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

Abstract

Gunn told me once that he had gone on a picnic on Primrose Hill with Ted and Sylvia. What was she like? She seemed a very good mother, Thom said, recalling the picnic basket she had prepared, adding that famous people never seemed to behave characteristically when he met them. Although neither Gunn nor Plath could have known it, they would come to have something deeply personal in common. Gunn's mother was a suicide who left her body for her children (in her case, two teenage sons) to find in the morning. His poem about it is called “The Gas-Poker.”Readers may ask whether we do not already know enough about Sylvia and Ted. The bite mark on his cheek where she drew blood the night they met, the cup of warm milk set out for her toddlers to find with her body in the morning. This detail—the cup of warm milk cooled to frigid temperatures during a night that was one of the coldest on record locally—is, for me, the hardest to forgive. But Clark, drawing on a vast reservoir of evidence and anecdote amassed over years, is able to construct a more nuanced impression of Plath than we have had before. There are missteps, as when Clark complains of Plath's “popular, clichéd image as the Marilyn Monroe of the literati.” No one who has ever heard the breathy voice of Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” and compared it to the plummy, matronly, decidedly upper-class voice Plath cultivated for the BBC can believe that any such cliché exists. Plath mythologized her own life, but Clark succeeds in weaving a tight fabric of minutiae that permits the reader to see what Plath was doing at almost any hour of any particular day. In this steady neutral light, she becomes more fully human.