Little Fugue Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  Acknowledgments

  BOOK ONE - The Bridal Path

  1. - Robert

  2. - Sylvia

  3. - Ted

  4. - Sylvia

  5. - Ted

  6. - Sylvia

  7. - Ted

  8. - Sylvia

  9. - Robert

  10. - Ted

  11. - Sylvia

  12. - Ted

  13. - Sylvia

  14. - Ted

  15. - Sylvia

  16. - Robert

  17. - Ted

  18. - Sylvia

  19. - Ted

  20. - Sylvia

  21. - Ted

  22. - Sylvia

  BOOK TWO - You Say You Want a Revelation?

  1. - Ted

  2. - Assia

  3. - Robert

  4. - Assia

  5. - Ted

  6. - Assia

  7. - Robert

  8. - Assia

  9. - Robert

  10. - Assia

  11. - Robert

  12. - Ted

  13. - Robert

  14. - Assia

  15. - Robert

  16. - Assia

  17. - Ted

  18. - Robert

  BOOK THREE - Ariadne’s Claw

  1. - Robert

  2. - Ted

  3. - Robert

  4. - Ted

  5. - Assia

  6. - Robert

  7. - Ted

  8. - Robert

  9. - Ted

  10. - Robert

  11. - Ted

  12. - Robert

  13. - Ted

  14. - Robert

  15. - Ted

  16. - Assia

  17. - Robert

  18. - Assia

  19. - Robert

  20. - Assia

  21. - Robert

  22. - Assia

  23. - Ted

  LITTLE FUGUE

  A Conversation with Robert Anderson

  Reading Group Questions and Topics for Discussion

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  For my parents,

  G. L. and JoAnn Anderson

  After the first death, there is no other.

  —DYLAN THOMAS

  Praise for Little Fugue

  “Highly charged.”

  —The New York Times

  “Inventive and powerful . . . a compelling first novel . . . As the characters’ lives intersect through cultural uncertainties and some of the most dramatic social upheavals of the past decades, Little Fugue offers a fresh interpretation of the Plath-Hughes drama.”

  —Pages (recommended selection)

  “A daring, inventive work that blends the imagination of the writer with the story of one of the darkest literary episodes of the 20th century.”

  —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

  “Blade-sharp, hypnotic and brilliant . . . Anderson has written an innovative, hugely interesting first novel that is successful in all the right places.”

  —The Oregonian

  “Masterful . . . [a] hypnotic and provocative novel . . . This is a fiercely imaginative effort, in which Anderson connects the intricate psychology of his characters with their art and the world around them. . . . Anderson’s writing is electric.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “Little Fugue finds the truth of Sylvia Plath where no biography has looked—deep in the character of her times and in the souls of those close to her, and most thrillingly in the heart of a young reader coping in the wild corridors of New York City as the legend’s life comes crashing down. Robert Anderson is an original, a new master with new tools: poignant wit, precarious structure, controlled obsession, mysterious clarity, a certain cynical warmth. He can tell a story, too, and this one—a love story without parallel—will lay you flat.”

  —BILL ROORBACH, author of Big Bend and The Smallest Color

  “Drizzled with dark humor, Little Fugue is an eerie examination of lives defined by death.”

  —Booklist

  “A singular book about a singular woman, and the way her life and death rippled through the lives of those around her. Anderson imagines us a Plath every bit as real, desperate, and turbulent as Michael Cunningham’s Virginia Woolf; and, if anything, Little Fugue digs even deeper than The Hours to unearth the poetic truth about the characters who inhabit it.”

  —D.B. WEISS, author of Lucky Wander Boy

  “A serious book rich with writing and imaginative power. In this book about love and desire, Anderson confronts the complexities that lie within his characters.”

  —GEORGE BRAZILLER

  “Little Fugue, with its brilliantly modest title, is a rare, enduring book of a generation. Below the beauty of language genius, the tale takes over, enforced by the hammered word, leaving us dazzled and terribly moved.”

  —WILLIS BARNSTONE, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Life Watch and The Gnostic Bible

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to Ian Kleinert for believing in me against your better judgment. You laid the foundation. Thank you to Dan Smetanka for your sense of architecture. You taught me that a house can stand against itself. Thank you to Elisabeth Dyssegaard, my choir director. You taught me how to make that same house sing. Thank you to Laura Jorstad. You are a human house of correction. Thank you to Signe L. Pike. House warmer.

  BOOK ONE

  The Bridal Path

  London, February 1963. New York All Along.

  1.

  Robert

  A flatbed barge is roaring down Broadway with an American flag furling. The semi is on an empty run, returning from one of the fills upstate. I’m standing on the roof of Dodge Hall, Columbia University. I’m covered with bone dust. Candles are left to burn on the blacktop. They weep in sleepers’ windows. The night’s fires burn low as the city lies in bed, still awake. There are some Columbia kids on the street in tattered, laundry day clothing and rearward baseball caps. They are mocking the Spirit of ’76 battle corps. One of them has a pennywhistle; another, a marching drum. The last one conducts the wind. They pass, single file, beneath the bell tower of the Broadway Presbyterian Church. They fade out of view. The kids have captured the essence of music. Soloing musicians always elude the range of the senses. They dare the faculty of memory to define them. Poets are even more surreptitious. They are forever soloing. Harmony, for them, is a matter of isolation. Revelation is a rootless tongue, a sourceless river. Before the race even begins, the starting blocks have disappeared. The lost runner is mortally wounded by the maddening echo of a gun unfired. Rarely do poets meet the viewer’s eyes in photographs. But she does.

  The aqua cubes flicker, rectangles within rectangles. Tonight, the news of the world will conjugate with my accustomed scrutiny of the cosmos. Dan, Tom, and Peter. Our boys of doom in their winter. Our nighthawks of the woeful countenance. They, or one of their dredged-up experts, will have an answer to every question and a solution for naught. There will be no commercial breaks tonight. The show is being sponsored by our collective subconsciousness. This is a party thrown by the crashers.

  And I had in mind to write the story of a violent trespasser long before this evening. For years I’ve obsessed about Sylvia Plath, she of the guileless photo studies. She was a formidable poet. She was another in a long line of female literary kamikazes, the breed extending back to the authors of the Sibylline verses or, if you would rather, to the First Intermediate Period of ancient Egypt, when it is said that female scribes, laboring blithesomely under the shadow of proscribed death sentences, were given the task of ghostwriting autobiographical funerary texts— und
er the pharaohs, dying in style was given exaggerated preferment over living in the same manner. The most prominent of these ancient farewell poems is The Dialogue of a Man with His Ba. This work, dating from a little more than two thousand years before Christ, is a meditation on the art of suicide.

  Sylvia, through the channel of her posthumously published dialogue with her own soul, has been for many years a spokesperson for the alienated, the lovelorn, the vengeful, the suicidal, and for all suicides, speaking to, for, in, and of multitudes from her early and chosen grave. Sylvia’s appeal is, in no small way, linked with her inscrutability and her swaggering mortal failure. This lingering impression seems to be precisely what she had in mind. The meandering and the vulnerability of The Journals, Letters Home, The Colossus, and The Bell Jar are as understandable as Hamlet’s when you read the unmasking act of Ariel. In photographs, she has a first date’s eyes, all too wide and eager, and a blind date’s smile that pleads with you to like her, while at the same time referring in its ebullience to the photo’s substructure; the phosphorescent neutralization of the negative beneath, wherein her smile will surely resonate and her certitude will surely glow, if you will just squint your eyes and hold your gaze. You must not pay attention to her; you must pay immersion. She is a fire that has burned low of its own severity. She lies in her grave now, still awake.

  From the perspective of forty years, her photographs have the exact value as her Ariel poems and the same eminence as recollected moonlight. In photographs, she is a captured death upon arrival. She is a bright, evasive, and eternal open question. She is wild and cannot be tamed. She is a wound that can be nursed and never healed. In Ariel, no matter how many times you read the poems, Sylvia is always your first, always your blind, auguring date.

  A few years ago, Sylvia’s widower, poet laureate of England Ted Hughes, surprised us all by acknowledging his wife in a published collection. What a bleak, anticlimactic, eschatological PR caper that Birthday Letters charade made for. Ted has his last word in his last book. Ted made his last buck. As in a fable, he broke his silence, spoke his contestable truth, and then whistled his way out of the spotlight. He died offstage of a heart attack, hard upon his belated birthday tidings. The black cable extended across the Atlantic and culminated in the leaden ink of the morning paper. The telegram photoelectrically opened the door to unending public gossip sans slander suits. It cued yours truly and God knows how many other bibliophilic skulduggerers out there. With Ted gone, we can now muse behind his back and over his grave as well. Hearing hovering voices, as a matter of fact, cannot be anything so very new for either Sylvia or Ted. Nor can answering those voices, indistinctly or outright, if we, their readers and interpreters, can hope for a continuation of our long years of haunting. To be vexed, haunted, harassed, and obsessed by their convergent lives and mutually exclusive destinies is what we, their readers, we, their jury, we, their angels of ill intent, want more than a delineation of their collective tragic/romantic mystery. Rest assured. Though their bodies lie in what passes for peace now, concordances are being amassed. Prodigal poems are being called home to the anthologies. The last of their papers are being perused. In troubled times, their enmity and adversity will always provide us with a source of repose.

  Notwithstanding jealousy, betrayal, marital separation, and their ultimate deaths, thirty-five long years apart, Ted and Sylvia have remained on tenuous, sometimes ireful, speaking terms all along. Many years before his birthday condolences, Ted wrote a volume concerning a transmutable crow who journeys to death and back. He wrote another book about the blood sacrifice of a changeling, seemingly in response to Sylvia’s poem about a trainee-suicide who sheds flesh like a striptease artist, taunting death itself. Sylvia seems to have left detailed instructions to posterity regarding the way in which she would like to be unremittingly psychoanalyzed in the echo chamber of Ted’s conscience and also in the dominion of Western literary studies. She was not only responsible for her own death; she selected the subterfuge of her burial site. She killed herself in pursuit of neither rest nor peace, nor even understanding, since recognition hardly ever equals understanding. For that matter, neither of the poets was interested in minting truth so much as in promulgating myth. Sylvia and Ted were mythologists with three primary thematic subjects: themselves, each other, and all the repercussions of their pairing—up to, including, and in the aftermath of the appearance of Assia Gutmann Wevill, the opaque lady of the sonnets. The divergent confessions of the two poets do indeed constitute a narrative much more than they constitute any sort of reckoning. In the last analysis, I think that it might be wiser to trust them less than their own critics and biographers. Their pattern of lies is my only paradigm, my one true fiction. I love Sylvia. I resent Ted. I owe neither of them anything. Their poems forged my identity. They did not foretell, but they fore-informed my future. And, incidentally, they ruined my life. I couldn’t imagine any of us old.

  2.

  Sylvia

  She parsed herself into something shingled, something cubistic. Something with edges. Look at how much weight she has lost in the past three months, as she has stayed so much to herself, nurturing her two babies and making rubrical blue lace in her maroon-backed notebook. She is tall with a tapered waist and scythe-like elbows. Her features have become angular and exaggerated like those of a Nubian sculpture. Her hunger has worked its way to the bone as well as onto the page. It was not so long ago that she carried some of the birthing surplus of her second child in her hips and thighs, and she bleached her hair, looking to rarefy her attitude. For the moment, she reminded friends of a good-natured Viking Amazon or a Klondike tavern wench. “The stork brought more than the baby,” they would say.

  “And what’s she got to drop her jaw about?” the game-legged war widow now invariably sniggers to the next customer in line once Sylvia has pushed her double pram up the bluff of the exit ramp and through the glass door with the hypnotic spider’s signature in the center. “You could just about pound millet with its p’int.” Sylvia’s mare’s tail curls up, frizzled, the blond now bled out, at the small of her back. It lies there in the shape of a stalk of straw. She lets this maisonette here on the Primrose Hill side of Fitzroy Road wherein W. B. Yeats himself once germinated, and the rooms are reasonably expansive by London standards. But the front part of the convenience is a bottleneck and, dressing in the early dawn with her children still asleep, she stands with her back to the white wall in order to have a look at herself in the full-length mirror while the mad dog ghost, tethered in her commode, gurgles on for thirty or so seconds, chewing at the pipes. Her poet’s eye will not spare her feelings. Her image in the mirror looks even to her as though she were something carved in relief.

  She takes her Seconal after breakfast to compensate for the sleep that she did not get the night before. Her long day is a languid, frigid aquacade, despite the three-ring of her two infants. Her bad self, also named Sylvia, floats by her, whistling. She wears a body armor of woven gauze. She casts a fearful shadow. She reminds Sylvia of Ted’s rabbit traps out on the lawn at Court Green. She can almost hear the dead meat singing. Court Green is the manor in North Tawton, Devon, that Ted claims he can afford, owing to his new half-standard position at the BBC. The manor is beloved by them both, but it is Sylvia alone who fears the wages of love. Ted is such a heedless, romantic spendthrift. It used to be the rejection slips that clotted their mailbox; now it’s the requests for payment. The private pediatrician that Ted insisted on is after repossessing either her children or her uterus.

  Ted and she extended the his-and-hers joke to the children as well. The boy for him; the girl for her. It has been three months since Ted left to go a-whoring without a proper goodbye to his boy, her girl. His apostasy, for she thought marriage not an article but a poem of faith, has bisected her soul and placed a canopy of insulating placenta over the plexus of her nerve endings. The betrayal has given her the omniscience and the invulnerability of a sleepwalker. She sees the future before it
fails to happen. Not long before the bon voyage, Ted brought home a marble-topped table that he had looted from a dying man’s flat. Some displaced West Yorkshire falconer whom Ted used to look in on as an excuse to talk birds and to get away from Sylvia’s leading questions and the recriminations that he very likely heard in the crying of his own children. Sylvia has to keep her furnishings deliberately spare. Each little hutch, highboy, and sideboard burns its way into her consciousness like a character. As a child, she gave her parents’ battered gear whimsical Dickensian names ante-ceded by a Mr. or a Mrs. In the altitude of her imagination—she gets a nosebleed still, now and again, working on a poem—she could hear the furnishings converse. Like her parents, they spoke of the weather and annoyances. She and the marbletop hadn’t had time to get properly acquainted when Ted packed his satchel, left the nugatory checkbook and the better part of his working papers (obviously as an excuse to return), and then left his gaping singularity so barbarously magnetic in the center of the room that she cannot even leave the kitchen drawer open for fear that the knives might fly out. With Ted gone, the stolid marbletop appropriated his role in her cerebral chamber play, the brutish, serpentine stranger in the house. And now Abdiel, Ted’s editor/critic/fellow academic/dearest friend, who will not round things by sleeping with Sylvia, nor respond more than nigglingly to the cataract of her recent poems, has warmed her cold flat with a calculated gift. A Portobello facsimile of a Greek bust. A sleeping woman with a half-veiled face. His way of praising her poems, without actually praising her poems, and turning her gently from his journal and his bed, the circuitous way around.

  Seeing the bust for the first time, she was reminded of an epic Ted wrote soon after the birth of their son. It was written in the rough. It was unedited and ne’er to be when her bad twin got ahold of it and turned it to ticker tape after receiving another phone call from one more biddy confiding into her dish towel. In the poem, a Bronze Age warrior is incubated in the bronze ground, basted by the bronze tears of the tyrannized villagers whom he must grow up to emancipate by any means insurmountable. The hero is born with a cowl over his face and a sword across his breast. His enemies snare and suffocate him in a magic mesh. The vitreous skull of a horned stag marks the cocoon of the warrior’s grave, cloaked in a veil for sorrow. She wanted her son to be spared the sentiment of the poem, and she wanted Ted to suffer from the heart for what he might have gotten away with libidinally.