Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath's Desk


When Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes moved to Court Green in September 1961, they had abundant living space for the first time in their married lives. Each even got a room to serve as a study. In a 15 September 1961 letter to her mother, Plath writes about settling in Court Green and that her brother Warren “has been really a wonderful part of the family “ (429). While he was there, Warren Plath assisted in “sanding an immense elm plank which will make me my first real capacious writing table” (429).

Over the next 14 months, Plath would probably write all her new poems and stories on this elm plank. And probably also typed letters home and made entries in her journals.

That elm wood desk was part of Plath’s estate sale that, in 1981, would go to the Mortimer Rare Book Room at Smith College. How wonderful and coincidental that Plath lived on Elmwood Road! To celebrate this piece of elm wood and the works composed on it, here is a badly shot video. It hangs in the offices of the Mortimer Rare Book Room. Its position hanging on a wall is highly reminiscent of Han Solo hanging frozen in carbonite in Jabba the Hut’s palace on Tattooine.

View the video!

If you’re interested in just seeing a still image of questionably better quality, please see “These Ghostly Archives” from Plath Profiles 2. The desk is on page 189 but, having co-written the piece with Dr. Gail Crowther, I’d encourage you to read the whole thing (if you haven’t done so already)! Like Star Wars, there was a sequel, “These Ghostly Archives, Redux.” And we’re in the early stages of a third installment...
Labels:

Comments

  1. Julia Gordon-Bramer01 November, 2010 10:52

    Thanks! It was nothing like I had imagined it. Much more rough and raw, which I really like.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter K Steinberg01 November, 2010 11:18

    Julia, thanks! It is something out of this world to stand in front of. From time to time they take it down and set it up for display. I'd love to see that. The archive is like a petting zoo.

    ReplyDelete
  3. panther01 November, 2010 11:55

    Am i being dense-didn't the table have any legs ? Was it just placed across something else for when SP wanted to write ?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Peter K Steinberg01 November, 2010 11:58

    Hi Panther - No I don't think you're being dense. It was (is) just a plank of wood and would have been rested upon something at both ends. What it rested upon I know not, tree stumps? Cabinetry? Something like this. Hughes and Warren Plath might well have made legs for it...I'll ask Karen...

    pks

    ReplyDelete
  5. panther01 November, 2010 15:19

    Thanks for that, Peter. It certainly has a lot of presence. I like to imagine SP spreading out her papers on it.

    And I was interested to learn elsewhere that SP needed a lot of space for writing, would spread out notes, books, etc all around her. . .whilst Hughes was happy to just tuck into any odd niche and write. Neither of these methods wrong, of course, just what suited that person. Personally, I like to write in cafes and on trains. Cafes with rectangular tables better than cafes with round tables.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Kristina Zimbakova01 November, 2010 16:01

    Wow! The plank is reminiscent of an experimental sculpture, its wood blank, but still 'ringing' from the artist's strokes.

    'Love is a shadow.
    How you lie and cry after it.'
    (Elm)

    ReplyDelete
  7. Anonymous02 November, 2010 10:20

    Extraordinary that this artifact is there for anyone to see. How I would love to place my hand on that surface -- as Panther said What a presence!

    "Echoes travelling / Off from the center like horses"

    --Jim Long

    ReplyDelete
  8. BridgetAnna05 November, 2010 17:11

    Thank you, Peter, for taking the time to record this video and uploading it! What a wonderful thing to see, albeit vicariously.

    My tactile experience with Plath was one which I still vividly remember, several years after it happened. When I as at the Lilly Library in Indiana looking at her archives, I came across a swatch of her blondish hair. I felt it, I imagine with the white gloves the library distributes, and felt awe. This was as close to Plath as I would ever feel, and it was extraordinary. Would love to put "seeing her desk" on my Bucket List!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Peter K Steinberg08 November, 2010 12:46

    Panther - I just heard back from Karen about what Plath's desk rested on...

    "Plath's desk rested on a metal stand that was screwed into the bottom of the plank. When Smith purchased Plath's papers, the elm plank was shipped without the stand."

    pks

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...
2 comments
Read more

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business.  Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known.  However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images.  There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's  Stendhal-c...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...
4 comments
Read more