The Word As Flesh

My agent’s assistant had written two comments on a page of my manuscript. I had written the sentence:

He was eager to be at home.

In the margin, in her flawless penmanship, the assistant wrote, “Sounds like Hemingway. Short declarative sentence. Beautiful.”

The other sentence was:

Uranium brains.

In the margin she wrote: “Very Plathian. Beautiful.”

This was before I knew who Sylvia Plath was, before I fell in love with her and claimed her, before I absorbed her every word and held them in my bones like heavy metal elements, things that do not degrade over time.

I knew Hemingway. I loved Hemingway, and still love him in a clumsy unstudied way. I remember the exact moment I fell in love with him. Reading For Whom The Bell Tolls, two sentences cut through my flesh, flayed me, rendered me helpless upon them. They were:

“We will not be going to Milan, little rabbit,” he said.

And then she began to cry.

I wept, deeply and unapologetically, all afternoon. As if Robert Jordan had forced me away while he was dying on the pines with a broken leg, death certain at his fingertips.

The experience of being so deeply invested in his words cemented my love for Hemingway. From Hemingway, I learned to trust in simplicity.

Sylvia came to me later in life. I hadn’t read her in high school or college. I hadn’t bothered to know the Ariel poems until Sheila wrote about her. When I finally found her, it was love at first sight. I acquired every thing I could about her, disected her poems and her life and journals like; scientific texts and diagrams of the world’s most brilliant poet. It was only after I’d learned who Sylvia Plath was that I returned to my manuscript, to the comment beside “uranium brains”. Very Plathian. Pure silver joy. What does that say about me that I could provoke that comment, before I even knew Sylvia Plath? I love the question as much as the comment.

Sylvia is with me now, in my heart and bones, in a way that no other artist ever has been. I take her with me, whereever I go.