The essay for this month’s issue of Plume is David Kirby’s “Ladies And Gentlemen…Silvia Plath”. In his fresh, timely re-examination of Plath’s classic poem “Daddy”, Kirby both reminds and re-informs his readers of the enduring poetic and psychic power of the mythic language in “Daddy” that conjures, both directly and implicitly, the enduring profundity of such diachronic feminine myths as Inanna’s descent into Hades, Medusa, the Furies, Nemesis, Medea, Clytemnestra, and Lilith, to mention only a few. And rather than set this essay in his study from a safe distance from his subject, he writes as it were, “on the job” in the context of a Parisian striptease show. With one eye on “the show” in Paris and the other on Plath’s poem, “Daddy”, Kirby provides just the right object lesson in what the poet Philip Larkin called in his poem “Talking In Bed”, a “unique distance from his isolation”, that is, from a objective distance. The result is a brilliant exegetical update of “Daddy” in the context of the indefatigable, two- dimensional male gaze that Kirby complements with a parallax vision in which he sees through Plath’s eyes both the dead familial “daddy” and the wicked, “bastard” German father who Plath associates with Nazis in her poem with such devastating use of anaphora. In the essay’s stereotypical setting of a Parisian striptease, Kirby’s complex “look” obviates the male “gaze” with brilliant insight into Plath’s grief and threnody that recalls the long history, both mythological and historical, of feminine lament.
–Chard deNiord
Ladies and Gentlemen . . . Sylvia Plath!
“Lady Lazarus” Tells You How to Write Your Own Poems
It’s a June evening near midnight, and I’m sitting in a boat moored on the Seine in the heart of Paris. It’s a big boat, and I’ve just had dinner upstairs with my wife and some friends. Now we’re down below in a 110-seat theater, waiting for a burlesque show to begin, and I’m guessing that I’m the only person here thinking of Sylvia Plath.
Listening to the pre-show chatter, I figure the audience is roughly half French while the rest are from another ten or a dozen countries, so very likely I’m one of the few here who has even heard of Plath.
That wouldn’t be a problem in the States, where sports fans who’ve never stepped inside an English classroom at least know her name thanks to commentator Dennis Miller’s remark during an August 21, 2000 Monday Night Football game that NFL coach Dick Vermeil “tears up more frequently than Sylvia Plath being pepper-sprayed.”
That’s a low blow, but Miller’s one-liner says a lot about what names we recognize and why. In poetry as elsewhere, pathology sells. Plath, Poe, and Dickinson are the English Department’s best recruiters. A suicide, an alcoholic, and an agoraphobe are more likely to seem relatable to a disaffected teenager than a fatherly figure like Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg, which may explain why Plath’s only novel, The Bell Jar, has attained such iconic significance in popular culture.
In an essay in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath, Janet Badia points out The Bell Jar makes appearances in films as different as 10 Things I Hate About You and Natural Born Killers. In the first, the novel appears in the hands of the film’s central character, “a cynical, depressed and angry teenage feminist,” according to Badia, who defends Plath’s status within the literary canon against what she calls “the oppressive, patriarchal values that dictate our education.”
In the second film, the novel is seen on a bed next to a sleeping Mallory Knox just moments before she and her boyfriend Mickey murder her abusive parents and set off on their cross-country murder spree. More references to the novel and to Plath generally occur in television as well, especially in those shows that focus on young women such as Freaks and Geeks and The Gilmore Girls, as well as in such novels as Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer and Seven Moves by Carol Anshaw, both of which depict female characters who read The Bell Jar.
And Badia’s article appeared years ago. How many times since has a character turned the pages of or brandished or appeared on screen or in print with a copy The Bell Jar?
✍
When it comes to Plath’s poetry, what’s the first poem that comes to mind? “Daddy,” of course. Talk about bang for your poetry buck: that poem works in so many ways, beginning with the torrent of raw emotion Plath unleashes. Even better, there’s more than one emotion, and boy, do they ever collide.. One-way emotional traffic is boring, but look how Plath speeds up and slows down and zigzags and u-turns down the mean streets of memory. Grief, rage, love, and hate race, brake, bang into each other and roar away toward freedom as the poem’s driver leaves those murky thoroughfares behind and lights out for the territory.
And I haven’t even mentioned the imagery. The daddy in that poem is a colossus, a shoe, and a Nazi, and the speaker’s a Jew. So long, conventional poetic decorum! These metaphors jar the poem’s readers, send them tumbling across deeply uncomfortable psychological terrain until they, too, emerge shaken but brimming, however uncertainly, with new insight.
Thematically, “Daddy,” too, is a feminist cry for liberation from patriarchal oppression as well as a case study in lifelong grief and trauma that is eventually resolved. Yet—and this may be the most important part of its appeal—all that emotional and political and psychological weight is leavened by the poem’s musicality, its nursery-rhyme tone. Its smothering darkness notwithstanding “Daddy” uses playful rhythm and rhyme. Lines like “You do not do, you do not do / Any more, black shoe” contrasts eerily yet appealingly with the poem’s violent content. The sing-song cadence creates a surreal, hypnotic experience that few readers can resist.
✍
For all that, for all the box-office appeal of Plath’s sole published novel and her best-known poem, there is a third work that not only tells us almost as much about her life but also, and this is more important, all we know on earth and all we need to know about how to write one’s life. For poets rather than biographers, scandalmongers, and sophomores wondering what major to choose, that’s the bigger lesson: what Plath teaches us in this poem about her approach to poetry is something we can adapt to our own attempts to organize, write about, and at least partially understand our own experience.
The basic materials of “Lady Lazarus” are ones we’ve already encountered in The Bell Jar and “Daddy”: the Holocaust (“my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade”), suicide attempts (“This is Number Three”). But suddenly a poem that begins with a shroud being pulled back prior to an autopsy (“Peel off the napkin / O my enemy”) turns into a people-pleasing spectacle:
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot—
The big strip tease.
Who performs striptease (usually one word) and why is a subject that’s been dissected in countless clinical treatises, many of which allude to the stripper’s ambivalent feelings about her choice of livelihood, her cocktail of pride and embarrassment. (With apologies to the Chippendales, we’ll stick to female practitioners here.) So it is with Plath’s persona:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
That’s pretty darned poetic, isn’t it? It’s multivalent, ironic, skilled in its use of anaphora and slant rhyme. But from what I know about classic striptease, it also sounds very close to how an actual stripper might think and feel. That’s why I’m here tonight, belly full of asperges aux amandes and filet de bar rôti, enjoying an Armagnac and waiting for the show to begin.
A few years back I began to wonder why so many millions of people were NASCAR fans, and as I started to research that topic, I noticed that every study I read had one thing in common: its author had never been to a race. So off I went with four buddies in a rented RV to the Talladega Superspeedway in Lincoln, Alabama, and spent three days in the infield watching cars and drivers chase each other around the track.
Here on the Seine, I’m playing anthropologist again, sipping a digestif instead of a Bud Light but just as eager to find out what I don’t already know.
✍
Before the actual entertainers come on stage in Paris, a single spot lights up a blonde with her back to us who, upon turning, turns out to be not only a blond but who sports a Western gunslinger mustache; she/he is wearing stiletto heels but tube socks as well. The show begins with a wink, in other words, and continues with the MC’s assurance that we will see “a little flesh,” sure, but unlike in the full-reveal spectacles taking place tonight at seamier clubs a few kilometers away in the Place Pigalle, none of the four entertainers here will end up à poil, an idiom best translated as “going all the way.”
For the next seventy-five minutes, adjectives like “clever” and “funny” come to mind every time a performer pops out in a mask (one begins her act in full crocodile costume) or does a complete on-stage costume change in mere seconds.
But “sexy”? Two or three times, maybe. It’s all about suggestion here, not revelation. In striptease as in poetry, what you take away us up to you. I’d say what happens is in the eye of the beholder, though frankly, there’s not much here to behold. Indeed, what we see is a lot less than what I’ve seen on the typical French beach.
And as on those beaches, no one in this show is hung up about conventional female beauty. True, two of the dancers are trim and appear to have not much more body fat than a bicycle. But the third is distinctly plus-size, and the fourth is either pregnant, was recently pregnant, or has, like me, been lingering a bit too long in this city’s pastry shops. On more than one performer, there’s more than a little cellulite.
What they all have in common is an explosive warmth. They bring it, as the saying goes. They light every inch of this little jewel-box theater with million-watt smiles and attitude to match.
✍
But we’re in France, not far from the universities where thinkers like Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Hélène Cixous wrote and lectured, and that means the MC is obliged by custom and audience expectation to provide us with plenty of cultural and historical context between acts. I’m ahead of him here, though, thanks to two marvelous books by Rachel Shteir, author of Striptease: The Untold History of the Girlie Show and Gypsy: The Art of the Tease. The first of these begins with the author finding out that “her otherwise ordinary school friend” Jane had become a stripper, which is when, writes Shteir, she realized that striptease stands for “a possibility that women could reinvent themselves as desirable creatures every night.”
That women are desirable is not exactly news, and while I wouldn’t want to speak for any group to which I don’t belong, I can not only endorse the discovery that straight men desire women but also add that it doesn’t take much to make us pant.
That explains why classic striptease, as opposed to today’s total runway nudity, was, as Shteir points out in that first book, pointedly demure. Lili St. Cyr, Tempest Storm, Blaze Starr, Candy Barr, and the incomparable Gypsy Rose Lee peeled very slowly; they continued the tradition of ‘30s stripper Gladys Clark, whom one reviewer from that time described as “walking around like a queen wondering if the tub is full.”
That’s not to say that classic striptease didn’t have its lively side. True, many “peelers” or “torso tossers” (thirties slang seems made for burlesque halls, or maybe its’s the other way around) remained veiled and unattainable. But others, like Georgia Sothern, danced, in the words of one impresario, “just like she had dynamite for lunch.” And Carrie Finnell (of Carrie Finnell and Her Red-Headed Blondes) used what she called her “educated bosom” to astounding effect as she brought tassel twirling to unsurpassable heights. Fellow entertainer Ann Corio likened Finnell’s act to the revving up of a military aircraft: “Carrie looked like a twin engine bomber,” Corio noted approvingly.
And then there was Gypsy Rose Lee, brought vividly to life in Shteir’s biography of her. She ruled the golden age of striptease as surely as Elizabeth I sat at the center of Shakespeare’s Renaissance. Tall, slender, elegant, and brainy, La Gyp (or “Gypola,” as she signed her letters) made exotic dancing respectable. She wasn’t especially pneumatic—in her biography’s photos, she looks more like a bank vice president than a showgirl—and she charmed her audiences more with tantalizing winks than bare flesh.
La Gyp was no nun, but compared to today’s bare-it-all pole dancers, she was downright modest. Along the way, she appeared in movies, lobbied for left-wing causes, hung out with artists and intellectuals, and became an early feminist icon for young women who, like Rachel Shteir’s friend Jane, liked the idea that you could be brainy and sexy at the same time.
Classic striptease, which was born in the Jazz Age, was more or less dead by the seventies, according to Shteir, having been replaced by mere “exotic dancing,” the goal of which is get naked fast and stay that way. Over time, capitalism takes every phenomenon to its extreme: sex becomes pornography, food becomes fast food, and portions (of everything) become supersized.
Worse, when striptease became mere stripping, it lost its sense of humor. Gone is the coy sophisticate who strolls downstage languidly, pulling off her glove a finger at a time, her place taken now by petulant nudes pestering customers for lap dances.
Whether you’re working on a poem or peeling for a polyglot audience, the secret to success is revealing just enough but not too much. At the show tonight, when one of the dancers pulls off a glove or draws a feather boa aside, the spectators respond with a sound that means the same in every language, a long, loud, and enthusiastic “Wooooo!”
That happens every time a garment comes off, but here’s the thing: the garments never come all the way off. No one on that stage gets à poil. In every genre, every performer invites the audience to play a game with them, and the best games are the ones that never end.
I wooooo along with the best of them as I try to balance my thoughts about poetry and the ways artists engage their audiences against my sheer love of fun. As it turns out, I’m not the only scholar in the audience. Sitting to my right is a woman in leopardskin tights and a gay little vinyl chapeau who turns out to be a striptease artist herself.
The MC told us not to take photos, but that doesn’t stop Mademoiselle, who ships out her phone the second the show starts and bangs away the entire evening. I spoke with her afterward, and she told she’d made the hour-long trip from Amiens to Paris expressly to get some ideas for her own act.
Good for you, I thought. Like an eager young assistant professor from a university in the heartland traveling to Chicago or New York for the annual Modern Languages Association meeting, here she was, gathering information, studying the strategies of her more experienced peers, thinking how she could become the best version of herself.
✍
Who was Gypsy Rose Lee? It’s hard to tell from contemporary accounts; reporters in those days were as bound by rules of decorum as the artist herself, says Shteir. We do know that she was born Rose Louise Hovick, though her birth year is variously given as 1908, 1911, and 1914, depending on the source. An early vaudeville performer, Gypsy whiled away her time between shows reading Rabelais, Shakespeare, and George Sand; as she herself wrote later, books are important not just for themselves but because they can help you reinvent yourself.
Doesn’t that sound like what poets do? Isn’t every poet a mixture of doubts and aspirations, dreams and what-me-worry indifference? Though we’d never say so aloud, don’t we all want to be either poet laureate of the U.S. or Billy Collins? (For the record, Collins has been the one and continues to be the other.) What we poets do is both welcome the mystery and exploit it, suggest more than we reveal. That’s what makes a career. One of Gypsy Rose Lee’s admirers, Julliard president John Erksine, complained that at a striptease, the guy never gets the girl. Exactly.
And like La Gyp, doesn’t Sylvia Plath both incarnate her desires and fears and caricature them? Not with a wave of her feather boa, as the Gypsy Rose Lee did, but with sass. At one point the speaker in “Lady Lazarus” reminds us that her performance is raw truth, sure, but it’s her livelihood as well.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
Our view of Plath is so darkened by tragedy that we sometimes forget how funny she can be. Here it’s as though the speaker here is saying, “You wanna see more, buster? Then you better stick a twenty in my garter, and I mean now.”
✍
And then she’s gone. Poem over. “I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air,” say the last two lines, but we don’t know when that’s going to happen or where or if it’ll even happen at all. Or who’ll do it: will it be the brassy babe who’s calling the shots here, the suicide who will take her life in a few months and eat those men as her last meal the way condemned prisoners do, the poet who describes them both, somebody else?
The spectators at the show on the Seine included a bachelorette party consisting of the future bride in a white dress and what I assumed were her seven bridesmaids, all in black. Trying to make a joke in my schoolboy French, I asked one if she were in mourning for her about-to-be-married friend, imagining she’d have at least some sense of how marriage can change people, how ones that begin with high hopes, like Plath’s, can take a slow then sudden turn toward regret, the loss of love, tragedy. The young woman looked at me for a minute and then hesitantly said, “Oui.” Later I realized they were all Russian, so maybe she misunderstood my question.
None of us really know who we are, but if you’re a poet, at least you can write about that riddle. All entertainers put on masks when they entertain. Actually, the show in Paris is not my first exposure to striptease. Growing up in Baton Rouge in the ‘60s, I and my friends would sneak through our windows at night, speed down to New Orleans, watch a few dancers on Bourbon Street go through their routines, and make it back to our beds just before our mothers woke us, their noses wrinkling suspiciously at the lingering scent of cigarette smoke and stale beer.
I’m pretty sure I saw the great Candy Barr herself, though it may have been Candie Barr, Candy Barre, Candie Barre, Kandy Barr, or Kandy Barre—strippers were shameless in more ways than one, and a hot act was often replicated under a sound-alike name.
And don’t forget that Plath not only took the name Esther Greenwood in the largely autobigraphical Bell Jar but also published it in England under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, in that way donning not one but two veils as surely as the entertainers at tonight’s show appear in garb rather different from the clothes they wear when they shop for groceries or take their kids to school.
In “Lady Lazarus,” she’s at it again: on stage, her speaker becomes the Biblical figure Christ raised from the dead but brags that she’ll not just die and return to life once as he did but outdo him several times over, should she choose to do so, telling us that “like the cat I have nine times to die.” Again, poetry and striptease parallel each other: there are only four dancers in tonight’s show, but each takes on multiple identities, appearing as a cowgirl, say, and a few minutes later as a mermaid.
✍
Then again, aren’t high art and stagey slight of hand really versions of the same thing? Poems don’t tell us what to do. Keats says, “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us.” Poems aren’t essays, and they sure aren’t sermons.
The unsettling first line of “Lady Lazarus” might actually make you think Plath intended the poem to be a suicide note. “I have done it again,” she writes, as though her death is already a fait accompli in both word and deed.
But look what happens: as the speaker thinks her way through previous suicide attempts, she becomes more interested in process than in possible outcomes. A little past the poem’s midpoint, the speaker discovers and then celebrates her growing power, and by the end, she’s staging what she herself calls a “comeback.” She’s got this! “I do it exceptionally well,” she says; she enjoys doing it and wants to go on doing so.
Poetry is not therapy, but poetry is not not therapy. If there’s one thing the two practices have in common, it’s this: if there’s a beast in the cave, and you pull the rock back and let that beast out into the light, you’re likely to discover that it’s not as big and scary as you thought.
Freud didn’t get everything right, but that grinding tension he describes between the death wish or Thanatos and its opposite, the life instinct he calls Eros, can be awfully useful as we try to figure out why people behave as they do, why they so often seem not to be masters in their own houses yet somehow manage to get by and even triumph.
Incidentally, Eros doesn’t mean just sexual energy but the drive toward creativity, pleasure, love, and life itself, qualities abundantly evident on this little stage tonight. The show must go on, and as long as it does, the artist will never die.
Every poem is two things, itself and a lesson on how to write a poem. Go over your material, says “Lady Lazurus.” Start with a hooky first line but don’t expect to end up where you started—in fact, don’t be surprised if you end up 180 degrees from where you began. Rehearse your moves, then cue the music and start dancing.
If your poem’s a little thick in the midsection or doesn’t look like other poems, that’s okay; energy and attitude are more important than looks. Get comfortable with the contradictions. Juggle them like oranges or tennis balls, and if you drop one or all of them, so what? The audience knows you’re human; it wants you to be, because it is, too. They want you to rise out of the ash, to charm them but to threaten to eat them and scare them as well, to do anything except bore them. What’s more lively than that?
Plath left a significant body of work, and in this one extraordinary poem, she tells us how to create our own.
– – –
Janet Badia’s “The Bell Jar and Other Prose” appears in The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath and can be found online. Planning on visiting Paris? You can book a show at Le Cabaret Burlesque at www.lanouvelleseine.com.
