Sappho the Cat (1959-1975)

Aurelia Plath with Sappho, Cape Cod, c. 1972

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in 1959 acquired a tiger kitten but could not keep it: That summer the couple traveled the U.S., spent autumn at a writers' retreat, and in December packed up and moved to England. Sylvia had named the cat, a female, Sappho, and on 21 January wrote Esther Baskin from Boston:

"Did Ted or I tell you we are owners of a kitling? Granddaughter on one side of a cat belonging to Thomas Mann . . . The minute she walked into our apartment she went straight for a book of poems lying flat on the lowest bookshelf and possessed it."

Guess who fostered Sappho while her owners traveled, and inherited Sappho when her owners left the country less than a year after adopting her.

Fortunately, Aurelia Plath liked pets. Otto Plath had not allowed any. Aurelia quoted eight-year-old Sylvia as saying, "I'm so glad Daddy died; now I can have a cat." The family adopted one, named it Mowgli, and Sylvia loved him and dressed him up in baby clothes. Mowgli went missing in 1945. 

In letters sent to Aurelia from London, Sylvia inquired often after Sappho, who grew into a "huge" adult and in 1960 gave birth to triplets. Sappho the cat was not a burden but a happy note and a comfort in Aurelia's life as it collapsed all around her. Neighbor and friend Beth Hinchliffe much later wrote a poem remembering Aurelia around 1971, suggesting that Sappho's imperturbable presence served as a kind of therapy:

And now there is only Sappho for Aurelia . . .

And through it all, through Aurelia's blinding fury,

the madness of anguish, the desperate scrabbling

to keep her memories untouched by ugliness,

Sappho sits. Kneads. Watches.

Among Aurelia's snapshots in the Plath Family Papers at the Beinecke Library was a dime-sized photo of Sappho's face, cut from another photo. The fragment was too small to photograph, but it looked like a duplicate or alternate of the one shown above: a memento only Aurelia could have gone to the trouble to make and put there. And now I have a good idea why Aurelia's American granddaughters sent her, in 1980, stationery printed with a cartoon of a large and self-satisfied tabby cat.

Aurelia had to ask someone to care for Sappho while she took annual trips to England in the early 1960s. Most likely some neighbors did. On returning to Wellesley in 1964 (July 2): "My kitchen was a smelly mess; Sappho's liver dish never washed and putrid." On returning to Wellesley in 1965 (30 June) Aurelia wrote, "Sappho, glad to see me, but unforgiving; when I pick her up, stiffens spine!"

The above photo is dated 1972. On 19 August 1975, Aurelia had terminally ill Sappho, age 16, put to sleep and grieved her, but not because Sappho had been Sylvia's cat. "I have lost the one living creature to whom I was the most important living being." In 1981 Aurelia still missed her cat and lets us know what else in life she had lost and valued: "Oh, Sappho, if only you were  here to pet, to make happy, have you lick my hand, my cheek & stretch out before the fire in blissful contentment -- greet me when I return home. Something to love and be trusted and loved by!" 

Images from the Plath Family Papers

Aurelia Plath's last diary. These pages from 1989 show variations in Aurelia's handwriting as she struggled with macular degeneration. Emotionally she has just been knocked sidewise after reading the new Plath biography Bitter Fame. 

On the leftward page she noted "Nov. 10 The OPENING OF THE WALL Between East and West Germany! Is light coming to this part of the world as I continually lose my sight?" Just above that, a late-in-life realization: "I should have worked for my own 'career.' Regret so not accepting the 'Dean of Women' post at Northeastern. Bleeding ulcers were still with me then." Young Sylvia had also guilt-tripped Aurelia about taking that job, saying, "For your own self-aggrandizement you would leave us complete orphans!" On the rightward page, on November 12 "(Full Moon!)" Aurelia and her neighbor, financial professional Bill Cruickshank, worked on her accounts until 5:30 p.m. "Think Positive!" she told herself, and under November 17 wrote a catty little note about "uneducated" Dido Merwin, whose searing short memoir about Sylvia is appended to Bitter Fame.

The baby is Aurelia's sister Dorothy, born in May 1911. Aurelia is on the right. They are with their mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober. If the photo is from 1911, Aurelia was five and her mother 23.

The label on this palm-sized diary says "1962 - Catastrophe at Court Green." During the week Ted and Sylvia's marriage fell apart their houseguest Aurelia kept quiet, tended her grandchildren, and wrote in this diary very little of consequence. On July 11 Sylvia shut herself away to write a novel and Aurelia served her dinner in the study. No further details. You'd never know except by reading a later diary that during that week Sylvia angrily told Aurelia, "You are of no use to me here!" and ordered her to move out. The only trace of that in the 1962 diary is a page with names and phone numbers of nearby hotels. It was midsummer and hotels were all booked. Housed with midwife Winifred Davies, Aurelia passed the time reading a book of home remedies, copying out numerous uses of cider vinegar. (I'm not making that up.) Invited back to Court Green a few days later, Aurelia recorded in Gregg shorthand that Sylvia, unable to sleep, eat, or care for her children was sedated by the local doctor. 

The above is the older of two diaries Aurelia definitively censored, this one by ripping out pages and noting, "Tore out all the sad notes made from 1936-40." Wish she hadn't. The other injured diary has several pages from autumn 1958 razored out. Letters from Sylvia hint that was a period of conflict having nothing to do with Sylvia: Aurelia was fighting with her siblings.

A frank and lengthy discussion about reading Aurelia Plath's diaries is free at Substack.

The Courage of Not Shutting Up

Aurelia Plath with her book Letters Home, getting her say.

Silenced by her son-in-law who held her grandchildren hostage, jeered by critics who judged her daughter's letters false but her daughter's fiction true, Aurelia Plath had things to say and intended to say them without destroying her life and relationships. [1]

Sylvia and Aurelia Plath carved out ways to say what they wished to say. When a circle of hearers was not enough they used the most durable communication tool they had access to: They wrote. If to get messages out they had to be artful, they'd message artfully.

First, Sylvia:

If being heard meant writing and publishing "grisly" and shocking works of art using ethnic slurs and making metaphors of the Holocaust and Hiroshima, poems spoken by figures jailed, raped, hunted, suicidal, burnt at the stake, with tongues cut out, Sylvia Plath would be heard. If it cost the good graces of family and mentors, Sylvia wanted her words not only heard but printed and read. Sylvia lived to be read. Readers wanting more would pay to read more. This might have worked to Sylvia's benefit had she and strangers been the only people in the world.

Shutting up became such an occasion that Sylvia wrote a poem about how hard it was: "The Courage of Shutting Up" (first titled "The Courage of Quietness").

Aurelia Plath's diaries, now at the Plath family archive at Yale and I hope not locked away, show Aurelia trained from youth to minimize or hide her life's most consequential facts. Even to herself she could not be so brazen as to say The money's run out. I married a brute. Censure awaited those who complained (let gratitude be your attitude!) or the world could trot out scripture to remind women not to speak.

To communicate artfully and modestly, those taught to measure their words tucked little notes beneath plates, and wrote in margins and in shorthand their families could not read. They spoke sub rosa, used maxims and quotations, euphemisms, greeting cards, formalities. They made suggestions and gave hints. They wrote each other long letters. They sent money. Those able might risk writing a poem or publishing a book. By no means was this the same as shutting up.

[1] "Letters Home can be read like a novel: all this truth, even the frank disclosures are very close to fiction." New York Times Book Review, 14 December 1975. 

N.B.: Plath in 1951 wrote for the Daily Hampshire Gazette an article reporting on a speaker who addressed the qualities of satire: exaggeration, parody, "makes fun of his audience," shock via "obscenities and violence." Reprinted in the Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath, p. 626.

Pleased With Everything: Plath Family Papers at Yale

The Plath family has gifted Aurelia and Warren Plath's literary estates to Yale University's Beinecke Library. This donation ended my seven years of being bound by a non-disclosure agreement. 

I saw and photographed Aurelia Plath's estate materials, then privately owned, back in 2018, and despite temptation have kept quiet all this time, praying that the letters, postcards, photo albums, artwork, realia, and Aurelia's journals -- ranged across 22 different notebooks, entries dated 1924 to 1990 -- might not rot in boxes or be auctioned off piece by piece, that the archive would stay whole, a gift to all Plath scholars. I am grateful.

Aurelia's journals for 1963, photographed in 2018. I used the ruler for scale in case these notebooks were never seen again.

In 2018 I spent only two days with the 20-plus boxes of Aurelia's estate so couldn't see every bit, but it included treasures I hope haven't been sold or withheld. We will at last see what Aurelia did not sell to Indiana University or donate to Smith but kept until she died. I plan to be there and report to you.* I don't expect a mob. This is the stuff Aurelia valued and you know how she has been valued. My impression was that Aurelia was a very critical and love-hungry adult (so was Sylvia) and she could keep a secret.

Remember this is once again Aurelia-curated material. It might or might not alter the narratives we are used to.

Such a thrill, of the sort researchers get! And what a relief. For two days after I learned about this gift to Yale I quivered all over and couldn't sleep or eat. Call me a geek, but I'm a happy one.

*A sample from one of my reports from Yale: https://theyalediaries.substack.com/p/aurelia-plaths-songs-of-experience 

What's Missing From Sylvia Plath Archives

You can buy this for $135K USD. Free shipping.

The primary Plath archive at Indiana University's Lilly Library isn't pure Sylvia Plath. It's her mother Aurelia Plath's edit of her accumulation of Sylvia's papers and memorabilia, 3000 pieces spanning Plath's lifetime, plus letters Aurelia wrote and received up to 1974. Generous, remarkable. Yet Plath scholar Dr. Anita Helle nails it when she writes, "It is in the character of the modern archive to be both overflowing and incomplete." [1]

Here then are some of the items I and others see "missing" from Sylvia Plath archives. In print are thousands of pages, millions of words, of Plath's writings, drawn from multiple archives and coaxed out of private collections, so much we can hardly read it all, but it's just human to fixate on what's missing, like the shepherd with 99 sheep.

These exist but can't be accessed: 

Telegram to Ted Hughes, February 1957, from New York's Poetry Center, saying Hughes has won the prize of publication for his manuscript The Hawk in the Rain.

Aurelia Plath's own journals, referenced in Letters Home, were part of a Plath family donation to Yale's Beinecke Library and might someday be available. 

A few letters from Sylvia to Aurelia and to acquaintance Lynne Lawner.

Ted Hughes around 1990 began hinting that he did not destroy Sylvia Plath's last journal. In a recent Substack interview [2], archivist and Plath editor Peter K. Steinberg said he knows where the last two missing journals are, and in an online talk added that they are sealed until 2063. In fact they are sealed until 2059.

Of Aurelia Plath's letters to Sylvia, some survived into the 1970s, because Aurelia had wanted to publish a few in Letters Home. In the 1980s Aurelia told Dr. Richard Larschan that nearly all her letters to Sylvia -- only ten are in archives -- had been burned, but never said Sylvia burned them. I say a better candidate for the "burning" is Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and Plath's censorious "literary agent." Larschan said that Aurelia spoke sadly of the loss but said no more. 

Absent from the Lilly archive's file of Sylvia's unpublished short stories are the manuscripts of "The Mummy" and "The Trouble-Making Mother," both written in 1959. Sylvia must have carried them to England. Olwyn Hughes in 1989 asserted that "The Mummy," in her custody, "went missing 20 years ago." [3] Peter K. Steinberg found a fragment of that story at Emory University's Hughes archive and it appears in The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (795-96).

Where these are, I don't know: 

Some very consequential communications were possibly destroyed soon after creation or receipt because they caused such pain:

-Telegram, February 1963, from Ted Hughes to Sylvia's aunt Dorothy Benotti, saying "Sylvia died yesterday."

-Letter, July 1953, from Harvard University Summer School denying Sylvia admission to Frank O'Connor's short-story-writing class.

Missing: Records from autumn 1958 when Aurelia and siblings Dottie and Frank argued over housing their aging father and spending his cash. Sylvia briefly mentioned the conflict but Aurelia certainly withheld specifics or conveyed them to Sylvia over the telephone.

Missing: Some tell-all letters Sylvia wrote to her in-laws when Ted left her, letters supposedly stolen by one of Ted's girlfriends. [4]

Missing: Hours before her suicide, Sylvia paid her downstairs neighbor for stamps so she might mail some letters, but the letters were in her flat, unsent, when she died. Ted did open and read the letter addressed to Aurelia, because later he advised Aurelia not to read it. Aurelia told Richard Larschan she did not read it.

Lost: 

The draft, written in 1962, of Sylvia's unfinished novel Doubletake, or Double Exposure, about an artist whose husband cheats on her. [5] Ted and his sister Olwyn and Assia Wevill all read this draft, variously said to be "60" or "130" pages, before it was lost. Ted said Aurelia stole it, but that makes no sense because Aurelia couldn't publish or sell it: Ted held the copyright.

Draft pages of Aurelia Plath's attempt at a novel about her mother's girlhood, its working title Teena Marie, are mentioned in a letter Aurelia wrote in 1960 and in an interview from 1975. And any other creative writings she attempted. Sylvia mentions a radio play Aurelia wrote for a contest she did not win.

Plath-Hughes divorce papers.

Sylvia Plath's letters to Chicago confidant Eddie Cohen. 

Most likely never existed:

Unabridged Journals editor Karen V. Kukil says "Sylvia Plath did not keep a journal her senior year at college" (p. 89). Some fans insist this break in journaling is out of character and a journal for 1954-55 must exist. For the curious, Sylvia documented that eventful year in her letters, and many friends such as Nancy Hunter, Peter Davison, Richard Sassoon, and Gordon Lameyer are quoted in Plath biographies or wrote memoirs covering that time.

Of Plath's "second novel of joy and romance," which Aurelia said was titled Hill of Leopards and Sylvia read to her and then burned, no trace has been found.

For sale, if you want to buy them:

Painting, signed by Sylvia Plath [top of page], $135,000, AbeBooks. Painted when Plath was 16. On the same page are about 20 other Sylvia Plath collectibles at scary prices. 

Ebay has a few vintage first-edition copies of The Bell Jar by "Victoria Lucas" (1963) and by "Sylvia Plath" (1966) plus many other Plath-adjacent items. If a book is a "first edition" but also a "second [or later] printing," or minus a jacket, it is of dubious resale value. 

[1] Helle, Anita. "Reading Plath Photographs" in The Unraveling Archives (2007), Helle, ed., p. 184.

[2] Turrell, James, "James Meets Peter K. Steinberg," Substack titled "James on. . . Everything," 4 October 2024. 

[3] Hughes, Olwyn, "Sylvia Plath's Biographers," New York Review, 7 December 1989. 

[4] Trinidad, David,  "Hidden in Plain Sight: On Sylvia Plath's Missing Journals," Plath Profiles, Vol. 3, Autumn 2010.

[5] Clark, Heather, Red Comet, p. 825.