Lucas Myers

Lucas Myers's An Essential Self: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Memoir is a book to skip. This review is no good, but I couldn’t help but write it. When I was growing up my parents always told me “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” But as an adult I feel like I can something that is not nice. This book kills the genre of the Sylvia Plath memoir for me. And it is more about Myers and Hughes than Plath; but only the latter really holds any interest for me. Myers, I have been told by several people, is a nice man. And I believe it. So if you are reading this Mr. Myers, sorry...

An Essential Self, grew out of his essay "The Voices of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes." which appeared in Saint Botolph’s Review No. 2. At its most basic level it is a defense of Ted Hughes and a castigation of Plath (and Alvarez). He’s throwing a long dead woman onto the tracks of an oncoming train. The Myers Express: Choo-choo. He has written a book he could not - and dare not - have written while Ted Hughes was alive, which I think qualifies as an act of cowardice. A classic example within this poorly written, often redundant text, is that although Myers was given “pause” at Plath’s story “The Fifty-Ninth Bear”, he did not voice his concerns to Ted Hughes, whose fictional representation was mauled, but to this sister Olwyn. Another example occurs late in the book.(and in other texts). Myers expresses great embarrassment at Plath’s excessive Americanisms in 1956 and likely beyond. This is childhood playground stuff. Myers is simply guilty of failing to try to get to know her or understand Plath in order to clarify or gain understanding to her actions and mannerisms. Clearly Hughes was the better man for Hughes “was in no way inclined to make fun of her, which was the general response” (110). He has expressed in the past that he couldn’t see or understand what Hughes saw in Plath. Well, that’s not really any of Myers’ business is it? What goes on between two people and what attracts them to each another is purely between them. A good friend supports his or her friend when the said friend is falling in love. These are “high road” statements but I’d much rather be on that road than the one Myers is travelling down.

The book is littered with errors that Myers should not have made in the first place and that an editor or reader/fact checker worth their salt should have caught in the second place. (I was going to offer to send a list of these errors to the press in an email but decided it wasn’t worth it.) A few of my favorites; however, are “Edna Higgins Prouty” (p. 10), “Poems for a Birthday” (48) and “Among the Butterfiles” (pp. 48, 95). “Among the Butterflies” is particularly bad considering Myers calls it one of his favorite stories by Plath! (To be fair he does get it right at least once.) His reading of “Metaphors” is laughable, “a poem about a woman who had eaten a bag full of apples and had boarded a train there was no getting off” (64). Wow, really? Even I could do better than that!

Why. Why Mr. Myers, why?

What I take away from this book is that Myers (and many in that Cambridge group) was clearly jealous of Plath because she got ‘the man.’ To write a book like this seems ungrateful despite a very lovely gesture that Plath did when she published a poem of his, “Fools Encountered,” in American Poetry Now, the Critical Quarterly Poetry Supplement Plath edited in 1961. His poem was even sandwiched between Richard Wilbur and Adrienne Rich, a position that would certainly considered especial. Despite having met Plath on several occasions, I am really not certain Myers ever had any idea of who she was. He makes claims against others, particularly Al Alvarez, saying “Alvarez did not know Sylvia profoundly” and “he did not know Sylvia well enough to have the evidence [i.e. information about the breakup of the marriage of Plath and Hughes]” and “he did not know her well enough to understand her mentality or her reasons for committing suicide” (78-9). I think these are incredibly false, disingenuous statements. Myers admits “It is hard to get trustworthy and historical information from anything that has been written about Sylvia...” (82). This is especially the case when the source of the information is suffering from his own bitter fame. Myers’ biases, jealousies, and bitterness call into question the validity and appropriateness of his motivation in writing a memoir: and a second one at that!

Very often people in the Hughes camp attempt to discredit Plath’s friends such as Elizabeth Sigmund, Al Alvarez, and maybe even Jillian Becker, etc. And to be even, there are certain Plath supporters who are equally aggressively anti-Hughes. But doesn’t it strike you as odd and/or defensive? Massive discrediting of first hand accounts or opinions, I guess, really started when Alvarez published part 1 of “Sylvia Plath: The Road to Suicide” in 1971. And then the biographies started to roll in, which opened the doors of name-calling against Elizabeth Sigmund. Becker’s memoir was published so late it seems to have missed this. All three of those friends of Plath’s - Becker, Alvarez, and Sigmund - were the most privy to information about the demise of Plath’s marriage to Hughes and Plath’s last few days, weeks, and months. As a consequence, these people had possibly the most dirt on them. But this is a whole different can of worms. (And Assia Wevill herself routinely fed information to Nathaniel Tarn who was good enough to take notes. But how reliable can even her words be?) Had the Hughes side not been so secretive and cover-upish and was more forthcoming and better editors and more responsible Estate managers and less intimidating and bullyish, the whole mess might have been avoided. But as it is, they gathered the “tatty wreckage of [her] life” - as Plath wrote in The Bell Jar - lit the match and stoked the coals.

To quote Marianne Moore, “I do like to like a book, especially anything [about] Sylvia Plath.” But Lucas Myers’ book An Essential Self is beyond likability. I was not going to review this book, not having anything nice to say about it, and I’ve likely carried on too long to the point where the review lost its focus (if it even ever had focus). But as I read An Esstential Self (and I read it three times in October) the itch to write something grew stronger and stronger, and so I found myself scratching. I cannot even claim to feel better when now it is done: this is a traveling itch. Relief will be hard to come by.… (altro)