The last Plath

Author Kate Moses stands up for the Plath "peanut" gallery. By Susan Gerhard

Wintering

THE WORDS DOCUDRAMA and poetry may be natural enemies. But that hasn't stopped Sylvia Plath's chroniclers from mixing the literal and the ephemeral – and running like hell as the mushroom clouds blossom behind them. Fact finders have found the explosive archives too tantalizing to turn from. And who could possibly avert their gaze from nuggets of history as poetic as her first encounter with Ted Hughes in the '50s: he ran off with her silver earrings, and she drew blood as she love-bit his cheek. The template – the looting of valuables from Plath, the drawing of blood from Hughes – has remained in place ever since. Plath's admirers grouse about the Plath journal Hughes burned, and the one he lost, while Hughes (and now their daughter, Frieda) have complained about the cult interest in Plath-as-martyr sucking the life from them. Janet Malcolm weed-whacked her way through both sides in her 1993 book-length essay, The Silent Woman, but anyone who, like me, stopped their Plath studies there has a lot of catching up to do – starting with Hughes's last words on the matter, Birthday Letters, which was receiving positive reviews as Hughes lay on his deathbed in 1998.

The latest in the Plath chronicles, this year's prestige poetry entry in the Oscar sweepstakes, Sylvia, makes an attempt to sidestep the quicksand that's buried so many other Plath-Hughes stories (this Sylvia is a little more animal, this Ted a little more lovable) before falling into its own biopickle by film's end. San Francisco writer Kate Moses is in a unique position to comment on the film, given she mined the facts for her own fictionalization, Wintering (2003), a richly detailed imagining of Plath's last months. She also became Salon's point person on Plath, and it's a tribute to the poet's legacy that such a position is needed. I spotted her at the critics' preview screening of Sylvia with Diane Middlebrook, whose look at the stormy, productive Hughes-Plath marriage, Her Husband, hits bookstores this month. I later phoned Moses for thoughts on the topic.

Bay Guardian: Where does your latest commentary on Plath come from?

Kate Moses: When I was in England, when Wintering first came out, it was right after Frieda Hughes wrote the poem condemning moviemakers and anyone who would watch [Sylvia]. So, of course, the first question everyone had for me was: 'Did you consider the children's feelings, and why do you think you have the right to tell this story?' It lingered with me, knowing the film was denied access to Plath's poems by Frieda Hughes and the estate. Frieda Hughes has been very up front in expressing her opinion that both her family's life and her own life are very personal. And yet what makes it impersonal is the very nature of her mother's work and her artistic project, which is about herself and expressing herself. The piece I wrote in Salon pretty much takes Frieda, and the estate, to task, on the one hand, for benefiting from the proceeds to owning copyright to her mother's work and wanting her mother's work to be available so that people can buy it, yet not wanting to hear any opinions about the work. Or artistic interpretations of it by someone else.

BG: What do you think of the continuing debate over Sylvia Plath's life and death?

KM: I see all these competing ideas adding to a better understanding of her on the whole. She wasn't just doom and gloom, or the exuberant Smith coed. What she wanted most was not to be restricted by other people's ideas of her, their cultural agendas. The place where she was able to do that was in her late poetry. In the Ariel poems, she tries on different personas and masks – Lady Lazarus, Purdah. They were parts of who she recognized herself to be, and they were also a more existential self – a woman at mid century. I'm hopeful that all these things are adding to our understanding of her as an artist. The fact is that for a long time, there was such a polarization of the way she was seen – a crazy harridan, or a self-destructive depressive, or the victimized genius. I think it's only healthy to recognize that she had traits of all of that in her and more.

BG: What sources do you think the film relied most heavily on?

KM: They're relying on the Birthday Letters, the story Hughes told, and on the Ariel poems from the fall of '62. The problem was they didn't have the right to use either of them in a significant way. What we see in the movie is a capturing of the tonal qualities of the story, although I'm not sure it captures all the tonal qualities of the story. I'm not sure you can do that in a two- or three- or four-hour film. It definitely captures a quality of fatalism, and Hughes was far more the fatalist than Plath. He was much more a believer in occult systems, and the idea that she was destined to kill herself. But the story that Hughes seems to tell about fixed stars governing a life is something that Plath only seemed to embrace at the very, very end of her life, in the last few poems that she wrote in the last couple of weeks. In the fall of '62, when writing what she considered the Ariel poems, she was chasing after the idea of transcendence – of having your life fall in a miserable heap in front of you and still being able to come out of it.

BG: That's what your book conveys, that hopefulness.... Shouldn't some studio have optioned Wintering?

KM: Chances are they won't now! The film conveys the other side of that story. They're both legitimate. I do feel there's a great darkness aesthetically in the film. The Plath of my imagination reflects a lot of the vitality; that Technicolor, larger-than-life quality that you get from the journals – her sense of living with gusto and loving to eat and loving sex and loving to talk and loving gardening and her children. She was very passionate; just as she decorated her own homes in reds and painted things with flowers and birds. I see her in red. The film really depicts her environment in much bleaker tones.

BG: How do you feel the filmmakers did with the facts they had and the inventions they came up with?

KM: They use the aesthetic, the visual metaphors, to really great affect. The scene in which Plath has finally asked for help and she's counting out the pills, then puts them back in the bottle, and takes out one, then runs herself a glass of water, it's shot from above. We see her hand under a faucet, water running over it. That's exactly Sylvia Plath. She was so hypersensitive to everything going on around. Her doors of perception were wide open all the time. Which must be hell to live with, but also why she could achieve the genius that she finally did. Just that idea of her experience of the overflow of that water, and the chill of it, the terrifying fragility of the glass in her hand – all of those things, to me, spoke to the idea that Christine Jeffs, in particular, and the director of photography, John Toon, were really capturing Plath in ways other than in words.

BG: Is there more Sylvia Plath out there?

KM: I'm hoping the Plath estate is going to recognize that they're still sitting on one unpublished manuscript of Sylvia Plath's, which is the Ariel poems in the proper order. [Moses gave each of her chapters in Wintering the title of Plath's Ariel poems in the order the poet herself had meticulously arranged them; Hughes changed that order, deleted some poems, and added others, to tell a different story with the collection when he released it to the public.] I do know that the first time ever in the 40 years since her death, Frieda Hughes asked for the copy of the original Ariel manuscript from the Smith collection where it's held. Maybe we'll get that; it'll be yet another corrective to the way Plath has been perceived over time that's gotten out of whack. I think, too, it would be a corrective toward Hughes. Because he made some brilliantly terrible mistakes, but at the same time, none of us would even know about Plath if it weren't for Ted Hughes.

BG: And where are the missing journals?

KM: Those may be in the one sealed box in his archive at Emory University, which won't be opened until something like 2025. I think, well, I just hope I live to be 60-something so that I can be there when they open the box.

'Sylvia' opens Fri/24 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times. Kate Moses's Wintering is available in a new paperback edition at Bay Area bookstores.