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Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
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Original price was: $25.00.$13.99Current price is: $13.99.
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PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.
“One of the most beautiful biographies I’ve ever read.” —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed
With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials, Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant Sylvia Plath, who had precocious poetic ambition and was an accomplished published writer even before she became a star at Smith College. Refusing to read Plath’s work as if her every act was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark considers the sociopolitical context as she thoroughly explores Plath’s world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her troubles with an unenlightened mental health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes; and much more.
Clark’s clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath’s suicide promote a deeper understanding of her final days. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark’s meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over.
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Categories: Women Writers
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Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Price:
Original price was: $25.00.$13.99Current price is: $13.99.
RR –
I don’t usually write reviews for books I read, but this book was so good, I feel it would be irresponsible of me not to review it.
This book is very, very long. Yes, there might be some details that could have been edited out for the final version but nonetheless, this is almost not worth mentioning at all because this seems so small when one realizes what one has gained from reading this book.
Heather Clark delivers a bird’s eye view of a magnificent life of a magnificent artist. She treats Plath’s life with a sort of dignity one seldom encounters in other biographies. There is so much respect, dignity, empathy and objectivity behind every chapter that is in this colossal tome that result in allowing the reader to draw their own conclusions, and avoids altogether, quite successfully, not delving into the tragic female poet cliche analysis.
This is one life and yet, the universality that Clarke delivers from analyzing Plath’s life and her poems, is memorable. The book stays with you long after you’re done with it, and not because of the ending that everyone knows, but because one has learned from it in ways that might actually be countless.
Opsimath –
I would never have thought I’d stay up until two in the morning unable to put down a doorstopper of a biography, but I did on several nights with this one.
As other reviewers have said, this biography is far more comprehensive than previous biographies. But for me, the main fascination was the way Clark linked Plath’s — and Hughes’s — taste for and interest in violence, which pre-dated their meeting, with their relationship, the natural world, and their artistic goal of dismantling what they considered a superficial, almost prissy modernist poetic tradition in the UK. This takes the whole issue of violence out of the exclusively personal realm in which it has often been discussed (was Hughes physical violent, what do we make of Plath’s accusation that a fight caused her to miscarry) and situates it as a vital part of their creative endeavors.
Clark also does a superb job of laying out precisely what Plath was up against in terms of sexism in the literary world. Not only was she battling a cultural assumption that women would inevitably become wives and mothers, that this would be their primary role — Adlai Stevenson told Plath’s graduating class exactly this in his speech at Smith — but the publishing world was also soaked in assumptions about what were proper topics for women writers and what language it was appropriate to use to discuss them. Plath had a somewhat doubled relationship to this sexism, both resenting it and at times subordinating herself to Hughes, whom she considered the higher talent. The intricacies of their artistic marriage of minds also gets close attention, so that we see Plath both grateful for, gushing over, that closeness as well as beginning quite early on to have misgivings about its effect on her own work.
A couple of other aspects I valued highly: Clark analyzes the way Plath’s longing to break free of codes of domesticity, her fear of being hampered by a family, her desire for a free-wheeling life of travel and freelancing, co-existed with her attraction toward a secure income, domestic skills, particularly cooking, and her later reveling in pregnancy, motherhood, fertility. Also this was the first biography I’ve read to thoroughly explore the unorthodox relationship Plath had with Dr. Beuscher, as well as putting Beuscher’s advice and analysis into the context of the Jungian analysis — particularly the blaming of mothers — that was dominant at the time. Most of all, I was impressed by the tracing of the evolution of Plath’s poetic style and philosophy over the years, how the seeds of her later work were planted at various stages and how they evolved.
This is the first major biography to be written since Olwyn Hughes’s death, and one thing I would have really liked, given Olwyn’s well-documented attempts to control what was said about Hughes and Plath by various biographers, and the difficulty getting permissions to quote extensively from their work, would have been an explanation of the impact of this new situation was. Neither Carol or Frieda Hughes are listed in the acknowledgments as having talked with Clark or in association with any permissions to quote from any work. But that’s just me; I’ve long been fascinated with the power Olwyn Hughes had over Plath’s estate and her sometimes bizarre interactions with biographers.
This is, in the end, the first page-turner megalith biography I’ve ever read.
Victória C –
Ótimo livro. Letra com um bom tamanho e papel creme. Papel sem textura, bem liso.
Comprei a versão em capa comum por ser melhor para manusear, afinal são mais de mil páginas. Super recomendo!
Victória C –
Best on the best
Emma Scott –
Wow. This book…
I’m a huge devotee of all things Sylvia. Since college, she seems to come in and out of my life in spans where I become hugely involved with her work. A few months ago was one of those times, where I had both her Letters and her Unabridged Journals open in my lap, going back and forth to try to get the full picture. (I eventually abandoned the letters because they were a sunshine-y front for the reality portrayed in her journals.) I then decided to embark upon a deep dive into poem analysis. No poetry scholar am I, but I had a good time marking up my copies of Ariel and Collected Poems with my own thoughts. As if I were trying to get closer to this incredible artist any way I could.
And then came Heather Clark’s incredible biography. Clark–who IS a poetry scholar–has provided the ultimate synthesis between letters, journals, and poetry, so that we see Sylvia as a whole person, by her own words and remembrances of those who knew her best. Clark had read and interviewed every one of SP’s surviving contemporaries to paint the most complete picture of the brilliant SP in all her facets–the good, the bad, and the ultra resilient–and to give us a clearer picture of her last, desperate days.
Notably absent from her acknowledgements is Frieda Hughes who has adopted a defensive stance with regard to SP history, likely to protect her father. And with good cause. It’s clear Clark did her due diligence to try to remain impartial with regards to the drama of the SP/Ted Hughes mythology, letting the players speak their own lines instead of adding her speculation. The effect is a pretty stark confirmation that Ted Hughes didn’t, up to his own death, take responsibility for his behavior.
To be clear, he’s not responsible for SP’s suicide. His betrayal, the coldest winter, caring alone for two small children, illness, the threat of being re-institutionalized when botched shock treatment from ten years before still haunted her…It all culminated in a perfect storm. As she wrote in Edge, her last poem,
We have come so far. It is over.
But TH was reckless and careless with SP’s heart. His partner in life and art was suddenly reduced to a jailer who kept him imprisoned, as if she’d coerced the vows out of his mouth. Clark shares in detail the symbiotic relationship between SP and TH and gives him full credit for taking on childcare to let SP write in a time where that was unheard of. But his actions in the last six months of SP’s life reveal a man who suddenly decided, upon meeting Assia Wevill–a married woman–that his entire 6 year marriage with SP was a constricting prison that had prevented him from creating. Never mind that she is the reason anyone knows who he is.
At face value, separated from SP, his poetry isn’t all that good. “The Thought-Fox” is one of his best known works but I can’t get past the juvenile title and the trite patness of the poem itself. Birthday Letters reads more like short essays, some banal, peppered with some pretty imagery. It was a bestseller when it came out in 1998 but honestly did anyone rush out to buy it because TH wrote it, or because the poems were about Sylvia? By his own words, he’d be fly fishing off a rock in Australia and not Poet Laureate if not for her diligence in getting him published. It’s not overstating to say he owes her his career, but the second he lays eyes on Assia, his marriage to SP was forfeit and the life she helped build came crumbling down. In the last weeks of her life, he treats her poorly, dangling reconciliation in her face while taking on a second mistress at the same time.
TH didn’t “murder” SP as some feminist poets attest, but his cavalier disregard for her pain (pain that he knew and wrote about and sold in the Birthday poems, where he tries to pin the bulk of her anguish on her father) speaks to a poor character. As does the fact he moved into SP’s London flat with his pregnant mistress after SP had paid the rent for a year. Or how he blamed Mistress #2 for him potentially missing a phone call from SP in her last, desperate hours.
But to sum up Sylvia as merely reflections of the men in her life is to actually do her disservice. Clark avoids playing up the salacious and the dramatic, but reveals the woman in all her flawed glory, as genius driven to make something of herself in a time when women weren’t expected to make more than dinner and babies. SP is inspiring and special, not because of her suicide or earlier attempt, but for what she endured up to that breaking point. The pressures society slammed down on her, and her own perfectionism that drove her so hard.
As Clark stated in her forward, her goal was to remove SP from the mythos of suicide and feminist icon, and portray her as a whole person, and she’s succeeded marvelously. By letting the players in SP’s life speak in their own words, the clearest and most definitive account of this remarkable artist’s life has now been written. It incorporates every aspect of SP and adds insightful poetic analysis, as it’s in her poetry wherein her true voice lies. SP’s Ariel poems, as Clark illustrates, were not “about” TH or her father solely–to believe that is to give those men too much credit, and erase the misogynistic post-war, post-Holocaust, Cold War-threat-of-annihilation-world in which she lived and worked. She is raging against it all, scraping herself raw and doing it bravely, with cold-stiff fingers at 4am, before the babies wake.
I read the last few chapters with my heart in my throat, as they raced like the Ariel arrow, toward the suicidal eye of inevitability. I wanted to reach into the pages and pull SP out of that cold, snow-choked flat and put her on her Nauset beach, warm and sun-filled, so she might heal. She was only 30 years old. In the past, I’d been saddened by that loss of so many years’ worth of her words and art. After closing Clark’s book, I felt a kind of grief for the lost woman. Clark has elevated Sylvia Plath from icon, artist and poet, and showed her as a pure human being, who fought to rise out of the societal prisons that sought to trap her.
If she must be a myth, let her be Ariadne, laying down the threads, leading us out from the center of the labyrinth. Let us not desert her.
No, let’s not desert her, but remember her for her mind, her talent, her art, and her resilience. Not for her final act. It was the period at the end of her sentence, not the beginning of her story.
CN –
Well writen with some new prospectives about the background of Silvia Plath. The autor has a good ointend to disolve the different stereotypes, that literature rechearch and mythical thinking has constructed and project on the life and work of one of the most creative poets and writers in the US of 19. century.
The books gives you very specific information about her personality, without loosing ground with the central aspects of her biography.
It’s more than worth the price. I recomand it.
Don Palmer –
I have read every biography on Sylvia Plath’s life that I could find having been a big fan of the poet since my university days in the 1970’s.
With the passing of Ted and Olwyn Hughes it seems that some of the material previously restricted by the family has been unlocked. As a result this book seems to offer a more balanced view on the relationship between these two legendary poets and their immediate family and friends.
Too many earlier biographies have been forced to rely on limited material, or even worse, have been designed to fit a specific perspective. They tend to be too one-sided, written by through a specific lens; often demonizing Ted H. for his infidelity and as a result presenting a very one-sided opinion of Sylvia’s suicide, making her out to be a hapless victim.
Dr. Clark delves into her life before her marriage, and while not a biography on Ted Hughes, it provides an important overview of who he was and how he interacted with Sylvia in both the ups and downs of the relationship.
Heather Clark presents a round, multi-viewed vision of the two lives of these poets together, making it clear that it takes two to tango, even if it only takes one to die.
When I purchased the book, I thought that a 937 page biography on someone who only lived for 30 years would be stuffed with superfluous filler. It isn’t!
The author indulges in extensive research which took her years. The result is review of a life that makes you feel you knew the poetess personally and had been exposed to everyone of significance in her orbit.
Aside from writing a well balanced, detailed and very non-judgemental biography, Dr. Clark suggests that in the future more documents will likely come to light, allow future biographers to build on her work. It is nice to see a biographer that acknowledges that hers may not be the definitive one.
There is so much in this biography that it is impossible to cover the many perspectives. Having worked in the field of mental health for 30 years, I found Dr. Clark’s analysis of the psychiatric profession during the 60s and 70’s provided a very important perspective on the life story.
If you are a fan of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and want to get an overview of the post-war literary period in the U.S. and U.K. this book is an absolute must!
MVC –
This is by a country mile the best book on the subject; a few books have been written about the tragic poet, and I have read many of them. While I am not a native speaker, i can only encourage any german reader to dare to go for this, as the author writes with fantastic insight, new sources, a fresh view and a distant yet sympethetic look onto Plath. Plath of course committed suicide way before i was even born, but as this book impressively demonstrates, not all was – and maybe is? – told about her. Def a book not to be missed.