Sylvia Plath walking the sunny side of the street

To a Miles Davis soundtrack

Three years ago my short format book about Sylvia Plath in Paris was published. During the research, I discovered so much about the poet, but also, unexpectedly, I fell in love with late-1950s jazz. I’ll explain…

In the autumn of 1955, seven years before the end of her life, Sylvia Plath, 23, was a young American newly arrived to study at Cambridge University. During both her first two extended holidays - Christmas 1955 and Easter 1956 – she journeyed to Paris. My short book, My Second Home: Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956 explores what she did in Paris on those visits, and, later in 1956, during a few days in the city with Ted Hughes at the end of their honeymoon.

Most of Plath’s visit during Christmas 1955 was spent with Richard Sassoon who was teaching in Paris; he was a boyfriend she’d been seeing for just over a year. Like so many bookish young Americans through the decades, Plath was fascinated by the idea of Paris. Christmas lived up to all her expectations, but as she was packing to return to Cambridge, Sassoon told her he wanted to break up with her.

Between Christmas and Easter, Plath slept with Ted Hughes for the first time, but arriving in Paris at Easter, her wish was to rekindle her romance with Richard. However, when she knocked on his door on rue Duvivier, he’d left for a short break in Spain. At this point Plath was in tears, knowing she had nearly a fortnight alone in Paris.

My Second Home documents in depth how she dealt with the aloneness that Easter; follows the progress of her thoughts; and pieces together her Paris itinerary and activities.

I was writing about Plath in Paris during the Covid pandemic, a period that for many of us was full of anxiety. Being in lockdown also disturbed many of my writing rituals, including the most important; I need to leave the house and go find a café to write in. Ideally with a seat in the corner by a window with a view of a street. All this helps me feel I might potentially be productive.

In lockdown I was cut off from my favourite neighbourhood coffee bar near my home in Manchester, but I had to find a way to focus and immerse myself deeper in the book. I was lost without my café bar writing rituals.

This was my strategy - I began listening to jazz from the late 1950s all the time, every day. I picked musicians who transported me to Paris; Miles Davis, Lester Young, Sonny Stitt, Dizzy Gillespie. The music filled my mind with compelling, poetic images, including those moments in Louis Malle’s film Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (English title Lift to the Scaffold) when Jeanne Moreau searches the Paris streets for her secret lover accompanied by a Miles Davis soundtrack of unparalleled melancholic richness.

Plath was no fan of bebop, hard bop or anything bop - in fact, in her diary description of her first encounter with Ted Hughes she tells how she swerves the loud jazz band at the party.

The Paris of Miles Davis, and Plath’s Paris were like parallel worlds. Decades later I was integrating them.

To dream myself out of lockdown, and to create a fertile environment for my researches into Paris in 1956, it was left to me to imagine Plath walking through the streets, the parks, the bars, in a nouvelle vague film of her own, to a Miles Davis accompaniment. It helped on so many levels. Looking back now at the writing of, and in, the book, the magically expressive tone of Miles Davis’s trumpet seeps into the themes, the words, the pages somehow I think, deepening the feelings, ramping up the emotion.

Miles Davis was another American in Europe, although his time in Paris was lengthier and motivated by a life-saving desire to be away from the pressures, hate, and threats of racial segregation in the USA – specific reasons to be in Paris he shared with so many Black Americans during the 20th Century, including the writer James Baldwin who, during Plath’s Easter visit was just a few streets away working on the final draft of his novel Giovanni’s Room.

Meanwhile, later in the year, Miles Davis played both the Coliseum Theatre and prestigious Salle Pleyel (from where the concert was broadcast by the French radio station RTF).  He was buoyed by the warmth of a welcome from the city’s jazz fans. He played the concert halls and cellar jazz clubs of the Paris, fell in love, worked to his heart’s content - onstage, and in the studio – to the extent that it’s worth noting that although Plath felt, and once wrote, that Paris was her “second home”, it was even more the case for Miles Davis.

During her Easter visit, Plath had dates and dalliances with several men. She had a drunken, confusing and unsatisfactory sexual encounter with Tony Gray, a friend of a friend. And an evening with Gary Haupt, one of her favourite Cambridge boys; they ate at Brasserie Lutetia on Boulevard Raspail and then went on to a cinema, the Studio Parnasse on Rue Jules Chaplain.

At an early point in my research, it became clear that Plath in Paris had a very complicated love life, suffered loneliness, but also enjoyed hours of happiness. Without minimising her struggles and burdens, I wanted to make a point of highlighting those carefree moments, and all her other positive experiences in Paris. The idea of depicting Plath as something other than doomed poet very much appealed.

Within hours of the tears on rue Duvivier, when she discovered Richard had deserted her, Plath was at a café in St Germain, alone with a coffee and book. “I felt downright happy”, she wrote in her journal. It’s a beautiful moment, Plath’s realisation of liberation and belonging; “I had as much right to take my time eating, to look around; to wander & sit in the sun in Paris as anyone”.

Cue the sound of John Coltrane’s ‘My Favorite Things’…

A day later, Plath upgraded her hotel room, taking residence in an attic room with a view of Paris rooftops, and paying extra for coffee and croissants served to her room every morning. She sketched the view, and played peek-a-boo with a green-eyed cat sitting on a window ledge across the courtyard. 

In the documentary film Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, American academic Dr. Farah Griffin comments that “Paris, for Miles, is a kind of opening of possibility and potential”. It seemed so for Sylvia Plath too; the narrow streets of Saint-Germain emerging into the big horizons of what Plath called the “gracious, spacious city”, as she took her walks along the Seine browsing the offerings of the book stalls to sit and sketch in the sun in the Tuileries. She enjoyed good food, embraced the city, and loved the window shopping; especially along rue de la Paix where she coveted the shoes. “If I were wealthy my idea of extravagance would be to have a closet full of colored shoes,” she wrote.

One particular song in my writing playlist was perfect – ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’ by Dizzy Gillespie. During her Easter stay I describe hours, days, that she felt desolate, but also hours, days she described herself as feeling “elated”. Thanks to finding the right soundtrack, I escaped from the lockdown; I was in Paris with Sylvia Plath in 1956, walking the sunny side of the street.

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Direct link to buy My Second Home: Sylvia Plath in Paris, 1956 - www.confingopublishing.uk