The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson Patricia Laurence (bio) the last days of sylvia plath Carl Rollyson University Press of Mississippi https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/T/The-Last-Days-of-Sylvia-Plath 246 pages; Cloth, $25.00 Carl Rollyson's The Last Days of Sylvia Plath is the charged and contentious story of the last seven months of Sylvia Plath's life. Focusing on the dissolving self and marriage of the golden poet, Rollyson patiently weaves the ironies and plight of Plath, poet and patient, as perceived by her therapist, Dr. Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse; her poet-husband, Ted Hughes; and multiple biographers as they converge "in a triangulated tragedy that is only now emerging." What happened to Plath and what she did to herself, Rollyson contends, was the coming together of many forces, and he tells his tale from different angles, in different voices, sometimes going back and forth in time. He is a distinguished biographer and professor emeritus of journalism, Baruch College, City University of New York, and tells a good story in readable prose. A notable dimension of the biography is his identification with Plath and London of the 1960s: "I came from a suburban middle-class upbringing and was startled [as was Plath] on my first overseas trip at the state of post-war Britain still in recovery. … I lost my father at an early age and wanted an audience." Rollyson has achieved that audience as a prolific biographer. This biography follows an earlier one, American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, published in 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, as well as many other lives: Rebecca West, Marilyn Monroe, Amy Lowell, Martha Gellhorn, Lillian Hellman, Norman Mailer, Susan Sontag, and William Faulkner. But what did happen to Plath? Her life and poetry will always be tied to the story of her suicide at the age of thirty on the cusp of a brilliant career by gassing herself in an oven while her two children slept safely in a sealed upstairs [End Page 122] room. Rollyson meticulously recounts the events and moods of her last days (sometimes in more detail than we want). Along the way, he is charged by the "coercive conspiracy" of Sylvia's husband and his sister, Olwyn, to prevent biographers, past and present, from gaining access to Plath materials and letters, often threatening lawsuits or public-relations campaigns to "protect" Plath's legacy. Rollyson compares their stance to the Soviet view of history, wanting to airbrush people out of Plath's life. Heather Clarke, in her 2020 biography, Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, will pivot from this well-worn path and create an alternative narrative that focuses rather on Plath's life and discipline as a poet. But Rollyson remains on track for another kind of "truth," hewing to Samuel Johnson's maxim that guides all of his honest biographies: "If we owe regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, to truth." He indefatigably pursues—despite obstacles—what happened in Plath's last days through interviews; the papers and biographies of Harriet Rosenstein, Ann Stevenson, and Elaine Feinstein; Peter K. Steinberg and Karen Kukil's wonderful collection of Plath's letters; and importantly for his biography, consultation with recently released papers of her psychiatrist, Dr. Barnhouse, at Smith College. He interviews Al Alvarez—the author of The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, which was inspired by Plath. He thoroughly reviews the Barnhouse notes, Plath's letters, and many biographies and biographical manuscripts as a basis for his narrative; however, as in other parts of the book, he follows journalistic conventions and does not clearly validate these sources in footnotes. If we juxtapose Rollyson's stance in his chapter on Barnhouse and Plath to Clarke's, a difference of perspective comes into relief—allowing that Clarke's is a full biography and Rollyson's a partial one that focuses on the last months of her life. Clarke casts doubt on the treatments of Dr. Barnhouse, beginning in Plath's days at McLean Hospital...