'THE ENGAGEMENT'- CHLOE HOOPER FICTION

 

            

I HAVE no doubt that Chloe Hooper is a very good writer. Her account of the Palm Island ‘murder’ from a few years ago in which Cameron Doomadgee died in a police cell was chilling and absolutely captivating. Her new, second novel of fiction, is called ‘The Engagement.’ Again one couldn’t deny that there is an intelligent writer at work here, capable of some impressively taut and thrilling writing. However, ‘The Engagement’ left me cold and I found it a bit of a chore to get to the end.

Liese Campbell, a 35 year old architect, is the unreliable narrator who has fled London and now works in her uncle’s Melbourne real estate business. Enter Alexander Colquhoun, a wealthy client who becomes more than just a little obsessed with Liese. After having sex in a number of potential rental apartments, Colquhoun pays her an enormous amount of money and takes her to his enormous grazier’s property named Warrowill,  in rural Victoria. Both people- and there is barely anyone else in the novel- continually play intimate mind games which ultimately leave me cold and disinterested. Eventually the games become too tense and serious for Liese, to the point where she feels a strong compulsion to run away, and even fears for her life. Earlier she enjoyed this game of pretending to be a prostitute, until the game became out of her control and Alexander became more of a disturbing prospect than she anticipated. I suppose both Alexander and Liese are unusual and interesting in a way. However, for me the book dragged on, each time making me think something of note or import was going to happen, only to feel let down.

Neither character is warm or attractive in any way. They are both selfish, scheming types and I didn’t at any stage care what happened to either of them. Alexander is by far the most repulsive, not helped by the fact that there is a carcass of a swan he has butchered in the kitchen, and a series of infantile and disturbing letters about Liese he has invented.

The melodrama is contained in the idea that Liese feels more and more desperate to escape, as a claustrophobic metaphorical net is placed over here. Alexander never really seems to lock any doors. Hooper is at her skilful best in that at times it seems that imprisonment is partly of Liese’s own making.  Ultimately, however, the whole ambiguous game is something that I never really at any stage felt I was wanting to buy into.

“It lay on the ground, a black spineless thing with arms and legs outstretched. It seemed to have no eyes. It seemed to have no mouth. It swam in shiny black oil, twitching and wriggling inside a translucent sheath.”

At her best Chloe Hooper is powerful, and one day perhaps, consistently powerful, like an M J Hyland who really knows how to write thrilling prose.

 

 

 

PARANOID PARK, 1997

                    



THE DIRECTOR, Gus Van Sant, made Paranoid Park in 1997. It is a real skateboarder’s picture. Having said that, I find skateboarding boring, but I enjoyed the film. It is a skateboarder’s film in the sense that it shows skateboarders in a good light- basically a big bunch of young, harmless people, performing impressive feats. No real sense of delinquency or pre-meditated violence, or use of drugs. Plenty of ennui, however, and some misguidedness, or reckless action- a film about adolescents/ adolescence.

                 

It is also an advertisement for Portland, Oregon, where Van Sant apparently hails from. Not a glamorous depiction of the city, but an honest one showing a reasonably tight knit community without glamour. There are unhappy people in the film, and family dislocation, but that happens everywhere, from North Carolina to Texas.

The ‘star’ is a young actor called Alex in the film, known as Gabe Nevins in real life. He is handsome and photogenic and the cinematographer studies his face and body and walk just as intently as Kieslowski does the beautiful Irene Jacobs in ‘The Double Life of Veronique’ and ‘Three Colours Red.’ You can see it when, early in the film, Alex is interviewed by a policeman at school about the death of a security guard. The camera probes Alex’s mind as it focuses squarely on Alex, even there is dialogue with the policeman. The camera slowly pans towards him until it comes very close to his face. He proves to be a good liar. In real life, scant research tells me, he has spent a little bit of time in the slammer. There has been post-film homelessness and drug taking, maybe echoes of River Phoenix. Van Sant evidently auditioned a non-acting skateboarding bunch using something like myspace. Nevins never expected to be in front of the camera much, but here he is in the vast majority of shots. A win for him, and a win for Van Sant. Maybe the day he found Nevins was a casting red letter day, a mild version of the euphoria John Duigan apparently felt finding Noah Taylor and Ben Mendelsohn on the same day for the lovely ‘The Year My Voice Broke.’

 

There are many tricks of the camera, some clever and others simple but effective. We watch Alex walk along the school corridor, in slow motion, about to be interviewed at school by a policeman interested in the discovery of the body of a security guard, cleaved in two by a train, down at the rail yards. Van Sant’s film contains many scenes at the skateboard park. The camera lovingly showcases the skills of various skaters. One shot particularly interesting has the camera inside a tunnel watching skaters negotiate the steep sides. There is a hint of claustrophobia here, and a hint that something isn’t quite right amongst the skating fraternity.

Alex plays the teenager heavily burdened by guilt or a secret very effectively. It is a role that was similarly played by James Dean in ‘Rebel Without A Cause’, but the difference here is that Alex has less existential angst associated with him. He doesn’t shout out, or get angry, just suffers his problems quietly and numbly, more like the way that the impressionable young lead handles his more significant problems in the intelligent horror flick, ‘Snowtown.’ Alex/ Nevins is probably just playing himself. But it was clear why he was chosen. Every time the camera is on him he is in some way fascinating, not the least because of his nice, youthful looks.

                 

At the centre of the film is that story about the security guard. His death is horrible. We get to see the body cleaved in two. What’s more, the upper half of the body lurches forward across the tracks, the facial expression pleading and helpless. Alex is understandably haunted by what he has witnessed. However he is reluctant to come forward, a typical teenage reaction. It dislocates himself from his family and his friends, as well as himself. There is a telling scene in the bedroom when his girlfriend is eager and all over him. But Alex is just numb. He barely participates in their communion, almost totally disengaged. When they break up she is incensed, and yet the filmmakers have her shouting with her voice muted. It’s like it is from Alex’s point of view. He is not really able to hear what she is saying, his depression and exhaustion being so bad.

The other way the film emphasises dislocation is by noises on the soundtrack. Sometimes there’s music and sometimes just muffled sounds. This occurs, for instance, when Alex is trying to cleanse his body and mind in the shower after the trauma of seeing the security guard dying on the railroad tracks. There is a kind of buzzing with bird squawks at the same time which is distracting and discordant. Interestingly, the music played in the scene of the accidental murder is classical- from the soundtrack to the Fellini film, ‘Juliet of the Spirits’, which gives it an elegiac feel. whenAlex is looking at the newspaper for reports of the accidental ‘murder’, he sees two female friends. His perspective of them becomes blurred as their mouths open to speak even though we can’t hear them, and the gentle movement of the scene is played in a vague, hazy kind of slow motion.

youtube and listening to america and bread

 

THESE days of warm autumn weather during holidays should be a relaxing time of reading, dreaming, seeing films on DVD you have always wanted to see, and the occasional crossword puzzle. Instead, with all the family responsibilities and living in a dislocated environment nothing very much like relaxation often takes place. So last night, numb and tired and in a state of stasis, and feeling unable to read my new Chloe Hooper novel, www.youtube.com is a welcome relief. It’s one of the greatest discoveries, the Internet at its most useful for dreamers, romantics  and lovers of music. Of course when you drift into a random state of searching, anything might appear on your music screen.

The songs I played last night were songs that hard- nosed Metallica fans would call mawkish and overly sentimental. They wouldn’t spit on songs like this. None of their transformative power would ever reach them. And that is the beauty of music- like films, it elicits different reactions because we all have different tastes and experiences.

My clumsy pointers typed in the name of the band ‘America’.  I haven’t heard their music for a long time- not since I played my brothers’ vinyl copies. I love the simplicity of ‘Daisy Jane’ from the album 'Hearts' from 1975: 

‘Flying me back to Memphis

Honey, keep the oven warm

All the clouds are clearin

And I think we're over the storm.’

A metaphoric oven? A metaphoric storm? No, we shouldn’t read too much into the simplicity of these words. Surely it is simply because ‘warm’ needs a rhyming word for ‘storm’ or vice versa. It’s a lovely song I hadn’t heard for years. In big open expanses like the country America, you might have to fly a plane to see the person you love.

I just had to play ‘I Need You’ next, another song by America on their first, self-titled record in 1971. Simplicity perfected again. But this time love gone wrong. 

‘We used to laugh, we used to cry,

We used to bow our heads and wonder why

But now you’re gone, I guess I’ll carry on

And make the best of what you left to me….'

Favourites from years ago, on battered old TDK cassette tapes. ‘If You Leave Me Now’ by Chicago- from the album Chicago X -the only song of theirs that I ever really played- and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ from the massive Elton John album of the same name, that I always thought had a lot of padding and should have been much shorter, just like The Beatles ‘White Album’ and especially George Harrison’s ‘All Things Must Pass.’ And who could pass up the dreamy romanticism of Bread? ‘Everything I Own’ is lovely and full of foolish commitment. But the song ‘Diary’ always struck the biggest chord with me:

‘I found her diary underneath a tree

And started reading about me

The words she’s written took me by surprise

You’d never read them in her eyes

They said that she had found the love she waited for

Wouldn't you know it, she wouldn't show it..'

The speaker of the song gets the shock of his life when a sudden tragic revelation occurs later on:

‘Her meaning now was clear to see,

The love she waited for was someone else not me

Wouldn’t you know it, she wouldn’t show it….’

I had a conversation with my seven year old daughter about the lyrics to this song tonight whilst she was cleaning her teeth. She understood what happened perfectly, and really felt the pain of the jilted lover. I explained that the same thing happens in the Jimmy Webb song ‘Someone Else’ from Art Garfunkel’s Watermark album. These are songs that reach across all age groups with their simple but telling lyrics and perfect melodies.

My fun hour of wading into the magnificent pool of www.youtube.com  concluded after this when darkness fully invaded the avenue.  But not before I heard Gerry Buckley’s warm and comforting voice in my ear plugs again… telling me of an amusing story in ‘Sister Golden Hair’ of a kind of innocent eroticism:

'Well I tried to make it Sunday

But I got so damn depressed

So I set my sights on Monday

And I got myself undressed

I ain’t ready for the altar but I do agree there's times

When a woman sure can be a friend of mine.'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Self obsession and insecurity- the American years of Sylvia Plath

I HAVE had this kind of fascination with Sylvia Plath- the writings and the life- for about thirty years. It strikes me that this is a long time, and because of the longevity of my interest, I think I can assume that I will always have this interest in he

Now I have read yet another book about Sylvia Plath: ‘Mad Girl’s Love Song’ by Andrew Wilson. I was, potentially, ‘Plathed-out.’ But this is the first book, as far as I know, that goes into a great amount of detail into Plath’s pre-Ted Hughes phase. It pretty much ends when Hughes and Plath meet at Falcon Yard, Cambridge University, early in 1956.

We can glean a fair amount from Plath’s Smith College days from ‘The Bell Jar.’ What this book shows, through its extensive interviewing of Plath’s living associates, is that ‘The Bell Jar’ resembles autobiography fairly closely. Plath had, literally it seems, hundreds of dates in her college days. It is fascinating to see the claustrophobic imprint of the 1950’s upon her in her battle to be independent, to refuse to marry young and comfortably and conservatively, and to hold onto her virginity as long as possible. She continually mixed in Ivy League circles, predominantly young, intelligent and wealthy men from Princeton and Harvard. The encouragement to have sex and/or marry as a supportive housewife and faithful bearer of offspring to an ambitious male must have been enormous. To her credit, she held out. Many of these men must have recognised the brains, the ambition, and the incredible literary promise, but how many of them really cared about these things and focused instead on the long legs, attractive face and potential security instead?  Indeed, how many were aware of how complex Plath was, and that underneath all the promising charm there was a psychological mess, a self- doubting fatherless suicidal time bomb?

                                                             

Plath’s female contemporaries, it seems, were well aware of her literary potential, as well as her complex psyche. One former Smith friend, Janet Rosenberg, whom Plath met at the library stacks, nicknamed her ‘Silver Plate’, an allusion to how unreal many people found her. Many of the women were also aware that there was every chance, on becoming famous, that they might end up featuring in a future Plath novel, poem or short story. One friend, Jane Anderson, from Plath’s home town and also an attendee at Smith College, experienced a severe mental illness and was a resident of the same psychiatric hospital as Plath at the same time. These two women followed in each other’s footsteps remarkably. Plath featured Anderson as a character in ‘The Bell Jar’ in the psychiatric hospital sections as ‘Joan Gilling’, with the ‘gleaming tombstone teeth’ (a great but cruel description, especially if you look at the photo of her in Wilson’s book). Wilson calls this sort of characterization ‘imaginative vampirism.’

  

Apart from many references to female friends, it is the predominance of male admirers that catches your attention and captures your imagination. One of these is Eddie Cohen, a pen friend who wrote hundreds of reciprocated letters to Plath throughout the late 40’s and some of the 1950’s. Wilson calls him ‘fantasy boyfriend’ and ‘sex counsellor.’ The photograph of Cohen depicts him as every bit the ladies’ man, reclining in a James Dean-like white t-shirt and jeans against a classic car, hands on hips wearing cool sunglasses, with a cheeky smile.

 Cohen was a graduate student from Chicago who deeply admired a short story Plath had published in ‘Seventeen’ magazine. He discovered a unique talent and probably recognized an enticingly complicated and complex mind. Their letters to each other became very personal and Plath clearly enjoyed being fully open with Cohen over a range of subjects, including philosophy and the art of lovemaking, so much so that Wilson says  Plath’s letters became ‘a kind of alternative journal.’ Cohen, it seems, was able to develop a complex understanding of Plath’s problems and insecurities. He fell in love with her over the course of a long series of letter writings. Cohen made an unfortunate error, however, as many people in this situation have done in the past. He decided, ‘on a whim’ in 1951 to take a long car journey to surprise Plath at Smith. Cohen took Plath on the three hour drive to her home in Massachusetts, with Plath edgy and nervous, Cohen timid and shy, and the whole trip a disaster, with Plath going up to her room upon arrival forcing Cohen to quickly depart after briefly meeting her mother. The full scale honesty and openness of the letters exchanged must have made it an intimidating encounter, best left alone as a two-dimensional relationship. Later Plath would request that he return all her letters to her. Showing fair judgement, his reluctance to do so was partly based on the monetary return he would glean from being the custodian of a famous writer’s correspondence.

There are many, many other fascinating encounters and anecdotes in this thoroughly researched book. I have spent so much time in general on Sylvia Plath that I hope it has once and for all quenched my thirst of knowledge for her. It is true there are many off putting aspects of her personality on show. At my age, this level of self -analysis and self -indulgence in others can be a bit nauseating. I often felt like saying to her ‘think about somebody else, not just an obsession with you for a change.’

‘The Bell Jar’ chapters are fascinating simply because of the strong correlation between fiction and real life, save for the odd substitution of person and place name.  The ‘Amazon’ hotel in ‘The Bell Jar’ in real life is the ‘Barbizon’ in New York, and at the ‘Ladies’ Day’ luncheon in the novel, Esther (Plath) eats a whole bowl of caviar, just as a ravenous Plath did in real life not long after arriving as a guest editor for a women’s magazine.

                     

Wilson’s book painstakingly details the well known facts of Plath’s serious breakdown and suicide attempt in 1953, after arriving back home after her volatile time in New York. Much of this is depicted famously in ‘The Bell Jar’, and it seems that much of what appears in ‘The Bell Jar’ is fascinatingly accurate. This includes Plath’s convalescences in mental hospitals and experiences with ECT, as well as her so called ‘recovery’, the subject of the brilliant ending in the novel- “patched, retreaded and approved for the road.” I place ‘recovery’ in inverted commas because, within seven or eight years of this tumultuous period, Plath will be dead, at the age of 30, by her own hand.

Shortly after this period Plath found herself involved in two very important pre-Hughes relationships. One was with the apparently brilliant Richard Sassoon, typically from Yale, who, Wilson notes, was able to ‘liberate her sexually.’ Sassoon was a distant relative of the famous war poet, and provided an incredibly rich intellectual tapestry for Plath just when she needed it. He, in turn, was drawn to her for a number of reasons, including her own intellectual capacity. By this stage Plath, in her early twenties, had written some highly successful poems and short stories. Later on, not long before Plath embarked on her literary career in England by winning a Fulbright Scholarship, Sassoon and Plath had a serious fallout. There would be further occasions they would spend together- notably in Paris after having already started her life at Newnham College, Cambridge, and in the south of France. Here Sassoon and Plath visited the Matisse Chapel and a damaging argument occurred after they found the Chapel unexpectedly closed. Plath eventually finished the relationship months later when she wrote to him to tell him that she was married to Ted Hughes, some four months after they met at a Cambridge party.

                                   

The other important relationship pre-Hughes was with a man Plath was ‘unofficially engaged to’ back in 1954. Gordon Lameyer was an English student at Amherst College who introduced himself to Plath in 1953. Wilson writes about a lovely encounter between the two of them that took place in August 1954. At her home, with her mother absent, they took their relationship to a new level and consequently Plath thought she might be pregnant. Lameyer, before he discovered it was a false alarm, promised he would marry her. Lameyer generously describes the subsequent atrophy of their relationship as a situation in which ‘our orbits were out of phase.’ During the height of their passion they read books by J D Salinger and Carson McCullers together. You can sense the influence of these two great writers on Plath. Plath got in contact again with Lameyer when she was seriously dating Sassoon near the beginning of 1955. However their relationship well and truly ended after a European holiday together a year later in 1956 when Plath had not just Richard Sassoon in her sights, but also Ted Hughes whom she had just met. She chose the latter. By this time Plath was living and writing in Cambridge, and this is where Wilson’s book ends.

The best thing about Gordon Lameyer, for the Plath lover, is the beautiful colour photos he took of her during their time together. For me, these are newly discovered ones, and she looks happy and radiant in most of them, especially the ones in 1954 when she bleached her hair after a fascination with Marilyn Monroe.

Plath emerges throughout as a wonderfully complex and interesting personality, but at the same time self-absorbed, ruthless and aggressively ambitious. A number of her female contemporaries considered her nothing more than a bitch. Perhaps, in some cases, this can be seen as mere jealousy as none of the equally ambitious young people about her ever reached the same heights in terms of fame and respect that Plath achieved.

 

A CLOSE BOND: 2

                                  

GERALD Hughes has just written a moving account of what it was like growing up with his famous little brother, TED in a just published memoir entitled ‘Ted And I’ (The Robson Press).

Of course it helps that the subject is famous, and that it is Ted Hughes- nevertheless the loving detail is enjoyable to read as a general account of the closeness two siblings have for each other, and the aching distance both must have felt living so far apart over a long period of time.
        

Gerald was born first, in 1920, in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire, to Billy Hughes and Edith Farrar. Ted was born some nine years and eleven months later in Mytholmroyd, close by. There was a sister, Olwyn, born between them, two years later, of enormous usefulness to Ted after Sylvia Plath’s suicide when he suddenly found himself the sole parent of two young kids.


Gerald was in every way the big brother who would cast an enormous, positive influence. Much of this account is of the two of them exploring the country fields near their home, shooting and fishing in particular, sowing the seeds of inspiration for a large number of Ted Hughes’ greatest poems. Part of the enchanting nature of the book is that it is such a life affirming story. This is an account of the extraordinary closeness of there children and the two parents they desperately love.

The first big outdoor adventure for the two precocious boys took place in the form of a camping trip when Ted was only four and a half years old. It was aborted early at the insistence of their parents, yet Ted would never forget his experience of seeing the kind of wildlife that would later intrude in his stories and poems. This was the beginning of many outdoor adventures, as Gerald lovingly handed down information about rabbits and pigeons, hawks and owls, stoats and grouse. The boys were also fascinated by model boats, and later a model steam engine.
               

When Ted was eight the whole family moved to Mexborough, another town in Yorkshire, and a much bigger location. Soon Gerald would begin travelling around the UK finding various jobs, whilst Ted would spend more time with his sister, Olwyn. When WW2 began Gerald was absent from his family for a number of years after joining the air force. Ted was fifteen when Gerald returned. Gerald says, in his account, that Ted opened the door ‘with tears streaming down his face’, saying “Mam, it’s him, it’s him!”

Work took Gerald to other faraway places, and eventually he accepted the temptation of a life in Australia, in 1948. Gerald enrolled in art classes and took up residence after he met his new wife in Essendon, just minutes from where I am writing this entry. For the rest of Ted Hughes’ life (he died in 1999), distance would always be an issue. Ted himself thought seriously of joining Gerald in Australia around 1956, however this was the year he met Sylvia Plath in Cambridge, and that changed everything. He was never keen anyway, with cultural places like Italy and France on his doorstep in England. Gerald never really entertained the idea of going back home to live. He was encouraged time and time again by Ted- implored, I have little doubt- but Gerald had started a new life in Melbourne, the potential return complicated further with the advent of a growing family.

Nevertheless return visits must have been amazing. The first occurred in 1951 when Gerald brought his wife, Joan, home to meet the family at Christmas. The visit stretched to ten months, some of it spent with Ted at his lodgings at Pembroke College, Cambridge. Gerald and his wife never met Sylvia Plath whom Ted married in 1956, but plenty of warm letters were exchanged.

It wasn’t until a year after Plath’s death, in 1964, that Gerald was able to return to Yorkshire, then to stay with Ted in Devon. He was a great support for his very fragile brother who nevertheless had a new partner, a relationship that started before the marriage with Plath collapsed. The visit after this was at the end of 1968. Again, there was a lot of touring involved, including a visit to London and Stonehenge.

Greater heartbreak for Ted Hughes followed with the suicide of Assia Wevill, and his young daughter with Wevill, as a part of a tragic double act. The Hughes’ beloved mother also died around this time. Unsurprisingly there is a letter dated from 1970 containing the words: “..I have found the most staggering property…cliff and rocky beach…How about coming in on it?” This is a moving part of the account. There is something sad and beautiful about two close brothers who cannot be together, but who long for each other’s company built on an intuitive friendship. In another letter Ted writes, “The final realisation that you will never come and live over here was probably what knocked me out- it was a big station in my life’s journey to realise the emptiness of that dream.”

Finally Ted Hughes made the trip to Australia in early 1976, as part of an arts festival. The brothers spent some time in Essendon, and at Gerald’s beach house on the Mornington Peninsula. Ted received his first taste of Australian wildlife and was fascinated. Gerald’s return visit was made in 1978- a ‘memorable visit’, and then again in 1990, by which time Ted had been made Poet Laureate. Back home again, after this visit, Ted wrote that their ‘were too many distractions’ this time and that the evenings were ‘not long enough.’

                        

Ted was diagnosed with cancer in 1997. He was presented with the Order of Merit by the Queen in 1998. On the phone Gerald spoke of how proud he was of him, and of his recently published ‘Birthday Letters.’ Ted died a week later. Gerald’s last trip to England was to attend his brother’s memorial service at Westminster Abbey.

The book concludes with notes regarding the Yorkshire settings for some of Ted Hughes’ most famous works. A lovely book. Not overly sentimental, but very loving and in some ways cathartic. Gerald Hughes is now 93 years old, and not living too far from here. I would love to meet him. I would feel, I am guessing, the powerful connections with Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath. And who knows? Perhaps he would share some manuscripts. But I have a feeling that at 93, I’d better be quick.

                               

A Close Bond: 1

A CLOSE BOND: 1

 


WHEN we think of Michael Haneke we cannot help but think ‘disturbing’, ‘frightening’, ‘chaotic’ or ‘disordered’, ‘dark’ and even perhaps ‘evil.’ I am thinking of Benny’s Video, The Piano Teacher, Hidden, The White Ribbon, Funny Games. This is why I was a little surprised with ‘Amour’ which I saw at the Nova tonight. Nothing really remotely frightening or disturbing, or evil for that matter- perhaps a little dark but nothing to jolt or shock the average filmgoer- well, perhaps one scene near the end, which we have seen before in ‘Betty Blue’ and ‘One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest’, involving a strategically placed pillow.

The old couple, Georges and Annie, are quite lovely. They have an authentic old people’s relationship, where there is still love, but everything is faded, much like the elderly couple in Elizabeth Jennings’ poem ‘One Flesh.’ One day Annie stares into space whilst Georges is talking to her, and cannot remember having a wet towel administered to her in attempt to jolt her back to her senses. Her health deteriorates after a series of strokes, and she becomes paralysed all the way down one side, and totally dependent upon her husband for help with walking, toileting, washing, feeding, etc. When a nurse demonstrates how to attach a ‘diaper’, the look on Annie’s face is one of despair, of bare acceptance, staring her mortality in the face. She makes him promise she will never end her days in a hospital, and he does his best, but the constant grim grind is exhausting and debilitating. In the end Georges starts to lose his mind.
 

Just about the whole film is set within the confines of their lovely, spacious Parisian apartment. The camera tracks lovingly across the surfaces of its rooms. There is something real and convincing about the way the whole drama is played out. We watch and flinch sometimes because we know it will probably happen to us. The way it is so truthful is its biggest strength, a kind of opposite to the farce that was another French film on a similar topic, ‘The Intouchables’. Haneke has pared back the scary challenging nature of his themes for this one, which is why it is probably more palatable to Western audiences, even winning the Oscar for Best Foreign film.

There are a lot of examples of Haneke’s customary stillness- long, lovely shots full of meaning- a long still of an expectant audience awaiting an orchestral recital- full screen images of a brief series of paintings- thought provoking imagery, such as when Georges cut the flowers off a series of stems. There were three occasions when he let water run freely from the kitchen tap.
              

Occasionally someone from the outside came to visit the apartment, but most of the time the couple alone were enough to interest us, inhabiting their space in complex ways. It wasn’t claustrophobic- the spaces within the apartment are huge- but the drama is played out between them and for them alone- even siblings (Isabelle Huppert) are like outsiders, and friends and carers are either tolerated or not.

I now realise that I said earlier that there is nothing in this film that is overly shocking. This is interesting because I must have clearly come to a point in my thinking that it is perfectly reasonable and understanding that a man might kill his wife if he thinks she is suffering. I am not 80 years old or older. I cannot fully appreciate the dilemma that was in George’s mind. And yet, many of us, seeing Annie’s tortured despair in lifting her buttocks for the nurse to administer a diaper, would fully appreciate his kind and brave decision.

 

Diane Middlebrook’s “Her Husband” on the 50th anniversary of Sylvia Plath’s death

                                                 
A couple of years ago I bought a biography of Katherine Mansfield (by Kathleen Jones), simply because it was about Katherine Mansfield. Having read a lot about her already, I wasn’t sure how much I would read that was new- however, I couldn’t resist, especially because it looked like such a big, beautiful book. To my surprise, it ended up being just as much about her husband, John Middleton Murry, than Katherine Mansfield herself. It chartered these fascinating years after Mansfield’s death in 1923 that I knew little about, including Murry’s subsequent marriages, his ongoing fascination with Mansfield, and the fact that he apparently to some extent reinvented her in the form of his first daughter. The book was a revelation because it was about so much more than Katherine Mansfield, and even the stuff I already knew was told with a lovely freshness and closeness.

I have just had the same experience all over again. At Sainsbury’s bookshop in Camberwell last weekend I came across ‘Her Husband’ by Diane Middlebrook. I thought this book would be yet another book about Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, similar to many I have read before. Again I was wrong. Most of the Plath stuff I knew, perhaps not in as much detail. But the book charts new ground for me in the subsequent chapters that deal with Ted Hughes’ relationship with Assia Wevill (I used to think it was an ‘affair’ until I discovered that their relationship went for six years, until Wevill’s suicide in 1969. Plath died at the start of 1963, and of course Hughes and Wevill had a daughter, Alexandra, together as well. Interestingly the book uses the term “affair” in its index pages). The book makes a big rush of the 80’s and 90’s (Hughes died in October 1998), however it charts the 70’s in good depth, an incredibly painful period for Hughes which makes fascinating reading- a decade of emotional turbulence and obscure poetry.
 

Well, it is now 50 years ago that Sylvia Plath gassed herself in her London home. It was a freezing winter back then in Jan/Feb 1963. I discovered this when I read about Keith Richards complaining about the same winter in his book in the chapters detailing the emergence of ‘The Rolling Stones.’ This seems to be one of the factors that may have led to her suicide. Perhaps, too, a factor may have been the fact that she had finally written the (‘Ariel’) poems that she said would make her name as a great poet. A sense of personal satisfaction, then, and accomplishment. Of course her separation from Hughes must not have helped. They were still seeing each other as friends at this time, propelled by the bond of their two young children, although this relationship sounds like it was very strained. Hughes was still seeing Assia Wevill, the woman he left Plath for. Plath must have felt incredibly wretched at being left in the lurch as a young woman with two small kids and not a lot of money. Her novel ‘The Bell Jar’ had just been published to mixed reviews. She was relying heavily on the support of friends and a good doctor who was extremely worried about her mental state. He must have known that she had tried to kill herself before. The story of how Sylvia Plath died has been told numerous times, and to her credit, Middlebrook spends little time on it. What I found much more interesting was the breakup itself, played in their home in Devon, with Plath’s mother as guest resident.
 

The story really begins in 1962 with a telephone call that Plath intercepts from Assia Wevill, meant for Hughes. After the call it is said that Plath ripped the telephone wires from the wall. Plath and Hughes spent several hours upstairs talking whilst Plath’s mother made herself and the children disappear discreetly next door. In the morning their daughter reported back to her grandmother that her parents were in the garden crying, and subsequently Hughes took a train to London. Plath’s mother later told the story of how her daughter made a big, blazing bonfire of her unfaithful husband’s work- manuscripts and letters.

Hughes then conducted his new relationship away from his wife (Assia’s Wevill’s husband subsequently becoming another victim), occasionally returning to his Devon home where for the sake of the children things became more civil. They even journeyed to Ireland together, which suggests they hadn’t entirely given up hope. It was there, though, at a friend’s house, that Hughes suddenly disappeared on the pretext of going fishing, and in fact went to Spain with Assia Wevill.
                                   

Eventually Hughes returned to Devon to pack his bags and move out. This was only four months before Plath would kill herself. Middlebrook describes the letters Plath wrote at this time as being “wild with pain.” She did, however, begin throwing herself into continuing to write the poems that would make her name- mostly ones filled with rage. This included her most famous poem, “Daddy”, written in fact the very next day Hughes left their home.

I don’t know why I find Sylvia Plath endlessly fascinating. Perhaps it is because her story is so raw and, like Marilyn Monroe, so well documented. This book also does a great job in making the Ted Hughes story endlessly fascinating as well.