A Legacy of Words (120)

“And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.”  
―     Sylvia Plath

Let me live, love and say it well in good sentences.”  
―     Sylvia Plath,     The Bell Jar

Sylvia Plath is one of those writers young women read when they are balancing between angst and fulfillment.

She is so compelling because her life was a complexity of passion, love, creativity, despair, fear, and futility.  Through all of that, she was an excellent author and poet.  And, even though she was wracked with mental illness, she managed to have the start of a good marriage and produced two children. Of course, after a while, the darkness overwhelmed her and she took her own life with her two young children in the next room.

Sylvia had already made a splash in the literary world with her books and poetry but I wonder if she would be so well remembered if she had merely had a heart attack or died in an auto accident. Part of the attraction to her writing is due to her tragic life. This is true of many writers, not just with tragic lives but sometimes with flamboyant lives. Is a prerequisite of being a notable writer having an interesting personal life? Or, is there something about having the drive to write that makes a writer have a tragic and/or flamboyant life? What makes up the personality of a writer?

The question I ask is more specifically about women writers. George Sands, Willa Cather, Louisa May Alcott, Flannery O’Connor, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, all are well known authors and all have had ‘interesting’ lives. Would we still read their books if they were typical middle income, suburban type people? Or, would they write if they were typical middle income, suburban type people?

I have recently developed a strong distaste for ‘artist statements’ that are required for most gallery shows. As a student of fine arts, I have always thought works of art should speak for themselves and sometimes they speak different messages to different people. Asking someone that produces a painting to ‘explain’ their style or the painting takes something away from the visual experience of viewing the painting. Perhaps this is true also of books and poetry. Maybe we should know less about the author and simply experience the words on the page for a full appreciation of the book or poem.

But, I have to leave with this one last quote from Sylvia Plath. Most writers will, I suspect, agree with this:

“Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.”

Sylvia Plath