridged versions reveal not only how Aurelia’s editing flattens Plath into a caricature of the “all-American girl,” but also how Plath herself carefully curated her experiences to pose as such a girl in order to please her mother.
Some readers may question Steinberg and Kukil’s decision to publish all extant letters. Although Plath kept journals from age eleven onward, The Unabridged Journals (also edited by Kukil) begins the summer before Plath matriculated at Smith. And, whereas Letters Home starts with Plath’s first letter from college, The Letters of Sylvia Plath takes 172 pages to get there. The pre-high school letters, many sent from Girl Scout camp, are especially tedious. Yet they reveal aspects of Plath’s character and style that carry over into adulthood: her healthy appetite (and sensuous interest in food and cooking), her love of nature (and skill in describing it), and her hyper-organization (evident early on in letters about her stamp collection, and remarkably present throughout the volume in the editors’ footnotes referencing her calendar to corroborate activities she mentions). Plath begins enclosing poems in letters at age ten, and by thirteen is already coolly ranking them, a habit she would continue into adulthood when compiling book manuscripts. In November 1945, she confides to a friend, “speaking of poetry I just began a notebook of my poems and already have about 5 real ones, and have about 5 medium and 5 jingles.” She also sketched throughout her life and liberally illustrated her letters with drawings. The editors reproduce a few illustrated letters as plates and take care in the text to describe any drawings Plath added to letters or envelopes. The book opens with gaily decorated letters to her parents and concludes, in the penultimate letter, with news she sends to Aurelia that the Christian Science Monitor has published her article, with four pen-and-ink sketches, about Benidorm, Spain, where she honeymooned with Hughes.
Evident also from early on are Plath’s all-out efforts to please mom. Describing piano practice, she writes with pride to Aurelia, “I kept saying to myself, ‘This is what mother would want me to do’” (January 1943). Hyperbole abounds—“Today in my opinion is the most beautiful day I spent at camp” (8 July 1945); in subsequent letters, summer after summer, year after year, new “most wonderful” days replace the old. The happiness reverberates through high school and crescendos during Plath’s first three undergraduate years. Thus, a summer job at the shore as a mother’s helper (doing nonstop cooking, laundry, housecleaning and watching three children) sounds like summer camp: “Yesterday was just about the most wonderful yet. . . . Nauset is the most beautiful place on the Cape. . . . I don’t know when I’ve had such a wonderful time in all my life. . . . I left her [fiction writer Val Gendron] at 12:30 after 5 of the most wonderful hours I have ever spent” (19–21 August 1952). Three days later, the wonder never ceases: “I don’t know when I’ve had so much work and fun combined! Really, I feel so much richer, older, and wiser after this summer. Never have I gotten along so well with such an amazing diversity of people!” (24 August 1952). Such exuberant over-insistence is hard to tolerate in either edition of Plath’s letters. The problem with Letters Home, however, is that it proposes—or, really, insists—that this saccharine version reflects the “real” Sylvia Plath.
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, in contrast, complicates Plath through showing how meticulously she designed letters—and different versions of herself—for a diversity of recipients. The correspondence with Aurelia so weights the book’s first half that letters to others arise as welcome relief: sudden flarings of a different Plath, more thoughtful and often more caustic, than the happy “Sivvy” of the letters home. In letters to women friends, Plath unleashes her snark about social double standards and the tedium of playing nice girl. For example, after enduring a bad date, she quips, “[he] was supposedly the best-looking boy in his dorm—& he was attractive in a weak-dark hair-tonic sort of way. He was one of those fool Americans who thinks of girls as a clotheshorse with convenient openings and curved structures for their own naïve pleasure” (3 February 1951). She also casts a cold eye on her era’s reverence for female propriety: “After Class Day it was a two hour tea at the headmaster’s house, and I got so damn sick of making small talk with mothers of boys and fiancées and young wives that I thought my sweet girlish smile had frozen to my face. I felt like drowning myself in the iced tea bowl, in a flurry of mint leaves” (12 June 1951). Along with mockery of social conventions, the letters to friends also record her left-leaning, humanistic politics. Her exchanges, beginning in high school with a German pen pal, register Plath’s pacifism, her curiosity about postwar life in Germany, and consciousness of how their generation bears the existential burden of growing up in the atomic age. Occasionally, in letters to Aurelia, Plath breaks good-girl character and gets sarcastic or political—sometimes simultaneously, “No news may be good news from Warren [Plath’s brother], but that doesn’t mean that no news means I’m on my deathbed. If I were, I’d at least have time to drop you a postcard.” Busy with midterms, Plath had last written to mom only two days earlier. She concludes, “It is lovely weather and I am as yet fine. If I live till after March 12 I can face the atombomb with complete equanimity” (3 March 1951). Aurelia did not reprint this postcard in Letters Home, nor did she reprint the passionate, articulate paragraphs from Fall 1952 letters in which Plath opposes McCarthyism, advocates for Civil Rights, and longs to be old enough to vote for Adlai Stevenson (Aurelia supported Eisenhower). In its inclusion of letters to friends, as well as to family, and in restoring all of the passages Aurelia suppressed in Letters Home, The Letters of Sylvia Plath resuscitates Plath’s political consciousness and her snark, including her capacity for self-satire.
O texto integral sobre a publicação recente do primeiro volume das Cartas de Sylvia Plath está aqui.
