{"id":131516,"date":"2018-12-05T12:30:00","date_gmt":"2018-12-05T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=131516"},"modified":"2018-12-05T19:08:49","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T00:08:49","slug":"on-writerly-jealousy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/12\/05\/on-writerly-jealousy\/","title":{"rendered":"On Writerly Jealousy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Illustration from Tacuina sanitatis (XIV century)<\/p><\/div>\n

Recently, while reading a new book of poetry, I noticed a certain signature of influence: a poem with a macabre playfulness that reminded me of \u201cDaddy.\u201d Plath-y!<\/em>, I wrote in the margin beside it. I pulled my copy of Plath\u2019s Collected Poems<\/em> off the shelf (inscribed Merry Christmas, 1994, Mom & Dad<\/em>; I would have just turned fifteen) and reread \u201cDaddy\u201d for the whatever-eth time.<\/p>\n

For most of my life I read \u201cDaddy\u201d quite literally, as a renunciation of Plath\u2019s father: \u201cDaddy, daddy, you bastard, I\u2019m through.\u201d She all but calls him Hitler, with his \u201cneat mustache\u201d and \u201cAryan eye.\u201d As Janet Malcolm points out in The Silent Woman<\/em>, the poem \u201chas had a mixed reception.\u201d She quotes Leon Wieseltier in The New York Review of Books<\/em>, 1976: \u201cWhatever her father did to her, it could not have been what the Germans did to the Jews.\u201d Irving Howe, writing in 1973, found \u201csomething monstrous, utterly disproportionate\u201d in the metaphor. I think of the Sharon Olds poem \u201cThe Takers,\u201d which begins, \u201cHitler entered Paris the way my \/ sister entered my room at night.\u201d (My friend Chris, in grad school, read these lines and said, simply, \u201cNo.\u201d)<\/p>\n

However, in 2012, newly released FBI files on the German-born Otto Plath suggested that he may have been a Nazi sympathizer. As the Guardian<\/em> reported at the time, \u201cthe files reveal that he was detained over suspected pro-German allegiance.\u201d Unlike her critics in the twentieth century, Sylvia may have had the inside scoop on those allegiances. She may have meant to literally call him a Nazi.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

That doesn\u2019t close the case on \u201cDaddy,\u201d though. Nazi sympathies notwithstanding, there is little evidence that Sylvia harbored hateful feelings toward her father. As noted in a short, rather wonderful article<\/a> about Plath and her series of bee poems, which I found on the website of a Dublin beekeeping association: \u201cHis death when Sylvia was only eight years old deeply affected her feelings and thoughts for the rest of her life.\u00a0Her mother writes that, when she was told of her father\u2019s death, she said: \u2018I\u2019ll never speak to God again!\u2019\u2009\u201d (Otto Plath, an entomologist, authored an influential book called Bumblebees and Their Ways<\/em>.)<\/p>\n

Plath does not betray conscious resentment of her father in her journals; the opposite, in fact: \u201cI rail and rage against the taking of my father, whom I have never known; even his mind, his heart; his face, as a boy of 17 I love terribly. I would have loved him; and he is gone.\u201d A few years later, she visits his grave: \u201cI found the flat stone \u2026 right beside the path, where it would be walked over. Felt cheated. My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead.\u201d Her journals make it clear it was her mother she hated instead. In 1958 she wrote:<\/p>\n

I never knew the love of a father, the love of a steady blood-related man after the age of eight. My mother killed the only man who\u2019d love me steady through life \u2026 I hate her for that \u2026 I hate her because he wasn\u2019t loved by her \u2026 It was her fault. Damn her eyes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It\u2019s misplaced blame\u2014Otto died of diabetes\u2014but evidently how she felt. So why the big switch, in 1962? I don\u2019t think there was one. She wrote the poem shortly after she discovered her poet-husband was having an affair with a mutual friend (the striking Assia Wevill\u2014I feel compelled to tell you that the beekeeping site misspells her name as \u201cWeevil\u201d) and shortly before she, at last successfully, committed suicide. Given the timing, I now presume \u201cDaddy\u201d is mostly a veiled address to Ted Hughes: Hughes is the bastard she is through with.<\/p>\n

I wrote a review of the new book, and turned in my first draft with a long digression containing much of the above material, trying but not expecting to get away with it. Sure enough, my editors suggested we cut it, because it \u201cdistracted a bit too spectacularly\u201d from the book at hand. (Quoting this editorial note is a humblebrag, I know, but what a brilliant bit of diplomacy\u2014of course I was willing to kill this darling once they said it was too good to survive.) But I figured the rabbit hole I had fallen down was a sign that I should write about Plath at length. Time to remind the world how good her poetry is, I thought\u2014no more of this focus on her persona, on her schoolgirl cuteness, on the mythology of her suicide. We tend to associate Plath with goth teenagers bent over their diaries; because we, unfairly, do not take her imagined readership seriously, we take Plath less seriously as well.<\/p>\n

Not long after this, I saw a link on Twitter to a piece in The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em><\/a>, by Dan Chiasson, about Sylvia Plath\u2019s last letters, which had just been published. I think I gasped aloud. It was coincidence, only, or else some manifestation of collective consciousness, but it meant that my new re-obsession with Plath was not unusual; any old Plath fan would be thinking, and writing, about Plath again now. I felt cheated (like Plath, at her father\u2019s grave) and a little mad\u2014mad that a critic, much more famous than me, had gotten to her first!<\/p>\n

The piece does the work I egomaniacally thought I might do\u2014reestablishing her genius, in the context of her vulnerability, her tendency to be underestimated, her \u201cfa\u00e7ade of chipper enthusiasm.\u201d It quotes the five words of Plath\u2019s I\u2019m most jealous of not having written, which I\u2019m sure you can guess: I eat men like air<\/em>. It is compassionate and full of interesting detail, like who ended up with her fishing rod, and critical insight:<\/p>\n

Her mind was brilliantly off-kilter, its emphasis falling in surprising places. We hear less than we might like about major literary or historical events: a dinner with T.\u2009S. Eliot and Stephen Spender in London, or her Tuesday-afternoon classes at B.U. with Robert Lowell, or drinks afterward with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck at the Ritz bar in Back Bay. It was unlikely that she could use these occasions in poems, and so, I think, they settled very lightly on her consciousness. But a groundhog\u2014that she knew she could use.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was mad it was so good.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a bad double bind in being a writer: If you don\u2019t write about things people are interested in, nobody is going to read you. But if you write about things people are interested in, other people are writing about them, too. I have felt jealousy as a writer many times: while reading Rachel Aviv writing about fugue states<\/a> and psychosomatic unconsciousness<\/a>; Lauren Oyler writing about the un-give-up-ability of social media<\/a>; and, even though she\u2019s dead, Susan Sontag writing about the way apocalypse looms but never occurs\u2014the last section of AIDS and Its Metaphors<\/em> is basically my whole work in progress, condensed. Sontag seems to have already had all my worthwhile thoughts. Reading writers I admire writing about things I want to write about, obsessions I\u2019m protective of, makes me feel unspecial: a bratty thing to feel, or at least to admit.<\/p>\n

Doesn\u2019t everyone want to be special, though? In an interview in 2015<\/a>, the novelist and screenwriter Bruce Wagner, who writes a lot about fame, said\u00a0the following:<\/p>\n

Of course Warhol said everyone will be famous for 15 minutes, but I think the new model of that mantra is that in the future\u2014which is now\u2014everyone will be famous all the time. I think fame has a really interesting place in our being human. The desire for acclaim is not new\u2014the attention one calls to self. An old Buddhist text said that the desire for acclaim is so strong that in many ways it\u2019s a more difficult hardship to overcome than poverty or disease. This particular Buddhist text I was reading said that even the most reclusive of cave monks will have the desire to be known the world over as the most reclusive of cave monks.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That last part\u2014\u201ceven the most reclusive of cave monks will have the desire to be known the world over as the most reclusive of cave monks\u201d\u2014remains one of the most comforting things I have ever read. I recite it to myself like a mantra. Wanting to be special isn\u2019t special.<\/p>\n

I wrote most of this essay and then got on a plane with a copy of Between Eternities<\/em>, a collection of short, riffy pieces by Javier Mar\u00edas, mostly selected from his weekly columns in the Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds<\/em>, which he has been writing for over twenty years. In these essays he seems preoccupied with the idea of uniqueness, and at least as jealously possessive of his subjects as I am. In a piece called \u201cThe Isolated Writer\u201d (2011), he writes of the writer\u2019s \u201cneed to feel almost<\/em> unique, rather than the mere interchangeable member of a generation or group, rather than even \u2018a child of one\u2019s time.\u2019\u2009\u201d How awful, to appear to be the product of the arbitrary coordinates of your time and place of birth! Without the illusion that we can reach escape velocity and transcend our zeitgeist, we\u2019d be unable to work; our books would seem \u201csuperfluous.\u201d<\/p>\n

In \u201cFor Me Alone to Read\u201d (2007), Mar\u00edas writes of the irritation of finding that your favorite art or artists have other fans. After naively believing \u201cwe were the only people who knew them, or at least the ones who best or most truly understood them,\u201d we learn that \u201cmany other readers, viewers or listeners are familiar with these books and have perhaps felt the same, and then you cannot help see these others as \u2018usurpers\u2019 or \u2018copycats.\u2019\u2009\u201d I\u2019ve had a slightly different worry, that once someone more famous than me has written about \u201cmy\u201d subject, everyone will think that I\u2019m<\/em> the copycat. For Mar\u00edas\u2014who I guess doesn\u2019t have to worry about writers more famous than him\u2014this having-to-share is worse when the others are \u201cpeople we don\u2019t like, or whom we detest or despise, or who strike us as arrant fools.\u201d Again, I feel differently; the pain of sharing is more poignant when I see the writer who got there first was at least as interesting on the subject as I might have been.<\/p>\n

Mar\u00edas ends \u201cThe Isolated Writer\u201d with a passage about winning the Austrian State Prize for European Literature, a distinction he shares with such people as W.\u2009H. Auden, Italo Calvino, and Simone de Beauvoir. \u201cThese were figures whom I viewed almost as extraterrestrial beings, some ever since I was a child, and who, I was sure, bore no resemblance to myself,\u201d he writes. One might think that such an accolade would finally make one feel truly special. But, for Mar\u00edas, to see his name added to this list of literary greats is paradoxically diminishing: it \u201cmakes me somehow less myself,\u201d it \u201cmakes me exist less.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is like achieving satori, an understanding of the principle of \u201cno self,\u201d via fame. How counterintuitive. It suggests that the cave monks, in their yearning for renown, were doing something right.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Elisa Gabbert, a poet and essayist, is the author, most recently, of <\/span><\/em>The Word Pretty<\/span><\/a> (Black Ocean).\u00a0<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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