This is the 5th book review from books in Sylvia Plath’s library, or mentioned in journals or letters. See older blog posts for other reviews.
I’ve decided that these book reviews are getting a bit long for a blog format, so I’m going to blog only the beginnings, and if you’d like to read the entire piece, I’ll have it posted on Academia.edu. After posting this review on Academia, I later considered how this book, Axel’s Castle, has one important difference from others in Plath’s library which I did not discuss. That difference is that during the time Plath read it, she was recovering from her suicide attempt at age 20 and actually having to teach herself to read and write again after ECT and insulin treatments. That said, she was coherent enough to write Gordon Lameyer some good letters mentioning this book, which I have drawn from in the review below. I think it’s safe to say, judging from her letters at this time in The Letters of Sylvia Plath, that she had gotten her faculties back by this time.
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Sylvia Plath’s boyfriend, Gordon Lameyer, gave Plath the book Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870-1930, by Edmund Wilson, to read while recovering at McLean after she attempted suicide in 1953. My fellow scholars have teased me about my “crush” on Gordon. He was gorgeous, smart, into literature, and completely devoted to Plath. But this post is not about him; it’s about the book.
I had been interested in Axel’s Castle for a long time and bought a copy long ago which I finally got around to reading this week. Knowing that Joyce and Yeats were into Kabbalah/Cabala/Qabalah, and knowing that Lameyer seemed to be quite open to ideas of mysticism, as well as his being a major Joyce scholar, I knew there must be something here of interest. In a letter, Plath thanked Lameyer for it and said it “will take me to new depths in my dearly beloved Yeats, Joyce and Eliot…” (LSP, 652)
Author Edmund Wilson is dry—even Plath thought so, although in her letters she said that she mostly got it (LSP, 660). Axel’s Castle traces the origins of contemporary literature and the development of the imaginative style among six writers of a common school: Yeats, Joyce, Eliot, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Paul Valéry. Here, I’ll review the chapters that I know interested Plath: Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, as well as the introduction and conclusion.
In Chapter One, Symbolism, Wilson discusses how this school of literature begins with Romanticism, where the writer becomes a part of the story. What we call “meta” today, although it was in the voice for its time. Romantics see “the world is an organism, that nature includes planets, mountains, vegetation and people alike, that what we are and what we see, what we hear, what we feel and what we smell, are inextricably related, that all are involved in the same great entity” (AC, 5). Yes. Wilson didn’t realize he did a fine job describing Qabalah.
[For more, see: https://www.academia.edu/35734898/The_Qabalistic_Palimpsest_of_Axels_Castle]