“Alicante Lullaby”: Holiday at Holiday

Over her infamous Mademoiselle summer, in her single years, and later with Hughes, Plath made occasional trips to New York City night clubs, and certainly knew of, if not attended, the famous Copacabana night club. While Hughes and Plath were on their Spanish honeymoon, the most popular act in America in the 1950s, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, had their last performance at the Copacabana on July 25, 1956. Plath’s second line “Bumblingly” describes Jerry Lewis, the clumsy goof to Dean Martin’s straight man (CP, 43). Originally located at 10 East 60th Street, the Copa’s Upper East Side Manhattan neighborhood at this time was full of Italian “yellow-paella eateries” and “back alley balconies,” just as they were experiencing in Alicante, Spain. The “cocks and hens / In the roofgardens” is the audience, which were sometimes royalty and other celebrities (“repose with crowns”) seated in their balconies and laughing (“cackles”).
The serving trolleys of the Copacabana are described as they “trundle” up and down the aisles under the dark theater’s “indigo fizzle” and the swanky “neon-lit palm” trees. Music at the Copacabana was predominantly orchestra, jazz, Latin and Caribbean. The club was known for performers such as Carmen Miranda, Harry Belafonte, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennet, Xavier Cugat, Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, and Billie Holiday, “goddess of jazz and of quarrels, / Crack-throated mistress” for whom it seems the last stanza of “Alicante Lullaby” was written. While Plath and Hughes were on their holiday, Billie Holiday was at the pinnacle of her career. Billie Holiday notably covered the old Al Jolson song, “Back in Your Own Backyard,” and includes the repeating line, You’ll see your castles in Spain. Plath’s first line in “Alicante Lullaby” suggests not only the famous World War II song, “Beer Barrel Polka,” undoubtedly sung there many times, and famously recorded by Holiday. Plath liked jazz music enough to note in her pocket calendar that she enjoyed it on March 2, 1956.
That year of 1956 was also when Holiday’s popular autobiography, Lady Sings the Blues, was released, along with a record of the same title. Like Billie Holiday’s voice, Plath’s final stanza of “Alicante Lullaby” wrestles with vigorous, fast-connoting words (“con brios,” “prestos,” “prestissimos”), words that are free and impulsive (“capricciosos,” “cadenzas”) and the quiet murmuring sounds of the infamous Lady Day herself, as Holiday was called (“pianissimo,” “susurrous”).
Hughes positioned “Alicante Lullaby” as a 1956 poem, yet Plath’s day planners reveal this was more likely to have been written in 1959, as Plath scholar Nancy Hargrove concurs. Billie Holiday died July 17, 1959, and this may have been Plath’s tribute to her, while also weaving in the history of the venue and her memories of it and Holiday over the years. Assuming Hughes knew the poem’s inspiration, he may have placed the poem in the 1956 grouping to match with the height of Holiday’s career and the release of her autobiography. Plath may have also built into this poem the famous Copacabana brawl on May 16, 1957, which made news headlines after their Benidorm holiday, when famous players from the Yankees took in a show at the club and got into a fight with a group of drunken bowlers (“bowl the barrels”) who heckled Sammy Davis Jr. with racial slurs.
ALICANTE LULLABY, BENIDORM, BILLIE HOLLIDAY, COPACABANA, COPACABANA BRAWL, DEAN MARTIN, EARLY POEM, JAZZ, JERRY LEWIS, JR., LADY DAY, LADY SINGS THE BLUES, NANCY HARGROVE, NEW YORK CITY, PLATH POEM, SAMMY DAVIS, SPAIN, SPANISH HONEYMOON, SYLVIA PLATH, TED HUGHES