Nicholas Hughes Commits Suicide

Sheila sent me a note with the terrible news this evening.

This post is not thought out so please forgive me.

Nicholas Hughes, the son of Slyvia Plath and Ted Hughes, has committed suicide. I talked to Nicholas a few times last year and he was very bright, very engaging…

I didn’t know him.

But I knew him from the poems his mother wrote about him. I speculated, often, what it must have been like to be the child of Sylvia Plath.

He was a bit blocked off. He knew I wanted to know about his mother. He told me, straightforwardly, that he didn’t remember her. He had no first-person memories of her.

I am trying to remember what else he said but my head is full of white noise.

My heart is breaking.

Sylvia Plath’s Birthday

Today is a special day for me. It’s Sylvia Plath’s birthday.

It was, I don’t know – three years ago? Four? – that Sheila wrote a birthday post about Sylvia Plath. (UPDATE: check out the yearly post here!) Knowing nothing about the poet, I found Sheila’s essay compelling. Later that same day, I strolled up to Barnes and Noble and bought Ariel. That very night, I fell in love. Deep, irrevocable, inevitable love. That very night, I began ordering every book I could find about Plath on Amazon.com, then the next day, walked back to the bookstore just in case there was something I missed.

One would think this sort of obsession would burn itself out. One would be wrong. That post of Sheila’s launched what would become one of the most defining loves of my life – it would enrich me as a writer (and cause a great deal of consternation and envy), it would inform my relationships with men, and would ultimately serve to make me a happier person than I would have otherwise been.

Unlike Sheila, I can’t really quantify why I fall in love with someone. I just know that when I read Plath’s poems, I become very still inside. Something rests. It’s like I’m absorbing more than just the words, I’m absorbing the experience that created the words.

It’s Sylvia’s birthday. For that reason, I want to share this poem with you. I am sure that Sheila could write a very compelling essay on how this poem was created, the circumstances, the date, and the Birthday Letters… but I want to focus on the work itself today. It just means so much to me.

A Birthday Present by Sylvia Plath

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?
It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.
When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

‘Is this the one I am too appear for,
Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,
Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation?
My god, what a laugh!’

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.
I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.
After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.
Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window
White as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.
Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me?
Do not be ashamed–I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.
Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.
Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,
You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,
Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.
Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.
You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.
I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.
To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,
Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.
You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine—–

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?
Must you stamp each piece purple,

Must you kill what you can?
There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.
It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.
Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty
By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.
If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.
I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.
And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,
And the universe slide from my side.

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.