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have written colossal amounts!), I shall start on your terrific plots”. Plath then returns to the “queer things” she had been feeling, and how she had become a social recluse, “I work; you work; we work. I have no desire, above my typewriter and my cows, to do anything except work for you, slave for you, make myself an always richening woman for you; and that is that”. Although being apart from Ted continues to be a “wrenched horror”, Plath finds “I am more miserable among people than alone.” She complains of having terrible difficulty sleeping without him, and begs him to stay an extra night on his trip to London the coming weekend, before signing “I love you more than the whole gibbering world which owes it existence & worth - if it has any - to your being in it - your loving wife sylvia”. Plath had now been apart from Hughes for ten days, and the strain of that separation was tak - ing an increased toll on her psychological state. At one point she remarks, “I have never spent such an intolerable numbed two weeks. Two-- -it is still only one; my god”. She had found that occupying as much of her time with writing helped, but still it was the case that misery could hit which “dashed all this sense of industry”. The two stories detailed here mark a notable development in Plath as a prose writer. She iden - tifies clearly her talent for both psychological descriptions and using black humour to approach serious subjects. The parallels of the college suicide of the second story and Plath’s own expe - riences are difficult to avoid drawing, but as Heather Clark has noted, “Plath never mentioned her history with suicide in her love letters”. Indeed, in replying to Sylvia’s description of ‘The Wishing Box’, Ted wrote “this is the kind of poetic theme you could make exclusively your own ground.” More important than the biographical implications of these stories is that Plath had identified an approach for dealing with suicide in fiction. This would later find its full realisation in her
masterpiece of vivid psychological description and black humour, The Bell Jar. PROVENANCE: Ted Hughes (1930 - 1998); Frieda Hughes (1960-).
Price: £50,000
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