You might think that classics like The Bell Jar are immedi-ately recognized the moment they reach a publisher's office.But publishing history is rife with stories about classic novels that barely squeaked into print, from Nightwood to A Confed-eracy of Dunces, and The Bell Jar is one of them. It's hard to say whether, if Sylvia Plath had lived--she'd be a senior citizen on her sixty-fifth birthday, October 27th, 1997--the novel would ever have been published in this country. Certainly it would not have been published until her mother died, which would have kept it from our shores until the early '90s. And by that time, Plath might have become a major novelist who might see her first book in a quite different light…