Writing for the New Yorker by Green Fiona;

Author:Green, Fiona;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

The exaggerated tone and self-deprecating silliness of this passage, mixing images of transfiguration with virginal deflowering bears comparison with Plath’s account of her first New Yorker acceptance: ‘the realisation of ten years of hopeful wishes and waits (and subsequent rejections)’. In both cases she imagines her arrival along the lines of sexual gratification and material dissolution, becoming weightless and insubstantial, a floating ‘nimbus’ and a tiny ‘bean’. The similarities between these two journal entries highlight the erotic aspect of Plath’s attraction to the glossy magazine and the perfect surface in which she might delete and re-make herself. In both instances, she creates a narrative set-piece which depicts the surrender of self-sacrifice. In both cases she juxtaposes The New Yorker’s smoothness, sophistication and ‘thin[ness]’ with a release from the ‘podgy’ flab of everyday life. As with the ‘Sunday lamb’, her self-sacrifice leads to renewal and rebirth.

Taking up space

On 24 February 1961, Moss sent Plath a first-reading agreement with The New Yorker together with a very welcome hundred dollar signed bonus and a cost of living agreement.33 Between February 1961 and February 1963, she sent him seventy-three poems (including nearly every poem that would go into Ariel) and he rejected sixty-four, publishing only ‘Tulips’ in the spring of 1962 and ‘Blackberrying’ in the autumn. When Plath died in February 1963, Moss still had seven of her poems in reserve. After her death, he sought permission to publish them in a single issue, which contained no other verse. They appeared on an otherwise bare double-page spread under a heading that read simply ‘Seven Poems’. At the bottom right corner of the right-hand page was Sylvia Plath’s name and the bracketed dates of her short life: (1932–1963).34 It was unprecedented for a double-page spread to be devoted entirely to showcasing a single poet’s work. The startling visual effect together with the dates at the bottom sent a clear message. Readers had no choice but to construe the poems within the narrative of Sylvia Plath’s life and premature death.

The poems were ‘Two Campers in Cloud Country’, ‘The Elm Speaks’, ‘Mystic’, ‘Amnesiac’, ‘Mirror’, ‘Among the Narcissi’ and ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’. For Plath, who had in 1958 fixated on the ‘shiny white New Yorker space around [her] two column poem’, the appearance of seven works surrounded by the luxury of empty space would no doubt have seemed a triumph. The double-page spread of ‘Seven Poems’ was not only free of cartoons, advertisements and other New Yorker distractions, but was also positioned between two short stories, so acting itself as a kind of story, and not a ‘place for the eye’ to rest while perusing a longer work. The bracketed dates of Plath’s birth and death did not give any sense of when the individual poems were written, nor of their order of composition. Readers would not have known that only ‘Mystic’ was written in 1963, close to the time of Plath’s suicide. In this context, even a comparatively early poem such as ‘The Elm Speaks’ (April 1962) might be taken as a suicide note.

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