Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
Review of Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark
“Plath was determined to play her part, but, as Stevenson’s speech suggests, the odds were against her. She lived in a shamelessly discriminatory age when it was almost impossible for a woman to get a mortgage, loan, or credit card; when newspapers divided their employment ads between men and women (“Attractive Please!”); the word “pregnant” was banned from network television; and popular magazines encouraged wives to remain quiet because, as one advice columnist put it, ‘his topics of conversation are more important than yours.’””
Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark (2020). Published by Vintage Digital.
Ever since I was in high school, I have been in love with the poet Sylvia Plath. I have always thought that she was such a brave woman for writing about what she wrote about in the era she lived in, especially because I knew that many people often romanticized her just because of the way she ended: her suicide. I thought I knew Sylvia, but had never actually read a biography about her because there really wasn’t one that caught my eye. Until one day I saw this book reviewed in The New York Times and knew I had to get a copy.
I originally started reading a PDF I had on a flight to San Diego while simultaneously listening, but about two sections into the book, I realized I needed a physical copy. I picked one up at my local Barnes & Nobles with a copy of The Copenhagen Trilogy—which I also highly recommend (Tove was another confessional female writer who also had a tragic end)—and got to work right where I left off.
At 1,100 pages, it took me a long time to scale this mountain, but, trust me, if you’re into Sylvia Plath or American women’s poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, there are some gems in here. You’re going to learn so much about who Sylvia was as a person, and, if you’re a writer, you might get inspired by her story and the passages contained within the book. This fell into a similar vein of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s biography, which I also liked a lot.
Let’s get into this review.
A deep dive into the life and writing of Sylvia Plath, as dictated by her environment.
What makes Red Comet stand out from other previous biographies about Sylvia Plath is that the author, Heather Clark, dug deeper to find content that previously wasn’t available for previous biographers and historians on the subject, making some of the information presented in this book completely new when it comes to the public consciousness about Sylvia Plath.
But, what I liked above all else, is that it seeks to deconstruct the myth of Plath in the opening section and dissect why she was portrayed the way she was.
She was an ambitious woman who, originally, wrote in a very rigid method of poetry that was defined by the poets before her, like Marianne Moore. When she finally began to break free from the formalistic approaches, she became more honest about her mental health and condition, but because she was a woman who wanted to be a writer, she was mocked.
As Clark puts it in the opening section, no male poet, or author, has been mocked for the way they killed themselves. Plath’s Bell Jar became a beacon of instability in female characters in film, while people who generally liked Plath’s poetry in society were seen as abnormal or also mentally ill because of it.
Her tragic ending has become so intertwined with her mythos that many have forgotten to look at her poetry and background without the tinted glasses, which truly is a tragedy. Clark’s accounts of the events of Plath’s life, complete with many passages from letters, journals, and poems, tries to remain as unbiased as possible.
And so we begin with Otto, Plath’s father. The opening section is about him and his pursuits as a German immigrant in the United States, as well as how he was targeted because he was an immigrant in the World War I era.
He meets Aurelia, Plath’s mother, and they marry, creating this very Germanic household with Plath and her brother. Aurelia is initially set up to be everything that is revolutionary; she is educated, she wants to be a professor and a writer, but, as she has children, she becomes limited to the home and her aspirations are put on the backburner. Plath then grows up with the perfectionistic tendencies instilled upon her by her parents, and when her father dies during her elementary years, it becomes a devastating blow.
The Plath family was not wealthy. This is seen throughout when Sylvia describes how hard she had to work to earn a scholarship to Smith College, but she does indeed have expensive taste. Once she starts earning the poetry money, she spends it on all the things she cannot afford. We see how her depression manifests during her childhood, as well as the interest in men strictly becomes defined as she gets older.
Plath is a perfectionistic person all the way through, and so it becomes obvious she will settle for no one who cannot match her creative output. Perhaps that is why she marries Ted Hughes while on a Fulbright to Cambridge, as she basically becomes his literary manager—though he has the talent to back himself up.
Clark weaves together Plath’s story magnificently throughout, although the prose can get a little dense at times because of the content. We know going into this biography that it will end in tragedy, and hints of that are sprinkled throughout. Sylvia is prone to episodes of depression, stopping her writing because of it (which, in turn, fuels said depression) and we see how deeply unhappy she gets at periods of her life.
It’s devastating to see the pressure Sylvia kept putting on herself, but her husband’s success truly did not help out in regards to boosting her mood. This poison is laced along the narrative at points, as we see it noted that Sylvia makes annotations about needing to not show Ted poems anymore.
I feel like I came out of this biography really understanding several of Plath’s poems and why she resented her mother and father the way she did. We learn the impacts of this and why she did so—her therapist was sexist and thus thought that the matriarch of the family must be the source of all of the problems—and it comes to really shed a new light on Plath’s work.
When we’re talking about poets like Sexton and Plath, you need to understand their backgrounds to truly get to the core of their work. Sylvia evolved from a college girl intensely studying English, mimicking the old forms of poetics to someone who truly was an innovator in form and genre.
But, at the same time, the sexism becomes very apparent as you read. She was a woman working in the 1950s and 1960s, and her own professors even said that women should be delegated to the home and not become writers.
Plath wanted to be a housewife and live a quote-on-quote normal life, but she was abnormal for being a female poet. Through this objective view, you come to understand the sources of her mental illness (and the fact it was hereditary in the family) and cannot blame her for what has happened. She had a difficult road to get there, and she never actually saw her first collection be released.
Overall Thoughts
I truly am only scraping the surface in this review because this is one beast of a book. You definitely need to read it if you’re vaguely interested in Sylvia Plath’s work, or American women’s poetry as a whole.
There’s a lot about her personal life, like how she dated her boyfriends in college and had spats with her friends, but there are also interesting accounts of the Boston literary scene, which featured the likes of Lowell, Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Ted Hughes himself. It’s an immensely and well-researched book about her life, and on the page it feels pretty comprehensive and solid in the way it was written.
I felt like I learned about who Sylvia truly was outside of the mythology created around her, which is the sign of a really good biography.
