“Come on, let’s go. What are we waiting for?” asks Miss Ambitious Chekhovian, pulling at my arm. “Time is money.”
“Let’s go and read novels,” says Miss Highbrowed Cynic.
“The shortest route,” orders Little Miss Practical. “Let’s catch a cab.”
Suddenly, I don’t want to hear or see any of them. At least for a while. “Go ahead,” I say gently, but firmly. “I’m staying.”
Thankfully, after a few protests, the four finger-women leave. Arguing among themselves as to which road to take, they walk away on their little feet, their voices trailing off into the air.
I notice a fat, tawny cat nearby, following them with his fixed eyes. Can the cat see them? The thought first excites, and then frightens, me. What if the cat confuses them with mice or birds and tries to gobble them up? But to my relief, even if the feline could see my finger-women, he shuts his eyes and resumes his nap, realizing, perhaps, that they would give him indigestion.
Taking a deep, deep breath, I watch the little women exit the park. What am I going to do with them? They make everything harder for me, and yet I love them.
For one long moment, I, too, want to be a fisherman.
Of Poets and Babies
S
he was the girl who wanted to be God so that she could create the entire universe from scratch. Such was her desire to live with real intimacy; she couldn’t fit into her body or her past. In her youth she was a teacher for a while, though it didn’t take her long to decide that being part of the workforce was not for her. She was made to write. Determined to earn her living from her writing, never satisfied with what was placed in front of her, she pushed and shoved. Waiting patiently for tomorrow to come didn’t suit her well. She wouldn’t make a good fisherman.
To her close friends she was Syl, to her family, Sivvie. To the rest of the world she was Sylvia Plath.
Her marriage to Ted Hughes has been the subject of numerous heated discussions among scholars, feminists and nonfeminists alike. Many have taken either her side of the story or his but the truth must lie somewhere in between, in a hue other than black or white. The essays and books written about her—even after all these years—tend to be as emotionally charged as she was. Perhaps somehow all her biographers end up falling in love with her.
Hers was a rocky marriage that caused much pain. Yet, like many other relationships that ended up similarly, it had started out as an uncontrollable magnetic pull. They were two poets in love: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Shared metaphors, conflicting subjectivities, powerful personalities. Can two poets be in love without competing with each other in the long run? It is not impossible, of course, but it is hard. They were young, headstrong and free. They had things to say to each other and a world to change together. Thus, they fell in love, fought endlessly, made love with passion and urgency, did and said things they bitterly regretted later, forgave each other and themselves, all through words. Words were their particular pride.
There is a poem she wrote titled “I Want, I Want.” The central figure is a God-like baby who is yet to be born. Immense, bald and openmouthed, this is not a cute, angelic baby but a powerful natural force that wishes to come into this world and demands to be given love and attention, and gets them. It is a baby that wants
to be
. The poet uses a volcano as the symbol of feminine fertility—the ability to breed, broaden and bear life within. But a volcano is also a dangerous and destructive force. Even when it is asleep you cannot be fully sure that it will not erupt at any moment. It cannot be tamed. It cannot be predicted.
Throughout her life, Sylvia Plath underwent various anxieties with regard to womanhood and motherhood. First, she feared she was sterile and could never have babies. Then she lost many nights’ sleep fretting over the pains of giving birth. How excruciating was it? Would she survive? And once she had babies, she worried about the outside world and its cruelties.
But she was equally convinced that being a mother would add great things to her life and to her writing. After having a baby, she was going to be a different woman—one whom she would depict in her poems as a superhuman being, a magical mortal who was transformed with the mere touch of a baby’s pink thumb. In her diary she wrote, “I must first conquer my writing and experience, and then will deserve to conquer childbirth.” Another time she said, “I will write until I begin to speak my deep self, and then have children, and speak still deeper.” Maybe she was right, after all. She would write her greatest work,
Ariel,
after becoming a mother.
Before long she gave birth to a daughter, and sixteen months later to a son. Staying at home to raise her babies was a critical choice, but one that she made. From then on, she would take care of her house and her family, and write her poems and stories. Sometimes the two occupations would overlap, and she would find herself scribbling pages and pages in her diaries about changing diapers and baking chocolate cookies.
As she immersed herself in household chores, she would watch from the sidelines the goings-on in the literary world. She took note of the new works being published and the emerging writers being feted, especially the female ones. She was no stranger to envy. Just like she was no stranger to anger, angst and self-destruction. And that perhaps is one of the things that makes her so real and her presence so palpable so long after her death. Plath openly and brazenly wrote about the myriad dark energies in life that we all recognize but often pretend not to.
In the repetitive rhythm of daily habits, she felt both elated by and frustrated with her motherly duties. Her husband, in the meantime, continued frequenting literary events they used to attend together. He carried on with his life as it had been, writing his poetry, making new contacts, fortifying his fame. Perhaps fatherhood was not as great a rupture in a man’s life as motherhood was in a woman’s. Or perhaps, she suspected, it was just their own unique situation.
Inasmuch as babies were powerful metaphors in her poems, poems were babies to Sylvia Plath. When she spoke about her works that were not yet complete, she called them “unborn babies.” She even described how her poems smiled at her, how “their little foreheads bulged with concentration,” and how they changed every day, moving their tiny fingers and toes. She was the mother to not only two children but a thousand poems. And there were times when they were all hungry and crying at once, craving her attention and compassion, and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t keep them all happy.
Her split with her husband was a major turning point in her life. After the emotional breakdown, she decided to put herself back together in a more indomitable way, to reinvent herself, to become a brand-new woman. She was ambitious. She was talented. She was alone. Often she started the day at four in the morning—the one or two hours that she had to herself before the children woke up were the most precious time of the day. The poems she wrote during those months are perhaps her brightest—such as “Medusa,” “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus,” where she shocked her readers by saying, “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” At the kitchen table, in the bathroom or in bed under the covers, she wrote wherever and whenever she could, scribbling furiously in her extra-careful hand, at an incredible speed—as if she were racing against God, against the men she loved and loved no more, against her numerous shortcomings, each of which she despised.
There is a poem she called “For a Fatherless Son.” It is about a father who has left his home, his wife and his children. There is more sorrow in this poem than resentment, more surrender than fight. One can sense that something changed in her. For it was not quite rage or rebellion she experienced but a feeling of perpetual sadness. She spoke of the emptiness that was left in her children’s lives after their father’s departure, an
absence that grew beside them like a tree
that they would have to learn to live with.
That was the stage in her life when she desired to be many things at the same time, and excel equally in each. A mother, a housewife, a writer, a poet . . . She wanted everything to happen immediately and flawlessly. Perhaps she was also in love with her creations. She stubbornly retained the belief that she could be an ideal mother and an excellent poet: the perfect Poet-Mother. It was not an easy combination, especially in the climate of the 1950s, when everyone thought a woman had to make an either-or choice. She refused to choose.
Nevertheless, her effort to become “superwoman” wore Sylvia Plath down. Before long she noticed that she was pushing herself too hard. When she made it to one place, she discovered she had skipped over another; when she fixed one thing, something else was falling apart. Slowly but surely, she realized she could not be perfect. That is why her poem “The Munich Mannequins” begins like this:
“Perfection is terrible, / It cannot have children.”
With the money she got from literary prizes or grants she would pay for a nanny. While writing her first and only novel,
The Bell Jar,
in an attempt to establish a deeper connection with her past and soul, she deliberately prodded the places of fear in herself—fear of sanity, of being like thousands of others; and fear of insanity, of being so fundamentally different there was no hope of mingling with society. She wrote in detail about mental breakdown, electroconvulsive therapy and the suffocating monotony of modern life: “To the person in the bell jar, blank and stopped as a dead baby, the world is the bad dream.” When the book was published in January 1963, readers were divided and Plath herself was deeply distressed by the tone of the reviews it received.
As she ran out of steam, unable to meet the extremely high demands she had placed on herself, Plath decided that she would rather die than live in the way it had been prescribed for her by others. The creative person with unbridled passion that she was, she wanted everything or nothing at all. . . . She had tried suicide before, an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of twenty. Yet at the time she had wanted both to die at her own hands and to be rescued. This time she wanted only the former.
It was a cold morning, February 11, 1963, one that reeked of tedium and induced a sense of isolation. After checking on her two children in their beds, and leaving milk and bread on their bedside table, she closed their door and sealed the cracks. She went into the kitchen, turned on the oven’s gas and took a dozen sleeping pills, swallowing them one by one. Then she stuck her head in the oven, and as the gas licked at her face, she fell into eternal sleep. She was only thirty years old.
To this day, Plath’s legendary heritage is unsurpassed. In Turkey, I have met numerous female college students who admire her work so much they organize special reading nights on campuses for her. In America, there is a colorful, intriguing blog called “Playgroup with Sylvia Plath.” In Germany, I once talked to a Filipino woman who had named her daughter Ariel after her. In France, at an international women’s organization, I met a chic businesswoman who asked us all to “toast to Sylvia.”
No other literary suicide has been talked and written about so much. No other woman writer, after her death, turned into such an icon beyond place and time.
The Midnight Coup d’État
O
ne night toward the end of the summer, I hear voices in my sleep. A door opens and closes somewhere in the house, footsteps on the stairs, whispers in the dark. Thinking I’m having a nightmare, I toss and turn in bed. Then someone pokes me on the shoulder, shouting, “Hey, wake up!”
I try to ignore the voice, hoping the moment will pass, as all moments tend to do, but there follows a second command, this time louder.
“Get up! Wake up already!”
I open my eyes and find Miss Ambitious Chekhovian literally right in front of my nose. She has climbed up my shoulder and crawled her way to my face, where she now stands on my chin, legs and arms akimbo. She is looking at me with a kind of triumph I find more puzzling than disturbing in my present state. Her makeup is perfect, her bun of hair is tight, as always. Even at this hour she looks prim and proper. It takes me an extra second to notice she is wearing a military uniform with a badge of rank on her shoulders. Before I get a chance to ask her why on earth she has dressed up like that, she speaks in a tone I can barely recognize.
“There is a matter of great importance. You better get up!”
“Well, can’t it wait till morning?” I grumble. “I was sleeping, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“No, it cannot possibly wait,” she says. “The best time for a military takeover is the wee hours of the night, when everyone is asleep and resistance is slim.”
I sit up in bed and stare at her, stunned, like an animal caught in the headlights. “What did you say?”
To my dazed expression she responds with a glacial look. In all these years we have known each other, I have never seen her like this before.
“As of this moment we have declared a coup d’état,” she says. “The regime in this house has changed.”
What on earth is she talking about? My hair standing on end, anxiety bubbling up in my throat, I try to make sense of the situation.
“In two minutes we expect you in the living room. Don’t be late, the committee won’t like that,” says Miss Ambitious Chekhovian, and leaves.
Still groggy from sleep, I put on a shawl, wash my face and go downstairs. A surprising scene awaits me when I step into the living room. The members of the Choir of Discordant Voices are there, all of them frowning. The tension in the room is so thick, I can almost touch it. In the corner the CD player is blasting the kind of songs I have never heard under this roof. They sound disquietingly aggressive, like anthems of a country that has waged war on all its neighbors and all the neighbors of its neighbors.
I see Miss Highbrowed Cynic first. She is sitting inside the fruit bowl on the table, dangling her legs as she puffs away on her cigarette. I don’t usually allow the finger-women to smoke indoors, but something tells me this is not the right moment to remind her. There is an unusual flicker in her gaze, an odd furtiveness, which I can’t quite put my finger on. She is wearing a military-style jacket over her hippie dress, a wacky combination that makes me dizzy.