Young John Harris, Still Venturing Out... (PART 2)

  

Continued from part 1…

SO, sometime towards July, after six inglorious months at 81 Rowan Street, Wangaratta, a second opportunity confronted John Harris.  An advertisement appeared in the local paper reading approximately thus: ‘A single man requires a boarder, male or female, non-smoker, professional,  in lovely old house in tree-lined street.’ Ha! That word ‘professional’ again. John Harris smirked as he perused the invitation, then steeled himself for the possible change. Leaving Lindsay, Peter and the fabulous thin grey spectre, Alan, would be no easy task, but one wintry day he made the journey around the corner to meet a new, older and wiser Alan, and the deal was struck virtually on the spot.

The house, in Templeton Street, was a lovely old house- with the emphasis on ‘old’, and Templeton Street certainly was tree-lined. The local Ovens River ran alongside it, and in the past, and probably into the future, it would be subject to floods. Alan was firmly ensconced into the nicer, front room, and John would have the back. There was also a nice sized kitchen, an ugly third bedroom, and a serviceable bathroom and lounge. Alan himself was a builder and part-time musician, quite a handyman who would soon make John look silly- he was always slightly uncomfortable around ‘handy men’- but this was a gentle, older soul, who was probably looking for mateship and colour and solidarity in his choice of John as boarder. It was true that John was becoming firm friends with some of the women in the town; nevertheless a father figure in the form of Alan was never going to go astray. And John immediately sensed that this was a much nicer Alan.

A few weeks into the adventure, John decided he’d like to paint the walls of his bedroom a baby blue. Alan was impressed. John was one to hang around for a while. So John bought the brush and paint somewhere and began splashing on thick layers of the lovely pastel paint. Alan wandered in to see how the preparation was going- the sanding, the preparing of floor covering, the different sheens of paint required, the sandpaper, the taping of the walls… the list goes on, especially for builder aficionados like Alan. Well, one can only imagine the mirth spread across Alan’s face as he became doubled over in pleasure at seeing John with paintbrush in hand, the baby blue paint looking streaky and unhealthy on the walls, and little globules all over the wooden floorboards. John’s parents visited Templeton Street a few days later, and what a wonderful story Alan was able to tell Mr and Mrs Harris after their long drive up from Reservoir.

 

Time went on and Alan and John became reasonably strong friends. John found himself a nice girlfriend and Alan had a short American woman called Bobby with him most of the time, and the four of them would sometimes go out as an unlikely foursome, to cheap restaurants, and one time to Beechworth to hear Alan play in his jazz band.

John’s coterie of friends had widened further towards the end of the year. Suddenly there was a party at Templeton Street. Alan was away for the weekend at Bobby’s pad in Yarrawonga. When he came back home at about midday on the Sunday he couldn’t believe his eyes. John was still in bed. The coterie of friends had left about six hours earlier. There was mess everywhere. Broken half empty packets of chips, cola and wine stains on cheap rugs, a couple of overflowing ash trays, a sink full of sauce-stained plates, a small piece of cold fried fish near the kitchen door, drinking glasses in almost every room in the house, clothes strewn on the floor. Alan waltzed into John’s bedroom, despair filtered all over his sad face. ‘I don’t feel as though this is my place anymore’, he blurted out. John was still a bit sleepy, and not his usual tactful self. ‘Well Alan, it’s not as if there’s a leaking car engine rotting on the lounge room floor.’

Things never did seem quite the same after all of this. Alan left one day, presumably with Bobby, with not exactly rancour in the air, but a certain formalness and coldness nevertheless. John had a bit of time to reflect. In two households he had independently inhabited in his short adult life, things had either turned sour or failed to ignite. There was another experience around the corner, which would become the third and final incarnation that would put these two experiences to shame, in terms of both dysfunction and unhappiness.

                           

 END PART 2

 

JOHN VENTURES OUT FOR THE FIRST TIME (PART 1)

       

 

 

JOHN Harris’ parents drove him up to Benalla, a three journey from Melbourne, to get some sort of insight to the new life he would shortly be leading. He was a mummy’s boy- a sort of daddy’s boy as well- living a very uncomplicated first twenty three years or so. He’d never mowed a lawn, never planted a tomato, never painted a fence. John Harris led a charmed life in luxurious Reservoir, and knew absolutely nothing about the real world. The day his parents drove him to Benalla, he sat in the back seat, contemplating the next chapter in his uneventful life with a degree of naïve confidence. ‘How could it be so difficult?’ he thought to himself. There was the teaching caper that was just around the corner, and the living in a rented house with others caper, and the new town of which he knew next to nothing caper. It all sounded fairly easy. He was always natural and good humoured, and knew he would always be able to fit in. Benalla High was about to be the location for his first teaching position.

Weeks later, John Harris arrived, solo, to the main street of Wangaratta, just thirty kilometres north of Benalla. Someone told him it was better not to live in the same town as your students, so he prudently chose Wangaratta as the town of choice, for the multitude of virgin experiences that lay excitingly ahead. His car was loaded with bags and books and very little else. He travelled lightly and knew that he would have to buy things, but there was no hurry overall. There was an advertisement that he had answered from Melbourne, just to make sure that first day went smoothly. ‘WANTED: A SINGLE PERSON TO SHARE A COMFORTABLE THREE BEDROOM HOME WITH A COUPLE AND ANOTHER SINGLE PERSON. PROFESSIONAL PEOPLE NEED ONLY APPLY.’

The ‘professional’ part appealed to him. ‘You must make sure the people are sensible and professional’, more experienced adults advised him. The prospect of living at 51 Rowan Street was good. He saw right away what a lovely home it was. Potentially a bit noisy, being right underneath the overpass, but John Harris was given a comfortable, reasonable sized bedroom at the front of the house. The other occupants proved to be very difficult to get to know. Alan had just broken off an engagement- or, rather, it seemed that he was the one on the losing side. He was the other single person in the room next door. Overly serious, morose you might say, seemingly depressed and totally non- communicative. Oh, dear. John felt that Alan was impenetrable, and John wasn’t used to that. Later he would call Alan the ‘thin, grey spectre’, but never to his face, only to his amused friends in Melbourne.

The biggest bedroom was inhabited by an older, mature couple called Peter and Lyndsay. They owned a photocopying company in the town. They were a little more friendly, but wrapped up in their own lives and not particularly interested in poor John Harris. Where John was expecting friendship, John was receiving acquaintance. You pay your money, you get a room. That was the kind of alien thinking that unnerved John. Even after weeks, and months, went by, John still didn’t feel comfortable in this modern, breezy house. He would usually go to Melbourne on weekends. One Sunday night, after a particularly enjoyable time in Melbourne with dear family and friends, John reluctantly returned to Wangaratta, but was nevertheless in a good mood as he entered the household and wandered into the lounge area. Alan, Lyndsay and Peter were all watching ’60 Minutes.’ ‘Hi’ said John with a confident, optimistic tone, ‘how are things here?’ ‘OK’ was the reply. ‘How was Melbourne?’ There was a distinct lack of tenderness in the voice. In fact, none of the three occupants of the house even looked at John. Their gaze remained on the television. John spent a couple more minutes in the lounge, utterly deflated, and crawled back to his room, to his desk, and to his diary. His diary got a good workout this particular month.

                       

Things improved a bit after this. There were still lonely times ahead, though.  John would wander the streets of Wangaratta with his ‘Walkman’ listening to Van Morrison songs for comfort, delaying his return to the house as long as possible: ‘Oh, won’t you stay? Stay a while with your own ones. This old world is so cold. Don’t care nothing for your soul, that you share, with your own ones.’

And then there was the awkwardness in the kitchen. Alan didn’t go out much, and as much as John tried to avoid a clash of cooking times with Alan, invariably they would become hungry at the same time. One memorable day, Alan was in the kitchen cooking eggs and baked beans for lunch. There were your usual four elements to choose from. John found one that was free. He planted his skillet pan on this and scooped the hamburgers inside. The air was thick with tension. John and Alan had not spoken for weeks. Perhaps a grunt here, and a grunt there. It had been like a monastery of two silent monks. With a tiny bit of space enveloping them, Alan and John managed to cook each other’s sad and sorry meals, almost elbow to elbow, and should to shoulder, without speaking a solitary word. It was almost impossible, yet they pulled it off.

School and teaching motored on reasonably comfortably. John took himself off sometimes to the local nightclub called ‘The Pinsent’ and met some local women. Things got easier rather than tougher. But he never felt happy in the tight confines of 81 Rowan Street. What a miserable household. Something comparable to a house in an Edgar Allan Poe short story.  John stayed six months. Eventually, and miraculously, he answered another advertisement.

 

END PART ONE

 

 

ON THE DEATH OF RAY MANZAREK

                                           

SO RAY is dead all of a sudden. I saw it in The Age last week, and I didn’t even know it was coming. It hasn’t a big effect on me like the death of John Lennon, occurring whilst I was having fun on a sunny day in a back yard pool. Dying in your 70’s after a life of sex, drugs and rock’n’roll isn’t so sudden, or shocking or surprising. Not like murder is. Still, The Doors were my favourite band for a long time, and I was barely cognizant of music when Jim Morrison died.

I never really thought a lot about Ray as I became obsessed with The Doors in the late 70’s and 80’s and even into the 90’s, but I think I have underestimated him. I’ve heard the story about when the Doors first got together- there are photos of it- staying somewhere near Venice Beach, trying to write songs. They set themselves a target to write songs this particular weekend- I’m guessing around mid-1966- and only Robbie Krieger really came back with anything substantial- just a little rock ‘n’ roll number he called ‘Light My Fire.’ Yes it was Robby’s tune, and Robby’s words, but I bet Ray had a big say in the way it was fully constructed, beyond the drafting phase. Think about the swirling organ at the start, and I wouldn’t mind betting he created that sound, just like John Densmore might have thought up the idea of the bang on the snare as the song’s first noise. The Doors, like The Beatles, I gather, all joined together to create their songs, like all good bands do.

I’m sure there is any number of key Ray influences in lots of Doors’ songs. ‘The End’ may shine in particular because of Jim’s words and Robby’s guitar, likewise Robby’s palpable influence on ‘Spanish Caravan’ or ‘Been Down So Long.’ But think about ‘Riders on the Storm’ and Ray’s pretty (for want of a better word) piano/organ comes to mind, likewise ‘Love Street’, the piano beautifully jaunting, the swirling mad organ in ‘Strange Days’, and especially in an underrated song like ‘Not To Touch The Earth’ with its exhilaratingly mad organ swirls.

           

Beyond the studio, I can see that Ray was an integral part of The Doors line-up. I remember Jim Morrison once saying that whenever he was getting ahead of himself, he would take one look at Ray and realise that he wasn’t Superman (it may not sound like it, but probably a nice compliment). It seems that Ray and Jim were pretty close, more than the others, and certainly more so than Jim and John. It was probably Ray that in some ways held The Doors together, talking Jim out of leaving the group, being a band spokesperson when something went wrong, like in Miami. And Ray was a crazy guy. You only have to read his memoirs about life in The Doors to realise that. Pages and pages about sex, and shamanism, and rituals, and what not. Ray used the (possibly LA) expression ‘man’ all the time, and he was, it seems, excessive in the way he spoke and the things that he said. He went on to create music and manage bands when the Doors ‘died’ but always associated himself proudly with The Doors legacy.

When I saw the obituary of Ray Manzarek in The Age the other day, I thought back to my days of being obsessed with The Doors and driving my friends crazy. It was a lonely time because I remember being, it seemed, not only the only fan in my school in Melbourne, but seemingly the only person who even knew The Doors existed. I would play the first album and ‘LA Woman’ over and over again, and it seemed back then that every album and every song they wrote was genius. It was not until later, from a less involved perspective, that I came to a personal view that albums like ‘Waiting for the Sun’ and ‘Morrison Hotel’ were not quite as good as I thought, and that even songs like ‘Queen of the Highway’ were downright average.

Ray was like a father figure to the group I am imagining. Not just in terms of age- he was the oldest, but not by a great deal, and barely older than Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger- but also in the sense that he may have been the wisest, the most experienced and most level headed, and probably the most settled or secure. This is only an inkling, because I cannot be really sure.

One day, I know, Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell will die- and then I will really feel it.

                                            

 

'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.