Mad Girl's Love Song

(Click here for Poem Text)

For years I thought that Sylvia Plath's Collected Poems was the definitive edition. I was aware that Ted Hughes was berated for lumping together most of the material written before he met Plath as "Juvenilia" and it was indeed clear that a lot of these poems were deserving of inclusion in the main body of work. Perhaps Hughes was not then aware that his own Collected Poems would include true Juvenilia such as "Wild West" written when he was 16 :

I'll tell you a tale of Carson McReared,
Who, south of the 49th was feared
Greater than any man ever before,
And men went in fear of his .44,
For he'd shoot the ears from any man
From Two-Gun Ted to Desperate Dan.

There ain't nothin' like that in Sylvia's Collected Poems. And there should be. We deserve nothing less than a matching complete edition. The title of this entry is also the title of this recent Plath Biography by Andrew Wilson which I've just finished reading, only after forcing myself to turn the internet off while I read it to stop myself looking up diverting details on The Interwebs.

In Forbidden Planet Action Figure terminology this is "Next Wave". After the crop of biographies gathered temporally around Bitter Fame, Anne Stevenson's detailed but definitely-flawed biography, (written jointly as Stephenson almost put it, with Hughes' sister Olwyn - so much so that it might have been better to attribute the book to a literary equivalent of Alan Smithee), there has been a gap of some years with just academic volumes. The fiftieth anniversary of Plath's death has sparked a new crop of popular biographies and the absence of Ted from the world seems to have lessened his family's desire to manage his image and to have allowed a refocusing of the analysis on Plath's life away from his influence.

Mad Girl's Love Song does indeed leave Ted as a blurry presence at the beginning and the end though last word really belongs to Richard Sassoon, who although a major presence in all the previous biographies, seems to have become The Colossus that Plath aspired to, and despite only having a few emails and stories from Sassoon, Wilson manages to give us a clear idea of his and Plath's relationship in a way I've not seen before. The pivot point of the timelines of Plath, Hughes and Sassoon is described well, in a way which re-balances this triangle of egos in a way which puts Plath and not Hughes at the apex. Sassoon is still alive and I am sad that he is not more well-known. Maybe he was never after the fame which Plath both craved and achieved but from this book it is clear that he had the intellect to match Plath and to obviously surpass Hughes.

I've always tried to step back from the vitriol that Hughes seems to attract and I still want to but the problem, as a fictitious academic with mild Aphasia once said of a past paramour, the trouble was that he had such a small .... what is the word .... intellect. Well when compared to Plath that is true.

Mash-ups (No Zombies)

It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they vapourised Syme, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Is there anything else on Radio 4 at the moment? George Orwell and Sylvia Plath seem to have taken over and I'm expecting one or both of them to be guest editor on Today sometime next week. Not a complaint of course apart from the time it's going to take to listen to it all once it's off the PVR and on a device somewhere. 

Like Chalk on a Blackboard



Two-Dozen Avocados Not Pictured
(SP top of picture)

 After Bonjour Tristesse, I've just whistled through The Bell Jar for the fourth time. I started reading SP poems some years ago and this being noted by someone at work I was pointed at The Bell Jar as being a very funny book and despite the clipped literary tones and serious events it is indeed hilarious in parts. I'm not sure I'd read it for a laugh as for the more melancholy reader it might cut close to the darker synapses of the brain with which the book has an almost-physical link because of the ECT. You might want to dismiss the whole thing as a middle-class girl's experience of mental illness - nice asylum paid for by rich benefactress - but as Esther herself states early on she does not have the experience to write a novel and so this book is basically autobiographical and I can only imagine it pretty-much describes exactly what happened.

I'd read a couple of the SP biographies before The Bell Jar and to me it seemed like a distillation of the fragments I'd already picked up. It seemed that all that was missing were the footnotes pointing the pseudonyms at the real people. So ignore the Bourgeois backdrop and concentrate on the description of Ether/Sylvia's predicament and the brilliantly-succinct way that a complex state of mind is described in a way that keeps you reading despite the over-whelming sense of ennui about the whole thing. If you are expecting obscure poetic references you will be disappointed - this is basic description born maybe of the detailed descriptions of peeling hotel rooms from the journals, a brilliant mind sharply dissecting both itself and the hypocrisy of others, all the while pointing out without judgement,  the hypocrisy of the narrator herself. There is a lot of what she ought to have said but didn't, times where she just shrugged and accepted the terrible behaviour of those around her. You can find a parallel here between the bright and breezy style of the Letters Home and the dark mazes of The Journals. You might not come away from this understanding any more of Plath's mind but you will feel that you have read a great book masquerading as Airport Fiction - A potboiler as Plath herself described it.

I know that there is a second film version of this in development at the moment. I am not hopeful that this will be any better than the 1979 version which resulted in legal actions and apparently managed to filter out any literary merit leaving the pulpiest of pulp-fiction on the screen.

This is not a Biography : Lost in Floridita

Our house rings to the resonant tones of the above and her husband. I heard some of these radio pieces on Radio 3 a few years back but now they are available from The British Library with a long interview with both poets which starts the CD. The content then moves from the cheerfully domestic through some harrowing and dark poems to a dramatic review of other Poet's work at the end. Plath has a voice which is obviously coloured by her years in the UK and has like TS Eliot, an accent that only slightly betrays her origins. I thought at some points I was detecting a catch in her voice which suggested severe distress which she was trying to control such as in Parliament Hill Fields but this may just be her way - it sometimes appears in the most cheerful of recollections of her home life. For those who have not heard or read any of Plath's poems, you may imagine them as dusty exercises with little relevance for the real world but to hear them read by the poet herself is a time-suspending experience. Occasional heavy floridness can be forgiven as the result of the distance between then and now, the transfer of original antique phrase into modern cliche and that strange accent more English than most of the English and yet still obviously not English carries the recital over these missteps.

The Entire Estate of the Recently Deceased Mayor of Ulan Bator

We have finally got around to watching some of the BBC poetry season we have on tape starting with a ten-year old program about Ted Hughes (with of course the usual concentration on his relationship with SP). There was a reading of one of Hughes' Birthday Letters poems with the rostrum camera image of pages from Plath's journals which had me again wondering about the last, supposedly-destroyed volumes of the journals and the salacious idea that somewhere in the various piles of papers sent to different universities around the world, that last volume still exists waiting to be released to us baying culturenistas. What would be the point? What further light would it shed on the situation and would it be worth the upset it would cause to surviving relatives? Dichotomy here - desire to read the details and also to be restrained and to do the right thing. All moot of course, unless that volume does in fact turn up.

The note in the book for this sounds like the title of a Dali painting - The possibility of the continued existence of Sylvia Plath's final journal. It is followed by these fragments of poetry - The tip-tap claw, the panther's maw across the mouth ... which begs completion but is so obviously a rip-off of an early poem by Plath to Hughes - Pursuit. Rereading it shows it to be a very personal poem but not a very good one - simply something to get a bit of her own lust out of the way I suspect. However, all the way through it, despite being stuffed with forest imagery, I see the whole thing overlaid with genteel views of Cambridge, the theatrical backdrops of academia cloaking the real world of pairing-off, of animal instincts and the struggle between the chemical depths of consciousness and the rational electrics of higher functions. But then again isn't that most poetry - the tabloid view of dusty offices, with bespectacled poets scratching away - all Hello Clouds, Hello Sky? In reality it is all rather sexy, punctuated with steamy thoughts and backstabbing.

All this has me looking forward to the Keats movie - Bright Star. This title comes from this sonnet which we end with today.

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art-
-Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors-
-No--yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Savage Saville

I'm not sure how I feel about this cover being censored by various supermarkets. I suspect that like the vitriol aimed at one of the CBeebies presenters who is in possession of fewer than the average number of arms, it will probably affect more parents than children. It might not even be blood on the child's face after all - maybe it's impressionistic. While I can't say it's beautiful, it is strangely hypnotic which goes well with the strange lyrics from the album that I heard when The Manics were on Later. It is brave of the remaining crew to use Richey's lyrics when they have no possibility of going to him for clarification but it does have a situationist charm. I am sure that Sylvia Plath had some influence on it, though nothing of hers was ever as unstructured.

The Poet's Guide To Britain about her poem Wuthering Heights was suitably atmospheric though I do wonder how long the crew had to wait around to get the wind and the rain exactly right for the backing shots to the readings. I suspect that Owen Sheers being the talent was allowed to saunter back to Heptonstall to nurse a pint in the shelter of the pub while the poor, bloody infantry of the BBC (or whatever independent production company made the programme) hung around the moor tops waiting for a particularly attractive huddling of the sheep. All those years I lived in proximity to many woolly ones and I never noticed that sheep's eyes have horizontal slots for pupils. It takes a proper poet to notice stuff like that.

Non Tali Auxilio

Has The Earth stopped turning? It is so dark here despite us being after the solstice. Lights went out again before anyone else arrived but the screen gives me just enough light to keep typing. I was struggling to get motivated this morning but as usual the gloom lifts with the sun and it's just the normal boring slog. It is not helped by the vacuous, verbal fencing that I overheard at the coffee machine this morning. It consisted of what seemed to be a contest to come up with the most inane comment while obviously not listening to the riposte. I suppose my own conversations must seem as empty to some people so maybe I should just take it on board that boring existence is just that.

What have we got from the notebook?

The oily smell of instant coffee on my hands - his hands? A dog in the house of Capulet. Nick Cave is Philip Larkin. "I do not believe in an interventionist God." Defaulting to not splitting an infinitive.

It's a pseudo-poem if nothing else. We also have an article about Three Women by Sylvia Plath which I skip over in the Collected Poems but sounds as though it might be quite special when performed. However, reading the first few lines now I am struck by ...

The moon's concern is more personal:
She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.

So obviously Plath but I don't remember it. All this reminds me that I finished the Bill Bryson Shakespeare book which has made me want to read the sonnets which I will have to dig out from somewhere - they are on the web I am sure.