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December 17, 2004

WE IMAGINE ONE OF YOU ISN'T TIRED OF THIS TALE

The appetite for all things Hughes/Plath appearing to be limitless, the latest TLS reviews Diane Middlebrook's Her Husband.

Plath and Hughes didn’t just use their relationship in their writing, they used writing to conduct their relationship: much of their poetry formed an extended, intricate ballet, from pas de deux to danse macabre. They were trying to create an art of privity; eventually it overwhelmed them. Drowning in intimacy, they couldn’t rediscover separateness without separating. Middlebrook effectively decodes some of their more cryptic poems by linking them back together, finding an intertextual marriage on the page: one particularly persuasive reading aligns Plath’s poem “The Rabbit Catcher”, Hughes’s “Difficulties of a Bridegroom” and Plath’s “Kindness” in an indirect (and nasty) fight circling around D. H. Lawrence’s “Rabbit Snared in the Night”. Their allusions were crammed with subtextual meanings, explosive in their compactness – which doubtless also made them more fun, if dangerous fun. Middlebrook neglects that part: Plath and Hughes were battling each other, but also playing word-games for each other’s benefit, enjoying the frisson of the in-joke (Plath called herself “Roget’s trollop”): their alliance was founded in a private language – for which both ultimately sought publication.

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TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

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