forty five years ago today...
... the elephant in the room; the ghost in the cupboard; it's getting to be a long time ago, isn't it. I hate to dwell on this though. I've lost all sight of Sylvia Plath as a poet; I find her work very hard to read, though of course the best of it is dazzling. Maybe that's it: I'm dazzled by the glare.
But then again you can't ignore the date, especially if you're deep in Ted Hughes' letters.
I find the picture above very unsettling. It has the look of the pictures of my childhood, and my mother even had one of those old-fashioned-looking hairdos at the time (but not coiled plaits; a rather elegant french twist, thankfully, with no fringe). I think there is something ghostly about this image, even if the story hadn't been what it is.
3 comments:
I'd never seen that picture before, Ms B. Haunting indeed. And I hear you about losing sight of Plath as a poet. She's become more of an icon, in a way. For me, she's bound up with memories of a rather purposeful brooding, indulged in by college-aged women for a time until they got a bit freer from their own Daddies and cheered up; an undergraduate's melancholy and dewy sexuality, braided together. (My own personal copy of Plath's Collected is still stiff and rippled from the time when, in 1995, a leggy friend of mine dropped it in her candlelit bathtub. See what I mean?)
Clay, I love reading in the bath. I am happy to report that I have never dropped a book in the bath in my life. And reading by candlelight is for idiots who WANT to go blind.
I read Ariel when I was 15, living just round the corner from where she died. A couple of years later, without realising it, I rented a room in the house where she died, and never realised. We had the same doctor. I know this photo. It is ghostly. I feel connected, even so.
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