An Interview with Sylvia Plath's Ghost

Sylvia and I sat across from one another in Ruby’s Diner at the end of the Huntington Beach Pier. I ordered two diet cherry cokes, and when the waitress brought them to the table Sylvia said huffily that ghosts don’t eat or drink, and then she stared grim-faced out the window at the fishermen. After a few minutes of staring she turned to me, grim face erased, and remarked in a sweet little voice that she wished she could remember what fresh mackerel pan-fried in butter and olive oil smelled like.

I didn’t want to hurry her, but I was worried about taking up a table with nothing but cokes in front of us. It was eleven in the morning and the sun was out, which meant we only had a half hour before the lunch crush began and people began to line up at the outside desk to put their names on the list for a table. If there’s anything that makes me blotch-faced in embarrassment it’s inconveniencing anyone, so I made up my mind to talk fast, get in as much of an interview as I could before the manager came over and asked us if we were going to order something for lunch, which would not only have turned me blotch-faced, but also incoherent. I tend to get very embarrassed when anyone questions anything I’ve done or implies that I’m not being fair or good or decent.

Me: Shall we start?

SP: Yes. But I won’t answer any questions to do with suicide or orphaned children. Take it or leave it.

At the utterance of the word “children” she seemed to lose herself for a moment, but only for a moment. She quickly regained her unsmiling, emotionless pose and didn’t even appear to notice the little boy at the booth to our right rolling a cardboard Ruby’s Diner motorcycle across the table. She kept her head turned toward me and aimed her laser-beam gaze at a spot somewhere in the vicinity of my right eyebrow. No glassy-eyed reveries, no hint that she would rather be somewhere else. One thing I have to say, for a woman in her seventies she looked pretty good, almost as good as she did in the picture on the cover of the book, Ariel’s Gift, where Ted is holding her around the waist, a stubbly grin eating into his cheeks, a glaze of impatience in his eyes, and Sylvia is leaning slightly to the right, her tawny hair in an adorable wave, a teeth-baring smile spanning her plump cheeks. She was even wearing the same white blouse and print peasant skirt. The only difference that I could tell was that now her former ruddily healthy complexion had the pale sheen of someone who has spent too much time indoors.

Me: First, I have to tell you how much I admire you. I’ve read everything ever written by you or about you. You can’t know what The Bell Jar meant to me. I read it over and over and over. All I could think of was how much alike we were, kindred spirits held hostage in a culture that repressed women. And then at the end of your life, that remarkable poem of victory.

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

SP: And do you know what I remember? Cooking. I was an A-plus cook. An epicure. In all things. Writing, cooking, flower arranging, interior decorating, fashion… I knew exactly how long my hems should be and whether a headband was better than a barrette. I never advertised any of it. No one liked a know-it-all woman in those days. Women were supposed to be modest and unassuming and were vilified for any display of overreaching or self-aggrandizement. I tried to repress my individuality, but it was a struggle. I had none of my mother’s selfless mercy. But I learned. Oh, how I learned. I broke myself in two. I became chameleonic. With strangers I was prim and well behaved unless speared with sharp knives. With my mother I was alternately loving and vicious. I hated her for not understanding. I mainly hated her because my father was dead instead of her.

Me: I didn’t want my mother dead, but I certainly loved her and hated her at the same time. She was disappointed that she had two difficult daughters instead of two ordinary sons. She would have known how to raise ordinary sons.

SP: What surprises me now is how many of us there were, all of us fighting our natures, hiding, pretending, acting as if everything was so fucking perfect. Anyway, I like your intensity. That’s why I agreed to the interview. You’re the only one who’s managed to snare an interview with me since my death, although a lot have tried.

Me: Intensity. Hmm. I appreciate that. Anyway, I can’t believe I’m here talking to you. Do you know that when I read The Bell Jar I went crazy with relief because I wasn’t the only one who felt the way I did? Would you believe that at 15 I wore pancake makeup and slept with steel curlers in my hair and went with my girlfriend to the 49th Street Corral and danced with strange men in cowboy boots who called me Babe and that I never told anyone that I got straight A’s in school?

SP: Wasn’t the struggle to be a goody-two-shoes a fucking mess?

Me: It was. I look at my daughter and my granddaughters and marvel at the opportunities they have. There’s a whole history of women’s struggle that they don’t know anything about, a blacking out of what I once thought would be a communal memory.

SP: Have you ever had shock therapy, where wires are glued to your head and then they zap you with electricity and it feels as if you’ve been hit by lightning?

Me: Never have.

SP: You’ve never felt as though your skin had holes as big as thimbles and that every day they grew a little bit larger until your body felt as though it had turned into a big pit full of rocks and gravel?

Me: Well. Sometimes. Once in a while.

SP: You see what you just did? You pretended to be crazy so as not to hurt my feelings. What a fuckingly stupid thing to do. Unsaid words bottle up inside and in time come out in ways you might not like. Never mind, I can see you don’t know what I’m talking about. No one ever did. That was the problem, the reason I wrote all that poetry, I was trying to understand what was wrong with me, trying to explain myself to myself, and there was all that oblivion just a few feet away that I could crawl into if the pain got too intense. I vacillated between the two: oblivion and poetry. Which poem was your favorite?

Me: Should I recite it?

SP: Of course.

Me: Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

SP: Lovely. You know, at the end when I had finished the Ariel poems I knew I was a genius. No one could take that away from me. A goddamn genius, and most of my poems were rejected before my suicide. Can you believe the stupidity of publishers? Ted always said they prefer their heroes and heroines laid out on their biers. Or maybe I said it. It’s hard to remember.

She had a dribble of spit on her upper lip. She licked it away, shook her head and sighed.

SP: I’ve been told that my fans keep defacing Ted’s grave.

Me: They blame him for your death. Do you?

SP: You know what they say. All men are dogs. Don’t look so stricken. I didn’t say that. I said you know what they say. There’s a difference. My death was perdurable, a dripping of water on granite. Who can say which drip bore away the last scrape?

It was then I noticed the scar on her cheek. In 1952 she took sleeping pills, crawled beneath her mother’s house and was found three days later, unconscious but alive. It was a minimal scar, an exotic scar, a scar that made me think of love bites and self mutilation. I had the sudden urge to confess something I had never confessed to anyone. I stumbled around at first, unsure how she would receive it. She had the reputation of being insensitive when confronted by the problems of others, and when cornered had been known to draw blood with her rapier tongue. I decided to risk it.

Me: I have to tell you something.

SP: Well, smash bang, whose interview is this?

Me: Sorry?

SP: Never mind. Go ahead.

Me: With the recession and all, publishers are firing editors and cutting book lists. I’ve had seven books published and suddenly I’m facing a brick wall. Sometimes I think I should just give up, throw out the file cabinets and computer and take up ballroom dancing. Sometimes I feel the pressure to do something rash. Sometimes standing at the edge of a cliff, I have the weird feeling that I want to jump. I don’t, of course, because I have excellent impulse control. Still, just thinking about it frightens me.

SP: I told you no references to suicide.

Me: You brought it up first. You said the poems were rejected before your suicide.

There it was, the rapier flick of tongue, the darting irises, the looming siege. And then suddenly she recovered, lowered her eyes momentarily, let emotion seep away.

SP: I’m not in the mood to argue with you.

Me: But you used the word suicide first. Don’t say you didn’t. Nothing I ever read about you said you were a liar.

SP: All right. I used the word suicide.

Me: Thank you.

SP: Back to the poem. If you were to give it a grade, what would it be? I don’t even know you and I want your approval. That’s really sick, isn’t it? Anyway, what grade would you give me?

Me: An A. And as long as we’re talking about suicide…

BP: We weren’t.

Me: You broke the agreement.

SP: Oh, please.

Me: Why did you kill yourself?

BP: Death lived behind my eyes all my life. It winked at me -- a leering wink, a knowing wink. I couldn’t shut it off.

Me: But there were periods when you were okay. Was it like a meteorite? You were fine one day and then the next day you woke up and everything was destroyed, so you said to yourself it’s time to go?

SP: I was always in pain.

Me: And all that moaning over your father’s death, writing poetry about it, I never understood that part at all. My father didn’t die, but he might as well have. He didn’t speak to me once I was old enough to know what a fraud he was. Not a word. Not a sentence.

SP: And you think that didn’t affect you?

Me: I don’t know. I don’t write about him. I don’t think about him any more. I’ve excised him from my life. Your father was in every sentence you ever wrote. And then you married a man whose betrayal was like your father’s death.

SP: You think I married Ted because of my father?

Me: I didn’t say that.

SP: Well, I didn’t. Do you know how hard it was to find a man who didn’t care that I was as talented as he was?

Me: I found one.

SP: Well, lah de dah, lucky you.

Me: I didn’t mean to upset you.

SP: Look, this interview was your idea, and I don’t even know who the hell you are. Who the hell are you?

Me: I told you, a girl just like you.

SP: We’re no longer girls. And for Chrissakes, would you just speak your mind, say what you think and be done with it? I know you think you could have lived better than I did, that you could have figured it out. Well, maybe you could and maybe you couldn’t, but I didn’t have a Bell Jar to read, and all that fucking poetry I wrote and all that love that I poured into everything with such intensity that it made me loonily, screamingly, frustratingly insane because nothing was ever as perfect as I wanted it to be, nothing could ever be as perfect as I wanted it to be, with a father who died and left me and a mother who hovered and cooed and drove me crazier than I otherwise would have been.

Me: But taping doors shut and putting your head in the oven isn’t something one does on the spur of the moment.

SP: You just said you sometimes feel like jumping off a cliff.

Me: But I don’t.

SP: Have you any idea what it’s like to be so out of control and know how out of control you are, to feel as though you are on a sled going ninety miles an hour and no one can hear you screaming and you’re afraid you’re going to crash and die, and you want to crash and die? Do you?

Me: I absolutely, positively was enraptured by your poetry.

SP: Enraptured? What kind of a stupid word is that to use? Are you trying to make me angry?

Me: I’m trying to identify with you. We’re the same, you and I. Apart from the talent and fame thing, that is. Both of us children of the fifties. But I didn’t do what you did, and I don’t think having a father die and disliking your mother and even having a husband walk out on you – my God, men are all over the place, better men than he was -- and if you had just had a few psychotropic pills you would probably have stopped wanting to off yourself, and wouldn’t have scarred your children for life. How could you have calmly left milk and bread out for them to eat when they woke up in the morning without a mother? How could you have done such a horrendous thing? It infuriates me that you did that, infuriates me that we lost you so young. It just blazingly, fuckingly, maddeningly infuriates me.

I had to take a few moments to let my face unblotch and my pulse simmer down. I was surprised that Sylvia seemed unaffected by my outburst except for a small twitch at the corner of her mouth.

Me: Well, it’s been incredible meeting you. And before you go I thought maybe you could give me a few quotes that my blog-readers might enjoy, those who’ve read The Bell Jar and your poetry and have lost a father and hate their mothers and have been betrayed by their husbands and…

SP: Carpe diem.

And that was it, both of us now on the verge of tears, sitting there while the tables filled up and the manager glared at us and the fishermen on the other side of the window cast silvery threads toward the sun.

Nina Vida copyright 2009