Nov 5, 2020 10:58 AM
(This post was last modified: Nov 5, 2020 11:05 AM by C C.)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertain...story.html
EXCERPTS: . . . Now, into the breach, comes Heather Clark’s “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” an exhaustively researched, frequently brilliant masterwork that stretches to 1,072 pages (including notes).
[...] Portions of “Red Comet” are deeply moving, but a tendency to downplay Hughes’s violence will likely attract critics. In May 1958, when Plath was teaching at Smith, she saw Hughes strolling on campus with a student. The ensuing altercation caused Plath to report in her journal that the fight left her with a strained thumb and Hughes with claw marks on his cheeks. “I remember,” Plath wrote, “hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room; instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars.” Clark writes of the passage: “Plath’s colon suggests that she ‘got hit’ by the ricocheting glass, not by Hughes” — a conclusion contrary to the one many other readers have reached.
Another episode, which Plath described in no uncertain terms, occurred in February 1961, when Hughes beat Plath so severely she suffered a miscarriage. “Red Comet” reviews the evidence but offers an apologia from Frieda Hughes, who contends that “my father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was.”
On that point, one central question has loomed since Plath’s death: What role did Hughes play, intentionally or not, in her death? “Red Comet” reports what Hughes said on the matter. “No doubt where the blame lies,” Hughes wrote to a friend. “It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius,” Hughes said to Plath’s friend Elizabeth Compton, adding on another occasion, “I feel like a murderer.” To Aurelia Plath, Hughes wrote: “[I]f there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive.”
In a letter to the Observer newspaper (never mailed) that was meant to thank Plath’s friends and neighbors, Aurelia seemed to concur: “Those who systematically and deliberately destroyed her know who they are.” (MORE - details)
EXCERPTS: . . . Now, into the breach, comes Heather Clark’s “Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath,” an exhaustively researched, frequently brilliant masterwork that stretches to 1,072 pages (including notes).
[...] Portions of “Red Comet” are deeply moving, but a tendency to downplay Hughes’s violence will likely attract critics. In May 1958, when Plath was teaching at Smith, she saw Hughes strolling on campus with a student. The ensuing altercation caused Plath to report in her journal that the fight left her with a strained thumb and Hughes with claw marks on his cheeks. “I remember,” Plath wrote, “hurling a glass with all my force across a dark room; instead of shattering the glass rebounded and remained intact: I got hit and saw stars.” Clark writes of the passage: “Plath’s colon suggests that she ‘got hit’ by the ricocheting glass, not by Hughes” — a conclusion contrary to the one many other readers have reached.
Another episode, which Plath described in no uncertain terms, occurred in February 1961, when Hughes beat Plath so severely she suffered a miscarriage. “Red Comet” reviews the evidence but offers an apologia from Frieda Hughes, who contends that “my father was not the wife-beater that some would wish to imagine he was.”
On that point, one central question has loomed since Plath’s death: What role did Hughes play, intentionally or not, in her death? “Red Comet” reports what Hughes said on the matter. “No doubt where the blame lies,” Hughes wrote to a friend. “It doesn’t fall to many men to murder a genius,” Hughes said to Plath’s friend Elizabeth Compton, adding on another occasion, “I feel like a murderer.” To Aurelia Plath, Hughes wrote: “[I]f there is an eternity, I am damned in it. Sylvia was one of the greatest truest spirits alive.”
In a letter to the Observer newspaper (never mailed) that was meant to thank Plath’s friends and neighbors, Aurelia seemed to concur: “Those who systematically and deliberately destroyed her know who they are.” (MORE - details)