The Sheila Variations

you and JL were always so much further ahead in your literary abilities/experiences when we were in high school (you still are!) - but I have a wonderful memory of a group of us sitting outside of the caf (I think we were being rebel non-smokers in the smoking yard), and you and JL were describing the sexual/sensual experience Plath describes while picking her nose - do you share this memory???

HA!

I remember it vividly.

Yes, there is a long sensuous passage in Sylvia's journal, where she openly discusses picking her nose. She rhapsodizes about it. She goes into great detail. It is as though she is describing a sexual experience.

JL and I were completely amazed by this. We were grossed out, we were embarrassed for her ... We would read the passage aloud to one another (and, apparently, to you all) as we sat on the slope of grass amongst the smokers.

I'm sure Sylvia had no idea just how much that passage would be discussed, and picked apart, and analyzed - by the Plath scholars (who Ted refers to as "the dogs" in his poem "The Dogs Are Picking Apart Your Mother" - the only poem besides one other in The Birthday Letters not directly addressed to Sylvia. That one is addressed to Nicholas and Frieda - the 2 children he and Plath had together). Anyway - Sylvia was ... 19 or something when she wrote the nose-picking sequence. She could have no idea that packs of wild dogs would analyze that passage to death.

Or that 2 teenage girls in 1984 would sit on a slope of grass on South Kingstown and read it aloud to one another.

Sheila,

I agree with much of what you've posted here. Hughes has been held responsible for and unfairly demonized for Plath's death. Likewise, Plath has been a shining example of victimhood. Neither of these is an accurate assessment.

This may be an obvious point, but I think it's important not to mythologize Hughes (at least not TOO much; perhaps it's impossible to avoid it completely). That marriage consisted of two intensely passionate and flawed people. He was, ultimately, just a man, and Plath was just a woman.

I think Plath's first mistake was mythologizing her husband, giving him larger-than-life proportions. In her journals, she has a tendency to describe him in such a way -- he was a godlike colossus to whom she could "go crashing, fighting." It's terribly romantic, but maybe she meant it more deeply or literally than you or I would. Certainly, she felt life deeply -- I will never forget the passage in which she described sitting in a diner and feeling intense love for the people around her. A love that brought tears to her eyes.

I've always wanted to be a fly on the wall in their apartment -- to UNDERSTAND their relationship. To know the truth about them, really. Words are all we have to go on now, I suppose, but I'm skeptical of taking from Hughes' poetry to form an image of their relationship, mainly because, as a poet myself, I know poetry takes licenses and isn't always "real."

Incidentally, I'm reading the letters of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and seeing a similar dynamic at work.

Eve

Eve - I just finished the letters of Scott and Zelda too! Wild.

I don't mythologize Hughes, I think - but it was good to hear his side of things - after so long. And of course, poems are not reality. Poems are not meant to be reality. His poems to her are like incantations, or - ruminations upon one theme - like a man going over and over the same material.

Biographies of Plath have been slim pickins because his estate, and Plath's estate, have been headed up by Olwyn Hughes, who wouldn't let anyone or anything go by without her approval. (Have you ever read Silent Woman? It's an incredible book - it's about the experience of trying to write a biography about Sylvia Plath - how to wade through all the myths, all the legends - all the people with axes to grind...)

What I got from his poems is that he fell in love with her - was entranced by her - and then became horrified, at last, when he realized what she was looking for in him.

But - who knows. This is just my interpretation. obviously.

Their first meeting, described so famously in her journal, of the St Botolph's party - where she bites his cheek - is very interesting because ... it seemed to set up an expectation. She was this wild and sexually free American, she was not repressed like English girls, blah blah. But then the second they got married, she developed writer's block - and seemed unable to reconcile the two roles - the poet and the wife, the Madonna and the Whore.

he seemed just as baffled by this as she was. What happened to that crazy girl reciting Chaucer to the cows? Why has she stopped writing?

I would love to be a fly on the walls in their apartment, too.

I loved Alvarez' assessment of Plath in that article in the Observer - that she was a woman who strove to be the best at *everything* she tried, hence, once becoming a wife and mother, she committed her entire self to the task, perhaps leaving behind most of what Hughes loved her so passionately for in the first place.

It's hard not to think poorly of a man who would abandon his wife for another woman, especially when there are children involved, but the status of victimhood that has been awarded Plath is revolting. Suicide is one of the most disgusting and dishonorable things a person can do, and reveals a lot about someone who would so callously burden their loved ones with such suffering. Plath herself has been placed on a pedastal by many, that despite her stunning talent as a writer, I feel she is most unworthy.

"His poems to her are like incantations, or - ruminations upon one theme - like a man going over and over the same material."

Yes! Beautifully put. Perhaps the movie is the same kind of thing. My tendency is to assume a film (like Sylvia) will try to be as "realistic" as possible, but of course it's another form of art. Whether or not it's a good movie (and I haven't seen it so have no opinion) perhaps is secondary to the fact that it's ONE perspective, combed from scattered information and Hughes' ruminations, and not necessarily obligated (obliged?) to be the truth.

And, oh, oh, do I really want the Plath of my imagination to be corrected and made real?

I love those journals. I felt dread, knowing what was going to happen, when I came across Plath's entries (when she was nineteen or so and still bright-eyed) about the conflict between marriage and a writing career, and how she feared sacrificing one for the other. She had no idea of the extent to which that conflict would play out in her life.

I did see the film. Neither comes off as the villain.

One of the things which I thought was very interesting, and very well portrayed, was their differences in writing style.

Hughes was a craftsman. He sat down every day, and sweated it out. He struggled - he faced the abyss on a daily basis.

Plath clammed up after she married him, and began obsessing about being the perfect wife. She became consumed with jealousy. After all, she knew what a womanizer he was. She had experienced it first-hand. And she couldn't face the abyss - she could not do it. It was too terrifying.

Then - when her psychic agony became so acute - when London froze over in the winter of 1963 - suddenly, the floodgates opened, and she wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. Alvarez himself wrote that he was frightened for her, that nobody could keep up that pace without crashing. He feared that this was not "art" - but some kind of exorcism.

The movie really captures that. The shots of Gwyneth (or Sylvia) with her hair down around her face, writing, and laughing, and crying ... are terrifying. Very different from the shots of Ted, sitting at his desk, his hair rumpled up, working on a daily basis.

BTW, Sheila, my title is after some horrid feminist writing a vindictive diatribe against Hughes called "J'accuse Ted Hughes". My apologies - her name doesn't come immediately to mind, but I'll look it up tonight in my old clippings and pass it on.

Oh, and Alvarez himself had tried to commit suicide and wrote one of the most definitive books on the suicidal mindset - It's called The Savage God. All else pales before the death wish.

Suicide is incomprehensible to people who have never experienced agony like that ... I remember writing about Elliot Smith a while back, the musician who stabbed himself in the heart ... and my logical mind cannot comprehend the pain he must have been to take such a step.

I have no idea what was going on in Plath's head. This is just a guess, forgive me: She wrote a poem called "Child". here is how it goes:

Child
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose name you meditate--
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

Okay, so here's my guess -

She stares over the crib at her baby son. She knows that all he sees is a "troublous wringing of hands" - She is a mother who is a "ceiling without a star" (I am haunted by those last lines).

I know it's hard to comprehend - but I think she wanted to spare her children the experience of having a mother who was so unhappy, who is a ceiling without a star.

It doesn't excuse her actions. But I think she really felt she was doing what was best for her children. (Suicides have an upside-down view of things - they are through the looking glass.)

Her crisis may very well have been temporary. Perhaps one day she would stop wringing her hands over he child's crib - but the insidiousness of depression keeps you from seeing that far ahead.

What is going on now is what will always go on. You will always be as you are. There is no respite, no escape.

Oh and Emily - I thought you were going straight for the Emile Zola reference. J'accuse! Very good title, nonetheless

To be painfully honest, Sheila, I lost my mother to suicide at the age of six. I was hospitalized in a psychiatric ward for two months when I was a teenager for attempting the same thing, partly as a result of the pain and responsibility I felt about my mother's death. I know it sounds crazy - a six year old feeling like they're to blame for the actions of an adult, but I carried those feelings of guilt with me for two decades. Maybe it was because of the lessons learned from those experiences that make my judgement and distaste so strong.

As for Smith's suicide, that had to have been beyond pain. There must have been some deep self-hatred for the man to stab himself in the chest. That's one of the most intense, gruesome suicides I can think of in recent memory.

Emily,

It makes total sense. Those who survive someone else's choice to check out are left with the real struggle. The guilt, the feeling of hopelessness...Especially to leave a child. Who couldn't possibly understand.

Depression is a kind of myopia. A tunnel vision. It becomes pervasive. It is very selfish, essentially.

Oh - and of course a 6 year old would blame themselves. Of course. What a burden. What an unbelievable burden.

"It is very selfish, essentially."

I think suicide is almost always a result of taking oneself so seriously that one's problems become grossly exaggerated in importance. We all have failings in our lives, things that haunt us and cannot be undone. It's just a natural part of being human, but some people take their failings so much to heart that they can't see past them. They can't even see the sun when it's shining on their face, can't see the good that they could still do in the world.

It's really the ultimate act of selfishness.

Mike -

Yes, I agree. In retrospect. It is only in retrospect that some things become clear.

I have struggled with what is known as clinical depression for many years. (I hate that term. It's way too over-used.) And the struggle has become much more acute in the last couple of years - and I finally have gotten some real help. Depression like that is not a rational place, it is not a place touched by logic at all. "The sun'll come out tomorrow" or "Everybody has problems" has no meaning there. Last year, I had the worst bout of depression I have ever had - it lasted 5 months - and I finally, with the help of drugs, got myself out of it. And that was when I started my blog. Surprise surprise!! When I started getting my thoughts out, and sharing them (when I started to reverse the unbelievable selfishness of depression) - was when the clouds lifted. That's no coincidence.

Once I came out of the darkness - I could look back and see how I had said No to all that was good. nothing gave me joy - my family, food, company, music. I stopped reading. I stopped sleeping. My friends and family were beside themselves with worry.

And that's where the selfishness comes in. I knew, somewhere, dimly, that I was being selfish. But I had no reserves left. I had been knocked over by a relatively small disappointment, and I literally could not get back up.

This isn't something I'm proud of, that I let life get to me to that degree, when, logically, I can look and see that I am very fortunate - that I am blessed actually! I have friends, I have a family who loves me, I have my health.

Depression clouds all that is good - you cannot see that you are blessed, and that's the worst curse of all. But I don't believe you can think your way out of it - having been there myself. I needed medication. I needed help. I could not get out of it on my own. The problem was in my own mind - not outside of me, in my life.

In the aftermath, looking at that time in 2002 - it reminds me of one of my favorite linguistic facts -

I always thought of those 5 months in 2002 as a "disaster". As it was happening, I kept thinking, "This is a disaster. i am a DISASTER."

If you break down the word disaster into its Latin components, it means "separation from the stars".

That is exactly what it feels like, don't it? It is exactly what you described. "can't even see the sun when it's shining on their face, can't see the good that they could still do in the world."