Friday, April 17, 2009

Notes to Murder

Notes to Murder

“how can
I accuse
Ted Hughes
of what the entire British and American
literary and critical establishment
has been at great lengths to deny
without ever saying it in so many words, of course,
the murder of Sylvia Plath”
—Robin Morgan, Arraignment,
Monster, New York: Random House
1970; reprinted in Upstairs in the
Garden: Poems Selected and New,
New York: W. W. Norton, 1990


“Then Olwyn asked me:
‘Do you want to be a murderer?’
I looked at her, stunned.
Do you want to be a murderer?
she asked again.”
—Judith Kroll, Chapters in a
Mythology: The Poetry of
Sylvia Plath


“He reminded me of Heathcliff—
another Yorkshireman—big-boned
and brooding, with dark hair flopping
forward over his craggy face,
watchful eyes and an unexpectedly
witty mouth. He was a man who
seemed to carry his own climate
with him, to create his own
atmosphere—and in those days
that atmosphere was dark

and dangerous
—Al Alvarez, Stevenson,
Bitter Fame, 189


“On Saturday evening Sylvia
put on her blue and silver dress
and went out. She didn’t say
where she where she was going
or whom she hoped or intended
to meet. Whatever had happened
the night before, whomever she
had seen, whatever had been
said, had resolved something for
her. She seemed invigorated,
mildly elated, she had things to
do, she said, all of the night.”
—Jillian Becker, Giving Up:
The Last Days of Sylvia Plath,
New York, St. Martin’s Press,
2003, page 57

“Fate was a big theme with both
Hughes and Sylvia. Both of them
Believed that doing violence
To reason released intuitive
creativeness.” —Jillian Becker,
Giving Up: The Last Days of
Sylvia Plath, New York, St.
Martin’s Press, 2003, page 58

“In 1998 Hughes’s sister Olwyn
introduced me to Ann Stevenson
the Plath biographer semiauthorized
by Hughes. When, in Olwyn’s
presence, I told Stevenson what
Hughes had said at Sylvia’s
funeral—that “everybody hated
her”—Olwyn stopped me. “You
can’t put that in
,” she shot at
Stevenson. In the end nothing

I related about the funeral
appeared in Stevenson’s
book Bitter Fame”
—Jillian Becker, Giving Up:
The Last Days of Sylvia Plath,
New York, St. Martin’s Press,
2003, page 56


“In correspondence with the
Hughes’s, [The Haunting of
Sylvia Plath] was called “evil.”
Its publisher was told it would
not appear. I was asked to
remove my reading of ‘The
Rabbit Catcher’, and when I
refused, I was told by Hughes
that speculation of the kind
I was seen as engaging in
about Plath’s sexual identity
would in some countries be
‘grounds for homicide’.
—Jacqueline Rose, Preface,
The Haunting of Sylvia Plath,
Cambridge: Harvard, 1992 xi







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