(1979)
When a major work by a major writer is published post-humously, no one bats an eye. Minor works by minor writers presumably don’t get published until the author has been dead long enough to have become quaint. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams is a minor work by a major writer, and it’s the contrast that causes niggling. Whom does such a publication benefit? Not the author, and not the author’s reputation, which is doing very well without it. Not the general reader hitherto innocent of the Plath opus and myth who may stumble upon it and wonder what all the shouting is about. I suppose the answer is “the student,” if by “student” is meant any reader already sympathetic enough to Plath’s work to have read most of it already and to be interested in foreshadowings, cross-references, influences and insights. And this is the kind of audience Johnny Panic assumes. It’s a prose catch-all, composed of short stories, short prose essays and journal entries, and as such it ought to round out one’s knowledge of the writer and perhaps offer some surprises. Luckily it does both.
I have to admit at the outset that this kind of publication makes me uneasy almost by definition, hinting as it does of rummagings in bureau drawers that the author, had she lived, would doubtless have kept firmly locked. What writer of sane mind would willingly give to the world her undergraduate short stories, her disgruntled jottings on the doings of unpleasant neighbours, her embarrassing attempts to write formula magazine fiction? But I must also admit that I read Johnny Panic with considerable absorption and, at moments, fascination. It was a shock akin to seeing the Queen in a bikini to learn that Sylvia Plath, an incandescent poet of drastic seriousness, had two burning ambitions: to be a highly-paid travel journalist, and to be a widely published writer of magazine fiction, either of the New Yorker or—can it be? —of the Ladies’ Home Journal variety. To this end she slogged away in the utmost self-doubt and agony, composing over seventy stories, most of which were never published, and filling notebooks with the details of what she thought of as real life: styles of clothing and interior decoration, mannerisms and acquaintances, sketches of the physical world which she believed she had no talent for observing. (Poetry she considered a mere escape, a self-indulgence, an indulgence in self; and as such unreal, since she was not totally convinced of her own worth or even of her own existence.)
It’s easy to sneer at such ambitions, and the editor does not altogether resist the temptation, though his disapproval is gentle and underlined by a statement of crushing validity: Sylvia Plath’s genuine medium was poetry. Of course this is true; but her desire for journalistic success, which seems so incongruous in view of the final excellence of her achievement, must be placed in context. Sylvia Plath became famous only after she was dead. These pieces were written by a young unknown writer who had gone almost straight from the status of student into another subordinate position, as the wife of a poet already hailed as a rising star. Her desperate attempts to write publishable magazine pieces and to make money were also attempts to assert herself as a real person, an adult worthy of consideration, in a world which had so far failed to acknowledge her.
On one level Johnny Panic is the record of an apprentice-ship. It should bury forever the romantic notion of genius blossoming forth like flowers. Few writers of major stature can have worked so hard, for so long, with so little visible result. The breakthrough, when it came, had been laboriously earned many times over. But there’s more to Johnny Panic than juvenilia. The writing varies widely in quality and interest, or rather in the quality of the interest; for although the young Sylvia Plath squeezed out some fairly dismal stories, as most young writers do, all the pieces presented here are revealing. Some things stand brilliantly on their own: two short later essays, “America! America!,” and “A Comparison,” several of the notebook entries, the title story, which foreshadows The Bell Jar, and “Tongues of Stone.” Two pairs—notebook entry, short story—demonstrate the transformation from observed real life to fiction; in both cases the notebook entries have a spontaneity that the stories, in their desire to be literary, almost lose. There are some straight formula pieces, most notably, “Day of Success,” which is about a young wife and mother who keeps her dashing playwright husband by being domestic. At first sight these stories are merely no more deplorable than other such fifties set pieces, but on second reading they cause pricking of the thumbs. Even when she was trying to be trite, Sylvia Plath could not conceal the disconcerting insights into her own emotional mainsprings that characterize her poetry. The unevenness of the stories is often the result of a clash between the chosen formula and the hidden message that forces its way through, seemingly despite the writer. “What visions were to be had came under thumbscrews, not in the mortal comfort of a hot-water-bottle and cozy cot,” thinks Dody Ventura in “Stone Boy With Dolphin.” Though she deplored it and tried to deny it, so did Sylvia Plath.
The author has been well served, both by her publisher—the cover is both handsome and appropriate, the presentation lowkey—and by her editor, though it’s a slight tease to tell the reader that Sylvia Plath wrote “vivid, cruel” things about people and then refused to print them. The stories are arranged chronologically but in reverse order. This creates an archeological effect: the reader is made to dig backwards in time, downwards into a remarkable mind, so that the last, earliest story, “Among the Bumblebees,” emerges like the final gold-crowned skeleton at the bottom of the tomb, the king all those other bodies were killed to protect. Which it is.