Mells, Somerset
Okay. I’ll admit it’s a habit. When I travel, I often check out literary landmarks — the place where a favorite author was born, died, wrote, or was buried. I’ve seen Mikhail Bulgakov‘s digs in Kiev, Elizabeth Bishop‘s glorious hideaway outside Samambaia, C.P. Cavafy‘s modestly exotic flat in Alexandria, Siegried Sassoon‘s grave in Somerset — I even visited Boris Pasternak‘s idyllic dacha in Peredelkino.
Milton scholar Martin Evans shares my enthusiasm.
His journeys to London are sometimes literary pilgrimages — he’s intrigued by the fact that his beloved John Milton and (my beloved) John Donne were both born on Bread Street. He wants to show you these and more literary coincidences for your next trip. Hence his new website, Authorial London. Please, do not be daunted. It’s not complicated at all. It’s a really easy site. And if you’d rather read about it than look at it, try Corrie Goldman‘s description of the site and how it came about here.
One passage intrigued me:
Nice man, odd habit (Photo: L.A. Cicero)
Readers may be surprised to learn that Sylvia Plath once lived in the same modest house in Primrose Hill in which W.B.Yeats lived many years earlier. In Plath’s time, it was a working class area beset with blue-collar workers and struggling artists. These days, glamorous socialites like Kate Moss and Sienna Miller have been dubbed by the British tabloids as the “Primrose Hill set.”
The website explains that Plath’s apartment consisted of a small bedroom, a kitchen, a living room and a bath. “Plath loved it, at least at the beginning,” the website explains. Here, Plath wrote her great social commentary of mental illness, The Bell Jar.
I was among the readers not surprised by this revelation — in fact, Plath moved to this flat precisely because Yeats had been a previous tenant.
I remember a trip to London — oh, over a decade ago — when I was writing a piece for the San Jose Mercury on the British reception of Sylvia Plath (a bare-bones, unillustrated version of it is here; the August 20, 2000 piece has disappeared from the Mercury‘s website).
The article opened:
Yeats lived here, too
IN THE Primrose Hill area of London, where Gloucester Road and Prince of Wales Road wind back on each other in a hopeless bend, one arrives at 3 Chalcot Square, a turquoise door on a five-story building painted the color of raspberry sorbet.This summer, a simple plaque was added to the building’s facade:
Sylvia Plath
1932-1963
Poet
lived here 1960-1961Question: Why has it taken Britain nearly 40 years to offer this first, minimalist postmortem recognition for the American poet who spent her last five years in London?
One answer: The British hardly see the need for it. When it comes to Plath, one of America’s most celebrated female poets, the British just don’t get it.
Alas, since the painting of the building has disappeared over the years, we are left with these newer images. The torquoise door remains — but raspberry sorbet? I think not.
Tags: Boris Pasternak, C.P. Cavafy, Corrie Goldman, Elizabeth Bishop, John Donne, John Milton, Kate Moss, Martin Evans, Mikhail Bulgakov, Siegried Sassoon, Sienna Miller, Sylvia Plath, W.B. Yeats