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Kingfisher Dedicated to
the appreciation of poetry, fiction,
painting,
"Anamorphosis," 1944, by Margaret Tompkins. Tompkins, 85, died of heart failure in April 2002. She was a Northwest artist who fought off the label and went her own way, painting beautiful abstract expressionistic landscapes. She was the wife of the painter and sculptor James Fitzgerald. For many years she lived on Lopez Island.
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For Pictures by Northwest Artists Tobey, Callahan, and Anderson, click here reading
plath Hughes edited the book of poems, so many years later. (He too now is dead, withholding additional comment, having got his licks in earlier and irremediably.) At the back of the main collection he has provided notes to the poems drawn from his assembling and editing them, and adding usually laconically (as though he didn’t know the woman, himself) biographical facts that illuminate the poems. Likewise he edited Plath’s Journals, putting the notebooks and loose sheets together over, what?, nearly forty years, deleting things he thought better left unsaid, especially those entries that might shed some light on her thoughts and motivations in the weeks before she killed herself. Those journals didn’t simply disappear; Hughes destroyed them, though there is the vague hope that one of them is simply lost, he told us, and might reappear and provide us with a beacon to understanding Plath and her last days. It is not much of a hook to hang one’s hope on. He destroyed them, he said, to spare their children. Of course this only maddeningly increases our morbid literary curiosity about what they, what she, said. The children, adults now and for a long time, could benefit and judge from being able to read the last of the journals, along with the rest of us. We are furious with Hughes (now unassailable) for what seems a gross error in judgment. At the same time it was certainly his right as literary executor and former husband, the children’s father. But what could they have . . . said, those journal entries? The poems are no clue. You cannot see it coming. Oh, you can make a case from a word here, a phrase there, a stanza that seems oddly prescient, but you could make such an imaginative case anywhere in the Collected Poems and be equally right, or seemingly so. For Plath had had breakdowns before, and had been in and out of institutions. Always the prospect of suicide has been present and known to her mother and husband. It is a recurring theme, almost a leit motif. And Hughes is no help. He writes in his notes to the poems: “1963. From the beginning of this year, in what was to be the coldest winter in England since 1947, SP lived at 23 Fitzroy Road. On 23 January her novel The Bell Jar, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, came out in London. On 11 February she died by her own hand.” And what newspaper do you work for, Sir, and how long have you been writing such Obits? And what is the significance, pray tell, of it being colder than any year in the past 17? I mean, she didn’t freeze to death out in the back yard, man. I am angry. Hughes had the right, but he shirked his responsibility to us and the literary world which he represented most absolutely in the matter. He was the Supreme Arbitrator. And the fact that he published his Birthday Letters 35 years later does not exonerate him. It was a crime against literature, with a capital L. He could have held them back, hid them. He could have arranged for them to be “found,” say, about now, or at least after he was himself dead. It is fascinating to read her edited journals and follow her through college (Smith) as an English major. She and Hughes are exact contemporaries of mine, and I can respond to certain elements that were in the air at that time, and to certain academic pressures. She started teaching at the same time I did (Berkeley, in my case) and felt the strain and didn’t like it much. She was already publishing, some of the poems really good, but had her eye on fiction—the well-paying markets of the women’s magazines, plus Seventeen (where she was first published and where she was guest undergraduate editor) and The New Yorker. The New Yorker didn’t accept any of her fiction, but a few years later, while at Cambridge on a Fullbright, published three of her poems, just when she needed literary suport most. Then she returned to teach at Smith and to study poetry writing with Robert Lowell. She began working in tight metrical, rhyming forms and did well in them; this sustained her over the years, developed her skills, and served her well when she (as everybody started to do) began writing free verse. And then—as do some poets and folksingers—she came into her own in her early twenties, having made that mysterious transition from fumbling adolescent rhymster to mature poet of considerable skill. It is terrific poetry. At the same time she was writing it, her journals indicate an intense academic and literary life just getting underway, and one that would not in itself suggest the quality that her work was quickly achieving. But her editors noticed and she was consistently being published, though every rejection (and there were many of them) was painful and met with angry rebuttal. One cannot write or talk about these years without bringing Ted Hughes into the picture. Tall, handsome, rangy, he was just what she wanted and needed. At the same time, as a fellow poet, he was in many ways her antithesis. It is tempting to trace many of her mental problems to her relationship with him, but that would be neither fair nor accurate. I think their competitiveness brought out the best in her, perhaps in him as well, even though it may have added a pressure (as poet, student, wife, and soon mother) that was not in her best interests from a mental health standpoint. Yet without the pressure, without Hughes in the picture, she might not have been the poet she was, in her few productive years on earth, and she might not have written so many poems of high quality. The precise nature of Hughes’s influence on her poetry will never be known and can only be glimpsed from his selection of the poems in the Collected and his terse comments on it as her editor. What a difficult job it must have been, and how lovingly he performed it, thought the lovingly part might not be so readily apparent. That she loved him, there can be no doubt. And it is the part that will produce a movie that (as with Jacqueline Du Pre and Daniel Barenboim) will make her and Hughes household words outside of the literary community. Perhaps they are deserving of this kind of popular fame. (But . . . Gwyneth Paltrow?) The poetry—that is what is important. Dig this: It is spring of 1953. Plath is an undergraduate at Smith, studying English, and writing poetry in her free time. Tonight Auden is coming to town and will read and talk to students at the home of Elizabeth Drew. Plath has been writing structured verse like crazy and sending it out to all the leading magazines that publish poetry. The refusals come back in demoralizing fashion. But today, April 27, there is a letter from Russell Lynes of Harpers accepting not one but all three poems she sent him, along with a check for $100. Not much money today, it was a bountiful amount then. The poems are “Doomsday,” “Go Get The Goodly Squab,” and “To Eva Descending The Stair.” |
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fEATURED POET Melvin Walker La Follete lives in Redford, Texas. His first book, The Clever Body, was published by Spenserian Press, San Francisco, in 1959. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Poetry, Botteghe Oscure (Roma) The New Yorker, Northwest Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and in several anthologies. An ordained Episcopal preist, he has preached and taught literature all over the world. Here are a few poems from the Sixties: NEW
DAY Woken long before, who arch their hooves As scrupulaous as unicorns--one swerves To miss a boulder, spills into the sun. The red day burns upon the blueing dawn, Hedges of silver poppies, birds in droves Garble our sense, now in the meadow moves Fleet as if hooved. . . I whistle and you come.
One word you will not say, I have not spoken; Let us pretend our minds are on the horses, Your knuckles, white, clenching the saddle-horn Do not exist--and while the pack-train passes-- I
am not here; your foot was never
cloven. MARSYAS The weak are strong, my lord, with flabby strength Like sheepkins flayed you cannot tear in two; Look, master! I can play as well as you. I am a sissy. In love, I shall be true To my own weakness; and yet, you shall believe That I am noble, brave, a worthy thing For you to destroy. My lord, I shall make you grieve. I am Arkadian. I shall decieve Your worshipping eyes, and laugh, and make you sing Purely for once, your license turned to flame. The boys in the field shall taunt, and the girls in the town Shall squeal: "The king is crying like a clown!" Stroke my flayed hide, and tremble, for I am As terrible and soft as any lamb.
APRICOT WALK Who can remember the golden boughs of fruit These gnomic trees belie in gracelssness? They squat like bad dreams metamorphosed into wood In that grey brumaire which always precedes the scream; Who can turn comfort from the soggy dream That fatal blossoms shall, at least they should, Return? Who would trade unconsciousness For hope blown badly on an untuned flute?
Making a metaphor of all our flesh, No longer dependent on the seasonal fear That spring will not come? The nibbling deer Flag in the startled light, and clear the brush; Deep in the apricot's tumulous heart the hornet hums. (both poems aabove from The New Orlando Poetry Anthology, Vol. 2, 1963)
VACATION SNAPSHOT (For Fred Staver) You letter, fat with snapshots, came today; The boys playing ball, our wives with windy hair, Bright sunburns breeding in the hazy spray. Our flesh as the reflex of water, earth, and air.
Demands that we must leave no fire; the paint Is fresh, this season's surely, time mocks Us only, the outline of your nearer face is faint.
The lens was on infinity--no prize For these, and yet, the camera never lies.
The faces are blurred, the distant driftwood clear-- We shall burn it again, against the colder year. (from
The New York Times, 14 November
1963) Mel was a classmate of mine at both the University of Washington and at Cal Berkeley, where he was James Phelan Scholar in Literature. He was elected a Yaddo Fellow in 1964. I published him inthe English Department's Month's Best in 1952, when we both were getting started in this lit business and I was the journal's editor. Later, we studied Old English together and translated the written language into a spoken one, Anglo Saxon,in the instances of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland and Hemingway's The Old Man and The Sea. We gave several impromptu reading in front of Cal's Dwinnell Hall to astonished students passing by. Working separately, yet together, we translated The Battle of Maldon into contemporary English. Mel
has been a friend of the years and is
an all-around good fellow. I
am pleased to republish several more of
his poems below. All are from The Clever Body,
and reprinted with the author's
permission:
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AT
THE MOVIES We owe a lot to the movies and
the people who make them.
Admittedly it is an industry, one
intended to make money. But movies
have high aesthetic value, too. To see a
movie, you used to have to go to a theater.
No more. Many more
movies are watched in our own homes,
either over network TV, premium movie
channels, pay-per-view, videotapes
rented or purchased, or DVD. The industry includes many fields and technical specialties, each with its highly trained professionals. It is likely each of us knows one or two people employed in the industry, presently or in the past. Not many are stars of the magnitude written about in People Magazine. It takes a team effort, a large one, to make a movie. Each contributes his expertise Richard Sylbert was one such
person. He was at the top of his
field, production
design. It is an aspect of
movie-making that most people know
little about, including myself.
But the people in the business knew
Dick well and respected him and his
talent. He was the choice of
the best directors and producers for
nearly fifty years. It is a tough business. Dick differed from many by somehow maintaining his sanity when many about him were losing theirs. Fishing and hunting, and after a long stint at making a movie (which often takes several years), he would reward himself with a few days off fishing, or a week at some distant place where he could hunt birds. Pheasants were a favorite. It takes a keen eye and a steady hand to bring down a flushed bird in heavy cover. Since his work
took him to all parts of the world,
he was knowledgeable about hunting
and fishing all over the world.
But always work came first. I once asked him when he was
going to retire, since he was nearly
70.“Retire?” he asked,
incredulously.
“Why, I’ve got the best
job in the world.”
Dick Sylbert with a Wenatchee River steelhead. Drawing by Loren Smith I
am no hunter, but Dick and I fished
together for two decades on an
irregular basis. Sometimes it was in
the spring on the Sauk or Skagit.
Or else it was in the fall on
the Wenatchee. Rarely was it on the river
where he and I had getaway homes, the
North Fork of the Stillaguamish.
I loved talking to Dick. He
had a way of getting to the heart of
a given matter quickly and with sharp
insight. He made a lot of money, but
did not condescend. He was a regular
correspondent. He told me once that
writing letters (often in airports,
awaiting a flight) was a way of
relaxing for him.
“Don’t feel obliged to
answer,” he wrote me once. “I know
you’re busy.”
Me, busy? Not really, or not so busy as
not to reply as soon as I could. I wondered where he found the
time himself? Dead
now, of cancer since March of this
year, he is missed by many.Yet his numerous movies remain
with us and in a way keep him alive.
I have collected videotapes of
most of them.
A few early ones I am awaiting
a chance to copy from the AMC or TCM
channels. His
movies number in the dozens and span
almost fifty years of great work. There are
few duds among them. I
list them below in reverse
chronological order. They are all
worth seeing. What an
impressive list they form, the very
best of his time:
There is a number of good early
ones, as well:.
Then there are the really early ones, which he art directed: Art Director - filmography
9.
Patterns (1956) MORE
SYLBERT! |
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