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Review of Heather Clark, the Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes

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Review of Heather Clark, the Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes Plath Profiles 379 Review of Heather Clark, The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. 328 pages, $99. Amanda Golden, Emory University In the past decade, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes scholars have responded to the publication of Plath's Unabridged Journals (2000), the Restored Ariel (2004), and the Ted Hughes collection at Emory University.1 In 2005, Karen V. Kukil and Stephen C. Enniss curated "No Other Appetite": Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and The Blood Jet of Poetry, a joint exhibition of materials from the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College and the Hughes papers and library at Emory held at the Grolier Club in Manhattan.2 The fall of 2010 witnessed The New Statesman's publication of Hughes's "Last Letter," a manuscript from the British Library's Birthday Letters materials.3 While critics may have once considered Plath's and Hughes's oeuvres separately, Heather Clark's The Grief of Influence: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes underscores that they are inextricably linked. In The Grief of Influence, Clark provides insightful new interpretations of the role of Plath and Hughes's rivalry in their development as poets. Clark's study updates Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband: Hughes and Plath, A Marriage (2003) and Clark adopts a version of Harold Bloom's "anxiety of influence" in order to examine ways the ways that Plath and Hughes responded to each other's work.4 Clark's study responds 1 I would like to thank Emory University's Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry whose Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Poetics enabled my completion of this review. I also thank Peter K. Steinberg, Gillian Groszewski, and Amy Hildreth. 2 See Karen V. Kukil and Steven C. Enniss, "No Other Appetite": Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Blood Jet of Poetry (New York: The Grolier Club, 2005). 3 Melvyn Bragg published Ted Hughes's "Last Letter" in "Ted Hughes: The Final Poem." New Statesman (11 October, 2010): 42-44. 4 In her approach to influence, Clark follows Tracy Brain in The Other Sylvia Plath (2001) and Stephen Axelrod in Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words (1990), who both employed theories of literary maternity in order to address Plath's literary influences, particularly Virginia Woolf. Golden 380 to previous attempts to grapple with Ted Hughes's Birthday Letters (1998), including Erica Wagner's Ariel's Gift: Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and the Story of Birthday Letters (2000) and Lynda K. Bundtzen's The Other Ariel (2001). Clark also reconsiders Margaret Dickie Uroff's connections between Plath's and Hughes's poems in Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (1979). The Grief of Influence analyzes Plath and Hughes's poetry and prose over the duration of both poets' careers. After reading Clark's analysis of Plath's "Black Rook in Rainy Weather" in light of Hughes's "Hawk in the Rain," for instance, it is difficult to imagine interpreting both poems separately. Her title acknowledges that their mutual influence "would eventually intensify the anxiety, and the grief, of influence in their late dialogue" (122). Clark's consideration of the length of Hughes's career alongside Plath's is also a dramatic departure from Middlebrook's study of the poets' "creative marriage." In the process, Clark produces new readings of Plath's posthumous influence on such volumes as Crow (1970) and provides an introduction for Plath scholars to the evolution of Hughes's career. Clark's accessible style will be useful for teachers of Plath's poetry and methods of close reading. Her close readings are fresh, her prose is clear, and her arguments are compelling. A central contribution of The Grief of Influence is Clark's new interpretations of such widely anthologized poems as "Ariel" (1962) and "Daddy" (1962). Clark also contextualizes her explications well, analyzing the roles of such factors as gender, nationalism, geography, formalism, and poetic traditions in Plath and Hughes's relationship. Clark's research with primary sources is strongest with the Hughes Papers and Library at Emory and the Plath Collection at Indiana University's Lilly Library. She responds well to previous scholarship analyzing Plath's manuscripts in the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College, and she includes valuable quotations from Hughes's correspondence with Keith Sagar in the British Library. Drawing on materials in Hughes's archive at Emory, for instance, Clark sheds new light on Hughes's response to American consumerism and materialism, and observes that he "was not entirely immune to the prospect of bourgeois contentment" (96). Clark's eleven chapters engage factors informing Plath and Hughes's literary production. In the fourth chapter, for example, her considerations of British and American landscapes, are particularly strong. This chapter's expansive treatment of Robin Peel's observation that "[i]n England [Plath] is the colonial subject" is a strong contribution of Clark's study (Clark 92). Critics will benefit from Clark's detailed assessment of Plath's responses to the British landscape. Plath Profiles 381 Clark also recounts well Plath and Hughes's strained visit to Withens and the ways that in "the speakers of [Plath's poems] 'Wuthering Heights' and 'Two Views of Withens' resist integrating with the [British] landscape" (105). Considering the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and T. S. Eliot enables Clark's innovative, new readings of such poems as "Daddy." For instance, she argues that in Plath's well-known line, "Every woman adores a Fascist" (line 52), she "is mocking Nietzsche's Zarathustra, who proclaimed 'Brace, unconcerned, mocking, violent—thus wisdom wants us: she is a woman and always loves a warrior'" (Clark 133). Clark also compares Plath's reference to the "Taroc pack" in "Daddy" to Eliot's "clairvoyant" Madame Sosostris who presents of one of The Waste Land 's "false prophets" (Clark 148).5 While this may still be the case, a Taroc pack is not the same as a Tarot pack. Plath's Taroc cards may have initially belonged to her mother, and differ from her Tarot deck, which she received from Hughes in 1956.6 As Elaine Feinstein has recounted, Plath learned the game of Tarock from her grandmother, and introduced it to the Hughes family while visiting in the winter of 1959.7 Clark's focus on Plath and Hughes's rivalry also enables new readings of such late poems as "Ariel." She interprets the speaker of "Ariel," for instance, as a mother who "focuses so intently on her journey that she ignores her child's cry" (157). In her explication of "Ariel," Clark also recounts a version of the Lady Godiva story that differs from the one that Plath may have encountered. In her dictionary, Plath underlined a version of the tale in which Godiva "rode naked through the streets of Coventry to fill a condition upon which her husband had promised to relieve the town of a tax."8 This version places more emphasis on the woman's sacrifice than the story that Clark cites in which Godiva is responding to "her husband's dare." Both stories enable what Clark calls, "a way of answering back to Hughes," but the version that Clark cites also 5 Stephen Axelrod also makes this assumption in his contribution to the Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath (83). 6 Plath wrote to her mother on December 26, 1959, "your Tarock pack is in good use" (LH 360). In the original letter, housed in the Lilly Library, Plath referred to "the Tarock pack." Becky Cape, Head of Reference and Public Services and Heather Cole checked this for me in an email. 7.27.05. See also Feinstein 72. 7 See <www.tarock.net>. Accessed 8.22.05 In her letters, Plath spelled the title of the game, Tarock. In her draft of "Daddy," she initially used the spelling, "Tarock," and then changed it to "Taroc" in a later typescript of the poem. Sylvia Plath, Drafts of "Daddy." Sylvia Plath Collection, Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College, Northampton, MA. See also Feinstein 94 and Stevenson 178. 8 Sylvia Plath's copy of Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 1949. Page 355. Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College. In Revising Life, Susan Van Dyne also includes a version of the story that places further emphasis on Godiva as a martyr. Acting as a dutiful "heroic wife," Godiva's act is a sacrifice for her husband and her "naked ride relieve[s] the town of her husband's unjust tax" (121). Golden 382 suggests Plath's recitation of Chaucer to a field of cows in Cambridge.9 Clark argues that in "Ariel," "Plath may have imagined herself . stepping up to Hughes's poetic challenge and proving to him that in her metaphoric nakedness she is empowered rather than humiliated" (161). Clark's version of the Godiva tale places a lesser degree of blame on the husband figure and alludes to Hughes's practice of giving Plath subjects for her poems. The version of Godiva story in Plath's dictionary would strengthen Clark's connection between "Ariel" and what she calls, "Plath's decision to 'bare all' in poems such as 'Lady Lazarus' and 'Daddy,' where she subverts the power of her interrogators and torturers by 'confessing' what she has suffered under their custody" (161). The arc of The Grief of Influence analyzes the layers of influence that informed Plath and Hughes's poetry. By the final chapter, Clark observes that in Hughes's Birthday Letters poem "Trophies," "[w]hen he refers to Plath's 'Pursuit' (which itself alluded to Hughes's early 'The Jaguar'), he engages in a self-conscious, intertextual dialogue and act of revision.
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