Red Comet

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.

I never thought there would be a definitive biography of Plath in my lifetime. Theres a great book (called The Silent Woman) by Janet Malcolm which explains why, but she is wrong about one thing you dont have to be on Team Plath or Team Hughes. The best writers who have tackled this subject, like Diane Middlebrook (who wrote Her Husband, about the Plath-Hughes marriage) have shown this and now Heather Clark definitively proves it.

When I first saw the size of this doorstop of a book, I thought really? But as other reviewers have said, I didnt want it to end. This profound and in-depth life and work study allowed me to see Plaths developing work as I never saw it before. And the author is resolutely even-handed about Plaths behavior and the behavior of those around her, allowing their own words and acts to speak for themselves. Only her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher gets a bit of a well-deserved tongue-lashing.

The author didnt spell this out, but the book makes clear Plaths stance as a traditionalist her most profound longings were for a faithful and loving marriage, the warmth of a home filled with children, animals, good food, friends, and conversation, and a community around her to belong to AND her own work, which was writing. Her strong stance on restraint in foreign policy and defense, along with her deep feeling for the natural environment and the need for conservation, back this up. She wanted the good life, the true and the beautiful which doesnt ignore the reality of evil and the most painful suffering, of which Plath wrote so well. If I can fault Heather Clark on anything, its for being tone deaf to Plaths clearly spiritual longings.

Regarding Plaths last days the authors scholarship on the medication Plath was taking and her looming hospitalization sheds horrible new light on the matter, even for this die-hard Plath fan who thought Id tracked down every fact. Like many, I wish the damn au pair had worked out as Plath often said, she didnt fall apart with someone else around. Bottom line Im tempted to start re-reading this page turner. And as we Eastern Orthodox say when thinking of someone long dead but dear and never to be forgotten Memory Eternal!

There have been many books written about the life of Sylvia Plath, but Heather Clark’s meticulously researched and richly detailed biography ‘Red Comet’, may well be the last to appear for some time. This is the first full biography to incorporate all of Sylvia Plath’s surviving letters and draws extensively on the poet’s unpublished diaries and pieces of creative work in addition to all of the published writings; also, Ms Clark, having been given full access to Sylvia Plath’s and Ted Hughes’ published and unpublished papers, has been able to quote directly from the sources. Therefore, this hugely detailed and incredibly informative biography, which is almost a thousand pages in length, is not one to be taken up lightly, and if your interest in the poet is merely a passing one, this may not be for you; for others, however, this is a superb account and one which deals very even-handedly with those connected with the poet – and it’s not just very impressive as a biography, it’s also an excellent social history of the times in which Sylvia Plath lived. Highly recommended.

5 Stars.

This is the most comprehensive and objective biography of Plath I have read in a long time and much use has been made of new information revealed in the recently published complete letters, the Harriet Rosenstein archive, and the authors own research. Previous biographies such as Bitter Fame by Ann Stevenson and Olwyn Hughes were too obviously biased towards Ted Hughes, while others portray Plath as a passive victim of Hughes. This biography is honest about the faults and virtues of both Hughes and Plath. Sylvia Plath is not portrayed as a plaster saint victimised by Hughes but as a very determined and tenacious person who did not suffer fools and expected the same perfectionistic high standards of others as she did of herself. Bad boys thrilled and excited her, and she was something of a masochist in that respect. She enjoyed a sexually sadistic relationship with Richard Sassoon and found a perfect substitute for him in Hughes when Sassoon dumped her in France. The choice of the wild, sexually virile and poetically gifted Hughes as her life partner rather than nice boys such as the safe and conventional Dick Norton or Gordon Lameyer was a big gamble, one that she was more than willing to take, for the sake of her art. She was more than a match for Hughes and thought she could handle or manage him. Plath was one very tough lady and deliberately pursued the life of a mother and writer with all the insecurity and juggling of domestic responsibilities that entailed. She was no feminist and yet was determined to have it all. She wanted lots of babies and to cook for her man at the same time as she wanted to be a prolific artist. The gamble paid off in terms of her art and she remains one of the most famous women poets of all time, but the consequences for her personal life were disastrous.

Unlike many of the other biographies, memoirs and books on Plath, this one has no overriding theory which it’s pushing: instead, Clark has crafted something that returns meticulously to the multiple sources including Plath’s letters, journals, commentaries and introductions, as well as those of people close to her during her short life, and has additionally conducted interviews as well as tracking down the previous interviews that have been archived. The result is the most detailed and comprehensive biography I have read of Plath – and is one which doesn’t see her life as teleological, leading inevitably and unwaveringly to that taped up kitchen and the gas oven.

Instead, Clark gives us a Plath who is dazzling in her multiple selves: complex, contradictory, mercurial, and the subject of many pressures from the public and political to the most intimate and personal. It’s admirable, too, that Clark challenges the idea of Plath’s poetry as barely-disguised autobiography; she redefines ‘confessional’ in literary terms and refocuses us on how Plath herself saw her writing: as using personal experience to explore and articulate wider social and cultural truths. Even a volume like Ariel encompasses variant voices from the tender tones of maternity, albeit crushed by fear and frustration, to the raging red of ‘Lady Lazarus’ and the exhilarating transcendence of ‘Ariel’.

This is long (it’s worth noting that the text ends at around p.947, the rest is references, notes and index), but never less that fascinating; and Clarke treads that delicate line between full disclosure and prurience.

Perceptive, sympathetic, balanced and with all the requisite scholarly apparatus, this will be the standard academic life of Plath for some time to come.

Galaxyaudiobook Member Benefit

- Able to comment

- List watched audiobooks

- List favorite audiobooks

- Bookmark will only available for Galaxyaudiobook member