Euphoria

Elin Cullhed

Description

A woman's life, erupting with brilliance and promise, is fissured by betrayal and the pressures of duty. What had once seemed a pastoral family idyll has become a trap, and she struggles between being the wife and mother she is bound to be and yearning for so much more. The woman in question is Sylvia Plath in the final year of her life. As Plath's marriage to Ted Hughes unravels, Sylvia turns increasingly to writing to express her pain and loss, yet also her resilience and power. She has decided to die, but the art she creates in her final weeks will set her name, and the world, ablaze.

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 06 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838855987
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

By the same author
The Gods (published in Sweden as Gudarna )
 
 
First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2022
by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Distributed in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright Elin Cullhed, 2022
The right of Elin Cullhed to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
Translated from the Swedish by Jennifer Hayashida
Published under agreement with Ahlander Agency
The cost of this translation was supported by a subsidy from the Swedish Arts Council, gratefully acknowledged
For permission credits please see here
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 596 3
Export ISBN 978 1 83885 597 0
eISBN 978 1 83885 598 7
For Mom
CONTENTS
7 December 1962, Devon
One Year Earlier
It was my
Why was I
What did the
A young girl
I moaned. In
I will buy
We were in
A pile of
I had read
It was our
New Year s Eve
On the evening
The boy lay
Ted stuck his
I had slept
April was here
May in England
It began to
Without looking at
He was in
I have written
Saturday morning. Through
Is there no
I walked around
The day my
When Mother couldn t
And so everything
The nights
I ran down
Mother and I
I was alone
Awakened by dreams:
I m so fucking
Here was the
And as if
Ted had - surprise!
On the night
A flock of
I had just
I dreamed that
Soft, yellow October,
Now it was
Soon it was
Filled with the
I sat with
Late November at
And now London,
Acknowledgements
Permission Credits
Euphoria is a work of fiction about Sylvia Plath that should not be read as a biography. Events and characters in the book, which may correspond with reality, are transformed into fiction and literary fantasy in the context of the novel. Thus, Sylvia Plath also becomes a fictive character in this work.
7 December 1962, Devon
7 REASONS NOT TO DIE:
1. Skin. To never again feel the skin of one s beloved child. Nicholas when he becomes a clown in bed and I nuzzle his behind. Frieda who needs to be tickled in order to feel alive and grows calm with a laughter that cleanses her, afterwards. My skin as it strains against theirs and knows that we are the same flesh for ever and ever in all eternity Amen. Oh, to never again feel their throbbing pulses that sprang from me. I can never cease to live for them no matter how much of Ted s skin they also possess, Ted s snakeskin, he who opens his maw and presses the prey whole into his mouth until you choke.
2. Time. I want to see my children grow up and scrub their knees as they learn how to cycle, I want to pull the noose off my neck and laugh in his face as he is already (and very alone, snakes are pathologically self-absorbed) on his way to the next prey and I am busy living. I want to lick a lollipop and feel how sugar and time dissolve inside me, I want to wake to a summer s day, coffee in hand and an urge to write like hell until time also stops and is preserved and ebbs like seawater and forgives me. Time, I want you to forgive me. I also want to feel how time makes everything so fucking forgiving, how it makes strawberries plop out yet again (even though death is so close, decomposition next), makes people awaken on their pillows and once again imagine that everything is just fine.
God, I feel so good now, now when I am going to die. I see everything more clearly than ever before. I should always live to die; it s like heroin, like the kick of seeing one s former beloved run out of oxygen since he has consumed all the air that surrounded him in his armour. Snakeskin is something you shed; the skin pales like a forgotten rag on a British beach. I prefer immolation: I am convinced of the superiority of fire as a metaphor for my own life. Oh, fire that could not be greeted with open arms. Oh, alarm, as the fire got hold of a living man s writing which he mistakes for Nobel Prize material. I say: the future will remember me. So, I don t have to be skin and time and the early sixties, since time will be transformed into me but without my involvement. Pristine, like a sublime word on a gleaming page of poetry. Ted will wash my book pages as I have washed his ugly shirts. He will shrivel like a paradise apple in the autumn dirt. One of the Japanese crab apples we have here.
3. Never to fuck again, to feel the heat of the stake as it pushes into my flesh and turns me into animal and obliteration. If someone wanted to fuck me every day, I wouldn t have to die, haha. Don t quote me on that, but feel free to show my mother, the most unfucked human in history (and therefore so sour, so parched, so banal to see through, like a glass of water; my mother is a glass of water, impossible to go without but so thoroughly boring and blandly predictable and who has made me so contemptuous of death, so hateful of other women when women are the ones who could possibly help me; she has made me feel as though I do not need water, as though I am beyond water, I am not a water-needing creature not a mammal, I stand above you with your common mortal thirst for water, I hate water, spare me my daily glass of water!).
4. GIVE him that. Give him that I die and all his prophecies come true. It would be easier if you were dead, as he hissed at me this summer in order to get set to dare to leave me. You and your death ray, you have a particular bite for death - all his groaning that I kill everything. I don t want to give him that. I want to stand at the centre of the circle and glow and live. If not me in my life, who else? I don t want to give him the story of my life. For him to declare: Yes, children, your mother was a special person, she was not always well, she loved life when it flowed toward her like gold but life is also hard edges and cold and bacteria in March and being broke. We must tend to her memory, children, we must tell her stories and every year when the daffodils emerge from the ground we can pick a bouquet in her honour. Your mother Sylvia s voice was deep and strong but it never managed to make its way out of her body and onto the page, that is why she so badly wanted to turn off her body and only let the spirit live on. What she has written for posterity was worth more to her than life with us . Blah blah. Fuck that! I don t want to give him the finest pieces of cake from my life. For Olwyn his older sister to stand there on her iron legs with her arms crossed and assert: Oh yes, I ve said it since the first time I saw her, you won t get far with that woman, Ted. Her fragile strength, that mourning veil across her face so temptingly easy to pull away with a sarcasm that makes her entire self-image crumble, the wide smile grow into a grin. A little devil-girl, Ted, a little hottie, a weak American with cellophane wrapped around her heart. You ll keep her for a while, then she will melt like sugar in rain. Trust me!
And he will listen to his sister and grow stronger and think: Yes, I was a fool to try to love her, for she could not be loved.
When the truth is that it s his home that has no room for love. His home, where he comes from, where you work and grin and bear it, where the senses and aesthetics and the way you interact DO NOT MATTER. There is no culture in his home, nothing noble, no refinement; there, you are coarse and foul-mouthed and have bad manners and how is it my fault that I was someone who could love and could be beautiful and who entered his house, his home, his England, his crude inheritance of coal and stained clothes.
I wanted to give of what I had, of my wit my knowledge my gift for words and for things you see. Observations. But see: the world does not want beautiful hard-working girls made of gold. The world cannot bear them. The world wants hard wicked Olwyn-girls, the kind of girls not loved by men, who are born to make their own way in the world, European post-war women who know what it means to dig in, but not what it is to be intellectually refined and teach girls at Smith and write astonishingly cool poems in their spare time. They are jealous, oh, how they are jealous of someone like me, and still they are the ones who come out on top - those who win at life, even though they themselves will never bear a man any children and carry on the royal lineage, splay their legs wide on the bed and push glowing magma out into the world. She won t sacrifice shit, Olwyn, for she will never burn. She will stand there and grin and bear it grin and bear it and let life sweep through her until she dies. She will never step into life itself, reshape it, dictate it, steep it in beautiful shapes, give it new children. Therefore, she also manages to avoid feeling how the world cannot stand her strength her crushing beauty her genius. She will laugh at my death, she will sigh at my death, she will also envy my death, for no, she will never be that brave!
5. The ocean, and the rocks. To walk in the sheer light one afternoon in Winthrop and gather rocks for my father, be seven years old and feel how the nature I find for him bonds us more firmly than anything else in the world. The mysteries I give him are ours to discover and carefully tend, like the heart s own secrets. The ocean licks my tanned legs, and it smells of furious salt and wet seaweed in heat, and he asks me to go for a walk to find the most beautiful shells, the smoothest rocks, which he will then tell me something about. The beach and my father, the ocean, his eternity. I love my father. I know that I was born of him, that he gave me sincerity: mystery and language. When I have returned to Winthrop I no longer see the grandeur of the beaches, and the ocean bores me -