The Bell Jar Read Free

course seen as messages from the grave,
clues to the mystery of what really happened. The jacket of the first edition,
with its dried-blood color and lugubrious tone, certainly gave no hint of the
hilarity inside. In fact, this is a very funny book--the intervening
twenty-five years give us a good reason to delight in Plath’s amazing humor, a
quality she herself thought would make her career as a novelist.
                    Even such a powerful personal
legend as Plath’s recedes in the enduring presence of the work itself, which is
of course as it should be. After Janet Malcolm’s penetrating piece on the Plath
legend appeared in the New Yorker in 1994, the artist Pat Stier, one of
the many readers to respond, noted “The poetry soars over everything.” This
novel too has wings--it takes its readers where they need to go, and shows no
sign of losing altitude.
Frances McCullough
    New York, 1996

 
    THE
    BELL JAR
     

 
    1
     
    It
was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New
York. 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 bummed alive all along your nerves.
                    I thought it must be the worst
thing in the world.
                    New York was bad enough. By nine
in the morning the fake, country-wet freshness that somehow seeped in overnight
evaporated like the tail end of a sweet dream. Mirage-gray at the bottom of
their granite canyons, the hot streets wavered in the sun, the car tops sizzled
and glittered, and the dry, cindery dust blew into my eyes and down my throat.
                    I kept hearing about the
Rosenbergs over the radio and at the office till I couldn’t get them out of my
mind. It was like the first time I saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward, the
cadaver’s head--or what there was left of it--floated up behind my eggs and
bacon at breakfast and behind the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible
for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were
carrying that cadaver’s head around with me on a string, like some black,
noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
                    (I knew something was wrong with
me that summer, because all I could think about was the Rosenbergs and how
stupid I’d been to buy all those uncomfortable, expensive clothes, hanging limp
as fish in my closet, and how all the little successes I’d totted up so happily
at college fizzled to nothing outside the slick marble and plate-glass fronts
along Madison Avenue. )
                    I was supposed to be having the
time of my life.
                    I was supposed to be the envy of
thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted
nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather
shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour with a black patent leather belt
and black patent leather pocketbook to match. And when my picture came out in
the magazine the twelve of us were working on drinking martinis in a skimpy,
imitation silver-lamé bodice stuck on to a big, fat cloud of white tulle, on
some Starlight Roof, in the company of several anonymous young men with
all-American bone structures hired or loaned for the occasion--everybody would
think I must having a real whirl.
                    Look what can happen in this
country, they’d say. A girl lives in some out-of-the-way town for nineteen
years, so poor she can’t afford a magazine, and then she gets a scholarship to
college and wins a prize here and