Bucolic rather than apocalyptic … a detail from Wuthering Heights Today. Photograph: Frieda Hughes
By Sam Leith
Who is the Sylvia Plath we, her readers, think we know? Nearly half a century after her suicide, the great poet is capable of surprising us. A selection of her drawings that have just gone on display at London’s Mayor Gallery shows us a new side of her. I found these drawings moving: not because they feed into the legend, but because they sidestep it. They bring us a fresh look at a woman now so barnacled with myth it’s hard to see her clearly. And – wow – they’re really good.
These drawings are not exact transcriptions of the world: they are, subtly yet boldly, interpretations. They take possession of their subjects. They have a calligraphic, almost cartoonish line that puts me in mind of Alasdair Gray, or even the comic-book work of Pat Mills. What they have above all – which is not the province of the poems and the Plath we think we know – is a sprightliness or, for want of a better word, wit. Look, for instance, at her sketch of a cat peeping out round a corner. Curious French Cat, she’s called it. Or look at the unaccountably entrancing drawing of a brolly, titled The Ubiquitous Umbrella. Or look at the two successive pen-and-ink sketches called The Pleasure of Odd (sic) and Ends, showing a scattering of lumber outside a shed, an old stove, a tractor tyre, a trunk with a warped lid.
To see these drawings as in some way complementary to the poems, as some will doubtless try to, seems to me off-beam. Plath did once tell the BBC: “I have a visual imagination.” But what’s so striking about these drawings is exactly their difference from the visual world of the poems. These are pictures that revel in the thinginess of things: in wine bottles, an old kettle, a pair of shoes, the uneven timbering of beached boats, the architectural curlicues of a Parisian roof.
Both Plath and her husband Ted Hughes wrote fine poems called Wuthering Heights, neither of which exactly played down the bleakness. “Black stone, black stone,” wrote Plath. “Iron beliefs, iron necessities,” wrote Hughes. But the Plath sketch of a tumbledown bothy included in this exhibition, called Wuthering Heights Today, is bucolic rather than apocalyptic.
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By Maria Popova
