Sylvia Plath: another writer, another addict.
Alcoholic retrospective of the month:
“I began to think vodka was my drink at last. It didn’t taste like anything, but it went straight down into my stomach like a sword swallowers’ sword and made me feel powerful and godlike.” So wrote poet Sylvia Plath in her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar. I suggest she understood an alcoholic’s brain because she was afflicted with the disease herself. I stumbled on to Plath on a list of “other artists” who, according to Maria Puente writing for USA Today, followed the same tragic path as did Robin Williams. Her list “includes painters, poets, writers, musicians and designers: Vincent van Gogh, Ernest Hemmingway, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Kurt Cobain, Alexander McQueen to name just a few of the famous creative who suffered from depression and committed suicide.” Depression is often rooted in alcohol or other-drug addiction; where suicide occurs, the underlying cause is usually substance addiction. Puente, unfortunately, appears to have no clue.
I already knew Van Gogh, Hemmingway, Woolf and Cobain to be addicts; I quickly added a fifth to my list, fashion designer Alexander McQueen. But what about Plath?
In “20 Distinguished Writers and Their Drink of Choice,” we learn that “Anne Sexton and her fellow writer Sylvia Plath met in a poetry class, and the pair would skip off to the Ritz-Carlton afterwards for a few rounds of apparently dry martinis. They welcomed other students and patrons into their fold as well, one of whom later became Sexton’s illicit lover behind her husband’s back. [Sexton] apparently loved throwing caution to the wind by illegally parking in the hotel’s loading zone before pumping her system full of booze.” Anne Sexton was clearly alcoholic; because addicts hang out with other alcoholics and a sense of power and God-likeness are nearly the exclusive domain of addicts, Plath almost assuredly was as well.