In 1983, six years after selling Sylvia’s letters and juvenilia,
Aurelia Plath at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley still had “oceans of
papers, out-of-print magazines, clippings of reviews, letters”; “dozens
of boxes of family pictures; my notebooks (travel, journals)”; “four three-drawer
filing cabinets, three desks, an eight-drawer bureau of papers.” While paging
through these, she uncovered yet more. [1]
Age 77, after 40 years in that house Aurelia had to sell it and move to an apartment. She
wanted the papers by and about Sylvia to go to the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College’s library—donated,
to get a tax break. Yet the prospect of sorting them was overwhelming.
That summer she told this to Wellesley neighbor and friend Dr. Richard Larschan, who volunteered his
help. I asked Dr. Larschan where in the house Aurelia had kept all the papers and memorabilia so vital to Plath studies
now.
“I only know that when we
were sorting, Aurelia kept it in two walk-in closets in the room where her
parents had slept,” he remembered. Self-described “pack rat” Aurelia “kept everything she
touched in meticulous order—hundreds of letters neatly organized according to
correspondent, and tied with ribbons.”
A U-Mass. professor of English (now Emeritus), Larschan was the right helper for sifting the goods systematically. He said they met “thrice-weekly
[for] two- or three-hour sessions, during which Aurelia and I would evaluate
the accumulation of 60-plus years, including things from Sylvia’s childhood
like the letter opener she had carved, Sylvia’s Girl Scout uniform, Otto’s
doctoral certificate, multiple copies of every newspaper clipping and magazine
article Sylvia ever published, hundreds and hundreds of letters from readers of
Letters Home, et cetera. I would type a list of things Aurelia would
either discard, give to me, or donate to Smith and Indiana University after
being evaluated by a rare-book expert.”
This task drained Aurelia emotionally. She wrote a friend, “Have to part with most reminders of my past—it hurts, as
you know. (Eyestrain slows me down.)” Not only did her eyes hurt, but “Discarding thousands of pages of
correspondence tugs at the heart. So many good people have given of
themselves!” She means they threw away the fan letters. On the good side, Larschan and Aurelia developed a bond. Like Sylvia, he had had been
a Fulbright fellow. At Exeter University in 1962-63 he had lived only fifteen
miles from Ted and Sylvia’s Court Green, although they never met. Larschan admired Aurelia’s
independence (“a burden to nobody”) while acknowledging her sometimes cloying sentimentality,
rather like his own mother’s.
Sentimentality is of course repellent,
but the next time you marvel over the rich resources in Plath archives, thank
Sylvia’s sentimental mother.
Smith College received the donation in
December 1983. Still, not every notable piece of paper went there. “In 1984,”
Larschan said, “Aurelia gave me her correspondence with Olwyn Hughes about
publishing (or NOT publishing!) The Bell Jar, which I sold to Smith
College. She also gave me duplicate copies of Sylvia’s various publications
that I sold privately and are now housed at Emory—along with [Sylvia’s]
downstairs neighbor Trevor Thomas’s [self-published memoir] Last Encounters,
inscribed to me when I lived in England."
Also withheld from the archives were Aurelia's own notebooks and journals, and photos of family members besides Otto or
Sylvia: maybe of sister Dottie or son Warren, and so on. Asked if he saw any
packets of Aurelia’s letters to Sylvia, Larschan said he did not.
So the task was completed. “When we
were through cataloging and evaluating the materials Aurelia donated to Smith,
in 1984 [Smith College] President Jill Ker Conway invited Aurelia and me for
lunch, and so I drove us to Northampton,” Larschan said. [2] That lunch was their
thank-you.
[1] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, letters
of April 1980 and September 6, 1983, Lilly. ASP to Rose Leiman Goldemberg,
postcards June and October 1983, Rose Goldemberg Papers, *T-Mss 2016-003, box
8, folder 1, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts.
[2] Emails, Richard Larschan to the author,
December 2 and 4, 2021.
