"I / Have a self to recover": the restored Ariel

Literary Review, Summer, 2005 by Lee Upton

Ariel: The Restored Edition is Sylvia Plath's "last manuscript as she left it," Frieda Hughes writes in the volume's foreword. The manuscript of forty poems was found on Plath's desk in a spring binder after her suicide on February 11, 1963. The Ariel that we know is Ted Hughes's edited version, which appeared in 1965 in the United Kingdom and, the following year, in the United States. Hughes took out about a dozen poems from the original manuscript and added about a dozen poems (the U. K. and U. S. versions differ) and was criticized in some quarters as if his editing amounted to suppression. Frieda Hughes, the daughter of Plath and Hughes, does not suggest that the restored version supplants her father's edited version of Ariel, and calls the publication of the original manuscript an attempt to release Plath's art again, an "art" that, unlike her life, "was not to fall." She concludes: "Each version has its own significance though the two histories are one."

Ariel: The Restored Edition is a visually remarkable book. Plath's name and the title appear in red on the jacket with what appears to be a facsimile mock-up of the original manuscript held together by a twisted rubber band. The cross-outs on the cover show us Plath's title as it evolved from The Rabbit Catcher to A Birthday Present to Daddy (before it became Ariel). Included are a foreword, the text of the restored Ariel, a facsimile of the book manuscript and of drafts of the titular poem and "The Swarm," Plath's notes for her BBC reading, and a section of notes on editorial differences (often regarding punctuation) between the original manuscript and the poems as they appeared in The Collected Poems. The facsimile pages of handwriting show Plath's three styles of cross-outs: light wavy lines across whole stanzas, straight emphatic lines, and multiple cross-outs as if she wished to blacken for all time an earlier choice.

But it is the typescript of Ariel, waiting for a publisher, that may be most moving. Here is the work taken as far as Plath could take it at the time, assembled, in humble typescript, ready to make its mark. With another writer such an assemblage might gain only the interest of scholars. But Ariel: The Restored Edition is meant for a broader audience. Plath's popularity has not been limited to a cultural moment or to the way her suicide was turned into publicity. Her significance emerges from her vitality as an artist. In her poems a sensuous, explosive inner life mattered.

To read the restored version is to encounter a book that is more furious, more unwieldy, and more repetitive than the Ariel we have had available for over forty years. The original manuscript that Plath left behind opens outward figuratively and narratively by concluding with its sequence of poems framed around bee-keeping. The collection's rage is not domesticated, its power over voices asserted in the act of release--to free the hive of the self into power: "I / Have a self to recover, a queen."

Neither version shocks (what can shock us now?), and it is unlikely that the restored version will put to rest some readers' wish to possess an iconic image of the author as if her manipulation of metaphor became reportage about her domestic situation. Strong art inevitably lives multiple lives. The reputations of artists whose art draws upon some recognizable elements of autobiography are more likely to be pressed into service as magnifying mirrors for readers' obsessions. A poet who makes violent transformations may find such transformations visited upon her reputation--however unjustly--as if style is the woman. The particular tragedy in Plath's case is that readers' obsessions led them to vilify Hughes and, in consequence, to cause pain to the children left in his care.

What is clear is that Hughes made a remarkable book out of the manuscript he found on his wife's desk. If we study his choices for omissions, many may strike us as primarily aesthetic. The faint tropes of space in "Thalidomide" echo too closely those of "Nick and the Candlestick." As a consequence, the former, lesser poem, is struck from Ariel. "A Secret," "The Jailor," and "Stopped Dead" use exclamatory lines and rhythms that are deployed more forcefully in the brilliant "Daddy" and in context dilute our sense of the uniqueness of "Daddy" as a master poem. (But surely "The Rabbit Catcher" and "Magi" should have been published in the first version to appear. Plath had even considered titling the book after "The Rabbit Catcher," and its images augment those of other poems in the collection.) The original arrangement of the remaining poems is not drastically altered. "Daddy" stays in its little Electra triangle between "The Rival" and "You're."

It is the tone of completion that differs most markedly between the versions. In Ariel: The Restored Edition the implicit narrative elevates toward renewal through its sequence of bee-keeping poems. Admittedly, the bee-keeping poems have less of the quickening vitality or the audacious urgency of much of her other work. Nevertheless, the sequence creates a strong progression outward for the manuscript, enacting a moment in which new effective orders may be seized and released from within. Plath's original version concludes with the line, "The bees are flying. They taste the spring." The 1965 Ariel follows that line with the early poem "The Hanging Man." Here is the first line of that poem: "By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me." Could there be a more unmistakable sign of a dramatic shift in agency? In Hughes's edited version agency is outside the self, and the persona battles against implacable force.