Sylvia Plath's Letters Volume 2 by Fay Bound Alberti

I have just finished reading the second volume of Sylvia Plath's Letters, published by Faber and Faber. They make for sober reading. The first volume, published in 2017, covered the period 1940-1956. In those, a smiling, bikini-clad Plath beams out from the front cover, while the pages are filled with the optimism and hope of youth. There are pockets of doubt and difficulty, the hint of rape and a suicide attempt, but also Plath's growing certainty of herself as a writer, a woman and an equal to the towering figure of Ted Hughes, with whom she is forever linked.

Letters, volume 1

It is evident from the book jacket that the second volume will be a more serious affair. Gone is the summer sun and the happy expression. Viewed from the side and in monochrome, Plath's expression is serious, her hair tied up in a no-nonsense style. In nearly 600 letters, we follow Plath's marriage to Hughes, their movement around the globe and the UK, her library successes and his more immediate recognition, childbirth and child loss, a breaking-down marriage and her suicide at the age of 30.

Letters, volume 2

To Plath, Hughes was a giant, a genius, a literary God. He must be fed steak for breakfast and waited on, his needs tended to. Yet she also resented her domesticity, her entrapment to the demands of her husband - first moving to Devon because he wanted space, searching for childcare in order to write,  and juggling the demands of that writing along babies, cooking, cleaning and tending to Hughes. The marriage was intense. It was also violent. She wrote to her psychiatrist that Hughes beat her when she was pregnant, causing her to miscarry their second child. 

In the foreword to the book, their daughter Frieda meets these claims head on. She writes in defence of her father, justifying his apparent violence towards Sylvia - which is also recorded in Plath's journals - on the problematic grounds that what was meant by 'a beating' is unclear (a hit, a swipe, a push?) and that her mother had been difficult, needy, disruptive. It is difficult to read this perspective, and to compare it with the plaintiveness of Plath's own journals, the constant fretting about existence that hovers at their margins, her need to do right, live right, be right. 

Yet it is clear in Frieda's foreword how difficult it must be to have parents so utterly in the public eye and simultaneously capable of creating division. Plath was better known after her death than in life, with her books The Bell Jar (a semi-autobiographical novel about a nervous breakdown) and her poetry. Her writing is said to have contributed to the development of the confessional style in literature. And yet it is Hughes who is remembered in Westminster Abbey, not Plath.

The Bell Jar, first published in 1963 

Plath's final letters were written just a few days before she died by suicide in her London flat. She had successfully moved back to the city after being left by Hughes (he was unfaithful with their tenant Assia Wevill, who, in a terrible mirroring would kill herself and her daughter in the same way that Plath died). Plath seemed to be getting better; she had been knocked by Hughes' infidelity and the subsequent rejection of some friends, and she struggled with Frieda missing her father. She was convinced that her daughter had 'latent schizophrenia', and she fretted constantly about her wellbeing. 

It took such effort on the part of Plath to reestablish herself, to find childcare, to push herself back into the London scene, that the exhaustion is apparent on the page. Her letters to people become repetitive as she tells one after another about Hughes' adultery and abandonment, the money he is to pay, his family's turning on her, her living in Yeats' house and how that was fate, and finally, the endless illness, colds and flu of her children. 

In the main, Plath's letters have an enforced jollity even when she is struggling. From time to time she was angry and critical with her mother, but she also felt responsible for her, writing to her sponsor, the American author Olive Higgins Prouty, not to pass on information that might cause Aurelia worry. Prouty had suffered with mental health problems too, so Plath felt she was an ally. Plath was convinced that Hughes wanted her to kill herself, something she refused to contemplate. 

But by the beginning of 1963, despite all her contrived hope and determination, Plath was sleep deprived, unwell, lonely and depressed. On 11 February, having previously convinced herself, and her psychiatrist that she was no longer a suicidal 'type', she left out a snack for the sleeping children, took precautions to seal the kitchen and gassed herself in the oven. 

23 Fitzroy Road, London, last residence of Sylvia Plath

Two years after her death, Plath's collection of poems Ariel was published by Ted Hughes. These poems, including the eponymous poem written on her 30th birthday, drew on the pain of abandonment and loss that had followed her marriage breakdown. This is the writing for which she is best remembered. 

ARIEL

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The child's cry 

Melts in the wall. 

And I

Am the arrow, 

The dew that flies 

Suicidal, at one with the drive 

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning. 

www.fayboundalberti.com 

Elmet, King Arthur and me

I had my DNA done (by Living DNA), which neatly matched what I already knew about my ancestry from all the Ancestry.com family trees and my own research. In a nutshell, this is me: 

The Scandinavian/Finnish bit comes from my Swedish-Finnish Great-Grandfather. The rest roughly matches the English/Scottish background of my ancestors. 

What was most interesting to me was the more than a quarter of my DNA that comes from the mysterious part of Yorkshire that was the ancient kingdom of Elmet. 

Only one of my grandparents - my mother's father - was born in England. Although his birthplace was Liverpool, both of his parents came from Almondbury near Huddersfield and his Eastwood/Wilkinson forebears seem to have lived in the Almondbury area ad infinitum. 

Almondbury is now a suburb of Huddersfield, but when my ancestors lived there it was a village. Here are some photos of Almondbury I took yesterday.

I had assumed the Yorkshire part of my genetic makeup would mean I had Anglo-Saxon or Viking DNA, because that's what we now associate with Yorkshire: Viking York (Yorvik) and Anglian Northumberland and Mercia. However, it seems I hail from a much older people, the original Celtic Britons. 

South Yorkshire is sometimes jokingly referred to as "The People's Republic of South Yorkshire". It has form, as many large Chartist meetings were held on hilltops across the South and West Pennine moors, and there were bitter protests during the Thatcher years. They're a bolshie group in that part of the world, and proud of it. Now I understand why that's so and I'm really happy to share their DNA.

To quote my DNA report:

"The formation of South and West Yorkshire as a distinct genetic and cultural region has its roots in perhaps the most mysterious part of Britain’s history. As the Romans withdrew roughly 1500 years ago, the island was undergoing a great cultural and demographic shift. Waves of migration from Northern Europe saw Angles, Saxons, and Jutes setting up vast and powerful kingdoms, both displacing and integrating with the indigenous Britons. In certain areas, this transition happened quickly with little evidence of warfare, but some post-Roman rulers resisted. 

The Kingdom of Elmet held out in England longer than most others, a buffer state in southern Yorkshire surrounded by expansive Anglian kingdoms. Though eventually it fell, remarkable evidence from the first fine scale genetic map of Britain shows that the ancient kingdom’s legacy is still felt today as a unique genetic signature can be found in an area almost perfectly matching its probable geopolitical boundaries." (my emphasis)

Living DNA refers to the portion of Yorkshire in red below as "South Yorkshire".

 

This is not entirely the area currently known as South Yorkshire, rather it lies within the old West Riding.

Basically, a quarter of my DNA comes from the people who made up this ancient kingdom of Elmet, which was an independent Celtic kingdom that existed between about the fifth century and early seventh century AD and was the last stronghold of the Britons to fall to the Anglo-Saxons in the seventh century. 

The boundaries of Elmet appear to have followed a rough line along the River Wharfe in the north-east, incorporating Ilkley to Tadcaster, and the River Don incorporating Doncaster and Sheffield in the south, up the side of the Peak District and taking in Sowerby Bridge Hallifax and Keighley. 

The capital of Elmet seems to have been in or near to what is now Leeds, then Loidis. The name Elmet comes from that of the elm-tree, because it was located in a great forest of elm-trees. 

It was known variously as Elmet, Elmed or Elfed, and the name may refer to its extensive forests of elms. The early chroniclers called it Elmete Saetan or "the dwelling place of the people of Elmete".

The people of Elmet were originally a part of the powerful Celtic tribe of Brigantes. In 155 AD the Brigantes revolted against Roman rule and burned down the Roman fort at Ilkley (Olicana). They were soon defeated.

Apparently the local Celtic British tribes centred around Leeds (Loidis) thought it wiser to be associated with the powerful Romans, who ound it convenient to rule through alliances with local chiefs. They separated from the Brigantes to form themselves into the separate kingdom of Elmet. They then forged an alliance with the Romans.

After the evacuation of the Roman Legions from Britain, around 407-410 AD, Elmet came into prominence as a Christian bulwark against the invading Anglo-Saxon pagans. And there is often an association of Elmet with the origins of Arthurian legends which speak of a warrior who led a band of heroic warriors to spearhead the resistance of Britons against the invading Saxons, Jutes, and others from the north of Europe, sometime in the fifth and sixth centuries AD.

It seems that Elmet had associations with the Welsh Celtic tribes. A two-line Latin inscription on an early Christian burial stone dating from the late fifth or sixth century was unearthed in a field known locally as the Gardd-y-Saint (the Garden of the Saints) near Llanaelhaearn church (about six miles north of Pwllheli) in north-west Wales. 

The  stone has been set into the wall of the church and it reads: 'ALIORTUS ELMETIACO HIC IACET', which means that "Aliortus, the man of Elmet" is buried there. (My husband's mother's maiden name was Allott and his mother came from Yorkshire. Perhaps Aliortus was an ancestor!)

Then came the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. In the sixth century, those Angles who were occupying territory to the east of Elmet (the East Riding) founded the kingdom of Deira, those to the north founded Bernicia, whilst the Angles of Mercia began to take over land to the south and in the Midlands. Elmet became a frontier land, ringed by the invaders.

One of my favourite TV shows in the 1970s was Arthur of the Britons. It now seems that the real Arthur may have been from Elmet.

This view is supported by an Historian, Adrian Grant, who claims that Arthur was the son of Masgwid Gloff, a 5th-Century king who ruled over the kingdom of Elmet. He claims that Arthur was born in around 475AD in Barwick-in-Elmet.

According to Grant, Arthur’s real name was Arthwys ap Masgwid (Arthur son of Masgwid), and he was the son of the king of Elmet, Masgwid Gloff and and his wife, Gwenllian V Bryche.

At the age of 15, says Grant, Arthur was chosen by the chiefs of the 'Hen Ogled' or 'Old North' - the kingdoms of northern England - as their Pendragon, or Commander-in- Chief and fought battles against the Scots, Picts and (probably) Saxons.

For a period Elmet was sufficiently powerful to withstand Anglian pressure, whether from Deira, Bernicia or Mercia. The poet Taliesin  wrote of Guallauc, a ruler of Elmet as "a skilled warrior," beloved of his followers. 

Sadly, Elmet couldn't hold out forever against the expanding Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.  The kingdom's downfall began in 590 when its king, Gwallog, was killed during a war against the Angles of Bernicia. 

Worse was to come for Elmet when in 616, Edwin, the king of Bernicia, merged his kingdom with its southern neighbour, Deira, to form the powerful Anglian kingdom of Northumbria. 

Elmet, the last of the Celtic kingdoms became the target of Edwin, king of Northumbria. His excuse for invasion came when an exiled Northumbrian nobleman named Herric (who had been given sanctuary in Elmet by its king, Ceredig) died of poisoning at the Elmet court. Some think that Hereric was poisoned on Edwin's orders, as an excuse to ipunish Ceredig for taking in Herreric by invading and annexing his country. 

Although the kingdom of Elmet became part of Northumbria in 627, it seems that its population of Britons stayed put. According to a genetic study published in Nature (19 March 2015), the local population of what had been West Yorkshire is genetically distinct from the rest of the population of Yorkshire. 

Later Anglo-Saxon and Viking names survive as Barwick-in-Elmet (berewic is Old English for 'corn farm'), Scholes-in-Elmet (the name is a plural of Old Norse skáli = "temporary shed") and Sherburn in Elmet, as if the locals were determined to maintain the memory of the fallen kingdom. The Angles who took over the area became known as the Elmed Saetna, or Elmet settlers, so the name was well enough established with the invaders to survive its demise as an independent kingdom.

The ancient kingdom of Elmet held a particular fascination for the poet Ted Hughes, probably because he spent his early childhood in Mytholmroyd, near Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire. He had a great love for the area. 

With the photographer, Faye Godwin, he produced an "episodic autobiography" of the region, in which he examined the disconnection between the lives people live, the places they live and the history that surrounds them. The book was Remains of Elmet, first published in 1979, with an expanded edition, called just Elmet, in 1994. 

Hughes felt that the Anglo-Saxon usurpation of Elmet ("the last independent Celtic kingdom in England") was the first in a series of disasters to befall the area. His poems depict a weather-beaten landscape and people and the vestiges of industrial enterprise, religious custom and ancient tradition. He claimed that only nature now flourishes, as it reclaims the land from those who inhabit it.

Sources:

http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/FeaturesBritain/BritishElmet02.htm]

https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/04/king-arthurs-birthplace-found-claims-british-researcher/

http://www.historyfiles.co.uk/KingListsBritain/BritainElmet.htm

Arvon Magic - Celia Rees

I'm sure that some of my fellow History Girls and our blog readers will have either tutored or attended an Arvon Course during their writing lives. For anyone who doesn't already know, Arvon runs a programme of residential creative writing courses and retreats for schools, groups and individuals. The five day courses are held at three centres: Totleigh Barton, in Devon, Lumb Bank in West Yorkshire and the Hurst in Shropshire and cover a wide range of genres, including fiction, poetry, screenwriting and playwriting. 

Lumb Bank

My first Arvon Course as a tutor was at Lumb Bank. The 18th century mill owner’s house once belonged to Ted Hughes and is set in a distinctive Pennine landscape with woods all around, a river at the bottom of the steep bank and the ruins of old mills just visible along the valley. It is about half a mile from the village of Heptonstall where Sylvia Plath is buried. Her grave is an object of pilgrimage. Writers leave pens and other offerings. If I'm there, I always find time to make the steep climb up to the village to visit her grave. 

My co-tutor on my first course was the late and much missed Jan Mark. A writer of considerable stature, huge talent and enormous erudition, we will not see her like again. It is good to see some of her books being re-published in the admirable Hachette Hodder Silver imprint. They serve as reminder of just how good she was.  She was also a highly experienced tutor, who had taught on numerous Arvon courses as well as being a regular at Ty Newydd in North Wales. I couldn't have had a better co-tutor; I learnt a great deal from her.

Jan and me - photo: Claire McNamee

Each day at Arvon is divided into workshops in the morning with individual tutorials and free writing time in the afternoon. The workshops are designed to look at aspects of the craft but also to stimulate new writing and can often be testing and challenging, pushing those participating out of their comfort zones. The one-to-one tutorials offer feed back and constructive criticism on work produced. The week is intense and draining for tutors and tutees alike, but at its best it can be transformative. Jan was a formidable tutor. Her workshops were brilliantly crafted to spur creativity and spark the imagination. She was quite willing to read anything and everything offered to her and she read every word. Her analysis was forensic and the criticism she offered, although not always welcome, was meticulously fair. Her advice was often to go away, try again, make it better. Wise words to any writer. She was also adamant that, while at Lumb Bank, writers had to engage in new work, not carry on with something that they had been writing before coming on the course. The last night is reserved for readings and new work was what Jan expected to hear. So that's what would be happening. No-one argued with Jan.  

Lumb Bank from across the valley

Jan was right, of course. Arvon has to be allowed to work its magic. And it is a kind of magic, a creative alchemy that comes from those five intense days and nights, the mixing of writers together, the focus on writing and only writing, the place itself. I still remember some of those Friday Night Readings, from this and other courses, how writers were transformed, how they wrote out of themselves. 

The most satisfying thing for a tutor is when a piece of writing that you remember, that was conceived at Arvon, becomes a book. One of the writers on that course was Tricia Durdey. She came with a  book already finished, she was just going to do a bit of final editing but Jan wasn't going to allow that. Tricia had to go away and think again. She came back with an idea for something she'd long wanted to write. A story set in war time Holland, involving a dance teacher and her class. It sounded intriguing, different. I told her to give it a go. She did. I can still remember her Friday night reading. Powerful, arresting, moving. Even Jan was nodding and smiling. I told Tricia that she should develop it into a novel, which she did, only to fall foul of mainstream publishers with their 'Not quite right for our list/the market'; 'If you could just change this, change that, make it for Young Adults/Real Adults/Children, give it another title...' and so on - we've all heard it - but she did not give up. Tricia has written about her experience of writing the book here.

By happy coincidence, another writer on the same course, Jan Fortune, went away and co-founded Cinnamon Press . Even more Arvon Magic. Not only are they writing books and getting them published but they are starting their own publishing houses.  How brilliant is that?

Jan has now published Tricia's book, The Green Table. My congratulations to both of them. Tricia has fulfilled her ambition to tell the story of dance teacher Hedda Brandt's struggle against Nazi oppression in wartime Holland. As Hedda's class dwindles, first the Jewish girl goes, then the girl handicapped by polio, we are reminded of bleak choices to be made, the heroism and sacrifice of ordinary people and the words of Pastor Niemöller:

 First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—

Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

underlying all is the eternal question: what would you do?

The Green Table is a story of love, loyalty and courage. Tricia makes fine use of dance and music to express spirited defiance in the face of brutal occupation. The book is beautifully produced and contains all the originality and passion I first heard on that Friday Night Reading in the sitting room at Lumb Bank. 

Celia Rees

www.celiarees.com

The Thought Fox - Sue Purkiss

A few weeks ago, my husband and I were lucky enough to be taken on a tour of Pembroke College in Cambridge. Bron was at Cambridge, and he'd recently realised that someone he knew back then, Nick Davies, now teaches there, and is an eminent behavioral ecologist. They share a love of birds, and it was after Bron had read Nick's recent book, Cuckoo, about how cuckoos adapt their behaviour to trick their hosts, that he guessed the writer must be the student he knew years ago.

So we had lunch, and then Nick took us round the college. It was as he was showing us some of the portraits in the dining room that I noticed a familiar profile with a loose lock of hair falling over a high forehead. 'Oh yes,' said Nick. 'That's Ted Hughes. Didn't you know he was here?' Neither of us did.

It's a beautiful college, with a chapel that was built by a youthful Christopher Wren. In one of the rooms, the Thomas Gray Room (yes, it's named after THAT Thomas Gray, and the manuscript of the famous Elegy is on display there) there is a portrait hidden behind a section of wooden panelling. It's a 17th century graffito of a youngish man with reddish hair and a beard, and it's said to be of Wren. It doesn't look much like the later portraits of him, but maybe he changed over the years - or maybe the artist was better at building than he was at catching a likeness. Anyway, it's a nice story, and whoever the subject is, it's one of those threads that lead you back into the past, to a particular moment on a particular day when, in a moment of rest, someone decided to pick up his chalks and start sketching.

But the greatest treasure, for me, was in the new extension to the library. We went up a flight of stairs, and there, facing us, was this glorious window*, etched with poems by Hughes and some of the creatures and landscapes that feature in them.

One panel is inscribed with the poem The Thought Fox, which Nick told us was generated during a long, dark night of the soul, when Hughes, labouring over an essay, saw or imagined he saw a fox...

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The Thought Fox

It was after this experience, so the story goes, that Hughes realised that if he continued to do English, his ability as a poet - which he knew was the most important thing of all for him - would be stifled by the aridity of endless dissection and criticism. So he switched to anthropology. And later, much later, he went to a party, where he met a girl called Sylvia Plath... and the rest, as they say, is history.

You may have seen the splendid BBC documentary on October 10th about Hughes. In it, one of his contemporaries at Pembroke spoke of gatherings in Hughes' room, where like-minded students read their poetry to each other. It was always clear to everyone, he said, that Hughes was the leader, the one whose attention all the others wanted to capture.

In 1970, I had just started at Durham University. It was Freshers' Weekend and, for a girl from an ugly town in the industrial East Midlands, everything was incredibly exciting and beautiful and fascinating. I remember only one specific event from that weekend. It was a poetry reading. It was held in Dunelm House, in the Students' Union, and the poet in question was Ted Hughes. He would have been forty. I can't remember whether I'd even heard of him, though others certainly had. 

But what I do remember is the incredible presence the man had, and the sense of gravity and sadness that he exuded. All the twittering and giggling and breathless excitement in that large room was stilled instantly as we took in this tall, brooding figure, which seemed to concentrate darkness within itself like the hawks and the crows he wrote about. When I compare dates, there's no wonder he was weighed down: although he had just married his second wife, Carol, Assia Weevil had only killed herself and their child the year before, and Sylvia had died in 1963. So much sorrow.

Logically, I think he must have read from Crow, as that came out in 1970. But the collection I have is The Hawk in the Rain, and that's how I think of him, standing there in Dunelm, reading to to an enrapt audience: his shoulders slightly stooped, his nose beaky, his hair falling over his forehead, his voice deep and as rugged as the Yorkshire countryside which bred him.

But I'm glad to think of all those happier years he had afterwards in the softer country of Devon, of all the other work he went on to produce. And I'm very glad to know that he has that beautiful window in Pembroke as a memorial, with the sunlight shining through and gloriously giving light to the images that pervaded his poetry and the words that formed it.

* The window was designed by Hans von Stockhausen.