Karen V. Kukil, Associate Curator of Rare Books and Curator of the Sylvia Plath Collection at the Mortimer Rare Book Room, was interviewed today by WFCR's Jill Kaufman about the new letters from Plath to Clarissa Roche and the Plath collection at Smith College. Listen to it here.
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...
Excellent - thanks for posting this, Peter. These letters will be very helpful in researching her writing from that time, especially since the journals are not available. kim
ReplyDeleteThese letters sound fascinating, with their mixture of daily detail, major upset. . .and humour, too !
ReplyDeleteBut Plath drafted THE BELL JAR while at Smith ? No, no, no. Given that the events it fictionalizes didn't happen until the end of her third year there, that would be almost impossible. THE BELL JAR was written in England, partly in London, partly in Devon. . .It frustrates me that so many journalists are sloppy with easily-checked facts.
I agree Panther! And right off the bat, too. I thought Karen did an amazing job of talking the letters, describing the thrill of receiving them and fitting them into not only their collection at Smith, but within the collection of information available on Plath too. & she's right, Plath's letters to her friends are such a different thing to anything else she wrote, especially letters to her mother.
ReplyDeleteNot to be too nit-picking but evidence suggest Plath was finished drafting The Bell Jar by 22 August 1961, which was about 9 days before they moved to Court Green. Plath likely only dealt with revisions and galley correcting in Devon. It was accepted quickly between 22 August 1961 and November of that year.
There are three largely incomplete "drafts" at Smith, as well as two "later" drafts. The later draft is really one draft: the original and its carbon copy. The original has edits both by Plath and her editors at Heienemann.
pks
I think many of us write different sorts of letters to our friends than we do to our relations, don't we ? Especially if a relationship with a relation is strained, which Sylvia's ceratinly was with Aurelia. Close, certainly, in many ways, too close. Suffocating.
ReplyDeleteThe quotes that Karen Kukil reads out give the impression of a determined and humorous woman who will not be easily downed.
Absolutely I agree. As Plath's letters to her mother are the only widely available material in this genre, though, I think Karen's point is that the pictures some paint of Plath is missing some color.
ReplyDeleteVery nice impression of Karen's selected quotes; I couldn't agree more!
pks