Burning The Letters: Aurelia's "Eyewitness" Account

From a 1976 interview of Aurelia Plath by Robert Roberton, published in The Listener, Vol. 95, p. 516. Aurelia had just described Sylvia Plath's sequel to The Bell Jar, an autobiographical novel "provisionally titled The Hill of Leopards," about an American Fulbright student who marries and has her first child in England.

Roberton: And yet I believe that you saw this manuscript destroyed.
Aurelia Plath: Yes, this was one of the most terrible experiences of my life, really. She had built an enormous bonfire in the court outside her home in Devon. I stood in the doorway, holding her little daughter by the hand, and holding the boy, her son, in my arms, not able to go to her. And then I saw her emerge from the household with her arms full of manuscripts, and I saw the second volume, in rough draft, which was to be a gift to, and a surprise, to her husband -- she tore the pages apart bit by bit and fed them into the flames. She fed much else into the flames.
Roberton: There was no way of stopping her?
Aurelia Plath: No, I couldn't. I couldn't leave the children.

The above, which supposedly happened on Aurelia's visit to Court Green in summer 1962, is probably false. In an unpublished version of the introduction to Letters Home, Aurelia describes in elaborate detail Sylvia sitting her down earlier on that visit and reading to her from this manuscript, written supposedly in honor of and dedicated "To Ponter" (Sylvia's private nickname for her husband Ted Hughes). 

This assumes that Sylvia had labored over a lengthy creative work she intended as a gift, but Sylvia wrote for money and never wasted any of her precious writing time on giveaways. She had already dedicated The Colossus to Ted. Sylvia left no trace of this supposed second "happy" novel: no rough drafts, no calendar notations, no mentions in letters to friends: nothing.

Aurelia Plath wanted readers to believe that Sylvia after writing The Bell Jar -- a mean-girl novel which harmed Aurelia's reputation and the other real people it caricatured -- wrote an anti-Bell Jar, a joyous novel about an Esther-Greenwood-type character in love, married, and having a baby, that unfortunately Sylvia burned after showing it only to Aurelia.

While writing The Bell Jar in 1961, and preparing it for publication during 1962, Sylvia wrote notes in her calendar and letters to her brother, her agent, friends, and publishers -- keeping the book secret only from her mother. Of the "joyous" "second novel" Sylvia made no mention. Aurelia's editor rightly deleted from the draft of Letters Home Aurelia's "she read to me from her joyous second novel" scene. The anecdote as written rang false and could not be verified. Aurelia did not write down what Sylvia had read, but she wrote that Sylvia had said that art and life were not the same, something Aurelia dearly wished her daughter would have said.

After confirming Ted's adultery in July 1962, Sylvia did begin an angry novel about a cheating husband titled The Interminable Loaf and then renamed Double Exposure. That manuscript actually existed, because Sylvia mentioned it in letters and on her calendar, and Ted and Olwyn Hughes and Assia Wevill read the unfinished 60 or 70 pages after Plath died. All were horrified by Plath's savage caricatures of themselves. Gosh, when they received The Bell Jar treatment, just like Aurelia they were shocked and  didn't like it! That manuscript is considered "lost" and rumor says it might one day be found.

Biographers have guessed that Sylvia also burned all her mother's letters in that bonfire of July 1962 or another bonfire soon after, but Aurelia did not say that in any letters or interviews I have read. I think Aurelia, who survived her daughter by 31 years, would have mentioned somewhere in her many hundreds of letters to others, or in Letters Home, how much Sylvia's burning of her letters hurt or disappointed her. In fact after some thought I think Sylvia didn't burn them at all.

Aurelia Speaks About "Mrs. Greenwood"

Quoted from a 1976 interview of Aurelia Plath by Robert Roberton, published in The Listener, Vol. 95, pp. 515-16. They're discussing The Bell Jar:

Roberton:  [W]hat sort of similarity do you feel between yourself and Mrs. Greenwood in that story?
Aurelia Plath: Very little, really. As my son and I analysed it, the words uttered by Mrs. Greenwood were uttered by five different individuals in real life. The counsel Sylvia gave me to bear in mind, whenever I read anything that she wrote in the form of poetry or prose, was: 1. that there is a manipulation of experience--this is part of the creative act, of course; 2. that there is always a fusion of characters--that's very, very evident; 3. that she firmly believed that art was a rearrangement of truth--this was to make the art form more consistent than life ever is.

[The Listener was the BBC's weekly print magazine, published from 1929 to 1991.]

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.

Off, Off, Eely Tentacle!

It's interesting to see, in the archives, what Aurelia chose to omit from Letters Home. (What Ted Hughes wanted cut from it is another story.)  Cut from Sylvia's letter of October 2, 1956 is a particularly long list of requests to her mother for material goods and time-consuming favors, one of many such lists omitted. Written from Cambridge, this letter says Ted will be easy to buy Christmas gifts for because he needs everything, and Sylvia plans to

• buy him a briefcase (and Sylvia herself needs one, too; it's the most important piece of writers' luggage) and 
• a bathrobe. Or maybe Aurelia can send the bathrobe? Sylvia asks that it be "warm but not bulky" and specifies the brand name, Viyella. 
• And will Aurelia "please, please" shop for, buy, wrap and send two separate, highly specific wedding gifts to two of Sylvia's American school friends? Sylvia wants to set a precedent so that when she and Ted have their wedding reception in Wellesley, her friends will send gifts. 
• Sylvia adds, "Now, sometime at your convenience, could you send me my two German grammars," and 
• "could we have a few packets, at least three, of corrasable bond" (because that kind of typing paper is hard to find in England). 
• Sylvia finishes the list with "Could you investigate about addresses of children's book publishers--I have no addresses here; you could just look in the bookstores, perhaps. . ."

Aurelia noted in the letter's margins that she could send them her own briefcase; wrote "No" about the bathrobe because Viyella was an English brand; wrote "where?" next to the request for the German grammar books, and sent four packets of corrasable bond. In Gregg shorthand, she penciled the word "omit" twice in the letter's right margin, a word she wrote on dozens of letters while editing Letters Home.

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."

While Everyone Was Reading The Bell Jar . . .

The Bell Jar was new in the U.S. when I was in high school, and reading about Esther Greenwood's unnamed mother trying to force steno on her daughter, I was delighted and envious that Esther had been allowed to refuse. Little did I know I'd end up transcribing The Bell Jar's author's mother's shorthand.

Here's my high-school transcript. The left side records the office-skills track my own mother determined I would take. The Gregg shorthand courses were 1972-73's STENO 32 and 1973-74's STENO 42, graded B and A respectively.

The courses with "1.00" lasted all year; the .50 courses, one semester.