For All Things Yale: "The Yale Diaries"

Have a rewarding All Saints' or Samhain.

I was asked to see Aurelia Plath's estate in 2018 because no one else cared. How times have changed. Now it's we who have the edge. Yale University's Beinecke Library staff says the Aurelia Plath and Warren Plath estates should open in its rare book room in December. I'm so excited I already want to post my plans and when I get there tell you what I see.

While this every-Tuesday blogspot continues, for all things Beinecke I wanted you with me on 1) a research diary/journal format 2) with no ads and free of charge 3) and video/audio and comment-friendly. I chose Substack for "The Yale Diaries," disabling all "pledge" and pay links. Free subscribers get posts emailed but they must register, and please know that in archive-induced ecstasy I might post at all hours and five times a day.

These new Plath Family collections have potential to radically alter Plath studies. Ten days in New Haven is costly and by choosing a suburban motel I cut lodging by half but this raised the cost of transportation to and from campus. So I am asking for your help with an estimated $420 for 10 days' local transportation. Just this once in this blog's history, here's a donate button. Any amount is heartening, but every $50 donation I will thank with a Tarot card reading or birth-chart reading for you or a friend. The secret is out: I lived by day in academia and nights and weekends as a reader of cards and horoscopes, pen-named Sylvia Sky. Yes cringe, but "she" published astrology books deeply scholarly or pop-snarky like ebook Sun Sign Confidential.

To further curry Sylvia Plath's favor I launched "The Yale Diaries" on her birthday. May it work as promised.

I've already posted the first entries at theyalediaries.substack.com. Or type that URL into the search bar. The Yale Diaries site is too recent to appear as yet in Google search results. I will look into posting a link on this sidebar. 

Thank you for joining your researcher on Plath studies' final frontier. -Catherine

Cultural Debris in Aurelia Plath's Archives

Meet Aurelia Plath's Joys of Jell-O cookbook (1962). Among her last effects and sharing a packing box with Great Short Stories of the World, this volume testifies to how, with one-quarter of a stomach, Aurelia lived days, weeks, and months on fruit-flavored gelatin mixed with whatever she could tolerate. Featured recipes include "Ring-Around-the-Tuna Salad" and the timeless "Broken Glass" dessert.

What's cultural debris? The leavings and tag ends of fads and fashions inconsistent with the level of discourse. Aurelia Plath's papers have few such items. She never mentions pop music or coffee brands or her era's entertainers. Only one fad really swept her away:

To Linda Wagner-Martin, 9 December 1985

 

 

In Aurelia's copy of "Bumblebees and Their Ways"

Aurelia Plath to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia started in the 1970s drawing "smiley faces" next to written or printed remarks, a pox-like American habit now faded but not extinct. The sun-colored "smiley" symbol that in the '70s defaced every manner of consumer item lived on to sire the whole emoji tribe. On a Christmas 1965 letter from Ted Hughes, Aurelia drew a "sad face" because Ted had canceled her upcoming annual visit with her grandchildren. (He wasn't ready to explain Assia Wevill's baby.) Aurelia drew that teary "sad face" on Ted's letter well after first reading it, because she used a type of marker not available in 1965.

Aurelia to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia had to explain "Paper from granddaughters" because the image was so uncomfortably inconsistent with who she was. Artist Bernard Kliban (1935-1990) drew tabby-cat cartoons printed by the millions on stationery, greeting cards, and tee-shirts ("Love to eat them mousies. . .") and the Kliban Cat still has fans. Of the examples of cultural debris in Aurelia's papers, the popularity of this nameless solitary cat (never a comic strip character, never animated) most defies political analysis. 

What else? Aurelia tried to quote in Letters Home Khalil Gibran's famous prose poem, "On Children" ("Your children are not your children"), made mawkish by overuse. Her editor stopped her. Online you will find a quotation from the popular prose poem Desiderata("You are a child of the universe") credited to either Sylvia or to Aurelia. Aurelia had quoted the poem in a letter to Sylvia, who liked it enough to quote it in her journal. [1]

Sylvia Plath on the other hand practically drowned in cultural debris, reading formulaic stories in women's magazines, in New York City vomiting beautifully sculpted food, and while wearing queerly-cut dresses watched food stylists using toothpicks to prop up melting scoops of ice cream.

[1] Journals, 27 February 1956. "Desiderata" (1927), an inspirational work by Max Ehrmann, was ever more widely quoted and reprinted in the 1960s and 1970s as a sort of creed for the counterculture.