Lady Lazarus

By Martha Duffy

THE BELL JAR by Sylvia Plath. 296 pages. Harper & Row. $6.95.

This book, which is just now scaling the bestseller lists, has actually been around for eight years. It was published in London, without causing much commercial stir, shortly before the author, a young American poet, killed herself. Bringing it out in the U.S.--after years of opposition from the author's mother --was either smart publishing or egregious good luck.

Sylvia Plath is already well known for her last poems, which are brilliant songs of self-destruction, the ne plus ultra of confessional verse. The Bell Jar is a marvelously unself-conscious confessional novel dashed off before such documents were in vogue. Now, however, it is as if the likes of Joan Didion have merely been sweeping the stage for Sylvia's ghostly comeback. Like the Lady Lazarus of her poem, she is a virtuoso of death. As she wrote: "You could say I have a call."

She was 30 when she died, an exhausted, mad mother of two, estranged from her poet husband, Ted Hughes. A typically American-looking blonde, she was much admired in English critical circles; half of literary London blamed itself for her death. Yet The Bell Jar, like the late poems, makes that tragedy seem a pathetic inevitability.

Not that the novel is either lugubrious or totally morbid. It is by turns funny, harrowing, crude, ardent and artless. Its most notable quality is an astonishing immediacy, like a series of snapshots taken at high noon. The story, scarcely disguised autobiography, covers six months in a young girl's life, beginning when she goes to New York to serve on a fashion magazine's college-editorial board. It ends when she emerges from a mental hospital after a breakdown.

Mad Logic. The first part is hilarious. Esther Greenwood, as the heroine is called, is an awkward rube of a girl with "fifteen years of straight A's" behind her but absolutely no experience of life --even as it was known to teen-agers in the '50s. She and her fellow "guest" editors are herded around the city "like a wedding party with nothing but bridesmaids." Upon discovering caviar, Esther consumes a pound or so at a magazine luncheon, paving her plate with chicken slices and smearing on the high-priced spread. But she knows that the whole enterprise is phony, that the girls are smug and dumb and, most important, that she is going against her own grain by participating at all. Before heading back to Massachusetts, she flings all her expensive, uncomfortable new clothes from the roof of her hotel.

At home it is psychic raiment that she lacks. She cannot sleep and will not wash. She longs to write a novel ("That would fix a lot of people"), but cannot write a paragraph. Her mother drives her crazy simply by living in the same house. With the awful logic of the mad, she considers and rejects any amelioration of her condition; she is under a "glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air." Rescued from a suicide attempt, she starts the long process of mental repair in an asylum.

It is obvious why Sylvia Plath's mother is distressed by the novel. The author remembers every misguided attempt to guide her, every ploy to use her, every complacent piece of advice. Yet her bitterness is so remorseless that it finally becomes poignant, especially since she foresaw the final tragedy. After shock treatments restore Esther's equilibrium, she wonders: "How did I know that someday, at college, in Europe somewhere, anywhere--the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn't descend again?"

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