Bones to Pick With Dick Norton

Sylvia Plath and Dick Norton

Found among Aurelia Plath's papers: a handwritten list of graceless/boneheaded comments aired by Sylvia's boyfriend Dick Norton, comments first made to Sylvia, who seethed and told her mother. Aurelia overheard at least one. Aurelia wrote down and numbered each and titled the list "Bones to Pick with Dick N.", that title in Gregg shorthand so we know Aurelia was its author.

1. "A poem is an infinitesimal speck of dust."

2.  "Anybody who can read can major by himself in English. Waste of time!"

3.  On Sylvia's arrival at Raybrook (where she was hoping to catch up on work and put on paper a story that was fermenting within her) -- "Well, you haven't grown any shorter!"

4. "A zircon looks like a diamond from a little distance. A large one would be impressive."

5.  "I suppose your grandfather looks forward to a visit with his cronies." [Aurelia continued:] That settled dad's visiting with the N.s in the living room after dinner. Of course poor Grammy had to plead weariness and retire upstairs, too! (I was blamed for snobbishness.) 

Document, black ink on a half-sheet of white paper, date unknown.

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]:

Business Class: Aurelia's Final Years at Boston University

Boston University yearbook, 1967

Aurelia Plath’s teaching job at Boston University’s College of Business Administration began dissolving in 1959 when a new dean dismissed all secretarial-program faculty except for five aging tenured females. Aurelia was 52.

With 13 years left before BU retired her, Aurelia prepared to teach in a different department, taking a night course in German and then courses in teaching remedial reading. [1] She could have quit BU for a medical-secretarial job, her field of expertise, but even in her teens Aurelia wanted a teaching career, ideally in languages and literature. Her daughter Sylvia wrote that Aurelia secretly hated teaching typing and shorthand, yet 1) Aurelia taught more advanced courses than those, and 2) regardless of subject, Aurelia liked educating and advising young people. It was Sylvia who had secretly hated teaching.

 

Shocked in September 1962 by the new College of Business course catalog with none of her courses in it, Aurelia was not sure she was still employed. Sylvia in England was “appalled to hear your department is closing.” Secretarial studies as a college major was everywhere dying on the vine. Yet however marginalized, BU’s secretarial major persisted and so did Aurelia’s job. She was lucky; she needed the money a tenured associate professor could make. During 1962 she bought Sylvia a Bendix and lent her 500 English pounds to pay off Sylvia's house in Devon and paid her own way there and back; and Aurelia then offered a very troubled Sylvia, deserted by her husband, $50 a month.

 

BU’s yearbook for 1967 pictures 232 College of Business Administration graduates, 53 of them female. Of these, ten had secretarial degrees: nine “executive secretarial,” and a lone “medical secretarial.” One would think Aurelia sat around with no students. Yet 22 more of the 53 graduating females were Business Education majors. Taught secretarial and business skills and communications, they were also educated to teach those subjects in high schools or vocational programs where typing and shorthand were flourishing.

 

Business Education graduates thus bypassed secretarial jobs for teaching careers better respected and paid. Essentially they studied to become new Aurelias. Freshmen from Aurelia’s 1963-64 shorthand courses were in 1967 taking her course, limited to Bus Ed seniors, in how to teach shorthand. BU’s 1967 yearbook lists seven College of Business fields of concentration. Secretarial and Business Education were not among them. The end had come: the last secretarial students enrolled in 1968, and Bus Ed moved to the School of Education. [2]

 

Entitled to a leave of absence, Aurelia took it in fall 1970, six months before she turned 65, when BU would retire her. During her leave Aurelia quietly worked at her new job: teaching medical-secretarial at a community college eager to have her teach until she was 70.

[1] ASP to Miriam Baggett, 6 February 1960; Sylvia Plath to ASP, 17 March 1960.

[2] Thus the College of Business Administration (later, School of Business; later, School of Management) was purged of female faculty, as the 1973-74 Bulletin shows, and of a large percentage of its female students. For a time.

"But You Stopped the Piston!"

Aurelia Plath shorthand annotation on London Magazine, p. 32

 

London Magazine in April 1963 and Encounter, in October 1963, published some of Sylvia Plath's "Ariel" poems, hot properties after her death. Encounter published a group of ten. Aurelia Plath collected and preserved magazines that published Sylvia's work, read them thoroughly, and wrote on them in longhand and Gregg shorthand, mourning or talking back to her famously dead daughter, or guiding future scholars and biographers to what they ought to notice.

In 1983 Aurelia donated her collection to Smith College's Plath archive. In Boxes 7 and 8, Dr. Gary Leising of Utica University found those two British litmags with shorthand annotations alongside two Plath poems, and sent me photos. As you know, I read shorthand. These annotations express mixed grief and fury.

Sylvia's poem "Years" (a favorite of mine), in London Magazine, includes these lines:

What I love is

The piston in motion.

Aurelia underlined and penciled alongside of this, "But you stopped the piston!"

She was speaking directly to Sylvia, a rarity among Aurelia's annotations. Aurelia visited this page more than once, adding an exclamation point in black ink.

In Encounter's shorthand annotation, on "Daddy," -- this is the context:

Encounter, October 1963

Penciled in shorthand next to "The vampire who said he was you" is " = Ted."

Understand that Aurelia knew the poem's references long before critics caught on. For years, through interview after interview, 1966, 1970, Aurelia withheld the "vampire's" identity, never said the "black telephone" incident was real and she had actually witnessed it. Ted Hughes told Aurelia she must stay silent about the circumstances of Sylvia's death or never see Sylvia's children again. Aurelia would not risk that. 

So under this gag rule, keeping secret the "why" of Sylvia's suicide that puzzled a generation of critics and fans -- had Sylvia Plath been in love with death? A victim of incest? A gifted woman driven mad? Was a crazy bitch? -- when journalists and biographers probed, Aurelia changed the subject, or simpered, said nothing and passed the cake plate.

But Aurelia could annotate. In shorthand, which no one else in the family could read, Aurelia penciled Ted's name. Besides pencil, in Encounter ther eis black ink, disclosing a second visit to the page, this time singling out identifying details. Dr. Leising added that on London Magazine's table of contents, Aurelia "marked a cross followed by the date of Sylvia's death. That little detail was, to me, a very poignant reminder of Aurelia's grief."

Not only that: where the poem says "I was ten when they buried you," Aurelia circled "ten" and wrote "8." Encounter's headnote, written by Ted, says Sylvia was nine when her father died. Aurelia corrected it to 8. These annotations, not dated, were probably made before it was widely known that Sylvia Plath's father died when she was eight: before 1975, when Aurelia Plath's preface to Sylvia's Letters Home made that clear.

Aurelia's Platinum Summer

In April 1954, Sylvia Plath mailed her mother Aurelia a birthday card picturing a witch. Back at Smith College after her breakdown, Sylvia, 21, was growing up and away, changing and thriving, and in case Mother didn’t get the message, she came home for the summer bleached blond and loaded for bear. 

“Kindnesses and loving acts were now viewed cynically, analyzed for underlying motives,” Aurelia wrote in Letters Home, using the passive voice to soften the truth: Sylvia had confronted her with a new, independent-from-her-mother personality. “One had to stand back and hope that neither she nor anyone else would be deeply hurt,” Aurelia wrote, but she was the one deeply hurt. (LH, 138)

The issue was Sylvia’s sex life. Aurelia worried that Sylvia might have sex. Parents of daughters still harp about that, but Aurelia got very ugly and grilled Sylvia about where she went and with whom. In mid-June Sylvia told her psychiatrist that Aurelia threatened to withdraw financial support unless Sylvia stayed a virgin. Sylvia, probably not a virgin even then, chose to tell her mother nothing rather than lie. Hearing about another mother-daughter argument on June 21, Sylvia’s psychiatrist advised her not to confuse defiance with true independence. [1]

That summer too Aurelia’s ulcer was bleeding, her mother had stomach cancer, her employer was closing the college she worked for, and she worried that Sylvia might try suicide again. Sylvia pleased Aurelia by accepting a suitor’s proposal but strung him along while having affairs with men she met at summer school. In an August 7 letter to her fiancé Gordon Lameyer, Sylvia claimed to have won her independence from her mother. What she had actually done was pick up a stranger and have a fling with him.

Back at Smith for her final year there, she wrote Aurelia as usual, at times sounding contrite, but avoided seeing her mother for the rest of the year while Aurelia’s ulcer raged out of control.

Known for smiling through her pain, Aurelia in summer 1954 gave in to self-pity showy enough that 20 years later Lameyer recalled that Aurelia would say to Sylvia, “you love ____, or you kiss ____, but you don’t like me.” [2] Aurelia was very bad at fishing for sympathy. In late 1954, feeling a bit better after a hospital stay, Aurelia told her woes to her sister Dorothy “Dotty” Benotti and her husband Joe. Devoutly Catholic Dotty told Aurelia that God was punishing her for leaving the Catholic church and her other sins.

Aurelia was so outraged she vomited blood. She wrote Sylvia that Dotty said something cutting which Sylvia’s return letter of January 29, 1955, does not specify. But Aurelia preserved what Dotty said in angry Gregg shorthand annotations in a book of Bible stories, in the margins alongside the story of Job:

And now upon the scene appeared a group of Job’s friends who said they came to be his comforters, but who turned into his tormentors because they kept on insisting that his afflictions must be a sign that he was very wicked, and that the first thing he needed to do was to repent. To the left of this passage, Aurelia penciled, in shorthand, “My sister Dorothy in 1954!”

As reinforcement, Aurelia wrote “1954” and circled it. She underlined nevertheless upon this good man all sorts of sorrow and bereavement descended, and next to it wrote “tell Dot!” [3]

Sylvia’s January 29 letter to her mother opened with six full paragraphs of consolation, saying Dotty was just jealous: of Aurelia’s children (Dotty’s were adopted), of Aurelia’s better looks despite her much harder life, and of driving lessons that were going badly but would lead to Aurelia’s greater independence. It is the lengthiest and most empathetic expression of sympathy Sylvia Plath ever sent her mother. She had indeed grown up, if just a little.

Aurelia had a long memory for slights but a longer one for kindnesses. On Sylvia’s comforting January letter she wrote in shorthand, “specially fine and kind to my bruised ego.” Dotty and Aurelia forgave each other, and Aurelia sped to her sister’s side in the 1970s when Dotty became terminally ill.

[1] Harriet Rosenstein’s undated taped interview with Ruth Barnhouse Beuscher, Collection 1489, Emory University, Stuart A. Rose Library.

[2] Collection 1489, Box 2, folder 13, "Lameyer" p. 2.

[3] pages 359-360, Stories of the Bible (Abingdon Press, 1934), in the Sylvia Plath collection, Smith College. The book is inscribed “Love to Sylvia & Warren from their ‘other mother.’ Marion Freeman Christmas 1940”. The underlining of "sorrow and bereavement" and annotations on another Bible story in the book indicate that Aurelia wrote the annotations after Sylvia's death.

"Do Not Let Mother See This!"

Sample of Aurelia's shorthand.

It is false to say Sylvia Plath’s “letters home” to Wellesley were written for her mother’s eyes and gratification only. Although addressed to Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s letters were in fact written for the Plath household, including Sylvia’s brother and grandparents, and Aurelia shared the letters soon after receipt with other relatives and friends, such as Marcia Brown Stern.

 

Sylvia was aware of that, because in some letters she asks Aurelia to keep them confidential. For example, Sylvia’s letter of February 24, 1956, says, “I am being very naughty and self-pitying in writing you a letter which is very private. . .” This suggests Sylvia typically felt obligated to keep her letters family-friendly, but in this case singled out her mother for more intimate communication.

 

The first sentence in Aurelia’s introduction to Letters Home (1975), a book often characterized as “Sylvia’s letters to her mother,” explicitly states that Sylvia wrote the letters to her “family.” Aurelia specifies that “family” includes Warren Plath and Olive Higgins Prouty. Aurelia did not tell readers she acted as a curator, deciding on her own and case-by-case who else should be allowed to read or hear her read Sylvia’s letters. We learn this from Aurelia’s shorthand annotations on some of Sylvia’s original letters, now in the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

 

Aurelia wrote her annotations mostly on envelopes. (Aurelia was the only person in the family able to read or write Gregg shorthand.) I have transcribed all her “share/don’t share” annotations, appearing on seven letters in all, and present here the transcriptions and the date of the letter they’re associated with. Use your copies of Plath’s Collected Letters to figure out why Aurelia might have made these curatorial decisions.

 

·      share with Gordon if the time is right.  1954, August 30 ["Gordon" was Plath's steady boyfriend.]

 

·      do not share   1955, October 5

 

·      (do not share) 1955, November 14

 

·      do not share!  1955, December 5

 

·      Do not let Mother see this!   1956, March 9  [“Mother” means Aurelia’s mother, Sylvia’s “Grammy,” who lived in the household and was then dying of cancer. Sylvia asked Aurelia to keep this letter private.]

 

·      do not let Dot or Frank see this.  1960, January 16 [“Dot” is Aurelia’s sister and Sylvia’s “Aunt Dot”; “Frank” is Aurelia’s brother. Neither lived in the Plaths’ home.]

 

·      don’t share    1962, October 21  [“don’t share” is written twice on this letter, on the inside and the outside.]

 

A few things to know: 1) Dozens of Sylvia’s letters home, especially in her first years at college, were penny postcards and openly readable. 2) We cannot rightly assume that Aurelia shared with others all the letters which she did not mark “do not share.” 3) Aurelia penciled in shorthand on Sylvia’s letter of April 25, 1951, “file in safe in my bedroom.” That letter she really didn’t want to leave lying around. Why? 4) Aurelia also read Warren Plath’s “letters home” aloud to visitors (Sylvia Plath to Warren, July 6, 1955).

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."

Smith College Shorthand Transcriptions Now Available

Transcribed into this downloadable Excel file (click the blue "Download" button when you get there) are Aurelia Plath's shorthand annotations on the Sylvia Plath papers in Smith College's Mortimer Rare Book Collection. Mrs. Plath donated her portion of this collection to Smith in December 1983. At that time Mrs. Plath was moving out of her house in Wellesley to an apartment in a brand-new retirement community called North Hill in Needham, Mass.

Compared with the wealth of shorthand annotations at the Lilly Library, those at Smith are few. I scoured the collection for shorthand and am pretty sure I captured what there is. Mrs. Plath wrote most of her annotations in longhand, but her most emphatic comments -- those she didn't want family members to read -- she wrote in shorthand. My favorite find: At the end of a typescript of the story "Among the Bumblebees," Aurelia wrote, "realistic."

Aurelia Plath's First Love

Austrian civil engineer Dr. Karl von Terzaghi was invited to the U.S. in 1925 to teach and establish a program at M.I.T. and, incidentally, to explain why new M.I.T. buildings on the Charles River banks had been sinking an inch per year. Terzaghi (1883-1963) founded two new sciences: soil mechanics (the physics and hydraulics of soils; he proved that soil types, like any other building materials, had principles) and foundational engineering, now called geotechnology. Terzaghi hired "Miss A. Schober" as his secretary in 1926 -- not 1927, as Aurelia has it in her introduction to Letters Home. That's where Aurelia, who never gave his name, wrote about:

". . .[w]orking at the close of my junior year (1927) for a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a handwritten manuscript in German dealing with new principles of soil mechanics. As he had a publication deadline to meet, I usually worked into the early evening, so we often had dinner together before I left Boston for home. It was during these meals that I listened, fascinated, to his accounts of travel and colorful adventures, fully realizing that I was in the presence of a true genius in both the arts and sciences. I came away with my notebook filled with reading lists. . ." (6)

She wrote that this self-education would one day benefit her children, but that is not the whole story. The friendship ripened into love.

For two years they enjoyed the theater, museums, hikes, camping, gardens, evenings with Karl's faculty friends, dining and dancing, and conversation most of all. The above photo was taken in 1926, when Karl, 43 and divorced, Boston's most eligible bachelor, chose Aurelia Schober, 20, moved by her innocence, intelligence, and sensitivity. He took her to her junior prom at the Kenmore Hotel on May 13, 1927 and then at 4:00 a.m. in Winthrop ate the post-prom breakfast Aurelia's mother had left prepared for them with instructions, Austrian style. Terzaghi wrote about it in his diary. His 82 volumes of diaries are in Oslo. I learned where his diaries were by reading his biography. ("Aurelia's boyfriend has a biography?")

Terzaghi centennial stamp, Austria, 1983

Shorthand transcription unlocked and confirmed his identity; he's the "Karl" in young Aurelia's lovelorn Gregg shorthand annotations in her copy of poet Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon. That book is in Sylvia Plath's personal library at the Lilly Library in Bloomington. Find the transcriptions here.

In 1928 Terzaghi left the U.S. for a prestigious engineering professorship in Vienna. Ten years later when the Nazis expelled his Jewish students and pressured him to work on the German Autobahn he returned to Boston, taught at Harvard and consulted worldwide. His legacy includes the Chicago subway system and the Aswan Dam, plus immortal equations and elegant problem-solving designs. In 1975 Bostonians in certain circles, or engineers, or Aurelia's college friends, could have guessed whom Aurelia was describing in Letters Home -- it's obvious, now that we know.

Their story is heartbreaking. For more of it, click here. Sylvia, taking her cue from her mother, married her own foreign-born male genius, Ted Hughes.

References: Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist (Goodman, 1998); Letters Home 1950-1963 (Plath, 1975); Norwegian Geotechnical Institute Terzaghi Library; Geoengineer.org; Wikipedia: Karl von Terzaghi (mentions Aurelia Schober, future mother of Sylvia Plath); Wikipedia: Ruth Terzaghi; Geotechnical Hall of Fame; American Society of Civil Engineers

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.

One of Aurelia's Dreams

Sylvia Plath’s letter to Aurelia Plath of 11 June 1960 said that Ted Hughes had written a second play better than his first. On the envelope that contained Sylvia's letter of 24 June 1960, Aurelia penned a note, its latter part in shorthand:

[longhand:] Write about my dream of Ted’s [shorthand:] writing a play – a comedy about Khrushchev & it being played everywhere in the world and everyone laughing at it!

Sylvia's July 9, 1960 letter to Aurelia said, "So you are prophetic!" Sylvia reported to Aurelia that Ted had indeed written a play about a military captain, just accepted for broadcast by the BBC.

Which Shorthand Did Aurelia Teach?

Gregg shorthand, its first manual published in 1888 by Robert Gregg, who initially called his phonetic shorthand system "Light-Line Phonography," evolved along with the business world’s requirements and vocabulary. Periodic revisions also made it leaner and easier to learn. 

Aurelia Schober (b. 1906) was probably schooled in what is now called “Pre-Anniversary” Gregg, likely that edition’s fifth and final iteration (1916). In 1929 the “Anniversary” edition superseded it. Mrs. Plath would have taught that edition at Boston University’s College of Practical Arts and Letters from the time she was hired in 1942 until the “Simplified” edition of Gregg came out in 1949. The “Simplified” edition was later superseded by the “Diamond Anniversary” edition (1963-1978), the edition I learned.

No iteration of Gregg is a truly radical departure, but each can be different enough so that, for example, a single shorthand character formerly transcribed as “love” now represents the phrase “will have.” Gregg’s efficiency is such that the stroke representing “d” can also be read as “would,” “did,” “dear,” “date,” “dollars,” or the suffixes “-ward” or “-hood”; pre-1963 it might also represent the diphthong “ch”. Context is everything. Change the angle slightly and write it as a downstroke instead of an upstroke and it's the letter "j." How to know an upstroke from a downstroke? Context is everything.

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.

"Medusa's Metadata" - Plath Conference Paper

Nearly 700 letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother, Mrs. Aurelia Schober Plath, are held in the Sylvia Plath mss. II files at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library. Mrs. Plath, a professional instructor of Gregg shorthand, wrote on these letters and their envelopes scores of comments and notes to herself and to posterity. One hundred fifty-nine annotations in the Plath mss. II correspondence are in in Gregg shorthand. Never before cataloged or transcribed, the shorthand annotations on Plath’s letters, labeled “unreadable” and ignored, provide new metadata about Plath—who rather famously never learned shorthand—and her uneasy relationship with her only surviving parent and provider.

The transcriptions include Mrs. Plath’s most urgent and personal responses to her daughter’s needs, marriage, suicide, and posthumous fame; bitter negotiations with Ted Hughes over the U.S. publication of The Bell Jar; and detail Mrs. Plath’s role as curator of her daughter’s correspondence: with friends (“Share with Gordon if the time is right,” 30 August 1954), family (“Do not let Mother [Granny] see this!” 2 February 1956) and ultimately the public (Letters Home, 1975). That role does not end with the publication of two volumes of The Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath. In fact, Mrs. Plath is that collection's first cause.

Plath Conference in Belfast in November 2017

I completed the Aurelia Plath shorthand project in February; it had taken another trip to Bloomington's Lilly Library, last September, to double-check all the correspondence in the Plath mss. II Boxes 1 through 6a.

On April 15, Mrs. Plath's estate granted me permission to use the findings for scholarship. Now I feel completely free to write. November's Sylvia Plath Conference in Belfast will coincide with the publication of The Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath and I will be presenting a paper there about Mrs. Plath's shorthand annotations, which I call "metadata," on said correspondence.

Conference information: Sylvia Plath Conference: Words, Letters and Fragments, at Ulster University, Belfast, November 10-11, 2017. Website here. Twitter: @plathconference. There's also a Facebook page.

Dick Norton Knew Shorthand

Sylvia’s boyfriend from 1951 to 1953, Dick Norton, in a July 1953 letter asked Sylvia how her shorthand lessons were going. (Aurelia later wrote in Letters Home that they didn't go well.) Norton himself knew shorthand—a now-forgotten form called Thomas Natural Shorthand.

Before Dick and Sylvia began dating, Norton wrote in an October 5, 1950 letter to Smith College student Jane Anderson that in addition to a full course load at Yale he had enrolled in a course in Thomas shorthand at a local commercial high school. He included in the letter a sample sentence he had learned to write at the first lesson.

Charles A. Thomas (1900-1982), introduced the Thomas shorthand method in 1935. Kentucky-born Thomas was a gifted chemist and MIT graduate later hired to isolate polonium for the Manhattan Project. In 1960 he became president of the Monsanto Company, contributing to the development of new products, and was accomplished and admired as both a chemist and businessman.

Thomas textbooks were published and reprinted by Prentice-Hall throughout the 1940s, indicating some degree of market traction, but not after 1949. At Sylvia’s request, or so he wrote, Dick Norton included a one-line sample of Thomas shorthand in a March 1, 1951 letter, on Yale stationery, to “Aunt Aurelia,” and transcribed it for her as “Best wishes from New Haven.”

Thomas Shorthand was a simplified form of Gregg shorthand and its foundational principle--symbols stand in for letters of the alphabet--inspired Teeline, a shorthand system introduced in 1968 and used in England by print journalists, who still take Teeline exams for certification. Norton’s Oct. 5, 1950 letter is in the Jane Anderson Papers, Box 1, Folder 10, at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, Smith College Libraries. Thanks to Karen Kukil for locating it and providing a copy.

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.

Tart Remarks From 1956

In May 1956, Sylvia's letters to Aurelia were gushing about her wonderful fiance Ted Hughes. Aurelia had never met Ted; she knew only that her daughter had met him three months before and that he was a poet with no job. Aurelia inked some Gregg shorthand notes on the letters, transcribed here for the first time:

On a letter of May 18, 1956, AP wrote: "About settled with Ted! I hope this will work out! Please God."

On a letter of May 26, 1956:  Next to SP's text "[o]ur children will have such fun," AP wrote,  "if they don't starve first."

Salaries for Stenographers and Sylvia

In 2013, the median annual salary in the U.S. is $45,790; in 2013 a stenographer's median annual salary is $36,325. "Little or no degree of creativity and latitude required," notes the job description. Sylvia Plath knew that, and knew that she and shorthand weren't a good fit.

Lies: There hasn't been "profit" in stenography for 100 years.

Professional stenography began as a largely male occupation; we have Cicero's speeches because his slave invented his own form of shorthand. In the Victorian era, shorthand writers (mostly males, well-paid, using the Pitman system) had clubs and monthly magazines and "translated" classics into shorthand; it was even faddish. Around 1900, stenography began to be derided as women's work. "I'm going to be a stenographer when I get big," assserted eight-year-old Nan Bobbsey, in the first chapter of the first book of The Bobbsey Twins series (1904), proving that by then, stenography was an entirely acceptable occupational goal for middle-class girls. She'd earn about $35 every two weeks. In 1950 legal stenographers in the California Department of Justice--legal stenographers were among the best-paid--earned $2,770 per year or $106.53 every two weeks. In 1974 I was earning $168 every two weeks or $4,368 per year; median household income then was $9,718.

Is that proof enough that stenography was a job and not a career? Stenography and other secretarial skills allowed women the illusion of choice: Office jobs in industries that interested them, although with no chance for advancement, autonomy or even enough of a salary to feed and house them well. In a parallel, the family of a minority male working as a bank security guard could say he had a career "in banking."

Sylvia Plath saw this, and resented and refused it. Aurelia Plath saw the same but urged her to accommodate. Sylvia won this round. In 1957, age 24, Sylvia Plath was offered her first salaried position: a one-year teaching appointment at Smith College, teaching three sections of Freshman English per semester, for $4,200 (Letters Home, 12 March 1957). This kind of pay and status put her far ahead of the "stenos" of the time.

Aurelia Plath and Shorthand's Evolution

The Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified, second edition (1955) arrived in the mail today, and will be used to sharpen my shorthand transcription skills before I visit the Sylvia Plath archives at the University of Indiana. Aurelia Plath made shorthand and longhand annotations on her famous daughter’s letters and books. Although Plath scholars are many and avid, no scholar has ever transcribed the shorthand annotations. That is up to me and I accept the challenge.

The version of Gregg shorthand Aurelia learned depends on when she learned it, and that is not yet known. The first Gregg shorthand textbook, a pamphlet titled Light Line Phonography: The Phonetic Handwriting (1888) was published in England by John Robert Gregg in an edition of 500 copies, and in the U.S. in 1898 as a book, Gregg’s Shorthand Manual. Succeeding editions presented refinements—the 1929 edition is the most lauded—but the 1949 edition had a new title: Gregg Shorthand Manual Simplified. “Simplified” emphasized speed and accurate transcription. All earlier versions of Gregg shorthand are called “pre-Simplified.” The 1949 version would have appeared during Aurelia Plath's business-school teaching career, when she was 43.

I was taught from the eighth edition, called the Diamond Jubilee Series (1963-1977), edited to “make shorthand easier to learn.” Even so it wasn’t easy to learn: in high school I studied it for two years.

The Gregg shorthand versions Aurelia learned or taught await discovery. But last autumn in Sylvia’s archives I saw and read Aurelia’s annotations (they are of textbook quality) and think that they will be of interest when transcribed.