Sylvia Plath the artist

These drawings give us a whole new Sylvia Plath – sprightly, witty and fun

Sam Leith
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 6 November 2011 22.30 GMT


Bucolic rather than apocalyptic … a detail from Wuthering Heights Today. Photograph: Frieda Hughes


Who is the Sylvia Plath we, her readers, think we know? Nearly half a century after her suicide, the great poet is capable of surprising us. A selection of her drawings that have just gone on display at London's Mayor Gallery shows us a new side of her. I found these drawings moving: not because they feed into the legend, but because they sidestep it. They bring us a fresh look at a woman now so barnacled with myth it's hard to see her clearly. And – wow – they're really good.


Sylvia Plath
Her Drawings
Mayor Gallery,
London
Until 17 December
Venue details

These drawings are not exact transcriptions of the world: they are, subtly yet boldly, interpretations. They take possession of their subjects. They have a calligraphic, almost cartoonish line that puts me in mind of Alasdair Gray, or even the comic-book work of Pat Mills. What they have above all – which is not the province of the poems and the Plath we think we know – is a sprightliness or, for want of a better word, wit. Look, for instance, at her sketch of a cat peeping out round a corner. Curious French Cat, she's called it. Or look at the unaccountably entrancing drawing of a brolly, titled The Ubiquitous Umbrella. Or look at the two successive pen-and-ink sketches called The Pleasure of Odd (sic) and Ends, showing a scattering of lumber outside a shed, an old stove, a tractor tyre, a trunk with a warped lid.

To see these drawings as in some way complementary to the poems, as some will doubtless try to, seems to me off-beam. Plath did once tell the BBC: "I have a visual imagination." But what's so striking about these drawings is exactly their difference from the visual world of the poems. These are pictures that revel in the thinginess of things: in wine bottles, an old kettle, a pair of shoes, the uneven timbering of beached boats, the architectural curlicues of a Parisian roof.

Both Plath and her husband Ted Hughes wrote fine poems called Wuthering Heights, neither of which exactly played down the bleakness. "Black stone, black stone," wrote Plath. "Iron beliefs, iron necessities," wrote Hughes. But the Plath sketch of a tumbledown bothy included in this exhibition, called Wuthering Heights Today, is bucolic rather than apocalyptic.

While the landscape of Plath's verse is intensely visual, it's not like these drawings. God knows her poems had an observational exactness. In Nick and the Candlestick, she writes: "The candle/ Gulps and recovers its small altitude." In Poem for a Birthday: "And how a god flimsy as a baby's finger/ Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air." But this was also a dream landscape, full of intense colours and annihilating transformations. Ariel, notionally an account of being on a runaway horse, is almost psychedelic in its refusal to alight on an image: transformation gives way to transformation before the whole thing dissolves "into the red/ Eye, the cauldron of morning".

Plath read Freud and Jung, and used them consciously in her poems. You could say she used the unconscious consciously. Symbols recurred and were reworked: all those white moons and black yew trees (fathers/husbands); white feet and black shoes; the black-and-white sea (always furious); the sinister flowers; the awful medical apparatus of bandages and scalpels, the bald doctors; the engulfing reds of blood and flame.

I spent my teens marinated in Plath's poetry (there's a school of thought, not a very honourable one, that this is evidence that I was a slightly morbid teenage girl trapped in the body of a slightly morbid teenage boy). I came to her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar late – and it seemed to me astonishing. It was as if it had been written by a different Sylvia Plath: one who, of course, had also been through electroconvulsive therapy, and who had an uneasy relationship with day-to-day life. But The Bell Jar had a sort of cool jauntiness to it. It looked at the world, whereas her poetry, for the most part, looked inward.

Now cast an eye over these wonderful drawings. You wouldn't connect them with that poetry at all. And you wouldn't connect them, either, with the prose Plath, the psychotic bobbysoxer of The Bell Jar. With these drawings, we get a third Sylvia Plath. You might notice that – at least in the selection on show – human figures are few and far between. Apart from a profile sketch of Hughes there are two, both turned away, one of them with a hand in an anxious clutch. But even these are breezy accounts of things in the world.

When I visited the gallery, all but a couple of the thinnest sketches had red splats on them: sold. The attendant said they expected them all to be gone shortly. I wish I'd been able to afford one. Her pen-and-ink lines are fine, exact and unexpectedly loving towards her subjects. Her blacks neither crackle nor drag.

Sketch of Ted Hughes- SP.

Boats in Rock Harbour, Cape Cod- SP.

Cambridge- SP.

Casket, bottle, apple- SP.

A Sketch of the Tuileries in Paris- SP.

Conkers- SP.

Cow- SP.

Spanish Kitchen- SP.

...these are really good...who knew?

The Bell Jar- SP.

Wuthering Heights- SP.

Beaujolais- SP.