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The tears of a Weeping Scholar Tree (Sophora japonica). |
I want to write like that, with vigor and spirit. A good essay about Plath might be quirky or a mere exercise, and through its logic and style still enrich and satisfy its readers, who are few but the toughest in the world.
Planning to write this week about why Sylvia Plath loved food, I read the essays "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food" by Lynda K. Bundtzen, anthologized in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022) and "Plath and Food," by Gerard Woodward, published in Sylvia Plath in Context (2013), edited by Dr. Tracy Brain.
I'd avoided for years sitting down with Sylvia Plath in Context, pouting because a book with that title should include an essay about Plath's background and family. Didn't those count as context? They do now. I see recent essays making little skeeter-sized references to Aurelia or shorthand. Please note that I am such a Tracy Brain fan I had her autograph my copy of The Other Sylvia Plath.
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They strongly remind me of Ted and Sylvia. |
But I now read "Plath and Food." Poet and novelist Woodward chose to count Plath's references to food and eating, finding that about one-third of Plath's poems refer to one or the other ("black as burnt turkey"). As we say in Missouri, "Well, butter me and call me a biscuit," because I had planned to state that there's no Plath poem about food, although this unpublished early poem, soon to be seen in The Complete Poems, would probably qualify. Doesn't it look like a tattoo?
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(Wondering if Plath was told, 'You will sit here until you eat it' | ) |
Reading these whip-smart and rather short essays re-taught me: Facts and fabulous quotations rule and are worth the finding. Woodward wrote with English authority about postwar English recipes Plath lampooned as "Lard and stale bread pie, garnished with pig's' feet." Ted Hughes praised her fine cooking but complained when meals were too fancy or too light.
Bundzten's "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops" feasts us on Plath's descriptions of the foods Plath bought, anticipated, cooked, served, and savored, the poet even providing for them dazzling new adjectives. And she packed her face when, as in her final days, she ate other people's food. Delightful.
"Why" Plath loved and troubled to cook fine food is no mystery to females. Food is women's lingua franca. We read whole magazines about it. Maybe Plath would have conquered the 'slicks ' as a food writer. Not only a "woman singer" she was the offspring of food-service and hospitality workers. Food was the family business. Plath's maternal great-grandparents boarded tourists in their Tyrolean pension. Her "Grampy" was a headwaiter. Her German father Otto worked in a New York grocery and a deli. Plath's Viennese grandmother worked in her parents' store and cooked hearty European food and bakery, which Plath replicated in her own household. Plath's uncle Henry's deli in Boston employed several other Schobers, and Henry and three other uncles scattered across the U.S. were professional waitstaff and restaurant managers.
We picture fin-de-siecle immigrants as miners and subsistence farmers, but the Plaths, Greenwoods, and Schobers arrived from Europe as service workers, white people visible and legible to the white privileged class. This, plus marriages to U.S.-born citizens, created for Sylvia's generation a great advantage: access to those privileges, but only if the kids did everything right.
So Plath's generation was assigned to do everything right. That's the struggle she lived with and wrote about, not about German-speaking family she did not live to appreciate beyond their focus on work and food. Each time I read a new Plath essay, I wonder if it will mention her heritage, which shows up in her life in other and more consequential ways.