Sylvia

Jack Foley

: It is almost over.
I am in control.
            --Sylvia Plath, “Stings”

      I went to see Sylvia despite the negative reviews and found myself enjoying it--if that is the word for such a film.

       The working title of the film was Ted and Sylvia, but--as was often the case for Ted Hughes after Plath’s death--his role was eclipsed by the intense concentration on his wife. Gwyneth Paltrow as Sylvia is appealing throughout the film, delivering a performance which will certainly add to her reputation as a serious actress. Indeed, the actors are far better than the script, which is limited and close to soap opera: poor Sylvia with that womanizing non-money-making Heathcliffean poet who saddled her with two children then abruptly left her for another woman. (The film nowhere informs you that the “other woman,” Assia Wevill, committed suicide as well--and she did it in precisely the way that Plath did, by putting her head in an oven, though she did Plath one better by including her child in her death. Sylvia was careful to see that her children did not die when she did. In one of the many “prophetic” moments inserted at the early portions of the film, Plath recites the Wife of Bath’s speech about the “wo that is in mariage”--and that is perhaps the true moral of the film.)

       Sadly, most of the issues raised by Plath’s poetry are as absent from Sylvia as the poetry, forbidden to the filmmakers by unfortunate decree of the poet’s daughter Frieda. Paltrow has been rightly praised for “conveying Plath’s fragility and volatility without resorting to excessive scenery chewing”--and her performance is genuinely touching--but Plath’s late poetry is nothing if not full of “excessive scenery chewing.” Paltrow never really goes crazy: Plath did. One would have thought the screenwriter, John Brownlow, might have noticed, but apparently he did not.

       Apart from the acting, the film, directed by Christine Jeffs--whose earlier film, Rain, also dealt with a problematical marriage--is strongest in its visuals: Sylvia is an enormously painterly film--an odd thing for a film about writers. There are people who dislike films which are so obviously and unabashedly “artistic,” but I found Sylvia quite beautiful, even at times mesmerizing: its images seemed to convey far more than its script. It is perhaps fair to say that it is only in its moments of silence that the film seems especially eloquent--which of course makes it rather the opposite of Plath. At the end of her life she couldn’t stop talking--and the poems partake of that manic energy:

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

This is something I didn’t do in my earlier poems. For example, my first book, The Colossus. I can’t read any of the poems aloud now. I didn’t write them to be read aloud. They, in fact, quite privately, bore me. These ones that I have just read, the ones that are very recent, I’ve got to say them, I speak them to myself, and I think that this in my own writing development is quite a new thing with me, and whatever lucidity they may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, I say them aloud.

ORR: Do you think this is an essential ingredient of a good poem, that it should be able to be read aloud effectively?

PLATH: Well, I do feel that now and I feel that this development of recording poems, of speaking poems at readings, of having records of poets, I think this is a wonderful thing. I’m very excited by it. In a sense, there’s a return, isn’t there, to the old role of the poet, which was to speak to a group of people, to come across.

I prefer poems to make an effect on being heard. And I don’t think that’s really a case of them being simple. For instance, Eliot’s poems make tremendous effect when you hear them. And when I first heard them, they did; and when I was too young to understand very much about them. They had an enormous effect on me. And this was an effect quite apart from anything that I’d call, you know, understanding or being able to explain them or knowing what was going on. It’s just some sort of charge and charm and series of operations that it works on you. And I think quite complicated poetry such as Eliot’s can do this on you immediately.

       Clearly Plath could feel her own life more vividly through speech than she could through the silence of the typewritten or printed poem. “In oral or oral-aural communication,” writes Father Walter J. Ong, “both speaker and hearer must be alive.” Yet the issue goes even further than that. Nowhere does Sylvia give you the appalling sense which Plath’s late work gives that these poems plus the suicide are a kind of grand performance piece (“the big strip tease”), something which is a summation of the poet’s entire life, the dead point towards which everything moves:

Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well... It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. It’s easy enough to do it and stay put. It’s the theatrical Comeback in broad day... That knocks me out.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air.

Even paranoids have enemies.
            --Delmore Schwartz

Photography is truth...and the cinema is the truth twenty-four times a second.
            --Bruno in Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat

Jack Foley