New Century Reading

The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 1

For decades, those of us fascinated by Sylvia Plath had to make do with a slim volume of letters called Letters Home, edited by her mother, Aurelia Plath. To say that Aurelia had a vested interest in keeping lots of details out of the public eye would be an understatement. But finally, we now have a collection of letters that are published in full, in two volumes (with volume 1 at an astounding 1330 pages). Apparently there are still a few other letters out there that the editors are aware of, but are privately owned and the owners weren't willing to have them published. Regardless, there's plenty to savor in the letters that are available.

To some degree, these are probably best for the people who are really interested in Plath. The first few years are primarily letters she wrote to her mother from sleep-away camp and to pen pals. But even those provide a striking contrast; Plath often wrote letters to her mother that seem tailored, even at a very young age, to please, whereas the pen pal letters show a more independent train of thought.

Having 20/20 hindsight about Plath's lives makes many of these letters even more touching. The brave, happy face she put on letters to her mother while at Smith College, as she began an inexorable dive towards her first suicide attempt. Or, especially, when she meets Ted Hughes and marries him in a very short period of time. The love letters to Ted are beautiful and heartbreaking at the same time.

Volume 1 ends at her 24th birthday, as she's married to Ted but living apart due to fear that her scholarship to Cambridge would be taken away if authorities knew she was married (ah, 1956, what a year for women). But she's finding life without Ted intolerable and is planning to ask Cambridge and the Fulbright folks to let her keep her scholarship while a married woman. It's brave, and optimistic, and the world seems bright and amazing. 

And now I go to volume 2.

Literary Witches

Well, this is a charmer. Author Taisia Kitaiskaia and illustrator Katy Horan created what they call a celebration of magical women writers. Each writer gets a witchly description ("Enchantress of bitter love, treachery, and jewels"), followed by a brief tale that's essentially a magical bio, then a short real bio and suggestions of works to read. Each is accompanied by an illustration of the real woman, but rooted in something akin to fairy tales or, in some cases, an almost Frida Kahlo-esque interpretation.

The range of chosen writers is pleasingly wide and diverse. There are well-known writers, like Flannery O'Connor and Virginia Woolf; ancient writers like Sappho; many women who are not white Americans; new-to-me writers like Yumiko Kurahashi, a Japanese experimental writer described as producing works that include ghosts, flying heads, witch masks, incest, and bestiality. Why, yes, I'd like to check her out. International writers are well represented and introduced me to other names I wasn't familiar with, but do plan to check out.

That said, there are some factual inaccuracies in the areas that are supposed to be literal. A friend noticed that Mary Wollstonecraft is reported in this book to have died during childbirth, when she actually died several weeks later. I noticed that in Virginia Woolf's bio, she's listed as childfree and sexually liberated, both presented as her being a feminist and ahead of her time. However, I'm in the midst of reading her journals (so wonderful) and it's clear that while she's childfree, and it's by choice, it's not a choice she's altogether happy about; her doctors and husband both demanded that she not undergo motherhood because of her mental health issues. In her diaries, she notes several times how wistful visiting her nieces and nephews makes her and occasionally ponders what life would have been like with children. Would she have been able to produce her masterpieces? Who knows? But to simply present her as a feminist who was childfree by choice is losing the context that's a bit melancholy and not as celebratory.

However, these are nitpicks. Read the book with a grain of salt and more for the witchly parts and wonderful illustrations rather than hard-core facts. Then seek out the writers you're not familiar with and be thankful someone introduced you to them.

I Am, I Am, I Am

"On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears."

Pretty much every woman I know would read this opening sentence to Maggie O'Farrell's memoir, I Am, I Am, I Am, with a sickening jolt. It's the worst nightmare for all of us: We're out doing something benign, like taking a walk on a nice day, but we're alone, and suddenly...

This book is an examination of O'Farrell's brushes with death throughout her life, and not always her own. From the incredibly opening memory of being approached by an unknown, menacing man while out walking in the hills, to dealing with a string of miscarriages, to having fought off a deadly disease as a child herself, to having been a willful child who's mother probably was not sure would make it to adulthood, she looks at living, and dying, and what constitutes living. 

It's at times horrifyingly vivid. But that shows what a good writer can do with this kind of material.

It also made me reflect on some of my own weaknesses and short-sighted moments. While reading of a third near-loss while swimming, I found myself impatiently thinking, Didn't you learn anything the first two times??

But then I reminded myself of how, as I've gotten older, I've gotten increasingly terrified of heights. I know this about myself. I know that even a taller-than-normal down escalator gives me vertigo. So why, when my husband I recently went to Las Vegas, did I propose the idea of going to the observation deck of the replica Eiffel Tower? What made me think that would be the exception? 

It wasn't the exception, and I nearly had a full-blown panic attack 500+ feet in the air. We are all capable of denial and magical thinking. 

In any event, the message that O'Farrell urgently states throughout this book is: Don't be afraid of life. You don't know when it will end. Go on living, as best as you can. A worthy message at any time. 

Forty Autumns

Forty Autumns is a true story of a family first caught behind East German lines after WWII, then separated by the new country's boundaries. The author, Nina Willner, is the daughter of Hanna, who escaped East Germany after multiple tries, then--with one exception--didn't see them for 40 years.

Willner herself has an interesting backstory, in that she became a U.S. Army intelligence officer and ended up serving in Berlin during the Cold War. She was quite aware that she had family there, but it wasn't even remotely safe for her to try and find them. And when I say safe, I mean it wasn't safe for her, nor was it safe for the East German family members.

The story is told in short segments, some of which focus on the experiences of the family members left behind in East Germany, some on Hanna's life outside of East Germany, some on Nina's life as an intelligence officer, and some general history of the time, to give more context and scope on what was happening. It's a mostly successful approach, although towards the end I found myself wearying of the political explanations and just wanted to get to the part where East Germany dissolves and the family could finally meet again. There was also a long stretch involving Hanna's niece, Cordula, who became an East German athlete during the highly competitive sporting years, when sports were all that East Germany had to brag about. But Cordula's sporting adventures, while numerous, were overall not that interesting and could have been shortened.

But the other parts of the book were riveting. From the German women waiting for their husbands and sons to come home from WWII in defeat, to learning their small town has been put under Soviet control, to the ever-tightening noose around their necks as the East German government became totalitarian, makes for tense, can't-turn-pages-fast-enough reading. The misery of food shortages, the fears that neighbors were informants, that not looking interested enough at a military parade could end a career--Willner tells these stories straightforwardly and frighteningly. Highly recommended. 

A Small Porch

This is such a lovely book. Poet Wendell Berry apparently has taken up the habit over the decades of spending his Sabbaths outdoors, wandering his farm and nearby natural spots, and thinking and writing about them. This strikes me as something pretty much everyone could benefit by doing, religious or not. (Although, as I write these words, my area has just received a foot of snow and it's still snowing on Sunday, so I won't be going out exploring today.)

He's a smart man, and careful with his language. The poems are deceptively simple, but that often adds to their effectiveness:

"There is never an end to imagining
the lives of the birds. Or to wondering
at the superfluous beauty and unspeaking
flight of butterflies who light nearby:
the Eyed Brown, the Spicebush Swallowtail,
the Red Admiral, the Red-spotted Purple.
These so visible must stand for countless ones
and kinds easily overlooked or hard to see
or invisible. A world of words could not
describe this wordless world."

The first half of this slim volume contains a number of these spare, thoughtful poems. The second half is an essay called "The Presence of Nature in the Natural World: a Long Conversation," which is indeed long at 77 pages. But it does read like a conversation, albeit one-sided, with a thoughtful farmer (Berry is a farmer) who wants to discuss the views poets (Alain de Lille in the Plaint of Nature, Chaucer, Spencer, Milton, Pope, Pound) have viewed nature and how humans can and do operate within it. But he also wants to talk about the problems men wreak upon nature, especially farmers, and why it's important that the conversation around farming begin to focus on that, before it's too late. He notes with exasperation that many self-proclaimed environmentalists are loud in their support of wild areas, but silent on what's happening to vast swaths of farmland--and what happens to that farmland could (and already is) have a dangerous impact on what's still wild.

Together, the poems and the essay show a fine mind, a thoughtful, concerned farmer, a lover of poetry and language. Can't ask much more out of a book than that.

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I've read this before, many years ago, but it was a pleasure to return to. It's a phenomenal journey through Plath's teenage and college years up until the time she was about to leave the U.S. for good, married to Ted Hughes and pregnant with their first child, and just on the verge of making her poetic breakthrough. We see everything from teenage naivete to early-20s obsession with self and lovers and first suicide attempt, especially Richard Sassoon (the entries involving him are perhaps the only ones I find almost unbearable to read), and finally her agonizing struggles over giving up her long-wanted academic career to pursue writing, a decision that both terrified her and put her in direct conflict with her mother.

Then it's the long section where she faces, for the first time, trying to be a writer as her primary vocation, and the world of struggles that go along with that. As a writer myself, this is the section I found mesmerizing. She's balancing her own needs and fears along with her role of a 1950s American woman and wife, as well as the expectations of her mother, and her own fears of failure as a writer. It's hard to believe that she didn't know about the success ahead of her, but of course, how could she?

While there are some post-1959 writings in the appendices, this volume does make the reader--this reader, anyway--really regret what's lost: the journals written after Plath and Hughes returned to Britain in late 1959. I saw someone on Goodreads commenting that this journal collection just shows how Plath was subjugated by Hughes and gave up her artistic autonomy to him as she wrote the most important works of her career. Um, no. Those poems were written in 1962-63. The poems she wrote during most of this journal are not largely considered to be her best work. In the latter half of 1959, the couple had a long stay at the writer's retreat Yaddo, and while there Plath did have a beginning of a breakthrough, composing things like Mushrooms and Poem for a Birthday that set the stage for her later work. 

Yes, in the journals she talks a great deal about the importance of Ted's work, and he seems to have been miles ahead of her at this stage, at least in terms of self-confidence and willingness to take risks. Yet she also notes the support he provided her during her myriad down times. So I don't think that Goodreads reviewer really grasped the timing and complexity of the situation.

And that makes me really wistful for a final volume of journals. Ted Hughes has said that he burned the last notebooks, and the ones previous to that "disappeared." Of course, that's led to all kinds of rumors. I can't help but hope that there's an unopened archive somewhere that still has them. Not because of the salacious details of the marital downfall between them, but to see Plath's journey as she increasingly came into her own as a writer and wrote the poems that she finally, correctly, said would make her name.

Alas, that is life in the literary artifact zone. Complete works are simply not always available, but this is a valuable piece to look at one writer's partial journey.

Ghosts of the Tsunami

Ghosts of the Tsunami is the kind of book that I want to urge everyone to read, and yet it's such a brutal, heartbreaking read that I find myself hesitating. I actually teared up three separate times while reading it--and I never cry while reading. Never. 

This is the story of the terrible tsunami that struck Japan in 2011. Specifically, it's about what happened at Okawa Elementary, where most of the children and teachers died, in spite of the school being next to a hill that was high enough that had they climbed it, they would have been safe. What happened at the school, how decisions were made, is pieced together throughout the book.

But it's about so much more than that. It's about Japanese society. It's about how people grieve. It's about how once you've faced a terrible tragedy like this, the people outside of the tragedy don't or can't understand, and you're left in a small community of people who know how you feel. One anecdote tells of a mother who lost one of her children shopping at a store one day and hearing two women from outside the community talking about the tsunami. The women both vehemently agree that if they'd lost a child, they would have killed themselves. They couldn't understand how the afflicted parents hadn't done that. Imagine being that mother, hearing that kind of judgment from people who have no idea what you've just gone through.

However, even within the community of survivors, there are fractures. Parents whose children's bodies were found quickly found themselves at odds with parents whose children's bodies were missing for much longer. A hierarchy of grief rose up: from those who lost all their children, and even spouses and parents, to those who lost some but not all of their families, there were levels of grieving and how the grieving were viewed. When a group of parents decided to confront the school and city government over the failure to protect the children, that drove a further wedge into the community. Unlike America, where people are increasingly confrontational and litigious, that just isn't done in Japan. Those who spoke out found themselves ostracized by those who didn't. And some who perhaps wanted to speak out feared for their jobs and livelihoods if they did. As author Richard Lloyd Parry so eloquently puts it:

"It is true that people can be 'brought together' by catastrophe, and it is human to look to this as a consolation. But the balance of disaster is never positive. New human bonds were made after the tsunami, old ones became stronger; there were countless remarkable displays of selflessness and self-sacrifice. These we remember and celebrate. We turn away from what is also commonplace: the destruction of friendship and trust; neighbors at odds; the enmity of friends and relatives. A tsunami does to human connectedness the same thing that it does to roads, bridges, and homes. And in Okawa, and everywhere in the tsunami zone, people fell to quarreling and reproaches, and felt the bitterness of injustice and envy and fell out of love."

Parry walks a fine line here and does an admirable job. He shows the all-too-human reactions, but he doesn't judge, and doesn't lead the reader to being judgmental either. These are humans in horrific pain, and how human react to that kind of pain is all over the place. That doesn't make them bad people.

There's also discussion, briefly, of Japanese politics of the time, of which I was ignorant and which bore a startling--and horrifying--resemblance to the American political climate today. 

Finally, Parry writes about Japanese beliefs, how as a country they don't consider themselves particularly religious, but they do have a strong belief system involving ghosts, ancestors, and the sacredness of the familial lineage. I don't want to give spoilers, but that section alone is worth the read. 

So. A very hard book to read, but so well-written, such an excellent piece of coverage of a tragedy and its aftermath--the aftermath that people stop paying attention to once the death toll is finalized. Parry has a couple of other books out, and I think I may need to read those too.

 

Who Reads Poetry

Who Reads Poetry is a collection of 50 essays originally published in Poetry magazine. It's a lively collection that disputes the old stereotype that only English professors read poetry, and that poetry is a dying art. It also demonstrates poetry's power, particularly in difficult times; one essay records the memories of a Warsaw ghetto survivor, who used poetry as a way to remove herself from the horrors around her; another, by a war correspondent, talks about reading MacBeth (yes, a play, but a play in verse) while covering the war in El Salvador.

But not all reflect dire circumstances, which is entirely appropriate. Musician and songwriter Neko Case, in an essay titled "My Flaming Hamster Wheel of Panic about Publicly Discussing Poetry in This Respected Forum," writes: "Poetry is such a delicate, pretty lady with a candy exoskeleton on the outside of her crepe-paper dress. I am an awkward, heavy-handed mule of a high school dropout. I guess I just need permission to be in the same room with poetry." See? Even someone as amazing as Neko Case can find poetry intimidating.

Daniel Handler--he of Lemony Snicket fame--contributed a hilarious essay about finding the right time--and right amount of time--to read poetry. Hip hop artist Rhymefest talks about his life as a poem, and the poetry of rap. Retired US Army three-star lieutenant general and former West Point superintendent William James Lennox Jr. talks about why poetry is taught to cadets at West Point (something another writer touches on later). 

So, if you, or someone you know, wonders who exactly reads poetry these days, the answer is: A lot of people. And for many different reasons.

 

Priestdaddy

We all know Catholic priests are supposed to be unmarried and celibate, no children. But as it turns out, there's a loophole; if a man is an ordained minister in another faith, and he's married with kids, and he decided to convert to Catholicism--he can become a priest, and stay married with kids.

That's gotta piss off a lot of Catholic-all-the-way priests.

Poet Patricia Lockwood is the daughter of this minority priest, and she has written a memoir about growing up in a Catholic priest's household. But this isn't just about the oddity of growing up as the priest's daughter, although for her, it was just what she knew; it's about her particular father, who's quite a character himself, prone to hanging around the house in his underwear, spending too much money on guitars, and having strong opinions about cats:

"My dad despises cats. He believes them to be Democrats. He considers them to be little mean hillary clintons covered all over with feminist legfur. Cats would have abortions, if given half a chance. Cats would have abortions for fun."

Depending on your sense of humor, that's pretty frickin' hilarious. And yes, it's exactly my kind of humor. I chuckled, chortled, guffawed many times while reading this book. Lockwood has a demented, sharp sense of humor, and she's not afraid to use it.

But she's also a gifted poet (whose poetry I am going to check out very soon), and she's not afraid to take risks. Chapter after chapter of hilarity, mostly focused on the time period when she and her husband moved in with her parents for financial reasons. So much fodder!

Yet halfway through, there's a sharp change in tone, as Lockwood describes her childhood yearning to be a talented musician, a singer, but knowing she doesn't have the skill; but her sister does. I admit one of the great disappointments in my life is not having the skill to be a real musician. I studied piano for many years and sang in the school choir growing up. I could carry a tune, but that was it, and I lacked sufficient prowess on the piano (not to mention a strong sense of rhythm) to succeed there. I've always wished it was otherwise, but if years of piano lessons with strong teachers and hours and hours of practice couldn't get me there, nothing would. So that chapter resonated almost painfully.

In the end, humor aside, Lockwood is also looking at family ties, and what makes a family work, even if it's a weird and somewhat dysfunctional family, and how her upbringing contributed to her own creativity and creative success. I've seen complaints that the book isn't linear enough, but I liked that aspect. If you're in the mood for a memoir that's both darkly humorous and luminously thoughtful, this is the one for you.

These Ghostly Archives

This book might be for you if you fall into one of two camps: Either you have more than a passing interest in the work and life of Sylvia Plath, or you have more than a passing interest in how archives, particularly literary archives, come to be and what challenges they face. As it turns out, I'm in the former camp, but also found out that learning about archive research and sleuthing itself can be very interesting.

When I thought of "archives," I thought of things like boxes of papers, letters, drafts of literary works, photos, etc. that are settled in places like Smith College and the Lilly Library. In fact, while Crowther and Steinberg researched through the archives, they even found two previously unknown poems of Plath's. Of course, that's correct, but it's a limited interpretation. As authors Crowther and Steinberg detail in this slim but fascinating book, archives are many things, including physical locations that Plath lived at or visited at one time or another (including little Cornucopia, WI); it's items of her clothing, or the cradle she painted for her babies, or the large elm desk her brother and then-husband Ted Hughes built for her. 

It's also things like her hair. Yes, her actual hair--not removed from her after her death. Her mother had apparently cut her hair at various points and kept it. (I'm surprised my parents, the functional hoarders, didn't do something like that with me; they did keep all my baby teeth, believe it or not. And no, I did not keep those after they were "gifted" to me.) At first glance, you wouldn't be the first to wonder why things like clothes and hair would be considered literary artifacts. But they are, both in the sense that they were things Plath wrote about, especially in her journals and letters, and in the sense that they help those of us who never met her in real life grasp her physical being, much the same way that a visit to Haworth Parsonage to see the couch Emily Bronte died on and one of Charlotte's dresses give some context to what's only imagined otherwise. 

For me, the last two chapters were perhaps the most interesting. Towards the end of her life, Plath edited an anthology of contemporary-to-her American poets. Researching her research and comparing/contrasting her selections against her own work of the time is really enlightening.

The final chapter talks about private and lost archives. Private is a fairly clear concept; there are many people who are Plath fans who have acquired items they keep under wraps. There are also likely things that have been stolen over the years, and obviously thieves aren't going to be likely to publicize that. (In a creepy aside, Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes has written about how her father found people had come to his home--likely on his invitation--and sneaked around to find books where Plath had written her name inside, and cut out the signature. I mean, c'mon, people.)

More intriguing, and what really gets hard-core Plath fans in a stir (yes, that's me) is what's gone missing: Her two last journals and a partial (possibly nearly full) manuscript of a second novel called Double Exposure. Hughes said that he destroyed the last two journals, but there are conflicting accounts of that, including some comments by his sister, Olwyn. Same with the novel. Where did it go? Is the novel and/or the missing journals possibly still in Ted Hughes' archives, the part that is sealed until the next decade? At the time of her death, he had already made money selling his own writings for archive projects, so he had to know how valuable they would be. Would he really have destroyed them, or simply put them where they couldn't be read during his lifetime?

And where did many missing letters go? And other paraphernalia that at one time was known to have existed, but for all practical purposes has disappeared. It's the most ghostly of these ghostly chapters.

Again, a great read if you're a Plath fan and/or interested in the background of archives.