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This all is my mere speculation. I do not know whether Eleanor Bergstein ever read anything by or about Sylvia Plath.
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Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar was published in the United Kingdom in 1963 but was not published in the USA until 1971.
Bergstein's first novel, Advancing Paul Newman, was published in 1973, so Bergstein probably finished writing the manuscript during 1972. So, in the early 1970s, Bergstein was beginning to develop the story for her second novel.
In the early 1970s, two books about Plath were published.
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The Savage God, by A. Alvarez, published in 1972, was a book about artists who committed suicide, and much of the book was about Plath.
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| "The Savage God", by A. Alvarez, 1972 |
Sylvia Plath, by Eileen Aird, published in 1973, was the first book-length biography of Plath.
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| "Sylvia Plath", by Eileen Aird, published in 1973 |
The Savage God, by Alvarez -- an English poet, novelist and literary critic -- was especially influential. Alvarez was a close friend of Plath and of her husband Ted Hughes. Alvarez himself was a suicidal poet. A book review by essayist James H. Brown about The Savage God included the following passages:
.... Alvarez is a distinguished English poet, literary critic and author. The book is very well written and displays an easy mastery of the relevant literary and historical scholarship. It is a gripping work, and deserves to be read and reread simply for its fund of information and insight, and the skill with which they are presented. ... He seems to be looking ... for a metaphysical (or perhaps literary) answer to the problem of suicide, and before the end of the volume he sketches a theory about suicide in poets.In April 1972 The New York Times printed a long excerpt about Plath's suicide.
The book consists of a prologue, which is an account of the author's personal acquaintance with the poet Sylvia Plath and her husband Ted Hughes, during the period leading up to Sylvia Plath's suicide; a review of some historical attitudes to suicide; a review of some of the current psychological, sociological and other data and theories on suicide (some of this unduly dismissive); a review of suicide and literature, particularly English poetry, concluding with a discussion of the "extremist" modem English poets (e.g. Lowell, Berryman, Hughes and Plath); and an epilogue, which is a description of the author's own suicidal attempt.
The largest, most coherent arid most luminous of these parts is the review of suicide and literature. At the conclusion of this the author, relying heavily on his brief accounts of Sylvia Plath and of the "extremist" poets, puts forward his view that this difficult poetic style is so demanding that it carries unusual psychic risks for its practitioners. ...
Alvarez's description of his own suicidal attempt, in contrast with his description of Sylvia Plath's suicide, makes no attempt to derive the episode from his life as a poet and writer. He speculates briefly about intrapsychic problems stemming from early childhood; refers elliptically to current personal and marital problems; and then describes a descent into a state of profound depression complicated by alcoholic excess, with increasingly frequent suicidal preoccupation and planning, culminating in an overdose of sleeping pills taken during an alcoholic blackout on Christmas Day. His life was seriously endangered. The crisis was apparently followed by complete and rapid recovery, so that by New Year's Day he was free of depressive symptoms and suicidal preoccupations alike.
Why, then, did she kill herself? In part, I suppose, it was "a cry for help" which fatally misfired. But it was also a last desperate attempt to exorcise the death she had summed up in her poems.======
I have already suggested that perhaps she had begun to write obsessively about death for two reasons.
First, when she and her husband separated, however mutual the arrangement, she again went through the same piercing grief and bereavement she had felt as a child when her father, by his death, seemed to abandon her.But as I have written elsewhere, for the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic; he is not automatically relieved of his fantasies by expressing them. Instead, by some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available to him.
Second, I believe she thought her car crash the previous summer had set her free; she had paid her dues, qualified as a survivor and could now write about it.
The result of handling it in his work may well be that he finds himself living it out. For the artist, in short, nature often imitates art. Or, to change the clichè, when an artist holds up a mirror to nature he finds out who and what he is; but the knowledge may change him irredeemably so that he becomes that image.
I think Sylvia, in one way or another, sensed this. In an introductory note she wrote to "Daddy" for the B.B.C., she said of the poem's narrator, "She has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it." The allegory in question was, as she saw it, the struggle in her between a fantasy Nazi father and a Jewish mother. But perhaps it was also a fantasy of containing in herself her own dead father, like a woman possessed by a demon (in the poem she actually calls him a vampire). In order for her to be free from him, he had to be released like a genie from a bottle.
And this is precisely what the poems did; they bodied forth the death within her. But they also did so in an intensely living and creative way. The more she wrote about death, the stronger and more fertile her imaginative world became. And this gave her everything to live for.
I suspect that in the end she wanted to have done with the theme once and for all. But the only way she could find was "to act out the awful little allegory once over."
She had always been a bit of a gambler, used to taking risks. The authority of her poetry was in part due to her brave persistence in following the thread of her inspiration right down to the Minotaur's lair. And this psychic courage had its parallel in her physical arrogance and carelessness. Risks didn't fright her; on the contrary, she found them stimulating. Freud has written: "Life loses in interest when the highest stake in the games of living, life itself, may not be risked." Finally, Sylvia took that risk. She gambled for the last time, having worked out that the odds were in her favor, but perhaps, in her depression, not much caring whether she won or lost. Her calculations went wrong and she lost.
It was a mistake, then, and out of it a whole myth has grown. I don't think she would have found it much to her taste, since it is a myth of the poet as a sacrificial victim, offering herself up for the sake of her art, having been dragged by the Muses of that final altar through every kind of distress. In these terms, her suicide becomes the whole point of the story, the act which validates her poems, given them their interest and proves her seriousness.
So people are drawn to her work in much the same spirit as Time magazine featured her at length: not for the poetry but for the gossipy, extra-literary "human interest." Yet just as the suicide adds nothing at all to the poetry, so the myth of Sylvia as a passive victim is a total perversion of the woman she was. It misses altogether her liveliness, her intellectual appetite and harsh wit, her great imaginative resourcefulness and vehemence of feeling, her control.
Above all, it misses the courage with which she was able to turn disaster into art. The pity is not that there is a myth of Sylvia Plath, but that the myth is not simply that of an enormously gifted poet whose death came carelessly, by mistake and too soon.
It's very likely that Eleanor Bergstein -- the wife of poet Michael Goldman, a professor of English at Princeton University -- was very interested by the publication of The Bell Jar and of these books about Plath in the early 1970s, when Bergstein was developing the story for her second novel.
Of course, in the early 1970s Plath was only one of many feminist writers who interested and influenced people. I speculate, however, that the tragic story of the Plath-Hughes marriage especially touched Bergstein, a female writer married to a male writer.
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Bergstein's second novel, which she was writing during the mid-1970s, never has been published, so I can only speculate about its story. In my previous post in this series, I speculated that the story was about the relationship between a female mathematics professor and a male mathematics professor. This relationship might have corresponded roughly to novelist Bergstein's own relationship with her poet husband, a university professor.
Bergstein wrote about mathematics professors (I speculated) because Esther Greenwood, the heroine of Plath's novel The Bell Jar, gave her virginity to a man named Irwin, a mathematics professor at Harvard University. Perhaps Bergstein's second novel somewhat imagined that Esther eventually became a mathematician and continued her relationship with Irwin.
After Bergstein abandoned this novel, she wrote the screenplay for the movie It's My Turn, released in 1980, about a female mathematics professor and a retired professional baseball player. I speculate that Bergstein converted her novel's male mathematics professor into the movie's baseball player in order to broaden her story's appeal.
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No matter whether Bergstein's second novel was about a couple of mathematics professors.
Between Bergstein's 1973 novel, Advancing Paul Newman, and her 1980 movie, It's My Turn, her focus shifted from a female-female conflict to a female-male conflict.
In Advancing Paul Newman, the conflict is between two young women -- Kitsy Frank and Ilia Rappaport. Kitsy get married to a professionally successful man and becomes a housewife and mother. In contrast, Ilia has an endless series of brief affairs and struggles to earn a living as a free-lance photographer.The conflict in It's My Turn is that Kate is troubled by feelings of inferiority and insecurity in relation to men whereas Ben feels blithely confident and aggressive in relation to women. Kate is seduced easily by Ben, despite various circumstances that should have inhibited her from succumbing sexually to him.
In It's My Turn, the conflict is between a woman and a man -- Kate Gunzinger and Ben Lewin. Kate aspires to make a major breakthrough in mathematics. Ben had to retire as a professional athlete because of a shoulder injury and now he is trying to start a new career as an inspirational speaker.
It's My Turn is a lousy movie, but it provides some insight into Bergstein's concerns as a writer during the mid-1970s. Bergstein loved and admired men (especially her father), but she resented the sexual and social realities that enabled men to excel professionally over women and to enjoy relatively satisfactory lives.
The battle of the sexes was not fair!
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Sylvia Plath (born in 1932) was only about two years younger than Ted Hughes (born in 1938), but she was clearly subordinate to him in their relationship. His reputation as a poet was better, and he earned an income as a professional writer for BBC. She got stuck at home, giving birth and raising babies.
In the following video clip from the movie Sylvia, she expresses her anxiety and resentment in relation to him, as he lectures to her about how she should improve herself as a poet.
The following video shows more excerpts from the movie.
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The following video shows Jonathan Bate, a preeminent scholar of English literature, talking about a biography he wrote, The Unauthorized Life of Ted Hughes. In the video, Bates calls Hughes "one of the two or three greatest poets of the Twentieth Century".
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The following video shows a lecture about the Plath-Hughes poetry-writing collaboration, titled "Poetry and Co-dependency: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath", read by Professor Belinda Jack, a teacher at Oxford University.
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