 Thank you for joining us for Mechanics Institute online and for our program, a conversation between Heather Clark, author of Red Comet, The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath, and Allison the Cloud, author of Tendonists, a novel. I'm Laura Shepherd, director of events at Mechanics Institute. For those of you who are new to the Institute, we were founded in 1854 and we're one of San Francisco's most vital literary and cultural centers in the heart of the city. We feature our General Interest Library, an international chess club, ongoing author and literary programs, and our Friday Night Cinema Lit Film Series. Please visit our website for all of our programs and offerings and we're so pleased to tell you that the library is now open five days a week. So please come down to 57 Post Street in San Francisco and see us. Also, I'd like to mention that our two books by our authors, these two gorgeous books, are available for you to purchase either online at alexander.com or at an independent bookstore near you. Today, we're going to celebrate and exalt two of the most iconic, publicized and controversial writers of the 20th century. These two writers are portrayed in epic works, one a biography about the relationships, inspirations, and ascent, and literary achievements of Silvia Plath, and the other, a work of fiction, the trials and tribulations of the great D. H. Lawrence closing at the end of his life around Lady Travelly's Lover. The two writers both defy the conventions of their time and will also explore how they intersect. So before we begin, I'd like to introduce our two guests today. Heather Clark earned her bachelor's degree in English Literature from Harvard University and a doctorate in English from Oxford University. Her awards include a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Fellowship, a Leon Levy Biography Fellowship at the City University of New York, and a Visiting U.S. Fellowship at the Eccles Center for American Studies, British Library. A former visiting scholar at Oxford Center for Life Writing, she is the author of The Grief of Influence, Silvia Plath and Ted Hughes, and the Ulster Renaissance, Poetry and Bell Fast, 1962 to 1972. And her work has appeared in publications including The Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and she's recently served as the scholarly consultant for the BBC documentary, Silvia Plath, Life Inside the Bell Jar. The Short Life and Blazing Art of Silvia Plath was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist. And she divides her time between New York and Yorkshire, England, where she is a Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the University of Huddersfield, but she's here today from Chapelcloth, New York. And Allison McLeod is the author of three novels, The Changeling, The Wave Theory of Angels, and Unexploded, which was long-listed to the Man Booker Prize in 2013, a two-story collection. She is a joint winner of the Eccles British Literary Library Writers Award of 2016 and was a finalist for the 2017 Governor General's Award. She is Professor of Contemporary Fiction at the University of Chichester and then in 2018 she became a visiting professor to Write Full Time and she's joining us from Brighton. So we are so pleased to have these esteemed writers with us today. So please welcome Allison McLeod and Heather Clark. So ladies, as I mentioned, these two incredibly epic books and really totally amazing works. I want to find out from you what inspired you, what sparked your interest in these two writers, these two iconic writers, and also what moved you forward to write in this epic form. So we're going to hear from Allison McLeod with Cloud First. Allison. Thanks, Laura, thanks so much and thank you everyone who's joined us. I'm about to say this evening, as you can see through my window, but thank you for whatever time it is in your world at the moment. So Laura, to pick up on your question, what took me to DH Lawrence, what inspired me to go to an author I had absolutely, like many of us, read in my teens, been inspired by my teens from first coming across him with sons and lovers at school and then moving on through the rainbow, Women in Love and Lady Chatterley. I think I went to when I was 17, probably when I wanted to find out, cobble together some kind of sexual education for myself and I thought it might be between those pages. I don't really think it was, but what I discovered instead was one of my earliest experiences of feeling moved by a story. So I read Jane Eyre and the ending of Jane Eyre moved me, but something really shifted within me, this expression on this love affair and the great tenderness of it. And tenderness, some of you may know, was actually, what's the title of my novel, I've borrowed it in a sort of form of homage to Lady Chatterley's lover because it was one of Lawrence's early working titles for his novel, which was his last novel of life. So Lawrence, again many of you will know, died at the age of 44, of tuberculosis, died young and he poured all the last of his energies into Lady Chatterley. It sort of represented his philosophy about the regeneration of a broken post-war, post-World War I society. And yet he ran into a problem, in spite of all the leafy greenness and celebration of Lady Chatterley, of course it was very, for the day and perhaps in some ways for us still today, very sexually explicit. His publisher Martin Secker said, no, can't publish it. And so the story began of its banning. My story is the story of its birth, its creation, its life, and its suppression, and eventually its liberation. All of those things I've really been long interested in, but I wouldn't have written a novel, and certainly not a big one as we have here, had I not discovered one thing above all, I thought that's a novel. I discovered a telegram sent by the FBI in 1959, instructing J. Edgar Hoover, instructing from Washington an operative at the Chicago field office to acquire, quote, unquote, a copy of this highly controversial book. And the Chicago field agent was instructed to be very discreet in that acquisition. So that happened. And there I am thinking, what on earth would the FBI be wanting with a novel in the middle of the Cold War? So that was the question that propelled me on, and it took me into all sorts of surprising places through freedom of information requests, through uncovering FBI protocols, and from realizing that at the very time that Lady Chatterley, the novel is about to be put on trial for obscenity. At that same point, at that very point, the Kennedy election is coming up. Kennedy Nixon, 1960 election is on the horizon. And of course, Hoover has his fingers in those pies at the very same time. For me in my novel, the character of Jackie Kennedy, who was a great admirer of Lawrence, she spent at least an hour and a half with the critic Lionel Trilling in 1962, the two of them locked heads talking all about Lawrence's novels. So this little scene, I'm going to read you just a taste, is I take the liberty, and this is one calculated liberty I take with a novel I spent six years researching, but in this case, I take what I imagine to be that conversation between Jackie Kennedy, the great admirer, who had some uncanny similarities at that pre-White House stage with Lady Chatterley. I can see why she really might have admired that book. And she's speaking in this, not in 1962, but I've moved the conversation back. So I'm going to give you, I'm going to truncate it. So I might bump a little bit as I read. I'm trying to just cut it down a little bit as I read. They're in Cape Cod. They're at the Kennedy Compound in Hyannisport. And that's all previously described. So I'm just going to plunge in. So it's Critic Lionel trailing 1959 with Jackie Kennedy at that age 29. She had perhaps an hour before Caroline would come toddling across the wide lawn with her regal grandmother Rose and mod their aging English nanny in tow. Jackie cleared the table hastily and returned with her notebook. Thank you for indulging me. She checked her notes, she returned with her notebook. She checked her notes as if she were about to move once again into old interviewer mode. Politics, you say, needs the imaginative qualities of literature. I like that very much if that's not too tried a thing to say. I'm flattered, Mrs. Kennedy. Jacqueline, please, I'm not trying to flatter, I'm trying to understand. By which I mean, please continue. Liberalism, you argue, needs literature's sense of variousness, possibility, complexity. You say that in the American metaphysic, reality is always material reality, hard and resistant. Well, it's a relief when one actually agrees with oneself, and he laughs. But she was reaching for something more, staring into the wide untroubled sky, as if she might draw her question from its resounding blue. How then does our native metaphysic evolve into something less hard, something more nuanced? How can we as a people come to love variousness and difficulty in the way we do with literature and stories and poetry when we're in love with modern conveniences and endlessly stray highways and segregated lives? In some ways, it's simple, Mrs. Kennedy, books, good books, bad books. They're all conversations, after all, dialogues. They're not theses, they're not sermons, they're not ideologies, or novels aren't at least. We need bad books so we can understand the power of good books, good books so we can talk to ourselves, so we can see ourselves as we are. So we come to understand, actually to experience, in the live unfolding of a story, that the reality that others are rarely other, only with such understanding can our sympathies as a nation-state mature. That's just a little taste of a conversation that's unfolding. I'm going to pass over to Heather to introduce you to her brilliant exploration of Sylvia Plav. And then we'll come back and we'll be in conversation. I want to keep talking about Lauren's. I'm so fascinated by what you've just said, and the fact that Jackie Kennedy was a huge admirer of Lauren's, I had no idea. I hadn't either. It was just, and I needed a bridging character between Laurence's world and the FBI. It was too, that was too dissonant to bring. And I just thought really, who might have, and I thought she was a big reader. She had been a reporter, so she would know all about the show trial in 1960. She had wanted to be a writer herself and published in the New Yorker. And then I came across in notes by Diana Trilling that that's what it brought her together with Lionel Trilling. So, wow, that is fascinating. We'll come back when we go to. Yeah, yeah, I'm so intrigued by historical fiction. And sometimes the line between biography and historical fiction is so porous. So I'm just fascinated by what you've said. Thank you. Thank you, Laura, for that wonderful introduction and thank you everyone for for joining us. So there have been a lot of biographies of Sylvia Plath. My biography, I think, was the eighth sort of major biography and the 11th biography, if you include shorter ones. So something that people always asked me was, why do we need another biography of Sylvia Plath? And I sort of became defensive, actually. And I felt like I always had to justify the writing of this book to myself and to other people. But my answer really comes down to the fact that there was not the kind of serious, scholarly, literary, critical biography out there that I felt a writer of her caliber deserved. And there had been several Plath biographies. But I felt that many of them fell short in different ways. Either they pathologized her or they were just really thin on detail. And maybe that wasn't their fault because they had problems with the estate or we're talking pre-internet research today. So I felt like there was room for the big biography about Sylvia Plath. And the person who was my sort of biographical inspiration was Hermione Lee and her biography of Virginia Woolf, which was my gold standard. So I always had Hermione Lee's work in the back of my mind as something that I really hope to aspire to. And there is a Hermione Lee quote that I feel like I need to share it with you because that was sort of the guiding premise of the biography. And the quote is in her very short introduction to biography, which is published by Oxford University Press. And in it she says, women whose lives have been affected by mental illness, self-harm, suicide, have often been treated biographically as psychological cases or victims first and professional writers second. And that quote really stuck with me. And I felt like that was so true in Sylvia Plath's case. And I think she was talking about Virginia Woolf, but I felt like it really applied to Plath. So I tried in this book to always treat Plath as a professional writer first. And I didn't want to sort of whitewash her struggles with depression. Obviously, it's a huge part of her life and a huge part of her story. But I didn't want that to be it. You know, sometimes that trajectory seemed to take center stage in previous biographies. And I quote Maggie Nelson in my introduction. Maggie Nelson says, to be the Sylvia Plath of anything is a bad thing. And I sort of wanted to try to push back on that and treat her as well. I think she's one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. And so I wanted the question that I always had in my mind was, how did Sylvia Plath become the writer that she became? It was a very simple question, but that's what guided my research and my writing. But of course, I had to do a lot of research about mental health, psychiatry at mid-century. I went to McLean Hospital. They gave me a tour of the grounds. I interviewed the archivist. I was able to go through their archive. So I had to learn a lot about many other non-literary topics. But I guess it was that sense of maybe anger or injustice that she had been pathologized, that she had sort of become a cliche in a way of the hysterical woman writer. The critic Jacqueline Rose has said that she says no writer has been more hystericized by the worst of a male tradition than Sylvia Plath. So which I know that's a provocative statement, but I saw that in some of the biographies. So I wanted to kind of give her the Hermione Lee treatment. So that was why I wrote it. I could read a short section of it. And we can talk about Lawrence and Sylvia Plath's love of Lawrence in a minute. So one of the things that surprised me when I was writing this book was just how how tough it was for women in the mid fifties. And I wasn't quite prepared for the historical reality of that. I thought I knew. And then you would read contemporary newspaper accounts or reading Plath's diary in her letters. And it was just even though she was at Smith College, which was this nurturing, wonderful place for women, there was just obstacle after obstacle thrown up in her way. And I had I gained such a respect for her and how much she had to fight to achieve what she did. So let me just read a sort of historical section that I hope gives you a sense of the difficult times that she launched her career. And this is I'm going to read to you part of Adley Stevenson's speech to the Smith College graduating class of 1955. And remember Adley Stevenson was a Democrat. He was a Democratic presidential candidate. He was a liberal darling. So he said to them, this assignment for you as wives and mothers has great advantages. So when he talks about this assignment, he is talking about the humble role of the housewife. He tells them they're going to be housewives. And he says, in the first place at his homework, you can do it in the living room with a baby in your lap or in the kitchen with a can opener in your hands. If you're really clever, maybe you can even practice your saving arts on that unsuspecting man while he's watching television. Stevenson acknowledged, quote, the sense of contraction in the lost horizons, unquote, that these women would feel in their new domestic roles. And he says, once they wrote poetry, now it's the laundry list. They had hoped to play their part in the crisis of the age, but what they do is wash diapers. Stevenson hoped this view was not, quote, too depressing, but he concluded that women never had it as good as you do now. So I just, that's a bit of historical context, which I wrote in my introduction because I thought that speech really drove home the sexism of the time and how hard she had to work to achieve what she did. Amazing. Amazing. Thank you for that introduction to both of the books. And I just want to move on to another question, which also, you've touched on in brief, but I'd like to delve deeper. You know, in your book, Allison, there's a whole section of comments from supporters and critics of Lawrence during the trial. And that quote from Steven Spender, who's a poet and an editor of, is it a magazine? Encounter is a magazine. An encounter, which is sort of the premier literary journal of the day. Yeah. And he says that Lawrence's book is truthful. And of course, the truth is dangerous. So I'd like to just pose to both of you, what truths did both of these authors bear? What did they bring? What was underneath? What messages are they bringing forth to the world that was too dangerous for their time? And also, what myths did you both want to bust? I think, Heather, you spoke about this a little bit, but I'd like to hear more from both of you. It's interesting that you selected that, Laura, because Steven Spender, in a sense, connected Plath to Lawrence in that he was the sort of senior poet who got her tickets for the day of the verdict at the infamous 1960 obscenity trial at the Old Bailey in London, the one that was had for, let me just grab it, for this edition, the Penguin edition, it's a little original from 1960, that caused the great, great scandal because it wasn't going to be an expensive edition aimed at gentlemen of means with private libraries, it was going to be sold for three and six, which was the cost of 10 cigarettes, and it meant that servants, schoolboys, schoolgirls, anyone, housewives with their pin money, could get this book. And that's exactly what Sir Alan Nade of Penguin Publishing intended, but for that reason he was brought to trial. So this book, going back to Spender's comment about explosive or dangerous, well Lawrence himself in 1928, as he was right finishing it in 1927, wrote to, who he hoped would be his publisher, Martin Secker, and said it's a bit of a revolution, it's a bit of a bomb, and Lawrence was a bomb thrower. He was born in 1885, he was essentially born a Victorian, but very much at odds with the culture, the milieu of a small mining community in which he grew. So this book, and incidentally because I'm more or less in the States with you at the moment, this never gets said, this is the 1959 Grove Press New York edition, which is made to look very sober and very almost scholarly and very proper. And the reason the FBI was pursuing this book is because they were pursuing Barney Rossett of Grove Press, who is what we would now call a diverse publisher, but was publishing homosexuals, explicit books, Europeans, people of various minorities wherever, he was interested in publishing, breaking the mainstream. So it was completely natural for him to take on Lady Chatterley. But the book, in my view, it's now dated in some ways, it absolutely is, some of the conversations are dated, there's something huge life affirming that transcends all that, and there's still danger in my view, because Lawrence gives expression to the body and human correspondence, human intercourse at every level. It's human intercourse that is rendered there with a kind of honesty that is still actually quite surprising and quite radical today for fiction writers on the page. We all know that sex can write badly. He really took risks with that, and he pushes it to a certain intimacy that is still fresh and makes me sort of go, God, look at the daring of that on the page. For Lawrence, the notion of tenderness wasn't sentimental, it wasn't just about some nice cuddly feeling. For him, tenderness, the reason it's so central to Lady Chatterley is because it was Mellers, Oliver Mellers the Gamekeeper says, I stand for the touch of bodily awareness between human beings and I stand for the touch of tenderness. For Lawrence, tenderness was achieved as a kind of coming through, coming through shame, coming through the darker impulses forced upon perhaps us all at some point by strictures and hypocrisies. So it's about the vulnerabilities, the fallibilities, the shame, and about pushing through all that to honest human expression at every level from conversation to the body. That for Lawrence, tenderness was wrapped up in something quite complex, human sympathy, but human sympathy born at genuine contact. So that's what caused the bomb to go off with this book and it went off first in the States with Grove Press when J. Edgar Hoover sent in agents to confiscate boxes in a Washington, D.C. bookshop and have them locked up as evidence and it went on from there right through the appeals court and Hoover wanted Rosset taken down. They had a huge file and of course at the time I'm researching, of course we had a huge file on un-American activity, but we now know that as well at the very same time, Hoover was covertly monitoring over 250 senators and congressmen including the Kennedys and over, well the estimates go between 200,000 and 10 million private American citizens. So within a democracy we've got citizens spying on citizens and for me, tenderness above all is about, I suppose for me, my real concern was liberal democracy and how precious and how fragile it is and it was concerns today that made me look back to 19, concerns today around surveillance, concerns today around banning and that made me go back to this story. Sorry that's a long answer. Well you know I think Sylvia Plath, Lawrence was always such a touchstone for her and Laura you asked about truth and what kinds of truth maybe Plath was trying to tell and I think I have to mention Lawrence and my answer because she started reading Lawrence in high school but she also read him in college. She had read almost all of Lawrence's novels by 1956. People think that Ted Hughes sort of introduced her to Lawrence but he didn't and she was obsessed with Lawrence. She writes in her journals all about him. She writes about reading his novels and she feels so attuned to his female characters and so by the time she meets Ted Hughes, she's sort of and I argue in one of my my second book that Lawrence was sort of what brought them together in a way that that both of them were so almost in love with Lawrence's works that that he was just a natural bridge between them. So I wanted to read just a short quote which gets at this idea of what kinds of truths maybe Plath wanted to tell and I think maybe the first answer that comes to mind is that in Ariel, her last poetry collection, I think she tried to tell the truth about women's lives and that had not really been done before. She introduced anger into the female poetic lexicon. She wrote honestly and unsentimentally about motherhood which is still a subject that is deeply sentimentalized at least here in America I think. It's starting to change but like you, Allison, when you read go back and read Lady Chatterley and you still feel like it's radical. When I read Plath's poems of motherhood, I still feel like oh this is so honest and I she's one of the few people I feel like who writes in that way that you know the joys but also the difficulties and the harsh sometimes harsh realities. But just to bring Lawrence back into the conversation I'll read you this is from a letter that Plath wrote to I think it's to her mother. Yeah, so when Ted won this big poetry contest, Mary and Moore was one of the judges and this is in 1957 and Mary and Moore wanted Ted to take two poems out of the book because they were both sort of more sexually explicit. So Plath is furious about this and she writes to her mother and I'll just read you a snippet from this letter because she mentions Lawrence. We feel strongly that to cut these two poems out would be to silence a large part of Ted's voice which is raised against the snide sneaking coy weekend review poets whose sex is in their head and the prissy abstract poets who don't dare to talk about love in anything but mild distant abstractions. It is Dylan Thomas but with a faith and deep religious morality which is also Lawrence both misunderstood by many blind people. Ironically enough I opened Mary and Moore's book of critical essays to see if she ever treated poets who wrote about sex directly and honestly and the page fell open to this letter from D. H. Lawrence to Miss Moore when she edited the dial and quoting Lawrence now Plath is quoting Lawrence. I knew some of the poems would offend you but then some part of life must offend you too and even beauty has its thorns and its nettle stings and its poppy poison. Nothing is without offense and nothing should be if it is part of life and not merely abstraction. And then we're back to Plath. Naturally Ted and I agree with Lawrence. I think he puts his finger on her blind spot most eloquently. So that's just a little I mean there's so much about Lawrence in Plath but that I hope gives you a sense of how important his truth-telling was to her and so yeah I could go on but he was so he was such a touchstone for Sylvia Plath. Could I just share with you a tiny little lines I love I think you just a few lines and I just came across this is what is it 1958 1958 February 23rd 1958 and it's very quick and she just says today from today from coffee till tea time at six I read in Lady I read Lady Tattlee's lover drawn back again with the joy of a woman living with her own gamekeeper and women in love and sons and lovers love love why do I feel I would have known and love Lawrence how many women must feel this and be wrong she's right on that I opened a rainbow which I've never read and was sucked into the concluding Ursula and Skrobensky episode and sank back breath knocked out of me as I read of their London hotel their Paris trip their Riverside loving while Ursula studied at college this is the stuff of my life my life different but no less brilliant and splendid and the flow of my story will take me beyond this my way arrogant I felt mystically that if I read Lawrence sorry if I read Wolf read Lawrence their vision so different is so like mine I can be itched and kindled to a great work she's she's amazing isn't she I love I love that yeah and she actually wrote she wrote a paper about Lawrence at Cambridge and she she rhapsodizes about Lady Tattlee's lover as well and you know Ted Hughes somebody well I won't get into the the was she a feminist was she not an argument because it's just you know but Ted Hughes always said she was Laurentian she wasn't women's lib which I'm not saying I agree with that but that was always his take on I think that's what I feel to that would have been her starting impulse would have been her natural grounding place yeah when she not so yeah he was he was just an enormous presence in their lives and she used to always talk about how she and Ted wanted to travel all over Europe because they wanted to be like Frida and Lawrence yeah they just had those two in their in their mind and then of course they had children and it wasn't really that went to Devon instead they couldn't go out to New Mexico or exactly and Lawrence I think always had a sense in fact Ian Forster said this of Lawrence that Lawrence knew that he wouldn't find acceptance within his own time that he looked Ian Forster said this and Lawrence's obituary that Lawrence always knew it would be the young who would pick him up and make sense of him and understand and she was obviously in and I place in my novel well Plath is in my novel moving through Cambridge near the end of my book and around the time of the trial but I also I also imagine a trilling reading that little bit from Forster to Jackie Kennedy because she clearly was of that generation that felt his influence and interestingly going back to your point Laura so going back to your point Heather about housewives and that terrible terrible Adlai Stevenson speech Jackie Kennedy in the year her yearbook from Farmington school for girls her ambition her primary ambition the yearbook stated not to be a housewife oh wow yeah and then she became of course housewife to the nation and it's a she hated the title first lady she said it sounds like a saddle horse so interesting the connections yeah the connections are so so it's just very visceral you can just just feel to feel this deep connection that they had and in fact I want to just talk about that and how they actually intersected because Sylvia did attend the obscenity trial and Heather do you want to just talk about that a little bit and we're both talk about that how how how did that how do they connect in that way yeah I mean she and I you know Allison you can talk more about this or correct me if I get the details wrong but but yeah Stephen Spender got her a ticket to the old Bailey on November 2nd and it was yeah that was the last day of the trial and so she she of course was on Lawrence's side and and and you know I just sort of talked about how part of her entire poetic philosophy really some of it at least comes from Lawrence so she took notes she scribbled all of these notes in her journal and some of these notes have were included in the published journals so she yeah she she she wrote about I'm just reading from my own biography here she wrote to her psychiatrist actually Sylvia Plath wrote to her psychiatrist about her surprise she was actually surprised by the not guilty verdict um because she she she felt like the the the jury was just she says there were unpromising prosperous middle-class looking jury so she's sort of snobby about the jury but uh so she was surprised by the the verdict um and so but she was very happy she recorded the bishop let's say she recorded yeah yeah mrs. Bennett of Gertin College Cambridge she recorded her saying quote physical life is important and is being neglected people live poor and emasculated lives living with half of themselves a marriage can be broken when it is unfulfilled and and that's something that Plath really took to heart I think for her sex was sacred it was not this sort of Bloomsbury you know more informal type of arrangement it was holy it was sacred and that's part of the reason why I think when the marriage broke up it was so devastating because they had had this Laurentian bond right they and a lot of their friends said oh it's just a bourgeois affair just it'll it'll blow over Ted will Ted will come back to you don't worry but for her because the marriage and the sex it was all Laurentian this was a world shattering event right this infidelity so I think a lot of that does go back to Lawrence yeah his whole philosophy of for him healing society and in Lawrence's view but well in many people's view England post-World War one was absolutely traumatized as a as a culture and a society and politically was stunted it was atrophied it was broken the the sort of slaughter on the fields of France and for him the renewal of the nation began with open healthy green fertile relations between man and woman and you know and then you know there's questionable things we can bring in about Lawrence's views you know around and non non heterosexual relationships I mean we you know then Lawrence begins to slide down slippery slopes to say the least but his philosophy even though even though in his own marriage which is something I explored at the end of his life it's he's really funny because he he's very much behind marriage he's almost more behind the notion of marriage the concept of marriage and he sticks very faithfully to Frida but at the same time feels he cannot curb her natural appetites and Frida had really countless affairs near the end of his life laterally with one one particular man but you know she would say oh but Lorenzo the woodcutter across the river looked very lonely so when you're off at market I swam across the river well why did well he looked lonely so you know this was and and and Lawrence while he raged and seathed and felt humiliated at the same time never tried to curb he felt this you know it is not for me to curb nature but he himself only had one extramarital affair in his lifetime and this was the great discovery for me another in my sort of six years of uncovering and research and detectiving was that because most people assume that lady chattel is in fact you know it's a it's a love letter to Frida and maybe in some ways that's true but there was a woman called Rosalind Baines with whom he had his only extramarital affair in September 1920 and that gave rise to his poetic sequence this is in birds, beasts and flowers the initial poems in that collection which are highly erotically charged he turned her away although I think she was at quite a vulnerable vulnerable point on the brink of divorce with three little girls I think she must have really been quite hurt but seemingly very gracious and he wrote the poems in those three weeks carried on writing them afterwards published them in 1922 and then all of the evidence all lady chattel's appearance her biography so much that she loves the Sussex Downs is all Rosalind Baines and yet she is the kind of unspoken secret because it was more convenient for the Laurences of the world thought this is a love letter to my wife so that was that was fascinating um unpeeling those those the almost the what lies behind the brush stroke or the pen strokes of creation yeah yeah and it's and it made me think actually about Hughes and and I think he had a a different interpretation of Lawrence than since maybe Plath did in in that way because I think for him you know and of course he is a great admirer of Lawrence and a lot of his poetry was deeply deeply influenced by Lawrence's poetry but for Hughes he felt like well I have these desires and I'm not going to repress them yeah and that and for him that was Laurentian it's the great contradiction in Lawrence and his philosophy in that oh I can see I think I would I would be Plath like and I would take it that way it's holy it's sacred it's upon Venus but also and this is what Lawrence actually says to Rosalind Baines that first night they're together and she records it in her diary or later in her memoir rather and he speaks about sex being elemental and impersonal that you have we have to get away from the ego so sexual appetite which is clearly what he was persuading of himself himself up with Frida in terms of her affairs that that is part of this elemental force that moves through us and one mustn't get too ego bound or get sort of more or less hurt feelings about it and so on the one hand you can think it's a sacred meeting of two souls conjoined and that feels very personal that's Laurentian but at the same time Lawrence's was so good with contradictions because great truths are contradictory and at the same time it was this impersonal which I think like if you're Ted Hughes yeah you know there is that that nature moves through us with force and something far beyond our you know our human daily egotistical reach yeah yeah exactly they were they were sort of coming at Lawrence from these opposite angles in a way and it blew up and the clash exactly you know in both of their own in their own right I'd like to just also find out you know because they both did neither of them lived a hugely long life I'd like to find out more about the trajectory of their notoriety what what work of theirs do you feel was the turning point or something that really brought them out that really was a change maker in terms of their writing career and achievements well for Lawrence his great notoriety really began I mean began it had flutters it had you know it's an early work called the Prussian officer when he was almost banned from lending libraries but really he his reputation hit the skids in 1915 with publication of The Rainbow and the immediate confiscation of it the banning of it and eventually the burning of it in 1915 all 1011 copies in London by by actually by the hangman of the of the the magistrates court and he read about it he read he read about it in the Manchester Guardian he hadn't been informed of its fate he later hit notoriety again with well I mean it went on women and love in was banned in the States he then had an exhibition of paintings because he also at the time he was writing Lady Chatterley he he'd always drawn and he used to be a teacher of of art and drawing at boy school and he always drew from boyhood and he went back to painting at the time he was living outside Florence and Italy and writing Lady Chatterley he'd write in the mornings from the eight a.m. in the in the wood behind this remote villa and in the afternoons he would paint and that exhibition those that series of paintings which included nudes the holy family is a nude holy family it featured pubic hair which was the great offence and so the police Scotland Yard came in and confiscated all the paintings with pubic hair and they were not destroyed but only on the condition that they were never shown in England again his lawyer agreed to it but Lawrence who was then really ill with fever tubercular fever in Florence was raging that the lawyer should have agreed those terms so the paintings would never be shown in his own country again and then of course we hit Lady Chatterley the obscenity trial and as as Heather noted Plath was surprised it wasn't a not guilty verdict I think now I mean even you know me as a sort of academic I like most had assumed it was pretty well you know an opening open and close case that it was of course it was going to win the day it was 1960 it wasn't 1860 but in fact that trial was on such a knife edge for so many reasons and the odds were very much against it the judge was nakedly biased against the book nakedly subjective and kept intervening the prosecution were determined to bring that book down Hoover from Washington was actually aiding the prosecution in London and trying to facilitate in whatever way possible so the odds that when I spent months and months in with the defense papers and the prosecution papers and it's absolutely moving to see the degree of work and commitment the defense put into it to win that day but it was no easy win and Alan Lane again it's forgotten to history Alan Lane not only faced unlimited fine but could have had three years in prison nobody would rule that out so it was just it was a new test case because the law had changed a bit so but nobody would say no that's you know that's definitely not going to happen and his family was in court that day worried on the day of the verdict that he could be sent down down so so Lawrence's reputation had these waves of scandal and to some extent he courted it and then he was briefly to summarize he then became you know the the the the the defense they won the day on November 2nd 1960 it ushered in along with the pill and so on other things the the decade of free love Lawrence was it's it's hero it's poster boy if you're like even even long you know even 30 years dead and then 1970 we had Kate Millet sexual politics which had been her thesis in which she examines the roots of power and patriarchy in the work of a few key male writers DH Lawrence being one of them and he enters into controversy again so that by the time I arrive at university in the 80s he's off the he's off the curriculum and so to some extent I wanted to along with coincidentally a few other female writers this year and upcoming one I think I'm just of the age where I thought I can do this now I am now confident enough and able enough to to go back to Lawrence and say actually very few male writers write women like Lawrence does or or gives the attention to female consciousness on the page so there there are suspect things there are you know not going to be a complete apologist but there's something so powerful Susan Gilbert I'm also a female critic a day is sning come back and say Lawrence does women like few others even women you know he's he stands there remarkable for his rendering of female consciousness yeah and uh Francis Wilson's new biography of Lawrence Burning Man I read an I can't remember if it was an interview but or maybe it was her in her introduction she says something similar like I felt like now I could do Lawrence yes and interestingly we've done events here together and she is we are the same age oh right okay I just think that's it and she said as well she hit university loving Lawrence as I did and and I just thought well where's Lawrence what you know and there was a whole sense of no we're not talking about Lawrence anymore that was fine for school for sons and lovers but you know I mean it wasn't stated but he was just suddenly nowhere and I didn't understand that yeah well Sylvia Plath would not have understood it either I think no she wouldn't do it if she had lived um I mean I don't mean to laugh when I say that but I just she he was so important to her and I think she would have been surprised by that he was you know off the the syllabi and it would have troubled her deeply what you're doing Heather so interesting because you know around rescuing Plath from this hystericization of reputation and I'll just just briefly say this I ended up which was my great good fortune in in a taxi briefly with glorious dynam in in India and I was just dazzled of course but very briefly I think because Virginia Woolf appeared in my last novel and and I lived very close to where she drowned herself and all those things but Gloria Steinem said to me I think she was at Smith I think Gloria are you out there and and she and she said that that's one of the things that made her angry was that Woolf and M Plath were always presented as before there were poets or writers there were hysterical women there were studies in hysteria so what you're doing is amazing to thank and thank you I mean it just and it bothered me that that the suicide had been you know just took up so much oxygen in the story and I felt like it didn't the male writers who died by suicide weren't necessarily as negatively overshadowed by that that particular legacy and so so yeah I just I wanted to to talk about her her present her as a writer and not you know obsessed not a writer that was obsessed with death but someone who was obsessed with art and and and someone who wanted to be a great poet from the time she was eight years old and and Laura you asked about sort of turning points and you know she she never had the kind of fame in her lifetime that of course she has now and she she published quite widely I mean she was publishing in 17 and Mademoiselle and these big American women's magazines when she was just out of high school and in college and she had a real reputation as a campus poet and and her first published collection The Colossus it got good reviews but you know it didn't win any prizes it it sold 500 copies and it and it's sort of it sort of dwindled into a minor obscurity and during that time and her aerial poems many editors rejected them the editor of The New Yorker was somebody who she kept sending them to him in 1962 early 1963 she kept sending Howard Moss all of these some of the greatest poems of the 20th century they were just too much for The New Yorker right The New Yorker was still a kind of a coffee table magazine and but but there were some some editors who accepted them so she wasn't howling in the wilderness but it really was aerial which was published posthumously that secured her reputation it was published in 1965 and of course the bell jar I sometimes I I tend to think of her so much as a poet but I love the bell jar as well and that's the book that most people come to when they first encounter Plath it's it for a long time I think it was a staple in American high schools I'm not sure about that anymore but but that was published in early 1963 and and under a pseudonym and and again and people are often surprised by this that that was not a bestseller you know it was again it got good reviews but she I think was she wished that it had gotten better reviews and so that book as well what we now consider an American classic it was not seen as such at the time and in fact Knopf rejected it and Harper and Row rejected they but both of these New York publishers rejected the bell jar right before her suicide and I sort of theorize in the book that that that news of these American rejections really you know that wasn't a good thing for her to hear when she was already in the throes of a severe depression but it was really aerial I think that secured her reputation great thank you well I just see a question or two in the audience so Pam would you come on and we can read off some of the questions from you our viewers out there yes um the first question I see is from Eugene Neiman how do you gauge Sylvia's reputation today also please contrast Sylvia with Anne Sexton oh um okay I think I think today uh her reputation is as strong as it's ever been um I think you know when I started writing this book 10 years ago the the plath myth and the doom and gloom and the hystericization and all of that I think was stronger and it it made me kind of angrier and it provided the impetus to to write this book now 10 years later after me too right the me too movement and all of this I do feel that we've we've turned a corner and we're more sensitive about the ways in which we talk about women who have struggled with mental illness um so but and I also think that her poetic reputation is quite strong there's so many brilliant academics writing about Sylvia Plath right now and I think it's it's trickling down um I think she's she's treated with a lot of respect in the the poetry circles that you know that the scholarly circles that I move in I study poetry for a living I don't write poetry but I'm sort of a historian of poetry so I think it's quite strong um as for Anne Sexton this is what I'm writing my next book on the Boston years of Sylvia Plath Anne Sexton Adrienne Rich and Maxine Cuman and they all were living in Boston at the same time they were all there in 1958-59-60 and so it's like a group little group biography of that time and place and Anne Sexton um I increasingly as I do this research I increasingly think that Anne Sexton was incredibly important for Sylvia Plath's poetic development they were very different in terms of their disposition Sylvia Plath was Germanic and sober and um hardworking and and very kind of put together uh Anne Sexton and of course Sylvia Plath was very educated right she was one of the she she graduated summa cum laude from Smith Anne Sexton did not go to college Anne Sexton uh had um a lot of um you know she was addicted to pills and alcohol and she had a sort of shambolic um life in a compared to Plath in a lot of ways in the late 50s and she really struggled to take care of her children her children were always at her mother-in-law's house and so in their dispositions they were almost complete opposites but they were both brilliant poets and they both wanted to become great poets and kind of break through um the obstacles that were put in front of them and they both took Robert Lowell's creative writing class in Boston in 1959 and just to wrap up because I'm sorry I'm going on about this because this is what I'm like I'm currently writing about but yeah so she her poems about depression and suicide and mental illness and mental hospitals I think her poetry sort of gave Plath permission to start writing about those things because she hadn't really engaged with those subjects into her poetry yet and she still felt I think a sense of taboo and Anne Sexton I think and Robert Lowell really helped helped push her in the direction that Ariel eventually took so then I think we owe Anne Sexton a lot great the next question is from Lucille Sutton how do you treat Ted Hughes in your bio it's hard to like him when we read about his behavior towards Sylvia Plath? Yes I mean this is something that comes up all the time and and actually I wrote my my second book was about Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath and their their poetic relationship because I was fascinated that in my opinion too the the great post-war poets and writing in English in the 20th century were married to each other for over six years and I just I wanted to know how that worked you know and how they influenced each other and and so in in my second book I really stuck to the work and I stuck to literary critical modes of examining their work and I tried to stay away from biography in a way although it is biographical but I couldn't do that in in red comment I had to I had to take the biography head on and and it was very difficult um and so I'm someone who's a great admirer of Ted Hughes's poetry and I tried I tried I'm interested in their relationship almost more intellectually than I am biographically and what they learned from each other and what they stole and what they what they took away from that but it was very difficult writing the the last half when he you know the marriage was devolving and he was having an affair with Asya Weville and she was alone with two young children and writing these searing letters to her psychiatrist and uh and it was just emotionally for me it was very draining um but I also had you know I feel like it's always difficult to get inside another person's marriage um so I you know I tried to give I tried to quote a lot in those sections when you'll you'll notice that there's more heavy quotation in some of the more fraught sections of I kind of wanted readers to to read their their original words and just take what they you know wanted to take away from that I saw um Ted Hughes read when I was in my 20s and I I suddenly had an understanding of I think was Eileen Feinstein said that once she she met him and and she found him so overpowering overpower overpoweringly attractive that she had to go into the loo and throw up and that was quite the line and then I mean I was in my I don't know I might have been 30 and he was in his 70s and he was like granite he was like this yeah I think from the stage with Seamus Heaney and it was very touching because his if ever he was trying to host the evening and just speak and his hands were shaking um Heaney was a complete natural and easygoing Hughes whenever he just had to speak in his own voice the audience was was nervous this great hulk of a man um and but as soon as he started to read his poems all the shaking stopped but he was a you know even in his mid late 70s and absolute I had a sense of that right I can I can see how you had a sort of force amongst women he you know he was a power on that stage that night yeah that's a lot of you you hear that quite a bit and and that um his cragginess and and the comparison to Heathcliff comes up yeah yeah there there was something unusual um I would say and in his his presence yeah um Jay Davis before we wrap is there any other questions yes yes okay go ahead um Jay Davis has asked could you talk about Eddie Cohen one of the most interesting characters in the book oh wasn't he yes I loved writing about Eddie Cohen he was uh this sort of a beatnik fan he wrote Plath a fan letter when he uh read one of her stories in 17 and they just started this amazing correspondence and most of what survives is from Eddie Cohen to Plath but a couple of her letters survive um and they just they had this sort of Laurentian correspondence actually they were just talked about sex and love and politics and and the Cold War and Korea and Eisenhower I mean it was it was very dramatic these letters um and he was a brilliant writer as well so they just kind of it was fireworks epistolary fireworks and they had a falling out when he he actually came to visit her and he didn't tell her he was showing up and she didn't like that she didn't like being surprised he came to visit her from Chicago and he had only existed on the page for her and then when he showed up in person she just she just kind of shut down it was too much um she was by her own admission quite rude to him and he just turned around and drove back to Chicago and so I think he had been hoping for a romance but um I think she had shared too much with him in a way uh so that it was it was okay when she was just speaking into a void but not necessarily ready to to have a real friendship they and they kept writing to each other for a little longer and the relationship petered out but it ended up still amicable good great well before we wrap up I'm going to just put the last two questions together to get your responses about what were the effects on the status of women that both of these writers brought to bear and also to freedom of expression and also if you have a favorite poem or one of a favorite book of these writers please share that with us um so other freedom of fix or freedom of women there's um a line that I'm going to I'm going to get probably slightly wrong but it's a wonderful line that someone says to lady chat early at the early stages of lady chatty's lover when she's struggling with her unhappy marriage and there's a complete staleness of it and the stagnation of it and um an older woman says to her if a woman does not live her life she must she must learn to live to repent it so for so the whole notion in 1928 of a woman living her life also reminded me when heather was speaking about the sort of anger around motherhood that plough allows herself to express and I wonder I was wondering as you spoke if she was influenced by Lawrence who is someone who did give expression in in the 20s to that which was quite radical as did his great friend Catherine Mansfield and they sort of communicated around such themes and it was so taboo um in Catherine Mansfield's stories like at the bay you get a character called Linda just wanting her children to be I mean she really it's very clear she's not a natural mother and in somebody like a story I absolutely love and for the moment I'll say it's my my my favorite Lawrence short story the rocking horse winner which is based on Cynthia as Cynthia Askworth and the little boy who goes into a trance on his rocking horse and his nursery and um and the walls are whispering and not enough money not the family doesn't have enough money they're wealthy and they're running out of money so but in that story there's a very clear depiction of maternal ambivalence and repressed anger around the children so I found that quite fascinating in terms of representing women's lives freedom of expression um I I think it just goes back to this notion of of artists needing to be bomb throwers and actually I think at the end of the American edition of my book I quote JFK giving the the eulogy at the funeral of Robert Frost and speaking to this very idea that writers and artists cannot be cooperative that society is at peril if we curb and control our writers and artists that to some extent um within those explosions lie the life the healthy life blood of society and I think it's a question today when we hear about beloved being a point of discussion for banning um I'm going to get the state wrong I've read about it peripherally here in the UK there's absolutely a kind of creep a kind of nothing so overt as the banning of a book right now but a creep coming in where this government is increasingly this conservative government increasingly trying to control what museums are doing to investigate the legacies of slavery within England and this government is pushing back and trying to control who gets appointed to trusts of those museums also in schools and the government is increasingly having control here around what novels are appropriate to be teaching at school's level and it's so it's nothing as overt and blatant as the banning of a single book um but it's a it's a stealthy creep coming in that that is there on an almost monthly basis so um Lawrence Lawrence would have um raged essentially he would have just raged yeah and you talk about bomb throwing what I think the the the plath line that comes to mind um which I'm sure you know you you all you're all thinking of as well is daddy daddy you bastard I'm through from from her her famous controversial poem daddy which is an aerial and that that became almost an anthem of the women's movement in the 1970s and just this rejection of patriarchy that poem was so influential I think historically for the women's movement and it's come under incredible fire um for many many reasons and there are academic articles written about it and then there you know so there's there's dodgy imagery uh but but that line I think really galvanized a movement and for me I think of um a lesser known work perhaps is class three women and it's it was a radio play it was meant to be a radio play it was read out loud on the BBC and she she taught she follows the the lives of three women who give birth um the first is a mother who who has a son and is very closely based on plath herself but even though she has a healthy child the mother is still kind of wracked with worry it's like this existential um anxiety the second mother has a miscarriage and the third mother gives her baby up for adoption so plath good she she discusses um these three experiences and I just again I I think it was so radical for the time early 1960s I think it's still radical and you know plath came of age in a in a time when you didn't even say the word pregnant on network television and here she's writing about miscarriages and she's she's talking about it on the BBC so I think she helped open up um that that debate and in a way that's part of her her bomb throwing I would just wish she had lived to see um lived to see what what her poems you know brought in a way well Allison did you have any other left well I I was just going to um to add to that but the pregnant that in in the trial in 1960 about pregnancy being pregnant being a unsayable word and of course Lady Chathley is full of unsayable words and in the trial the prosecution pulled out almost a grocery list of and I won't repeat them all here but 42 of this we literally just scandalized the jury but amongst that whole long list of the word counts from um uh from Chathley um were were the words womb and and the word inside as well was on their list oh my god wow amazing well I want to thank uh Heather Clark and Allison McLeod for their inspiring and illuminating conversation about Sylvia Plath and DH Lawrence once again everyone please pick up these books red comet and tenderness um just brilliant um I I hope we get to talk with you again that we could just go on and on and it's so much to say and important messages for today about the status of women uh and also the freedom of expression which we must always fight for and so ladies I thank you so much and thanks to our audience out there please join us again and we look forward to uh furthering the conversation thank you it was a pleasure thank you Laura thank you pal thank you Heather wonderful and thank you everyone for being with us thank you okay join us again everyone thanks