The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark

Episode Date: October 16, 2021

Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography • “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant daughter of Wellesley, Massachusetts who had poetic ambition from a very young age and was an accomplished, published writer of poems and stories even before she became a star English student at Smith College in the early 1950s. Determined not to read Plath's work as if her every act, from childhood on, was a harbinger of her tragic fate, Clark evokes a culture in transition, in the shadow of the atom bomb and the Holocaust, as she explores Plath's world: her early relationships and determination not to become a conventional woman and wife; her conflicted ties to her well-meaning, widowed mother; her troubles at the hands of an unenlightened mental-health industry; her Cambridge years and thunderclap meeting with Ted Hughes, a marriage of true minds that would change the course of poetry in English; and much more. Clark's clear-eyed portraits of Hughes, his lover Assia Wevill, and other demonized players in the arena of Plath's suicide promotes a deeper understanding of her final days, with their outpouring of first-rate poems. Along with illuminating readings of the poems themselves, Clark's meticulous, compassionate research brings us closer than ever to the spirited woman and visionary artist who blazed a trail that still lights the way for women poets the world over

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks it's voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming here with another great podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in thanks for being here be sure to, as always, subscribe

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Go to goodreads.com, Fortune's Christmas. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Also go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. You can see all the cool stuff that we're doing. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of

the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well. So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold. But the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages. You can take advantage of an ordering the book and for the same price of what you can get it from someplace

else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies that we've taken and given away, uh, different collectors, limited edition, custom made number book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beacons ofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out, or order the book wherever fine books are sold. Today we have an amazing guest on the show. She's the finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. She wrote this great book.

It came out on October 27, 2020. It's called Red Comet, The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath by Heather Clark. And she's going to be hanging out with us today to tell us about this amazing woman and her amazing book. Heather Clark earned her bachelor's degree in English literature from Harvard University and her doctorate in English from Oxford University. Rewards include a national endowment for the humanities, public scholarhip, a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York, and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship at the Eccles Center for American Studies, British Library. Welcome to the show, Heather. How are you? Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for coming. Congratulations on the book. These are always fun to take and have. Give us your plugs for people who want to find you on the interwebs. Sure. I have a website, heatherclarkauthor.com. And on Twitter, my Twitter handle is at Plath Biography. Excuse me, Plath Biography. And I'm on Instagram, heatherclarkauthor. There you go.

There you go. We got your book here. And this is an Instagram, Heather Clark author. There you go. There you go. We got your book here. And this is an amazing thick book. It's over a thousand pages. I thought I had a hard time just writing up to 200. This thing is quite detailed on this young lady. What motivated you to write this book? There were two reasons that I wanted to write the book. And I guess the first is that I was angry about the way

that Sylvia Plath, who was an American poet and fiction writer who was born in 1932, died in 1963. I was annoyed at the way that she had been pathologized and made to be this sort of cliche of the historical woman writer. And I was annoyed by the way that most people knew Sylvia Plath almost better for her death, in a way. She died by suicide in 1963, than for her brilliant trailblazing poems. And often when I would talk about Sylvia Plath, that was always the first thing that was her suicide and her battles with mental illness. And it just bothered me. And I felt like we needed to refocus our attention to her art rather than her death. And I felt previous biographies, and there have been many,

mine is I think the 11th biography. Yeah. And some of them are good. Some of them are not so good. But there was this tendency to, again, focus on the suicide. Some of the biographies start with her suicide. So I wanted to get away from that and read her life practical reasons to write a new biography of Sylvia Plath. All of her surviving letters were published in 2018. So that was a massive two volume edition, 3000 letters, anyone can read them, including really vulnerable, searing letters that she wrote toward the end of her life to her psychiatrist that were just incredibly honest and raw. So I was able to take advantage of that new material. And also her husband, Ted Hughes, a lot of his archival papers were deposited in the early 2000s. I knew there was more to mine there in her husband's archive. And then the last thing is that serendipitously

in late 2019, like in the ninth hour as I was finishing up the book, this incredible archive came to light. It was owned by a woman named Harriet Rosenstein, and she had started a biography of Sylvia Plath in the 70s, but just never finished it. He had interviewed scores of people who knew Sylvia Plath a few years after Sylvia Plath's death. So people who had passed away, right, in the intervening years that I couldn't interview. So it was just this treasure trove of anecdotes and interviews with friends and family and doctors. And it was incredible. And that came to light in late 2019. So I was able, thankfully, to include a lot of that new information. There are a few different reasons.

It sounds great. Most artists are tortured. They have something that maybe drives them, that tortures them and stuff. Who was, for those who don't know, who was Sylvia Plath? Yeah. So Sylvia Plath was an American writer. She is most widely known for her poetry collection, Ariel, which was published in 1965, and also her novel, The Bell Jar, because it's one of those books that a lot of people read in high school. So that's probably her most well-known work. But she was born in 1932 in Boston. She was right from the start, she wanted to be a writer. She published her first poem when she was eight in a Boston newspaper. She mastered all of these poetic forms when she was a child. She was always

the best student in the class. She was just incredible in terms of her academic prowess. She went to Smith College, where again, she was the star of the English department. She was publishing in newspapers and magazines at a pretty early age. And then she had a breakdown in the summer of 1953 when she went to New York City to intern for Mademoiselle magazine. And that's the story in the bell jar. That's the bell jar based on her breakdown and subsequent recovery at McLean Hospital. And Sylvia Plath is somebody who had electroshock therapy when she was at, which is a very famous psychiatric institution outside

of Boston. And she draws upon that in the bell jar, and it's really harrowing and disturbing. Wow. And so she really suffered from depression at that time in her life. She got better. She went on to, she studied in England. She went to Cambridge on a Fulbright fellowship. She married the poet Ted Hughes when she was over in Cambridge. They returned to America, established themselves as poets, and then they eventually left America for Britain. And she had two children. The marriage started to break down in pretty terrible ways in the early 60s. And then they broke up in summer of 62. And then Sylvia Plath died by suicide in

February of 1963. That's a thumbnail, a real thumbnail sketch. Okay. So I don't know how much that pertains to the overall arcing of the book, but do you want to give us an overall arc of the book and what are the details or how you laid it out? Yeah, I didn't really do anything fancy in terms of stylistic innovation. I wish that I had been able to. The biography, I started it thinking, oh, maybe I'll shake up the genre a little bit and I'll mix up the time periods or I'll do it by theme. And I just realized the easiest way for me was to start at the very beginning and end at the very end. And I think maybe that is helpful for the reader as well, because it did turn out to be a very long book. And I just there hadn't been a long biography of Sylvia Plath, like a long, deeply researched biography. And all of the ones that existed were 300 pages or under, maybe a little more, which is fine. I have nothing against

concise biographies. I think they're great. But I just felt like she was such an important writer. I think she's one of the most important writers of the 20th century. And I just felt like she deserved that really detailed treatment and she deserved to take up that three inches on the shelf. So I spend most of my time in the book just charting her life, progress and going back to this question all the time of how did she become the writer that she became? And I go deeply into sort of America in the 1950s, the politics of the time, the difficulty that women had fulfilling their ambitions, especially if those were artistic ambitions. A quote in my first chapter in my prologue, I quote the commencement speech that Adlai Stevenson at the Smith College commencement in 1955 when Sylvia Plath graduated. And in his commencement speech, he says, he tells these brilliant women that they

should all go home and be, he says, humble, happy housewives, and that they can help their man with a can opener in one hand and a baby in the other. And it's just this, you read it now and you cannot believe that people clapped for that speech. Nobody booed him. It was just a given that these women who graduated from Smith College in 1955 were going to I'll go home and be housewives, even if that wasn't necessarily the message that they had received while they were at Smith. So I spend a lot of time in the book just diving into the history and the politics and the context. And that's partly why it's so long, because I'm a frustrated historian.

There you go. There you go. So she starts out her life as a young wannabe poet. How young was she when she found her poetic ambition? Yeah, there are drafts of poems in New York City in the Morgan Library, which I think she was, she could have been six, seven. She did publish her first poem when she was eight. And then she just kept at it. It was a calling. It was a vocation. That's the only way that I can describe it. And she never veered from it. She just was one of these people with extraordinary artistic talent who knew from just childhood on what they wanted to do. And she had a real determination and a real focus.

And it's incredible to me how much she achieved given the sexism of the time, but also the fact that she was dealing with this very severe mental illness. She attempted suicide when she was 19. Oh, wow. And luckily, she was found alive. She tried to overdose on sleeping pills, but she ended up vomiting them up. So she was found alive and that ain't it. And she talks about, she writes about this in the bell jar, right? But so she

was always dealing with this really serious depression as she's trying to make a name for herself in the world. And so, yeah, she just, there were a lot of obstacles thrown up. And so I was always very, I was always surprised by how strong she was. And oftentimes the idea of Sylvia Plath in the public imagination is somebody who's really fragile and her name is often associated with madness and tragedy and doom and gloom. But I found a different Sylvia Plath through her letters and through her diaries and that didn't jive with that kind of cliche of Platt that we know. Was there something that triggered her depression or was it maybe inherent? I think people, I think we're finding people inherit depression. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I do speculate in the book that there was, there was a family, probably a family history of depression. Her maternal grandmother was institutionalized

in a psychiatric institution later in her life. And that was all new information that just came to light. And that made me think that it seems like there may be some genetic thing going on here. And then very tragically, Sylvia Plath's son died by suicide as well. I'm not a psychiatrist, but that genetic component does seem to be there. Yeah. And again, this was a question that came up over and over just in terms of what happened, what triggered it, why? And it's just so hard to pin down one thing. And why do some people suffer more severely from depression than other people?

Why do some people die by suicide and others who are depressed don't? And it's hard to say. I speculated, but I... A lot of it has to do, because I've suffered from it, is an overactive mind. Your frontal lobes are really firing at a high rate of speed. And you think about a lot of stuff and you process a lot of stuff. And more so, you're just processing of stuff and it more so it's you're you're just processing too much and it overloads the system it's sad that in her day they didn't have some of the tools

and medications that they have nowadays to slow down that frontal lobe and and to kind of bring some peace to yourself and i'm not sure shock therapy how did shock therapy work for her did it clearly didn't work out or made for good book writing? Maybe, I don't know. It's a good question because her first round of ECT was badly administered and they didn't give her any painkillers and it was awful. It was just, and it totally traumatized her to the point where she told a friend, if this ever happens to me again, I will kill myself. Wow. No, I'd rather,. I'm quoting her. She told this friend,

I'd rather be dead than have to go through that kind of torture again. And then she did try to attempt suicide shortly after she had her ECT. So to what extent did this horrible experience of shock therapy make the depression worse? But then she did have a better round of it when she was recovering at McLean Hospital. And it was more properly administered there. She had more anesthetic. And then she got better. And I think it helped. And I know today, ECT can be a lifesaver for people with depression who have not been able to get help from medications and that kind of thing. So I know today, it's a different kind of procedure. In the mid 50s, they were still finding their way. And the same with antidepressants at that point. Thorazine had just come on the

market in 1953. And so she was taking that. I think that the drug cocktail that she was prescribed was not really well understood. The interactions with the drugs were not understood. So all of these questions I had about her mental health treatment made me wonder to what extent did some of the mental health treatment actually exacerbate her depression and worse. It's hard to disentangle those things. Yeah. You have lots of beautiful pictures in the book of her life and showing how she lived, houses and things like that. These were pretty insightful. Yeah, I hope so. I took a lot of them myself. I took many research trips over to England because she lived there for a few years

with her husband. Her husband was from Yorkshire, quite a famous British poet. He was poet laureate in England before he died. And they had a sort of idyllic marriage at the beginning, and then a very stormy one at the end, it devolved. They were married for almost seven years. But yeah, I went over to the, I tried to visit all of the places where she had lived and walked. And I really tried to follow in her footsteps. And I was even allowed access into the house where she wrote some of her greatest poems in London and where also she passed away. And so that was just an incredible experience being in that house. So yeah, it was, there was a lot of travel involved, not just to archives, but

international locations. Yeah, yeah. This is pretty cool. So what are some things that you think are really going to stand out to readers that readers are going to really find really enriching inside the book? I think part of what I'm trying to give the reader is just, I guess, two things. The overall sense of the life of one of the greatest American writers. And not even just greatest American woman writers, just great American writer, just an overarching and very detailed sense of her life and the obstacles that she overcame and the way that she became a poet, a novelist, how did she

do all this, but at the same time, giving a lot of historical context about the era, the Cold War, and try to situate her within that. So I think that a lot of readers will get like a double, like two books in one. It's a very historical biography, I guess I would say. Yeah. And that was an interesting time to live through. So that context is important. I know, I can't remember the writer we had on the show, but she's written about 66 books. She's probably written more now since the last year. But she grew up in that sort of 1940s, 50s era where most women were respected very well, getting in the workforce and expected to be in the kitchen.

And she knew she wanted to be a writer. She had that inside of her. She went to college, but then her husband was like, no, I'll be the only writer in the family. And I forget her name, but she talked at length about how hard it was in that sort of environment, that culture at that time to be a woman who wanted to write and be respected and then to sell and everything else. And it was a hell of a journey. It was a tough time. So it was probably really tough for her as a poet, Sylvia, to take and move up through the society and culture and be able to get her works published out there. Is that true? Yeah. And I don't really think people appreciate how hard it was for her. And again, there's so much emphasis on the suicide. And

when I told people I was writing about Sylvia Plath, they would often even make lots of jokes about her suicide. And it's just become such a part of our cultural imagination. But yeah, she was like, like I said, the star student at Smith College and publishing poems in the Christian Science Monitor and Seventeen Magazine and Mademoiselle Magazine when she was before graduate school. So she was just constantly publishing. And but she, I think she realized she had to work so hard because she was a woman. And people have said, oh, Sylvia, she was so she was such a perfectionist. She just couldn't, she couldn't relax, or she couldn't come in second,

and almost like it was this neurosis. But I actually think that part of the reason that she always felt like she had to work so hard at everything and always get the best grades and get the scholarship and get the prizes is because she knew that as a woman in that era, she did have to work twice as hard. And that speech by Adlai Stevenson, who was a Democratic presidential candidate in 1955.

He was a Democrat. He was a liberal darling. And he's telling the most educated women in America, Smith College, one of the seven sisters, you're probably going to be a housewife. Just deal with it. And part of his speech, he said, I know before you wrote poetry, but soon it will be the laundry list. He says stuff like that.

And imagine being in that says stuff like that. And imagine being in that audience and hearing that. And then little stories I tell in the book, like she applied for a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to fund her graduate studies in English. And she writes about it in her letters. And she says, it was just a wall. I was facing a wall of these male academics and they didn't care about what I was saying, about how I wanted to write or who I wanted to study. All they wanted to know was I going to get married and have babies. That was it. That was all I wanted. This is Harvard and these are Harvard academics. But those are the kinds of things that she always was up against. And I think it was exhausting. Of course, dealing with the depression

as well. I'm just astonished by what she achieved. That doesn't help at all. Any stories you want to highlight or tease out that you think people will be most interested in or maybe that struck you that were like, wow, this is amazing, or I didn't know about this. Yeah. Sylvia Plath wrote a series of letters to her psychiatrist in the last year of her life. And these letters have only recently come to light. And they were very different from the other letters she was writing to her mother or to her friends. These letters to her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth, were honest about the breakdown of her marriage to, by then, one of England's most famous poets, Ted Hughes. And they're heartbreaking. She talks about what it feels like to be left by her husband. Her husband had started an affair with another woman, and she felt abandoned, alone with two toddlers. And just these searing emotional

letters that have come to light. So those letters really helped me to frame, I would say, the end of the book and gave me a much better sense of the emotions that Plath was going through towards the end of her life. And in the last letter that Plath wrote to her psychiatrist about a week before she died, she basically says in that letter that she's thinking about suicide and that she has this fear of being institutionalized. And she mentions her fear of mental hospitals and lobotomies. And so for me, again, that made me wonder to what extent was the suicide influenced by this idea that she was going to be institutionalized,

that she was going to go back into a mental hospital that was not going to be a posh mental hospital like McLean. It was going to be a British mental hospital. And she often used the word Dickensian to talk about British institutions. So she was just really scared, I think, about that. So there was a new, a lot of new material has come to light about her psychiatric treatment, about the breakdown of the marriage, when she was writing her greatest poems.

So that, I felt like I was really able to offer a new take on some of the final years and some of the greatest poems that she ever wrote. Yeah, that was an era where they were trying that lobotomy stuff. I remember Rosemary Kennedy, the Rosemary Kennedy. And they were like, oh, maybe this is a way to fix it. And of course, they were trying to regulate that frontal lobe that gets out of control. I studied with the drugs there. I think I was in Zoloft at one time dealing with my depression. And I was studying what it did.

And it basically slows down that frontal lobe that's gotten out of control and gets things going. Anything more you want to touch on the book before we... Just that it is long. It probably looks really... Very detailed. Yeah, I was shocked myself when I got the copy. But I guess I would just say that a lot of people have told me that it reads almost like a novel. I keep hearing that from people. Nice. And Sylvia Plath, she lived a very dramatic life, for better and for worse.

And I really wanted, I wanted to keep the reader invested in her story. And I really tried hard not to ever lose the reader. I always cared about that. I hope that the book, it's big, but I think it's a good, it's a good read and informative read. Yeah. I was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. So you did something great. There you go. That's something else. So it's been wonderful to have you on the show to talk to us, Heather. Give us your plugs as we go out so people can find you on the interwebs. Sure. I have a website.

It's heatherclarkauthor.com. There are a lot of Heather Clarks out there. My Twitter handle is Plath Biography. And my Instagram is heatherclarkauthor. There you go. There you go. There you go. And thank you very much, Heather, for coming on the show

and sharing your story with us. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to youtube.com for Chess Chris Voss. Hit that bell notification button.

Go to goodreads.com for Chess Chris Voss. See everything we're reading and reviewing over there. Also go to all of our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Follow us over there as well.

Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other and we'll see you guys next time. So we're excited to announce my new book is coming out. It's called Beacons of Leadership, Inspiring Lessons of Success in Business and Innovation. It's going to be coming out on October 5th, 2021. And I'm really excited for you to get a chance to read this book. It's filled with a multitude of my insightful stories, lessons, my life, and experiences in leadership and character. I give you some of the secrets from my CEO Entrepreneur Toolbox that I use to scale my business success, innovate, and build a multitude of companies. I've been a CEO for, what is it, like 33, 35 years now. We talk about leadership, the importance of leadership, how to become a great leader, and how anyone can become a great leader as well.

So you can pre-order the book right now wherever fine books are sold, but the best thing to do on getting a pre-order deal is to go to beaconsofleadership.com. That's beaconsofleadership.com. On there, you can find several packages you can take advantage of in ordering the book. And for the same price of what you can get it from someplace else like Amazon, you can get all sorts of extra goodies

that we've taken and given away. Different collectors, limited edition, custom-made numbered book plates that are going to be autographed by me. There's all sorts of other goodies that you can get when you buy the book from beaconsofleadership.com. So be sure to go there, check it out,

or order the book wherever fine books are sold.