Revealed: Sylvia Plath’s unseen art, discovered in the attic

Paintings and drawings by Sylvia Plath, many of which have never been seen before, are to be published in October to mark the 75th anniversary of the birth of the American poet and novelist.In the book Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath’s Art of the Visual, editor Kathleen Connors reveals illustrated childhood letters that Plath wrote when she was seven, which were found in the Plath family attic in 1996. There are also schoolbook sketches, portraits and a series of photographs and paintings from when Plath was an art student at Smith College, Massachusetts, including this self-portrait. The works were all completed by the time Plath was 20, at which point she decided to concentrate on her writing.

As Connors points out, it was no small decision. “While few would argue with Plath’s career choice, it is unfortunate she dropped her Smith college studio courses just as she was developing her famous literary themes in art,” she says. “The limited life options for women, and the marriage of military and commercial cultures during the 1950s, for example, are beautifully depicted in her late artwork.”

Connors will discuss the book in person on October 14 at the Cheltenham literary festival, with one of Plath’s friends, poet and critic Al Alvarez, and actor Diana Quick, who will read a selection of her poetry. In addition, there is a planned concert reading at the Royal Festival Hall for which musicans such as Patti Smith and Alanis Morissette and actors, including Alan Rickman, have been approached to participate. more…

“Richness, beauty, horror”

Peer Teuwsen talks with author Walter Kempowski about his autobiographical literature, his life as a writer and his activities as a people collector.
Walter Kempowski is a unique figure among German writers. He is known primarily for his large-scale literary projects "Deutsche Chronik" (German chronicle) - an autobiographical novel in nine volumes - and "Das Echolot" (echo sounding), a ten-volume collective diary in collage form.

Die Weltwoche: Mr. Kempowski, you led a German life.

Walter Kempowski: You’re right to use the past tense.

In your case a German life means war, prison, confrontation of the past. What remains?

Endless amounts of richness, beauty and horror.

And what are you thinking about in particular in your last weeks?

About my wonderful childhood. My father was a monarchist and my mother a stout Christian, a peculiar mixture. My father used to carry the Christian sayings that my mother had given him in the left coat pocket of his uniform, and the loo paper in the right. Amiable parents, who never did anything violent. That’s how we grew up, not particularly rich, but well-to-do.

A bourgeois upbringing.

Oh, it wasn’t all that great back then in Rostock. My father rode a bicycle to work in 1935. He was killed in the last days of the war, and we all ended up in prison. That wasn’t how we’d imagined peace. But you have to consider how much guilt the Germans had heaped upon themselves. And someone had to shoulder it. I’m a participant of the post-war era. I paid the price for the sins of others. My family did nothing awful. My father helped a few Jews escape to Sweden. But my father was no hero. Nor was my mother.

Are you a hero then?

By now I believe so, yes. Keep on keeping on.

And now with the end in sight, do you think about death?

Oh you know, I just hope when I wake up in the morning that I won’t feel any pain today. I have no problem with the end in itself. I mean, of course I’m interested in what happens when one day the trap shuts.

You had a stroke in 1991.

Yes. I experienced what a feeling of bliss it is to collapse sideways. “Thank God it’s all over,” I thought at the time. I hope that’s what it will be like now.

You once tried to take your own life?

Yes, as a prisoner in Bautzen in 1950. I would have been spared a lot had I succeeded – but missed out on a lot too. That’s what the world’s like. It was no easy job to be the headmaster of a village school. On the other hand I became a writer and had the satisfaction of travelling round the country with books and experiencing the so-called feedback from my readers. And I’ve got nice children and grandchildren, amazingly competent co-workers and a clear head. more…

Schumann’s haemorrhoids and hangovers

Composers die in peculiar ways. Lully banged his toe so hard with his conducting stick that it turned gangrenous. Alkan was killed not by a bookcase, as legend has it, but by an umbrella rack that toppled over. Granados went down with a ship that was torpedoed during the First World War. Webern, living in Berlin in 1945, defied the curfew by stepping outside his house for a cigar and was shot.

Poor Robert Schumann met a fate far, far worse than any of the above. His terminal illness – described in savage detail in John Worthen’s biography – subjected him to a torture so extreme that you can hardly bear to turn the pages. Unless, that is, you’re a historical rubbernecker like me, in which case you can’t turn them fast enough.

Schumann will always be a tricky figure to assess. He once hailed the young Frédéric Chopin with the words: “Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” And he, too, was a genius, but not of the hat-flinging variety.

There are many Schumann pieces in which the spirit of inspiration descends and then flits away, sometimes in the course of a few seconds. There are passages in the First Piano Sonata where the soloist sounds as if he has had a memory lapse and is frantically improvising; even in masterpieces such as the Piano Concerto, part of the excitement comes from the sense that the composer might lose control of his material at any second.

Scholars have traditionally assumed that the patchiness of Schumann’s output reflects the progress of a slow-burning mental illness that led to his death in an asylum at the age of 46 in 1856. Worthen, a professor at Nottingham University, is determined to remove the diagnosis of madness, and replace it with one of heavy drinking and syphilis. Indeed, it’s the purpose of this well-written biography. “This is a book about the lives Schumann led [groan - why is it always "lives" these days?], not about the music he wrote,” he says. more…

Marginalizing the Gulf Culture!

Could the so called Arab ‘hostility’ toward the ‘emerging’ Gulf literature and arts be real? Is there a rejection of the literary spirit that is currently flourishing in the Gulf region? Are the Arabs of the Levant, Egypt and Iraq still looking at the Gulf literary works as a product of ‘money’ rather than the reflection of real culture and of reality? IN fact, is there a cultural conflict between ‘real’ Arabs and ‘Gulf’ Arabians? Is the Gulf literature threatening its other Arab counterpart? And is there a desire to exclude North Africa’s culture which is rich in philosophy and literary expertise that reflects reality? Do the intellectuals of the Gulf need to build a literary front to stand against the coalition of those who call themselves “Arab intellectuals” who insist on limiting Arab culture and literature to themselves? And why do the intellectuals of the Gulf and Yemen still have to earn approval and acceptance from the intellectuals of the Levant and Egypt?

Is it true that some Arabs still look at any Gulf literary works as the product of a barren desert while their works are the fruits of green pastors and prosperous meadows? Why is the Gulf intellectual still classified as a foreigner to literature and culture and his literary works as the outcome of the oil wealth rather than a literary revolution with no ties to the spirit of progress and defiance?

In its most recent issue, “A book in a newspaper” or “A newspaper in a book” managed to cram 36 poets from Saudi Arabia and Yemen together whereas the pages of an entire issue are often allocated for a single poet from Egypt or the Levant.

There indeed is a sense of revolt and bitterness among some Saudi and Yemeni poets, and for a good reason too. After all, if cramming 36 poets from the Gulf region in one issue does not indicate despise toward the literary experience and heritage of this region, then what does? more…