Happy Birthday, Sylvia

Sylvia Plath would be 78 today.

I have communicated my regard for her on these pages numerous times. Whether or not you share my feelings, I believe the quality of her verses to be beyond question. I detest Harold Bloom for his contemptible dismissal of Thomas Wolfe—and, effectively, of everyone who loves him—but for his treatment of Plath, I come nearer real hatred for The Wet-Lipped One. His dismissal is attached to a word—hysteric—that has come to be used by many patriarchal types to put her in her place (in the vernacular of the patriarchal soul) ever since. Not that the tsking and the guffing and the clucking of the patriarchy matters all that much—I'd put Sylvia's book-sales up against Bloom's any day (and Wolfe's against Bloom's, for that matter)—but it is still irritating as hell. Sylvia excites the contempt and subsequent spit-filled invective of white male blowhards like no other, I think (witness Theodore Dalrymple's thick-headed opus to the sound of his own voice, published just this year), and this is testimony to her merit.

To deny Plath's talent and mastery of craft would be absurd, and seldom, if ever, do her critics proceed on that tack. On several occasions, though, I have read judgements of her poetry which claim that Greatness cannot be her's given her subject matter; her poetry did not engage the external world, or help her readers relate to it better, or raise their consciousness, or whatever the hell hoops they expect her work to metaphorically jump through. This is the Henry Higgins-approach—what they are saying, as I read it, is that it's a shame she didn't think like a man. Don't get me wrong—anyone who's read her journals knows she's a different breed of cat—yet still, undoubtedly, some of this disconnect derives from the fact that as a woman she regards the world from a slightly different place. A. Alvarez has said that Plath had "instant access to the inferno of her unconscious", and as a reader, I do not doubt this. Which is the more real, then—the more true? The poet who observes the external through the prism of experiences unknown to us, or the poet we know intrinsically in her work, and who reveals to us the inferno?

(I vote for the latter)

Take a look at this affecting video someone made, to Plath herself reading what is arguably her greatest poem (with maybe the greatest last-line ever).

We must love one another or die

Auden died in his sleep, in Vienna, 37 years ago today. Already he felt an antique among latter twentieth century culture. What might he who "(did) not know what is worse/the anti-novel or free verse" have made of this new century? A mixed bag, probably—he'd have made some noise about the computer age, but he would've been compelled to join it, I think. Would've had a blog, probably—what fun that would've been—and he would be a voice of reason and humanity, as he ever was.

The above picture of Auden rests atop one of our Poetry book cases, along with those of Yeats, Plath, and Pasha. It is a very young Auden in this picture; the tweed jacket with the dark shirt makes him look raffish, I think, as does the fedora, and his rather jaunty lean against the column. The pipe is a nice touch (it makes him look months older). His unlined face affects seriousness, and there is a sense of satisfaction in his bearing. It is the same bearing any picture taken in the 60's or 70's would've revealed—so central it was to him—although by then, the lines on his face had faithfully recorded his many, many sins.

I remember after September 11, Auden's September 1, 1939 turned up everywhere, prescient as it was. As you may or may not know, he did not permit its inclusion in his Collected Poems—he had come to regret his choice of words for the last line of the penultimate stanza (We must love one another or die) as being hyperbolic, even false. Most of us who love him, I think, would disagree, recognizing the Romantic closeted in his person (and appreciative of it), though Auden disdained the idea, on principle.

In a time when fanatics threaten our future like no time since the early decades of the last (ruined) century, the values he stood for—compassion, humor, and decency, expressed from a place of intelligence and refinement—are especially comforting, and necessary. And in the absence of a contemporary Auden to make sense of our still new (and ruining) century, the original will do quite nicely. From 1937, one of my favorite poems, As I walked Out One Evening:

As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.

And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.

'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,

'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.

'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'

But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.

'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.

'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.

'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.

'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.

'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.

'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.

'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.

'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'

It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.

Poets

I am currently enthralled by Ted Hughes, in a way that has seldom happened.

Yeats is My Poet; he is magnetic north to me, pointing way to my truest self.

Stevens somehow brings me into his singular universe, if I let him—if I surrender to his rhythms, and his conceits—and at the end, I become attuned better to my own.

Eliot quite often moves me; we share weaknesses, I think, both of us too often mesmerized by the past.

Auden is my companionable poet, who I can read in good times and bad, and who makes me laugh and feel happy to be human.

Dickinson is my first love; I fell for her in grade school, when I discovered that she was nobody too, and referred to angleworms as "fellows", and when I grew older, fell deeper for her ability to find ecstasy in stillness, to mock death as if it was a house-servant, and for her strangeness, her insolence, and her audacity.

I fell for Plath the moment I read "Lady Lazerus"—I love nearly everything in The Collosus and Ariel, but it was not necessary, to seal the deal. The fierce feminine intelligence at work in that poem, beguiling language and consuming men whole, was enough.

But in Hughes, I am discovering.

It is exhilerating, and I will report soon.

For now, have a look at Ted Hughes' "Crow's Fall":

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened-
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."

Thoughts on Plath and Yeats and Hughes (and me and you and everyone we know)(and whatever's really out there) (or in here)

The conventional wisdom regarding Sylvia Plath—and this is true across the spectrum, whether you ask the feminists who co-opted her after her death, or Ted Hughes, who many blame for her death—is that she was set on her course long before she ever met Hughes, or even decided to become a writer, by unresolved feelings from the loss of her father. A lovely villanelle, which she wrote while an undergrad at Smith, betrays more than common angst, I think; it's called Lament:

"The sting of bees took away my father
who walked in a swarming shroud of wings
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

Lightning licked in a yellow lather
but missed the mark with snaking fangs:
the sting of bees took away my father.

Trouncing the sea like a raging bather,
he rode the flood in a pride of prongs
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

A scowl of sun struck down my mother,
tolling her grave with golden gongs,
but the sting of bees took away my father.

He counted the guns of god a bother,
laughed at the ambush of angels’ tongues,
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

O ransack the four winds and find another
man who can mangle the grin of kings:
the sting of bees took away my father
who scorned the tick of the falling weather."

(Almost makes you feel sorry for Ted Hughes, doesn't it?)

Similarly, Plath is regarded as being among the most self-obsessed of poets. I don't know that I agree—for one thing, that particular category covers a hell of a lot of ground. For another, this conclusion is too easy, driven usually by nothing deeper than her status as the best and most influential of confessional poets, and even motivated sometimes by sexist drivel cloaked as high-minded polemic. However, from reading her poetry and her journals, there seems little doubt that Plath was one who had a vivid interior life, and a strong sense of every moment. It is also true that her denouement can be considered an act of wanton self-absorption.

It seems obvious that within the cipher of competing interests inhabiting perception, a sense of loss can inflate the relevance of Self dramatically. That it seems so readily apparent to me may be because it happened to me. I experienced what I can only describe as a galvanic loss, and it's not an exaggeration to say that I barely—slimly—survived it. I well recall the certain and joyful feeling that art, manifested especially through the keening miracle of poetry, represented—reality hyperactuated, divested of the extraneous—the irrelevant—along with the sturm and drang that adheres to consciousness like barnacles to the hull of a boat. When Yeats, in part 2 of Blood and the Moon, declared that Bishop Berkely “proved all things a dream”, intuitively I agreed, given leave to do so by this heightened sense of my Self; when he asserted, then, that “this pragmatical, preposterous pig of a world…(would) vanish on the instant if the mind but change(d) its theme”, I nodded emphatically, and heavily underlined the text, reflecting as it did my own faltering, ungainly relationship with awareness.

Like the whirling digits on a slot machine, our thought revolves uncertainly around the sprawl of creation. So much depends on the the accident we wake to. What of Plath and Hughes, and their well-documented collision with each other? Or of we—colliding no differently, really, with one another, or with the furniture, or with our own feet—equally uncertain, but captivated (at least for the moment, I hope) in their wake? No matter where the spinning reels end, the ultimate choices we're offered are guesses for everyone else. No one else sees from where I do, or you do, or they did, and our communication is impoverished by these limitations of perspective, as well as those of language and imagination. The smallness of the spaces we ostensibly inhabit magnifies this potential estrangement, and can create reservoirs of incredible loneliness, especially when our little windows of reality are threatened by seismic shifts that rearrange the ideas we stand on; none can be more dramatic, or frightening, than the loss of someone we love. And when our window to the external world is altered radically, the only calm place that remains for us to escape is inward. And even though tenuous bonds with the external world can be reconnected, once one has lived, surrepticiously, locked within one's self, the temptation to remain there, as well as the ease of doing so, can be narcotic.

Which is, perhaps, where Yeats connected to me, and probably to Plath, as well.

He was a major influence on Hughes, too, and not only because of his craft. As much of his work was wrung from the sadness and loss of Ireland's "heroic" past, Plath's is haunted by the rotting away, and the aforementioned end of her father, when she was all of 8 years-old. “I’ll never speak to God again,” she said, and while we have no way of knowing if this is true, I think it accurate to say, from reading her poetry, that she became a critic of human experience, and remained one until she ended her life—like the humans in Ted Hughes’ fable, who sent round to God asking that He take their lives back. God’s response was to demand that the hand/voice in his nightmare create something better than man. This was the origin of the crow, the figure at the center of the cycle of poems for which Hughes is probably best known; it would not be a stretch to see Plath’s voice and the crow’s as being similar.

Joyce Carol Oates has said Plath was victim, in part, to the effects of her virtuosity as a lyric poet upon her “precocious imagination”; “How quickly," says Oates, in The Death Throes of Romanticism: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, “these six-inch masterpieces betray their creators!” In that vein, Plath does seem to revel sometimes in her isolation: “It is so beautiful, to have no attachments!/I am solitary as grass. /What is it I miss?/Shall I ever find it, whatever it is? “(Three Women) while appreciative of the benefits accruing to inanimate objects (“No thirst disturbs a stone’s bed”, Child’s Park Stones). According to the first draft of Elm, the “stigma of selfhood” is among her fears, though: “I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me,” she says, in the final version. “All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.” Oates refers to the self-examination (crucial) to the lyric poet as being “the deadly mirror”—choosing the lines “I am not cruel, only truthful—/The eye of a little god”, from Mirror, to begin her essay. She argues, nearly persuasively, that this poem contains the seeds of Plath’s undoing—“the audacious hubris of tragedy… illustrate the error of a personality who believed itself godlike.” Plath shares with Yeats the intellectualized ideal of the perfection of Nature without Man (and his damned intellectualizing); yet along the way, she has, according to Oates, and in the words of D.H. Lawrence, “lost the cosmos.”

As evidence, she cites numerous examples of Plath’s “otherness”, of her seeming indifference for other humans, extending, sometimes it seems, to even her own children. In spite of the “stigma of selfhood”, she looks increasingly inward; and while she praises the unspoiled ideal of creation—sans the human factor, that is—her poems are seemingly the reality she prefers—even grieving, in Stillborn, of their inferior relation to reality: “It would be better if they were alive…But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distractions.” How easy to equate this version of Plath with Yeats’ gold enamelled deathwish from Sailing to Byzantium.

But it's not the whole story—it never is, is it, when we start trying to deduce people through their art, or from what other people say? To me, Plath was something different. Nobody's fool. Brilliant and strange and deeply cynical about human beings. Savagely honest, and pathologically driven—but not the empty vessel some portray her to be. Beautiful and funny and bemused and disappointed, she was the human embodiment of Crow...

A subject for another post.

Ted Hughes, We Hardly Knew Ye...

"Ambition, like talent, is a gift," according to Joyce Carol Oates, in an essay about Sylvia Plath. Anyone who has read Plath's journals knows just how ambitious she was, a quality that rates high with me. I don't pretend to have any particular insight into who she was, or why she did what she did; I only know that she was one of the very best poets I've read, and I wish things had turned out differently. Besides, what she represents to me may have nothing at all to do with her. Just as the words of the dead are modified by the living (as Auden said about Yeats), their substance is given over to the "foreign codes of conscience" they affect. Like so many others, I am moved by her seeming contradictions, by her talent and her drive, and what I perceive to be her vulnerability. There was a hardness about her sensibility, though, and a stern, almost cruel quality to her intelligence which belied any ideas of softness at her core. In the end, what mattered most was her poetry, which was startling—no, fuck, that's not enough—it was lacerating. It was tough, and dagger-sharp, and brilliantly crafted. As much as any I have read, it took my breath away. I don't know how much of her is revealed in her work, but what I imagine is enough for me to love her.

And because I love her, I hated Ted Hughes for a very long time.

I was wrong. It happens.

I'm not attempting to justify Hughes' behavior in their marriage, or after, with Assia Wevill. There's no defense to be made, beyond the certain fact that people are complicated animals, who often do stupid, destructive, totally fucked-up things, for reasons they don't even remember once the dust settles. Hughes behaved abominably. Plath was difficult, I have no doubt, and formidable. She was also the mother of his children, and his greatest champion. And the love of his life. He should have done things differently—less piggishly, and with greater understanding of the implications. Anyone who's read Birthday Letters knows that Hughes loved her, enormously. And in spite of some of the rather easy self-justification in those letters—the surmises regarding her relationship to her father's death, etc.—I believe that he shouldered much of the blame for her death (read The Offers, a poem published a few days before he died, if you doubt it). Of course, it was a thing impossible for Hughes to admit during his active life; the admission would've seemed to him to be a surrender to those who picketed his readings, calling him a murderer, and who repeatedly chipped his name off her tombstone. Perhaps it was his gigantic egotism, or perhaps just a blind spot where Sylvia was concerned—but he could never engage the very real blame Plath's admirers directed toward him, to the point where it seemed he could not comprehend it. How different things could have been, if he could've simply revealed his feelings—his guilt, his shame, his loss—but then, Ted wouldn't have been Ted, would he? It just wasn't in his nature to reveal himself so nakedly, or even to concede an inch of ground; she was his goddamm wife after all, and it was private.

From reading Plath's letters and journals, and some of the biographical material, as well as Hughes' poems, I've formed a theory about the dynamic between them. When they famously met that February evening in 1956, Hughes had only published a few poems. His career was going nowhere, it seemed, and he was actually on a wait-list to join his brother in Australia—to find adventure and fortune, or whatever they were doing down there—and working a dead-end, subsistence level job for the Arthur Rank Company. Plath knew pretty much immediately that he had greatness in him, and her faith changed everything, centered him and caused him to see himself as the man he wanted to be. The standard she held him to may have felt like a yoke, sometimes; and in Birthday Letters, I often sense what I can only describe as a kind of self-recrimination, attached to bitterness—the result, perhaps, of an egotistical, chauvinistic man who was dominated by a woman, and his love for her, and who is still in her thrall—unsure of how to deal with it long after her death, still flailing about in the vicissitudes of many thousands of his own dark nights, for answers.

It is a remarkable document.

Early on, Hughes, the Rube from Yorkshire, tells us that "At 25 (he) was dumbfounded afresh/By (his) ignorance of the simplest things" (Fulbright Scholars)—stumbling about, it seems, all fidgety talent and uncertainty, unaware he "was being auditioned/for the male lead in (her)drama." In Sylvia's world, which Ted merely inhabited, "Ordinary jocks bec(a)me gods/deified by (her) infatuation/that seemed designed at birth for a god" (The Shot). It was a fruitless endeavor, for both she and whoever she annointed, because "a god/who was not (her) father/was a false god" (Being Christlike). What remained for him was the recognition that reality—or rather, the reality of him—would never be enough:

"In my position, the right witchdoctor

might have caught you in flight with his bare hands

Tossed you, cooling, one hand to the other.

Godless, happy, quieted.

I managed

a wisp of your hair, a ring, your watch, your nightgown"

(The Shot)

Among my favorite verses, and most telling, I think, appears at the end of Ouija, a poem literally describing their experience fooling around with a ouija board:

"...Once, as we bent there, I asked:
'Shall we be famous?' and you snatched your hands upwards

as if something had grabbed it from under.

Your tears flashed, your face was contorted,

your voice cracked, it was thunder and flash together:

'And give yourself to the glare? Is that what you want?

Why should you want to be famous?

Don't you see—fame will ruin everything.'

I was stunned. I thought I had joined

your association of ambition

to please you and your mother

to fulfill your mother's ambition

that we should be ambitious. Otherwise

I'd be fishing off a rock

in Western Australia. So it seemed suddenly. You wept.

You wouldn't go on with ouija. Nothing

I could think of could explain

your shock and crying. Only

maybe you'd picked up a whisper that I could not.

Before our glasses could stir, some still small voice:

'Fame will come. Fame especially for you.

Fame cannot be avoided. And when it comes

you will have paid for it with your happiness.

Your husband and your life.' "

These are the thoughts Hughes was left with, in the intervening years, between their deaths. Perhaps it is no real wonder that he succumbed to Assia's seduction—a beautiful, far less complicated woman, who desired him, I would wager, more specifically, or so at least it seemed to him. The "dreamer in (him)" fell in love with her "black Mongolian hair" and "many-blooded beauty"—the dreamer in him, the very real man who lived outside the expectation, and inevitable disappointment, of his strange and brilliant—and at the level he probably desired, unattainable—futurely famous wife.

From Fever, a poem describing Plath sick with a virus when they were in Spain:

...You cried for certain that

You were going to die.

                                      I bustled about.

I was nursemaid. I fancied myself at that.

I liked the crisis of the vital role.

I felt things had become real...

In the end, according to Ted Hughes' version of The Truth, it seems that was all he wanted.