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Oh Really? About several things.
Aug. 19th, 2010 05:39 pmI stumbled across Germaine Greer dismissing Sylvia Plath's poetry as "a suicide note" and hence not real art, which annoyed me to no end. Both because it's not true, and because of the context in which she says it, which is an interview about the Plath/Hughes marriage, and she seems to do that irritating "if you like one, you must bash the other" thing. (I love both poets, for new readers of my ramblings.) I dislike this tendency in general, and here it's especially ridiculous because Ted Hughes himself hated this particular interpretation. He was quite eloquent (and consistent) on the subject, both before Sylvia became a world wide icon, when she was only recently dead, and decades later, when she was acknowledged as one of the great poets of her age. Here's an early letter, from 1963 trying to convince a critic (Donald Hall) he was wrong dismissing her poems as mere personal melodrama: Other people’s weaker poems look like anybody’s, or somebody else’s, but her least successful efforts were unique – like a completely original substance, even the very artificial ones. When you criticise her for using the impact of her sufferings in place of the impact of art, it seems to me you misread them. What you’re saying really, is that at last she managed to get through – she managed actually to say something of her own, in verse. What a feat! For a change, and at last, somebody’s written in blood. Whatever you say about them, you know they’re what every poet wishes he or she could do. (…) When poems hit so hard, surely you ought to find reasons for their impact, not argue yourself out of your bruises. If I cavil a bit, it’s because I hate to see cavilling, when something like those poems has occurred. And you seemed to cavil a bit, in that review.
By the 80s, of course, it wasn't necessary to defend her to the general literary community anymore - on the contrary - he was seen as the villain responsible for her death by a lot of them, and as an inferior poet (if they bothered to read his own work at all) - but to friends of his like Keith Sagar who went for the "one-note-breakdown/suicide note" interpretation as well. Hughes wrote in a private letter that wasn't published until after his death, argueing again against this interpretation:
Ariel – March-Nov. 62 – is the diary of her coming to grips with & inheriting this real self. It isn’t the record of a ‘breakdown’. Growing up brought her to it – having children etc., & confronting the events of 1962 (and mastering them completely). (After all, in 1960, she was only 18 months out of college – nearly all the Colossus poems were written while she was still a student or teacher & the rest within the first year after.)
You know Goethe’s remark about the labour & difficulty of actually laying claim to what we have inherited – and you know how few people attempt it, how few even know they need tom ake the effort, how some go through Primal Screams to find it etc. Well, Ariel is her record of her experience of it – of coming into possession of the self she’d been afraid of. You suggest you find much of it a language of disintegration. I see it as a footwork & dexterity – the honesty (nakedness) to meet the matter on its own terms, & the brave will to master it – which she did. Those poems enact a a weird fusion & identity with the material & simultaneously take control of it, & possession of it.
It’s a process of integration, start to finish. By Dec. 62 she was quite a changed person – greatly matured, and a big personality. In Dec/Jan she stopped writing (no poems really from early December to late January) & set up a new home, a new circle of friends, & a new life. (…) So you see I read those Ariel poems as a climb – not a fall. A climb to a precarious foothold, as it turned out. But she was knocked off again by pure unlucky combination of accidents. (…) I tell you all of this to quality your attitude to the notion of her as a young woman hurtling to disintegration shedding rags of poetry – leaping into Aetna & bursting into flames as she fell. Ariel poems are about successful integration – violently inheriting of a violent temperament. The first sign of disintegration – in a writer – is that the writing loses the unique stamp of his/her character, & loses its inner light.
Mustn’t underestimate her humour either.
The real question is – what would be the interpretation of those poems if she hadn’t died, if she’d gone on to write something marvellous in a different way. As those very last poems suggest she was about to do. They could only have been read as the scenes of a victorious battle for so called ‘self-integration’. The whole accent of subsequent commentary would have been different. The interpretation generally given is a pure fantasy – induced by her death, which was an accident (it could have happened at any moment between 51 & 63, if she’d got physically low enough – just as it could happen to thousands who never show a symptom), and not at all essential to her poems – except as one latent factor in her mythology.
Of course, Hughes isn't more "right" than any other reader in his interpretation, and yes, he does have a personal investment in believing that Sylvia Plath could have survived and that her suicide was not inevitable, nor necessary by her poetry, but I still find his reading of her work for more layered than Greer's simple dismissal.
Still on a literary note, Twenty Things You Never Knew About Shakespeare, apropos Simon Callow's newest one man show. He and Jonathan Bate vote for Shakespeare as a Jack-Harkness-type omnisexual, though when I read Callow's "at parties he would certainly have gone home with the best-looking person in the room", I thought: What makes you think he'd have pulled? I mean, let's be realistic here. Greatest playwright of all time or not, Our Will wasn't exactly a stunner in looks with his premature baldness, hamster cheeks and sad moustache. Also, the best looking person in the room might have gone for the most affluent person in the room, which, unless we're talking his very last years in Stratford, certainly would not have been Shakespeare. Otoh, there's that anecdote about the the citizen's wife whom leading actor and head of the company Richard Burbage had his eye on and who went for Shakespeare instead ("tell Mr. Burbage William the Conqueror came before Richard III"), so who knows. Maybe Shakespeare had raw sex appeal in addition to genius which portraits and sketches rarely render. (This is also the only explanation for the women in Brecht's life. I mean, Brecht was ugly, Thomas Mann's secretary Hilde Kahn told me his personal hygiene was so appalling that you could smell him a mile wide, he stank so much, and he exploited the women who fell for him in every regard, sexually and work wise, and yet there they were, women galore.) However, I think Wells is kidding himself if he thinks finding a letter addressed to William Shakespeare from Stratford mentioning Anne & the children and Hamlet on the same page would shut upt the Oxfordians, Baconites and the various other people writing tirades since centuries about how Shakespeare can't have been Shakespeare, that it must have been *insert candidate of choice* instead.
...but you know, if we did have more data on William S., what might take the place of "it was really *candidate of choice* books? Fannish feuding between Marlovians and Shakespeareans. I mean, why not? It would fit the pattern. Marlowe, like Sylvia Plath - or John Lennon, for that matter - died young. (Which is why he's one of the outside candidates of who was really Shakespeare, the "he only faked his death" theory.) We could have people going on and on about how he was the true genius and that surviving hack Will was really second rate with way too much of an eye on the box office, and then there would be a backklash in some quarters where Marlowe would be declared a one note writer whose entire reputation rests upon being knifed in a tavern and really, aren't all those übervillains tiresome after a while? There's be a trashy tell-all biography, "The Lives of Kit Marlowe", but that would be so hysterically over the top that it would start an anti-backlash-backlash. Yes, that's how it would go.
Meanwhile, have some recs:
Merlin:
Love is a tired symphony: attempting to reconcile the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle of many Arthurian myths with the characters as currently characterized in Merlin the show is a bit of a challenge, and this story rises elegantly to it the occasion. My own intepretation would be somewhat different, but one of the characteristics of good fanfiction is that it can convince you for the duration of the reading. Also, I really love that the author does something all the other fanfic set in the future of Merlin hasn't (unless it's dark fic which this story is not): it doesn't automatically assume that once the magical reveal is over and done with and Arthur has revoked the laws against magic, he'll never ever be troubled with the attitudes Uther raised him with again. This version of Arthur still struggles with that - rationally accepting something doesn't mean the beliefs you were imprinted with for most of your life don't plague your subconscious anymore, after all. Which makes much sense to me.
BTVS/AtS:
Excellent meta about Cordelia. Again, I disagree in parts (to me, the problems with the writing of Cordelia start as early as Disharmony in s2, the s4 Jasmine retcon is actually a character salvation after what happened before, and I have severe problems with You're Welcome in s5 which prevent me from being as happy about it as most of fandom and the writer of this meta is), but it's so thoughtfully and eloquently put that it's just a pleasure to read.
And lastly, I found a Harry Potter/RPF crossover vignette in which the Beatles teach at Hogwarts. It's terribly cute and really charming, though I utterly disagree with the Houses chosen for John and Paul. George as Ravenclaw and Ringo as Hufflepuff are perfect, but you'll never convince me that John's a Slytherin and Paul a Gryffindor. Let's examine the agreed-upon character traits here, and with all the partisanship in many a biography, there are actually a lot of those. John Lennon: prone to acting before thinking ("impulsive" is putting is mildly), thought frays were for jumping into. By natural inclination lazy (both descriptions of mid-60s John and 70s John feature days spent in front of the tv without communicating) unless spurred to work first by Paul and then by Yoko. No patience. Not a long attention span. Very easy to con (ask Magic Alex, ask Allen Klein) and to fleece, though absolutely unforgiving and vengeful as hell once he did clue into that. Prone to a black and white view of the world, and absolutely willing to do anything to champion a cause no matter the cost once he's convinced that cause is good. In conclusion, definitely a Gryffindor. (If you think a talent for sarcasm, pranks or verbal cruelty is not Gryffindorian, check out Sirius Black or the Weasley Twins.) Paul McCartney: gets described by friend and foe alike as an ambitious workoholic from teenagedom onwards. (And a good thing, too, otherwise they'd never have become more than a garage band. It always cracks me how how those solely- in-for-a-laugh mates of John's in the Quarry Men mysteriously drop out one by one after Paul joins, and get replaced by George whom John first objected to on the grounds of him being too young but who actually could play which is why Paul insisted on bringing him in.) Depending on whether the biographer is friendly or hostile, was "diplomatic" or "manipulative" about reaching his goals, but either way, used tactics and people skills. Perfectionist prone to drive people crazy not by wandering off or not showing up (aka the Lennon variation) but by putting them through 40 takes just if two chords don't sound right. Is, however, able to compromise on things like image and looks if it makes success more likely. Likes to be in control, whether openly or behind the scenes. Definitely a friend of long-term planning. In conclusion: definitely Slytherin. (Yoko, too, by the way. And again, John was lucky they are. He probably would have drunk himself to death in Liverpool or overdosed on drugs in London or Los Angeles otherwise at respective points in time, thoroughly discontent with his life but unable to really do something about it.)
By the 80s, of course, it wasn't necessary to defend her to the general literary community anymore - on the contrary - he was seen as the villain responsible for her death by a lot of them, and as an inferior poet (if they bothered to read his own work at all) - but to friends of his like Keith Sagar who went for the "one-note-breakdown/suicide note" interpretation as well. Hughes wrote in a private letter that wasn't published until after his death, argueing again against this interpretation:
Ariel – March-Nov. 62 – is the diary of her coming to grips with & inheriting this real self. It isn’t the record of a ‘breakdown’. Growing up brought her to it – having children etc., & confronting the events of 1962 (and mastering them completely). (After all, in 1960, she was only 18 months out of college – nearly all the Colossus poems were written while she was still a student or teacher & the rest within the first year after.)
You know Goethe’s remark about the labour & difficulty of actually laying claim to what we have inherited – and you know how few people attempt it, how few even know they need tom ake the effort, how some go through Primal Screams to find it etc. Well, Ariel is her record of her experience of it – of coming into possession of the self she’d been afraid of. You suggest you find much of it a language of disintegration. I see it as a footwork & dexterity – the honesty (nakedness) to meet the matter on its own terms, & the brave will to master it – which she did. Those poems enact a a weird fusion & identity with the material & simultaneously take control of it, & possession of it.
It’s a process of integration, start to finish. By Dec. 62 she was quite a changed person – greatly matured, and a big personality. In Dec/Jan she stopped writing (no poems really from early December to late January) & set up a new home, a new circle of friends, & a new life. (…) So you see I read those Ariel poems as a climb – not a fall. A climb to a precarious foothold, as it turned out. But she was knocked off again by pure unlucky combination of accidents. (…) I tell you all of this to quality your attitude to the notion of her as a young woman hurtling to disintegration shedding rags of poetry – leaping into Aetna & bursting into flames as she fell. Ariel poems are about successful integration – violently inheriting of a violent temperament. The first sign of disintegration – in a writer – is that the writing loses the unique stamp of his/her character, & loses its inner light.
Mustn’t underestimate her humour either.
The real question is – what would be the interpretation of those poems if she hadn’t died, if she’d gone on to write something marvellous in a different way. As those very last poems suggest she was about to do. They could only have been read as the scenes of a victorious battle for so called ‘self-integration’. The whole accent of subsequent commentary would have been different. The interpretation generally given is a pure fantasy – induced by her death, which was an accident (it could have happened at any moment between 51 & 63, if she’d got physically low enough – just as it could happen to thousands who never show a symptom), and not at all essential to her poems – except as one latent factor in her mythology.
Of course, Hughes isn't more "right" than any other reader in his interpretation, and yes, he does have a personal investment in believing that Sylvia Plath could have survived and that her suicide was not inevitable, nor necessary by her poetry, but I still find his reading of her work for more layered than Greer's simple dismissal.
Still on a literary note, Twenty Things You Never Knew About Shakespeare, apropos Simon Callow's newest one man show. He and Jonathan Bate vote for Shakespeare as a Jack-Harkness-type omnisexual, though when I read Callow's "at parties he would certainly have gone home with the best-looking person in the room", I thought: What makes you think he'd have pulled? I mean, let's be realistic here. Greatest playwright of all time or not, Our Will wasn't exactly a stunner in looks with his premature baldness, hamster cheeks and sad moustache. Also, the best looking person in the room might have gone for the most affluent person in the room, which, unless we're talking his very last years in Stratford, certainly would not have been Shakespeare. Otoh, there's that anecdote about the the citizen's wife whom leading actor and head of the company Richard Burbage had his eye on and who went for Shakespeare instead ("tell Mr. Burbage William the Conqueror came before Richard III"), so who knows. Maybe Shakespeare had raw sex appeal in addition to genius which portraits and sketches rarely render. (This is also the only explanation for the women in Brecht's life. I mean, Brecht was ugly, Thomas Mann's secretary Hilde Kahn told me his personal hygiene was so appalling that you could smell him a mile wide, he stank so much, and he exploited the women who fell for him in every regard, sexually and work wise, and yet there they were, women galore.) However, I think Wells is kidding himself if he thinks finding a letter addressed to William Shakespeare from Stratford mentioning Anne & the children and Hamlet on the same page would shut upt the Oxfordians, Baconites and the various other people writing tirades since centuries about how Shakespeare can't have been Shakespeare, that it must have been *insert candidate of choice* instead.
...but you know, if we did have more data on William S., what might take the place of "it was really *candidate of choice* books? Fannish feuding between Marlovians and Shakespeareans. I mean, why not? It would fit the pattern. Marlowe, like Sylvia Plath - or John Lennon, for that matter - died young. (Which is why he's one of the outside candidates of who was really Shakespeare, the "he only faked his death" theory.) We could have people going on and on about how he was the true genius and that surviving hack Will was really second rate with way too much of an eye on the box office, and then there would be a backklash in some quarters where Marlowe would be declared a one note writer whose entire reputation rests upon being knifed in a tavern and really, aren't all those übervillains tiresome after a while? There's be a trashy tell-all biography, "The Lives of Kit Marlowe", but that would be so hysterically over the top that it would start an anti-backlash-backlash. Yes, that's how it would go.
Meanwhile, have some recs:
Merlin:
Love is a tired symphony: attempting to reconcile the Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot triangle of many Arthurian myths with the characters as currently characterized in Merlin the show is a bit of a challenge, and this story rises elegantly to it the occasion. My own intepretation would be somewhat different, but one of the characteristics of good fanfiction is that it can convince you for the duration of the reading. Also, I really love that the author does something all the other fanfic set in the future of Merlin hasn't (unless it's dark fic which this story is not): it doesn't automatically assume that once the magical reveal is over and done with and Arthur has revoked the laws against magic, he'll never ever be troubled with the attitudes Uther raised him with again. This version of Arthur still struggles with that - rationally accepting something doesn't mean the beliefs you were imprinted with for most of your life don't plague your subconscious anymore, after all. Which makes much sense to me.
BTVS/AtS:
Excellent meta about Cordelia. Again, I disagree in parts (to me, the problems with the writing of Cordelia start as early as Disharmony in s2, the s4 Jasmine retcon is actually a character salvation after what happened before, and I have severe problems with You're Welcome in s5 which prevent me from being as happy about it as most of fandom and the writer of this meta is), but it's so thoughtfully and eloquently put that it's just a pleasure to read.
And lastly, I found a Harry Potter/RPF crossover vignette in which the Beatles teach at Hogwarts. It's terribly cute and really charming, though I utterly disagree with the Houses chosen for John and Paul. George as Ravenclaw and Ringo as Hufflepuff are perfect, but you'll never convince me that John's a Slytherin and Paul a Gryffindor. Let's examine the agreed-upon character traits here, and with all the partisanship in many a biography, there are actually a lot of those. John Lennon: prone to acting before thinking ("impulsive" is putting is mildly), thought frays were for jumping into. By natural inclination lazy (both descriptions of mid-60s John and 70s John feature days spent in front of the tv without communicating) unless spurred to work first by Paul and then by Yoko. No patience. Not a long attention span. Very easy to con (ask Magic Alex, ask Allen Klein) and to fleece, though absolutely unforgiving and vengeful as hell once he did clue into that. Prone to a black and white view of the world, and absolutely willing to do anything to champion a cause no matter the cost once he's convinced that cause is good. In conclusion, definitely a Gryffindor. (If you think a talent for sarcasm, pranks or verbal cruelty is not Gryffindorian, check out Sirius Black or the Weasley Twins.) Paul McCartney: gets described by friend and foe alike as an ambitious workoholic from teenagedom onwards. (And a good thing, too, otherwise they'd never have become more than a garage band. It always cracks me how how those solely- in-for-a-laugh mates of John's in the Quarry Men mysteriously drop out one by one after Paul joins, and get replaced by George whom John first objected to on the grounds of him being too young but who actually could play which is why Paul insisted on bringing him in.) Depending on whether the biographer is friendly or hostile, was "diplomatic" or "manipulative" about reaching his goals, but either way, used tactics and people skills. Perfectionist prone to drive people crazy not by wandering off or not showing up (aka the Lennon variation) but by putting them through 40 takes just if two chords don't sound right. Is, however, able to compromise on things like image and looks if it makes success more likely. Likes to be in control, whether openly or behind the scenes. Definitely a friend of long-term planning. In conclusion: definitely Slytherin. (Yoko, too, by the way. And again, John was lucky they are. He probably would have drunk himself to death in Liverpool or overdosed on drugs in London or Los Angeles otherwise at respective points in time, thoroughly discontent with his life but unable to really do something about it.)
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