"I Am More Myself in Letters"

Sylvia Plath was under uniquely monstrous pressure to write happy, reassuring letters home, right?

Dearest Father and Mother! . . . Cable me as soon as you can as soon as you see my latest article in print . . . Your advice is very good, dear mother, I'm keeping my umbrella handy . . .  No, work doesn't really tire me, dearest of parents. But if I do feel fatigue, I stop writing . . .  I really feel very well . . . 

-Theodor Herzl, 1888

. . . I have never met anybody in my life, I think, who loved his mother as much as I love you . . . . the reason I am a poet is entirely because you wanted me to be and intended I should be, even from the very first. You brought me up in the tradition of poetry, and everything I did you encouraged. I cannot remember once in my life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay to her mother, 1921

Are you certain that only Sylvia Plath, because she had to, wrote her mother about every little detail?:

I have been in Rome three and a half days and it seems like a whole epoch. I felt at home here more quickly than in other towns I've been to, and I had expected the contrary. Perhaps it is because the first thing I did here was listen to some good music. I arrived about midday on Saturday and congratulated myself on having the rest of the day to look for a hotel. But after I'd got my breath, bought and studied a town-plan and had lunch, it was already 2:30 . . .

-Simone Weil to her mother, 1937

One might argue that these authors' "false selves" wrote these fakey letters full of highlights with no lowlights to please and reassure very needy parents.

Yet on social media we "post" mostly our highlights and successes. Sylvia Plath in her letters "posted" the same.

Give Sylvia some context, such as what other writers wrote to their parents, and how we select our social-media posts, and how often, and it is not so simple as "700 letters means a sick bond with her mother." 

Sylvia had a "following." Aurelia typically read Sylvia's letters aloud to family, friends such as the Nortons and Cantors, or showed them to neighbors or others interested in Sylvia's progress, and Sylvia knew that.

Sylvia said so:

. . . I manage [to write] a weekly vignette to mother and rely on her to disseminate the cultured pearls and grains of sand, such as they are! (to Gordon Lameyer, 12 December 1955)

When Sylvia did not want particular passages "disseminated," she let her mother know:

This is all rather private musing, and I would rather you kept it in the family and shared the most extroverted passages with other people. (to Aurelia, 14 November 1955)

Non-writers might not understand that skilled writers such as Plath could turn up the heat or play it cool depending on their audience. This has nothing to do with a "false self" versus a "true self," as if humans could have only one solid unified self. The self is symphonic!

I think Aurelia savored reading to and sharing with Sylvia's followers to showcase her daughter's success and devotedness. If that is bad, it is just as pathological when modern parents and grandparents showcase brag-worthy offspring to every neighbor and friend and colleague they can collar. Does that mean their lives are empty? No, it means their lives are full. (Before grandparents had cellphones, they bought and carried small photo albums called "brag books," and Aurelia did too.)

Aware that her letters were a family affair, Sylvia liked knowing that while she was under pressure the folks at home cared that she wrote, creatively or otherwise, telling them from England:

I miss that very subtle atmosphere of faith and understanding at home, where you all knew what I was working at and appreciated it, whether it got published or not.

-Sylvia Plath, February 1956

Oh, Aurelia. Auschwitz? Really?

Sylvia Plath wrote on August 16, 1960, to her mother, Aurelia:

As you were reading your World War II book about Colditz

and Aurelia altered it in Letters Home to:

As you were reading your World War II book about Auschwitz

Colditz Castle was an ultra-high-security Nazi prison holding escapees from other prisons, especially American and British officers. Fifty-six prisoners escaped Colditz. I gather the Colditz book was more heartening reading than a book about Auschwitz might be. [1]

Aurelia's edit I think hoped to belie Sylvia's now-famous October 25, 1962 rebuke, "[Y]ou've always been afraid of reading or seeing the world's hardest things--like Hiroshima, the Inquisition or Belsen," a sentence Aurelia left out of Letters Home. She guessed that we'd believe Sylvia when we read it. But if Sylvia was correct in saying Aurelia "always" feared reading about incarceration and mass murder, why was Aurelia reading any book about World War II?

Most of Aurelia's edits in Letters Home were benign, not worth remarking. But to use Auschwitz not for art's sake, as poet Sylvia tried to, but to clap back at her dead daughter: That's not benign.

[1] Books about Auschwitz available in 1959-60 included Elie Wiesel's Night; Dr. Miklos Nyiszli's Auschwitz: A Doctor's Eyewitness Account, and Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz. The two most popular books about Colditz, by Pat Reid, were published as one volume in 1953.

In 1972-74, BBC-TV aired a weekly series about daring escapes from Colditz, inspiring the creation of the Parker Bros. board game [pictured].

Colditz board game, 1970s

"Sylvia Bites"

Bitten plum / photo by Marco Verch

Sylvia Plath, as a kid, was violent—so much that Aurelia Plath had to keep Sylvia and her brother Warren apart. Sylvia kicked her brother, choked him, stuffed cloth down his throat. Sylvia said this to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher in a February 1959 therapy session, and Beuscher around 1970 read the therapy notes to Harriet Rosenstein, who audiotaped the interview.

Sylvia, age 26, told Dr. Beuscher her vivid memories of hating Warren from his birth, and published those memories in her essay “Ocean 1212-W.” Sylvia wrote in her journal (15 June 1951) that she had pelted Warren with tin soldiers, “gouged his neck” with an “careless flick” of an ice skate. You can’t carelessly flick an ice skate. Aurelia said Sylvia’s bullying became a neighborhood problem after her father died, but if Sylvia’s short story “Among the Bumblebees” is as thinly fictionalized as most of her fictions, the original of young Alice Denway was kicking her brother’s shins under the family dinner table to impress a father who was there. In other Plath fictions, girl-child narrators bite a playmate on the leg, bully a Jewish boy, are accused of ruining a neighbor girl’s new snowsuit. The real Sylvia had a rough enough reputation so that when the real-life neighbor girl’s parents came asking for money, Sylvia’s family sadly paid.

Aurelia’s Letters Home preface gets cagey and Latinate about her children’s infighting, signaling that she is suppressing much worse. Aurelia wrote: “[t]here were many times when each made the other miserable; and Sylvia, as the older, was the more dominant and the more culpable,” and does not say, but we know, she sent her daughter to live with her grandparents. Sylvia bit people. A police report in the Boston Globe (23 August 1938) says at the Plath house in Winthrop a dog “severely” bit on the nose a two-year-old guest. The Plaths did not own a dog. The dog was a neighbor's, but that Sylvia might have done it crossed my mind. Later when Sylvia first met Ted Hughes she bit his cheek until her teeth nearly met and the blood ran.

It is normal for children to be jealous of younger siblings and sometimes hurt them. Ruth Beuscher noted that Sylvia’s sibling rivalry went beyond normal. At age 26 Sylvia was bothered that Warren was at Harvard and she was not. Sylvia fought with her husband—“violent disagreements,” she told her mother; “snarlings and bitings,” she told her journal; “sprained thumbs and missing earlobes,” she told her brother. That was two adults in love. She had rushed to marry a “violent Adam,” “a breaker of things and people,” yet complained piteously after they broke up that he had beaten her. A line deleted from a draft of the poem “Edge” (“She has taken them with her”) suggests she considered killing their children along with herself, but on February 11, 1963, killed only herself.

Or so we say. In July 1964, Ted Hughes wrote about their two-and-a-half-year-old son, “Nick is a very tough-minded little bloke—altogether a very strange & violent little kid, a little Napoleon.” “I have a violence in me,” Sylvia wrote, “that is hot as death-blood.” That is true of many others. The difference is that Sylvia knew herself and spoke honestly about how bullying could get her what she wanted.

Was Sylvia Plath a Witch?

A solid quartz or lead-crystal ball 7 inches across weighs about 22 pounds.

Was Sylvia Plath a witch? References in Sylvia Plath’s creative work to the supernatural, weird, and mythic are in fact typical of her time and place, the era of plays and Hollywood movies called I Married a Witch, The Bad Seed, and Bell, Book, and Candle. [1] Plath’s references to the unseen do not mean or prove Plath was a witch. That idea first emerges in the USA and UK around 1970 when faddish interest in the occult, and cute media portrayals, made witches trim and beautiful, feminist and cool. [2] Popular fiction and film have since kept their modern witches young and appealing. Everyone who feels stronger owning an Isis poster or consulting Tarot cards, or takes pride in their zodiac sign, as Plath did -- is a witch an occultist.

For those pursuing the “Was Plath a witch/mystic/psychic?” question, precise definitions of “what she was” are crucial.

An occultist seeks power or advantage through rituals or tools such as Tarot cards, crystals, chanting, Ouija, or horoscopes; the use of such tools for those ends is called magic(k). A person can do occult work with and for other people. Most major religions prohibit occultism. An occultist is not automatically a witch.

A mystic (from a Greek root meaning “with eyes or lips closed”) looks inward, is receptive, seeks personal spiritual union with a higher power, and wants less from the material world rather than more. [3] Therefore Tarot cards, crystal balls, charms, prayers, and so on used to cull deliverables, such as predictions or good health, are not in fact “mystical.” One cannot do mystical work for other people. Major religions revere their mystics, and they are few. Being an occultist or being spiritual or intuitive does not make someone a mystic.

“Mysterious,” “mystical,” and “magical,” are not synonyms. An example to show that word choices matter: Which slogan would the Disney Corp. likely choose?

-Disney World is mysterious.

-Disney World is mystical.

-Disney World is magical.

A psychic (noun) has clairvoyant, healing, mind-reading or prophetic ability. Such ability, on call and consistent enough to make a reputation and money, is extremely rare. It is rarer yet to possess more than one such ability. Psychic (as an adjective) “seers” supported by cards, crystal balls, pendulums, drugs, fire, and so forth are occultists, not psychics. Most “psychics” are, alas, performers. Intuition is not psychic. Intuition originates in the body.

One’s psyche is defined as the totality of one’s mind or spirit or soul; the being, without the body. That we all have a psyche is a useful philosophical concept, but not a fact. Unfortunately the adjectival form of “psyche” is “psychic,” which makes people think of crystal balls and mind-reading. Plath’s post-breakdown “psychic regeneration” is not related to occultism.

A witch is a person of any gender who self-identifies as a witch. Plath never called herself a witch. No one is a witch just because someone says or thinks so. Things we call “witchy,” such as dancing around a bonfire, or using Tarot cards or bibliomancy to reveal desired information (“divination”), do not make Plath a witch. They make her an occultist, like her idol, poet William Butler Yeats.

All the above labels have been muddled, misused, corrupted, sensationalized, and contradicted, because people read Harry Potter and watch Disney and The Craft and anime and Buffy, playful fictions drawn from misinformation. Sylvia Plath herself was misinformed about the differences between “psychic” and “occult” and “intuitive.” She wrote in a 1956 letter to her mother Aurelia Plath:

[a]ll my horoscope points to my psychic, occult powers, & certainly if I give them play, I should at least, with my growing “woman’s intuition” be able to join Ted in becoming a practising astrologist. [4]

Plath soon found out that casting horoscopes is not intuitive or psychic but instead required her to do math, so Ted Hughes remained their house astrologer while Plath elected to use Tarot cards. Friends say Sylvia used Tarot ever more obsessively as her life came to a close. Using Tarot cards or playing Ouija (a Victorian parlor game, trademarked in 1902), still do not make Plath a witch, a psychic, or a mystic. They make her an occultist. Collecting and burning Hughes’s stray hairs and nail clippings for spite is something Plath read in The Golden Bough. [5]

Sylvia Plath only dabbled in the occult. Ted Hughes, through his mother, had lifelong occult interests, but no one asks “Was Ted Hughes a witch?” That suggests that Plath’s gender has encouraged this line of Plath-as-witch inquiry. Even asking the question is frivolous, because whatever the answer, it does not matter. Nor (as Hughes would have it) was his wife bedeviled by “psychic gifts,” seemingly never used except to catch him cheating.

Plath’s writings show a character hyper-rational, practical, keen-eyed, and worldly. The “Mystic” of her eponymous poem after one big moment falls to Earth with a thud. The speaker of “Witch Burning” is “a dartboard for witches” and never admits to being one. It was poet Anne Sexton who in a poem (“Her Kind”) called herself a witch. Maybe “Plath was a witch” persists because people still suspect, as in the witch-burning days, that “black magic” is how high-achieving women get their edge.

Plath above all was a dedicated and hard-working writer. Writers experience inspirations and breakthroughs to higher  levels – not of spirit, but of confidence, nerve, and skill. Such breakthroughs are part of a working writer’s experience: remarkable, but not mystical or magical at all. Sylvia’s hard work on the Ariel poems is documented in the many drafts of them archived at Smith College.

Eternity bores me, 

I never wanted it.

[1] Plath saw the play Bell, Book, and Candle and wrote her mother about it on 21 January 1953. Her letter of 13 December 1954 says she had just seen the play The Bad Seed in New York.

[2] Examples: U.S. TV sitcom Bewitched (1964-72), openly based on a 1942 Paramount comedy starring beautiful Veronica Lake as a witch; U.S. TV program, animated, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1970-74). Sabrina stars in her own comic-book series starting in 1971. Read here about the U.K. “witchploitation” TV and media fad of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[3] https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/other-religious-beliefs-and-general-terms/religion-general/mystic 

[4] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, October 28, 1956. “Astrologist” and “astrologer” are synonyms; the former is rarely used. 

[5] Plath's copy of this book is held by Smith College. https://libguides.smith.edu/c.php?g=1227026&p=8978322

Sylvia Plath Quotations From "Letters Home"

"Simply gutted of all strength and energy. I wear about five sweaters and wool pants and knee socks and can't stop my teeth chattering. The gas fire eats up the shillings and scalds one side and the other freezes like the other half of the moon. I was simply not made for this kind of weather. I have had enough of their sickbay and hospitals to make me think it is better to perish in one's own home. . . " (1956, February 24) 

"When one feels like leaving college and killing oneself over one course which actually nauseates me, it is a rather serious thing." (1952, November 19)

"I can't wait to get out of this dusty, dirty coalbin of a house" (1957, May 5)

"[a]ll the other little 'creative' writers were similarly dismissed, but I was singled out for particularly vicious abuse" (1957, June 8)

"I am sacrificing my energy, writing, and versatile intellectual life for grubbing over 66 Hawthorne papers a week and trying to be articulate in front of a rough class of spoiled bitches." (1957, November 5)

"Oh, we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs and Ted with missing earlobes. . ." (1958, June 11)

"I lost the little baby this morning and feel really terrible about it." (1961, February 6)

"The next five months are grim ones." (1961, November 5)

"I got so awfully depressed two weeks ago by reading two issues of The Nation--Juggernaut, the Warfare State--all about the terrifying marriage of big business and the military in America and the forces of the John Birch Society, etc.; and then another article about the repulsive shelter craze for fallout, all very factual, documented, and true, that I simply couldn't sleep for nights with all the warlike talk in the papers" (1961, December 7)

"I simply cannot go on living the degraded and agonized life I have been living, which has stopped my writing and just about ruined my sleep and my health" (1962, August 27)

"I guess my predicament is an astounding one, a deserted wife knocked out by flu with two babies and a full-time job" (1962, October 18)

The next time you hear or read that Aurelia Plath's edit of Sylvia Plath's Letters Home (1975) "expurgated" "everything negative or political" in Sylvia's letters and made Sylvia's life and character look sunny and sweet, "like a child's pink frilly bedroom". . . send them this page of quotations from Letters Home.

Why Was Sylvia Plath Shut Out From Harvard Summer School?

Sylvia Plath’s summer 1953 breakdown and suicide attempt are said to have hinged on being denied admission to author Frank O’Connor’s short-story-writing course at Harvard Summer School. The course catalog said enrollment was limited, but how was it that Plath, a well-published writer at age 20, was not admitted?

 

Irish-born writer O’Connor (1903-1966) in 1953 was internationally famous, a literary star. Enrollment in his course that summer was not restricted to undergraduates or Boston-area locals. Anyone could apply. The catalog entry stated only a preference for those with some experience in creative or critical writing.

 

Plath recorded her very reasonable doubts about competing for admission with “professional writers and grown-ups” from across the nation (CL1, 636). Plath saw the summer-school course catalog in March (CL1, 586), but applied only after Harvard offered her a $75 scholarship, news that arrived at her home in Wellesley around June 3. Plath was in New York for the month. Her mother Aurelia Plath, opening Sylvia’s mail, relayed this information, and also that O’Connor’s course required applicants to send in a writing sample. Plath asked her mother to retype her story “Sunday at the Mintons’” and mail it to her in New York. From there Plath mailed her sample between June 8 and 13 (CL1, 636).

 

Andrew Wilson’s 2013 biography Mad Girl’s Love Song hazards that because Wilson did not find Harvard’s rejection letter among the hundreds of other letters in Plath archives, Mrs. Aurelia Plath “perhaps” intercepted and destroyed what was in fact an acceptance letter so as to keep Plath at home serving family members that summer (pp. 209-212). If so, it was the only time Mrs. Plath shot down her writer daughter’s rising star to get her own way. Biographer Carl Rollyson gave no source for a claim that O’Connor deemed Plath “too advanced for his class” (American Isis, 64). Heather Clark’s Red Comet notes that source is an unpublished Plath biography archived at College Park, Maryland. 

 

All of that is wrong.

 

It is unlikely that Mrs. Plath, an educator, plotted to deny her daughter instruction from the moment’s most celebrated short-story writer at the nation’s most prestigious university, where Sylvia might write stories to sell for badly needed money. Wilson guesses that Sylvia was fooled but then discovered, too late, her mother’s treachery, triggering that summer's matricidal and suicidal urges. The “Sylvia was too advanced” theory flatters Plath. A 2010 essay by Peter K. Steinberg reasoned:

 

Plath had, after all, published five stories and four poems in Seventeen and Mademoiselle before June 1953. In addition, she had three poems and three journalism pieces in The Christian Science Monitor, and more than two dozen articles published anonymously as a Press Board correspondent in the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Springfield Daily News. While she had no published criticism, it would be surprising if other candidates for O’Connor’s class had such a résumé. (1)

 

This ingenue’s résumé might not have impressed O’Connor, an Irish Republican Army veteran, former political prisoner, W.B. Yeats’ playwriting protege at Dublin’s Abbey Theater, biographer, poet, translator, critic, memoirist, and fiction writer. Knopf published his collected stories in 1952. An O’Connor biography, quoting O’Connor's assistant, said Plath’s writing sample made O’Connor think her “demented” and when Plath’s suicide attempt made local and national news that summer O’Connor said it proved he had been right (2). Mrs. Plath wrote in Letters Home (LH, 123) and elsewhere that Sylvia’s application, sent in mid-June, was a late one for a course that began on July 6 and had already filled.

 

In Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, a careworn Esther Greenwood, just back from New York, sourly accepts this bad news. Esther soon receives and opens for herself a follow-up letter:

 

Propped on the table I found a long, businesslike letter from the summer school and a thin blue letter on leftover Yale stationery, addressed to me in Buddy Willard’s lucid hand.

 

I slit open the summer school letter with a knife.

 

Since I wasn’t accepted for the writing course, it said, I could choose some other course instead, but I should call in to the Admissions Office that same morning, or it would be too late to register, the courses were almost full. (Bell Jar, 97)

 

If this second letter is as much fact as fiction, and O’Connor’s assistant told the biographer the truth, Harvard and not Aurelia Plath denied Sylvia admission to the writing course, the only course she cared to take that year. Sylvia Plath’s Journals (pp. 185-187, pp. 546-549) show her weighing and dismissing summer-school alternatives and choosing, for financial and not familial reasons, to stay home in Wellesley and write on her own.

 

Maybe O’Connor’s choice not to admit Plath to his writing course was unfair. Maybe, as Steinberg suggests, “Plath’s creative self . . .was still forming,” meaning Plath was adolescent and so was her work. At age 20 no writer, even Plath, is too advanced to learn from a successful writer with 30 years’ experience and an international reputation. “You are too advanced” is to this day a common rebuff to an applicant maybe naïve enough to believe it. “The course has filled” also softens a “No.” For whatever reason, “no” was a disappointment, the greater because Plath had planned her entire summer around O’Connor’s course.

 

Showing professionalism rare in disappointed young writers, Plath never groused in writing that O’Connor had misjudged her tremendous value or that her qualifications had entitled her to admission--or that it was Mother’s fault she didn’t get in. Plath wrote in her journal that the course “was closed to me” (J 543), and to correspondent Eddie Cohen that she had felt “miffed” (CL1, 655) rather than devastated or furious. In a few years she would pore over O’Connor’s stories, seeking the secrets of success.

 

(1) Peter K. Steinberg, “They Had to Call and Call: The Search for Sylvia Plath,” Plath Profiles 2010, p. 108.

 

(2) My blog post of November 1, 2022 documents in detail the source of this remark, mentioned in passing in Deirdre Blair’s “Enmity, Torment, Adversity,” review of Voices: A Life of Frank O’Connor, The New York Times, Section 7, page 11, May 22, 1983.

Sylvia Plath and Speedwriting

c. 1960s

Sylvia Plath did learn a form of shorthand -- "Speedwriting," the "cn u rd ths" note-taking system invented in the 1920s by Emma B. Dearborn, a suicide, and persistently advertised for 50 years in the unglamorous back pages of Mademoiselle, but also in Popular Mechanics, Glamour, and Ebony: pretty much everywhere. Plath certainly saw these now-iconic ads; they ran in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle Plath had guest-edited. Mademoiselle had the last word, printing in September 1977 the latest Speedwriting ad I could find. It said, in plain block letters, "Yes, I went to college. But Speedwriting got me my job."

And so it was with Smith and Cambridge graduate Sylvia Plath who couldn't get her secretarial job at Harvard in 1959 without it. I wrote a paper, "Sylvia Plath and Speedwriting," that goes into depth about the topic. It includes the history of Emma Dearborn, her invention of Speedwriting and why it became big business, when and where Sylvia learned and used Speedwriting, and why she wanted to use it again while living in London. There are no known examples of Sylvia's Speedwriting, but some might yet be discovered. 

Shorthand and 1950s office practice and office machines will always be relevant in Plath studies, as they were in her life. Plath's clerical and secretarial skills -- typing poetry manuscripts, keeping track of submissions, filing carbon copies, answering editors' letters -- were essential to Plath's career and her husband's. My paper was published in Plath Profiles, vol. 11, 2019.

Sylvia Was Fat? No, It Was Assia

Seeking reviews of Letters Home I found in the Sydney (AU) Morning Herald, April 3, 1976, page 18, a review by novelist Jill Neville titled "The Sylvia Plath Industry." Neville didn't say who her "great friend" of Plath's was, but it was Al Alvarez; Neville was his girlfriend from 1960 to 1962. Neville wrote:

"A great friend of hers was my great friend. I glimpsed those surrounding her at the final drama; even the woman who acted as the detonator of her own life, I knew. She was too fat and not particularly young but when she came into a room men swayed like wheat in an evening breeze. To look into her perfect Russian-Jewish face was to hear a singing in the ears."

I misunderstood her to be saying Plath was fat and not young and had a Russian-Jewish face. I found it puzzling that Neville would so describe her. The "She" is Assia Wevill, Ted Hughes's "other woman" who in 1976 could not be publicly named.

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.