This Ghastly Archive: Remembering a Plath Superfan

Claim to Fame

 

Like many dying women she spent her time making collages.

I mean it. Stuffed between oversized scrapbook pages,

  clashes of greeting-card images cut

from the times she had been greeted or congratulated.

None is attractive or makes any sense.

It was late in life that she became an artist and no less;

finally we all get around to making art,

the language when language ends, and the motionless track

travels on while the train puts us out

onto the platform that at any hour is inadequately lit.

 

A boy named Sawyer his mother calls Soya

  brings chimneys of magazines seventy percent advertising,

exactly life’s proportion. Mary Ann must make her mark.

Neighbors interrupt her making-for-posterity

collages, edge-to-edge frustration, a series of barren wants

coupled with annoyances. In her thirties she had written

letters to celebrities asking them for money and tried to sell

to rare-book dealers their angry or astonished replies, events

not in the collages. No words are. Language couldn’t root in them.

The colors red and black did. Frowning, she concentrated.

 

Collage as a claim to fame. If only it had the body’s depths

of bone, sinew and fat. Remarkably she had gone from shameless

begging to graduate school in her fifties, choosing a place

she could go entirely mad, a comparative arts program,

where no one said anything and no judgment was final. Ginsberg’s

penpal, she called herself; everyone knew she was lying.

Ginsberg had replied that her letter was stupid. She ran and begged

Sylvia Plath’s mother to “Tell me something secret about her,”

as Mrs. Plath backed out of her Wellesley driveway

in 1977. She clings to the historical record by fingertips.

 

That is what she approached with scissors and what

she approached the scissors with. To acquire the few letters

from the famous in her files, the archive had to take the lot

and store acid-free cartons of late-in-life collages

in bulk, uninteresting and unattractive, dated,

made daily as she tried to live, Mary Ann Montgomery,
old and sick and living on Social Security in a house

in Michigan she had inherited, magazines to its ceiling, every

scrapbook filled to the limit of its binding with images.

Tired of words and reading, she tried collages, wanting

her name in an archive’s collection, and succeeded.

 

Mrs. Aurelia Plath was usually generous with the Sylvia Plath fans and mourners who came unannounced to her house on Elmwood Road, but one morning in September 1977 Aurelia could not stop to talk with a would-be visitor parking a motor home with a Michigan license plate. The stranger was a 47-year-old ex-nun, music teacher and divorcee trying to live by selling famous people's letters, and obsessed with Sylvia Plath. Terribly hurt that Aurelia didn't speak with her, she sent Aurelia a letter and, each having ulterior motives, they kept up an unctuous correspondence from 1978 to 1989: eleven years. Some of Aurelia's replies include useful biographical information. 

 

Montgomery early on begged Aurelia for "something of Sylvia's, even a letter or scrap" and for Aurelia to tell her something secret that Aurelia had never told anyone else. Aurelia declined. Montgomery sent Aurelia a poem comparing her own life to Sylvia's; she sent unwanted gifts such as flowers (once) and cassette tapes of her piano playing, refusing to take seriously Aurelia's statements that she didn't have time or energy or eyesight enough to correspond. Montgomery visited twice, once bringing a priest friend, once sick with a cold or flu that Aurelia caught.

 

Plath superfan Mary Ann Montgomery, Ph.D. (1931-2022) in the 1990s distinguished herself as a university teacher and donated her letters collection and more to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Viewing her archive there moved me to write the poem "Claim to Fame," which takes poetic license, but the boxes of collages are real.

Too Busy To Drink Sylvia's Blood

"Sylvia" the movie, 2003

Aurelia Plath taught five days a week during the academic year and usually summer school at Boston University. When her children Sylvia and Warren were in college Aurelia also tutored on weekends so they could buy clothing as good as their peers'. [1] When we realize that from 1942 Aurelia worked full time with a twice-daily 40-minute commute, plus evenings at home with two dependent parents and student papers and class planning to do, plus seeing friends and paying bills, and having (please note!) a son she cared for as much as she did her daughter, and personally liking to read and needing to sleep, Aurelia didn't have much time to suffocate Sylvia and drink her metaphorical blood.

Sylvia only imagined Aurelia was preoccupied with Sylvia. Like a much younger child, Sylvia seemed unaware that her mother's life was already full.

From her girlhood summer camp days until her death Sylvia wrote her mother weekly, often more. What if instead of saying Sylvia wrote so many letters because her mother needed reassurance, try taking the view that Sylvia was the insecure one, wanting to occupy the center of her mother's world and consume her time and resources despite the miles between them. 

(No working woman of forty-five needs an eighteen-year-old's reassurance.)

Aurelia told a reporter in 1979, "They say [Sylvia] wrote the letters to keep me happy, to hide the darker side. Sylvia? Putting herself out day after day? The reason she wrote those letters was to get a reply, and she always did. I wrote them on my lunch hours, with my sandwich beside me." [2] We learn from Sylvia's volumes of letters about Sylvia's dependence on Aurelia not only for letters but for favors and support: typing and mailing manuscripts, banking, giving feedback about her new poems, shopping and sending money and packages.

Sylvia wrote from college so often that Aurelia sometimes had little to report except that Grammy had baked a cake last night. Sylvia read her mother's letters aloud to her roommate Marcia Brown to make fun of such trivia [3]. Although only ten mailings from Aurelia to Sylvia survive, from those and from Sylvia's replies we can see Aurelia's letters typically described family news, or books Aurelia was reading, and gave advice that Sylvia read as infantilizing or manipulative. 

Sylvia didn't realize her mother's letters mirrored Sylvia's own infantile or manipulative letters.

If genuinely bothered by her mother's letters Sylvia could have replied to them less often or not at all--or with honesty. But she did not. Casually we say "Sylvia wrote only what her mother wanted to hear," but read the letters and see how often she wrote her mother about distressing happenings and fearful moods; and no one knows what Aurelia wanted to hear. Maybe Aurelia wanted her lunch hour for her lunch. Sylvia's was the almost physical dependence, calling her mother's letters a "sustaining life force," and, when asking Aurelia for a quick reply, "Well do send me an infusion of energy, it will do me more good than thyroid."

[1] ASP to Leonard Sanazaro, Lilly.

[2] Robertson, Nan; NYT Book Review, October 9, 1979.

[3] Harriet Rosenstein's interview with Marcia Brown Stern, Emory.

Could Aurelia's Letters to Sylvia Still Exist?

Somebody wiped Aurelia Plath's letters to Sylvia Plath off the face of the earth. Who was it?

When biographers have guessed -- no one has proof -- that Sylvia Plath in 1962 made a bonfire of "all of her mother's letters," allegedly burning "upwards of a thousand," they make an odd assumption. [1] When Sylvia moved to England with Ted Hughes in 1959, she left at her mother's house in Wellesley her schoolbooks, manuscripts, childhood diaries, scrapbooks, letters from former boyfriends and Ted, her artworks, and all the letters Sylvia had written to Aurelia up to then. The bonfire story asks us to believe that Sylvia packed up her mother's letters, ten years' worth (c. 1950-1959), hauled them across the Atlantic to store in the couple's small London apartment, then three years later at her country house, Court Green, burned them all at once. We don't know why, so biographers have guessed "to symbolize her liberation from maternal influence."

Sylvia moved overseas in part to get away from her mother. Aurelia might have mailed to Sylvia from Wellesley a box of mother-letters, or brought them when visiting, but that sounds unwieldy and costly. Whatever happened, the voidance of Aurelia's side of the mother-daughter correspondence is so near perfect as to suggest it was methodical, and only one person in the Plath story was that methodical and had the opportunity to wipe the whole shebang: Aurelia.

Ten letters from Aurelia to Sylvia are all that exist in Plath archives. [2] Those archives hold dozens of letters Aurelia wrote to everyone else in her life, letters both sent and unsent, originals and carbon copies. Sylvia moved house six times between 1955 and the end of 1959, and was not the "pack rat" her mother was, or as sentimental. The bonfire story asks us to believe Sylvia sentimentally maintained and carried with her to England an accumulation of her mother's letters. I don't believe it.

Even the burning of "all" Aurelia's letters at Court Green in July 1962 would leave six months of letters Aurelia mailed to Sylvia after that time. Let's say Sylvia did burn all her mother's letters in the yard at Court Green, not in July but before she moved to London the first week of December. Sylvia had yet to receive letters Aurelia sent in late December and in January 1963. Sylvia received those, because she wrote replies. But they are missing too.

Aurelia had the right to take from London or Court Green in 1963, or on subsequent visits to England, any of her own letters to Sylvia that she could find, and destroy them if she liked. But Aurelia kept thousands of other Sylvia-related papers, even scraps, now in Plath archives. Aurelia thought highly of her own writing skills and evidence indicates she planned to include some of her own letters to Sylvia in her edit of Letters Home (1975), to show a loving mother-daughter relationship. Either the Hugheses or her own editor shot that idea down.

But that would mean that Aurelia had kept at least some of her own letters well into the 1970s.

Sylvia's poem "Burning the Letters" is dated August 13, 1962, so Sylvia did burn letters, once, and the poem makes them sound like Ted's. But all accounts of "bonfires" (and Sylvia dancing around them like a witch, etc.) in that turbulent period are suspect. Aurelia told The Listener in 1976 that at Court Green in July 1962 she watched Sylvia burn in the yard an armful of papers and Sylvia's new ("second" and "happy") novel in manuscript titled The Hill of Leopards, dedicated to Ted. [3] No trace of that "happy" novel has ever been found. Aurelia in 1976 said it had hurt her to watch, but she had to hold the children. She did not say Sylvia burned her letters.

If Sylvia destroyed a thousand of Aurelia's letters, in front of her or not, Aurelia would likely have told someone about her hurt or anger, or what a tragic loss it was, over her next 30 years of intimate letter-writing and friendships. Richard Larschan said Aurelia told him she was sad they had been burned, but I think a large, perhaps selective, portion still exists and could tell us much.

Did no biographer or critic ask Aurelia while she lived, "Where are your letters to Sylvia?"

[1] Rough Magic (1991, p. 286) says "upwards of a thousand" and that Aurelia watched Sylvia burn them; it cites no sources, but the book's second edition (1999) says the author spent a lot of time with Aurelia. Aurelia wrote others that the biographer's presence over three days had annoyed her; she might have lied to him. Clarissa Roche said Sylvia told her she made a bonfire of Ted's papers a few days before Roche arrived for a visit in November 1962; but also that Sylvia told the story jokingly.

[2] The ten known surviving Aurelia-to-Sylvia mailings are cataloged on page 3 in Bridget Anna Lowe's essay "Burning Free" in Plath Profiles, 2012.

[3] Unpublished anecdote from a draft of Aurelia's Letters Home introduction, Sylvia Plath collection, "Aurelia Plath," Box 30, Folder 66a/b, Smith College, written c. 1975. The anecdote says Aurelia verified the event and date, July 10, 1962, by consulting her travel diary, but this too is suspect.

"Medusa" and the Meaning of "Paralyzing the kicking lovers"

Aurelia Plath wrote to her frequent correspondent, independent Plath scholar Leonard Sanazaro, on September 8, 1986. On the letter's page 4, Aurelia describes the hours just before she left Court Green in July 1962 to stay with Winifred Davies and give the troubled Hugheses their privacy. Aurelia had packed and was prepared to go. But she couldn't -- she was caring for six-month-old Nick while his parents were in their bedroom, where they stayed for two hours past Nick's feeding time. Aurelia wrote:

"I kept walking the floor with sobbing Nick in my arms. Finally, I knock on the [bedroom] door and announced my departure -- so 'please take Nick.'

"Sylvia grumbled something; I knocked, opened the door and handed the baby to his mother. His parents were in bed; I put the baby down, turned, shutting the door and left the house. What else could I do? That is the only thing -- and Sylvia later blew it up into the shocking poem 'Medusa'."

So that is Aurelia's version of what "paralyzing the kicking lovers" refers to. According to an unsent letter from Aurelia to Warren Plath, dated July 17, 1962, Aurelia moved to Davies' house on July 16.