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Read my book, TEACHING BEAUTY IN DeLILLO, WOOLF, AND MERRILL (Palgrave Macmillan; forthcoming), co-authored with Jennifer Green-Lewis. VISIT MY BRANCH CAMPUS AT INSIDE HIGHER ED





UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, October 23, 2007

The Frog Through the Door


When she was growing up, UD had crushes on the following men:

James Agee
Albert Camus
D.H. Lawrence
George Orwell
Thomas Wolfe

This was not your standard list for a 'thesdan female in her teens.

To make UD's list, you had to write brilliantly, live intensely and self-damagingly, and die too soon. For UD, reading and re-reading Lyrical Essays or Let Us Now Praise Famous Men was (since she'd also read every detail of these men's lives) communing with personalities still very much alive for her.



Another morbid crush of UD's was Ted Hughes, who, though he lived longer than her other crushes, exhibited the same creative/destructive intensity. UD remains deeply intrigued by Hughes, for whom things went grotesquely wrong twice, with the suicides of Sylvia Plath and, not long after, Assia Weevil (Weevil killed herself and the young daughter she had with Hughes), and then, for Hughes, a haunted afterlife.

UD is very excited about the release, in a couple of weeks, of Letters of Ted Hughes. She read his posthumous book of poems about Plath, Birthday Letters, with amazement and admiration. She cried through the last poem in the book, and UD doesn't cry all that much...

The Telegraph has been running some of the letters in advance of the book's release, and they're spectacular. Spectacularly moving. The London Times reviewer writes: "No other English poet’s letters, not even Keats’s, unparalleled as they are, take us so intimately into the wellsprings of his own art." And simply on the evidence of the few letters UD's seen, this looks likely to be true. Here are two brief excerpts and one long one. They're related in theme.

"The inmost spirit of poetry ...is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain – and the physical body, so to speak, of poetry, is the treatment by which the poet tries to reconcile that pain with the world. "




"The only calibration that counts [Hughes wrote this toward the end of his life; it's addressed to his son] is how much heart people invest, how much they ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.

And the only thing people regret is that they didn't live boldly enough, that they didn't invest enough heart, didn't love enough. Nothing else really counts at all."



And in another late letter to his son:

"Do you remember ... you described a dream – ...A frog was jumping up the path behind you. You entered the building and closed the glass door, shutting out the frog. The frog then jumped against the glass of the door. Do you remember it?

...One series of dreams I had, from my teens on. Occasionally still have. Were versions of your frog. Instead of a frog, mine, in these dreams, is an aeroplane. Sometimes I'm in it. More often, it goes over – in trouble. On fire, or driving out of control. It crashes – usually just out of sight.

...That plane is the frog hitting the glass. Something from the other side of my conscious mind – something mighty important, ie the news from my whole body and its understandings, is trying to get through to me.

...What I was needing to do, all those years, was deal with what had happened to your mother and me. That was the big unmanageable event in my life, that had somehow to be managed – internally – by me.

...The best I could do, through all those following years, to deal with that giant psychological log-jam of your mother and me, was write, as if to her, quite privately, simple little attempts to communicate with her about our time together.

They were what accumulated, over the years, to this Birthday Letters. ... So all I wrote, through all those years, contained nothing of what I really needed to say. And nothing in my way of life contained the real me – I was living on the wrong side of the glass door. ...

It was when I realised that my only chance of getting past 1963 was to blow up that log-jam, and assemble whatever I had written about your mother and me, and simply make it public – like a confession – that I decided to publish those Birthday Letters as I've called them.

I thought, let the feminists do what they like, let people think what they like about me, let critics demolish and tear to bits these simple, unguarded, quite private for the most part, unsophisticated bits of writing, let the heavens fall, let your mother's Academic armies of support demolish me... – I can't care any more, I can't lock myself in behind this glass door one more week.

So I did it, and now I'm getting the surprise of my life. What I've been hiding all my life, from myself and everybody else, is not terrible at all. Though you didn't want to read it.

And the effect on me, Nicky, the sense of gigantic, upheaval transformation in my mind, is quite bewildering. It's as though I have completely new different brains. I can think thoughts I never could think. I have a freedom of imagination I've not felt since 1962. Just to have got rid of all that.

Well, let's hope it wasn't all just a bit too late.

...You were given the means – if you use them, everything about you will be changed, by what follows the frog through the door. Slowly. Like a leakage. Bit by bit."