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Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath - Softcover

Clark, Heather

 
9780307951267: Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Softcover
ISBN 10: 030795126X ISBN 13: 9780307951267
Verlag: Vintage, 2021

Inhaltsangabe

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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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

HEATHER CLARK earned her bachelor's degree in English literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York, and a Visiting US Fellowship at the Eccles Centre for American Studies, British Library. A former visiting scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, she is the author of The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes and The Ulster Renaissance: Poetry in Belfast 1962-1972. Her work has appeared in publications including Harvard Review, Times Literary Supplement, Time, AirMail, and LitHub, and she recently served as the scholarly consultant for the BBC documentary Sylvia Plath: Life Inside the Bell Jar. She divides her time between Chappaqua, New York, and Yorkshire, England, where she is a professor of contemporary poetry at the University of Huddersfield.

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1
 
The Beekeeper’s Daughter
Prussia, Austria, America, 1850–1932
 
Like Sylvia Plath herself, Plath’s parents, Otto and Aurelia, have had to bear a difficult posthumous burden. Plath used her parents, like so many others in her life, as material for her writing. They existed as real people whose praise she craved and, at the same time, a deep fictional resource. They were of her, but not her—a looking glass that reflected the possibility of what might or might not be, and she could not resist plumbing their depths as she sought to understand her own. She came to feel that in her parents lay the root of her anxieties, and, encouraged by her psychiatrist in the late fifties, she began to lash out at them in her journals and, later, her poems. Plath would express rage toward her parents—at her father for aban­doning her, at her mother for hovering too close. They remain distorted car­icatures, stuck in amber. In Plath’s most famous poem, “Daddy,” Otto—who died when she was eight—is a patriarchal tyrant, a Nazi “bastard.” Aurelia, skewered in The Bell Jar, is a menacing martyr who demands perfection from her daughter. But if Plath inherited anxiety and depression from her parents, she also inherited intelligence, discipline, and ambition. They stand Janus-faced, curse and blessing, at the beginning and end of Sylvia Plath’s story.
 
In Otto Plath’s case, myth has overshadowed truth in the popular imagi­nation. For many readers of Sylvia Plath, Otto Plath is “Daddy”: Aryan, fas­cist, Nazi. In fact, Otto Plath was a committed pacifist who renounced his German citizenship in 1926 and watched Hitler’s rise with trepidation. He held himself to rigid moral standards and expected others to do the same. In a photograph taken when he was a college student in Wisconsin, around 1910, he gives the impression of a man who does not suffer fools gladly. He sits unsmiling in the front row surrounded by drunken peers, laughing and holding steins. This is the serious, driven young man who would not compromise his ideals, even if that meant severing ties with his family—a decision that would have a profound impact on his daughter.
 
At least three generations of the Plath family lived in Posen Province, West Prussia, before coming to America. Today Posen (Poznan) is part of Poland, in the area known as the “Polish Corridor” when it was transferred from the German empire to Poland after the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Like the Alsace-Lorraine region, it became a disputed territory, where tensions between ethnic Poles and Germans ran high. Despite the fact that the majority of those living in this area were Poles, Hitler attempted to annex it in 1939—one of the early acts of aggression that spurred France, Britain, and other Commonwealth nations to declare war on Germany. Though Otto Plath left Posen in 1900, well before both world wars, his daughter would eventually portray him as an embodiment of German imperialist aggression in “Daddy.”
 
Posen, whose population comprised Germans, Poles, and Jews who lived in separate ethnic enclaves, was perhaps the poorest region in Prussia. By the late 1800s, ethnic Germans, lured by the booming industrial economy in the Rhine and Ruhr regions, as well as free land in America, began leaving the region en masse in the Ostflucht, or “flight from the east.” More than two million had left by the early 1900s, including Sylvia Plath’s paternal great-grandparents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and father. Her great-grandfather, Johann Plath, was an illiterate farmer, but his grandson Otto would eventually become a Harvard-educated professor, and his great-granddaughter a trailblazing poet and novelist. Sylvia’s “perfectionism,” often derided as neurotic or pathological, needs to be understood within the historical and sociological context of the American immigrant experience, which framed her life. Her desire to excel on all fronts has its roots in the Germanic aspirational work ethic that was her inheritance.
 
Otto Plath’s German provenance was important to his daughter. Sylvia wrote that she felt her “German background very strongly,” and talked up her German-Austrian roots to her German pen pal, Hans-Joachim Neupert, in high school. “I feel a strong kinship for anything German,” she told him in 1949. “I think that it is the most beautiful language in the world, and whenever I meet anyone with a German name or German traits, I have a sudden secret warmth.” She felt “patriotic pride” when she read German authors such as Thomas Mann and spoke lovingly of her grandmother’s hearty Austrian cooking. She was well aware of the dazzling artistic and intellectual achievements of German musicians, writers, and philosophers; she listened to Bach and Beethoven, and read Nietzsche and Goethe with her mother. But hers was a dual inheritance, for she had also heard how her mother’s family was harassed during the First World War by Irish and Italian neighbors in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Sylvia may have been picked on for similar reasons during the Second World War and possibly nervous that members of her family would be sent to a domestic detention camp for German Americans. (Her father was, in fact, detained by the FBI for alleged pro-German sympathies in 1918.) In December 1958, she described a short-story plot in her journal—which eventually became “The Shadow”—about a young German American girl who is treated suspiciously by her neighbors during the Second World War:
 
My present theme seems to be the awareness of a complicated guilt system whereby Germans in a Jewish and Catholic community are made to feel, in a scapegoat fashion, the pain, psychically, the Jews are made to feel in Germany by Germans without religion. The child can’t understand the larger framework. How does her father come into this? How is she guilty for her father’s deportation to a detention camp? As this is how I think the story must end?
 
These questions suggest that Sylvia understood from a young age that the German identity she shared with her father was somehow dangerous—a secret source of shame.
 
Plath’s journals are full of frustration about her inability to master the German language. In January 1953 she regrets not having taken more German in college; in February 1956 she wants to “revive German again,” declaring, “I haven’t really worked at learning it”; she vows to spend the summer of 1957 studying the language; in 1958 she berates herself for “wasting my German hours” and writes, “to learn that would be a great triumph for me.”In 1960, exhausted and homesick in London, she was comforted by her German-speaking friend Helga Huws, whose German cooking made her weep. As late as 1962, she listened to German linguaphone records and tuned into a BBC German radio program. She hired a German-speaking au pair shortly before her death in 1963.
 
Sylvia was the daughter of a German immigrant and a first-generation Austrian who had studied German language and literature and knew Middle High German. Her mother’s parents, the Schobers, with whom she lived in Wellesley, spoke German at home. Despite her exposure to the language—and the fact that she excelled at every other academic subject—German did not come easily to her. In her 1962 poem “Daddy,” the German language itself becomes the “barb wire snare” and “the language obscene,” “An engine, an engine / Chuffing me off like a Jew” to the death camps. Plath’s notorious metaphorical...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
2021
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
030795126X
ISBN 13 
9780307951267
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
1184
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Penguin Random House Ireland
https://eu-contact.penguin.ie

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