september 20, 1902
Friday 22 September 2006 | I like a cookie
…was, in fact, Stevie Smith’s birthday.
Ages ago, from some Plath biography or another, I’d tucked away in my head a confession of Sivvy’s, that she was “a desperate Stevie Smith addict.” Somehow I missed the fact that the phrase actually came from a letter of Plath’s written to Smith, in November of 1962, right after she had separated from Ted Hughes.
Plath wrote: “I better say straight out that I am a Smith addict, a desperate Smith addict.” She told Smith of her plans to move to London with Frieda and Nicholas, and she requested that they meet once she had settled in “…to cheer me on a bit. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.” And Smith apparently wrote back, hoping that the move would go well and that they would be able to meet (though she admits in her reply that she doesn’t really read contemporary poetry, which presumably meant that she didn’t know Sylvia’s work, as indeed few did).
But not long after her move to London, Sylvia committed suicide (on February 11, 1963—one of the only literary dates that has any adhesive ability whatsoever in my brain, the others being 1863 as Dickinson’s annus mirabilis and 1798 the publication of Lyrical Ballads) so the two never met.
If they had, would Sylvia’s rush into the red eye of morning been stayed? Would she have found some comfort in friendship with another poet half in love with easeful death, one who’d herself tried (and failed) to cut her own wrists at her office desk one morning, in a rush of anger which later humiliated her greatly?
I think of a Jessamyn West short story (but can’t remember its title, only that it’s in Love, Death and the Ladies’ Drill Team) in which she envisions, on the same night, Thoreau and Emily Brontë, separated by an ocean and by their ignorance of each other’s existence—but each romantic restless and yearning for the companionship of a mysterious other, someone as passionate about nature’s wildness as they themselves. I’ve long had a theory that if Sylvia had stayed alive, she would have become a crazy-intense second-wave feminist, burning and chanting and defying and demonstrating alongside Germaine Greer and Robin Morgan and Gloria Steinem and Rita Mae Brown, possibly becoming a Sapphist herself, Adrienne Rich’s lover—and almost certainly winding up with a nice fat university position and a contract with Knopf, if that’s what she wanted. Or remarried to someone you wouldn’t expect at all—some completely quiet and unassuming faculty husband in any department other than that of English literature.
Or perhaps, given over to Stevie’s influence, Sylvia would have ripened into an eccentric crazy old lady poet, wearing Peter Pan collars and badly-dyed suits and a schoolgirl bang and reciting double- and triple-edged doggerel in a quavery soprano. In any case Ms. Sylvia, dead then at 31, would be dead by now as well.
For it’s September 22, 2006; and we will never know.
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