New facts about Sylvia Plath's background and her mother Aurelia. By Catherine Rankovic
Aurelia Plath Biography
Friday, October 6, 2017
Doing the Numbers
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.
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
Otto Plath as a Husband
"I loved [my parents] and took them for granted--after all, I knew nothing else but that we were close, enjoyed each other, which I thought was the essence of most family life. Oh, what hard lessons lay ahead--what shocking, terrifying revelations. My husband never knew love in his family; I was ready to share all of mine with him. I never witnessed jealousy before, distrust, possessiveness--all augmented through untreated diabetes that I did not know existed within him. On the outer personality, high idealism, honesty--oh, well, why dig into the past? It would take forever to give a complete picture and then who ever knows another completely or is competent to judge. The thing to do is remember what was good and go on with that."
Sylvia Plath must have witnessed a jealous, distrustful, possessive marital dynamic in her family home -- born as she was 10 months after her parents' wedding. That could explain a lot.
"Medusa's Metadata" - Plath Conference Paper
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.
Sunday, September 17, 2017
"Medusa" and the Meaning of "Paralyzing the kicking lovers"
"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.
Saturday, September 16, 2017
Sylvia Was Fat? No, It Was Assia
"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.
Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Plath Conference in Belfast in November 2017
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.
Thursday, September 22, 2016
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.