“Conversation Among the Ruins”: The Furious Wreck of Love Affairs and Tunisia

Pictured: the Dougga ruins of Tunis, Tunisia
Plath’s “Conversation Among the Ruins,” positioned first in the Collected Poems for the year of 1956, is widely read to be a piece she wrote about the famous Georgio de Chirico painting of the same name (CP, 21). The notes to the poem explain that Plath had a reproduction of this painting pinned to her door in Cambridge, and so clearly she admired the work. Two years later, in 1958, Plath wrote in her journals of writing two poems inspired by de Chirico: “The Disquieting Muses,” and “On the Decline of Oracles” (UJ, 359). Curiously, she did not list her poem “Conversation Among the Ruins” with these other two. This is because Plath’s “Conversation Among the Ruins” is less focused on de Chirico’s painting, and is instead a triple-metaphor for art, her autobiography, and the world politics of the moment.
In January 1956, Plath’s calendar reveals that she had been reading a great deal of works by August Strindberg. Some of the plays mentioned are Strindberg’s After the Fire, a story of a person returning home to find everything in ruins, and all manner of crimes, sins, and secrets exposed in the rubble for everyone to see; Dance of Death, a 1900 play of marital dysfunction; and Prometheus Bound, the Greek model for the dramatic treatment of Satan. These works appear to have been an influence on “Conversation Among the Ruins.”[1] Likewise, that same month Plath also read two Chekov plays: Uncle Vanya, and The Cherry Orchard, also with the overriding themes of losing a family estate (“our bankrupt estate”).[2]


A greater bearing on Plath’s poem, however, was the news regarding the country of Tunisia, which was going through upheaval in early 1956. Tunisia, formerly Carthage, is known for its ruins, its “wild furies” of wars, its Greco-Roman and Ottoman history.  Like Chekov’s stories, Tunisia had become a “bankrupt estate” in the late 1800s. It was then taken over by France until 1956, when it finally achieved its independence at around the time Plath probably wrote the poem[3].   Just a few months earlier, in an unpublished excerpt of a letter to her mother Aurelia Plath, dated September 25, 1955, Plath wrote that she and some other students were received by the Countess of Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, at a private reception. What happened in the outside world mattered to Plath, and after this experience, Tunisia was no exception. The reception, held at Barbara Hutton’s former palace in Regent’s Park London, made a great impression upon this young American girl in sophisticated England society, and the occasion was described by Plath in her letter as “Such elegance.” [4]
Plath might have been feeling like somewhat of a “bankrupt estate” herself. She had just been in France, spending the New Year with her lover, Richard Sassoon. Sassoon was a heavy drinker, occasionally brutal, and an intensely passionate character with a dark side. In her New Year’s Eve journal entry,  she wrote that she had dreamed “that azure sea I dreamed about on maps in the sixth grade, surrounded by the pink, yellow, green and caramel countries the pyramids and the Sphinx, the holy land, the classic white ruins of the greeks” [sic] (UJ, 549).  These colors and images are all invoked in the de Chirico painting.
On Plath’s return trip to Paris in February, she learned that Sassoon had dumped her. Her pocket calendar entry on February 11, 1956, reveals her trying to talk herself out of loving Sassoon, focusing on his selfishness and superficiality, as well as the impossibility of a future together. Plath had just had a wild night of lovemaking with Ted Hughes in London and had struck up an affair for consolation, perhaps, with Giovanni Perego, a journalist in Paris whom she also dated during this time. She wrote in her journals of talking to Giovanni about the artist de Chirico. The timing of her ruined relationship with Sassoon, and the wild night that she was then seeing as a probable mistake with Hughes, cannot be a coincidence.

1. 1. These Strindberg plays are named in Plath’s calendar notes for January 17 and 18, 1956. This calendar is held in the Sylvia Plath Archives of the Lilly Library, at Indiana University-Bloomington.
   2. Plath’s calendar notes for January 21 & 28, 1956. This calendar is held in the Sylvia Plath Archives of the Lilly Library, at Indiana University-Bloomington.
   3. The exact date of the Plath’s writing “Conversation Among the Ruins” is not known.
   4. Excerpt from two letters from Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, both dated September 25, 1955 (LSP: 1, 961-962)

AFTER THE FIRE, ANTON CHEKOV, AUGUST STRINDBERG, CONVERSATION AMONG THE RUINS, DANCE OF DEATH, GEORGIO DE CHIRICO, PLATH POEM, PROMETHEUS BOUND, SYLVIA PLATH, THE CHERRY ORCHARD, TUNIS, TUNISIA, UNCLE VANYA