Cowy

London, September 2024.

Years ago when a good friend of mine was very down and blue, she took up Jonathan Coe. She read several of his books. They made her laugh. 

Many years ago, when I had a rotten cold and a 104-degree fever, the saving grace of those few days was the novel A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.* Its 752 pages carried me through my illness and to this day remains one of my favorite books. Which is why I am re-reading it now.

I am also re-reading The Bell Jar. Something tells me that this book is seldom studied in universities and colleges. But it would be an excellent book for any number of syllabi, mainly because the writing is superb, with gems on every other page or so. 

Case in point: 

I stepped from the air-conditioned compartment onto the station platform, and the motherly breath of the suburbs enfolded me. It smelt of lawn sprinklers and station wagons and tennis rackets and dogs and babies.

A summer calm laid its soothing hand over everything, like death. 

Digression: The writing of Plath’s short story “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit” is also notable. It’s in the collection Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts (first published by Faber and Faber in London in 1977, as the rare book linked here shows). 

Image of a story (Harper & Row 1979 edition)
also worth reading.

But today’s post is from The Bell Jar, Chapter 11. 

Here, the narrator is pretending to a stranger to be from Chicago. [Italics mine.]

In Chicago, people would take me for what I was. 

I would be simple Elly Higgenbottom, the orphan. People would love me for my sweet, quiet nature. They wouldn’t be after me to read books and write long papers on the twins in James Joyce. And one day I might just marry a virile, but tender, garage mechanic and have a big cowy family, like Dodo Conway.

Dodo Conway is a neighbor who is pregnant with her seventh child. 

Such an unusual word, cowy. The online OED shows an 1893 variant spelling of cowey.

Cowy is a reminder of why Plath is worth reading, even if her book, while full of mordant wit, is not yet of help for the blues.

* Mine was and still is the Faber paperback edition that a wonderful editor “with ginger-colored hair” (as one author put it) was the one who sent it to me. JL: I’ve never forgotten this kindness.