altariel | Strictly narrative

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: More Mozart

Strictly narrative

Turning away from difficult issues, I'm internally debating the ethics of going to see Sylvia. It's hard not to take into account what Frieda Hughes has written:

"Now they want to make a film
For anyone lacking the ability
To imagine the body, head in oven
Orphaning children."

***

I really enjoy my offline reading group, but we decided at the outset not to read classics, in which I am woefully under-read. There should be a reading group for people hastily trying to fill the gaps in their reading. A sort of mutual support group in response to that game in that David Lodge novel, where all the English Lit academics admit to the most gaping hole in their reading.

***

And, thirdly:

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Speaking purely from personal experience, it's always easier to skip something on moral grounds when the something in question sounds as dull as overboiled cabbage leaves.

It certainly never hurts to have both the moral and the aesthetic high ground.

(PS - how are you?)

It wouldn't bother me on moral grounds. Frieda Hughes uses her parents as material when she fancies, and I'd say their lives, as famous artists, had become part of a common mythology. But I gave up on that film when they didn't realise only Alan Rickman could play Ted Hughes...

Frieda Hughes uses her parents as material when she fancies

Oh, that does put a slightly different complexion on it...

I gave up on that film when they didn't realise only Alan Rickman could play Ted Hughes...

The potential charms of Daniel Craig were one point in its favour, but I absolutely see the Rickman-casting!

While some of the Plath cult has been horribly insensitive and invasive, it's certainly true that the Hughes family have profited from it themselves. E(.g. Olwen Hughes, Ted's sister and manager of the Estate, sold high-priced limited editions of some otherwise unavailable poems.) It's also the family who decided to release intimate stuff like Plath's journals and letters in order to provide information on her life, and T.H. as executor who authorized The Bell Jar (originally pseudonymous) to appear under Plath's name and later be made into a film.

Is the Plath-Hughes marriage all that cinematic, anyway? Since the film-makers have been forbidden to quote from the poems at any length, we might be left with nothing but looking after babies, picking daffodils and stencilling furniture :)

IIRC, the trailer went: smoky, ill-lit party -- biking, punting, generic scenes of Cambridge gaiety -- frolicking on beach -- vicious arguing in London flat after Hughes has stayed out late. There may well be some daffodils and stencilling in the rest of it!

generic scenes of Cambridge gaiety

That brings back horrible memories of Paul Anderson's bad Plath biography, Rough Magic, which describes the bar where S & T met as being 'on campus'. Clearly familiar with the place.

Hehehe! I'll remember to avoid that one.

It also includes the little-known fact that Ted once tried to strangle Sylvia. Definitely best avoided.

The best book on them I've read so far isn't any of the Plath biographies, but Janet Malcolm's study of the biographies, The Silent Woman. She says some interesting things both about biographical bias and the subjects themselves, and treats them common-sensically as human beings with understandable issues, rather than taking up either the 'Plath-as-victim' or 'Plath-as-self-dramatizing-fantasist' lines. That one is worth reading.

That sounds extremely interesting - thank you for the recommendation.

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Strictly narrative

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