Paris represents very different things to different people, of course. To the characters played in the classic film by Bogart and Bergman, the city of light represented their wondrous days of love and happiness, brought to an abrupt end by the gross invasion of Nazi soldiers.
A few years ago, there was a terrorist attack in Paris. Do you remember? There are so many atrocities these days, it is difficult to keep track at times. It was mid-November, 2015, and the bombings were a series of co-ordinated attacks.
The world was shocked, and horrified. Every TV screen showed the scenes, and the panel discussions with expert analysts and commentators seeking to process this orchestrated tragedy.
Those were early days for social media influencers, with Instagram in its early days, but anyone feeling compelled to comment had an opportunity to participate in the global grief.
A Facebook friend of mine at the time posted a poem called ‘Your Paris’ on her page, saying it was by Sylvia Plath. It was not. It was a piece of fan art poetry written by someone else, calling him/herself ‘OnlyCrow’. At the very bottom of the poem, it says: ‘A response to Ted Hughes’ poem in the style of Sylvia Plath’.
Not wanting to embarrass the poster of the poem in front of her FB audience, I contacted her on Messenger when I saw the post, and said I believed she had made an error. Her brazen, argumentative response amazed me. She said she felt sure it was a little-known poem by Plath. I said that specific title was a poem written by Plath’s husband, Ted Hughes. She said: then this poem must have been Sylvia Plath’s response to his poem!
The original poem in question, ‘Your Paris’, by Ted Hughes, was a bitter revelation about the honeymoon he and Plath had spent in Paris. It was riven with ironies: the couple even in those early days were incompatible, estranged, experiencing the city differently in radical ways. The city he knew had just survived the war, the same war Bogart’s character had referred to, in ‘Casablanca’. The walls of the beautiful historic buildings were ‘patched and scabbed with posters’, pockmarked with bullets, and the people were damaged in ways that could not be glossed over:
‘So recently the coffee was still bitter
As acorns, and the waiters’ eyes
Clogged with dregs of betrayal, reprisal,
hatred.
I was not much ravished by the view of the roofs.
My Paris was a post-war utility
survivor,
The stink of fear still hanging in the wardrobes,
Collaborateurs barely out of their twenties,
Every other face closed by the Camps...’
Ted Hughes, ‘Your Paris’.
Hughes described Plath as willfully ignorant of recent history, her ‘ecstasies ricocheting’, her ‘gushy burblings’, her ‘shatter of exclamations’, the ‘thesaurus of her cries’ only grazing the surface of her surroundings: sentimental without being truly emotional, striking an attitude she thought was appropriate, a poser, cut off from herself as well as her surroundings, including himself.
The person who had posted the fan poem on her Facebook had not read Ted Hughes’ poem. She had probably been taken unawares by the contemporary terror attack, and could not at short notice manufacture an original response to the hot button topic, so she had looked up ‘Paris’ and ‘Poetry’ on Google’s search engine, and grabbed the most emotive post to share and make herself relevant, which is the most overriding concern for a wannabe influencer.
The thing is, Plath could not have written that poem in response to Hughes, because Hughes wrote it and published it decades after his wife’s death, in the collection ‘Birthday Letters’. This fact was pointed out by me to the poster of the poem, in our private chat on Messenger. She said: ‘Well, who cares? Everyone today attributes everything to Shakespeare, anyway.’
So you see, while terrorists attack eternal cities and places of worship, there is another contest going on, amidst the breaking down of incompatible beliefs and value systems. It matters who said what, and when. It matters that identities are not conflated, and demarcations are not blurred. It actually matters, that people create original work, and that it is correctly attributed to them. It matters that false truths are not perpetuated, by what Hughes himself calls ‘practiced lips’.
The person who made that prideful error had been a student in Sri Lanka with a degree in Arts. A reader of books. A person who considered herself to be highly literate. But she was also - in that instance - careless and inexact, and actual inaccuracy and ignorance are costly, if you want something more than rapid fire attention and Insta-fame.
I was asked last week about what I thought characterized great literature, in an interview. And I thought it through, the minutes ticking in the sound studio where the podcast was recorded. Restraint, I said, eventually. Exactness of word choice. Precise positioning and placement. The stretching of the ideas over a strong conceptual frame, like a fabric, so the patterns can be traced, and seen.
Passion is not enough! Emotion is not enough! Ranting is not poetry!Hyperventilation is not expression! Grabbing at the most obvious thing is graceless, inadequate and ill-advised.
It matters that not every situation can be reduced to a meme or a GIF. Not everything is interchangeable and shareable and relatable. In my opinion, anyway.
My own Paris is the silhouetted trees on the boulevards in winter, and the waffles bought and eaten hot from vans with chestnut chocolate sauce; and the strange feeling when you walk past the place where the guillotine used to stand, at the Place de la Concorde. Not so much the overarching hollow victory of the Arc de Triomphe.
It was buying three big blue buttons for my winter coat, with all the French I didn’t learn in school in one of those tiny haberdashery shops which are so hard to find anywhere these days.
It was imagining the mobs and the aristos being publicly leveled and taken down in front of them. The fading of the great ideal of the Republic. It was all that, but without heartbreak.
Hughes said in his poem that he and Plath stayed in the ‘Hotel Des Deux Continents’, showing their inability to bridge their otherness even in supposedly the most intimate stage of marriage. He found her reactions to things vociferous and hectic, almost anticipated or rehearsed, ringing hollow in his ears.
Hughes became Poet Laureate of England in his time. Somewhat known. An original voice.
Plath became a feminist icon. Gone too soon. Died too young. Lady Lazarus. Indeed, she would have had to rise from the dead to write the poem that woman claimed she did.
I wish that Ingrid Bergman could have married both men, in ‘Casablanca’, because her character clearly loved both of them. I wish Hughes and Plath had had a happier honeymoon. But I am glad that the grating incompatibilities of time, temperament and circumstance produced that classic film, and some wonderful 20thC poetry, to redeem the despair of terrorism and the trauma of delusion and false hope.
Teaching us all the difference between friend and frenemy: what is true, and what is faux.
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