Jenny D. quoted from a Jenny Diski essay the other day and it seemed remarkably prescient for some thoughts I've been having on Sylvia Plath lately. Here's the quote, from Diski's latest essay collection:

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

This is an issue I can completely identify with as I'm forever trying to find some quiet, but really it is not going to ever be there to the level that I most want. And honestly, if it was then I wouldn't be happy anyway as it would mean no child, no dogs, no desire to work out or listen to music or read books or watch movies. Basically life in a vacuum and who really really wants that? And yet.....for the writing, I long for it sometimes. I long for that silent place with no heavy thoughts at all but the words and all the room in the world for them to come.

Australian author Emily Maguire was blogging at Powells last week and she also wrote on this theme, explaining how all of her years working in the service industry often left her too drained (or too angry) to accomplish much creatively. Here's a taste:

See, the thing about the service industry is that you are constantly surrounded by people and noise. There is always another customer waiting to be served, a phone needing to be answered or a bored co-worker wanting to discuss her plans for the weekend. Only when I started working full-time from home and began to go days without seeing or speaking to anyone did I realize how much being around other people drains me.

I know that for many people spending 12 or so hours a day in a windowless shoebox of a room, leaving only to throw a high-sodium frozen dinner in the microwave or make another pot of coffee sounds depressing as hell. To me, it is bliss.

For Maguire interacting with people can also affect a writer in a strongly negative way - or at least some writers. And I agree with this, I really do. I have good friends but they are not physically close (due to jobs mostly) and so while I enjoy my time with them (and phone calls, etc.) I know when I was in FL this summer and was rather social that I got basically nothing done - NOTHING. And the books stalled horribly; a stall I am actually still dealing with in some ways which makes me cautious about how I will plan such trips in the future. So yes, people are great but for a writer in particular - sometimes they force choices on you that make everything so much harder, and in the end, it is often the writing that doesn't get done.

As it happens, while I was thinking about Diski and Maguire's thoughts, I read in the Guardian about the new biography of Assia Wevil, Ted Hughes' mistress who also killed herself (in the same manner as Plath), along with their young daughter. Interestingly, the first person the reviewer writes about is Hughes:

Within a period of six years, Ted Hughes faced the sudden deaths of four people dear to him. In February 1963 his estranged wife, Sylvia Plath, gassed herself in her kitchen following his affair with another woman, Assia Wevill. He was just 32 when he found himself in sole charge of their children, Frieda, who was three, and Nicholas, barely one year old.

Six years later, in March 1969, Wevill killed herself and Shura, their four-year-old daughter. At that time, his mother Edith appeared to be getting on well after an operation on her knee, but Hughes was afraid that the news might affect her recovery. In the following weeks he shunned his parents, and did not visit, phone or write to them. When his father asked Olwyn, Hughes's sister, what the matter was, she told him but made him vow to keep it a secret. But he could not keep silent and told his wife. Edith suffered a thrombosis, lapsed into a coma and died three days later. Ted was certain that Wevill's suicide was the final blow.

How annoying that even when writing about a book about Assia, the first person one has to be told about is Hughes.

For the record, I don't blame Ted Hughes for the deaths of Plath or Wevil - in the end these suicides were decisions they made themselves. But I can't help but think, in Plath's case anyway, that there was no space for her to be alone - no place for her to pursue her compulsion to write that was not filled with the physical presence of her children or the emotional/psychological presence of all the things she had to worry about. It might have taken a miracle to save Plath anyway - Hughes apparently suggests as much when interviewed in the Wevil book - but still, it is clear that all of the "everythingness" of each day drove her to a kind of longing for peace that spurred on the madness she had toyed with for years. And while she tended the children in a flat with little heat and no phone, he was off tending his writing, because he was a man and that was how it was in 1963. How utterly sad.

For Assia Wevil, there are much harder answers to find - she was not a writer looking for quiet contemplation, but a woman hopelessly in love. And she also took her daughter Shura with her, something ever so much harder to understand, let alone forgive.

Fay Weldon, a friend of Wevil's, has a small and most impressive essay about her friend in the October British Vogue (sadly no link I can find). As it turns out, she knew not only Wevil (from work) but lived quite close by to Plath as well and has often wondered what might have happened if only she went to see her that fateful night. She compares Assia and Sylvia to Lilith, Adam's first wife (as in Adam & Eve), and writes "...Assia and Sylvia still circle that atmosphere, clamouring for justice, making us uneasy, demanding that their side of the story be properly heard. Her fault, her fault! She killed me! They continue to materialise in a stream of plays, films, articles, memoirs and biographies." But later she acknowledges that perhaps it is Shura who circles with Lilith, disturbing the peace. "What about me? What about me? She was the prettiest, daintiest child, beautifully cared for, often dressed in white, carefully and delicatedly handwashed by Assia - she'd never have trusted delicates to the au pair. Remember me! But nobody does, really."

There was no way for Assia to silence everyone else, particularly Ted. There was no way for her to return to the powerful, independent woman she had been before him - she was wrapped up in the Hughes and Plath story too tightly in the end to break free. "Everyone hated her", Hughes said at her funeral (as Weldon recalls) and she couldn't escape it all - she couldn't find the quiet her head and heart so dreadfully needed.

In Ronald Hayman's Death and Life of Sylvia Plath the author looks heavily at Plath's poems, letters and diary entries to better understand her motivations. I just read this last night: "When you give someone your whole heart, and he doesn't want it, you cannot take it back, it's gone forever." (Taken from an essay written by her friend Elizabeth Compton Sigmund in 1976, comment made by Plath in a conversation with her about Ted and Assia; Compton cooperated on the biography.) I thought the words were as true for Sylvia as they were for Assia, both of them so vibrant and intelligent and yet so lost when overwhelmed with losing Ted Hughes. Such a pity, and such a waste.

So what would Sylvia (or even Assia) do if they read Jenny Diski's essays? Would they stand up and brush themselves off and go walk into that back room or shed or garden hut and be the creative women they longed to be? Would they find a way for the children to be watched by others and chores to be done and all the cares of the world to be packed away - to be dealt with at another time, or ignored forever if they chose?

Would they do that, if they knew they could - if someone told them they should? How sad that they are remembered for such sordid tragic moments - for the worst part of their lives, the bitter ends. How sad they didn't have or see or find the options that might have saved them.

I'm closing the door for awhile, giving the words time to breathe. It seems the sanest thing I could do, although yes - the dogs will still be walked, and the boy spoiled and the laundry done (and the blog updated!). But sometimes, the door will close and then I change the world a bit more the only way I know how. I will change it, and certainly, that will change me.