Grief, Memory, Three O'Clock in the Morning

a Mavis Gallant Centennial Diary Addendum for February 11, 2023

I don’t have much heart for writing these days, and this addendum seems less than needful given that it’s ground I’ve covered before — or touched on, at least, in fits and starts — but last night I dreamed I was walking through the store where I work, carrying a heavy box, trying to find the best shelf onto which I could unload its cargo which, upon examination, proved to be a condiment called Suicide Ketchup — the label was cheery, the font jaunty, the marketing possibilities electric with dark whimsy — and while this oneiric episode was more antic than desperate or alarming, it must have jarred me because, aberrantly, it lingered after waking, and I suppose it was owing to wondering after the source of the dream — why did that fissure open and that gas escape? — that I’ve now fired up the computer and will  append to my MG jottings this brief addition to mark, as many already have, a singularly sad day, February 11, 2023: the 60th anniversary of the death of Sylvia Plath, who took her own life a few weeks after the release of The Bell Jar, which she published, pseudonymously, as Victoria Lucas.

(That’s a hell of a long sentence, and it could use some work, for sure; anyone who wants to tinker has my express permission to do, and also to keep the results confidential.)

In September, 1959, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes began a residency at Yaddo. Sylvia, ever Discipline’s disciple, ministered to her diary. While she didn’t log a daily account of their three-month stint — which Ted loved, which Sylvia found over-long — she wrote (also sketched) regularly, and at length, plying her pages with pen-and-ink drawings, and with detailed and oppressively self-analytical accounts of what she saw as her failures as a writer and her inadequacies as a wife. She availed herself of Yaddo’s library, read Eudora Welty,  Jean Stafford, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bishop, and, yes, Mavis Gallant (MG). All were women a decade or so older than she, and all regularly appeared in the hallowed pages of The New Yorker. She ended her journal entry for September 28, “My first job to open my real experience like an old wound; then to extend it; then to invent on the drop of a feather, a whole multi-colored bird. Study, study one or two NY’s. Like the now-prolific Mavis G.”

A few weeks later, on October 19, she writes, “Involvement with Mavis Gallant. Her novel on a daughter-mother relation, the daughter committing suicide. A novel, brazen, arrogant, would be a solution to my days, to a year of life. If I did not short-circuit by sitting judgment as I wrote, always rejecting before I open my mouth. The main concern: a character who is not myself — that becomes a stereotype, mournful, narcissistic.”

Sylvia was writing about MG’s Green Water, Green Sky, which had been published that year. Bonnie is an American of adequate but not infinite means, adrift in Europe. Her exile is the price she pays for a personal scandal (an affair, a divorce) that makes it impossible for her to return to America. Her daughter, Flor, who is sometimes Bonnie’s pet, sometimes her toy, sometimes her wailing wall, is her increasingly unwilling companion on this forced march from resort location to resort location. Flor asserts her independence by making her own unhappy marriage. She begins to lose ground. Finally, there’s nothing left beneath her. Like everyone on whom gravity loses its grip, her ending is tragic.

The four chapters of this short novel — substantially, though not entirely — had appeared in The New Yorker in June,  July, and August of 1959. To say that GW, GS was a template for the nascent The Bell Jar would be, I think, over-reaching. But it doesn’t seem too much to ascribe to it catalytic qualities, to suggest that MG’s considered and pointillistic examination of a troubled mother - daughter relationship, and of a family suicide, might have set off in Sylvia Plath a synaptic firing. I don’t think it’s impossible that she chose the name “Greenwood” for her heroine as a sly nod in the direction of “Green Water.” Who knows? Writing has never been anything other than a borrowing from reading. Whoever told the first story set a primal fire, and every writer since then, to a greater or lesser extent, has relied on that blaze to kindle their own torch. (Oh, Bill. THAT was excellent! Top drawer!)

What I think doesn’t matter a damn, as no one need tell me, but I’ll say out loud that while each of the books has much to recommend it, The Bell Jar — if you consider and compare them as novels — is the more successful. Green Water, Green Sky is triumphant in its parts, the first three chapters most particularly, though the last feels a bit pat, and tacked on. The Bell Jar has integrity, coherence, shape, and a remarkable sustaining mordancy. It was largely brushed off when it was first published, dismissed a little bit of light fare from yet another unknown girl writer with yet another faintly promising debut novel, but time has proven the naysayers wrong.

Generations of readers — young women most particularly — have found something regenerative in the Esther Greenwood’s story of madness and recovery. For me as a reader, it’s the second chapter of Green Water, Green Sky that can be seen to be in active conversation with The Bell Jar.  It was first published under the title “August,” in The New Yorker, in the issue of 08.21.59. It’s beautiful and frightening in the way it details Flor’s evaporation during a hot, surreal month when Paris, traditionally, empties out, and she contrives to be left alone, the sole superintendent of her fate, as her husband and mother head off to their respective vacation destinations. The Bell Jar opens with an evocation of that same, charged sultriness, and in Esther Greenwood’s accruing impairment there are more than a few echoes of that endured by Flor.

As near as I know, the two writers never met nor corresponded. Somewhere, in a published interview that’s now eluding me — I think it may have been in French, and I simply cannot turn it up — MG answers a question about how she felt when she learned that her name turned up in Plath’s journals. Her reply was along the lines of, “Why didn’t she write to me? I could have helped her.” I don’t recall that she was more specific than that about the assistance she might have offered, but I suspect that if the two of them had sat together, they would have found a lot to say about the writing game, about men, about disappointment, about German heritage, and most especially about managing the legacy of the father who dies too soon and the hegemonic reign of the Monster Mother.

Sylvia Plath was a writer of growing reputation but not widely sought after for interviews; it was, cruelly and inevitably, her suicide that cemented her legend and opened the vast space for all the analysis and speculation and gossip that followed. The survivors — most particularly and complexly Ted Hughes, and, of course, her two children — were indelibly marked. It was her mother, Aurelia, who was placed in the impossible position of having to speak to her daughter’s feelings and intentions vis a vis The Bell Jar. MG, who lived into her 90’s, and who preferred that her many interviewers confine their inquiries to the work and leave family matters out of it, would speak in generalities about her strange childhood but deflected questions about her parents, about her mother most particularly. Here, for instance, a clipping from the San Francisco Examiner, a report of a testy exchange during an onstage interview in the fall of 1989.

Enough. There’s nothing here to prove, or that needs demonstrating, particularly, except to say that this is a day worth noting, and that there existed between these two women something that might be described as a relationship, however tenuous and diaphanous it might have been. To reading and to writing there’s a kind of relay race quality, a passing of the baton, but without anything like a finish line in view; it just goes on and on, as it always has, as it always will.

By way of awkward envoi, I leave you with these clippings, both from the Regina Leader Post, from their “What’s New In the Library” column, 2 squibs, each about the length of a fortune cookie message, and each proof that even the great — maybe particularly the great — are also susceptible to absurd reduction. (I especially appreciate the way Victoria Lucas is credited as the author of The Bill Jar.) Thanks for reading. Carry on!