Reading all the books

The Emigrée is one of my favourite poems, not least because – despite being published almost thirty years ago – it seems desperately relevant in our current political climate. Written without a specific time or country in mind, Carol Rumens’ dramatic monologue explores the conflicted emotions of a woman (as the feminine title implies) who left her home country as a child; it is now ‘sick with tyrants’, and ‘there’s no way back at all’. This poem is written in free verse, as if the speaker’s memories are tumbling out, like ‘the child’s vocabulary [she] carried here’. It is a heartbreakingly personal poem, despite Rumens (who grew up in south London) not actually experiencing the kind of displacement outlined in The Emigrée. The poem was published in Rumens’ 1993 collection, ‘Thinking of Skins’, and reflects both Rumens’ fascination with ‘elsewhere’ and the millions of refugees who were fleeing war-torn countries such as Iraq and Turkey in the 1980s and 1990s. Significantly, the speaker of the poem is an emigrée, not an emigrant: notice the past tense form. She has left somewhere, and this is a poem about leaving rather than going somewhere new: emigrée, not immigrant. She has gone through a kind of self-exile.

The Emigrée begins like a fairy tale: ‘There once was a country…’ This opening is childlike, reflecting the fact that the speaker ‘left it as a child’, and also sets up the idealised fairy tale vision of the speaker’s homeland which permeates the poem. The adverb ‘once’ emphasises the significance of the past, and alludes to the ways in which her homeland has changed. (Note that the homeland is not named: it could be anywhere.) The ellipsis in the middle of the first line is interesting, because it bridges ‘country’ and ‘I’. They are separated by time and distance, but somehow still connected. Rumens introduces the motif of sunlight in line two; the speaker’s ‘memory of it is sunlight-clear’, unobscured and purifying. But we quickly come to understand that the country has changed significantly:

for it seems I never saw it in that November

which, I am told, comes to the mildest city.

The speaker has not seen this for herself (‘I am told’); her memories are idealised and untainted. November could be a metaphor for the onset of a kind of winter, a period of darkness and gloom and emptiness – the start of something long and bleak. Yet the transformation of her country ‘cannot break / my original view, the bright, filled paperweight’. There is irony in the line break, which could mirror the breaking of her illusion; or perhaps it reflects the way in which her utopian vision is split off from the ‘worst news’ she receives. The ‘bright, filled paperweight’ lends itself to several interpretations: like her country, or her impression of it, it is beautiful yet fragile and easily breakable. It could symbolise the contracting of her memories, the way in which they are fixed and trapped in time and crystallised. Or it could represent her attempt to hold her memories down, lest they blow away. The paperweight is ‘filled’, suggesting it is not quite ‘sunlight-clear’; perhaps her memories are actually somewhat confused or blurred.

The speaker reluctantly acknowledges her country’s affliction through the repetition of ‘it may be’. ‘Sick with tyrants’ is an interesting example of personification because it implies that there is hope and space for healing. Later in the poem, Rumens imagines the city as a pet or child; here we also see vulnerability. The last line of the first stanza is a continuation of the sunlight motif:

but I am branded by an impression of sunlight.

The branding metaphor implies that her memories (if we take sunlight to represent those memories, and the beauty/light/hope associated with them) are permanent and unshakeable. But there is a paradox in this line: to be branded is ugly and painful. Perhaps there is something agonising for the speaker about the difference between her memories and the present reality of her country. We see this paradox at the end of every stanza: each one ends with a sort of defiant hope, tinged with darkness.

Stanza two begins with the memory of ‘the white streets of that city’ which ‘glow’; the city takes on a kind of clean, heavenly purity. But ‘time rolls its tanks / and the frontiers rise between us’; Rumens conflates the inevitable passage of time with what could be an oncoming military invasion. The repetition of the alveolar ‘t’ mimics the caustic ticking of a clock; the rising frontiers could represent both the physical and metaphorical separations from her country which she must undergo. They ‘close like waves’; again, the simile could allude to both a real and imagined sea, or perhaps to the Parting of the Red Sea in Exodus. The waves closed up again, and those who had crossed the sea could not go back.

The speaker goes on to reflect on the preciousness of her language:

That child’s vocabulary I carried here

like a hollow doll, opens and spills a grammar.

The speaker’s language is something to be cared for and treasured, yet it finds its own agency as it ‘spills a grammar’ – perhaps a metaphor for political expression, or her inability to hide her identity. ‘Soon I shall have every coloured molecule of it’ implies that the speaker is continuing to learn her home language, or at least collecting the spilled words and putting them back inside that ‘hollow doll’; she is reassembling herself. Despite her language now being illegal to speak (presumably in her home country), she ‘can’t get it off [her] tongue. It tastes of sunlight’. Once again, there is a sense of unease: the speaker lacks agency. Normally something we can’t get off our tongue is unpleasant. Yet this time it tastes of ‘sunlight’. The synaesthesia (conflating sight with taste) could reflect her confused memories of the city.

The final stanza opens with the acknowledgement that the speaker is trapped and that she will probably never see her homeland again: ‘I have no passport, there’s no way back at all’. A passport isn’t just a way to travel around; it’s also a form of identification. Perhaps the speaker has lost part of her identity in fleeing her country. And yet it is still unequivocally hers: ‘my city comes to me in its own white plane’. The possessive pronoun ‘my’ denotes belonging; ‘comes to me’ alludes to the power of memory. I love the phrase ‘white plane’: again, whiteness has connotations of purity and cleanliness; ‘plane’ could be a literal reference to an aeroplane, symbolising the metaphorical journey to her city, or it could also mean a level of existence, as if she is connected to her city on some higher level of memory and thought. Rumens uses zoomorphism to imagine the city as if it is a kind of pet: ‘It lies down in front of me…I comb its hair and love its shining eyes’. It is as if the speaker is determined to protect her city, or at least her memory of it; later, her city ‘hides behind [her]’. ‘Docile as paper’ is a simile that implies fragility and innocence; perhaps it is connected to the paperweight metaphor earlier in the poem, the city of her childhood held down by the weight of her memories. The city then becomes a teenage lover as it ‘takes [her] dancing through the city / of walls’. The delight and freedom associated with her city are separate from the ‘walls’ of the new city; note the distinction between ‘my’ and ‘the’ as the speaker distances herself from her homeland as it is now.

The next two lines are ambiguous:

They accuse me of absence, they circle me.

They accuse me of being dark in their free city.

Who is ‘they’? Given the (possibly ironic) reference to the ‘free city’, the speaker is presumably referring to the residents of her new home, which could be England or somewhere else. The sinister repetition of ‘they’ combined with the uncertainty could be symbolic of the hostility she faces in her new country, and the alienation she feels. ‘They circle me’ creates a sense of entrapment; ‘dark’ could allude to the literal darkness of her skin, or it could be a metaphor for her emotional turmoil and the trauma she has experienced. Another interpretation could be that the instigators of the new regime in her homeland are guilting her for running away, and attacking her for speaking out against their brave new world of ‘freedom’. I think this ambiguity is part of what makes The Emigrée so powerful as a poem. ‘They mutter death’ could also have several interpretations. Death where? In her home city? In her new country? Is it literal death, or the death of her idealised vision? The final line of the poem is another paradox:

and my shadow falls as evidence of sunlight.

I interpreted this line as suggesting that there is hope even in the darkest places. The light and shade is symbolic of the speaker’s ambiguous relationship with her home country, and the juxtaposition of her idealised memories and the frightening present. ‘My shadow falls’ could allude to death, but without sunlight there is no shadow. The extra line in the last stanza (the other two stanzas have eight lines each) could reflect her reluctance to let go of her memories as she grieves the loss of the city she once knew.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post! Tomorrow I get to teach one of my favourite poems, ‘Flies’ by Alice Oswald. I have a lot of thoughts about this poem, and not all of them are coherent, so I thought it would be clarifying to write them down. Hopefully you will like it as much as I do.

‘Flies’ is from Oswald’s 2016 poetry collection, Falling Awake. I love the idea of falling awake. An awakening is the start of something new; it’s the beginning of consciousness, and – on a metaphorical level – an epiphany. Yet ‘falling’ implies a lack of agency, a spiralling out of control. It’s a strange and sudden inversion of the expected. It’s a paradox, and I think ‘Flies’ is ultimately a poem about paradox and also about liminality, about the boundary between one thing and another.

The flies in Oswald’s poem seem to exist in a half-conscious, half-comatose state. They ‘fall awake mid-sentence’, as if their incessant buzzing is part of an automated mechanical process. Or perhaps it never stops, even in their sleep. It seems as if this poem is supposed to be about awakening, as if it’s about the changing of seasons; ‘they drop from their winter quarters in the curtains’. But falling, and death, and reminders of death, are everywhere. When they stop buzzing, it is ‘as if the questioner had been shot’. They feel ‘like old cigarette butts called back to life’. Oswald has spoken about her fondness for simile; it ‘keeps both worlds alive at the same time’. So the flies are the cigarette butts, and the cigarette butts are the flies; both of these things exist together, just as this is a poem about the simultaneity of life and death, falling and waking. Their wings are like ‘flakes of dead skin’; they have been ‘called back to life’, Lazarus-like. Life from death. They come from a ‘charred world’, a burned and blackened and lifeless place. And they ‘fall’ twice; they are ‘blown’ and ‘carried’. When they try to regain some agency, it is as if they are small children trying life for the first time – ‘walking about a bit / trying out their broken thought-machines’. But all they have is their ‘used-up words’, the ‘horrible trapped buzzing’ that makes thinking ‘impossible’.

The only thinking that takes place in this poem is the ‘blackened disembodied question / what dirt shall we visit today? / what dirt shall we re-visit?’ The anaphora creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, emphasising the repetitive nature of their lives. The last lines of the poem are an unfinished echo of this question: ‘what should we / what dirt should we’. I don’t say ‘ending’, because in many ways this isn’t an end at all. Cut endings are common in Oswald’s poetry. She said, ‘I think my theme is often unfinishedness. I like the feeling that the universe isn’t finished’. I’ve been trying to figure out how ‘unfinishedness’ relates to this poem. Perhaps the flies are no longer able to articulate themselves because of the noise. Perhaps it’s a death – a reminder of the fragility of life? Oswald often writes about nature’s cycles, about mortality. The flies have come from death, and now they are approaching it. Or perhaps it’s about ambiguity. Who knows how long the flies will live for? Will the whole cycle begin again? One thing I like is that ‘what dirt shall we’ becomes ‘what dirt should we’. The shift in modal verb could reflect the shift from intention and a certain future to uncertainty and a loss of agency. The flies have tried to take control, but they are hopeless.

I wondered if the flies could be the poet. The ‘falling awake’ is the poetic inspiration, the rousing from sleep, the creative rebirth. The poets ‘lift their faces to the past’, hoping to seek inspiration from others. But the poem is ultimately ‘trembling sections of puzzlement’, composed of ‘used-up words’ that others have already written with. Oswald once said, ‘poetry…is about what happens when language gets impossible’. Perhaps the impossibility of fully capturing the flies’ experience is what this poem is about, rather than the flies’ inability to speak. Admittedly this theory may be a stretch, but I liked it!

Alice Oswald is known for her use of sound; a classicist by training, she has spoken of her love of the oral poetic tradition, and ‘Flies’ is about juxtaposition of sound as much as it is about the juxtaposition between life and death. Oswald’s use of sibilance throughout the poem – ‘shaking with speeches’, ‘flies fall’ – creates a sense of weightlessness that contrasts sharply with the plosive ‘b’ and ‘d’ sounds of words such as ‘blackened’ and ‘disembodied’. The weight of the world, of their own mortality, is upon them. Another thing I like about ‘Flies’ is the way in which the stanzas are laid out on the page, like concentrated periods of buzzing cut off suddenly by negative space. In ‘On Poetry’, Glyn Maxwell suggests that ‘poets work with two materials, one’s black and one’s white. Call them sound and silence.’ So we get a stop-start buzzing effect, culminating in that ambiguous final line, and the endless silence afterwards. I also love the way in which Oswald inhabits the flies’ consciousness in the last stanza. We see the gulf between their thoughts and their speech; they cannot express themselves, they hate the sound of their own voices, and there is an awful sense of futility as their frustration can only express itself through the trapped buzzing.

I’m afraid have to abruptly bring this to a close, because I am super busy tonight. Did you interpret the poem differently? I would love to read your thoughts!

I was finally doing something that really mattered. Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I’d slept enough, I’d be okay. I’d be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.

When I first saw this book, I was immediately attracted to the cover. The subject of Jacques-Louis David’s Portrait of a Young Woman in White gazes vacantly into the distance, beside a splodge of shocking pink containing the title – echoes of Kirsten Dunst’s 2004 film Marie Antoinette. I think I subconsciously dismissed it (how could a book about a year of resting be interesting? Was it a self help book?). But something compelled me to read the blurb, and I bought it.

Young, thin, pretty, a recent Columbia graduate, an apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan paid for by her inheritance: our narrator has many of the advantages of life. But there is a vacuum at the heart of things, and it isn’t just the loss of her parents. Or the way her Wall Street boyfriend treats her. Or her sadomasochistic relationship with her alleged best friend. It’s the year 2000 in the world’s greatest city, city aglitter with wealth and possibility. What could be so terribly wrong?

The unnamed protagonist of this novel is not exactly likable. Beautiful and wealthy, traumatised by the deaths of her dysfunctional parents, and unable to find joy or meaning in life, she decides to drug herself into a narcotic haze for a year. In between blackouts she watches VHS tapes on repeat, orders things she doesn’t need, and treats her best friend like shit. There is an emotionally abusive on-off boyfriend who occasionally appears.

This is not an easy, pleasant read. The plot is repetitive, and deliberately so. There are graphic descriptions of what it feels like to be stuffed full of sedatives and painkillers. There is a pervasive sense of emptiness; the writing itself often feels suffocating and sedating. The protagonist feels that she has nothing to live for, and at times it is as if the words on the page dissolve into nothingness and float far away. Yet there are also genuinely funny, satirical moments. Ottessa Moshfegh’s acerbic wit – her ability to send up the darkest of situations, the most pathetic of characters – is strikingly reminiscent of Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar. Dr Tuttle is a genuinely awful therapist, but the protagonist endures her nonsensical ramblings for a continual supply of increasingly ridiculous drugs. The pretentious art gallery she works at displays ‘avant garde’ pieces such as a ludicrous collection of frozen dead dogs. Her best friend Reva is a tragic parody of an insecure, self-obsessed twenty-something year old living in New York. No one in this book is likable – and yet it was an utterly compelling and absorbing read. And I really wanted her to be okay.

My Year of Rest and Relaxation has been criticised because it is about a self-absorbed wealthy white woman: “ridiculous, privileged, and, ultimately, pointless” according to one Goodreads user. But the protagonist’s privilege arguably accentuates her downward spiral. She wears her good looks like a mask; she has everything she could ever want, except a loving family; she has no reason to work; she has no interest in the material possessions she can so easily acquire, and which her best friend covets. Her wealth derives from her dead parents’ inheritance. Her pain does not feel superficial, and Moshfegh’s exquisite prose is gut-punching. This bleak, funny, powerful study of trauma will stay with me for a long time.

Like most children born after 1990, I first came across Simon Armitage at school. I remember studying ‘Kid’ and ‘Mother, Any Distance’. I was struck by the disarmingly down-to-earth frankness of his poetry, threaded with flashes of trembling beauty and sensitivity. I remember his kindness and wisdom when he came to speak to the kids at the school I work in (for free!) And I was delighted when he was announced as the new Poet Laureate.

Armitage’s first poem as Laureate, ‘Conquistadors’, commemorates the 1969 moon landing, and it is really quite special. (I have pasted it below as a picture, otherwise the line breaks don’t work properly…you will have to imagine that they are there when I quote the poem later on!)

According to The Guardian, Armitage’s inspiration came while he was “dwelling on the memories of when I was a kid, and the moon landings, drawing parallels between something being both captivating and intoxicating, almost in a romantic way”. He also drew on Philip Larkin and Robert Graves (Graves described walking on the moon as “the greatest crime against humanity in 2,000 years”). Now Armitage has hit out at Nixon’s “arrogant assumption, the idea that something so ephemeral [as space] could ever be captured and conquered”.

This is an ambivalent poem that refuses to position space exploration as ‘all good’ or ‘all bad’. The title, ‘Conquistadors’, translates from Spanish as ‘conquerors’, specifically the Spanish conquerors of Mexico and Peru in the 16th century. We read it and think of the enduring human desire to possess new territories and explore new regions, throughout history and today. Armitage uses the metaphor of a first kiss to evoke that desire: the intoxication of entering uncharted waters, and the sense of power that comes from making a personal conquest. In the poem, a six-year old boy is determined to ‘coincide / the moon landing / with his first kiss’, and the desire to make one’s mark on something, to stamp it as yours, is alluded to here:

hoping to plant his lips
on —— ———’s
distant face

‘Plant’ has connotations of firm decisiveness, of conquest, but it also evokes the idea of growth – the sense that he will create something that will last out of this moment, this kiss, or this moon landing. The ‘distant’ (probably unattainable) crush’s name is redacted; it could be anyone, and the implication is that the adult speaker remembers the intoxicating rush of desire far more than he remembers the specifics of his love interest – that it doesn’t matter who it was, in the end. The line spacing cleverly mirrors the distance created between the young boy and the face of the person he hoped to conquer; throughout the poem we are enticed back structurally, before the lines start to pull away from us again, and there is an ultimate sense of unattainability, which I will come back to later.

There are some obvious historical references: ‘Simon Armstrong’ refers to both the poet Simon as a child and famous moon-landing astronaut Neil Armstrong, evoking childhood dreams and excitement. ‘Tranquility Base’ is the name given to the part of the moon where humans landed. (About 100 artificial objects and footprints left by Armstrong and Aldrin remain at the base, including a US flag that they planted.) And ‘Tricky Dicky’ is the then US President Richard Nixon, who presided over the moon landing and resigned in disgrace following the Watergate scandal.

The Apollo 11 space mission was not just about human curiosity and discovery: for almost two decades prior to the moon landing, the Cold War rivals US and USSR had been engaged in an ideologically motivated space race. In the 1950s, economist Bernard Baruch spoke for many when he wrote: “While we devote our industrial and technological power to producing new model automobiles and more gadgets, the Soviet Union is conquering space…It is Russia, not the United States, who has had the imagination to hitch its wagon to the stars and the skill to reach for the moon and all but grasp it. America is worried. It should be.” Space exploration was a way to demonstrate a nation’s economic and scientific power. It was also often framed in the language of conquest, power, and control; Nixon told Aldrin and Armstrong that “because of what you have done, the heavens have become part of man’s world”, which Armitage alludes to here:

But as Tricky Dicky clears his throat
to claim God’s estate
as man’s backyard

from the Oval Office

And then there is the most extraordinarily beautiful image:

  and the gap narrows
to feet then inches,

suddenly stars recoil
to the next dimension
and heaven flinches.

The phrase ‘so near, yet so far’ comes to mind here. The moon landing has been successfully completed, space travel seems more real than ever before, and yet there is a ‘recoil[ing]’ of the stars, and ‘heaven flinches’ (and, if we remember the kissing metaphor, presumably also the love interest), mirrored also in the gulf between the stanzas. Space is personified here as a harmless and frightened victim, as opposed to the predatory language of conquest used to describe the space mission itself, or the hopeful boy’s romantic ambitions. Its response to man’s invasion is one of instant, automatic repulsion and desire to protect itself. And yet there is also a sense of unknowable mysticism in the references to ‘God’s estate’ and ‘heaven’; and the recoiling of stars to a different dimension is a tacit acknowledgement of the vast and unexplored regions of space; man’s desire to follow, chase and capture; and the ultimate fruitlessness of such pursuits, as whatever we search for ultimately eludes us. The rhyme of ‘inches’ and ‘flinches’ provides a resolution, but it is not the one we expect, or hope for; there is discomfort in the satisfying linguistic closure, which jars with the surprising unpleasantness of the poem’s ending.

This poem seems very simple on the surface, and it is very easy to read and understand, which is one of the things I love about Armitage’s work. But its essential ambiguity – and the questions it raises about exploration, scientific progress, human nature, colonialism, consent in the #MeToo era – is what will make me come back to it, again and again.

Spoilers ahead for Seasons 1 and 2

Having devoured Season 1 of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s brilliantly clever spy drama Killing Eve, I recently began watching Season 2. If you haven’t seen it, you must. The premise is simple: restless MI5 employee Eve Polastri tries to hunt down Villanelle, a skilled assassin who also happens to be a psychopath. But Eve and Villanelle become obsessed with each other, and the consequences are both destructive and intoxicating.

Much has been made of Villanelle’s wardrobe over the two seasons. For her, clothes are fun. They are part of what makes her so difficult to typecast. As well as her actual disguises (such as the waitress outfit and wig in Season 1), there are pieces that reflect different facets of her personality, and she deploys them cleverly (and often satirically).  During her psychiatric assessment in Season 1, she wears a girlish pink tulle Molly Goddard dress – deliciously juxtaposed with the gruesome subject matter of the interview. A pair of tough Balenciaga biker boots completes the look.

I thought this explanation from the show’s costume designer Phoebe de Gaye was very insightful:

“I thought Molly Goddard’s stuff was just perfect for it because it has that subversive streak…In that scene, her minder takes her to the psychoanalyst to see if she’s losing her edge. It’s like she’s sticking two fingers up and saying, ‘Okay, I’m going to dress like a little girl and act like a mad little girl.’ She’s quite subversive. I thought that would be great to use with the color and the mixture of the extremely feminine, almost to the slightly perverse point, with those boots, which are a good mix.”

So clothes are very fun and theatrical for Villanelle. We see this again in an episode of Season 2, when she declares to Eve that she is wearing black because she has “dressed for the occasion” i.e. Eve’s funeral (although of course she doesn’t actually kill her). In another episode, she dresses up in a grotesquely girly dirndl and pig mask – and proceeds to brutally murder a man in the window of a brothel, to the delight of spectators who assume that it must be some kind of magic trick or game.

But Villanelle can also dress seriously, and she is not averse to a power suit, as we see in the fateful nightclub murder episode. Here she prefers a more tailored, androgynous style, courtesy of Dries Van Noten:

In Season 2, we see the return of the patterned blazer; this one is by Chloé, and Villanelle pairs it effortlessly with an Isabel Marant blouse. The more masculine silhouette is arguably an example of ‘queer coding’, and there seems little doubt amongst fans that Villanelle is queer (as well as her obvious attraction to Eve, she has several ex-girlfriends/female lovers). For her, fashion is a form of expression and freedom.

Villanelle recognises the allure of good clothing, and uses it to get under Eve’s skin. When we meet Eve, her style could best be described as frumpy. Villanelle’s entire existence is intensely intoxicating for Eve, who wears questionable anoraks and lived a quiet life with her husband Niko until she began working for Carolyn. Villanelle begins to show Eve what she could be like: the first time they meet, a disguised Villanelle tells her to wear her gorgeously wild hair down. Later in Season 1, Villanelle steals Eve’s suitcase and replaces her dowdy clothes with designer outfits. Eve tries on a sexy black-and-white Roland Mouret dress and stares at herself in the mirror. Villanelle has forced her to confront her own erotic potential – or, in the words of de Gaye, she “wants to manipulate Eve into seeing her own beauty”. It is perhaps significant, then, that Villanelle breaks into Eve’s home and confront her just as she is admiring herself in the gifted dress.

De Gaye has other insights to offer on Villanelle and her wardrobe. For one thing, clothes are her reward for killing people. Almost everything she wears is designer, and we can also see her expensive tastes reflected in the décor of her Paris apartment. So there is a motive for killing that goes beyond pure twisted enjoyment. And Luke Jennings, who wrote the Villanelle books which inspired the show, said that her “clothes reflect her status and independence. She doesn’t have to conform or please anyone’s gaze”.

Some of Villanelle’s most iconic looks

So here’s to you, Villanelle. You may be a cold-blooded psychopath, but there’s something stupidly endearing about you – and no one can say that you don’t know how to pull off a stylish kill.

I thought about what Villanelle might buy if she went shopping today. Here’s what I’d recommend to her:

Diane von Furstenberg

Prada

Gucci

Costarellos

Gucci

 

Happy Sunday! Today I am going to talk about one of my favourite poems, ‘since feeling is first’ by modernist free form poet ee cummings. His poems are experimental and pretty hard to decode, but it’s worth the effort: they are so raw and beautiful. cummings is so good at crystallising emotion; it is as if he extracts its essence, and injects it into a little cube of poetry. Poetry is often said to be the ‘purest’ form of literature, and you could definitely make a case for that with cummings.

NB I am by no means a cummings expert – these are just some thoughts on a poem I really like!

since feeling is first
who pays any attention 
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady I swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
-the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

cummings is known for his unconventional syntax and erratic use of punctuation, so I think it is interesting that this poem references ‘syntax’, ‘paragraph’, ‘parenthesis’. Reading cummings’ poems often feels like a case of feeling over understanding, and I think the first line emphasises that: feeling comes first. It comes first in two senses: emotion often precedes language, and it is also rawer and  more powerful than any attempt to express it in language. To me, this is a poem about the difficulty of expressing emotion in writing, or conventional writing at least. It can also be read as a criticism of obsessive analysis of words or feelings, and the constant search for meaning. Can you fully experience an expression of emotion if you are scrutinising it, and creating a sense of detachment? If you are paying too much ‘attention / to the syntax of things’, you will ‘never wholly kiss’ someone. And we are left with the frustration of the abrupt semicolon, which jars against the free-flowing, unconventional syntax of the first four lines.

I love the line ‘my blood approves’. We often talk about our heads and our hearts, but this line evokes the carnal, the primitive. The speaker’s feeling runs deep through his body. Like blood, it is vital for survival. It brings life.

cummings asserts that ‘the best gesture of my brain is less than / your eyelids’ flutter which says / we are for each other’. A gesture is a movement; it lacks feeling. Similarly, it is an action performed for effect. There is something false about it. The brain struggles to articulate love and passion, unlike the ‘eyelids’ flutter’ which communicates so much more.

The poem goes on to suggest that ‘kisses are a better fate / than wisdom’: again, an endorsement of feeling over understanding? Perhaps feeling, and acting on feelings, will lead to a sort of understanding which is impossible to achieve through other means.

The last line is one of my favourite lines in poetry; I love its ambiguity. It ties into the idea that life and death is not about writing; it cannot be captured in writing. How can you properly express life and death, joy and grief, through syntax? But there is also something sinister about the reflection on death. Perhaps the last line is also suggesting that death cannot be contained or ignored, like a bit of information in parentheses; it will end all feeling. Feeling is first, but death is last. The omission of an end stop could be an act of defiance against death, or it could also symbolise the absence of appropriate words and grammatical structures to convey grief after death.

It does feel quite weird and ironic pulling this poem apart, given its subject matter. My favourite thing to do is just read it aloud to someone, again and again, and to just feel the joy and hope and sadness contained within its strange syntax. But I also feel that searching for meaning produced some interesting ideas which made me see the poem in a new light. And I guess the poem itself is also ironic, given how precisely planned its language and structure seems to be, and how it is expressing in words how difficult it is to express feeling in words!

Last week I was fortunate enough to stay in London for a couple of nights; while wandering around alone during the day, I took the opportunity to go on a few literary excursions. First was to Bloomsbury, to see the Virginia Woolf statue:

The statue is located in Tavistock Square, where she lived before her home was bombed during WW2.

I also came across this blue plaque commemorating Charles Dickens:

The next stop on my list was Persephone Books. Founded in 1999, this famous bookshop reprints little known, out-of-print works by women writers. All the books are beautifully bound in grey, with unique endpapers and matching bookmarks.

Photos from a visit earlier this year

I bought ‘Saplings’ by Noel Streatfeild. As a child I’d read ‘Ballet Shoes’ several times (and adored it), so I couldn’t resist this little-known wartime novel, about an English family that painfully disintegrates during the war. It was really compelling reading, especially as it explored the psychological ramifications of war through the perspective of children.

In the afternoon I visited The Second Shelf, a tiny bookshop specialising in rare books and modern first editions by women writers. It’s been open less than a year but has already attracted a huge amount of publicity (and I’ve visited it three times). The range of stock is huge, from cheap paperbacks to Jane Austen’s best friend’s copy of Sense and Sensibility (£20k) and Sylvia Plath’s tartan skirt (£12k). The staff are extremely friendly and knowledgeable; handling the precious first editions is encouraged, and there is a cosy, relaxed vibe that is often missing in shops selling rare books.

I couldn’t resist buying a 1967 edition of ‘The Colossus’ by Sylvia Plath (anyone who knows me, or has read this blog before, will know how much of a Plath fan I am). If I could, I would buy up all the first edition Woolf, the rest of the Plath collection, ‘The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie’ by Muriel Spark, ‘The Apple Tree’ by du Maurier, a beautiful edition of ‘Casa Guidi Windows’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and so much more…..

You must go and visit this amazing shop: their stock changes frequently, and they are always looking for new suggestions of works by obscure/forgotten women writers!

Finally, I visited the literary cocktail bar in the basement of Waterstones Tottenham Court Road.

I was super impressed! You’re often hard-pushed to find somewhere quiet to drink in Central London at 5pm on a Friday, and this had everything: dreamy book setting, delicious cocktails (happy hour 5-7pm), plug points, WiFi. I had the Voltaire Sour, Catcher in the Rye, and Dorian Grey, all of which were very good, but the Voltaire Sour has to be my favourite.

Thus concludes my literary tour of London. (I also dropped into Foyles and the London Review Bookshop, both of which are lovely and stock signed copies, but I didn’t buy anything or get any pictures.) If you are visiting London for the first time, I would recommend all these places alongside:

• Sylvia Plath’s two houses in Primrose Hill
• The British Library – lots of important literary manuscripts on display
• Sherlock Holmes Museum
• Charles Dickens Museum
• The Globe Theatre
• Keats House
• Daunt Books
• John Sandoe Books
• Waterstones Piccadilly

Let me know if there are any other literary destinations in London you’d recommend!

I know that this poem has been done to death, but it’s my favourite and I really wanted to get my thoughts about it on paper. And I referenced it in my post about Mary Ventura a couple of days ago. NB: this is a fairly hastily written commentary, and I will probably revisit it soon with fresher (and less tired) eyes. There is also nothing here that probably hasn’t been said by someone else before, but maybe it will be helpful for some A Level students or people who have never picked up Plath’s poetry before…

Apologies for the massive line breaks between the lines of poetry. I tried for ages to format this properly, but WordPress is rubbish!

Background

Sylvia Plath wrote Lady Lazarus in late 1962, months before her suicide in February 1963. At this point, she was a single mother – she and Hughes had split that year, following his affair with Assia Wevill – raising her two young children, Nicholas and Frieda. Lady Lazarus is a bitter, scathing dramatic monologue about death and rebirth, survival and revenge. 

The title of the poem alludes to the Biblical figure Lazarus, who was resurrected by Jesus after death. Here, the Lazarus figure is Plath: nine years earlier, she had overdosed on sleeping pills in her mother’s cellar. In June 1962, she had deliberately driven her car into a river in another attempt to end her life. And, as a 10-year-old girl, she almost drowned in a swimming accident. These brushes with death form the basis of Lady Lazarus. Is it worth noting, though, that Plath often played with different personas in her poems, and it is reductive to assume that the speaker is simply a mouthpiece for Plath’s own feelings.

When recording the poem for the BBC in 1962, Plath said:

“The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.”

Plath also seems to be alluding to the parallels between herself and the speaker in the poem, who is simultaneously an ordinary woman and a symbol of liberation and rebirth; this rebirth is both a blessing and a curse, and must always be preceded by the agony of death.

Commentary

I have done it again.   

One year in every ten   

I manage it——

The poem opens with a confession. We do not know what ‘it’ is at this stage: is a suicide attempt something taboo and unspeakable, or something so disturbingly commonplace and trivial that it is not worth mentioning explicitly? ‘One year in every ten’ closely mirrors Plath’s life (swimming accident at 10; overdose at 21; car crash at 30, although the latter isn’t alluded to in the poem). She also imagines a future attempt. A year later, at 31, Plath would successfully kill herself. The long dash at the end of this first stanza creates an uncomfortable space and silence as Plath leaves her ‘confession’ hanging in the air. But there is a playful, performative tone at work here, and a genuine sense of triumph or rueful self-reproach. This creates an ambiguity that the reader will have to navigate: how are they supposed to feel? We are reading about a series of awful, intimate moments; we are invited to witness somebody’s personal tragedy.

A sort of walking miracle, my skin   

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,   

My right foot

 

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine   

Jew linen.

Plath’s use of Holocaust imagery to convey her own sense of personal hell has sparked controversy for decades; but, regardless of how we feel about it morally, we cannot deny that the imagery is visceral and shocking. ‘Miracle’ is contrasted sharply with the ‘Nazi lampshade’ skin and the ‘Jew linen’ of her face. For Plath, the psychological pain of her mental suffering is akin to that of concentration camp victims. Plath also had a German father, who died when she was a child; the Nazi imagery may also be a result of her fascination with him, and her conflicted feelings towards him. In Sylvia Plath: The Poetry of Initiation, Jon Rosenblatt argues that Plath’s Nazi imagery “shows how a contemporary consciousness is obsessed with historical and personal demons and how that consciousness deals with these figures…the holocaust serves her as a metaphor for the death-and-life battle between the self and a deadly enemy”, which I think is the most eloquent and concise interpretation.

Notice the stanza break – ‘My right foot / A paperweight’ – mirroring the crushing heaviness of the metaphor. Rebirth is associated with rising up, weightlessness, air; for Lady Lazarus, it is like a burden anchoring her to the ground. The identification with mundane objects, the paperweight and linen, implies entrapment in an existence designed to please or be of use to others.

Peel off the napkin   

O my enemy.   

Do I terrify?——

 

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?   

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

 

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be   

At home on me

 

And I a smiling woman. 

The unnamed ‘enemy’ is the first reference to another person. From reading the rest of the poem we can infer that it is an anonymous male antagonist, but the enemy could also be us. Lady Lazarus is preoccupied with the public vs the private, speculation vs intimacy; Plath’s 1953 overdose was all over the newspapers, and the search was conducted very publicly. This poem forces us to examine the nature of our uncomfortable fascination with other people’s trauma: ‘Do I terrify?’ she asks us accusingly. The ‘napkin’ is presumably a reference to skin, and reminds us of the way in which we as spectators consume this kind of tragedy. The skull imagery evokes the speaker’s outer self being publicly stripped away, to reveal the ‘true’ self that ‘terrif[ies]’. The ‘grave cave’ could be a reference to Lazarus’s body left in a cave to decompose, and also to the cellar in which Plath hid after her overdose. The monosyllabic assonance of ‘grave cave ate’ is theatrically sombre and deathly.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

 

This is Number Three.   

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

Plath excels at black humour, and the incongruous reference to feline folklore is simultaneously amusing and jarring at this stage in the poem. There is a sense of invincibility here, at attempt ‘Number Three’. Yet the decennial rebirths seem anything but positive: they are a ‘trash’, an ‘annihilat[ion]’, a destruction of years of her life. Like her stripped-back body, the speaker’s life is depicted as an emotional wasteland.

What a million filaments.   

The peanut-crunching crowd   

Shoves in to see

 

Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.   

Gentlemen, ladies

 

These are my hands   

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

 

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

Mark Ford summarised this part of the poem better than I could, so I will quote him: Here Plath “deploys the language of advertising, mass spectacle and pornographic self-display – the ‘big strip tease’ that the ‘peanut-crunching crowd / Shoves in to see’. The poem figures the nameless, faceless crowd’s fascinated eyeing of her body parts and fingering of her blood as part of a debased, commercialised martyrdom”. A suicide attempt becomes a crowd-pleasing ‘strip tease’ performed in front of ‘a million filaments’ (from cameras – a reference to the media interest generated by her overdose). The reader realises that they are part of the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’: are watching a poetic re-enactment of the suicide attempt, and poring over the gruesome descriptions of her body. The speaker is also complicit in the theatrical spectacle, but there is a sense of savage bitterness as she unwraps her body for us. At this point, she has become disparate body parts.

The first time it happened I was ten.   

It was an accident.

 

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.   

I rocked shut

 

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls. 

These are explicit references to the swimming accident and the sleeping pill overdose (notice that near-death is still ambiguously referred to as ‘it’). The ‘seashell’ simile contrasts starkly with the preceding ‘strip tease’, as we are reminded of the speaker’s vulnerability and desire to close herself off from the world. Having been under her mother’s house for three days, Plath most likely encountered creepy crawlies which had to be picked off her; but there is something uncomfortably sexual in the imagery of the ‘sticky pearls’ removed by the anonymous ‘they’.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.   

I do it exceptionally well.

 

I do it so it feels like hell.   

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call. 

These two stanzas perfectly encapsulate the juxtaposition of self-mocking black humour and creeping horror that makes this poem so powerful. The former stanza nearly always gets a laugh when I read it aloud; the latter is met with silence. There is something masochistic in the speaker’s hellish suicide attempts, her determination for death to feel ‘real’, her sense that this is what she was made for. The anaphora ‘I do it…’ intensifies the brutal simplicity of the confession. Death, or attempted death, becomes a performance designed to entertain others, but there is serious agony behind it.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.   

It’s the theatrical

 

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute   

Amused shout:

 

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.  

Again, we have the language of showbusiness (‘theatrical / Comeback’) and spectacle (the ‘brute’ amusement of the waiting crowd). Suicide becomes a kind of magic trick. But nothing changes with each rebirth: she is ‘the same, identical woman’; she comes back ‘to the same place, the same face…’. There is a feeling of futility here, but also perhaps a strange reassurance that everything is what it was before.

There is a charge

 

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge   

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

 

And there is a charge, a very large charge   

For a word or a touch   

Or a bit of blood

 

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.   

The unwrapping of the speaker’s body becomes a commercial venture, reminiscent of the ‘big strip tease’ earlier in the poem – a kind of morbid prostitution. (Perhaps Plath was also correctly predicting the rush to buy up her possessions when they were auctioned off by her daughter in 2018, and the displaying of her hair in various exhibitions after her death.) Or perhaps the ‘charge’ is metaphorical: those she loves most, who are close to her, will pay the price of emotional pain?

So, so, Herr Doktor.   

So, Herr Enemy.

 

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,   

The pure gold baby

 

That melts to a shriek.   

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Here the speaker directly addresses the anonymous male antagonist again. ‘Doktor’ is obviously German for doctor, perhaps in this case an ‘Enemy’ doctor in a concentration camp who performs tortuous experiments on Jewish people. There is a vein of suffering and torture running through this poetic rebirth. Or perhaps Plath is attacking wider patriarchal structures, of which the man is a symbol. ‘Enemy’ casts the speaker as a kind of heroic figure, facing her adversary head-on. Are we the adversary? It certainly feels that way at times. Lady Lazarus is cast as an ‘opus’, a ‘valuable’, a ‘pure gold baby’ – a possession, or a specimen – but she eludes the ‘Enemy’ as she ‘melts to a shriek’. In agony, she can melt away to nothing. Phoenix-like (or possibly witch-like), she ‘burn[s]’, sarcastically noting the audience’s ‘great [fake] concern’.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

 

A cake of soap,   

A wedding ring,   

A gold filling. 

Reduced to nothing – like the cremated victims of Nazi extermination camps – she no longer exists for the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ or for ‘Herr Doktor’: only her belongings remain. This could also be an allusion to the Nazis’ stealing of Jewish victims’ valuables, and their use of human fat to make soap.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer   

Beware

Beware.

 

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair   

And I eat men like air.

The doctor figure becomes a Biblical paradox: he is simultaneously God and Lucifer. But the speaker’s wrath is directed not just towards him, but also towards ‘men’ more generally. The final lines are a witch-like incantation: the sinister repetition of ‘beware’ rhymes with ‘hair’ and ‘air’, and the final stanza evokes phoenix-like imagery of rising from the ashes. This time, Lazy Lazarus is resurrected as a powerful, vengeful, fully-formed figure, reminiscent of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan. It is her turn to consume, instead of being consumed metaphorically by the crowd and literally by the flames. And yet she eats men ‘like air’: is it effortless? Does it mean that men are nothing? Or is it ultimately an empty, futile victory?

This year’s Met Gala theme was ‘camp’, inspired by Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Notes on “Camp”’. The ground-breaking piece, published in 1964, famously declares: “the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.” Camp is “life as theater”; it is “epicene” (genderless); it is “the spirit of extravagance”. It is “Dandyism in the age of mass culture”; it is “vulgarity”, an understanding that there is “a good taste of bad taste”. It’s about “dethroning the serious”. Or, in RuPaul’s words: “you have to be able to see the façade of life…you have to see the absurdity of life from outside of yourself.”

Some Met Gala guests fulfilled the brief more successfully than others. There were some fabulously outlandish outfits, the best of which I will share below. There were some disappointments (Trevor Noah, Karlie Kloss, Hailey Bieber). And then there were some outfits that were so clever as to be awe-inspiring. Here are a selection of my favourites.

Lady Gaga

Janelle Monae

Katy Perry

Billy Porter

Celine Dion

Zendaya

Kacey Musgraves

And now for my top 3:

3) Michael Urie. Urie’s Christian Siriano half ball gown/half tuxedo, combined with a semi-made up face, paid homage to Sontag’s celebration of androgyny in camp culture:

Camp taste draws on a mostly unacknowledged truth of taste: the most refined form of sexual attractiveness (as well as the most refined form of sexual pleasure) consists in going against the grain of one’s sex. What is most beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is most beautiful in feminine women is something masculine. 

2) Ezra Miller. Miller’s suit is obviously incredible, but not as incredible as the optical illusion of multiple eyes painted onto his face, which were only revealed when he removed his mask. His make up artist Mimi Choi said, “as I was thinking of the theme ‘camp’, I thought multiple eyes that revealed different personalities and alter-egos would be very fitting”. A+ for concept, effort, and delivery!

1) Amy Fine Collins. The sequin print she is wearing is of a 1924 portrait of Una Troubridge by Romaine Brooks.  Troubridge was born in the Victorian era, and was known for her long term relationship with Margeurite Radclyffe-Hall. The portrait depicts her with a tailored suit, a cravat, and a severe bob (she was known for her androgynous style, but this portrait with its severe angles is somewhat exaggerated); she also wears a monocle, a symbol of lesbian identity in the early 20th century. According to the Smithsonian, ‘Brooks intended the portrait to be a caricature of her friend as a headstrong, demanding woman, and noted in a letter that this was “a sign of the age which may amuse future feminists.”‘ I love the fact that Fine Collins is wearing this portrait while simultaneously emulating Troubridge’s style.

It’s been months since I’ve written in this blog! I read so much and I’m so busy that sometimes the prospect of posting can be a little overwhelming. But someone asked to see the blog today, and I felt kind of embarrassed about how out of date it is. I’ve also read a lot of excellent stuff lately, and it feels a shame to not say anything about it on here.

Earlier this year, Faber and Faber published a short story by Sylvia Plath, ‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’, for the first time. The premise of the story is cryptically sinister (in true Plathlike fashion):

Lips the colour of blood, the sun an unprecedented orange, train wheels that sound like ‘guilt, and guilt, and guilt’: these are just some of the things Mary Ventura begins to notice on her journey to the ninth kingdom.

‘But what is the ninth kingdom?’ she asks a kind-seeming lady in her carriage. ‘It is the kingdom of the frozen will,’ comes the reply. ‘There is no going back.’

Sylvia Plath’s strange, dark tale of independence over infanticide, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.

Plath was 20 years old when she wrote this “vague symbolic tale” (her own words). It was rejected by Mademoiselle magazine, and lay unpublished in her archives for decades after her death. In Mary Ventura, the eponymous heroine is forced by her parents into going on a train journey she doesn’t really want to take. They tell her to get off at the mysterious ninth kingdom. Initially the train journey is pleasant and comfortable, but unsettling omens begin to appear. In order to escape the murky fate that awaits everyone on the train, Mary must pull the emergency cord and run away from the station.

Much has been made of the fact that Plath’s first suicide attempt occurred mere months after the writing of this story. Indeed, it is possible to read it as a reflection of her anxieties and sense of hopelessness. Is the train hurtling towards death or towards a bleak, empty future? The ambiguity of the ending, however, means that we can read it as more than a tale of death, or of the escape from it. Mary Ventura could also be a story about the triumph of female independence and agency. Parts of the story also evoke the horrors of the Holocaust (Plath is known for her controversial use of Holocaust imagery to express her own sense of hell and entrapment).

The story begins with a strong sense of foreboding in the eerie setting of a train station, with ‘red neon lights blink[ing] automatically’ and the ‘grat[ing]’ loudspeaker. The distant father figure warns Mary that trains “don’t wait” – she must hurry onto hers. The black clock ‘clip[s] off another minute’: time is running out. There is something funereal about the cathedral-like ‘vault’ of the station above their heads. Mary lacks agency at this point: despite her protestations, she is ‘propelled’ towards the train, where an anonymous black-uniformed conductor ‘herd[s]’ the ‘chaotic jostling crowds’ through an ‘iron gate’ to the platform. Mary’s stop is “at the end of the line”, according to her father. We do not know the reason for the trip, only that “Everyone has to leave home sometime”. So this could be a literal journey away from home; it could be a metaphor for growing up and making your own way into the world; it could symbolise puberty (evoked by the blood and repeated references to red throughout the journey). I was also vaguely reminded of the Holocaust Trains which transported thousands of Jewish people to forced labour and extermination camps. There is clearly some kind of national catastrophe: the newsboys call out “ten thousand people sentenced…ten thousand more people”. A reference to the Nuremberg Trials? There is something eerily dystopian about the sheer volume of people sentenced (for what? We never find out).

The journey begins comfortably enough, with Mary admiring the luxury of the train. But a series of seemingly innocuous happenings create a sense of creeping menace. A baby is wrapped in a dirty blanket. A child strikes his brother with a tin soldier. The forest fires distort the landscape. A sinister scarecrow stands alone in a field. Three identical businessmen speak cruelly about a crying infant. We learn that the friendly woman next to Mary is involved in some kind of shady business. She asks Mary if she has noticed anything unusual about the other people on the train. A woman is forced off at the sixth station, and escorted from the platform by station guards. We learn that the train journey is one of inevitability: the passengers chose to get on and must accept their destination regardless. Mary learns that her destination, the ninth kingdom, has no return route: “It is the kingdom of negation, of the frozen will.” The woman encourages Mary to rebel by escaping the train. And she does.

Red permeates the train journey. The ‘red plush seats’ are ‘the color of wine’. Mrs Ventura has a ‘painted red mouth’. Mary’s coat is red. The blood on the little boy’s face is (presumably) red. The women forced to get off at the sixth stop has lips ‘the color of blood’ and a ‘crimson’ skirt. Her ticket is red. She steps out of the train into ‘the red glare of neon light’. The forest fires have turned the sky red. The ‘red light of the station…stain[ed] the faces of the passengers scarlet’. Red is violent, visceral, dangerous. It suggests hell. It is also seductive and sexually charged, perhaps denoting an entrance into puberty (period blood). The redness starts out as something ‘plush’ and pleasant, but takes on a more menacing form as the journey continues, with the station at the end bathed in an eerie red light. The lanterns in the train cars are red. Mary must run away from this claustrophobia, from the red light spilling closer to her, into the darkness of the unlighted stairs. Red is notably absent from the park she emerges into: there are ‘fertile gold webs of sunlight, ‘white and blue pigeons’, ‘tall white granite spires’, ‘white roses and daffodils’. There is a sense of purity and rebirth in this afterlife of sorts: even the roses are white.

One thing I noticed when reading this story is the prevalence of children. We are never told Mary’s age, but the implication is that she is a child: her parents authoritatively propel her towards the train, there is talk of leaving home, her mother calls her a “good girl”, and the lady on the train is knitting a dress “for a girl just about your size”. A baby is ‘wrapped in a soiled white blanket’, there is the fight between the ‘two little boys’, and there is another baby ‘crying as if it would cry forever’. The cold businessman passing through labels it a ‘brat’. The blurb of Mary Ventura mentions infanticide, and it is possible that this train could be specifically transporting children towards their deaths. Over 1.5 million children from across Europe were murdered under the Nazi regime; they were often immediately gassed when they reached concentration camps.

An alternative reading is that, at least for Mary, this train represents the journey into adulthood. Mary casts off the former, childhood self at the start of the story who ‘automatically’ obeys her parents; she defies the ‘kingdom of the frozen will’ and pushes through the fear of cobwebs, lizards, the unknown to emerge victorious in a kind of paradise. It could be death – after all, she meets the old woman there, a surrogate mother figure – or it could be Plath’s vision of the kind of adulthood she wanted to live.

Mary Ventura could also be read as a metaphor for abortion and for female bodily autonomy. There are nine kingdoms, which could mirror the nine months of pregnancy. The scenes with children are ugly and disturbing. The train is womb-like, and contrasts with the ‘barren’ landscape. The blonde woman forced off the train begs for “a little longer”. Mary is pressured by her parents into something she doesn’t really want, before realising that she has the power to stop it. There is no going back when they reach the ninth kingdom – so she gets off at the seventh. The sunlight at the end is ‘fertile’. In the end, it is another woman who helps her realise that she can change the course of action laid out in front of her. In 1952, abortion was illegal across the USA. We don’t know Plath’s views on abortion, or whether she consciously set out to write symbolically about pregnancy, but this reading has potential.

Mary Ventura is certainly not Plath’s best piece of prose. Some of the symbolism is heavy handed, and the reader may feel frustrated by the vague, at times confusing plot. But this ambiguity is what brings out so much scope for different interpretations, and we also see a writer refining her craft and paving the way for some of her better-known stories. In January 1953, shortly after writing Mary Ventura, Plath was feeling optimistic. In her journal she considered her potential future: a Fulbright scholarship, a summer job, travels abroad, a career, marriage. “How much more hope I have now than my Mary Ventura!” she exclaimed. Six months later she would attempt suicide for the first time. Perhaps, then, Mary is a manifestation of Plath’s sense of inner agony, her fear of ‘fading out into an indifferent middle age’, her fears of losing control of herself through sickness. Perhaps Mary does die at the end, and enters a heavenly afterlife. But I would rather think of it as an escape from death, or as a sort of rebirth, Lazy Lazarus-style: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.”