Skip to main content

Sylvia Plath and Big Rock Candy Mountain

Sylvia Plath mentions the song "Big Rock Candy Mountain" in her short story "The Day Mr Prescott Died":
As I helped Mama up the stone steps to the porch, I could hear a creaking and sure enough, there was Ben Prescott sitting and swinging on the porch hammock like it was any other day in the world but the one his Pop died. He just sat there, lanky and tall as life. What really surprised me was he had his favorite guitar in the hammock beside him. Like he'd just finished playing "The Big Rock Candy Mountain," or something. (Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Harper Perennial Modern Classics 2008, p. 223)

Plath wrote about the real life events that inspired this story in two letters to Gordon Lameyer written on 22 and 23 June 1954. Plath had recently visited Winthrop because her childhood friend Ruth Freeman's father passed away suddenly. Plath does not however, in either of the letters, make reference to the song. The original letters are held by the Lilly Library in the Lameyer mss. Copies of the letters are in Lameyer's unpublished manuscript "Dear Sylvia."

After these letters were written, Plath herself went down to Eastham, Cape Cod, and stayed in the Hidden Acres area where she would later honeymoon, with Ted Hughes, in the summer of 1957. Hidden Acres is so hidden no one seems to know exactly where it was, though Plath tells Lameyer in the second letter that it is off the road to Thumpertown Beach.

Read more about the song here.

All links accessed 10 May 2013.
Labels:

Comments

  1. suki25 June, 2013 12:14

    Hi Peter, there is a Hidden Acres Farm in Medway MA, which has been going since around 1907 http://www.thehiddenacresfarm.com/contact.html
    It's about 100 miles from the beach... But Plath didn't say it was on the same road.....

    ReplyDelete
  2. Peter K Steinberg25 June, 2013 12:18

    Thanks. Medway won't cut it. There is a hidden acres road or something I think nearer by in Wellfleet, maybe, but it was in Eastham. There is an area nearish that road, off McKoy Road, that is a strong possibility...but no once seems to know. I've been to the historical society and library down there to no avail. Maybe it'll be found one day.

    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's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...
22 comments
Read more