Hype: The Sales Numbers of Ariel

"Published last year in Britain, the last poems of Sylvia Plath sold 15,000 copies in ten months," says a 1966 review of Ariel, and you will find that figure repeated everywhere, but below are reports for the British edition of Ariel covering 1) 1965; Ariel was first published March 11 of that year; 2) the first half of 1966; 3) the second half of 1966. 

Publisher Faber & Faber sent these royalty statements to Olwyn and Ted Hughes. The royalty money accrued to the children. For a book of poems these are excellent sales figures, but if these reports are accurate, we can henceforth revise that stupendous "15,000 in ten months" downward by four-fifths.

 

969 copies sold up to December 1965.

999 copies sold from January through June 1966. Notice how after 1000 total copies had been sold, the royalty was bumped up from 12.5 percent to 15 percent of the cover price; that is typical.

 

1,010 copies sold in Britain in July-December 1966. At this time, the first printing of 3100 copies would have sold out; demand enough for a second printing of another 3100 copies.

  

Ariel the book was no runaway hit with the British public. Excepting Plath's personal friends, early British reviewers had never read such a book, didn't know what to make of it, called it "sick" and "violent." Reviewers mentioned Sylvia Plath's "early death" and "fascination with death," but it was October 1965 before any British reviewer dared to out Plath as a suicide. That inspired the Times of London and its Times Literary Supplement to review the book in November 1965, TLS calling it "one of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time."

 

The U.S. publisher Harper & Row published Ariel in June 1966. The claim of "15,000 copies" in Britain, "almost as many as a bestselling novel," originates in the U.S., in a hypersensational review of Ariel in Time magazine, one that fetishized the suicide for a readership numbering in the millions. The Time review (June 10, 1966) can be read in full here. The story about the reviewer's meeting with Aurelia Plath is here. I couldn't possibly be the first to have seen these statements in the archives. If you can prove that Ariel sold 15,000 copies in Britain in ten months, please let me know.

 

The above Faber royalties from 1965-66, added up, would in 2023 amount to about 5000 British pounds or 6000 American dollars.

Rosalind Constable is Why You Are Reading This: Time Magazine's "Ariel" Review

Screen grab from Constable's Warhol screen test, 1964

 

Perhaps you’ve read it:

 

On a dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open. The dead woman was Sylvia Plath, 30, an American poet whose marriage to Ted Hughes, a British poet, had gone on the rocks not long before. . . .

 

But within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape. . . . 

 

So begins the review of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel in Time magazine (June 10, 1966; on newsstands June 6). From this unsigned work, the first Ariel review for America’s general public, Plathdom as we know it unfolded. The national newsweekly’s paid circulation was then 3.3 million, newsstand sales 4 million, its worldwide readership 17 million, the 1966 equivalent of going viral; The New York Times and its Book Review had not one-tenth its reach. Time reprinted alongside of the Ariel review the poem “Daddy” in full, and family photos lent by Aurelia Plath.

 

The author was British-born Rosalind Constable (1907-1995), Time’s arts-and-culture correspondent from 1948 to 1967. A talented trendspotter, her reports on the avant-garde helped nudge the edgiest art and artists toward the middle. She wrote for Fortune, The New Yorker, Vogue, Life (Time’s sister publication), Esquire, New York, and Saturday Review. She was friends with Andy Warhol and championed Pop artists. From 1940 she scouted out new artists for gallery owner Betty Parsons, who launched the Abstract Expressionists, and Constable in the 1950s was rebel novelist Patricia Highsmith’s crush.

 

Time’s juicy Ariel review set a trend. Three generations of Plath criticism, highbrow and low, aped this review's narrative architecture, almost helplessly leading with Plath’s suicide followed by a capsule biography. Then, if only to slight it, critics referenced “Daddy,” a poem that in 2021 is just past being interpreted literally. In 1966 this review established “Daddy” as  Plath’s flagship poem and Plath’s father as the core Plath preoccupation -- until the year 2020 when Heather Clark’s Plath biography Red Comet suggested that regarding Otto Plath “myth has overshadowed truth.” This review made Plath’s head in the oven her life’s most basic fact.

 

Constable used advantageously her British sources, reporting that in Britain Ariel, published in March 1965, had sold 15,000 copies in ten months. The Time review also recycled from Britain into the international mainstream crippling buzzwords from a year’s worth of snooty British Ariel reviews: “sick,” “morbid,” “psychotic,” “confessional.” Constable had read The Bell Jar, not available in the U.S.; this enhanced the review's authority and snark. She found and interviewed a witness to Plath’s pathetic final weekend. In March 1966 she interviewed Aurelia Plath in Wellesley.

 

Aurelia had thought Constable’s phone voice “pleasant,” but in person Constable took no notes and asked questions so invasive that Aurelia would not answer. (1) The review is unsigned, and Constable, although she had an office at Time-Life, is not on Time’s masthead, but Aurelia named Constable in a letter and later wrote that only she could have told Constable that three-year-old Sylvia, sighting a bumblebee, would say “Bombus bimaculatus,” a statement the review styled as that of an attention-seeking Daddy’s girl.

 

Time magazine today is of interest only because of its past and because its cover photo makes its subject a celebrity. Plath quoted from Time in a letter dated 11 September 1950. The Bell Jar, set in 1953, described withered copies of Time and Life lying on a coffee table. Let another poet attest to the power and ubiquity of Time (founded in 1923) during its midcentury heyday. In 1956 Allen Ginsberg wrote, addressing America:  

 

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?   

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. 

 

Even Time’s covers, with their familiar red borders, made news. The April 8, 1966 cover stunned and riled the readership, baldly asking “Is God Dead?” Time once forged and ruined reputations. In one bruising review that sounds a bit envious, it made Sylvia Plath a household name. (2)

 

1. Aurelia Schober Plath to Olwyn Hughes, March 7, 1966: “The day after your letter arrived, I had a long-distance call from New York and heard Mrs. Rosalind Constable’s pleasant voice for the first time. She is coming to Wellesley this next weekend.” ASP to Ted Hughes, March 29, 1966: “Mrs. Rosalyn [sic] Constable, the reporter and writer of the article on Sylvia for LIFE INTERNATIONAL was here over a week ago . . .  She took no notes to speak of . . .” ASP to Ted Hughes, July 6, 1966: “Only two words from my tapes occur [in the review] and identify the author: Bombus bimaculatus -- and then they are used in such a way as to be utterly ridiculous.” ASP to Miriam Baggett, July 7, 1966: “Last March, when confronted by a reporter (an English woman), I refused to accept her invitation to develop a very disparaging remark .  . . She did not need to sign this brutal, malicious article in TIME; her fingerprint is there unmistakably . . . her revenge.” [ellipsis in original]. 

Read the original review, “The Blood Jet is Poetry,” Time, June 10, 1966, 118-120.