Skip to main content
Read page text
page 2
T H I S W E E K No. 6342 October 18 2024 the-tls.co.uk UK £4.50 | USA $8.99 T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T Heather Clark Sylvia Plath’s final say | Claire Lowdon Alan Hollinghurst gets Brexit done Katie Stallard The dictator’s treadmill | Boyd Tonkin Keeping the Warburg weird A world away from K-pop Yoojin Grace Wuertz on Nobel laureate Han Kang Han Kang © Gorm Kallestad/ NTB scanpix/Alamy In this issue S ylvia Plath once said that “nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing”. Ted Hughes curated two editions of her prose in 1977 and 1979, but admitted that his selections represented only a fraction of her work. Since then her correspondence has been collected in The Letters of Sylvia Plath (published in two volumes in 2017 and 2018), edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V Kukil. After thirty years of labour in American university archives, Steinberg has now brought together all of her surviving fiction, reviews, essays and journalism in one volume, The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath. Anne Kennedy Smith has written in these pages that “the melodramatic Plath myth” entailed that “for well over half a century she has been more famous for her death than for her life and work”. In recent years Plath’s oeuvre has benefited from more considered critical reassessment. Heather Clark, whose biography of the poet, Red Comet (2020), drew on her unpublished diar i es and creative work, salutes Steinberg’s enterprise. In her TLS lead review she writes that to see Plath’s prose “finally published under one cover is to be surprised all over again by the breadth of her vision, ambition and talent”. The highlights are the seventysix short stories written between 1940 and the early 1960s. The volume contains previously unpublished fragments that “make art of Plath and Hughes’s relationship”. Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags (1956), written three months after her marriage to Hughes, seems especially poignant – she “saw him famous and suave in a tuxedo, roaring sestinas in a godly voice over the BBC, in a dither of actresses, ballet dancers and Italian countesses with a literary flair, while she skulked about choking on cheese rinds like a tear-blind mouse”. “For those not paying attention, it might feel as if we’ve woken to an overnight K-ification [of culture], in the form of K-drama, K-beauty, K-pop”, writes Yoojin Grace Wuertz on the award of the Nobel prize in literature to Han Kang. Han, however, is not a poster child for Korean cultural marketing, but rather a critic. Her novel The Vegetarian (2007) questions patriarchal authority, but transcends the form “as a hungry demand for a specific, utterly idiosyncratic experience of life free from every constraint”. Human Acts (2014), set during the military dictatorship’s massacre of unarmed civilians prote s t ing against martial l aw in her native c i t y, Gwangju, in 1980, and the subsequent cover-up, is too raw for many democratic politicians in Korea today. Hardly Gangnam style. MARTIN IVENS Editor Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement @the.tls @TheTLS To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS, go to timesbookshop.co.uk 2 3 LITERATURE 4 POEM 5 COMMENTARY 6 LETTERS TO THE EDITOR HEATHER CLARK ALAN GILLIS The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath Peter K. Steinberg, editor Walking Out One Morning After Lockdown Has Been Lifted YOOJIN GRACE WUERTZ A hunger for truth – Nobel laureate Han Kang makes uncomfortable reading for the Korean authorities Israel and Palestine, Gaia, Thom Gunn, etc 7 LITERARY CRITICISM LUCY FLEMING 8 POLITICS KATIE STALLARD ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE The Haunted Wood – A history of childhood reading Sam Leith Autocracy, Inc. – The dictators who want to run the world Anne Applebaum. How Tyrants Fall – And how nations survive Marcel Dirsus. The Origins of Elected Strongmen – How personalist parties destroy democracy from within Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Joseph Wright. The Reactionary Spirit – How America’s most insidious political tradition swept the world Zack Beauchamp. The Wannabe Fascists – A guide to understanding the greatest threat to democracy Federico Finchelstein On Freedom Timothy Snyder 12 ART HISTORY BOYD TONKIN BEN STREET Memory and Migration – The Warburg Institute 1926—2024 (Warburg Institute, London) The Story of Drawing – An alternative history of art Susan Owens. How Painting Happens – (And why it matters) Martin Gayford 15 ARTS AMBER MASSIE-BLOMFIELD Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett (Theatre Royal Haymarket, London) 16 FICTION JONATHAN GIBBS LORNA SCOTT FOX CLAIRE LOWDON 18 LITERATURE & HISTORY J. J. LONG ALICE BLACKHURST SOFIA CUMMING Childish Literature Alejandro Zambra; Translated by Megan McDowell The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine Mario Levrero; Translated by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter Our Evenings Alan Hollinghurst Shadows of Reality – A catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s photographic materials Clive Scott and Nick Warr, editors Colette – My literary mother Michèle Roberts Marseille 1940 – Die große Flucht der Literatur Uwe Wittstock 20 FEMINISM 22 ECOLOGY 24 IN BRIEF 26 LETTERS 26 POEM 27 AFTERTHOUGHTS 28 NB JUNE PURVIS EILEEN M. HUNT C. K. STEAD SEB FALK EMILY JONES REECE SHEARSMITH DAVID MORLEY CRAIG RAINE M. C. Sexed – A history of British feminism Susanna Rustin Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy – The feminist critique of commercial modernity Catherine Packham Koe – An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan, editors The Green Ages – Medieval innovations in sustainability Annette Kehnel; Translated by Gesche Ipsen The War Below – Lithium, copper, and the global battle to power our lives Ernest Scheyder Extra Time Beckons, Penalties Loom – How to use (and abuse) the language of football Adam Hurrey, etc Robert Aickman – Selected letters to Kirby McCauley Robert Aickman Beethoven’s Yellowhammer T. S. Eliot and Lytton Strachey Britishisms vs Americanisms, New Worlds at sixty and other anniversaries Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk) Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk TLS OCTOBER 18, 2024
page 3
L I T E R A T U R E ‘Why not use the good vile words’ Sylvia Plath’s unpublished short stories reveal her passionate dedication to her craft I M A G E S / G E T T Y B E T T M A N N © HEATHER CLARK THE COLLECTED PROSE OF SYLVIA PLATH PETER K. STEINBERG, EDITOR 848pp. Faber. £35. In 1977 Ted Hughes published the first selection of Sylvia Plath’s prose in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. Two years later he added a new cache of her work to an expanded second edition. Twenty-two of Plath’s short stories appeared there, as well as some of her later essays and a few evocative journal excerpts. Hughes chose wisely: the stories and essays in Johnny Panic are among Plath’s best. But he revealed in his introduction that his selection represented only a fraction of her “extant” oeuvre: he estimated that she had written “about seventy short stories”. So it was never a secret that there were reams of unpublished prose in Plath’s American archives – work that spanned her childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Bringing together these far-flung pieces, housed at Indiana University, Smith College, Emory University and elsewhere, was no small feat. The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath was nearly thirty years in the making. Scholars who have worked in Plath’s archives will be familiar with most of the material in the Collected Prose. Yet to see so much of her surviving fiction and journalism, so many of her essays and reviews, finally published under one cover is to be surprised all over again by the breadth of her vision, ambition and talent. Much of the work here has been published for the first time and will give any reader a fuller understanding of her thematic preoccupations, her development as a writer, her facilit y with different prose genres and her passionate dedication to her craft. Writing was Plath’s life work, and anything that redirects our attention to this plain truth is a welcome addition to her canon and story. As Hermione Lee has noted, women writers with a history of mental illness and suicide are often regarded “biographically, as victims or psychological c ase -hi stories f i rst and as professional writers second”. The Collected Prose reminds us that Plath’s greatest ambition – one she fulfilled – was to be a professional writer. The book is divided into three sections: fiction, nonfiction and newspaper pieces that she wrote as a student at Smith College (newly attributed to her by the collection’s meticulous editor, Peter K. Steinberg). The book is more than 800 pages long, but there is still more prose in Plath’s archives that remains unpublished: her academic papers from Wellesley High School, Smith College and Cambridge; her adolescent diaries from the 1940s; and her Smith senior honours thesis. Then there i s her last, unfinished novel, Double Exposure, which disappeared after her death and may someday resurface. Steinberg’s selection contains a wealth of nonfiction. The best of these pieces – “Context”, “A Comparison”, “Snow Blitz”, “The All-Round Image” and “Landscape of Childhood” (published as ‘Ocean 1212–W) – appeared in Johnny Panic, but most will be new to readers. Some may ask whether her short, expository pieces about summer camp, junior high assemblies, girl scouts or Smith College concerts merit republication. But even the most unpolished of these pieces provides important historical and literary context. Articles such as “Youth’s Plea for World Peace” (1950) and “The Atomic Threat” (1948) remind us that she came of age during the Cold War and was haunted by the spectre of apocalypse. Small feminist rebellions in “From the Memoirs of a Babysitter” (1946), in which a teenage Plath calls children OCTOBER 18, 2024 “bothersome” and “a nuisance”, look forward to her poem “Lesbos” (1961), where the kitchen is filled with the “stink of fat and baby crap”. Her droll exposé of sexism at Oxbridge in “A Cambridge Letter”, published in the Isis in 1956, still has some bite: The most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both […] A debonair Oxford PPE man demurred, laughing incredulously: “But really, talk about philosophy with a woman!” A poetic Cambridge chap maintains categorically: “As soon as a woman starts talking about intellectual things, she loses her feminine charm for me.” Plath fantasized about a future when Oxbridge men accepted a woman as “an intelligent human being” rather than just “a girl […] and, alas, not much more”. The highlight of Collected Prose, however, i s Plath’s fic tion: seventy-six short stories written between 1940 and the early 1960s. Although the strongest have already been published (“Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams”, “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit”, “The Shadow” and “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom” among them), fifty-four are presented here for the first time. Fifty-four unpublished stories by Sylvia Plath! This alone would make Collected Prose a major literary event and an invaluable scholarly resource. Approaching this writing as archaeology, a reader can see traces of themes that later found their full expression in The Bell Jar (1963): ambition, depression, male cruelty, suicide, apocalypse, the Cold War and, above all, the perils of womanhood in mid-century America. Plath’s early stories are uneven, but they served as an important apprenticeship. Many show her wrestling with what it means to be a young woman who wants to fit in, but who TLS Sylvia Plath, 1957 “Writing was Plath’s life work, and anything that redirects our attention to this plain truth is a welcome addition to her canon and story Heather Clark is the author, most recently, of Red Comet: The short life and blazing art of Sylvia Plath, 2020 also burns with literary and intellectual ambition in a culture that caters almost exclusively to the interests and intentions of men. This gendered tension runs through much of her early fiction; she watches, almost helplessly, as her female characters make themselves small to snag a man. “You had to sacrifice part of your identity”, she writes in “Den of Lions” (1951). “You had to compromise things that were intangible, yet terribly important.” Secretaries and spinsters populate her early stories too: they are “weary”, “numb”, “lonely”. “The same work, day in, day out”, Judith Anders says in “Heat” (1948). “Filing letters, pounding typewriters. So dull, so dull.” These women want more from life, but they won’t get it: “There was no escape”. Characters such as Judith are versions of Plath’s widowed working mother – and a nightmare vision of her own future if she did not write, study or marry her way out of the lower middle class. Plath’s early fiction shows that even as a teenager, and well before the dawn of second-wave feminism, she was troubled by the mental and physical toll that sexism took on women’s lives. In “The Attic View” (1948), a young woman living in a shabby boarding house embarks on a “free secretarial night course for working girls” in the hope of leaving her miserable, dead-end job. But as soon as the course begins she comes down with a mysterious fever and dies. It’s as if she is punished for her ambition. When another starry-eyed young woman moves in to take her place in the attic room, with its ocean view, there are ominous signs that the pattern will repeat itself. Here we see Plath developing her trademark feminine gothic, where female autonomy comes at a cost. But there is a cost, too, that comes with living life on someone else’s terms. In stories that pit “career women” against wives and mothers, such as “The Visitor” (1948) and “Day of Success” (1961), the wives and mothers triumph, but their victories ring hollow. Plath’s early experimental stories of interiority, like “Heat” and “The Brink”, written in the late 1940s, are more powerful. They show women on the verge of a breakdown, or a breakthrough: we don’t know which. Not surpri s ingly, these s tor i es about lonely, depressed or independent women were rejected by the popular magazines to which Plath sent them. But she believed in them, and wrote to her friend Eddie Cohen in 1950 that her rejected stories were “better, less trite, less syrupy” than “the usual ‘Seventeen’ drivel”. She studied the market, learnt what sold and became adept at penning both literary fiction and plot-driven stories. By the mid-1950s she was writing small masterpieces such as “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit” (1954), a superb study of quiet malice and paranoia, as well as True Confessions-style melodramas such as “I Lied for Love” (1953). This skill would serve her well when she came to write The Bell Jar, with its nods to both James Joyce and the tabloids. She called her novel a “potboiler” and told a friend it was “so funny, but so serious”. Male violence – physical, psychological and sexual – i s d i s t re s s i n g l y c ommon i n P l a t h’s s t o r i e s , beginning in 1946 with “On the Penthouse Roof ” and running right through to “Stone Boy with D o l p h i n” ( 1 9 5 8 ) , wh i c h c o n t a i n s a p owe r f u l depiction of what the writer Melissa Febos has called “empty consent”: Hamish began kissing her mouth, and she felt him kiss her. Nothing stirred. Inert, she lay staring toward the high ceiling crossed by the dark wood beams, hearing the worms of the ages moving in them, riddling them with countless passages and little worm-size labyrinths, and Hamish let his weight down on top of her, so it was warm. Fallen into disuse, into desuetude, I shall not be […] 3

Page Text

View plaintext

T H I S W E E K

No. 6342

October 18 2024

the-tls.co.uk

UK £4.50 | USA $8.99

T H E T I M E S L I T E R A R Y S U P P L E M E N T

Heather Clark Sylvia Plath’s final say | Claire Lowdon Alan Hollinghurst gets Brexit done

Katie Stallard The dictator’s treadmill | Boyd Tonkin Keeping the Warburg weird

A world away from K-pop

Yoojin Grace Wuertz on Nobel laureate Han Kang

Han Kang © Gorm Kallestad/ NTB scanpix/Alamy

In this issue

S ylvia Plath once said that “nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing”. Ted Hughes curated two editions of her prose in 1977 and 1979, but admitted that his selections represented only a fraction of her work. Since then her correspondence has been collected in The Letters of Sylvia Plath (published in two volumes in 2017 and 2018), edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V Kukil. After thirty years of labour in American university archives, Steinberg has now brought together all of her surviving fiction, reviews, essays and journalism in one volume, The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath.

Anne Kennedy Smith has written in these pages that “the melodramatic Plath myth” entailed that “for well over half a century she has been more famous for her death than for her life and work”. In recent years Plath’s oeuvre has benefited from more considered critical reassessment. Heather Clark, whose biography of the poet, Red Comet (2020), drew on her unpublished diar i es and creative work, salutes Steinberg’s enterprise. In her TLS lead review she writes that to see Plath’s prose “finally published under one cover is to be surprised all over again by the breadth of her vision, ambition and talent”. The highlights are the seventysix short stories written between 1940 and the early 1960s. The volume contains previously unpublished fragments that “make art of Plath and Hughes’s relationship”. Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags (1956), written three months after her marriage to Hughes, seems especially poignant – she “saw him famous and suave in a tuxedo, roaring sestinas in a godly voice over the BBC, in a dither of actresses, ballet dancers and Italian countesses with a literary flair, while she skulked about choking on cheese rinds like a tear-blind mouse”.

“For those not paying attention, it might feel as if we’ve woken to an overnight K-ification [of culture], in the form of K-drama, K-beauty, K-pop”, writes Yoojin Grace Wuertz on the award of the Nobel prize in literature to Han Kang. Han, however, is not a poster child for Korean cultural marketing, but rather a critic. Her novel The Vegetarian (2007) questions patriarchal authority, but transcends the form “as a hungry demand for a specific, utterly idiosyncratic experience of life free from every constraint”. Human Acts (2014), set during the military dictatorship’s massacre of unarmed civilians prote s t ing against martial l aw in her native c i t y, Gwangju, in 1980, and the subsequent cover-up, is too raw for many democratic politicians in Korea today. Hardly Gangnam style.

MARTIN IVENS

Editor

Find us on www.the-tls.co.uk Times Literary Supplement

@the.tls @TheTLS

To buy any book featured in this week’s TLS,

go to timesbookshop.co.uk

2

3 LITERATURE

4 POEM

5 COMMENTARY

6 LETTERS TO THE

EDITOR

HEATHER CLARK

ALAN GILLIS

The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath Peter K. Steinberg, editor

Walking Out One Morning After Lockdown Has Been Lifted

YOOJIN GRACE WUERTZ A hunger for truth – Nobel laureate Han Kang makes uncomfortable reading for the Korean authorities

Israel and Palestine, Gaia, Thom Gunn, etc

7 LITERARY CRITICISM LUCY FLEMING

8 POLITICS

KATIE STALLARD

ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE

The Haunted Wood – A history of childhood reading Sam Leith

Autocracy, Inc. – The dictators who want to run the world Anne Applebaum. How Tyrants Fall – And how nations survive Marcel Dirsus. The Origins of Elected Strongmen – How personalist parties destroy democracy from within Erica Frantz, Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Joseph Wright. The Reactionary Spirit – How America’s most insidious political tradition swept the world Zack Beauchamp. The Wannabe Fascists – A guide to understanding the greatest threat to democracy Federico Finchelstein On Freedom Timothy Snyder

12 ART HISTORY

BOYD TONKIN BEN STREET

Memory and Migration – The Warburg Institute 1926—2024 (Warburg Institute, London) The Story of Drawing – An alternative history of art Susan Owens. How Painting Happens – (And why it matters) Martin Gayford

15 ARTS

AMBER MASSIE-BLOMFIELD Waiting for Godot Samuel Beckett (Theatre Royal Haymarket,

London)

16 FICTION

JONATHAN GIBBS LORNA SCOTT FOX CLAIRE LOWDON

18 LITERATURE & HISTORY J. J. LONG

ALICE BLACKHURST SOFIA CUMMING

Childish Literature Alejandro Zambra; Translated by Megan McDowell The Thinking-About-Gladys Machine Mario Levrero; Translated by Annie McDermott and Kit Schluter Our Evenings Alan Hollinghurst

Shadows of Reality – A catalogue of W. G. Sebald’s photographic materials Clive Scott and Nick Warr, editors Colette – My literary mother Michèle Roberts Marseille 1940 – Die große Flucht der Literatur Uwe Wittstock

20 FEMINISM

22 ECOLOGY

24 IN BRIEF

26 LETTERS

26 POEM

27 AFTERTHOUGHTS

28 NB

JUNE PURVIS EILEEN M. HUNT

C. K. STEAD SEB FALK EMILY JONES

REECE SHEARSMITH

DAVID MORLEY

CRAIG RAINE

M. C.

Sexed – A history of British feminism Susanna Rustin Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy – The feminist critique of commercial modernity Catherine Packham

Koe – An Aotearoa ecopoetry anthology Janet Newman and Robert Sullivan, editors The Green Ages – Medieval innovations in sustainability Annette Kehnel; Translated by Gesche Ipsen The War Below – Lithium, copper, and the global battle to power our lives Ernest Scheyder

Extra Time Beckons, Penalties Loom – How to use (and abuse) the language of football Adam Hurrey, etc

Robert Aickman – Selected letters to Kirby McCauley Robert Aickman

Beethoven’s Yellowhammer

T. S. Eliot and Lytton Strachey

Britishisms vs Americanisms, New Worlds at sixty and other anniversaries

Editor MARTIN IVENS (editor@the-tls.co.uk) Deputy Editor ROBERT POTTS (robert.potts@the-tls.co.uk) Associate Editor CATHARINE MORRIS (catharine.morris@the-tls.co.uk) Assistant to the Editor LISA TARLING (lisa.tarling@the-tls.co.uk) Editorial enquiries (queries@the-tls.co.uk) Managing Director JAMES MACMANUS (deborah.keegan@news.co.uk) Advertising Manager JONATHAN DRUMMOND (jonathan.drummond@the-tls.co.uk)

Correspondence and deliveries: 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF Telephone for editorial enquiries: 020 7782 5000 Subscriptions: UK/ROW: feedback@the-tls.co.uk 0800 048 4236; US/Canada: custsvc_timesupl@fulcoinc.com 1-844 208 1515 Missing a copy of your TLS: USA/Canada: +1 844 208 1515; UK & other: +44 (0) 203 308 9146 Syndication: 020 7711 7888 enquiries@newssyndication.com

The Times Literary Supplement (ISSN 0307661, USPS 021-626) is published weekly, except combined last two weeks of August and December, by The Times Literary Supplement Limited, London, UK, and distributed by FAL Enterprises 38-38 9th Street, Long Island City NY 11101. Periodical postage paid at Flushing NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: please send address corrections to TLS, PO Box 3000, Denville, NJ 07834 USA. The TLS is a member of the Independent Press Standards Organisation and abides by the standards of journalism set out in the Editors’ Code of Practice. If you think that we have not met those standards, please contact IPSO on 0300 123 2220 or visit www.ipso.co.uk. For permission to copy articles or headlines for internal information purposes contact Newspaper Licensing Agency at PO Box 101, Tunbridge Wells, TN1 1WX, tel 01892 525274, e-mail copy@nla.co.uk. For all other reproduction and licensing inquiries contact Licensing Department, 1 London Bridge St, London, SE1 9GF, telephone 020 7711 7888, e-mail sales@newslicensing.co.uk

TLS

OCTOBER 18, 2024

read next page

My Bookmarks

Buy this Book
Skip to main content