Fiction about real historical figures can divide readers, I think, presenting a legitimate concern about what a novel might bring to a life that has already been well documented. When the historical figure in question is someone as famous as Sylvia Plath then the divide becomes ever sharper – is it possible to take apart the legendary quality of her life to say something real and significant? Sylvia Plath occupies similar imaginative territory in literary culture to Virginia Woolf and, to some extent, Jane Austen, all writers who bucked the constraints of womanhood, placed their flags in an exclusive canon of creative groundbreakers and lived lives of fascinating intensity. As such they are lightning rods for the creativity of other writers. Austen is the most open to reinvention; her work has lost all barriers in a torrent of continuation novels, biographical novels, and modern day rewrites. It seems that no one flinches at the liberties taken with her life and novels. Woolf has survived thus far with most of her barriers intact – thankfully no one has yet had the bright idea to create a crime fiction series in which she plays detective, or picked up the tale of Lily Briscoe’s life in old age, though I fear the time may come. And Plath sits somewhere in the middle, with a few pockets of open questions tentatively available for picking. She’s more approachable than Woolf, suicidal in a way that hints at unimagined depths lurking beneath the shiny American carapace, with Ted as complicated catalyst and young children for poignancy. A poet, therefore an otherworldly creature, fugitive and intriguing. Biography might be exhausted, but now fiction comes to toy with Plath, seeking iterations that don’t offend the purists or endorse the gossip, or turn her into a person she was not.
Helen Bain’s debut novel, The Daffodil Days, mostly manages to pull off the difficult trick of doing something original with Plath’s life that avoids the well-trodden biographical paths. It’s essentially a series of linked short stories, each of which focuses on a person (some real, some imagined) who crossed paths with the Hughes’ over the course of the year they lived in North Tawton. During this year Plath was pregnant with, and gave birth to, her son, Nicholas, while Ted Hughes embarked on his affair with Assia Wevill that would break up their marriage. It was also the year that Plath’s poetry hit a simmering zenith as she wrote the poems published in her posthumous collection, Ariel. A few weeks beyond the end of this narrative, she would take her own life. Helen Bains enters into the heads of a range of interested bystanders, from Plath’s charlady, the Bendix representative who comes to explain her new washing machine to her, and a dazzled young assistant in a dress shop, to the critic and poet, Al Alvarez and her friend Clarissa Roche, anxious about Sylvia’s manic creativity but distracted by her own new baby. Plath comes to us in glimpses and vignettes, necessarily presenting different facets of herself in these different contexts. The emphasis is as much on these mostly ordinary people as it is on Plath, with the result that the book is as much about a time and a place – small town Devon in 1961-2 – as it is on a literary superstar.
What makes this book is the writing. It’s superb. Helen Bains has obviously done her research and enters into the occupations and preoccupations of her characters with a level of detail that imparts not just vivid realism but a kind of sensory hallucination. I was in the church with Bill and the other bellringers as they practised for an important local competition, hacking along the Devon lanes with former WREN Miss Redwood, and an over eager Sylvia, desperate to master her horse, an extra witness in the recording suite at the BBC with the unwillingly pregnant producer, Stella, astounded by this unknown poet’s eloquence as she records her essay in one take. That chapter at the BBC was one of my favourites, as was the one in which Sylvia goes to the surgery of Dr Webb to have the top of her thumb sewn back on. Equally brilliant is the New Year’s Eve party held by the bank manager and his socially pushy wife, which Ted and Sylvia escape to hear the bellringers herald the advent of 1962. In these instances, Bain pulls off the ambitious challenge of taking her reader swiftly and effortlessly into the intense life of a stranger and offering a perspective on the Hughes’ marriage that hasn’t been attempted before. Sylvia Plath is depicted in a pure, clear light, her social confidence, her good teeth, her sudden bouts of temper when things aren’t to her liking, her genuine yet unfocused warmth, her fierce attention to detail, the absolute commitment to her poetry, her fits of selfishness, her shining braid of dark hair, all meld into a striking and utterly believable character.
The novel is not without problems, however. Sylvia Plath’s story is told backwards, beginning with Nancy Axworthy cleaning the house that Plath has abandoned in favour of returning to London, and beginning with the Hughes together at the cathedral in Reims, full of bright optimism about the new life they are excited to embark upon. This makes for an exquisitely poignant ending. But when I looked backwards from this chapter at the rest of the book I had read, I could see no clear progression for Sylvia towards her fate. Those early chapters only really hint at Sylvia battling demons, and the middle section remains mostly quiet about what must have been a chaotic time in the Hughes’ marriage. We have only the doctor’s brief references to an unsuccessful attempt to talk sense into Ted Hughes and some mentions of the terrible pneumonia Sylvia suffered over the late summer. I think I have a fairly good picture of Sylvia Plath, having read two biographies and Janet Malcolm’s brilliant investigation into the biographical industry surrounding her, The Silent Woman (one of my favorite books). But even so, I found it hard to piece together what was happening in her life. I don’t think you could read this novel, knowing nothing about Plath, and get any sense of the larger picture. And when, like me, you do feel you know something about her, it seems like quite a lot of work to pick that famous narrative out. When I sat and thought about this, it felt dangerously close to undermining the whole premise of the novel. What would I be reading this novel for, if not for insight into Sylvia Plath? There’s neither motivation nor progression to the stories without the fuel of her tragedy pushing you forward into deeper understanding, and that understanding is nowhere to be seen. This is partly due to the external perspectives that are taken on her. We see Plath’s powerful character, but are only told about her fragility and vulnerability, which then become harder to discern.
And yet, I can only tell you that I read this novel enjoying every moment of it. The energy of the prose is so good – calm, steady, thoughtful energy, and the writing is clean as a sharpened knife. Perhaps the point of Plath’s presence here is to inspire Helen Bain to create a vehicle that is worthy of carrying these fragments of her life. To give us the feel of, and a feeling for, the texture of the time and place in which she lived. For wider significance we have to look to the randomness of chance that throws disparate people together, creating an unexpected impact on their experience, shaping them in large ways and small. It’s undeniably a way of approaching Sylvia Plath that literally slides in the back door, avoiding the overbearing structure of myth surrounding her history. For all these achievements, I loved it.
