From the Plath Archives: Dark of the Moon

In 1926, Aurelia F. Schober, 20 years old, “to make a black day brighter” bought a copy of Sara Teasdale’s newest book of poems, Dark of the Moon. On the flyleaf Aurelia wrote her name and “December 29, 1926.” With an ultra-fine pen she underlined, checkmarked, and bracketed titles, lines, and stanzas. Sprinkled throughout the book’s 91 pages are 14 annotations in the tiniest Gregg shorthand I have ever seen.

 

Two decades later Aurelia’s daughter Sylvia Plath affixed her bookplate to the same flyleaf, signing it in her distinctive rounded hand and heavy black ink. That ink appears elsewhere in the book only as a checkmark in the Table of Contents alongside the title “Effigy of a Nun.” Aurelia had long before judged that poem as “really very excellent and it’s different.” Sylvia could not read her mother’s shorthand but singled out that poem too.

 

Dark of the Moon is the only book in Lilly Library’s Sylvia Plath archive claimed and autographed by mother and daughter. [1] Aurelia’s shorthand annotations show her weighing her attachment to “Karl.” My research identified him as a professor of engineering, Aurelia’s first love, 22 years older than she. In October 1926 Aurelia brought Karl home to meet her parents. He also spent Christmas with the family. In his diaries he described these as heartwarming occasions. By December 29, Aurelia’s mother had told her Karl was too old and to tell him goodbye. Privately, in shorthand her family could not read, Aurelia made her own decision, which I transcribed and placed in context in the table below. As a decoy for any nosy parent or sibling, Aurelia wrote one comment in plain English.

 

Sylvia discovered her mother’s copy of Dark of the Moon at age 14 and exclaimed in her diary, “What I wouldn’t give to be able to write like this!” Teasdale’s poem “An End” frames Sylvia’s first published short story “And Summer Will Not Come Again” (1950). It’s a cruel little tale: Girl meets Boy, then one day sees him with another girl and jealously confronts him. Girl loses Boy and it’s all her own fault. The end of the story quotes the poem:

 

With my own will I turned the summer from me

And summer will not come to me again.

 

The first line of Teasdale’s poem “Appraisal” echoes in Sylvia’s early poem “Ballad Banale”:

 

Never think she loves him wholly.

 

Others have documented Teasdale’s influence on Sylvia’s poetry, but how and why this book got to Sylvia only the shorthand tells.

 

[1] There were other such books, not in the Lilly Library’s Plath collection.

Click to clarify and enlarge the transcription table [it has a second page]:

What's In Biographer Linda Wagner-Martin's Archive?

Linda Wagner-Martin wrote and published Sylvia Plath: A Biography in 1987, and for many years it was the best Plath biography, enriched by details Aurelia Plath provided. Wagner-Martin first contacted Aurelia in 1984, sending her a draft subtitled A Literary Biography, and then interviewed her. Wagner-Martin secretly tape-recorded an interview and admitted to doing it. Aurelia was hurt and angry. Wagner-Martin's husband immediately returned the tape with apologies.

Aurelia forgave Wagner-Martin and kept in touch until 1990. Wagner-Martin also contacted other people acquainted with Sylvia Plath. In the Wagner-Martin files at the Lilly Library I found information and observations new to me, most of them not in any published biography:

Aurelia, age 13, in 1919 took on the care of her siblings, including her infant brother (born September 1919), while their mother was still weak from influenza and double pneumonia. This experience made Aurelia long to become a mother. (March 9, 1986)

Sylvia's classmate Donald Junkins, quoted as saying that Sylvia in Robert Lowell's poetry workshop looked "mousy," after reading the biography described Sylvia as "all silkwormy and opera-lonely and mono-blonde in that thin straggly way she had with her brain competing with everything in sight." Her lively classmate Anne Sexton outshone her. (Jan. 10, 1988.)

Eddie Cohen wrote Wagner-Martin (Sept. 3, 1985; Oct. 14, 1985) that Sylvia kept all letters she received, meticulously, as her mother did, and kept copies of her own letters. Cohen wrote to Aurelia after Letters Home was published in 1975, and from her first learned the details of Sylvia's ruined marriage and how Sylvia destroyed her second novel.

Regarding Plath biographies, "It is strange that nowhere have I read about my own education," Aurelia wrote Wagner-Martin on September 1, 1984. But that was Aurelia's own fault: "In those days a girl who made high grades kept the fact to herself -- it was unpopular to be a 'green stocking'! So the secret has been kept all these years that I [w]as Salutatorian of my high school class and Valedictorian of my college class. . . I am a retired Associate Professor Emerita -- really!" Wagner-Martin quoted this letter in this biography and a later one.

Gordon Lameyer, Sylvia's boyfriend in 1953 and '54, wrote Wagner-Martin in 1987 complaining that everyone he met, including Anne Sexton, asked him about Sylvia's virginity. Lameyer's unpublished memoir said Sylvia had sex with him only after secretly losing her virginity to a stranger because, Lameyer said, Sylvia was afraid to seem to her boyfriend like a beginner or unskilled.

Senior housing. Aurelia probably added the "Peace" sticker.

Dido Merwin criticized Wagner-Martin and Letters Home for not mentioning astrology when astrology had been essential to the Hughes-Merwin friendship. What Dido wrote in this 1985 letter about Ted and Sylvia's visit to Lacan is retold in grating detail in Dido's postscript to Anne Stevenson's 1989 Plath biography Bitter Fame.

The senior-housing complex where Aurelia lived her final ten years, North Hill, had 454 residents, most of them strangers to Aurelia. The Wagner-Martin archive includes a Christmas greeting picturing the complex (Dec. 9, 1985; pictured) and a postcard photo of North Hill (June 25, 1990).

Elizabeth Sigmund alleged in a phone interview that Ted deliberately moved Sylvia to their Devon country home, "the most alien place he could have put her," to keep her isolated.

"I have read, weeks ago, your [manuscript]. . . I am very pleased with most of it. . ." Aurelia wrote to Wagner-Martin in June 1984. Aurelia objected chiefly to the the portrayal of herself. She told Wagner-Martin she had not been an absent parent but was always home when school-aged Sylvia and Warren came home from their extracurricular activities.

Perry Norton's ex-wife Shirley (Mrs. Tom Waring) wrote on March 28, 1985 that Mrs. Mildred Norton, mother to young Sylvia's friends Perry and Dick, was a "charming but manipulative mother" whose sons had to excel academically, win scholarships, and become doctors. "And from Mildred too was the frantic message against physical attraction" that made sensitive Perry a worrier. Mildred sent eldest son Dick away to boarding school because he was becoming attracted to a girl.

It was known in the 1980s that a character named "Esther Greenwood" appears in a 1916 short story, "The Unnatural Mother," by first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. ("Greenwood" was Sylvia's grandmother's maiden name, and Sylvia had a cousin Esther in Boston.)

Aurelia congratulated Wagner-Martin on her "most attractive book" on October 29, 1987, but not without bitterly criticizing again the portrayal of herself, which caused her a "pressure-heart attack." On January 10, 1989, Aurelia wrote a thank-you note for two copies. And thanked the author again on June 25, 1990, for sending the "fine English paperback."

A sample of Ted's and Olwyn's objections to Wagner-Martin's manuscript.

Young Sylvia and Warren were always invited to "professors' kids" summer picnics and Christmas parties, according to a July 13, 1984 interview with C. Loring Brace (1930-2019). Aurelia at these events met Loring's mother Margaret, a Boston University graduate who "may have had a class from Otto Plath. She befriends Aurelia and always felt sorry for her, married to Otto. He was a real tyrant, and Aurelia suffered. So her need for companionship of other educated women was real. Mildred Norton and Margaret Brace were sorority sisters at B.U. . . Made the Plath-Norton connection much easier." Wagner-Martin paraphrased this information, leaving out the reference to Otto.

The thickest folder in the Wagner-Martin Box 1 holds letters from Olwyn Hughes, starting in 1982. In 1986 Olwyn read Wagner-Martin's final draft and sent the biographer 15 pages of deletions and changes [a sample is pictured] required by Ted and herself. Olwyn kept requesting changes until Wagner-Martin balked. Olwyn then denied Wagner-Martin permission to quote from Sylvia's poems. Despite the Plath Estate's efforts, Wagner-Martin's biography was published and she went on to publish another, more specifically literary biography, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (1999; second edition, 2003) and four other Plath-related books I know of.

How Much Money Did Aurelia Plath Make From Sylvia's Work?

Aurelia Plath taught at Boston University for 29 years but never made much money. Paying for Sylvia's needs and wants, and, after Sylvia's death, annual visits to the motherless grandchildren in England, smoked Aurelia's accounts down to their filter. Boston University forcibly retired employees at age 65, so a year before that, in 1970, Aurelia found another job teaching secretarial skills at Cape Cod Community College, 80 miles from Wellesley, where she could teach full-time until age 70. She was too old to enroll in its pension program, but without the job she'd have no income. [1]

What, didn't Aurelia ever get any money for being Sylvia Plath's mother?

Sylvia died without writing a will, so her husband Ted Hughes inherited Sylvia's bank accounts and property, valued shortly after Sylvia's death in 1963 at 2,147 English pounds. Hughes phoned Aurelia saying he was willing to return to Aurelia and to Sylvia's Aunt Dottie and to Olive Higgins Prouty the cash they gave Sylvia during her final desperate months. Aurelia told him, "Keep it for the children." Hughes also by default owned the copyrights to all of Sylvia's writings, the most valuable asset in Sylvia's estate. He assigned his sister Olwyn the job of managing these rights.

Aurelia had other assets, in 1963 worthless except to a sentimental mother. Sylvia had told Aurelia to throw out or use for scrap the accumulated junque of Sylvia's childhood and youth: letters from camp, early manuscripts, schoolwork, artwork, childhood diaries, paper dolls, and Sylvia's long ponytail, to name a few. Sylvia left these items with her mother when Sylvia settled in England. The material was destined to balloon in value after Aurelia's worst nightmares came true.

Appalled after reading The Bell Jar, published only in England, Aurelia refused to allow Ted and Olwyn Hughes to sell it to a U.S. publisher. Olwyn nagged Aurelia for three years. In 1970 Aurelia gave in, but demanded and won in exchange the right to edit and publish a volume of Sylvia's letters to her family. Aurelia owned the letters, but Sylvia's estate owned what was written on them. The deal was made, with hard feelings all around.

There is some evidence that Aurelia was to receive from publishers Harper & Row a percentage of royalties from Sylvia's books Crossing the Water or Winter Trees (both 1971) or even The Bell Jar, but the checks were so small they disgusted her.

Aurelia quit Cape Cod Community College to edit Sylvia's letters for Letters Home, receiving from publishers Harper & Row a $5,000 cash advance. [2] Aurelia immediately spent $2,400 for new siding for the house in Wellesley, and for two years worked at editing and typing the Letters Home manuscript, published in 1975.

In March 1977, with the money from Letters Home dwindling, Aurelia sold the bulk of her stored material, including the original letters from Sylvia to her family. A broker sold them to Indiana University's Lilly Library for a sum kept secret. Aurelia received payment in installments. (Why Indiana? The Lilly Library already owned Plath manuscripts a London bookseller had purchased from Sylvia Plath in 1961.) Aurelia also sold items the Lilly Library later purchased and added to its now-resplendent Sylvia Plath archives, where pack-rat Aurelia's storehouse of Sylvia's junque is today so valuable one must wear gloves to handle it.

Aurelia felt comfortable enough to vacation in Antigua in 1978 and 1979. Aurelia told a correspondent in 1979 that she received no money from her daughter's writing with the exception of Letters Home [3] and, without mentioning the Lilly Library, said she had "eked out" a few years of living on Sylvia's name, hoping she wouldn't outlive that money. In 1988 Aurelia told Elizabeth Compton Sigmund she was receiving interest income from the sale of the letters. [4] A 1979 play based on Letters Home paid Aurelia $750, half of the profit from its New York run. [5] A later production netted her $291.63. 

In 1980 Aurelia wrote that she still wore some of Sylvia's clothes. [6] Before selling the Wellesley house and furniture and moving to an apartment in the North Hill retirement complex, Aurelia in December 1983 donated books and papers to Smith College's Plath collection. These included Aurelia's own Sylvia-related papers and family documents, and letters and clippings about the effect of Sylvia's life and death on her family and friends. This got Aurelia a tax break that year when she sold her house.

In exchange for all of a resident's funds, North Hill agreed to house and care for residents, as needed, until they died. [7] This sounded to Aurelia like a good deal. Aurelia died at North Hill, of Alzheimer's disease, in 1994.

[1] ASP to TH, 11 March 1973, Emory.

[2] Journal of Mary Clarke, 11 October 1973, Smith College. There is evidence that Olwyn Hughes opposed the $5,000 advance going to Aurelia.

[3] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, 30 January 1979, Lilly.

[4] Elizabeth Compton Sigmund phone interview with ASP,  February 1988, Smith.

[5] ASP to Montgomery, 23 November 1979.

[6] ASP to Montgomery, 25 June 1980.

[7] ASP to Carol Hughes, 17 May 1983, Emory.

Sylvia Plath's Only Gregg Shorthand, Transcribed

Sylvia Plath wrote some Gregg shorthand after all! Her July 5, 1945 letter to Aurelia Plath, written from Camp Helen Storrow, includes three shorthand characters indicated but not transcribed in the Letters vol.1. Curious, I had a look at the original letter in the Lilly Library's Plath mss. II.

Twelve-year-old Sylvia had written to her mother, “Can you tell me what-these signs in shorthand mean?” and drew three shorthand characters. The first two are linked by “and,” and the final character is in parentheses, followed by a period. Why these shorthand characters and not others? Sylvia was asking what they said, so did not know. But she copied them from a grid of 154 Gregg shorthand characters pre-printed on the back cover of the steno notebook she was using as her 1945 summer camp diary.

Sylvia, using her thick black ink, made four checkmarks on this grid. They mark two pairs of symbols that look near-identical. Sylvia chose one of each pair to copy into her letter. The third symbol Sylvia asked about, the one in parentheses, is the same as the second. The first character means both “far” and “favor.” Which of those two would depend on their context. Sylvia's second shorthand character says “got.” The third says “got” in parentheses. So go fill in the blanks in your copy of Letters vol. 1, page 24.

Ergo: “Can you tell me what these signs in shorthand mean? Far/favor and got (got)."

The other two checkmarked characters in the grid that look so similar:

In Aurelia’s lighter ink and elegant hand, on this notebook’s back cover, up top, two Gregg shorthand characters say “medical texts.” Aurelia had been hired in 1942 to teach a Medical Secretarial Procedures course at Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters (Letters Home, 28-29).

These characters are from the Anniversary Edition of Gregg, taught from 1930 to 1949. I await permission to show on this blog a photo of the notebook's back cover.

Bless us, now we know three more words Sylvia wrote.

Images of the shorthand are from gregg.angelfishy.net. The diary’s official location at the Lilly: Plath mss. II, Series: Diaries and Calendars 1944-1957, Box 7, Folder 2, “Daily Journal at Camp Helen Storrow, July 1-14, 1945."

Aurelia Plath's Shorthand Transcriptions Have a Home

Aurelia Plath's shorthand annotations on the Lilly Library materials, cataloged and transcribed, are now available to all on the open-scholarship platform at Marquette University (my alma mater). The Excel files and short "keys" to each (PDFs) can be accessed and downloaded here. Take your time; there's a lot.

Marquette University Libraries digital librarian Heather James, herself a poet and Plath fan, welcomed the Aurelia Plath materials and skillfully uploaded the files. You must agree the Excel files are handsome and easy to use. Please credit Catherine Rankovic when referencing my work in your work. The Estate of Aurelia S. Plath granted me permission to release these transcriptions for scholarly purposes. Contact me at aureliascholar [at] gmail.com with questions re the shorthand.

Peter K. Steinberg kindly published a notice on his SylviaPlath.info blog that this project was ready.
 
I'm grateful that this project chose me. Currently I'm creating a chronology of Aurelia's life, gathering biographical information from every available source. It bears saying (because I've never heard it said) that Aurelia is an important key to Sylvia.

Doing the Numbers

In the Lilly Library's Sylvia Plath archive collection of correspondence known as Plath mss. II, boxes 1-6a, we can find Aurelia Plath's shorthand annotations. The first instance is on correspondence dated July 8, 1948 and the last dated July 1974.

Mrs. Plath wrote her Gregg shorthand annotations on letters and/or their envelopes -- very often on their envelopes. She was careful not to overwrite or deface any of Sylvia's letters (except the two black-marker redactions we can see in The Letters of Sylvia Plath, volume 2).

Of the Gregg shorthand instances, many relate to Aurelia Plath's editing of Letters Home in 1973-74. These, always in margins, are "typed" or "excerpted" or "omit" or "used."

Of the Gregg shorthand instances, two were so vigorously erased as to be illegible, but they are recognizable as Gregg shorthand.

Mrs. Plath made many more annotations in longhand on the correspondence than she made in shorthand.

Aurelia's Marginal Notes: Some Stats

There are 1,934 pieces of correspondence in the Lilly Library's Sylvia Plath archive. Since posting here in 2013 I have updated in detail the shorthand annotations tally in the Plath mss. II boxes 1-6a in a post made on October 6, 2017: It stands at 159.