henna day post / Plath letters

[gwynnega]

I am hennaing my hair, during a spate of ridiculously beautiful Los Angeles weather (with no end in sight).

I finally finished reading volume 1 of the Plath letters. Reading the last months in the book, I was struck by the fact that, if not for Plath, Ted Hughes might never have had a writing career. When they met, he had not attempted to publish any of his work (aside from student magazines). Plath lavished her considerable market savvy on Hughes. Taking time from her grad school work and her own writing, she typed up and sent out his manuscripts, and even made sure he bought a suit so he'd be presentable to go for an interview at the BBC (radio). (To hear Plath tell it, when they met he wore basically the same trousers and old sweater every day.)

It's also more than a little ironic to read Plath crowing about how, unlike bitter women writers like Dorothy Parker, she was going to make her name writing happy love poems...

Comments

[usedtobeljs]

Interesting about Plath's influence on Hughes.

And yay for henna day!

[gwynnega]

I did sort of know that about Plath and Hughes already, but reading her previously unpublished letters to Hughes detailing the massive amount of work she did on his behalf was an eye-opener.

[sovay]

It's also more than a little ironic to read Plath crowing about how, unlike bitter women writers like Dorothy Parker, she was going to make her name writing happy love poems...

My brain went straight to "Résumé" ("Gas smells awful; / You might as well live") and now I'm sad.

[edit] You should write something about Parker and Plath. You are the poet I know who could do it best.

[gwynnega]

I know a lot more about Plath than I do about Parker, though I like Parker a lot.

[kore]

Plath goes on and on about Parker and Teasdale and Phyllis McGinty and Adrienne Rich and Millay and other female rivals in her journals. Only women, tho, and she wanted to be crowned "The Poetess of America." Yeah, poetess. It's such a fucking shame she died right when it was all about to change. Apparently the one serious conversation she and Rich had was about whether or not you could still write after having children! (Dido Merwin said Rich told Plath not to, and Rich said something like "it's possible but you'd better think about it really hard," which felt like a total lie to her at the time. Plath totally crowed about how she felt motherhood unblocked her writing, tho. Actually given how terrible her PMS and menstrual problems were -- she had great difficulty getting pregnant the first time -- which her daughter inherited, pregnancy might have been a big hormonal physical bodily relief for her particular mind.)

[gwynnega]

The letters show she was also really into Edith Sitwell when she was an undergrad, which I hadn't realized. It's too bad she didn't get to interview Shirley Jackson as she'd wanted to, since Jackson managed to combine writing and motherhood pretty successfully.

[kore]

And Dickinson too, right? IIRC she and Sexton were both really into Teasdale as adolescents, and then grew up and realized she was "the lowest of the low," as Sexton wryly said once. And Lowell didn't like Millay and thought Dickinson and Moore were the only Real True Female Poets, and he moulded both of them, blahblah. (No shock that when a man started using his own personal experience for poetry, it was culture-shattering, amirite? But women doing it was....ick. And Hughes constantly went on about how terrible it was that Plath used 'their bad times' 'for poems' and did exactly that himself, and how many prizes did he win for Birthday Letters? Feh.)

About the only constant mostly-positive female role model I can remember Plath talking about is Woolf, altho she was also always fighting with her, and the childlessness was a big thing. I remember she liked Ruth Fainlight a lot in England, and met Doris Lessing altho Lessing thought she was too needy. (I think Lessing thought most people were too needy.) Did she read Jackson's novels? I can't remember, she must have. But the book she always talks about in comparison with Bell Jar is Snake Pit, not Hill House or even Bird's Nest.

Also did you ever see this? I love the Legacy Libraries stuff.

http://www.librarything.com/catalog/SylviaPlathLibrary

That has some DELICIOUS biblio data, like her copy of Dickinson's "Love Poems and Others (WTF what a title) is "SP's copy offered for sale via Bonhams, 21 March 2018. Awarded to SP as First Prize for "Excellence in English Expression" by the Wellesley Club, Wellesley High School on 4 June 1948."

[gwynnega]

I can imagine that Teasdale and Millay etc. would have seemed old-fashioned in the 1950s, plus the fact that they weren't given academic respect the way their male contemporaries were.

In the letters Plath mentions reading The Bird's Nest. The letters also reveal that Jackson was one of the authors she wanted to interview at Mlle., but they assigned her Elizabeth Bowen instead.

Oh, that Plath Library Thing is great.

[kore]

Bird's Nest is so good! I wish she'd written about Jackson more. But from what I remember it was mostly Woolf and Lawrence and Thomas and also Hughes, Hughes, Hughes. I frankly never thought he was that great a poet. (I do like Crow tho. But parts are so misogynist.) Gunn is miles better. IMHO, which is no longer needed for anything literary/academic at all, hah.

[gwynnega]

Probably Plath read Jackson's short fiction, since Jackson published so many stories in The New Yorker and Plath was so desperate to publish there! Yes, she was hugely into Woolf and Lawrence and Thomas. I agree that Gunn is a better poet than Hughes. Crow is Hughes's best, I think.

[kore]

OMG, I hadn't thought of that, yeah. And also in Ladies' Home Journal....hmmmm, now I'm surprised that more critics haven't picked up on that, because all I've seen about Plath's code-switching like that is either "she was so desperate to be published" or "she was equally happy in either format!", hah. But yeah, Jackson was a mother of a big family, happily married to another intellectual for all anyone knew, published popular articles and stories and also well-reviewed stories and novels....it's too bad they never connected. (LOL, remember when Plath writes in her journal that she thought she had a rival named Shirley who was "Ted's mistress," "let all rivals forever be named Shirley.")

There doesn't seem to be a lot of serious scholarship, tho, comparing the two of them/their works, which is too bad. The one Plath always gets compared to is Sexton (thanks /Obama/ Lowell), and they were both doing such different things.

[kore]

Yeah, not only that, but I remember when he read for the BBC, she urged him to read his own poems too, along with Thomas and Hardy. And she was the one who heard about the Hawk in the Rain contest, typed up the mss (maybe even choosing the order), and sent it in -- he never had to worry about any of that stuff when he was with her. That totally made his name, got him Faber and Faber as a publisher, put him in the ranks. (People do talk about him wearing the same black corduroy trousers, same black sweater, same black WWI greatcoat.) And she did her own work on top of it too, and studying/teaching and cooking and then child care....altho they did split the child care. Whih was pretty unusual for that time. Altho him suddenly freezing in the headlights of paternal responsibility wasn't.

Imagine if she'd had about 10 years of her own life free from him, she might have been able to break through sooner....might even have lived longer. Anyway.

[gwynnega]

In one letter she mentions taking two whole days to type up one of his manuscripts, in the middle of grad school! Yeesh.

I was amused by her letter to Peter Davison in which she talks up Hughes at great length and only then bothers to mention that they're a couple...

[kore]

I think that wasn't long after she broke up with Davison, too. He wrote some really poison pen stuff about her in earlier memoirs and trash talked her to biographers, but is somewhat kinder in The Fading Smile. Somewhat.