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.

Plath and Sleeping Pills

Sylvia Plath mentioned sleeping pills in numerous letters. The pills were barbiturates, some available over-the-counter.

From Sylvia Plath's Letters, Volume 1:

28 June 1949 to Aurelia Plath: "I really don't need any sleeping pills by the time the day is over." (Plath at the time is 16 years old.)

29 October 1950 to Aurelia: "I have taken a hot bath and a sleeping pill"

3 December 1950 to Aurelia: "I'm going to take two little pills and be asleep by nine o'clock"

31 January 1951 to Aurelia: "I guess I'll take sleeping pills till after exams are over"

9 May 1951 to Ann Davidow: "swallowing a handful of cold pills"

18 October 1951 to Aurelia: "It's wonderful how comfortable strong nosedrops, hot compresses and penicillin and sleeping pills can make a sinus sufferer."

20 October 1951 to Aurelia: "I was dosed with pirivine [nose drops] and pyribenzamine [antihistamine] and sleeping pills"

3 March 1952 to Aurelia: "I took two sleeping pills two hours apart, as you said"

(Plath takes sleeping pills prescribed by her aunt and family doctor, Francesca Racioppi, M.D., for most of spring semester 1953. That summer, Racioppi prescribes for Plath a stronger sleeping pill. In August, Plath overdoses on sleeping pills and barely survives.)

28 December 1953 to Eddie Cohen: "I became immune to increased doses of sleeping pills"

27 October 1955 to Elinor Friedman: "Gone are the good old Smith days with cocaine, codeine, and sleeping pills" [1]

Journals, 5 November 1957: "First I couldn't sleep without pills, now I can"

In Letters, Volume 2, as Sylvia's marriage falls apart she becomes addicted to sleeping pills and knows it.

29 September 1962 to Kathy Kane: "I can't sleep without pills."

12 October 1962 to Aurelia: "Every morning when my sleeping pills wear off, I am up about 5, in my study with coffee, writing like mad."

16 October 1962 to Aurelia: "I live on sleeping pills"

14 December 1962, to Dorothy Benotti: "I hope to get off sleeping pills"

26 December 1962, to Daniel and Helga Huws: "I am going to the doctor this week to see if he can help me get off those sleeping pills"

4 February 1963, to Ruth Beuscher: "I am living on sleeping pills and nerve tonic"

Because most of Sylvia's mentions of sleeping pills are in letters to her mother, I think her mother, who herself took sleeping pills, got her started on them. There are very few studies about Plath and drugs.

[1] U.S. pharmacies legally sold cocaine and the morphine derivative codeine most of the 20th century, at first over-the-counter and then by prescription. Sylvia Plath was prescribed cocaine for sinus pain.

A Talented Mother

Aurelia Schober's college classmates read, sort of sub rosa, the pop-psychology book The Nervous Housewife (1920) by neurologist/psychiatrist Abraham Myerson. He wrote:

One of the commonest and saddest transformations is the change of the gay, laughing girl, radiant with love and all aglow with the thought of union with her man, into the housewife of a decade -- complaining, fatigued, and disillusioned.

This was an open secret, but no one had ever put it quite that way before. I thought of Aurelia Schober, her college class's valedictorian, yearbook editor, German-language actress, voted by her peers "Most Studious," with a dashing Austrian boyfriend who was one of the century's greatest engineers, and in her sophomore year her headshot was published in The Boston Transcript:

Aurelia, 19, in The Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926.

Much of Aurelia's creativity and spunk got shell-shocked and died during an almost-nine-year marriage to human land mine Otto Plath, a behavioral scientist, at home a thrower of tantrums and a monocrat. The lasting effect on Aurelia was perpetual anxiety. I believe that from her marriage and husband's needless death Aurelia had PTSD. The day after his death she signed a contract drawn up by her eight-year-old daughter never to marry again. And never did.

 

Then Aurelia had to support her children on a single woman's salary. Good thing she had prepared herself with a master's degree and let her parents do live-in childcare. From their births Aurelia supported her children's education and growth in every possible way, was positive and honest with them: Aurelia was a talented mother.

Aurelia Plath couldn't become a writer but seems to have used a surviving part of her dramatic talent and resonant voice to read aloud to family and friends Sylvia's and Warren's letters from college. Her children knew their letters were shared, and wrote accordingly.

 

Aurelia also used part of her talent for her 29-year university teaching career: Teaching can feel like performance, and the show must go on whether your stomach aches or your daughter killed herself. In retirement she edited and published a bestselling book of her talented daughter's letters and recited her talented daughter's poetry on video.

 

Abraham Myerson (1881-1948), who thought socio-cultural pressures triggered addictions and mental illness, published other books for laymen such as The Foundation of Personality, and one of his dozens of papers appeared in The American Journal of Insanity, later renamed and still known as The American Journal of Psychiatry.

I Am the Jew

Family photo, 1920; the baby is my future stepfather.

After proving that Sylvia Plath was not a Jew -- her maternal ancestry is 100 percent Central European Roman Catholic -- it turns out I was the Jew.

Found out my maternal great-grandmother's surname was Goldmann.

Of course I am not a real Jew unless my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother practiced Judaism. Grandma and Mom were so Polish Catholic they pinned hankies on our heads. In 1886 Josepha Goldmann in Prussia married a Polish Catholic, the church wedding record giving her maiden name as "Josepha Goldmann alias Wlodarczyk." "Alias" is so very unusual in such records, and the handwriting so cramped, that a searcher before me transcribed Josepha's name as "Goldmannalias." [1]

My mother had once said we were really Jews and I rolled my eyes because European immigrant families, including the Plaths, often tell of a Jew in the family, just as longtime U.S. residents claim Cherokee Indian blood. Furthermore Mom said that her father's older brother, resentfully serving in Russia's army, stole the Czar's horses. Nearly every family has its horse thief.

Genealogy is a hobby. I've been at it about a year, taking lessons in the software, learning as I go, and I know that Jewishness is passed down through mothers.

Then I looked up online why a Jewish girl might get a Polish alias and marry a Polish Catholic named Ludovicus Ziolkowski and have two kids and then emigrate to Chicago and have ten more kids before disappearing from official records. Maybe she ran away. Ludvik, an iceman, then remarried, siring a total of two sons and 14 daughters, two named Josephine. My grandmother was the one born in 1896, according to pages I tore from the family bible.

I told my sister we had a Jewish female ancestor, and she told her daughter, who thanks to other people's research can now also qualify as a Daughter of the American Revolution because her father's 6X great-grandfather was a captain in the Revolutionary War. My father's family records were destroyed in World War I, but new databases of World War II Nazi Persecutees and Displaced Persons let me follow his progress from camp to camp to Ellis Island. Dad had us raised as Eastern Orthodox Christians, whose priests blessed us with herbal incense and holy water, and we had all sorts of rituals, some cognate with Jewish ones.

What was different now that I was Jewish? Earlier in life I might have cared more. I respect Judaism and Jewish authors, the latest Sylvia-Plath-related book I read being Alfred Kazin's lyrical depth-charge A Walker in the City (1951) about growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. Kazin was Sylvia's teacher. She had to have read the book. Her memoir "Ocean 1212-W" has similarities.

But back at the family tree some days later I saw I had identified the 1896 daughter named Josephine Ziolkowski with her father Ludvik through the 1900 U.S. census. Polish baptismal records show my genuine grandmother was born in 1893, to Francizek, not to Ludvik, and no Ludvik, no Jew. I had also confused Francizek's wife Mary Kotwica (b. 1864) with another Mary Kotwica (b. 1865), both emigrants to Chicago and both buried in the same cemetery.

I cleaned up my family tree, merging and purging and trying to match genuine great-grandfather Francizek, b. 1858, with the 30 or so "Francis" "Franz" "Franciscus" and "Frank" Ziolkowskis born around then. Not finding him I couldn't find his parents so couldn't ascertain whether Ludvik who married the Jew might be Francizek's relative.

Then I double-checked the name Goldmann and learned that "Goldmann" with two "n"s is a German name denoting a goldsmith or gilder. The Jewish version of the name is Goldman.

So Josepha was not a Jew who masqueraded as Polish -- as some girls did -- but a Germanic woman who assumed a Polish alias so as not to be mistaken for a Jew. Which is what Sylvia Plath's immigrant grandparents did when they anglicized their surname, Grunwald, to Greenwood.

I spent hours, having once again to learn: Guesses are always wrong.

I make mistakes. But this one -- the very idea -- confirmed for me that I could use a vacation.

[1] "Alias" in Polish names sometimes signifies a pseudonym chosen to disguise political activity.

Aurelia Plath's Political Group

On 9 January 1953 Sylvia Plath, her leg in a cast, wrote from Smith College to her mother that she was less depressed after persuading the college to let her audit the science courses she so dreaded that she had talked suicide. Meanwhile, in a nation battered by the Red Scare and war in Korea and the new hydrogen bomb, with Eisenhower’s inauguration days away, Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath, Boston University professor, scribbled on the envelope’s verso:

subjects questions for political discussion group

1. religion

2. Are sororities and fraternities democratic.

3. Is liberal education desirable for everybody.

4. college education open to all / should a college education be public as one will be to high school students?

5. heredity or environment

6. are students taking advantage of the opportunities around them.

7. what will be religion’s should place [sic] in the modern world.

8. is there a course or lessons needed for college education work.

9. communism and how it affects us.

10. current events

11. the American negro [1]

 

Because “religion” and “sororities and fraternities” top the list, the political discussion group was for college students, possibly fellow Unitarian congregants or at Boston University where Aurelia taught. “The American negro” as a topic implies all group members would be white. A subject “1” on the list implies that the group had not yet formed or met.

 

Was this group Aurelia’s own brainstorm, or are these notes, written in Gregg shorthand, from a planning meeting? Regardless, the list opens a window onto Aurelia Plath’s politics.

 

Most discussion items center on Aurelia’s areas of expertise: religion, education, college life.  Topics 2 through 8 are formulated as questions, most with her own answers implicit -- yet open for discussion. Topics 9 through 11, nationwide and nonspecific, conclude the list because they were either too explosive for initial group discussions or rearmost in Aurelia's awareness. Yet the plan to start the group is activist. And the agenda does not sound prescriptive.

 

Biographers assume that Aurelia voted for Eisenhower in 1952 because Sylvia supposed her mother had, but that’s not proof, and "Republican" back then didn't mean the insanity it means now. Aurelia wrote in Letters Home that her Austrian-born parents “believed [in] every word their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, ever wrote or uttered" and voted Republican ever after. Why? Possibly because Roosevelt was “the only candidate in whose veins flows German blood, who has received part of his education in Germany,” said the German-American Roosevelt League. [2] Otto Plath and his first wife Lydia registered to vote as Progressives in 1912 when Roosevelt's Progressive party ran him for re-election on a very liberal platform.

 

Aurelia's political discussion group never met. A crisis erupted in Aurelia’s household: Her mother was diagnosed with gastric cancer. Aurelia took summer 1953 off from teaching to care for her mother, and Sylvia, disheartened by a month as a guest editor in New York City, chose to spend July and August at home and became suicidally depressed.

 

[1.] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 9 January 1953, Lilly Library.

[2.] Gable, J. The Bull Moose Years, Kennikat, 1978. When Roosevelt was 15 his parents sent him and two siblings to Dresden, Germany for five months, to learn German. Roosevelt did not become fluent.