Elisa Gabbert Reflects on Sylvia Plath's Prose
At the Paris Review, Elisa Gabbert dips into Sylvia Plath's recently recovered short story, by way of her quintessential novel, The Bell Jar. Gabbert explains, "[w]hen I heard that a previously unpublished Sylvia Plath short story would appear in January 2019, I requested an electronic galley and then let the file sit unopened in my inbox for several weeks. I felt apprehensive, even frightened of it." From there:
I love Plath’s poetry, but what if I didn’t like this story? I read The Bell Jar so long ago, when I was fourteen or so, that I couldn’t remember anything about it. But I read The Catcher in the Rye at around the same time, and I remember that book clearly. Had I only meant to read The Bell Jar, and never finished it? Oh God, I thought, what if none of Plath’s fiction is good?
I decided to read The Bell Jar again before addressing the new old short story. The first, striking sentence—already suffused with death—gave me hope: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” By the end of the first paragraph, I was nervous again: “It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.” Then, a hard return and a single-sentence paragraph: “I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.” Plath’s journals and letters are often unintentionally funny in their absurd dramatics—in 1956, after lending some books to a friend who returned them with underlining in pencil, she wrote in her journal, “I was furious, feeling my children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien.” (I actually threw back my head laughing, alone on my couch.) The silliness of calling being executed “the worst thing in the world,” a kind of understatement by overstatement, is rendered sillier by giving it its own paragraph. Oh God, I thought, Sylvia Plath doesn’t understand how paragraphs work.