Joanna Biggs on Sylvia Plath's Letters

Sylvia Plath, Letter to Aurelia Plath (November 22, 1962)

I’ve just finished reading Joanna Biggs’ “I’m an intelligence” (London Review of Books, December 20, 2018), a review of The Letters of Sylvia Plath. What an impressive piece of critical writing! Quoting extensively from the letters, Biggs reconstructs Plath’s life, blending it with her own personal history and her love of Plath’s writing. For example:

And I had married in a Sylvia dress, with ‘love set you going’, the first half-line of ‘Morning Song’, which begins Ariel, engraved inside my wedding ring. My idea of marriage was a Plath-Hughes one: meeting at Oxford, honeymooning in Venice, sharing a study, writing a book each, painting our North London living room French grey, babies in view. It broke down even so. During my divorce, I remember thinking: am I victim or beneficiary? Sylvia’s late poems suggest: always both. The speaker of ‘Lesbos’, ‘The Jailer’, ‘Daddy’ and ‘Lady Lazarus’ couldn’t be more of a victim, but she expresses herself as if no one has told her that. The Arielvoice makes something glorious of a woman’s always abject – divorced or not – position in the world. ‘Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff!’ Sylvia wrote to her mother ten days after Ted left the marital home. ‘What the person out of Belsen – physical or psychological – wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like.’ 

Describing Plath’s state of mind after Hughes left her, Biggs says,

The lowest point came when she found Ted’s poems about Assia, ‘describing their orgasms, her ivory body, her smell, her beauty, saying in a world of beauties he married a hag, talking about “now I have hacked the octopus off my ring finger”. Many are fine poems.’ It was torture:

I am just frantic … I still love Ted … I am drowning, just gasping for air … I have no one … How can I tell the babies their father has left them … How and where, O God do I begin? … Frieda just lies wrapped in a blanket all day sucking her thumb. What can I do? I’m getting some kittens. I love you & need you. 

At the end of this letter I was in tears, and had to stop reading. Plath received a reply from Beuscher before she posted the letter and added a postscript: ‘PS Much better. The divorce like a clean knife. I am ripe for it now. Thank you, thank you.’

The piece’s final paragraph is amazing; Biggs imagines Plath is still alive:

I sometimes like to imagine that Sylvia Plath didn’t die at all: she survived the winter of 1963 and she still lives in Fitzroy Road, having bought the whole building on the profits of The Bell Jar and Doubletake, her 1964 novel about ‘a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter & philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful and perfect’. She wears a lot of Eileen Fisher and sits in an armchair at the edge of Faber parties, still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction earlier this year, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet. She is baffled by but interested in MeToo. She still speaks Boston-nasally, but with rounded English vowels. She stopped writing novels years ago, and writes her poems slowly now she has the Pulitzer, and the Booker, and the Nobel. She is too grand to approach, but while she’s combing her white hair and you’re putting on your lipstick in the loos, you smile at her shyly in the mirror and she says: ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’

That “still wearing the double-dragoned necklace that was sold at auction earlier this year, with the badass divorcée pewter bracelet on her wrist like an amulet” is inspired! The whole piece is inspired – one of the most absorbing, memorable reviews I’ve read in a long time. 

Postscript: Biggs’ piece has at least four New Yorker connections: (1) the magazine published twenty-eight of Sylvia Plath’s poems, including “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor” (August 9, 1958), “Water Color of Grantchester Meadows” (May 28, 1960), and “Tulips” (April 7, 1962); (2) Biggs has written two New Yorker pieces: “We,” a review of Chang-rae Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (January 27, 2014); and “He’s Gotta Have It,” a review of Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana (July 30, 2018); (3) Dan Chiasson, in his excellent “The Girl That Things Happen To” (The New Yorker, November 5, 2018), reviewed the second volume of Plath’s letters; (4) and, of course, Janet Malcolm’s brilliant The Silent Woman, a critical analysis of writings about Plath, originally appeared in The New Yorker (see here and here).  

In Praise of FSG

A special shout-out to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux (FSG) on its recent publication of Janet Malcolm’s essay collection Nobody’s Looking at You. Over the last ten years, FSG has published a number of books by my favorite New Yorker writers, including three by John McPhee (Silk Parachute, Draft No. 4, and The Patch), two by Ian Frazier (Travels in Siberia and Hogs Wild), two by Janet Malcolm (Forty-one False Starts and Nobody’s Looking at You), and one by James Wood (The Fun Stuff). These books are all beautifully covered, printed, and produced – handsome physical objects that are a pleasure to hold and read. I treasure them. 

In Praise of Alex Abramovich's "Built to Last"

S. F. Denton, "Pickerel" (from John McPhee's "The Patch")

One aspect of Alex Abramovich’s “Built to Last” (Bookforum, Dec/Jan 2019) that I especially relish is his analysis of John McPhee’s style. He selects a “bravura passage” from McPhee’s “The Patch” (The New Yorker, February 8, 2010) and comments on it. Here’s the passage:

Pickerel have palatal teeth. They also have teeth on their tongues, not to mention those razor jaws. On their bodies, they sometimes bear scars from the teeth of other pickerel. Pickerel that have been found in the stomachs of pickerel have in turn contained pickerel in their stomachs. A minnow found in the stomach of a pickerel had a pickerel in its stomach that had in its stomach a minnow. Young pickerel start eating one another when they are scarcely two inches long. 

And here’s Abramovich’s comment:

That final turn is typical McPhee—you see the same fillip in the last line of the Cary Grant passage I’ve quoted above. A simple declarative sentence performs the rhetorical function a couplet provides in Shakespearean sonnets: It sticks the ending; it sums up the argument; and, in this instance, it sends us back to the Escher-like, ouroboric sentences that have preceded it.

That “Escher-like, ouroboric sentences” is wonderful. It’s an original attempt to describe McPhee’s pickerel-within-pickerel-within-pickerel construction. But what I really like about Abramovich’s approach is his use of quotation. Mark O’Connell says of James Wood, “When Wood block-quotes, you pay attention—as you would to a doctor who has just flipped an X-ray onto an illuminator screen—because you know something new and possibly crucial is going to get revealed” ("The Different Drummer," Slate, November 2, 2012). The same can be said about Abramovich's quotes in his McPhee piece. It's like he puts them up on a screen to highlight their brilliancies. 

McPhee is a master stylist. It’s time we had a full study of his form. Abramovich’s superb “Built to Last” points the way.

February 18 & 25, 2019 Issue

The piece in this week’s issue that I enjoyed most is Ian Frazier’s “Pumper’s Corner,” a profile of Oklahoma oil well pumper Rachael Van Horn. Actually, pumping wells is only one of her jobs. She’s also an Army Reserves veteran, a newspaper columnist, and Director of the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau for the city of Woodward. And she does extraordinary things like save three badly burned Angus calves:

Rachael brought the calves to her place and bucket-fed them, called a vet to treat them, put salve on their burned foreheads and lips and on the stubs of their burned-off ears, and built a small wading pool that she filled with a saline solution and walked them through twice a day in order to soothe their burned feet. The pain they were in distressed her so much that she drove to Pueblo, Colorado, and bought liquid THC—marijuana extract—to give them. After they began taking the THC, she noticed that they got hungrier, started to eat more, and put on a lot of weight. The calves gradually got better. She spent endless hours doctoring them. She had been in Iraq for three years and was present at the mess-hall suicide bombing near Mosul on December 21, 2004, which killed twenty-five people. She was continuing to deal with her post-traumatic stress, and the calves became part of the process. 

But it’s her job as a pumper that draws Frazier’s closest attention. He accompanies her on her oil well rounds:

As Rachael walked me through each well, I appreciated the Rube Goldberg-ness of it all. No two were the same. “The guys out here like to say that a well is like a woman, because each one needs to be handled differently,” Rachael said. She had been to these wells often, and sort of whispered each one, the way she would a horse. She put her hands on pipes, felt for hot spots, peered into gauges, cocked an ear for wrong sounds. She had me listen at a pipe where rising gas from a mile down hissed and echoed—all O.K. there. 

At a well called the Neff, Rachael has to re-start the pump. Frazier writes, “As the pump motor re-started, the horse head lurched to its full twenty-foot height above her, like a waking Tyrannosaurus.”

The piece brims with Frazier’s lyrical descriptions of the prairie: 

Prairie grasses turn colors in the fall, like trees in New England. The broad patches of big bluestem had darkened as if marinated in red wine; other grasses seemed to have been bleached to the palest yellow, like sun-damaged hair. A brisk wind blew, and hawks teetered by on it. 

I made the fifty-minute drive from Woodward to Laverne in darkness that became a gray day. No trees in America are more beaten down than the cottonwood trees of the central plains, chastised by ice storm and fire and wind into postures of broken supplication. Their black, wracked branches emerged against the sky as the light came up. 

My favourite detail in “Pumper’s Corner” is Frazier’s description of Rachael when he first meets her:

When she came out of her house, she was brushing her teeth. The arrival of a stranger at her door at nine-thirty in the morning did not faze her, and she continued to brush for a few minutes as we talked.

“Pumper’s Corner” is a tribute to an amazing individual and a fond appreciation of the land where she works. I enjoyed it immensely. 

February 11, 2019 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Burkhard Bilger’s brilliant “Extreme Range,” a profile of the experimental choral group Roomful of Teeth. Using exotic vocal techniques like alpine yodelling, Bulgarian belting, Persian Tahrir, and Inuit and Tuvan throat singing, the eight-singer group “produces music that’s both primal and sophisticated, ancient and startlingly modern.” Bilger sits in on a rehearsal (“The chants and howls and panting rhythms alternate with moments of sudden beauty – luminous plains swept by shimmering chords”). He visits the group’s founder and conductor, Brad Wells (“Wells has a deep, oaky baritone that roughens to a grumble in its lower register”). He talks to a young composer, Harry Stafylakis, who is teaching the group to sing death metal (“Death-metal singers sound as if they’re broiling their vocal cords with a blowtorch, but the technique causes no harm when done right”). He meets with Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, who is one of Roomful of Teeth's two mezzo-sopranos (“Thin-boned and petite, with sharp eyes behind oversized glasses, she had the high-strung yet unruffled quality of a bird on a wire”). And most memorably, he visits a silo in a restored Shaker Village in Hancock, Massachusetts, to hear a recording that Wells made of an old Shaker hymn called “Solemn Song No. 1”:

The voices were growing louder, circling the silo one by one with the choir close behind. Wells lifted his head to the cloud of voices rising and swirling toward the ceiling, then stretched out his arms as they joined in a great, ragged chord. When they fell silent, I could hear the tapping of rain on the roof outside. Then a last voice sang out—Shaw’s quiet mezzo, wafting up like a fleck of ash above a flame. 

“Extreme Range” brims with wonderful vocal descriptions. I enjoyed it immensely. 

Janet Malcolm's "Nobody's Looking at You"

I see Janet Malcolm has a new essay collection out called Nobody’s Looking at You. Malcolm is one of my favorite writers. I first encountered her work in 1976, when I read her transfixing New Yorker review of an exhibition of photographs by the team of Nina Alexander and Herta Hilscher-Wittgenstein. I’ve been reading her ever since. Her new book contains several New Yorker pieces, including her superb “Performance Artist” (September 5, 2016). That’s the one where she says of pianist Yuja Wang, “She looked like a dominatrix or a lion tamer’s assistant. She had come to tame the beast of a piece, this half-naked woman in sadistic high heels. Take that, and that, Beethoven!”

Parul Sehgal, in her “Janet Malcolm, a Withering Critic, in a Nostalgic Key” (The New York Times, February 5, 2019), says of Nobody’s Looking at You, “There is stirring, beautifully structured writing here.” I look forward to reading it.

February 4, 2019 Issue

Sarah Larson, in her excellent “Home on the Range,” in this week’s issue, reviews a revival of Sam Shepard’s 1980 True West, a play I’ve always wanted to see ever since I read John Lahr’s memorable review of it in the March 27, 2000, New Yorker (included in his great 2015 collection, Joy Ride). Lahr called it “a droll tale of sibling rivalry.” That 2000 production starred Philip Seymour Hoffman and John C. Reilly. (Reilly is one of my favorite actors; his performance in The Sisters Brothers is, for me, one of 2018’s movie highlights.) What made Lahr’s piece memorable was his description of the play’s action. For example:

When the lights come up on the two brothers in the next scene, Austin is burnishing one of a dozen newly acquired toasters (“There’s gonna’ be a general lack of toast in the neighborhood this morning,” he says); meanwhile, in the foreground, Lee is taking out his writer’s block on the typewriter, smashing it to smithereens with a nine iron. Here Shepard is at his best: loose, intuitive, his dialogue rippling with subtle shifts of mood and ideas. In this impeccably staged piece of slapstick, while Reilly tears up the dining alcove looking for a pencil, Hoffman pads behind him, priming his toasters with white bread and talking about going back to the desert with Lee. “There’s nothing real down here, Lee! Least of all me!” he says. The frenzy builds to a sidesplitting, infantile epiphany. Lee knocks the toast out of Austin’s hand, then as Austin drops to his hands and knees to pick it up, grinds each slice into the floor.

That is a marvelous passage, and what makes it marvelous is its specificity – the burnishing of the toaster, the smashing of the typewriter with a nine iron, the grinding of each slice of toast into the floor.

Edward Sorel, illustration for John Lahr's "True West"

Larson’s piece contains vivid passages, too:

This could be your grandmother’s kitchen. Cherry-print wallpaper, sunny yellows, lush houseplants, decorations approaching kitsch without succumbing to it—everything conveys haimish order and care. There’s love in this room, and it’s about to get torn apart.

Hawke, in a scuzzy trenchcoat, looking convincingly greasy, enjoys himself, at times nearly singing his lines, waving his hands in teasing disdain. But he doesn’t overdo it. 

The plot whirls along, heading inevitably toward collaborative writing, drunken mayhem, brandished golf clubs, existential crises, flying toast. 

Josh Cochran, illustration for Sarah Larson's "Home on the  Range"

Comparing the two pieces, I think I still like Lahr’s the best. But Larson makes a valid point when she says, “Shepard’s writing and his vision are as powerful as ever, but American masculinity has evolved since he wrote ‘True West’; what’s true for one generation may not be true for the next.”