For the #1962Club: Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath

I came late to Plath. Having tried and failed to get to grips with her collected letters while I was still at school, I left her alone until I heard the writer Heather Clark talking about her new Plath biography, Red Comet: the short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath, on the excellent Slightly Foxed podcast. 

I was fascinated, and immediately sought out The Bell Jar. It was a revelation, a staggering insight into a woman's mind crumbling under the weight of societal pressures and expectations. In my review (here) I said,

The Bell Jar shines a clear and penetrating light on the way in which society seeks to control, gaslight and destroy any woman who rejects its demands for compliance.

So when I was looking for my #1962Club reads, I was delighted to find that Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams fitted the bill*. It's a collection of some of Plath's early and late short stories and other writings, and it shows us yet again what a brilliant, troubled, perceptive mind she had. 

I have to say right at the beginning that I am reviewing this book without having quite finished it. I'm doing so to be in time for the #1962Club round-up, but I'm still reading - so there are some excerpts from Plath's notebooks, plus nine of the stories found in the Lilly Library at Indiana University after the publication of the first edition of the collection, that I have yet to read.

*I also have to say that I'm now not entirely sure this collection was published in 1962 - I'm can't remember why I thought it was. Nevertheless, it reeks of 1960s American to me, and at least four of the stories date from that year, so I hope I may be forgiven.

The introduction to the book is written by Ted Hughes. He was, of course, entitled to his own opinions, but to me he sounds terribly patronising and unfairly critical, and I would suggest not reading his thoughts until you've read the book and had some thoughts of your own. He labels the first part of the book 'The more successful stories and prose pieces.' - successful in whose eyes, Ted? I wonder if anyone wrote the same thing about any of his collections of poems?

The stories cover all sorts of subjects, but many clearly reflect Plath's own experiences. 

In The Wishing Box Harold has more and more exotic dreams every night, and recounts them all to Agnes, his long-suffering young wife. (He wakes her up on their wedding night by twitching his arm so much that she thinks he's having a seizure. 'I was just beginning to play the Emperor Concerto' he explains.) As Agnes becomes more and more irritated with Harold, she looks back to a time when she too had wonderful dreams, and wonders when they stopped and turned instead into her occasional nightmares. Harold tells her she's just not using her imagination;

'You'll be all right....every day, just practise imagining different things like I've taught you.'

Agnes tries reading, but every time she stops she feels overwhelmed by the solid objects, the reality, around her (Hughes says this was one of Plath's own problems.) 

The utterly self-sufficient, unchanging reality of the things surrounding her...if he didn't like the scene at hand...he would change it to suit his fancy. If, Agnes mourned, in some sweet hallucination an octopus came slithering towards her across the floor, paisley-patterned in purple and orange, she would bless it. Anything to prove that her shaping imaginative powers were not irretrievably lost; that her eye was not merely an open camera lens which recorded surrounding phenomena and left it at that.

Agnes starts going to the cinema;

...the voices speaking some soothing, unintelligible code, exorcised the dead silence in her head.

She persuades Harold to buy a TV set so that she can sit at home to watch movies while knocking back the sherry. In the end even that doesn't help. She can't sleep;

She saw an intolerable prospect of wakeful, visionless days and nights stretching unbroken ahead of her, her mind condemned to perfect vacancy, without a single image of its own to ward off the crushing assault of smug, autonomous tables and chairs. 

Her doctor prescribes sleeping pills.

There is a predictable ending to this story.

It was written in 1956, the same year in which Sylvia met Hughes. 

Other stories frequently take place in psychiatric hospitals, where the narrator is usually a secretary. Johnny Panic itself is about an employee who is preparing a book of patients' dreams, illicitly culled from notes she copies out in her spare time. When she is eventually discovered, the story takes a surreal turn as the narrator is taken to a basement room and forced to submit to electric shock therapy, something that Plath herself had, of course, already had. 

The air crackles with his blue-tongued lightning-haloed angels.

Plath's use of illuminating detail is on display in this story as in so many others. In the hospital she sees someone being prepared for a lumbar puncture;

I can glimpse the end of the white cot and the dirty yellow-soled bare feet of the patient sticking out from under the sheet.

Other stories are snapshots of social situations. In The Day Mr Prescott Died Lydia and her mother pay a visit to a bereaved household - except Lydia is well aware that the much younger Mrs Prescott;

'was just waiting for him to die so she could have some fun....He was a grumpy old man even as far back as I remember. A cross word for everybody, and he kept getting that skin disease on his hands.'

Her struggles to sound sympathetic without lying are all too familiar, and the conversation at the house is beautifully observed; the weird things that people come out with in these situations, the need to offer to help, the requirement for everyone to be fed,

'Turkey and ham, soup and salad,' Liz remarked in a bored tone, like she was a waitress reading off a menu...'Oh, Lydia, Mama exclaimed, 'Let us get it ready. Let us help. I hope it isn't too much trouble...' 'Trouble, no,' Mrs Prescott smiled her new radiant smile.

Snow Blitz is a very funny story about the American narrator's (clearly Plath's) experience of living through a long cold winter in an unheated London flat. She laments the lack of snow ploughs, the power cuts, the disinterested response of the letting agent to her calls about a leaking ceiling and other people's dirty water coming up though her bath drain, the impossibility of finding a plumber. We laugh, but then we remember that it was the London winter of 1963 that finally drove Plath to suicide.

Sunday at the Mintons is another study of an oppressed and gaslighted woman, this time one who is retired and doomed to live with her domineering brother. For a moment, towards the end of the story, we think she has maybe found a solution. Sadly this turns out to be a flight of fantasy, but at least she enjoyed that flight. 

I had just heard from a friend who had been visiting her son at university when I read Initiation. My friend's son had a colossal hangover after taking part in an initiation ceremony for a sports club, and here I was, reading a story about a girl keen to join a sorority, and the horrible, demeaning things she has to do to be considered. 

I've never really understood sororities; I get the desperate need to belong, especially for teenagers, but sororities and fraternities just seem so exclusive and unpleasant. Millicent sees all of this, but she can't shake off the need to be accepted into this self-appointed elite group of self-satisfied young women, even though she is truly sad that her best and most loyal friend Tracy has not been invited to try out. 

Plath's descriptions of the things the hopefuls are put through are so vivid that she must have experienced them herself. For a week the girls have to become the virtual slaves of their appointed 'big sisters', who are thoroughly mean and dictatorial, making them walk behind them at all times and ask ridiculous questions of strangers, and forbidding them from ever smiling or answering back. A chance encounter on a bus makes Millicent start to question the value of the whole thing. She asks Liane, another 'slave', what the sorority actually does,

'Why, they have a meeting once a week...each girl takes turns entertaining at her house...'

'You mean it's just a sort of exclusive social group...'

'I guess so...though that's a funny way of putting it. But it sure gives a girl prestige value. My sister started going steady with the captain of the football team after she got in. Not bad, I say.'

Shades of Mad Men and Mona Lisa Smile.

There are many more stories in this collection, and I've enjoyed every one that I've read.

Hughes says,

In spite of the obvious weaknesses, they seem interesting enough to keep.

Sylvia Plath was a genius. Her only weakness, in my opinion, was having anything to do with Hughes. These stories are wonderful; they are both of their time and way beyond it. As indeed was she. 

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath is published by Faber & Faber.