Sylvia Plath, England’s Jubilee Queen and Secret Life of the
British Poet Laureate
By Matilda Prouty Kennedy
“Like Fabian
Colbachi, I must speak before I am silenced.
Thank you Winsip Custer” – M.P. Kennedy
She described her
life as lived under The Bell Jar, Jewish, so not like Princess Dianna, but suffocated nonetheless by the Anglophile gurgling of juiced pub pundits pounding out poems like a blacksmith slamming his hammer on a wrought iron door hinge until it's moulded into a predictable design. An unhinged hinge like a British magistrate in 18th Century Calcutta or in pre-Revolutionary New London, Connecticut. Rigidly screwed into place between her America and British door and door frame, she sought to removed the shaft that pinned her there through her poetry. She poeticized everything...her passion for her profligate husband, motherhood, crabs at low tide, little birds with broken wings that her husband tried with her to heal, then gassed. Her father's shadow and a Ouija-wish for a liberator.
High School honor students who get permission
from their parents may read this painful account of a life filled with promise,
piercing perception and pain by this talented Jewish-American author. She took
her own life at thirty-one. The daughter
of a Russian immigrant who escaped the Nazi Holocaust, Sylvia Plath attended
Smith College the alma mater of Barbara Pierce Bush, Nancy Reagan, Betty
Friedan, Gloria Steinem, Julia Child and others closely connected to the
dominant Anglo-American-Judeo-Christian and markedly Puritan Protestant New
England power elites. Smith College in
the 1930’s was like a lake with deep and dark canyons reserved for the schooling
of America’s upwardly mobile. Like the offspring of the fierce river pike,
the fish that feed on the milder species in the shallower waters above, Smith
students not unlike their other Ivy League counterparts understand their
preparation as America’s leadership elites.
Their preparation in the pond of this inverted bell jar, the shallows of
which provide abundant weaker schoolies as a source of nourishment, was meticulously designed and jealously guarded.
As we now know
from Edwin Black’s book, War Against The
Weak, Sylvia Plath lived among this element of America’s elite who schooled
their offspring in ideologies that gave prior corresponding influence to the military
industrialist complex in Nazi Germany. From this position
of prominence came the domination and feeding frenzy of early 20th Century German Nationalism and Mid-Twentieth-Century Fascism which terrorized most Englishmen and inspired some others. In the U.S., between those two wars two-time
Medal of Honor winner, General Smedley Darlington Butler, would signal to the
nation the hidden supply lines that these elite predators on both sides of the
Atlantic had secretly maintained.
Between these two wars, Butler’s outing of the “Business Plot” in the
1930’s which included the connections of some of America’s leading
industrialists to Axis powers coincided with the evolving civil rights and
women’s movements.
The refusal to allow
black singer Marion Anderson to sing the National Anthem at Boston’s
historic Faneuil Hall….an incident that
caused Eleanor Roosevelt to resign her membership in the Daughters of the
American Revolution…occurred in 1939….one year before some Yale students protested their families’
refusal to intervene in what was becoming the Nazi Holocaust.
Sylvia Plath’s
mentor at Smith College was Olive Higgins Prouty. A sister in literature and author of the story
that became movie director Hal Wallis’ 1942 film, Now, Voyager, Prouty had
borrowed her title from a Walt Whitman poem…..
“The untold
want by life and land ne’er granted. Now
voyager sail thou forth to seek and find.”
Unlike Eleanor
Roosevelt, Prouty defended her membership in the DAR, perhaps believing she
could remain closer to the original vision of American liberty by nurturing
students like Plath from within Smith College’s elite circle of women leaders. Indeed, the Prouty name is a proud one in New
England, politically and militarily connected like the outspoken encyclopedic
military intelligence officer for JFK, Col. L. Fletcher Prouty. L. Fletcher Prouty would later provide
revealing insights into the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane incident, the unusual
handling of the JFK motorcade at Dealy Plaza, the use of U.S. military
personnel and equipment for drug smuggling and other little known aspects of
life in the U.S. republic.
Olive Prouty’s Now, Voyager employed actor Bette Davis whose own daughter would
later complain on the bell jar under which she lived in Miss Davis’ home.
Davis played a clinically depressed Boston Brahman socialite whose mother dominated
her life. Breaking free of her mother’s
control Miss Charlotte Vale, a name perhaps chosen because of
it close similarity to the Vane family whose historic connections to both the British power structures
and American Revolutionary leadership, Vale nicely veiled the uniquely American
psycho-tensions inherent in issues of freedom and authority.
While Barbara
Pierce Bush studied at Smith College, her future husband would attend Yale. Yale
University would become the scene of a student political debate led by one who
favored intervention in the war in Europe about which Sylvia Plath’s father knew
much. Pushing intervention was William Gardner “Ted” White, the
future tail gunner in George H.W. Bush’s plane, the Barbara II. White was one of two lost
crewmen in Bush's raid over Chichi Jima. Bush was son of Prescott Bush who FDR's policeman on improper trading arrangements with Germany, Leo Crowley, had ticketed.
White and his
fellow supporters would be influenced in his Yale years by Louis Nizer who like Sylvia
Plath was a prominent Jewish writer who would later become the chief
attorney for the Motion Picture Industry of America. Within twenty years Bostonian JFK would
wrestle with the Boston Brahmans changing their iron-clad control of the American political process as his father dated Hollywood starlets like Gloria Swanson while intimidating Winston Churchill with his view on Germany. The Second World War over for fifteen years, within days of his inauguration John F. Kennedy fought to keep the U.S. out of a full-scale nuclear
attack with Russia as expatriate Cubans accused him of abandoning their efforts
to reclaim their nation from Fidel Castro.
Twenty years hence and Nancy Reagan’s husband would be faced with
Iran-Contra, the brain-child of Barbara Bush’s husband whose involvement in the
Bay of Pigs is seen in the CIA operation that bore the name of his oil company,
Operation Zapata.
On November 26,
1942 Now, Voyager director, Hal B. Wallis, had also released the film, Casablanca, starring the Now, Voyager’s male star, Paul Henreid, as Victor Laslo. Laslo, the exiled French resistance fighter, reminded all
Americans of the role the French played not only in rejecting the tyranny of
the totalitarian monarchical political systems of Europe, but of the place that
the French played in liberating the Americans from the boot of the British
Royals. Tyranny is tyranny regardless of
its name.
With the shift in
the British monarchy from the Tudors to the Stuarts to the House of Orange and House
of Hanovers and then toward the German influence of the Saxe-Gotha’s turned
Windsors the Europeans were painfully aware of the potential dangers inherent
in a Nazi German/British alliance which Joseph Kennedy favored along with a number of American industrialists including Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone and Averill Harriman whose father had employed Prescott Bush and for whom Robert and Ethel Kennedy's son, Douglas Harriman Kennedy, was named.
FDR
would recall the Irish-American Ambassador and Boston patriarch
whose ambitions were checked and influenced by the more powerful
Puritan-Protestant Boston and New England Brahmans who were themselves compromised as FDR's Leo Crowley had proven. Wallace
Simpson’s marriage to the heir of the Saxe-Gotha/Windsor crown, Edward, the
Duke of Windsor, along with Rudolph Hess’ midnight flight to the estate of Lord
Hamilton, provided clues to the unraveling of any notion of a movement toward
democratic rule.
Wallace Simpson
was a confirmed Nazi spy who had met the Saxe-Gotha-Windsor heir at a hotel in
San Diego, California, a key U.S. Navy and Marines training center. Winston Churchill would see to it that the
Duke and his wife rode out the war years in the Bahamas far away from any
sphere of British influence.
Sylvia Plath’s
husband would become the Saxe-Gotha’s personal poet. Drawing most of his poetic
inspiration from the brutality of nature, there was an animal magnetism pulling
this talented wordsmith not only toward a bevy of women who had been in many
ways victims of the power elites' politics, but toward those power elites who sought justification for
the social Darwinism being developed in Germany, the laboratories of Cold
Spring Harbor, New York and in the minds of the British monarchists who were
having to skillfully tap-dance around popular American ideals that were increasingly
influencing the British and world populace.
Within this milieu
Olive Prouty found, under the broader bell jar, young Sylvia Plath just as Charlotte Vale
would find Christine “Tina” Durrance in Now,
Voyager… the sad woman whose life before Paul Henreid’s character of Jeremiah Duvaux Durrance, was filled with
self-doubt fueled by her mother’s priggish paternalism. Under Prouty’s tutelage Plath would find her life taking an
exhilarating upward rush. She went to
England as a Fulbright Scholar where she met and fell passionately in love with
Ted Hughes.
Plath was also the student of New England Brahman poetry
scion, Robert T. Spence Lowell, IV whose family members included Boston’s James
Russell Lowell and a bevy of prominent New Englanders of Puritan Protestant
and Plymouth Pilgrim descent. Poet Robert
Lowell would shock his mother by joining the Roman Catholic Church and eventually
marrying Lady Caroline Maureen Hamilton Temple Blackwood….a name that connects
with both Lord Hamilton upon whose estate Hitler’s third in command, Rudolf
Hess, crashed his Messerschmidt airplane while on a mission to secure a
Nazi-Anglo alliance, and also with Blackwood Magazine for which America’s chief
Scottish Rite Mason and chief legal counsel for the American KKK, Albert
Pike, was a writer. Pike was also married to a member
of the Hamilton family, Mary Ann Hamilton, but his branch of Masonry, unlike
that of the U.S. Founding Fathers, was organized after the American Revolution by
the Prussian royal family and exported to the U.S. through Pike. Adopting the “Scottish” nomenclature in the same way
that the Saxe-Gotha clan would adopt the Windsor name to hide its monarchical
ideology, Masonry in America bifurcated. Lady Blackwood was also
married to Lucian Freud, the grandson of Austrian Jewish psychiatrist Sigmund Freud, whose breakthroughs in
mind-science were being incorporated into everything from the Tavistock Group's
global initiatives, to American advertising techniques to CIA mind-control projects
like project MK-Ultra.
In her relationship
to Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath’s life brings to a head the battle between genetic
predispositioning toward mental illness and environmental issues aggravating, or
perhaps implanting, suicidal ideations.
Time opens many
windows and doors and with it can come destructive forces which can ironically let in a great deal
of healing light, but not always in time for the benefit of those who have to endure the struggle. Winston Churchill is reported
to have walked through the London rubble following a particularly violent Nazi
bombing raid, picked up a shop sign that read “Open” and penned “More Open Than
Usual” and tacked it to the shop’s skeletal door frame. We try to tack some new awareness to Plath’s
skeleton, too, but Plath and Hughes’ romance has provided an enigma. Did her love of Hughes take her career to new
heights which she would never have reached on her own? At what price?
Erica Jong
describes her encounter with the Queen’s poet and Plath’s unfaithful spouse…..
He was fiercely sexy, with a vampirish,
warlock appeal. He hulked. He was tall and his shoulders were broad. His hair
fell against his broad forehead. He had a square jaw and an intense gaze and he
reeked of virility. Moreover, he knew how irresistible he was in the Heathcliff
fashion, and he did the wildman-from-the-moors thing on me full force when we
met. He was a born seducer and only my terror of Sylvia's ghost kept me from
being seduced.
I
remember sitting across a bar table with Ted and his friend Luke while Ted put
the poetic moves on me. Knowing I'd want an autographed book, he snatched my
copy of Crow and drew, on the title page, a lecherous
snake climbing an Edenic tree. "To Erica, a beautiful Surprise," he
scribbled flirtatiously, as he must have done with every woman he met. You
could inhale the man's pheromones across the table — this stink of masculinity
and musk that must have worked on countless girls. His eyes held you in his
gaze as if you were the only person on the planet. The only other man I've met
who had such intensity was Ingmar Bergman, another born seducer — in the gloomy
northern style. Are these men from the cold and gloomy north so sexy because
they taunt you with the promise of sex that can melt icebergs? Or is it the
intensity of genius that attracts? Genius is a strong aphrodisiac.
"To quench his thirst I squandered my blood," wrote Plath. If she was speaking of Hughes as most suspect she bears witness to that adolescent urge to look for Mr. Goodbar only to discover that as a poet his poems are like lace curtains on a slaughter house.
Was Ted Hughes like Paul
Henreid? No. He wasn’t French. He was English and empowered by the
Anglophile lusts that many had come to believe were fueling the American
reversion toward the monarchical exclusivity of New England Brahman culture. That
lust bonded the like-minded even during the American Civil War when Boston’s most powerful
opium smuggler, Caleb Cushing with his ties to British and American shippers and
world-traders conferred with Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his henchman, Roman
Catholic Confederate General Albert Pike. Pike wrote, as previously stated, for the Scottish Jacobite anti-Puritan
periodical, Blackwood’s Magazine. He would go on to usurp the leadership of the KKK's founder, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, taking over control of the American KKK and leading it into a more violent direction that Forrest rejected. Pike was the leading proponent of America’s Tory-aligned Scottish Rite Masonry and is entombed in its Washington D.C. temple.
 |
Gweneth Paltrow as Sylvia Plath
in 2003 movie. |
The
Anglo-American alliance included the intricate trading arrangement between
the New England and Liverpool-based Brown and Russell families whose involvement in the laying of the U.S. Transcontinental Railroad served their world-wide ambition while employing men like Prescott Bush in their Union Pacific transportation system. While they domiciled their children at Smith,
Princeton, Harvard, Brown or especially Yale, their warehouses held goods needed to
rebuild America following its many wars and its Westward expansion toward the
lucrative China trade. The wars were supported by their weapons, chemicals and petroleum. Today the China trade
has culminated in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, regions from which poppy production has always been transported for profit. Before these conflicts there were similar ones in
Korea or Vietnam providing lucrative quarter-mastering opportunities at the spigot
of the U.S. tax-dollar pipeline. In time their warehousing spread through the earlier China-trade relationships to Chinese goods funneled through Walmarts across America and around the world with the wholesale relocation of
American jobs to the Orient under the
direction of Anglo-American power elites feeding like Pike on milder species and even their own
guppies.
Ted Hughes’
affair with Assia Wevill would hardly add self-assurance to Sylvia Plath’s
feelings of inadequacy and entrapment. Like
Plath, Assia Wevill would take her own life and that of her daughter by Hughes,
four year old Shura Wevill Hughes. In
the American South, Boll Weevils eradicated entire cotton crops. What child named “Shura Wevill” would not
have heard of this connection by her sixteenth birthday had she lived? More importantly, Assia Wevill, Jewish like
Plath, was also a Holocaust survivor.
Did Hughes prey, like the many subjects of his poetry, on the smaller and weaker
for his own pleasure rising from the dark waters... “deep like England”?
Inherent in their
Jewishness, had Plath and Wevill been able to embrace it given the expectations
associated with their Fulbright Scholarship honors which originated with J. William Fulbright in Little Rock, Arkansas, the city from which Albert Pike wrote for Blackwood Magazine, was the distrust of
monarchs and all of the primogeniture-driven legal machinations upon which the
whole British empire and monarchy rested and which the pre-Scottish Rite Masons
of America…..Washington, Franklin and the rest…..rejected. They cared not about strutting the grounds of
Balmoral, as had John Brown with Queen Victoria or Ted Hughes with Queen
Elizabeth. They would collectively
assign the task of writing out of U.S. law all English first-born favoritism
upon which the monarchy depended. To
that task they appointed Thomas Jefferson whose love affair with the French was
as unveiled as Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave, but whose relationship with Sally Hemmings was not. Within less than 100 years a new legal
device, the corporation, could insure the return of family dynasties with
cross-pond interlocking directorates and global shenanigans, but the U.S.
Founding Fathers are forever linked to a passion for crop-topped pyramidal
structures where leadership rises, but not to a pin-point.
The monarchy, in
their opinion, didn’t need revamping it
needed dismantling. It is this opinion that is used as justification for police-state militaristic silencing of the populace under the guise of controlling communists, socialists and trade unionists, of which the early Masonic stone masons were a part. The Jewish position
was the correct one, balancing capitalistic values and incentives with socialistic models of justice under a common egalitarian rule of law. Even the leading German theologians of the
mid-Twentieth Century were getting it right.
“Democracy is ordained by God,” said Karl Barth. Israel’s King David was the last-born son of
Jesse, not the first-born. With this in
mind, Oliver Cromwell had repatriated the Jews to England following their exile
at the hand of Edward I or Longshanks because the Puritan reformers could
envision a form of republican rule and democratic virtues which the monarchy
historically bemoaned and which Judaism cherishes to this day and which the Americans had courageously forged. The Jew's claim that Israel is the only real
democracy in a region laced with the dominant values of the old order is essentially
correct.
Ted Hughes’
greatest difficulty as a poet was in finding a voice that could pay respect to
the guppies in the shallows and to the larger predators that feed on them at
will. Unlike England’s poet laureate, Tennyson
before him, Hughes seemed not to try. By
the time Ted Hughes’ son was born, Jewish American folk singer, Bob Dylan was
proclaiming….”Steal a little and they put you in jail. Steal a lot and they make you a king.”
Hughes’ influence
on his son by Plath, Nicholas Farrar Plath Hughes, a notable Alaskan biologist
who unlike his father not only caught fish, but studied their prospects for
survival, especially the Alaskan salmon, is noted. Nicholas’ hobby was pottery. Molded as he was by the influence of his
mother and father, what was he thinking when he, too, took his own life in
Fairbanks on March 16, 2009?
Before taking her
own life on February 11, 1963, Sylvia wrote her last poem “Nick and the
Candlestick”: “O love, how did you get
here? O embryo. In you, Ruby.
The pain you wake to is not yours.”
With two women
closest to him apparently dead at their own hand, Ted Hughes took over the care of
Sylvia’s two children with his third wife, Carol, and surely taught Nicholas
about fish and fishing long before he disclosed to the boy the truth of his
mother’s death. Representative of Hughe's notable
poems is the one titled “Pike”.
Killers from the egg: the
malevolent aged grin.
Three we kept behind glass,
jungled in weed: three inches, four,
And four and a half: fed fry to
them
Suddenly there were two. Finally one.
Jungled in
weed. Under glass. A bell jar of a deep black abyss where the
warrior-poet admired not the pastoral protector of the garden and stream, but
the passionless dominator of it, like the name implies….a spear of the warrior
or the rails along a highway for turning around the travelers as they make
their way on what they thought was an unobstructed journey. Hughes’ friend and fellow fisherman, Annalisa
Barbieri, said that when Hughes wanted to be alone in a pub and dodge the
notoriety of his poet laureate honors he would tell people that he was “a
farmer”. That is what all empire
builders make of their captives before they devour their culture and them with
it. They turn them into farmers of the
soil where they tend and preserve a small plot while the warriors subdue and
exploit at will. A self-sustaining existence has no more glamour and excitement
for some women than the Bridges of Madison County without the poetic
photographer to frame her in the beauty she has long taken for granted and
blamed on her familiar farmer who has unselfishly fed her. We need not be too critical of Plath for her attraction to Hughes. Everyone has shit on their shirt-tails. It's just that unlike Prince Harry who appeared at a costume party in a Nazi SS uniform, it usually stays tucked neatly inside. The most pietistic of the New England Puritans cherished the horror stories of their beloved Edgar Allen Poe and the threatening aspects of Melville's painted cannibal, Queequig, in pursuit with Ishmael, Starbuck and Ahab of the great white whale. Like the tragic life of Princess Diana, Sylvia Plath serves to remind the world of the dangers of life at the top....or bottom....depending on one's world-view.
In America, Bostonian
Caleb Cushing would lead the charge West first consulting with future
Confederate President Jefferson Davis and his Agent for Indian affairs, Albert
Pike, whose brutality in the KKK led Nathan Bedford Forrest to leave it in
1869, according to historians Ken Burns and Shelby Foote. From this triumvirate would come the
eclipsing of British naval superiority in the orient by the U.S. fleet and the
protection of America drug policy as outlined by Col. L. Fletcher Prouty. This closed system, more than anything else created the bell jar and social bubble that defines the Plath-Hughes experience. Cushing’s earliest diplomatic missions to China for the U.S.
government while his family walked Boston’s Copley Square, worshipped in the
Anglican Trinity Church and admired bronze statues of Sir Henry Vane, with
little reflection on the meaning of substituting the old British Empire with
the newer American one, fulfilled Ted Hughes’ image of the single-minded pike.
When years after her death Ted Hughes announced the release
of Sylvia Plath’s letters, many wondered if he had not sanitized them for a
public which had waited long for some final word from tragic poet.
Sylvia Plath’s diary which she kept from age 11 to her death
and which contained details of her life at Smith College were published in 1982
and titled The Journals of Sylvia Plath.
The book was edited by Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes. Frances McCullough would also edit a cookbook
that has in many ways been compared to Julia Child’s now famous The Art of French Cooking. Diana Southwood Kennedy’s many books on Mexican cooking are widely available and she reportedly lives in the Mexican area associated with international tourism, San Miguel Allende.
In 1982
Smith College acquired Plath's remaining journals. Ted Hughes sealed two of them until February
11, 2013, the fiftieth anniversary of Sylvia’s death and one year after
the British queen’s widely promoted and televised golden jubilee.
Frances McCullough’s editing of Diana Southwood Kennedy’s
work has an interesting connection to New England's Protestant Brahman/Catholic
Kennedy pond. Diana Kennedy’s husband was Paul P. Kennedy,
the New York Times reporter whose article
on January 10, 1961 disclosed a secret training base in Guatemala that was used
to prepare the Bay of Pigs soldiers, code named “Operation Zapata” in their attempt to reclaim Cuba from Fidel
Castro. Diana Southwood Kennedy would
help to open the Austin, Texas restaurant, Fonda
San Miguel, where George Walker Bush reportedly proposed marriage to Laura
Welch….a fitting place for a real power meal-deal.
United States
Brigadier General Russell Bowen in his 1991 book, The Immaculate Deception, verifies that George H.W. Bush worked
with anti-Castro Cuban groups in Miami before and after the Bay of Pigs
invasion using his company, Zapata Oil, as cover for the activities. Bowen notes that the University of Miami was
where the operations were based for many years and that records there indicated
that George H.W. Bush was present during this time. It is widely known that the Bush's Florida compound in at the Ocean Reef Club on Key Largo just down the coast from Palm Beach where Madoff, Trump and the European Royals had partied together, played polo, mixed and mingled.
Minutes from Diana Southwood
Kennedy’s beloved Fonda San Miguel in Austin, Texas where George Walker Bush proposed marriage,
was the office of another noted American poet and thoroughbred in Fran McCullough’s
stable. Robert Bly is founder of the mythopoetic men’s movement and author of Iron John: A Book About Men and Light Around the Body which won the 1968
National Book Award for poetry. Bly,
whose name recalls Captain William Bligh, whose role in the Mutiny on the Bounty forever links the name to authoritarian structures,
argued that the modern American democratic experiment suffers from a shortage of
elder-insights and elder-younger nurturing. Boys learn
to be men from older men and that has been lost in the industrial age, or so Bly argues.
Bly’s book Sibling Society
decried this loss of authoritarian influences in American life and while Bly in 1966
protested American involvement in the Vietnam War and gave money to support the anti-Vietnam War movement. It is difficult to know if
his rejection of the war was an honest rejection of
American hypocrisy or a younger Bly’s unintentional furthering of an authoritarian agenda that Ted Hughes’
British benefactors would have warmly embraced.
King of the mountain is an awful game for those fighting on the slopes. Was a younger Bly arguing that mature males embrace anti-authoritarianism while an older Bly embraces it? Then hello Fletcher Christian, move over Captain Bligh! Perhaps Fran McCullough, as the editor of
both Hughes and Bly, has some idea. Either
way a limiting of American Imperialism would have satisfied to some degree both
the anti-war movement, America’s enemies and the same Anglo-Austrian-Prussian monarchists
who proved so problematic to Churchill and FDR….and come to think of it….to George
Washington, John Adams, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, William Davidson and
the others.
Bly’s
first wife, Carol, may have had a handle on men from which Sylvia Plath would
have benefited. In 1996 she wrote
Changing The Bully That Rules the World, but even this attempt to address the
problems of ethics in modern life shows the paradox. Milkweed, her not for profit publisher,
acknowledges the support of the Bush and McKnight Foundations. While Robert Bly,
like Sylvia Plath, studied in Europe….Norway and not England….on a Fulbright
scholarship, Carol attended the local Smith Ivy League alternative, Wellesley.
Robert Bly attended St. Olaf University in Minnesota before transferring to Harvard. St.
Olaf University’s motto is the battle cry of the Old Norsemen…the cry of St.
Olaf King of Norway: “Forward! Forward!
Men of Christ, Men of the Cross!”……like “Onward Christian Soldier”….a hymn sung
by GI’s and Nazi storm troopers alike.
The Blys are seemingly
so far from the fray and yet so close.
Carol Bly has made most of her living from The Loft, an independent
writers’ workshop and at a similar programs at the Splitrock Summer Arts
Program for the University of Minnesota, Hamline University, Carleton, Ashton
and Moorhead State Universities. The
Bush Student Center and McKnight facilities in St. Paul at Hamline University
are located on the Pierce Butler Route….named for W.G. Harding appointee to the William Howard Taft Supreme Court, Supreme Court Justice Pierce Butler's heritage is from the neighboring county in Ireland of Pierce Butler, the Southern slave owner
whose 1859 divestiture of the largest number of slaves sold on a single day
in American history became known as “Weeping Time” and saved the single biggest slaveholder to
attend the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention from financial ruin one year ahead of the Civil War from which his other family members would handsomely profit. Pierce Butler’s family connections to the
Pierce and Percy families are well chronicled.
Archibald Granville “A.G.” Bush and William McKnight were founding
members of 3M, Minnesota, Mining and Manufacturing a major supplier of wartime
products and the kind of mining devastation that both Robert and Carol Bly
decry in their poetry.
 |
Pierce Butler, Minnesota railroad attorney appointed by
W.G. Harding to Chief Justice, William Howward Taft's
Supreme Court. To the right is Pierce Butler from
South Carolina and slaver whose massive sale of slaves in 1859
created "Weeping Time". |
Indeed,
William L. McKnight’s daughter would marry the head of another military
industrialist supplier, James Binger of Honeywell, previously of Dorsey &
Whitney law firm, whose founder Wheelock “Whee” Whitney was a classmate of
George Herbert Walker Bush at Phillips Exeter Academy and Yale. Wheelock’s son, Benson Kelly Whitney would be
appointed by George W. Bush as ambassador to Norway following his service as
the Bush-Cheney finance chair in Minnesota, an appointment that seemed to
compliment the appointment of Swedish American ambassador to Sweden from George
W. Bush’s home county in Texas, McClennan, attorney and Scottish Rite Mason,
Ambassador Lowell Olson. Meanwhile, not
far from the college where Robert Bly taught, Concordia Lutheran University,
was an expert in the Norse and Germanic mythology, Stephen Edred Flowers, a
professor in the Austin Community College system. Flowers, an American Runologist and proponent
of occultism and Germanic mysticism often went under the pen name Edred
Thorsson advocating esoteric runology and Odanism while succeeding the founder
of the Temple of Set, the infamous U.S. military intelligence officer from San
Francisco’s Presidio, Col. Michael Aquino, once a key member of Anton LaVey’s
Church of Satan.
It is not that Bly’s belief that
men needing a centering authoritarian image is wrong. The problem is that like Ted Hughes’
throwback to nature as a guiding image, Bly’s belief in some Jungian acorn of a
monarch and king includes the likes of Edward I, Henry VIII and the Duke of
Windsor. The Blys may, as Lutherans, point
to Jesus Christ as that other worldly king and firstborn of Mary who didn’t act
like one, but Jesus hardly fits Hughes’ pike-portrait and Christianity's ultimate mythopoetic image has yet to
be truly tried even among the Puritans.
Like Hughes, Bly points to the past to provide a road map for the
future. Darwin, on the other hand, used
nature’s past to show us from whence we have come, but not where we are going.
To their credit, Robert and Carol
Bly’s poetry seems not to be in vain.
Robert founded with fellow poet, David Ray, the poets' protest group American Writers Against the Vietnam War
in 1966. The group included Galway
Kinnell, W.S. Merwin, Allen Ginsberg, Adrienne Rich, Grace Paley, Douglas Kent
Hall and Robert Lowell....all mostly incorporated within a position of privilege from which, not unlike New York's Union Seminary's William Sloan Coffin, they pointed out the moat in the eyes of their close and powerful neighbors. In the same
tradition, Sam Hamill a veteran 1960’s protester like Bly and Ray, founded
Poets Against the War in February 2003.
When it was discovered that Hamill and other poets intended to use a
White House symposium on the poetry of Dickinson, Whitman and Hughes…..Langston not Ted
Hughes…..as an occasion to protest the imminent invasion of Iraq by President
Bush, the president’s wife, Laura, cancelled the event. From what we now know of that war would they push for a new group called Poets for Treason Laws Enacted? It's not likely. The Sylvia Plaths of this world are nurturers. Even at the end they lay a glass of milk and cookies at their childrens' bedside. The Hughes of this world count on that. They look backwards for their vision and poetic license.
Poets and historians deal in myth, not reality. What historian has drawn the connection between Langston Hughes' grandmother's husband, Lewis Sheridan Leary, who joined John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, to John Brown's connection to his "secret six" including Boston's George Luther Stearns who was trying to corner the lead market with the promised outbreak of Civil War? Or to Alexander Brown and the Brown family's Merchant Shot Tower in Baltimore where James Hamlet, the first black test case of the Fugitive Slave Laws pushed by Pierce Butler was making musket balls and to which he was returned....returned by a name that's legendary in U.S. intelligence circles....Federal Marshall Talmadge. What historian has noted the 19th Century mind control and public relations ploy of using a slave named Hamlet to draw attention to a law guaranteed to fuel the flames of war by the profiteers? What historian or poet has drawn connections between the first Federal soldier on the scene at Harper's Ferry, John Ewell Brown Stuart, to the Brown and Stuart clans of Baltimore, Boston, New York and Edinburgh or to the Jacobite Stuarts buried in the Vatican and surely aligned with Albert Pike or to the absence of the same JEB Stuart from battles that parallels the military record of General Braxton Bragg sending Shelby Foote's most celebrated military hero on either side of the conflict, Nathan Bedforest Forrest, into a rage? Foote respected Forrest presumably not just for the loyalty of even the blacks in his company, nor for his great military mind, but for his early assessment of the whole charade that didn't require the premature ending of the incomplete period of Reconstruction to figure out. An American Civil War would have been in the British monarchy's interest and for all of James Russell Lowell's love of the beautiful songbird, the Bobolink, wisdom dictated that wise old owls in their power elite packs....British and American war profiteers together....devour America's song of freedom, liberty and justice. Owls eat songbirds like the pike eats its own. Could it be that Sylvia Plath's dirges and dark depressions were much more than some genetic predispositioning and manic rocket shot that fizzles, plunges, crashes and burns?
Ronald Hayman's book,
The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath in a chapter titled "Boston", speaks at length of Hughes' and Plath's interest in the occult. Hayman also covers her interest in living in William Butler Yeat's home in London at 23 Fitzroy Street.
W.B. Yeats: A Life by R.F. Foster explores Yeat's relationship to the progenitor of Western occultism embraced by everyone from L. Ron Hubbell of The Church of Scientology, to the Kaballa movement, to Anton LeVay and Col. Michael Aquino. Winston Churchill's refusal to allow Crowley to interview Rudolf Hess after his plane crash on the Hamilton estate is well documented as is Yeat's confrontations with Crowley over the leadership of occultism in England.
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(L) 23 Fitzroy Street, London. Home of W.B. Yeats where Plath died.
(Center) Foster's 1997 book on Yeats with coverage of his relationship to
Aleister Crowley and occult. (R) Ronald Hayman's book,
The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath which covers the couples'
occultist interests in the chapter "Boston". |
Olive Prouty,
Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Assia Wevill and her daughter Shura and now Nicholas
Plath are all characters in an Anglo-American tragedy, but one that has its counterpart in every society. That tragedy rivals, no eclipses, the histories
of the Medici and Borgia's... Napoleon and the Hapsburg's. Beneath the shallows lies the darker waters from which ascends the cannibal carnivores
invoking a vision of liberty and freedom which they, all the while, intend to
devour.
