Her Blacks Crackle and Drag

A few words before we begin:

1. Sylvia Plath wrote a journal until the end of her life. A highly edited version was published decades ago, with a foreward by husband Ted Hughes who admitted to destroying the final two years of her journal. This was like a bomb going off, and the reverb has lasted to this day. He has been the focus of much anger because of it. He said that he wanted to protect his children from having to read said journal. So it must have been pretty awful. But the loss to Plath fans is incalculable. I do not blame him for his actions, because he had to have been a wreck, but I do regret the loss. In the last decade, a big publishing event was an “unedited” version of Plath’s journal with additional material – but sadly, those two years were still not included. So. Please don’t insult me by calling them “unedited” then. Thanks. Did Hughes destroy them as he said? Is it possible a copy exists somewhere? Hughes is dead now. Will we ever know? It is something to speculate about (and drool over).

2. My friend Cara is as huge a Plath fan as I am. We have even considered meeting up together at the Lilly Library to go through Plath’s papers that are held there.

3. The missing journals are important. Remember how important those journals are to Plath fans, and how much we ache to get our hands on them. How much we believe they do exist somewhere, and how much we long for the day when they are revealed.

4. Cara has just written a tale on her blog – part spy-novel, part international thriller, part homage to Sylvia Plath – starring me, her, and Tracey. One other thing to take note of: Most of the dialogue is direct quotations from Plath’s poems, and the narrative is peppered literally with countless references to Plath’s work. If you are at all familiar with Plath, you’ll recognize some of them.

It is so brilliant what Cara has done here.

Now:

Knowing all of this as a preamble, go read Cara’s explanatory note, and then go read the story that my friend Cara has just written.

This entry was posted in writers and tagged . Bookmark the permalink.

7 Responses to Her Blacks Crackle and Drag

  1. seang says:

    What does that mean “My blacks crackle and drag”-is she referring to her hair? I remember a Westerberg tune about Plath.

    • Ian Wright says:

      Plath was Depressive or bipolar, a treatment for which is electro-shock therapy). Her “blacks” were her periods of Depression; “cralkle” refers to the ECT she underwent; and “drag” is the slowing of life during a depressive period–like walking through molasses.

      • sheila says:

        I guess if you like there to be only one possible interpretation (which seems quite boring to me) – then that works, sure.

        A bit too literal and on the nose for me.

  2. red says:

    Yeah, Westerberg was quoting Plath. Pretty cool, right? No easy answer to “what she means”, although “blacks” in this context refer to mourning clothes. It is the last line from the last poem Plath wrote called “Edge”. She killed herself a week later. Here is the poem:

    The woman is perfected.
    Her dead
    Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
    The illusion of a Greek necessity
    Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
    Her bare
    Feet seem to be saying:
    We have come so far, it is over.
    Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
    One at each little
    Pitcher of milk, now empty.
    She has folded
    Them back into her body as petals
    Of a rose close when the garden
    Stiffens and odors bleed
    From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
    The moon has nothing to be sad about,
    Staring from her hood of bone.
    She is used to this sort of thing.
    Her blacks crackle and drag.

    • Ian Wright says:

      Plath is considering suicide (again) and whether to take her children with her, whether first to kill them: “If I can’t have them all to myself, no one shall”. It’s a quite terrifying poem. And that reasoning is not uncommon among some sections of mentally ill mothers.

  3. Patty says:

    I also am deeply interested in PLath and have read all of her journals and many books about her life and her work.
    During graduate school (I earned my PhD in lit, but Plath was for fun, not my scholarship), I was driving through Bloomington and stopped by the Lilly Library and requested to review some of her materials. The archivist had a “tired reaction” to my request to review Plath docs. Reading her scrapbooks, letters, etc. helped me get to know her as a person, a woman, and just not a “literary figure.” Totally fascinating. I also have followed a little bit the career of Freida Hughes. Sylvia Plath was a remarkable woman and artist. Thanks for the links.

  4. Patty says:

    I also am deeply interested in PLath and have read all of her journals and many books about her life and her work.
    During graduate school (I earned my PhD in lit, but Plath was for fun, not my scholarship), I was driving through Bloomington and stopped by the Lilly Library and requested to review some of her materials. The archivist had a “tired reaction” to my request to review Plath docs. Reading her scrapbooks, letters, etc. helped me get to know her as a person, a woman, and just not a “literary figure.” Totally fascinating. I also have followed a little bit the career of Freida Hughes. Sylvia Plath was a remarkable woman and artist. Thanks for the links.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.