November 5, 2018 Issue

For me, the two most absorbing pieces in this week’s issue are Ian Frazier’s “The Day the Great Plains Burned” and Dan Chiasson’s “ ‘The Girl That Things Happen To.’ ”

Frazier’s piece reports the devastation wreaked by the Northwest Complex Fire (also known as the Starbuck Fire) that, in 2017, burned almost two million acres of the south-central Great Plains. Frazier’s descriptions of the fire are superb. For example:

Now, to the southwest, the gray and black smoke was boiling up toward altitudes where airplanes are tiny white X shapes with pipe-cleaner contrails. The smoke mounted in gray cumulus-like eruptions or redacted everything above the horizon line to black, while the underside of the billows glowed orange from the flames. Embers flew through the air, and the fierce heat added its own force to the wind, which blew with such a noise that people standing four feet apart had to shout to talk.

And:

Burning tumbleweeds flew forty feet above the ground, and the red cedars in the hollows roared as their resinous boughs ignited like kerosene. The wind swept up the dry grass until the air itself was on fire. 

And:

Bumping over rough ground, the trucks threw the firemen around, banging them up and bruising them as burning sparks went down their necks. Several times, the fire’s front line jumped over the trucks, and the firemen kept from burning by spraying a mist around themselves.

The first half of “The Day the Great Plains Burned” is written in the third person, an unusual form for Frazier, who is a master first-person stylist. Reading it, I found myself missing his inimitable “I.” But then, at the start of section five, there it was: “One afternoon last summer, I talked with Bernnie Smith in the shade behind the Englewood firehouse.” I read that and smiled: Frazier is back! The rest of the piece, written in the first person, is a joy. I should clarify that. Frazier’s writing is a joy; the message it conveys is dire. The Starbuck Fire is not a singular occurrence. As the globe heats up, there’s going to be more of them. 

Dan Chiasson’s “ ‘The Girl That Things Happen To’ ” reviews a new book of Sylvia Plath’s letters that includes fourteen letters Plath wrote to her close friend and former psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher, between February 18, 1960 and February 4, 1963, a week before Plath committed suicide. Chiasson says of the Beuscher letters,

They are among the most revealing pieces of prose that Plath ever wrote, in any genre. In them, she alleges that Hughes “beat me up physically” a couple of days before a miscarriage, “seems to want to kill me,” and “told me openly he wished me dead.”

Chiasson is mindful that “a letter tells only one side of the story.” “But,” he says,

their transparency is arresting; these are the only letters in the book where Plath sets aside the kaleidoscopic genius of her style in favor of the plainest possible account. And it is fully consistent with what has long been suspected about Hughes and Plath’s relationship that he might have assaulted her.

The appearance of these new letters adds another plot twist to the Plath-Hughes saga. But, as Chiasson points out, their real value is in the way they deepen our appreciation of Plath’s poetry. Thanks to these letters, we now know the “emergency conditions” (Chiasson’s words) in which she wrote her greatest poems.