Sylvia Plath and Smith College's Campus Cat

The Campus Cat,
Commencement 1952

In the spring of 1952, Sylvia Plath was a very active young woman at Smith College. Completing her sophomore year, Plath was doing well academically, but also socially and in terms of extracurricular activities. She was involved with Press Board, covering campus events as well as sending out news stories to local papers. But she was also involved with a small publication called the The Campus Cat.

The Campus Cat was a publication created by Smith students in 1918. Its contents provided information to the campus about going-ons, events, activities, and poked fun at the rituals, trials, and stresses of academia and life on the Smith campus.

Contributions to the periodical were anonymous, though the contributors were listed in the front of the magazine. In her 1952 calendar, held by the Lilly Library, Indiana University at Bloomington, Plath has three reminders on 3, 7, and 14 May 1952. On the 3rd she worked on writing her piece; on the 7th there was a meeting; and on the 14th there was a meeting and her "story" was due. This was new to me, as it does not appear in any bibliography: perhaps as the publication was anonymous. Plath's work on The Campus Cat is mentioned briefly in Carl Rollyson's 2013 biography American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath.

On a trip to Smith College on 31 March 2015, I looked at the Campus Cat records and was very happy to find Plath listed as a contributor to the "Commencement 1952" issue of the periodical. Below is a list of the articles and features in the issue. Many of the titles appear in the table of contents one way, and under a different name on the page on which they appear. Those alternate titles are in square brackets.

"The Cat's Eye"; "The Core of the Matter" ["On the relative importance of the Apple in History or The Core of the Matter"];
"Wednesday Song" ["Il Wednesdoroso"];
"Bermuda" ["Bermuda Buggy Ride"];
"Dearie" ["Dearie; do you remember when "];
"On My Malocclusion";
"Fully two, you're famous" ["Fifty-two you're famous"];
"The Bowlegged Dinosaur"; and
"The Cliché Expert" ["The Cliche Export: Paradise Lost Revisited"].

"The Cat's Eye" section featured short pieces with separate titles:

"Spring Comes to Paradise Road";
"On Seeing One's Self in a Mirror";
"T.V. or Not T.V.";
"Ve-ry Funny!";
"The Athletes";
"Be Mine -- For Now";
"Thought for the Day";
"Who?";
"Why -- Hello!";
"And Hello To You, Too!";
"Reflection on Ivy Day"; and
"'She's Got It By Going 'BRRR' In Front of Bergdorf's', Peter Arno".

Blurry/fuzzy list of Contributors,
Plath among them

But as stated above the pieces were printed without attribution so pinning down exactly which article was authored by Plath might difficult, if not impossible, in the absence of any typescript or other document confirming authorship. The full list of authors in this issue were: Paula Granger, Ag Hawkins, Diana Yates, Ga Snikwah, Paula Shiff, Marj Wedin, Sylvia Plath, Betty Nore, Sue Schuster, and J. Gregg.

The Smith College archives holds material on the Campus Cat which includes most issues of the magazine, press releases and other Campus Cat related publications.

All links accessed 3 April 2015 and 26 February 2016.

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...

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...

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...

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