During that night perhaps he thought about the hunchback that had always seemed to have pursued him, arriving now to take him in one last fateful grasp. Had they arrived just one day before, nobody would have raised any objections to their continuing their journey to Portugal – one day later and they would have been aware that the regulations had changed. They would have been able to seek alternatives, and would certainly not have presented themselves to the Spanish police. There was only one brief interval in which they would meet the worst of all possible outcomes. And this was precisely the one they had chosen. Misfortune had triumphed, and Walter Benjamin had conceded.
For many years nothing more was known: it seemed as if all trace of his attempted flight had vanished. In the 1970s, at a time when the importance of Benjamin’s work was finally being recognized, many students of his writing set off to Portbou inspired by the memoirs of Lisa Fittko, in which she had revealed to the world her part in getting him there. But they found nothing. No black suitcase, and no gravestone. Benjamin seemed to have disappeared into thin air.
Even today, amongst the welter of information available on the internet, some of it false, like much else one finds there, there are those who repeat only this version of events. Who maintain that nothing can be known about the suitcase and its contents.
Fortunately, in addition to the internet I have friends. One of them, Bruno Arpaia, some years ago wrote a wonderful novel about Benjamin called The Angel of History. And he is the one who has told me about what actually happened. Because while it is true that for many years no one managed to find any trace of Benjamin in Portbou, the mystery was later clarified. The Spanish authorities had assumed that Benjamin was his first name (an easy enough mistake to make, since though pronounced differently it is used as one in Spain) and that his surname was Walter. And so they had registered him in the public archives, and then placed all documents relating to him in the court building at Figueres under the letter W.
It was then revealed that he had been buried in the Catholic cemetery and at some later date moved to a communal grave – and that all of his belongings had been recorded in a ledger, providing an apparently complete and accurate inventory. A leather suitcase (of no specified colour); a gold watch; a passport issued by the American authorities in Marseille; six passport photographs; a pair of glasses; a few magazines or periodicals; some letters; a few papers; a little money. No mention is made of typescripts or manuscripts. But those ‘papers’ – what did that refer to?
What Benjamin was carrying that was so precious to him? Which text, if it wasn’t The Arcades Project he had given to Bataille or the ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ which he had entrusted to Hannah Arendt?
To this question not even Bruno Arpaia has an answer. In his novel, with fictional license, he has Benjamin hand them over to a young Spanish partisan to carry to safety. Someone who during a night in the mountains, prey to extreme cold and desperation, uses them to light a fire with which to save his life.
And fire, as I have already had occasion to remark, is a recurrent motif with regard to our lost books. As is well known, paper burns easily. But in reality, in a small town just over the border between France and Spain, in room number 3 in a small provincial hotel, it appears that no fires were lit.
There are those who doubt that the suitcase ever contained a manuscript. But what possible reason would Benjamin have had to lie to his companions in misfortune, and to drag that suitcase with him if it only contained a few personal effects? I’m convinced that there was something of real importance inside. Perhaps notes with which to continue his work on Arcades, perhaps a revised version of his work on Baudelaire. Or perhaps another work altogether, one that is entirely missing, that we do not even know existed.
No, Bruno Arpaia does not have the answer, but at the end of our conversation he gives me another story, since Portbou has been the site of many more stories about lost papers.
Less than a year before Benjamin reached Portbou, amongst the half a million or so people fleeing bombardment from German and Italian planes and seeking to cross in the opposite direction to Benjamin, there was one Antonio Machado: the great and at the time, unlike Benjamin, genuinely elderly Spanish poet. Machado also had with him a suitcase, containing many poems, which he was forced to abandon there in order to reach exile in France, in Collioure, where he would die just a few days later.
Where are those poems, so compromising at the time because they were written by an enemy of the Franco regime? Where are the pages Benjamin guarded so jealously? Were they really all destroyed? All lost?
Who knows. There might still be some forgotten, yellowing papers in a wardrobe or an old chest in the attic of a house in Portbou: the poems of the old defeated poet and the notes of the prematurely aged European intellectual, conserved together, unknown even to the owner of the wardrobe or chest.
Is it too much to hope that sooner or later – by chance, scholarship or passion – someone will rediscover those pages and enable us to read them at last?
London, 1963:
I Guess You Could Say I’ve a Call
FEBRUARY 11, 1963: in the flat in 23 Fitzroy Road that she has rented partly because W. B. Yeats once lived there and it seemed like an auspicious precedent, Sylvia Plath wakes up very early. She always has problems sleeping when she is unwell, but has learned to turn this to her advantage, writing poems at dawn before the children are awake. The last one she has written, a few days previously, is called ‘Edge’ – the limit, which she has finally decided to cross. She prepares breakfast for Frieda and Nicholas (she is almost three years old; he is just one), enters their room and places two small glasses of milk and a few slices of buttered bread on a sidetable; then opens the window, even though it is cold outside, and leaves the room, sealing it after she has done so by placing a rolled up towel along the bottom edge of the door. She goes back to the kitchen, shuts herself in and seals the door in the same way she had sealed the children’s bedroom. Then she opens the oven door, places a cloth on it to lay her head on, and turns on the gas.
This is how Sylvia Plath kills herself. It is the second time she has tried, ten years after her first suicide attempt.
She has recently turned thirty and is the wife of Ted Hughes, though a few months previously they separated because of his infidelity. She is not yet famous: she has published widely in magazines, and is the author of one volume of poems, The Colossus, and of The Bell Jar, a novel she published under a pseudonym. The critical reception of these books had been lukewarm.
She leaves behind a great deal of unpublished writing. As well as personal papers, diaries and letters, there is a completed volume of poems – Ariel – together with many other uncollected poems and the manuscript of another novel with the provisional title Double Exposure.
Even though they are separated, Hughes is still her husband and the legal inheritor of her literary legacy: it falls to him to determine the fate of everything she has left behind.
Whoever has read this book thus far will have gathered that I am interested in gossip: not least, perhaps, as someone once remarked, because literature itself is a higher form of gossip. But on this occasion I would like to indulge in it as little as possible. For years Hughes had to endure the accusation that he was responsible for his wife’s death, as if her suicide had been an inevitable consequence of his own behaviour. Some have even pointed to the fact that the woman he left her for also committed suicide: conclusive proof of his culpability. Perhaps only when, decades later, Hughes published the poems he had written to Plath over the years in the form of birthday letters was it properly understood that things were somewhat more complicated, as of course they always are. And that behind it all, perhaps, was the fascination he had always had for women who were troubled, difficult, dark. They had been like this from the start; he wasn’t the one to make them so.
But the choices made by him – so important during Plath’s lifetime – have certainly contributed heavily, for g
ood or ill, to her posthumous success, and have played a role in determining what we have been able to read and what we are no longer able to read: what we will never be able to see now.
And this is the last story of a lost book that I have decided to relate.
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it…
[…]
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
This is how ‘Lady Lazarus’ begins, one of the last poems by Sylvia Plath who did not, unfortunately, enjoy the luck afforded to cats, dying at the third ‘life’. The first had been not a suicide attempt but an accident she had had, aged ten.
It frequently happens that when someone commits suicide, their death becomes the point of departure for reading their entire life. But this entails the risk of superimposing over the face of the actual person – the one who has lived, thought, written – a mask that squeezes the richness of their humanity and artistry into the form of an icon, into something two-dimensional.
That Plath had always flirted with death is a given. And this flirtation no doubt grew out of the kind of fragility that is evident in her diaries – but also from a defiance, a strength, a capacity to struggle, a controlled violence manifest in the sculpted hardness of her poems.
Much of her own experience can be recognized in The Bell Jar, filtered through its protagonist, in the painful trajectory from depression to attempted suicide and ‘cure’ by electroshock therapy. And in these pages it is possible to discern the inextricable link between suffering and guilt that was at the centre of her life and poetry, as if suffering were the responsibility of the sufferer – as well as the means of arriving at truth in writing, and being a poet. It is a narrow, high ridge to walk, one she trod for her entire existence. ‘Lady Lazarus’ again:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.
But her real vocation was writing. And this is what we need to focus on to understand what happened to her after her death.
Before doing so, however, we need to return to her relationship with Hughes. A deep relationship of love but also of literary solidarity; one in which Plath energized her husband to be a poet to his core, to make this the meaning of life, while at the same time seeking from him support in facing the agonizing creative struggle that formed the basis of her own ideas about literature. ‘What I am fighting for’, she wrote in a letter to her mother, ‘is the strength to claim “the right to be unhappy” together with the joy of creative affirmation…’, as if the two things could not be separated; as if the latter could only emerge in fact from the former. This was a kind of unhappiness Plath had carried within her for some time, since the death of her father, which left her bereaved aged ten – an avoidably early death, since he believed that he had cancer and refused medical help, when he was suffering in fact from a curable form of diabetes – an unhappiness that also originated in her difficult and conflicted relationship with her mother, in her desperate need to be loved.
What Hughes meant to her can be gauged from another letter written to her mother in 1956:
I shall tell you now about something most miraculous and thundering and terrifying and wish you to think on it and share some of it. It is this man, this poet, this Ted Hughes. I have never known anything like it. For the first time in my life I can use all my knowing and laughing and force and writing to the hilt all the time, everything, and you should see him, hear him…
It must have been difficult for Hughes to live up to such expectations, to such a role, such love. And it is possible that he balked, ultimately, at this intensity, this altitudinous conception of both personal and artistic life.
An intensity evident from the violence of their very first encounter, when he tore the headscarf from her hair and kissed her neck – and she responded by biting his cheek. That this is not some kind of literary myth is testified by his own account of the meeting, in his poem ‘St Botolph’s’:
[…] I remember
Little from the rest of that evening.
I slid away with my girl-friend. Nothing
Except her hissing rage in a doorway
And my stupefied interrogation
Of your blue headscarf from my pocket
And the swelling ring-moat of tooth-marks
That was to brand my face for the next month.
The me beneath it for good.
And it was to be ‘this man, this Ted Hughes’, who at a certain point had fled from the risks of an all-encompassing relationship, who was tasked with handling the papers Plath had left behind; papers suffused with the same vehemence from which he had sought to extricate himself.
There were diaries, including the diary of her last months in which she described her situation, her feelings, her resentments, as well as their interrupted love. (A love not ended, never at an end, as we will see decades later in the poems that Hughes wrote for her.) There were poems that included fierce attacks on her long dead father, in which he was transformed into an emblematic figure of male and even Nazi violence (he was of German origin), into an inextricable amalgam of parent and husband. There was also a substantial draft of an unfinished novel that like The Bell Jar was semi-autobiographical but was based on more recent experience, dealing with her unfolding life together with Hughes, and his betrayal of her with their mutual friend, Assia Wevill. Plath wrote in a letter that this novel was based on a scenario that was ‘semi-autobiographical, about a woman whose husband turns out to be treacherous and a womaniser’.
What was to be done with all of these papers?
Hughes made his decisions, and they would be radical ones, destined to determine the future of Plath’s work.
The first of these was to destroy the diary dealing with the last months of her life. He did this, as he later explained, because he did not want it ever to be read by their children: he was convinced that it would cause them too much suffering. (Though, tragically, this act could not prevent their son, many years later, from also taking his own life.) I have already made my own position clear with regard to decisions about destroying work intended for publication, when that work might profoundly affect people other than the author. It might be the wrong decision, but the heirs are within their rights when taking it. Plath’s other diaries gradually find their way into print, along with many of her letters.
Then Hughes published Ariel – the book that established her reputation as a great poet – after modifying somewhat Plath’s own selection of the poems to be included in it. In subsequent years he would continue to publish other poems and prose, some of it already published in magazines, a good deal of it appearing for the first time.
So what became of the unfinished novel? What became of Double Exposure?
We can only know from what Hughes has said about it. According to his remark in the introduction to Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, a collection of short stories and other miscellaneous prose by Plath, this text of ‘some 130 pages’ had ‘disappeared somewhere around 1970’. Surely a strange enough assertion, when looked at closely. What does it mean to say that it ‘disappeared’? How is it possible, given the devotion and care Hughes had dedicated to preserving and editing Plath’s work, that one hundred and thirty pages of a novel could disappear into thin air with his barely even noticing?
One wonders whether this might not be a way of defending himself from accusations that he had in fact caused it to disappear: yet in the case of the diary he had no compunction in saying that he had destroyed it, and in accepting full responsibility for having done so. In this case, however, he switched between different versions of what had happened to the manuscript, having previously attributed its disappearance to Plath’s mother – after her death, when she was no
longer able to confirm or deny responsibility – referring to it at that time as a typescript of some sixty or seventy pages. It seems mysteriously to have doubled its length (its still-missing length) by the time of Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.
It seems likely that Ted Hughes was not telling the truth, and faced with his reticence and contradictions it is next to impossible to know what really happened to Double Exposure.
‘When it comes to poets, we should let their words have the last say.’ So my friend the poet Maria Grazia Calandrone tells me, when I talk to her in an attempt to clarify my ideas. Too many layers have ossified around Plath. Her life and the nature of her death have resulted in the construction of a fictional character; her own words have been overlaid by thousands of accounts by others. Even accounts by those who may never have read a line of her work, but who speak as if they had known her.
Maria Grazia reads me part of a poem written in 1997 by Frieda Hughes:
While their mothers lay in quiet graves
Squared out by those green cut pebbles
And flowers in a jam jar, they dug mine up.
Right down to the shells I scattered on her coffin.
They turned her over like meat on coals
To find the secrets of her withered thighs
And shrunken breasts.
They scooped out her eyes to see how she saw,
And bit away her tongue in tiny mouthfuls
To speak with her voice.
But each one tasted separate flesh,
Ate a different organ,
Touched other skin.
Insisted on being the one
Who knew best,
In Search of Lost Books Page 7