Ted Hughes Archives - Julia Gordon-Bramer

The End of An Exciting Year; The Beginning of Even More

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 03:32:50 +0000

Hello and Happy New Year!

On this first day of 2023, we have a symbolic blank page on which to write our hopes, fears, prayers, and creative energies. All of these create our experience of this new year. Today, I hope that you celebrate possibilities and empower yourself to attract them. This is that “manifesting” buzzword you hear so much in spiritual circles.

For me, it’s been another year of neglecting regular blog entries, but let’s get real: We all have too much to read and spend too much time anyway! I only want to write if I have something worthwhile to say to you. If you want the micro-blogging stuff, check out my Twitter @jgordonbramer.

I am astounded to say that 2022 is over. And I’ve done some things! Manifesting is real! The highlights are:

A book contract and finalizing the manuscript for Tarot Life Lessons (formerly The Tarot Diaries) with Destiny Books, a subsidiary of Inner Traditions (and a publishing home to the tarot genius Alejandro Jodorowsky! So honored to share his label!). Release date should be announced VERY SOON. The cover is beautiful!
A book contract for The Magician’s Girl: the history and mysticism of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, with Inner Traditions. The title could change, and it may be on another imprint of Inner Traditions–I’ll hear soon.
In May 2022, I became the proud owner of Sylvia Plath’s (hand-carved by her) Hermetic Caduceus with provenance papers. Additionally, I’ve acquired a November 1952 photograph of Sylvia, autographed by her mother Aurelia to friend Richard Larschan and his wife, as well as a copy of the very rare “Last Encounters” memoir of Plath by neighbor Trevor Thomas, inscribed and signed by the author. Many thanks to Richard Larschan for all of these things, but most of all, for his friendship!
At the end of June, I lost my dear friend, literary mentor, writing teacher, surrogate father, and friend of Plath and Hughes’, Zulfikar Ghose. I’m not over it yet. I began writing him a memoriam, but nothing can do him justice. We shall see if I ever finish it.
I toured Sylvia Plath’s childhood home in Wellesley, Massachusetts with the Larschans; I had a blast traipsing across Cape Cod with my friend Margaret following Plath and Hughes’ footsteps (if you’re going to the Cape, stay at Margaret’s beautiful historic Bursley Manor); and I had some time visiting family in both the Boston area and Ocean City, Maryland.
I watched one of my besties and his wife, Garrett and Stacy Enloe, put out the coolest book ever about Mississippi Nights, of which I was honored to help with and even more honored to be in (along with Tom). I’m in for Night Times magazine, which started as a Mississippi Nights publication, and Tom is in the book with his old band Radio Iodine. Our 30-year-old pictures are in it too! Garrett and his work have reunited me with so many dear friends from the St. Louis scene and I’m so proud that his efforts have made it a best-seller in St. Louis this Christmas season.
I fully immersed myself in a return to music and saw some great shows: The Cult with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club; Jack White; The Who; Jane’s Addiction and Smashing Pumpkins; Gin Blossoms; Local H; the Eagles—and those were just my favorites, there were others!
Finally, I am going to have my own radio show on NewsTalkSTL 101.9 and 94.1 FM! I am still figuring out some of the details: studio time, who my producer will be, sponsorships and advertisers, etc. As soon as I have a start date, I will post it here. But I can tell you it is called Mystic Fix and the show will focus on mind-body-spirit topics–everything from yoga to Qabalah to the paranormal. Should be a lot of fun! If you have a business that wants to help support this program (and of course, get lots of publicity on STL’s fastest growing station) PLUS it’ll be podcast so all those outside of the area can hear at their leisure and ads will last in perpetuity–give me a holler and we will talk!

OK. Back to manifesting! Hope you have a fab 2023! xo

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New Book Coming! Tarot Life Lessons

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Fri, 18 Nov 2022 22:42:09 +0000

Hi Everyone,

Sorry I’ve been so bad about blogging. I’ve been finishing up two books for Inner Traditions publishers, and then I went right into my busy Octoberfest/Halloween season. I should have a little break between now and the Christmas party rush and will hopefully catch up a little. In the meantime, I’m sharing the catalog page and cover design for my forthcoming Tarot Life Lessons: Living Wisdom from the Major Arcana. To those of you who have been following my writing career, the working title of this book was The Tarot Diaries.

The cover of my forthcoming book

I don’t have a release date just yet–that should happen in the next couple of months, but it will be out on an Inner Traditions’ subsidiary, Destiny Books. I am told the famous Tarot and Occult writer, Alejandro Jodorowsky, published on this imprint so I am in good company. Here’s a link to the catalog page:

TarotLifeLessons_CatPage

What’s the other book? That is The Magician’s Girl: The History and Mysticism of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Title/Subtitle also subject to change! More on that as I learn it.

I did a few podcasts and radio appearances in the last few months. My favorites were talking about how the spirit world is presented in Hollywood with Max on Movies, as well as another good LifeBlood podcast with George Grombacher called “Return to the Source.” Check them out if you get a few minutes!

I’m filling up for weekend holiday parties in December, so reach out fast if you’re looking for my tarot services. And of course, I am always taking my regular weekday and weeknight appointments. Looking for a different gift idea? I can make you a custom gift certificate to print, email, or send by phone. Just email me at tarot@nighttimes.com or through this website for more information.

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“Spider”: Caught in Willie’s Winning Web

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 20:08:52 +0000

Ted Hughes positioned “Spider” as a 1956 poem, but the evidence suggests it may have been written in 1958. In the poem, Plath references the African folklore tale of Anansi, the trickster spider. Hughes noted in The Collected Poems that by the end of the year 1956 she had become greatly interested in African folklore, and he cited in his book Winter Pollen the “explosive transformation that author Paul Radin’s African collection worked on the poetry of Sylvia Plath” (WP, 78).

In January 4, 1958, Plath herself wrote of reading “myths & folktales & poetry & anthropology” (UJ, 306). From this point, folklore shows up creating another level of understanding to much of her work.

While undated, the “Spider” poem’s line, “Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin” sets the poem after Plath and Hughes’ honeymoon in Benidorm, which happened in July 1956. Plath had not been to Spain before then. In her journal on June 26, 1958, Plath wrote about “the black spider in Spain knotting ants around its rock,” and if one believes that her diary entry inspired the poem, then she wrote this poem in late June 1958 (UJ, 398), almost two years after her honeymoon. This seems to be in conflict with a statement Plath made a month later in her journals on July 27, 1958, when she wrote about having just composed two new Benidorm poems, a subject that had been “closed” to her until then. Plath also wrote in January of 1959 of wanting to do a series of Cambridge and Benidorm poems, but this did not seem to happen (UJ, 466). She called her new poems “deeper, more sobre, sombre (yet well colored) than any” she had done before (UJ, 410). These comments make “Spider” and her other poem, “The Goring,” likely candidates to have been written in 1958, not in 1956 where they are placed by Hughes in The Collected Poems. However, with the “Last summer” reference, it is also possible that Plath wrote “Spider” toward the end of 1956 and had simply forgotten that she wrote the poem.

The year makes no difference. Plath’s “Spider” celebrates the great baseball player Willie Mays, who in 1956 hit 36 home runs and stole 40 bases. Whether looking at 1956, 1957, or 1958, Willie Mays remained an MVP in baseball. Mays was, in Plath-speak, a “black busybody of the folktales,” right behind Jackie Robinson. Why would Plath know or care about baseball? In 1953, she had been romantically involved with a professional ballplayer for the Detroit Tigers, Myron “Mike” Lotz. Plath’s hometown of Boston is known to take baseball very seriously, and Mays played for the neighboring New York Giants, and later, the New York Mets.[1]

Plath’s “Spider” is loaded with baseball words and metaphor: Willie Mays could field (“squint from center field”), hit “As a sledge hammer,” and run the bases (“nimble filament” and “each time round”) better than almost anyone. The summer season of baseball is named in the second stanza, and Mays had first become a star playing with the Black Barons in the Negro League (Plath’s “baron”). Plath notes the “Spanish cousin” of the prior summer, and that summer of 1955 was when Joe DiMaggio, called “Dago” by teammates, was accepted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. “Dago” is a colloquialism for an Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese-speaking person. By the time of this poem, DiMaggio had already had a short marriage to Hollywood legend, Marilyn Monroe, another celebrity Plath admired.[2]

The MacGregor baseball glove Mays used in the New York Giants was called a “spider web glove,” appropriate to the poem’s name, and Plath’s “gray spool of stone” is home base. Mays outhit, outfielded, and outran everyone to the point it was nearly “Appalling to witness” […]“His next martyr to the gross cause.”

The baseball stadium is Plath’s “altar tiered” and the ants are the small players and fans, when viewed from a distance or on television. They are “a file of comers, a file of goers.” Plath sees the team players and bases as a “small stonehenge.” As the players touch base, Plath’s “caught ants waved legs in.” Mays is a “spry black deus” (god) in the machine (“Ex machine”) of baseball. In mid-1950s American professional baseball, race began to mean nothing in the face of great talent, “Nor did they seem deterred by this.”

“Spider” may have first been inspired by a line of ants and a spider that Plath and Hughes observed in Benidorm, but once one is aware of Plath’s layering of meanings, this is an extremely limited interpretation (UJ, 255-256).

[1] Willie Howard Mays, Jr., born 1931, is a retired American professional baseball player who spent the majority of his Major League Baseball career as a center fielder with the New York and San Francisco Giants before finishing with the New York Mets. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979, his first year of eligibility.

[2] Sylvia Plath’s letters and journals have several references to Marilyn Monroe. See Carl Rollyson’s book, American Isis: the life and art of Sylvia Plath (2013, St. Martin’s Press) for more.

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“Maudlin”: The Monthly Curse

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:48:31 +0000

Of all the work in the 1956 section of The Collected Poems, “Maudlin” may be the one closest to Plath’s autobiography. However, this poem was probably written in 1959. After all, Plath wrote in her journals on May 25, 1959, “My Maudlin poem is a prophetic little piece. I get the pleasure of a prayer in saying it: Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man” (UJ, 485). The question is, what is the poem’s prophesy?

Plath had always been a slave to her menstrual period, which was irregular, heavy, and caused severe cramping. On the day this poem was written, Plath suffered from menstrual cramps, cancelled appointments, and dreamed of drops of blood and tiny white rabbits, seeming to be her subconscious echoing the old adage for a positive pregnancy test, the rabbit died.

“Maudlin” addresses the narrator waking up in blood, seeing herself as both a virgin and a hag, a woman without children and getting older. She is “sleep-talking” because she is ruled by her subconscious and hormonal urges. The menstrual cycle is parallel to the moon’s 28-day phases, and this explains “Faggot-bearing Jack,” the man on the moon who carries his load of sticks within the moon-shaped egg that does not crack. This expression “does not crack” might also symbolize a strong man. A gibbet is an upright post with a projecting arm, used to hang men for execution. Plath turns this instrument of death into a verb here, seeing it as a woman pointing and cursing. She curses the man on the moon for causing her this pain every twenty-eight days. He is no good to her without a pregnancy, just as Plath saw menstrual cramps as “ridiculous” (UJ, 486). Plath’s “crackless egg” is one that does not hatch and bring life. She may have also had fun with the slang (and now politically-incorrect) meaning of faggot as a gay man, who is just as likely not to make a woman pregnant as the man on the moon.

In “Maudlin,” first entitled, “Mad Maudlin,” Plath is jealous of men, who are seen with disgust. This “Jack,” an everyman’s name, is macho (“He kings it”), with ugly descriptive words such as “hogshead” instead of a prettier cask. He is “hatched” from these eggs and he swigs, not sips or drinks, his claret-wine, a symbol of blood. Plath’s journal entry from May 20, 1959, around the time this poem was probably written, revealed a fight and tedious silences between herself and Hughes (UJ, 484). Everyman Jack, her Hughes, and all men, are “navel-knit to no groan” from the pain of menstrual cramps. Yet Plath believes that any woman would give up being the perfect dream of a mermaid to purchase two separate legs in order to bear a child. Her “at the price of a pin-stitched skin,” sounds painful, and it is. She knows that the maternal body is sometimes torn to give birth, and a body after a baby is never the same.

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“The Beggars”: Neighboring Countries on Hard Times

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 19:10:06 +0000

“The Beggars” is one of Plath’s poems seemingly set in Benidorm, Spain. If Plath had been reading the newspapers from home, which Aurelia might have sent, she would have seen that a new version of Faust opened at the Theatre on the Green in Wellesley, running July through August. In an article entitled, “The Beggar’s Opera,” the Harvard Crimson’s rave review praised stars Jack Cassidy and Shirley Jones in the leading parts. Meanwhile, the famous movie director Werner Jacobs had released his motion picture, The Beggar Student.

Beggar “tragedians” seemed to be everywhere in 1956. Also that year, Patience Macelwee published Beggar My Neighbour (Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1956), a book about how in economics, policy that benefits one country may be at the expense of others, and even at the expense of a country’s own longer term security. Finally, in August of that year, the famous poet and playwright Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht, a Marxist who probably had strong feelings about Macelwee’s subject and who famously revised “The Beggar’s Opera,” died on August 14, 1956. The date Plath wrote “The Beggars” is uncertain, but Hughes did place it within Plath’s 1956 poems.

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“Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest,” “Monologue at 3 a.m.,” “The Glutton,” and “November Graveyard”: The Emotional Weight of National Guilt

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 18:09:37 +0000

Pictured: The New Yorker’s celebrated editor, William Shawn

Plath’s poem, “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest” talks of the “black November” in the year of 1956 which severely escalated the Cold War. The character of “Father Shawn” may well be the editor of The New Yorker at the time, William Shawn. As an editor, Shawn seemed to be one of the few journalists with a conscience. He insisted, for example, that an entire issue of the magazine be dedicated to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Writers loved William Shawn, and J.D. Salinger even dedicated his novel, Franny and Zooey, to Shawn, who had first serialized Salinger’s work in two separate stories.[1]

In her poem, “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest,” Plath places Shawn in the position of a holy man (“Father Shawn”) speaking to a spirit who walks the earth. Shawn asks the newspaper-man’s question: “How now” and he directs him to “simply tell.” The news of the day of course was the Cold War and the related Hungarian Revolution. Meanwhile, British and French troops had moved in on the Suez Canal (“Gnaws me through” and “this sorry pass”) with Israel, against Egypt. Nikita Khrushchev threatened to rain his rockets down on London (“The day of doom”). America’s president Eisenhower believed that British imperialism was finished, that Arab nationalism was going to be lasting, and that the Suez Canal was irretrievably lost. Eisenhower was angry at Britain for occupying the canal and not informing him.

In “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest,” Plath saw the love of territory to be “too great love / Of flawed earth-flesh,” with governments forgetting about the nearly unseen who live there. The Hungarian Revolution had temporarily paralyzed the Kremlin, “Some damned condition,” and “shriveling in torment,” until the Russian tanks came and crushed the Hungarian student protesters. Plath’s last stanza of her “Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest” reflects the national guilt of watching and doing nothing.

Plath’s poem, “November Graveyard” began on September 9, 1956 per her calendar, with the worst of this horror yet to come. At the time of her writing the poem, anti-Communist protesting had escalated and journalists exposed the Soviet’s oppression. By late October and through mid-November, thousands of freedom fighters had been massacred and many more were forced to flee, setting the scene of Plath’s poem. Plath wrote to her mother in early November that she had been depressed and almost physically sickened by the news of both Britain bombing Egypt in the Suez Crisis, and the Hungarian Revolution. America watched in shame. Eisenhower had pledged to keep out of it, for fear of starting a full-scale war with the Soviets.

Plath’s personal guilt about doing nothing during this conflict may lie in the un-restful “Monologue at 3 a.m.” written on October 3, 1956. The poem has been compared in mood and format to Louis Simpson’s “Summer Storm” (Peel, 147). Outwardly, of course, it is a poem of Plath missing Hughes. But since the end of July that year, martial law had been imposed upon Poland following an anti-Communist revolt. The poem inside the poem appears to be that Plath grieves over that almanac which displays the land of Eastern Europe in its fury and drenching blood, while she does nothing but sit mute and twitch in discomfort.

Unsurprisingly then, Plath’s poem, “The Glutton,” written on April 27, 1956, is a portrait of British Foreign Minister Anthony Eden. Eden had made a remark summarizing the Western position, to which it seems Plath and the world thought he should have “Cupped quick to mouth.” Eden said: “We do not wish to move a finger” for the Hungarians. On this same date, doubts about Eden’s future as prime minister were being expressed in the papers as his personal ratings plummeted. Plath played on the nation of Hungary’s name with “hunger-stung”; Eden’s Englishness shows in the drink of “wassail” as he enjoys his “prime parts” and rich meals. Known to be quite stylish, Eden was “So fitted” in his suits. In her pocket calendar, Plath referred to “The Glutton” as a “good, small, hard, packed poem.” Also on the day Plath wrote “The Glutton,” Nikita Khrushchev departed London with Soviet Premier Nikolai Bulganin. It had only been months before, back in February 1956, when Khrushchev had publicly made a bitter attack on his predecessor Stalin, and the world had held hope that the Soviets might ease their pressure on Hungary. In an April 26, 1956 letter to her mother, Plath wrote that she had attended the reception of the Soviet leaders and shook Bulganin’s hand. She had called him a “dear, white-bearded little man with clear blue eyes,” and “rubbed elbows” with Anthony Eden. In those times of American McCarthyism, jokes had been made that Plath would not be allowed back into the States for her Communist sympathies. Yet all that was changing as the Soviets showed their fiercer side.

[1] Franny and Zooey would later be a great influence on Plath’s 1961 poem, “Tulips.” See my book, Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath, volume one (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press) for more.

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“Strumpet Song”: …And God Created Female Competition

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:59:27 +0000

Plath wrote in her journals that “Strumpet Song” was written shortly after meeting Hughes (UJ, 410). It is a literary treatment of time in the metaphor of a whore (CP, 33). Plath’s first encounter with Hughes, when he kissed her “bang smash on the mouth” at a party and she bit his cheek (UJ, 212), seems a good match for “that mouth / Made to do violence on.” Hughes’ “seamed face” and Plath’s casting him as incomparable with another man well fits this poem. Hughes was with a different girl that night he met Plath.

But Plath’s work was beyond mere autobiography by now: “Strumpet Song” is also Plath’s judgment on the wildly popular French actress, Brigitte Bardot. At the time Plath wrote this poem, Bardot had recently popularized the bikini and got worldwide attention with the 1956 boundary-pushing film movie, …And God Created Woman, released in Europe in November 1956.

…And God Created Woman is about an immoral teenager (“that foul slut”) seducing the men (“Until every man” […] “Veers to her slouch”) in a respectable, small town. Bardot is known for her swollen, pouty lips (“that mouth/ Made to do violence on”) and the coal-black, heavy eyeliner (“black tarn”). Toward the end of the film, Bardot’s husband slaps her face four times, and she smiles at him.

At the time of writing “Strumpet Song,” Plath was either consciously or unconsciously trying to seduce Hughes to remain with her in Britain instead of leaving for Australia with his uncle, as he had planned. She may have compared herself a little bit with Bardot, whom she disliked. Bardot was always cast as the ingénue or siren, usually in a state of undress, and was one of the few French actresses to be wildly adored internationally. Plath might have seen a little of her pre-Hughes seductress-self in Bardot, and her own faults are projected onto the actress (“That seamed face / Askew with blotch, dint, scar”). Nevertheless, Plath closes her poem with the hope that Hughes can look up into her “most chaste own eyes.” Plath’s February 1962 journals also show disdain for the actress, when a neighborhood girl expressed how much she idolized Bardot (UJ, 635).

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“Dream with Clam-Diggers”: A Sinking Feeling

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:46:16 +0000

Over those first six months of marriage with Hughes, Plath told her mother that she was writing new “happy” poems glorifying her love with Ted. The poems she listed were “Two Sisters of Persephone,” “Metamorphosis,” “Wreath for a Bridal,” “Strumpet Song,” “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” and “Epitaph for Fire and Flower.” It is curious that Plath labeled these works as “happy,” as no matter how one reads them, each is loaded with ominous portents, a clear dark side, and impending doom. The dream which inspired “Dream with Clam-Diggers” occurred March 11, 1956, when she had only just had her brief fling with Ted Hughes. At that time, Plath was not sure what may become of it. Interestingly, several months later, another dream was recorded in a Benidorm journal entry of notes observing “bait diggers” (UJ, 576).

Most consider “Dream with Clam-Diggers” to be a Benidorm poem. On the most obvious, surface level, this poem portrays Plath’s sleeping subconscious, its buried memories, thoughts, and feelings (CP, 43). The poem begins with an idyllic early childhood at the beach. Next, evil, dark clam diggers rise from the muck of the bottom with the intent to kill her. “Dream with Clam-Diggers” captures some of the images in Plath’s August 13, 1956 notebook entry (UJ, 576), however, her calendar shows that she had begun at least the first line of this poem on June 1, 1956, calling it “the dream budded bright.”

Plath’s March 11, 1956 journals suggest that this poem was partly rooted in memories of a night when a drunken Ted Hughes and his friend threw clots of dirt at a window to wake her. Her dream that night was of returning to Winthrop, and in her journal she wrote:

“…But last night they came, at two in the morning, Phillipa said. Throwing mud on her window, saying my name, the two mixed: mud and my name; my name is mud. She came to look for me, but I was sleeping. Dreaming of being home in Winthrop on a lovely new spring day, walking in pajamas down the streets of melting tar to the sea, the salt freshness, and squatting in the sea in a tangle of green weeds were clam-diggers with osier baskets, rising, one after the other, to look at me in my pajamas, and I hid in spring shame in the trellised arbors of Day’s home.

“Mail came through the sewer, and I got only bills. Mail and rice came through the sewer, that bubbling green mucky sewer we played in by the sea, transmuting what corruption, what slime-gilded periwinkles, into what radiant magic. They laughed and said they trusted the mail and rice coming through the sewer.

“And all this while, those three boys in the dark were treating me like what whore, coming like the soldiers to Blanche DuBois and rolling in the gardens, drunk, and mixing her name with mud” (UJ, 235).

It is easy to see elements of Plath’s dream in “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” however this poem may also be one of the best examples of Sylvia Plath’s premonitory dreams. We must keep in mind the date that Plath started writing, if not completed “Dream with Clam-Diggers” before she and Hughes were even married, much less on their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain. It is generally assumed that the beach in this poem is the one at Plath’s familiar Winthrop, Massachusetts.[1] Nowhere in “Dream with Clam-Diggers” is the beach specifically named. Details such as “pilgrimages” do suggest Massachusetts. Her images of “air winnowed by angels” and “sea-town” suggest ships, as does the more obvious fifth stanza “schooner” and “ship sank.” However, Plath has also perfectly described the old seaport town of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

On July 25, 1956, at 10:15 a.m. (“on that hot morning”) almost two months after Plath had begun “Dream with Clam-Diggers,” the Andrea Doria luxury cruise ship would become one of the first televised tragedies. From Italy, the Andrea Doria was known as the most beautiful and luxurious ship in the world, its pretty flag pennants strung like Plath’s “cockle-shells” (originally “slime-gilded periwinkles” in her dream). The ship, on its hundredth crossing across the Atlantic, was returning to New York City (“she was come / Back to her early sea-town”) through the waters of Nantucket. The Andrea Doria had serious trouble with listing (“wayward girl”), and it had encountered this problem near Nantucket before, also fitting Plath’s poem’s sense of returning. Meanwhile, the nearby Stockholm, fitting Plath’s neighbor image, and “squatting at sea’s border,” a sturdy Swedish workhorse ship (“She, in her shabby travel garb began”), had just left its dock in New York’s busy harbor (“eager toward water”). A thick fog surrounded the Andrea Doria, fitting Plath’s angelic air. When the ships finally spotted each other in the waters off of Nantucket, it was too late to avoid a collision (“wrack of wave”). Plath’s last line in the poem shows the ships advancing, their front windows like squinting eyes, “fixed on murder.” The Stockholm slammed into the Andrea Doria’s side. The Andrea Doria continued looking beautiful, despite the huge hole in her side which filled with water, and took the boat down, fitting Plath’s entire third stanza. As the ship “Sloped seaward to plunge in blue,” Plath has described the “white fire” of steam and fog. Ships all around rushed to help with rescuing its more than a thousand passengers and crew, fitting Plath’s last line of that third stanza. Fifty-two people were killed. This accident remains one of the worst maritime disasters to occur in United States waters.

As Plath traveled by ocean liners to cross the ocean for “her first move of love” to the U.K., this news event, which took place while she and Hughes were on their honeymoon, certainly must have shocked her. We can’t know for sure if she followed this seemingly inescapable event on the news and in the papers, but we can know that her poem foretold the disaster in perfect detail.

[1] Sylvia Plath enjoyed childhood summers at the beaches in Winthrop, Massachusetts, and also occasionally visited Nauset Beach in Cape Cod.

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“Spinster”: Unlovable Imperialism

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 03:32:04 +0000

Pictured: French police attack Algerian protesters in Paris, 1956

The image of the spinster was a popular one in the movies during the 1940s and ‘50s, and the character was often pictured pining over a dead soldier boyfriend whose picture was on the mantel. In 1942, Bette Davis had starred as spinster Charlotte Vale in the film adaptation of Olive Higgins Prouty’s Now, Voyager, a book Plath owned, and a popular movie she surely saw, as Prouty was her benefactor at Smith College. By this year, the famous Hollywood star Katherine Hepburn had played a spinster in three starring roles: The African Queen (1951); Summertime, released as “Summer Madness” in the UK (1955); and The Rainmaker (1956).

Plath’s language in her poem “Spinster” reveals there is more to this work than just a story of a particular woman (CP, 49). With words such as “mutinous,” “treason,” “vulgar motley” and “bedlam,” alongside the month of “April” and Cold War-ish wintery images has Plath casting the country of France as the unloving and unlovable spinster during the Algerian war.

In April 1956, Plath was in Paris. There, she mourned over Richard Sassoon, reeled from Ted Hughes, and passed the time with her old boyfriend Gordon Lameyer and two other gentlemen, one being a political journalist. In her confusion and seeming inability to find love and settle down, Plath may have likened herself to be a spinster. Meanwhile, as she was in the capitol of France, she surely was aware that the Algerian protests against France were increasing (“April walk”). The National Liberation Front (FLA) sought Soviet support (“longed for winter”) during this Cold War era, but the Soviets were ambivalent. The French public relations’ campaign denied that this was war and pitched their actions as bringing enlightenment and values to a backward culture. In truth this was a dirty war of village burnings, torture and executions that was all in the news that “bedlam spring.” A group of priests had published letters by French reservists revealing the truth and the reservists began a rebellion (“vulgar motley”), refusing to fight for their country (“a treason not to be borne”). It was a messy, simultaneous and escalating fight (“burgeoning”) of French reservists against their own country; and a civil war of loyal French Algerian settlers against the FLA; and of course, France against the FLA.

The “barricade of barb and check” references the Berber languages of North Africa, and “check” is a homophone for “Czech.” Unlike the Czechs in 1938, the Algerian settlers were not going to be manipulated by the FLN. Many tens of thousands of Muslim civilians were killed, abducted, and/or presumed killed by the FLN during the Algerian war. A new administrative structure was proposed that would give Algeria some autonomy while still being governed by France, by dividing Algeria into five districts (“her five queenly wits”). In 1956, after a series of highly publicized massacres, the French abolished the idea of reform (“She withdrew neatly”).

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“Landowners” and “Departure”: There Goes The Neighborhood!

Julia Gordon-Bramer — Thu, 20 Jan 2022 01:14:34 +0000

Hughes placed Plath’s poem, “Landowners,” in the year 1956 in the Collected Poems. Plath referenced in her journals writing a poem on the subject of landowners two years later, on July 4, 1958, (UJ, 399). It is of course possible that she had another poem on the same subject.

If we agree with Ted Hughes’ placement and read “Landowners” and “Departure” both as 1956 poems, South African Apartheid had been in place for a little over a year, beginning with the forced removal of Blacks from Sophiatown to Soweto. Sophiatown was once the Black epicenter of jazz, blues, and politics. Plath’s most beloved professor, Dr. Dorothea Krook, was from South Africa, as well as some of her closer friends at Cambridge. Plath’s journals reveal that she felt an obligation to give to a scholarship to Black students at Cambridge coming from an apartheid government. And Plath, like her father, was a pacifist.

Plath’s “Landowners” poem is loaded with hints of South Africa, most especially with its word “Indigenous” (CP, 53). The removal was part of the government’s plan to turn the country’s urban and residential areas white. Blacks were moved to ghettos or townships, and the town was flattened over the next eight years and removed from the maps of Johannesburg. “Landowners” suggests that those white as ghosts were “envious,” and had to “define / Death as striking root on one land-tract.”

Meanwhile, at the northern end of Africa, the Suez Canal had been seized and claimed for Egypt in 1956. Britain, France, and Israel were at war against Egypt. In an unusual alliance, the United States, Soviet Union, and United Nations attempted to persuade them to withdraw. This was a different kind of departure from the forced removal of Blacks. Plath’s poem, “Departure,” ultimately illustrates evacuations at both ends of Africa (CP, 51). The first two stanzas are full of the North African figs and grapes, brick-red porch tiles (Britain’s architectural mark upon the area), brassy sun, and lack of money. Plath’s third stanza serves to reflect upon these two moments in history occurring simultaneously. She casts the sun and the moon as the north and the south, both weighted with “The leaden slag of the world.” Slag has a number of definitions, from the least to greatest in vulgarities, especially in Britain. To match it with the word “expose” in Plath’s next line suggests the definition of a whore, to be used and not paid for her riches. It is also left over waste metal from mining or smelting operations, yet another connection to South Africa, famous for its mines of diamond, gold, and other valuable metals.

Judging from the words in “Departure,” Sylvia Plath believed it was important to “always expose” the truth. The last two stanzas perfectly describe the rocky cliffs of the South African coast, with its many blue bays. It was time for Britain to lick the salt in their wounds, as Plath’s last line of “Departure” suggests. The withdrawal upset Europe greatly, even breaking apart close friendships back at Cambridge due to cultural and familial alliances (Sophian).

“Landowners” is also a term for Britain’s landed gentry, the aristocracy born into owning large deeds of land and thus not having to work. Landowners took over a great deal of Northern Ireland, and all of the orange in Plath’s poem is a nod to England’s William of Orange who reigned over England, Scotland and Ireland until his death in 1702. Because of a mass emigration due to famine, this land was “Flimsily peopled.”

If “Landowners” and “Departure” are read as 1958 poems, the imperialist theme of accumulating territory in these poems remains: Apartheid continued on in South Africa, and by that year the Egyptians were fully in control of the Suez. Yet there was a new twist: In America, President Dwight D. Eisenhower was getting ready to sign the Alaska Statehood Act into United States law, another great claim on property. “Flimsily peopled,” Alaska was another kind of whiteness with its “ghost’s / Eyeful” with its snowy mountains and their “vaporous wayfarings.” Whether “Landowners” is a 1956 or a 1958 poem, the struggle for land and power is always relevant.

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