Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath In New York, Summer 1953 (2013) - Plot & Excerpts
God damnit...I just had about four fifths of this fucking review fucking written when somehow a click of my mouse lost it...God damnit...Anyway. I really liked this book. It's kind of funny, when I was in high school, it was almost hip to read Sylvia Plath. Although, I don't really think it's possible for anything to be hip in high school, personally I just don't believe there is almost any real intellectual substance to high school at all, but that's probably just because I hated high school.But then it's funny, because in college it's almost always really, really not hip to read and enjoy Sylvia Plath. And God forbid you try and write like her or are even inspired as a writer by her. I tried reading The Bell Jar when I was in high school and just didn't get it.Then I tried picking through a couple of her poems in community college but didn't really get those either, but the numerology aspects in her line breaks and words per line, maybe, if I remember right, we studied in class were interesting to me at the time. I remember paying a lot of attention to those and experimenting with meaning in the number of words and lines a lot back then in my attempt to write the perfect Christian Freedom Fighter poetry. Those were interesting times, walking around community college in overalls and a Bob Marley t-shirt, hehe.I really got interested in reading Sylvia Plath when a friend of mine in Iowa City, whom I lived with for a year, liked her and Anne Sexton so well. Some of my favorite memories in Iowa City were staying up late with him and reading Anne Sexton and e.e. cummings and Carol Ann Duffy poems to each other.Then after I saw that Audible had several non-fiction books about her and Ted Hughes available I thought that would be a really good place to start. This book tries to fight the image of her being a tortured poetess (Am I even allowed to type that?) and tries to reclaim this image folks who knew her have described her with: Someone who bluntly loved life more than almost everyone else around her.This book got better and better as it went on.It mostly deals with Sylvia Plath in New York in 1953 in June on an internship while she was an undergrad.It's kind of funny reading about people who thought success was their only option. In a sense, Sylvia kind of saw into the future, especially through her association with all kinds of different men and women, to the kinds of people who I knew and know from college and different places, whose main goal or dream in life isn't success, it's survival. There are lots of quotes from people she knew and lived with, which was kind of interesting. There is a book about Ted Hughes I want to read too. I read at some point The Birthday Letters, and that is one of my all time favorite books of poetry.It's kind of funny, thinking back to trying to read books in high school. I can remember telling a doctor of mine that if I could change one thing about my life it would be that I wanted to be able to sit down and read a whole book and then be able to do it again and again and again.Thankfully, that's one wish or dream that I actually was able to make happen and happily, I guess, sustain.That's probably a big reason I didn't get The Bell Jar in high school, reading was really, really hard for me back then. It still is now, but I have some good momentum to go on. And a lot more time and energy now that I'm not in school anymore, thank God.What I found really, really interesting was how Sylvia reacted after leaving New York. I vaguely knew she had tried to kill herself before her successful attempt, but I didn't realize she was already in her 20's and that it was after her time in New York and after a bit of partial success.Her time spent in the hospital, which is only kind of briefly touched on, still, really, really moved me and spoke to me.After she wasn't able to read, at least to her own standards, James Joyce, after New York and while she was preparing for her senior's thesis, she decided that she had become illiterate.Reading about her mother working with her to try and make it through that period, too, was really, really moving and I appreciated that a lot. Knowing that Sylvia Plath decided she was illiterate, I think, is really, really encouraging, essentially. You know, even the most brilliant people in the fucking world think they're fucking dumb as hell, sometimes, or most of the time, depending on the time, or whatever.It was also kind of funny, I think it was an editor at Knopf or someone like that told Sylvia in a rejection slip of some kind that they thought The Bell Jar, "lacked the gravitas needed in describing the harsh reality of mental illness and suicide attempts and life in mental hospitals."Hehe.Too, this book has a lot detailing the links between the literary and fashion worlds of 1953 and around that time.The magazine Sylvia worked for in New York that June, besides publishing important photos and articles on fashion, also published stories by folks like Truman Capote and Shirley Jackson.That is such an interesting time in American literature, I might add, to me at least. Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg weren't published yet, it's fascinating thinking of a time when Truman Capote and Shirley Jackson ruled American letters, as at least in schools it seems like they're hardly taught...except I guess that almost everyone teaches the Lottery in high school...and maybe it's just me...but I just can't take whatever gets taught in high school seriously. Not that the material isn't worthwhile, and I'm not at all trying to say that the people attending high school aren't intelligent or experiencing powerful growth and phases of development, but I just don't believe that any true intellectual depth or development happens in high school.But again, that's probably just because I hated high school, and truthfully, I have all the respect in the world for high school teachers and the men and women who have to go there for classes every day and try to graduate from those hell holes. A high school diploma means an awful lot and is seriously worth fighting for. There's really smart people I know who really enjoyed and seemed to learn a lot in high school, even in literature courses. I just fucking hated high school.Anyway. The way fashion and literature were kind of linked in the early 1950's kind of called to mind the way Playboy published works by Stephen King or Denis Johnson. It's interesting and really cool to me, thinking that industries outside of the literary world might have an interest in promoting and celebrating literature. And you know that Playboy had to have faith in the stories they published...if you're willing to keep reading a short story when there's photos of naked women on the subsequent pages, you know you've got a good short story on your hands. This book was really, really good. It painted an interesting picture of a time and place that really I don't know anything about. And I like that it seems to take a fresh and hopefully somewhat more accurate and life like take on Sylvia Plath as she really was, maybe. Either way, it was a really wonderful introduction to Sylvia Plath and I'm looking forward to reading more about her and things by her. Pretentiously written and incomprehensibly organized.The bulk of the book suffers from a writing style that attempts to compete with Plath's in poeticism; the rest, which catalogues the remainder of Plath's life, is a little better in that it strays from the sort of unfounded suppositions that characterize the majority of the book. (The author on Plath's love of starfish: "Perhaps she saw her own appetites in the creature's 'active search for and ingestion of animal food, dead or alive, in large portions.'")It was worth reading only because of the subject matter, in the end.
What do You think about Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath In New York, Summer 1953 (2013)?
Not too bad of a read. It was interesting but different at the same time.
—cupcake
Contrived and awkward. A much paler shade of The Bell Jar.
—Mel
