Crossing Paths With The Spirit of Sylvia Plath

Canadian poet and novelist Helen Humphreys is a wonderful writer. Here is an excerpt from her most recent book AND A DOG CALLED FIG: Solitude, Connection, the Writing Life:

My grandmother’s road housed several retired military officers, including famous Colonel Maurice Buckmaster, who had trained spies for British Special Operations during the war. He was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and had a portrait of himself hanging over his sitting room fireplace. He also had a small barky terrier, as did the retired major next door to my grandmother. Neither dog helped assuage our collective nostalgia for our family pets. “Yappy little things,” my grandmother said of the terriers. “I always want to step on them.”

I had decided to write a novel while at my grandmother’s house, because I felt I should write hard every day, to see if I had the discipline for it. Poetry, my usual form, couldn’t be harnessed in the way prose could. My poems were often written quickly, in a rush of words and feeling, and it would be impossible to work all day at them the way I anticipated working on a novel. But my book progressed slowly. Writing all day was hard, although not as hard as the loneliness that attended it. (A fact that I have found to be true all through my subsequent writing life.)

I worked at one end of a massive walnut table in the dining room, with my back to the garden windows for the light. At the other end of the room was the coal fire and a huge portrait in oils of my father as a child. Whenever I looked up from the page, I saw him there, aged about six and wearing a sort of pink jumpsuit, painted in the act of climbing down from the bench where he’d been made to sit by the artist. It was strange to see him as a child, and I admired his disobedience in the painting. (He had been, my grandmother said, “a difficult child.”)

When I think now of living in my grandmother’s house and working on my novel, I find it hard to remember the writing part, even though I was actively writing for the majority of my hours there. But writing is largely an internal process. It relies on the thoughts and feelings of the moment, and I no longer have access to those thoughts and feelings, having moved so far past them and not being someone who has ever kept a journal. But I do remember the feeling of writing itself from those days, which was largely a feeling of loneliness, shot through sometimes with a jolt of excitement when the words and phrases came out in a surprising and pleasing order.

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