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The Grolier Club of New York opens a major exhibition
Sept. 14 devoted to two of the 20th century's most
celebrated poets. "'No Other Appetite': Sylvia Plath, Ted
Hughes and the Blood Jet of Poetry" brings together for the
first time original letters, manuscripts and photographs
from the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College and from the
Ted Hughes archive at Emory University. The exhibition
documents the close creative relationship of these two poets
during the years of their marriage and the repercussions of
Plath's tragic suicide in the life and work of her husband,
the late poet laureate of Britain.
The exhibition, co-curated by Smith's Karen Kukil and
Emory's Steve Enniss, includes materials drawn from a number
of recently acquired collections that have never before been
exhibited to the public. Included are family letters and
photographs, manuscripts of the poets' work -- sometimes
with writing by each on opposite sides of the same page --
as well as books from the two poets' personal libraries that
have been heavily annotated in their hands.
Among the highpoints of the exhibition is a selection of
notes and typescripts for Plath's unpublished novel
Falcon Yard. This autobiographical novel, described
in Plath's notes as "a fable of faithfulness," recounts the
story of her and Hughes' courtship and marriage. One of
Plath's early biographers doubted the existence of such a
manuscript altogether. More recently Plath was thought to
have destroyed the entire manuscript when she learned of
Hughes' affair with Assia Wevill. The notes and typescripts
included in this exhibition -- part of a larger selection of
manuscript fragments of the novel in the Emory collection --
escaped destruction because of the couple's habit of
composing new work on discarded manuscript pages of one
another's work. These surviving fragments cast light on
Plath's conception of this previously lost novel.
Also present in the exhibition are a number of books owned
by Hughes and Plath that have never before been seen by the
public. The copy of Ernest Jones' study of dreams, On the
Nightmare, which Plath inscribed for Hughes their first
Christmas together, is included, as is Plath's heavily
underscored and annotated copy of Virginia Woolf's To the
Lighthouse. One of the most moving books present in the
exhibition is the copy of Erich Fromm's The Art of
Loving, which Plath read on the advice of her analyst in
the final weeks of her life. This heavily underscored text
offers readers a glimpse of Plath trying to come to terms
with her own failed marriage in the weeks leading up to her
suicide, weeks during which she also composed the poems that
would insure her posthumous fame.
Equally illuminating are letters and manuscripts in Hughes'
hand that reflect the hurt and guilt he felt in the years
following Plath's death. In a badly-worn notebook dating
from the late 1960s, Hughes records a dream in which Plath
comes back to life for one day. After the subsequent suicide
of Wevill in 1969, Hughes writes to a friend and confides,
"I wonder sometimes if things might have gone differently
without the events of 63 & 69. I have an idea of those
two episodes as giant steel doors shutting down over great
parts of myself-leaving me that much less, just what was
left, to live on. No doubt a more resolute artist would have
penetrated the steel doors." In an undated manuscript Hughes
confesses that he writes poetry in hope of some catharsis:
"I am not composing poetry," he writes, "I am trying to get
out of the flames."
In a letter to fellow poet Seamus Heaney written shortly
before his own death Hughes explains his decision to write
the autobiographical sequence of poems, "Birthday Letters,"
about his marriage to Plath. "I'd come to the point where
there seemed no alternative," he writes. He first published
a small number of poems about Plath in his "New Selected,"
but "the rest I stuffed back into the sack. But they
wouldn't stay."
"So I brought them back up & wrote at them en masse for
some time-not knowing what I'd end up with or where I'd end.
Till suddenly -- between one day & the next -- I
realized that was it. I couldn't grasp the wholeness of it
but I had the sensation of the whole load of long
preoccupation dropping away -- separating itself and
dropping away like a complete piece of fruit. The sense of
being released from it very strong and very weird."
This selection of documents from the Plath and Hughes
archives will give readers of these poets' work an intimate
glimpse of the shared life of two of the last century's
major poetic voices.
LOCATION AND TIMES: 'No Other Appetite' will be on view at
the Grolier Club from Sept. 14-Nov. 19, 2005, with the
exception of Oct. 10, Columbus Day. Hours: Monday-Saturday
10 AM - 5 PM. Open to the public free of charge.
An
illustrated catalogue of the exhibition (hardcover, 6 x 9, 84 pp.,
27 illustrations, $35) will be available from
The University Press of New England (UPNE). Copies may also be purchased at the
Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street, between Park and Madison
Avenues) in New York City during exhibition hours.
For more information e-mail Megan
Smith at the Grolier Club.
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