“Everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”
Sylvia Plath
I developed a thing for Sylvia Plath last semester. During spring break, I came up to camp to visit the Tates, and Sarah mentioned she had been reading Plath’s collected journals. Intrigued by how intriguing Sarah found them to be, I picked up the copy our library happened to have when I got back to school. And so what I intended as a curious, cursory read-through became a weeks-long journey into the adolescence and adulthood of a mid-century poet-writer. I couldn’t help it; from the first page I heard her speaking as clearly as if she were standing next to me between the rows and rows of bookshelves. She elevated the mundane and particular—wisdom teeth, living in a dorm full of girls, staying home alone on a Saturday night—into something clear, sonorous, and universal. Furtively snatching passages when I had a few spare minutes, I simmered in the immediate sense of kindred thought that reading this most personal of writing gave me. I saw more of myself in her than I could probably legitimately admit to, and I couldn’t get enough.
“Can I write? Will I write if I practice enough? How much should I sacrifice to writing anyway, before I find out if I’m any good? Above all, CAN A SELFISH EGOCENTRIC JEALOUS AND UNIMAGINATIVE FEMALE WRITE A . . . THING WORTH WHILE? Should I sublimate (my, how we throw words around!) my selfishness in serving other people—through social or other such work? Would I then become more sensitive to other people and their problems? Would I be able to write more honestly, then, of other beings beside a tall, introspective adolescent girl?”The facts of her life are undeniable—she was almost certainly manic-depressive, and she committed suicide at the age of 30. But she could write, and she did: glowing, ecstatic descriptions, marketable short stories, increasingly penetrating poetry, a largely autobiographical novel, passages of incisive introspection. She had no hope or faith, and little love. And yet she’s completely irresistible to me. I found her shining, intellectual approach to literature and composition deeply impressive. During those weeks, reading almost everything she wrote, even the early, forced poetry and the highly commercialized magazine pieces, I found myself under her influence. Under her tutelage, I got through two short stories for my composition class and even a poorly executed poem scribbled out at a sleepless 5 am (what a rare and precious time just before dawn is; I’d never tasted such a fleeting delight), her story Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams at my elbow. It’s her raw intensity, her honesty, that spoke to me, I think. I realized that a good writer doesn’t necessarily begin that way, that a good writer sometimes writes sentimental schmaltz. And I think that was freeing.
“There are times when a feeling of expectancy comes to me, as if something is there, beneath the surface of my understanding, waiting for me to grasp it. It is the same tantalizing sensation when you almost remember a name, but don’t quite reach it. . . . Oh, something is there, waiting for me. Perhaps someday the revelation will burst in upon me and I will see the other side of this monumental grotesque joke. And then I’ll laugh. And then I’ll know what life is.”
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