Your Paris

The lifestory of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had enough smashing and crashing together of love, tragedy and good poetry to keep me interested for many years so it wasn't too surprising that last night I decided to watch the dvd of the film Sylvia. Gwyneth Paltrow, with her penchant for English dinner parties as opposed to American discussions about work and money around a table full of food, was appropriately cast as the expatriate American poet Sylvia Plath, reciting, writing and chewing on poetry in the bars of Cambridge, in London and under the thatched rooves of the English countryside. Daniel Craig's blossoming muscles and dyed black hair made him a passable version of Sylvia's big, dark, hunky boy, Ted Hughes.

But the film was a series of plots points (boy meets girl, boy and girl write poetry but girl has writer's block whereas boy wins prizes, relationship falls apart, girl writes good poetry, girl kills herself) strung together to create little more than a string of fake emotions, egged on by overly romantic music. The film was lacking in genuine dialogue between Sylvia and Ted, and if we hadn't already read all her diaries and all the biographies about them we might be wondering why everyone in the film was saying they had a love like no other (although in one scene "Gwyneth" did make "Daniel Craig" a full English breakfast after she suspected he had probably been cheating on her, so I guess that's real love).

More disappointing was that although the title of the film is Sylvia as opposed to Sylvia and Ted, the film begins with the meeting between Sylvia and Ted rather than with Sylvia's previous life in the US. As if to say that Sylvia's life was nothing without Ted, whether as her husband or eventually her betrayer.

The good that did come out of watching this film is that I revisited Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters, the organ-bursting poems that he addressed to Sylvia for 25 years after her death, and I came across the poem entitled "Your Paris". Bearing in mind he was referring to a time when they visited Paris about ten years after the Second World War, I'll quote what he says of Sylvia:

"Your Paris, I thought was American
I wanted to humour you
When you stepped in a shatter of exclamations,
Out of the Hotel des Deux Continents
Through frame after frame,
Street after street, of Impressionist paintings"

and of himself

"My Paris
Was only just not German. The capital
Of the Occupation and old nightmare
I read each bullet scar in the Quai stonework
With an eerie familiar feeling"

This got me thinking about something I wrote in my old blog about everyone having their own version of Paris:

When friends and family come to visit me in Paris, they each lead me somewhere new, giving me their customised Paris.

My father's Paris is wartime Paris. Part of the reason for this might be that his uncle was killed during the First World War, buried in a stark field adorned with a practical cross, somewhere in Normandy. With my father we visit Les Invalides, La Musee de La Resistance, the Memorial of the Shoah. We stop for any plaque that pronounces someone's cause of death as war, and we scrutinise the streets for tombs of unknown soldiers that he might recognise.

And then I thought about how my Paris is constantly changing. In the four years I've lived here the quartier that energises me continues to shift, the people and places I frequent form and re-form. Endless taxies have transmogrified and become walks on blisters. I plan to write a series on some of my Parises, but for now I'm just going to post below a couple of pieces about Paris from my old blog, which I think belong here.