I Interrupt This Program

I find it hard to concentrate on things Plath or Plath-adjacent when my country -- the good old USA -- is being torn to shreds by madmen. I think of these events as the old white males' last hurrah. They remember an all-white, all-Christian, women-stayed-home world that they imagine they once lived in. Long insulated by their privileges and power they can't bear to share them. They've been seething this whole time.

There is so much to fight.

This presidential administration is attacking universities, freedom of speech, and the individual academics it can pin some kind of blame on. The administration is defunding libraries. It wants to control the national archives. I can't do everything, but will fight for libraries and archives and museums, and librarians and archivists, with every tool I have. I've already participated in a "Data Rescue" at a university library, preserving online databases this administration might decide to "scrub."

You know what is happening. 

If you have a website or blog, please back it up.

There are more Plath matters and I hope to SOON return to writing about them. I will accept guest posts about Plath and Plath-adjacent topics, should you write one of 1000 words or fewer.

Meanwhile, please forgive me interrupting this blog. I would rather leave it blank than write a post that is less than rigorous and heartfelt.

My email: platheducational@gmail.com, and there are 241 posts already here.

"The Shadow Knows"

From Sylvia Plath's short story "The Shadow" (1959):

"Prepared as I was for the phenomenon of evil in the world, I was not ready to have it expand in this treacherous fashion, like some uncontrollable fungus, beyond the confines of half-hour radio programs, comic book covers, and Saturday afternoon double features, to drag out past all confident predictions of a smashing-quick finish. 

"I had an ingrained sense of the powers of good protecting me: my parents, the police, the FBI, the American Armed Forces; even those symbolic champions of Good from a cloudier hinterland -- The Shadow, Superman, and the rest. Not to mention God himself. Surely, with these ranked round me, circle after concentric circle, reaching to infinity, I had nothing to fear. Yet I was afraid. Clearly, in spite of my assiduous study of the world, there was something I had not been told; some piece to the puzzle I did not have in hand."

I paid no attention to the above passage until recently.

"The Shadow" is an anti-hero detective character who gets revenge on evildoers. He starred in a radio show popular from the 1930s until 1954, remembered for its famous taglines, including "crime does not pay." From 1937 Orson Welles voiced the character [listen]. Young Sylvia Plath and her brother Warren were among the Shadow's millions of fans.

Plath spun up the story from a childhood memory: "Feeling of badness in the world unconquerable by good; war, death, disease; horror radio programs." [Journals, 28 December 1958].

"The Shadow," The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, P. Steinberg, ed., pp. 382-389.

Sylvia Plath and Phyllis McGinley

"I rise to defend/ The quite possible She."

 Of course no one like this could write serious poetry:

"When Phyllis McGinley, a pleasant matron of 60 who could pass for 45 and does not try to, a woman who just misses being pretty and does not care, presents herself at the White House, she will find herself on a program that includes only one other poet —Mark Van Doren. Asked to recite one of her own poems, she chose "In Praise of Diversity," written for a Columbia University commencement, which ends:

Praise what conforms and what is odd,

Remembering, if the weather worsens

Along the way, that even God

Is said to be three separate Persons. 

Then upright or upon the knee,

Praise Him that by His Courtesy, 

For all our prejudice and pains, 

Diverse His Creature still remains." [1]

McGinley was Time magazine's cover story on 18 June 1965. President Lyndon Johnson was hosting a White House arts festival at which poet Robert Lowell had for political reasons declined to appear. [2, 3]

As for the poem "In Praise of Diversity," McGinley seriously meant diversity of the type that's topical right now.

In 1958 Sylvia Plath listed her competitors for the title of Poetess of America: Sappho and Dickinson; among the living, "poetic godmothers" Edith Sitwell and Marianne Moore. Then she added, "Phyllis McGinley is out -- light verse; she's sold herself." [Journals, 360] Today we wonder why she was in Plath's pantheon at all.

Long forgotten, McGinley (1905-78) was the U.S. mid-century's most popular "housewife poet" who sang in rhyme the joys of being a wife and mother in the leafy suburbs, but also of the annoyance when someone bought and leveled the leafy lot across the street. Genuine wit and fiendish technical skill got her elected to the National Academy of Arts and Letters and won her the 1961 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Times Three. It was the first Pulitzer ever for a book of light verse.

Back then "light verse" meant "domestic" poems written by a woman from a woman's point of view, suitable as day-brighteners in women's magazines. While Adrienne Rich in her first two books of poems (1951, 1955) wrote "he" when she meant "she" or "I," McGinley ran with the feminine pronouns, writing bestselling poetry books and children's books and collecting royalties from multiple publishers, and without any doubt influencing Sylvia Plath.

McGinley, born in Oregon, having sold some poems to New York magazines moved there in 1929. The New Yorker prodded her: "We are taking your poem, but why do you sing the same sad songs all lady poets sing?" [4] McGinley's housewife persona became Sylvia's business model: wife, mother, and New Yorker poet publishing in litmags as well as the slicks, writing children's classics, recording for the BBC. McGinley's rural childhood and her urban life in the "threadbare" 1930s and '40s made New York City's suburbs in the 1950s look like paradise. To Sylvia's generation the same suburbs looked and felt like hell.

Maybe that's why Sylvia thought McGinley had "sold herself." But the author of the one McGinley biography I could find, Linda Wagner-Martin, points out that McGinley's poems complicated the "housewife" ideal. What she wrote was barbed:

[From "Carol with Variations, 1936"]:

Oh little town of Bethlehem, how still we see thee lie;

Your flocks are folded in to sleep, and sleep your little ones.

Behold there is a Star again that climbs the eastern sky,

And seven million living men are picking up their guns.

A review from 1954 of one of McGinley's books opens:

McGinley told Newsweek, "I'm so sick of this 'Phyllis McGinley, suburban housewife and mother of two' . .  . That's only an eighth or a tenth of my work. The rest is different. There's a hell of a lot of straight social criticism." [4]

When the nation's most influential newsweekly, readership then peaking at about 17 million, featured McGinley on its cover [5], the news angle was that McGinley was countering author Betty Friedan's very scary call for liberating legions of unhappy housewives. McGinley could be relied on to defend motherhood and housewifery as noble and fulfilling occupations.

She didn't win this round and in the 1960s retreated into writing about the lives of saints. Less than a year after that cover story, on June 10, 1966, Time's book section published a hyper-sensational review of the U.S. edition of Ariel, introducing "compulsive writer" and suicidal "literary dragon" Sylvia Plath, who eclipsed McGinley -- and other Plath foremothers and influences -- seemingly forever.

[1] 1954 Columbia University Phi Beta Kappa poem. Read the full "In Praise of Diversity" here.

[2] "The Telltale Hearth," Time Magazine, 18 June 1965.

[3] "A Day at the White House," New York Review of Books, 15 July 1965.

[4] https://www.oregonencyclopedia.org/articles/mcginley_phyllis/ 

[5] Time then had a substantial and regular Books section, publishing reviews and profiles of authors, often poets.

N.B. Sylvia might have borrowed the McGinley poem title "Six Nuns in Snow" for her first drafts of "Nuns in Snow," retitled "Sheep in Fog."

New Video: "Sylvia Plath's Neighborhood"

I just posted an all-new video of my guided tour of Plath sites, featuring Sylvia Plath's former family home at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley (4:43). Find the video here: https://youtu.be/SmRDStePDlc

My host and guide was Dr. Richard Larschan, neighbor and friend of Aurelia Plath from the mid-1970s until her death in 1994. His memories and opinions are controversial; just remember that you are listening to someone Aurelia found companionable. The original Elmwood Road house is so small you can't believe that three adults and two adolescents once shared it. Larschan (professor of English, emeritus) and his wife Laurence (she's French) drove me around that August day and finally to their house and the beach on the dreamlike South Shore of Massachusetts, complete with sand castle.

It took me six months to accept that the final film would be imperfect, and to feel convinced that what's more important is that it is unique.

The Meaning of "Carbon Paper"

Carbon-copy color hierarchy, National Cash Register Co., 1953

Sylvia Plath's poem "Insomniac" begins:

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

Letting in the light, peephole after peephole-- 

Greetings from your mid-century U.S.-business-office material-culture antiquarian. In 2025 we have photocopiers and "transfer paper," but what Sylvia Plath meant by "carbon paper" are very thin single blank 8.5 x 11-inch sheets, often midnight blue ("blueblack"), and brittle as nori. One side of each sheet is sticky with a blend of dark ink and wax. Placing the ink side face down between two blank sheets of paper and writing on the top sheet creates a duplicate called a "carbon copy," or "a carbon" for short.

To get the most from every sheet, frugal typists re-used carbon paper three, four, or even five or six times, until its ink was depleted and the sheet so fragile (like toasted nori) that using the typewriter key for "." punched little holes in it.

Carbon paper has its place in Plath studies.

The carbon paper's ink side preserved a mirror image of any typewriting. Because of this, some years ago archivist Peter K. Steinberg was able to retrieve two previously unknown Sylvia Plath poems, "Megrims" and "To a Refractory Santa Claus," from carbon paper in the Lilly Library.

As with other documents, for business and professional transactions carbon copies weren't acceptable. Sylvia learned this in 1958 when celebrated poet Marianne Moore, a business-school graduate [1], returned Sylvia's carbon-copied poems with a "tart and acidy" note about how typing was such a chore. Plath grieved her "great & stupid error -- sending carbons to the American Lady of Letters," [2] and she and Ted Hughes hated Moore for the rest of their lives.

For letters or manuscripts in triplicate or quadruplicate, the typist sandwiched sheets of carbon paper between three or four sheets of blank paper. Rolling this sandwich evenly around the typewriter's platen was a feat. The copies were to be systematically color-coded, indicating the document's urgency, importance, or routing. Carbons of business documents mostly began with white paper (often ultra-light "onionskin"), then green, yellow, pink, and "gold" (mustard): all bilious, unwearable pastels now seen only on pharmaceuticals.

[1] Moore "completed the business course at Carlisle (PA) Commercial College in 1910, [and] taught stenography and typewriting at Carlisle Indian School." Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2004), Gioia, Mason, and Schoerke, eds., p. 227.

[2] Journals, 17 July 1958.

It's Aurelia's Story and She's Sticking To It

Aurelia's indignant "Fran X'ed this! out!"

I guess Aurelia Plath decided if daughter Sylvia could make shit up, she could too, although without Sylvia's talent and her years of practice and tutoring by some of the best living teachers and writers. Mentors too paved Sylvia's way to writing what her mother experienced as lies, half-truths, and personal attacks on her mothering and character, which Sylvia's thousands of readers devoutly believed.

Undaunted by the odds, Aurelia spent the rest of her long life trying to neutralize what Sylvia had written about her, aiming mostly at The Bell Jar's unsympathetic portrayal of mother figure "Mrs. Greenwood." One thing Aurelia tried was making up or fictionalizing events from her own life and Sylvia's. Sylvia had got away with it; why shouldn't she?

The single largest body of Aurelia's writings, of those available in archives, is what she wrote in her own self-defense.

Aurelia was a competent writer and most of what she wrote is true enough, but with a critical eye one can tell when Aurelia Plath wrote a fiction because it is badly written. Expert editor Fran McCullough deleted several anecdotes Aurelia wanted in her preface or the headnotes for Letters Home (1975) -- Aurelia's project to prove that she had been a good, liberal mother and not a conventional Mrs. Greenwood who made her daughter suicidal.

Aurelia Plath saved the inserts McCullough deleted and Smith College holds the carbon copies. The following example, set in 1953, is labeled in pencil "Basis of the Bell Jar." Aurelia wanted us to know that while Sylvia recovered from her suicide attempt, Aurelia met with psychologist Dr. Paul, a female, for regular counseling sessions, where unlike Mrs. Greenwood she was humble and contrite:

I asked [Dr. Paul] where I had been at fault, what in myself I should change to help my daughter, what I could do to help her when visiting her and when she returned home. 

She exclaimed, "My dear, you have been through a most harrowing experience, and you are doing magnificently! Follow your own instincts; they are sound. In Sylvia's present depression, no matter what you do or say just now, it will be wrong. Let her talk, but don't take issue with her present misconceptions."

In four sentences Dr. Paul absolved Aurelia of all blame for her daughter's problems by blaming the daughter's depression.

I call these "set pieces" or "idealized scenes," sometimes repeated in print or in Aurelia's letters. The more fictional, the worse the writing, especially the stilted dialogue. To her credit Aurelia was very bad at lying.

McCullough rejected too another set piece: Sylvia at Court Green reading to Aurelia excerpts from a draft of her lost, "happy novel of joy and romance," which only Aurelia ever heard of or saw. Aurelia in this scene put words in Sylvia's mouth -- why not? Sylvia had put words in hers! Sylvia explains that her novel in manuscript is "autobiographically based, more or less -- facts serve Art, you know." She then tells her mother:

"I feel I have been living a series of novels, really, and this is, so far, the most exciting part." She paused, then added, slowly and thoughtfully, "It is life seen through the eyes of health," a statement I did not fully understand until after her death and after my reading of The Bell Jar.

Signals of falsity: Cringey dialogue, adverbs, Sylvia's two acknowledgements that she knew The Bell Jar fused facts with fiction and its narrator was not normal but sick, things Aurelia tried for twenty-five years to prove to her critics. In set pieces Aurelia is always the only witness. They include exposition and unnecessary detail, different iterations, and emendations on the typescript:

On July 10, 1962, I saw Sylvia toss this manuscript tear apart this Ms., section by section, into a huge bonfire she had built and set to blazing at the far end of the courtyard.

Fictionalizing is not illegal. The only thing it should be is believable. Making it so requires multiple skills harder to acquire than it might seem.

Let me say here that everyone involved in Sylvia Plath's story lied and edited events, as humans do. Fran McCullough carefully steered Aurelia through Letters Home and then Ted Hughes's hectic edit of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982; by then Harper & Row had let McCullough go). Those closest to Sylvia, husband Ted and mother Aurelia, when exposed, fought back: Ted with edits and rearrangements of Sylvia's works and finally, with Birthday Letters, poems styling Sylvia's suicide as inevitable. In archives she created, Aurelia pointedly left notes for future scholars to see and analyze. That she left such notes was just another count against her.

I'll discuss this more later. It will save you ten years of reading Aurelia's notes and letters.

[1] Sylvia Plath Collection IX Aurelia Plath, Letters Home [book] Commentary by AP, folder 67, Smith College Libraries.

No Post This Week

 "Something's going around," it is said here; whether flu A or flu B. I will return to posting soon.