The Sylvia I Loved, The Sylvia I Regretted
On visiting her gravesite, on ghosts, on the women we swallow daily.
The grave was quiet. The air, cold and still.
In late October last year, at the churchyard of St. Thomas A. Beckett in Heptonstall, Sarah Westcott and I stood. I had not gone to Hebden Bridge with the express need to visit Sylvia Plath’s grave, though I was there for the festival being held in her honour. The question — to visit, not to visit — kept spinning in my mind like a bright penny, coppery and unstable, the entire train journey from London. Perhaps, like so many other feral feminists had done, I too would take the flat of a penknife to the Hughes on her tombstone, render it even more ragged than it already was. Were I eighteen, I would have so done, without a farthing of regret. Now, twice that age precisely, it was confronting to self-witness myself in the piercing West Yorkshire light: how less certain I had become of particular, angry truths I held close to my breast as a younger woman. The bright penny might have spun on endlessly, if not for Sarah announcing that Sunday morning, optimistic and calm, that she might go to the churchyard. It was the most natural of states to fall in step with her, up the hill and into the tiny town.
My reluctance was nothing to do with lack of intensity. I had fallen in love with Sylvia in my teens, and then as passionately fallen out of love with her in my early twenties. We had, and have, backstory. The one thing I could not be accused of was indifference in my affections or in their diminishments; yet I was wary of being seen as an ingrate at the feast. What was my purpose here, if not to praise her? How to reflect the truth of my complicated, complicating herstory with Plath, a cracked mirror unto itself? I was not there to mount a hagiography to Sylvia, but neither was I there to berate her. I stood, and breathed. It was cold. Sarah and I said fine and private things to each other, threads of conversation that still warm me, many months later. She was the Right one to visit Sylvia with, for many reasons. Crucially, like me, we wanted to neither take nor post a grave photograph. You will not find one in this post. It wasn’t my purpose for going, though if it were the purpose of others, I would never fault them. Indeed, on our way back through the overgrown weeds of the dirt path away from Sylvia, a glorious coven of young witches made their way to her, to celebrate and mourn as they saw right and just. We smiled at each other, respectful non-conspirators united by a breath of psychogeography.
No epiphany, then, visiting Sylvia in the fog and rain: no terrible angel split the sky, anointing me with a sword of revelation declaiming I understood her better, or myself with greater charity. Nor did I enter Heptonstall on foot with any such hope. If I hope anything, now, it is that Sylvia might have appreciated my honesty. She was, in the work she shared with the world, unfailingly that: who could accuse her of giving less than she could? How do you say to a writer you belove that they have once broken your heart by their failings to imagine you in their world? Many will reflect, and have, glassy-eyed with grieving, on all the splendours of further writing Plath might have given us, had she lived longer. Had she lived longer, I hope she would have retracted her former racisms in prose, her diminishments of women unlike herself. I hope she would have looked at herself, canny and blazing with feral intelligence, and saw what we must, each of us, inevitably saddle with: that even our brilliance can break a heart, and will. That it depends on each of us, writer or windowmaker, to live with that, and reshape our relationship to our past ungoodness in writing or in sculpting glass.
On our way back from the grave, we stopped by the Friends of Heptonstall Museum, where some fringe festival events were slated: cozy, convivial gatherings buoyed by lashings of strong tea and secondhand sale books. The Listening Chair was there, on loan from Pennine Heritage’s Birchcliffe Centre. Amidst the jolly tumult of a writers’ talk that was just wrapping up, I sat and let Sylvia’s own distinctive, sonorous drawl fill me. What you see on my face, listening, isn’t anything so monochromatic as bliss. Neither more nor less, it’s other: a peaceful Plathian otherness in which I have come to find some contentment, some rare illumination. Something like a room in one’s home that was flooded, once, and as a consequence still smells of the sea.
I don’t seek a bucolic accommodation with Sylvia Plath. The relationship we have is uneasy, haunted, friendly. While it may never be possible for me to adulate her, I know that whenever I hear her own voice, reading her own words, I will be galvanized. I will stop, and remember how I loved her once. How, despite bitter awareness and thorny coming of age, love doesn’t die, though it be ever so pierced with arrows.