I began reading serious novels, written for adults, when I was about twelve years old. The Hardy Boys gave way to The Last Hurrah by Edwin O’Connor, a sophisticated novel of Boston politics and Irish family loyalties. When I finished the book and felt the weight of it in my hand, I knew that my life had been changed forever. I had access to the secrets of the adult world at my fingertips.

I read that book during my eighth-grade English class at Saint Aidan’s. For eleven years, from sixth grade through college, I attended all-male Catholic schools. It was a rigorous education and helped me construct a foundation of literacy I continue to build upon. But it had its limitations. Essentially we were white Catholic boys being educated by white Catholic men, many of them celibate.

From 1960 on, not one classmate was a woman. Not one teacher. In all those years of reading and study I can remember only a handful of woman authors (Emily Dickinson, Willa Cather, Rachel Carson) presented as part of the curriculum. It was only when I was in graduate school at a public university that the tide began to turn, when the work of Flannery O’Connor, Joan Didion, and Nora Ephron began to dazzle my mind and enrich my experience.

It may have been in the summer of 1968 at Oxford that I became vaguely aware of a poet named Sylvia Plath. She had been married to Ted Hughes, who would become England’s poet laureate. I would come to know her as a brilliant writer and troubled soul, a woman whose mental illness would lead her to suicide in 1963 at the age of thirty. The story of her death was lurid and disturbing: she died of asphyxiation by placing her head in a gas oven. Her legacy includes volumes of great poetry, short stories, extensive journals, and a single scintillating novel called The Bell Jar. That such brilliant work could come from such a damaged spirit is one of the literary miracles of the twentieth century.

SHOCKING INTRUSION

Most of the novels discussed in this book I read years ago. Some mysterious force—I’m not kidding—led me to The Bell Jar, which I devoured in October of 2014, about a month after I had submitted what I thought was a completed draft of The Art of X-ray Reading. By the time I finished Plath’s novel, I knew I wanted—needed—to write about it. That feeling came with the first sentence.

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

Before I read another word, I felt the need to X-ray that sentence. At twenty-three words, it is a short and memorable first sentence for a novel, beginning with subject and verb of the main clause, always an encouraging sign.

“It was a queer, sultry summer…”

I feel a tension between the adjectives queer and sultry. The first carries a judgment of distortion, something not quite right in the air. The second, sultry, has the sense of something physical, hot and humid, but not necessarily unpleasant, perhaps carrying a sexual connotation, like the sound of a tenor sax. (I’ve always felt that individual letters can carry hidden meanings. It may seem strange to say, but the letter u makes me uneasy, especially that triple dose of it in the phrase “queer, sultry summer.”)

What comes next is a shocking intrusion: “the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…”

A lot of things happened during the summer of 1953, when the story takes place: the Korean War ended; JFK and Jackie were married in Newport, Rhode Island; television was coming into its own. An obsession with a New York Jewish couple executed for espionage aligns with queer and connects the collective paranoia of the McCarthy era with our protagonist’s distorted view of reality.

Each of us brings our autobiography to the reading of any text, and I confess a lifelong fascination with the Rosenbergs. I took a boyish interest in spying, the Soviet menace, the FBI, and the atomic bomb. We did have civil defense drills in elementary school in which we practiced hiding under desks with our hands covering our heads to protect ourselves from the Red menace. More particularly, for the first four years of my life, 1948–1952, I lived in an apartment complex on the Lower East Side of New York City called Knickerbocker Village. The Rosenbergs lived there, too. After the Rosenbergs’ executions in 1953, my uncle Pete and aunt Millie, who were on a waiting list, got their apartment!

That final clause of that first sentence stands out for its multiple meanings. An actor could read it in different ways:

I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.

The whole sentence moves with remarkable efficiency from a season to an era to the confusion of a single young woman.

RAISING THE DEAD

If something is important enough to place in the first sentence of a novel, even as a seeming aside, is it important enough to revisit? We saw in Gatsby how the author introduced the green light on Daisy’s dock in the first chapter, how he reintroduced that light in the middle of the novel, and how he brought it back, with dozens of suggestive thematic implications, at the end. We come to expect that type of exquisite story architecture from our favorite literary artists.

So beyond my personal curiosity about the Rosenbergs, should I expect them to return to the stage later in Plath’s novel? Here is what follows that first sentence:

I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick, and that’s all there was to read about in the papers—goggle-eyed headlines staring up at me on every street corner and at the fusty, peanut-smelling mouth of every subway. It had nothing to do with me, but I couldn’t help wondering what it would be like, being burned alive all along your nerves.

I thought it must be the worst thing in the world.

“It had nothing to do with me.” Yeah, right. It has everything to do with our protagonist, Esther Greenwood, a fill-in for Plath in this highly autobiographical novel, who, during an internship at a fashion magazine in New York City, is traumatized time and again.

Sure enough, the Rosenbergs reappear on page 100 of my edition, the beginning of chapter 9. Esther is speaking with another young woman at the fashion magazine about the imminent execution of Ethel and Julius:

So I said, “Isn’t it awful about the Rosenbergs?”

The Rosenbergs were to be electrocuted late that night.

“Yes!” Hilda said, and at last I felt I had touched a human string in the cat’s cradle of her heart. It was only as the two of us waited for the others in the tomblike morning gloom of the conference room that Hilda amplified that Yes of hers.

“It’s awful such people should be alive.… I’m so glad they’re going to die.”

This dispiriting moment comes just before the crisis that will crush our protagonist at the end of the first half of the book, when a blind date turns into a muddy rape attempt that leaves her physically injured and emotionally devastated, so much so that she returns to her hotel and throws all the glamorous clothes she has accumulated off the top of the skyscraper.

Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.

In that dark moment, Plath offers a kind of silent convergence of the public and the private. Almost at the exact time the Rosenbergs would be electrocuted, the main character undergoes a kind of symbolic death, her clothes being scattered to the winds, “like a loved one’s ashes.”

LIVING WHAT YOU DREAD

The second half of The Bell Jar takes place in Massachusetts: Esther has returned to her home in a dark cloud of depression. It is a fictionalized version of Plath’s own mental and emotional deterioration, a series of imagined and real suicide attempts that result in the protagonist’s institutionalization. The rooms, patients, doctors, and therapies are chronicled, building up to one terrible failed attempt to cure her:

And as Doctor Gordon led me into a bare room at the back of the house, I saw that the windows in that part were indeed barred, and that the room door and the closet door and the drawers of the bureau and everything that opened and shut was fitted with a keyhole so it could be locked up.…

Doctor Gordon was fitting two metal plates on either side of my head. He buckled them into place with a strap that dented my forehead, and gave me a wire to bite.

I shut my eyes.

There was a brief silence, like an indrawn breath.

Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done.

At the end of the novel a more compassionate doctor and a more competent version of shock therapy would result in her return to the outside world and hope for a healthier life. (Sadly, the novel ends more happily than the author’s real life did.)

It was only after I had closed the book that I was stunned by the beauty of what Plath had created. It was like looking at daybreak pouring through the rose window of a cathedral. All that business about the Rosenbergs—the constant references not to their execution but to their electrocution—turned out to be a prologue to the traumatic events in Esther’s life, including a medical procedure in a facility that looks and works like a prison in which she is pinned down and wired up (like the Rosenbergs, no doubt) and shot up with electricity. It is, at least at first, her version of the death penalty.

POETIC PROSE

The adventure in X-raying The Bell Jar comes from knowing that the author was a poet writing prose. I often work in a discipline—journalism—in which metaphor is discouraged. Let me rephrase that. Figurative language is not discouraged per se; it’s reserved for features and opinion writing rather than for neutral reporting. You can understand why. If I write, “Governor Scott walked across the stage with the bald reptilian confidence of Voldemort’s younger brother,” I have abandoned straight reportage for something more biased—and fun.

In that sense, the literature of journalism is the opposite of poetry, which uses metaphor and other figures of speech to expand the possibilities of language and vision. It should not surprise us, then, that a daring poet such as Sylvia Plath would carry her associative imagination from poetry into fiction.

To savor her poetic sensibilities, we only have to look at the first stanza of one of her most famous poems, “Daddy”:

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

In her book Break, Blow, Burn, critic Camille Paglia describes Plath’s dangerous and sensational voice:

Garish, sarcastic, and profane, “Daddy” is one of the strongest poems ever written by a woman. With driving power of voice, it marries the personal to the political against the violent backdrop of modern history. Like Emily Dickinson, another shy New Englander, Sylvia Plath challenges masculine institutions and satirizes outmoded sexual assumptions. But the energies aroused by “Daddy” ultimately become self-devouring. The poem is so extreme that nothing can be built upon it. Plath has had many imitators, but she may have exhausted her style in creating it.

If this is true for Plath’s poetry—that she exhausted the style she created in poetry—I would argue that it is not true for her prose. In fact, the figurative language in her novels greatly enriches the experience of the reader and establishes a style for fiction that might have led to many more literary adventures if Plath had lived long enough to take them on.

EMPHATIC METAPHORS

As I was X-raying the novel, I began to notice a particular strategy that Plath favors enough to use as often as two or three times per page, sometimes more. What is exciting about this move is that you can read page after page, chapter after chapter, without noticing it. It does not call attention to itself but always advances the narrative.

If you keep track of the metaphors and similes in The Bell Jar (a title that is also a metaphor for a distorted, confining, airless existence), you discover that Plath can begin a sentence with figurative language or stick it in the middle, but her preference is to place it at the end. Any word or phrase placed at the end of a sentence stabs the reader. If that emphatic language happens to be metaphorical, the reader feels the steel twice. The blade goes in. The blade comes out.

Whenever I saw this move in the text, I circled it and wrote the word move in the margin. (X-ray readers love to write in margins.) Here is a healthy sample:

• I made out men and women, and boys and girls who must be as young as I, but there was a uniformity to their faces, as if they had lain for a long time on a shelf, out of the sunlight, under siftings of pale, fine dust.

• I tried to smile, but my skin had gone stiff, like parchment.

• Being with Jody and Mark and Cal was beginning to weigh on my nerves, like a dull wooden block on the strings of a piano.

• Underneath, the water was green and semi-opaque as a hunk of quartz.

• Against the khaki-colored sand and the green shore wavelets, his body was bisected for a moment, like a white worm.

• A heavy naughtiness pricked through my veins, irritating and attractive as the hurt of a loose tooth.

These are isolated sentences, taken out of context. Attached to action, these metaphors and similes operate on the reader as verbal exclamation points, bringing to a head—and to our heads—some point of insight. As in, “I poked my head out of the covers and stared over the edge of the bed. Around the overturned enamel tray, a star of thermometer shards glittered, and balls of mercury trembled like celestial dew.”

Why celestial dew? Because they will soon come to symbolize her shattered and fluid state:

I opened my fingers a crack, like a child with a secret, and smiled at the silver globe cupped in my palm. If I dropped it, it would break into a million little replicas of itself, and if I pushed them near each other, they would fuse, without a crack, into one whole again.

I smiled and smiled at the small silver ball.

I love those four hissing s words that point to the word ball at the end.

Even with its scenes so dark and its protagonist so tortured, The Bell Jar is a novel written by an author who plays with language. How can such a depressed and suicidal spirit find a place to play with words? That is a great mystery of art. But play Plath does. At one point in The Bell Jar, Esther decides she will write about her own experiences, but in the form of a novel. That creates a kind of hall-of-mirrors effect, since that is exactly what Plath is doing in creating Esther Greenwood. She writes:

A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.

I had my X-ray glasses on when I read this. I used my index finger to hold my place so that I could examine the cover and the first name of the author. S-y-l-v-i-a. Six letters, just like Esther and Elaine. Not lucky, it occurred to me, but very clever; funny, even—and wise.

WRITING LESSONS

1. Many examples of good writing have a one-two-three quality to them: subject, verb, object. In most cases, you don’t want the reader to stop or even pause. My mentor Don Fry calls this effect “steady advance.” But there will be exceptions, moments when the writer will intrude on the reader’s expectations, even in the middle of a sentence. Call it a bump in the road. Plath achieves this effect with the insertion of the Rosenberg execution inside her first sentence. What if that sentence had been: “It was a queer, sultry summer, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.” Clear and compelling enough, but not brilliant and explosive. Most sentences you write will be A-B-C. If you want to catch the reader off guard, consider A-X-B.

2. Not all allusions are created equal. When an author quotes another author or mentions historical figures (such as the Rosenbergs), he or she embeds one narrative within another. As we’ve seen with the opening of The Bell Jar, an apparent offhand comment becomes a much grander metaphor, taking on new contexts and connotations as the narrative builds up steam. Most coherent texts contain a dominant image—sometimes more than one—that links the parts and accelerates the action.

3. Figurative language—such as metaphor and simile—is more common in some forms of writing than in others. Too much of it in prose can call attention to itself or make the writer sound word-drunk. But done with control, it has the effect of expanding consciousness—especially when it is hardly noticeable. When George Orwell argued that good writing is like a windowpane, he was using a metaphor that is exactly like a windowpane, a frame for seeing the world, a boundary that is hardly noticeable.

4. That last word or phrase in a sentence or paragraph gets special attention from the reader—whether the writer intends it to or not. Good writers know that these locations are hot spots and reserve them for the most interesting or important language. Plath doubles down (to use a term from blackjack) by using the ends of sentences as places to insert metaphors and similes. In Plath’s case, it is like looking through Orwell’s windowpane, then throwing open the window to the cool air.

5. Clever writers sometimes play little tricks they know will delight some of their readers. My old friend Howell Raines, an author and a former editor of the New York Times, wrote a profile of a young politician whose father was a famous and powerful senator. He began, “Will the son also rise?” a lead sentence clear enough on its face, but even better if it reminds you of Hemingway, and better yet if it gets you to Ecclesiastes. Even if most readers don’t get it, some will, and that makes it worth the effort. Plath plays the six-letter-name trick with Esther, Eileen, and, for those wearing their X-specs, Sylvia. On more than one level the act of writing is, to use a fancy word, ludic. It’s a game. A game of language, connection, and meaning. Have some fun, for goodness’ sake.

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