Recap: Letters of Sylvia Plath Book Talk and More

Thanks go to Gregory Stall at the Grand Central branch of the New York Public Library for asking me to come and give a talk about my work on The Letters of Sylvia Plath. I did so Thursday and had a good time talking to the crowd. And it was terrific to see some familiar faces such as Eva S. and Richard L. I appreciate the rapport of the Q & A afterwards, and am grateful to Liz for lugging copies of the Letters from Staten Island.

After the talk I retired to my room at the nearby Roosevelt Hotel. I chose it for its Plathian association. On 2 June 1953, her second day as Guest Editor at Mademoiselle magazine, Plath wrote in a letter home: "Yesterday a.m. we saw our first (my first) fashion show at the Roosevelt Hotel" (p631). The hotel is located at 45 E. 45th Street.

Her calendar for the day calls it a "College Clinic" that started at 10:15. In a document from Plath's Mademoiselle papers held by the Lilly Library, we can learn a little more:

The Grand Ballroom is located on the Mezzanine Level, is 5,696 square feet and features twenty-seven feet high ceilings. I could not access it as there was a private event going on and I was asked politely to leave. Felt it was better to admit defeat than be escort outed.

After the Fashion Show, Plath had lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station and then went to Richard Hudnut for hair and make-up consultations. Since it was effectively next door, I visited Grand Central and the awfully smelling Oyster Bar.

Before the long journey home yesterday morning I spent some time in the Berg Collection at the main branch of the NYPL. I had visited this archive once years ago and decided it was worth a trip to look again at the following Plath materials:

Cartoon of a koala bear (Juvenilia)
Alphabet and birthday quatrain (Juvenilia)
"Trixie and the balloon" (Story, Juvenilia)
Camping list (Juvenilia)
Pencil drawing of campsite (Juvenilia)
"Winter and magic" (Story, Juvenilia)
9 pencil tracings and drawings (Juvenilia); and
Notebook of copied poetry (With "Activities and Awards" sheet)

The Berg also has some drafts of "Brasilia" and "Insomniac" with other Plath works on the versos but I already have copies of those. In addition, they have a letter from Plath to her grandmother but that's in the Letters (Volume 1).

I wrote about the Berg Collection in this previous blog post. Some of the Berg's holdings were highlighted in this Gothamist piece. Which leads to another document I worked with: a letter from Plath to Alfred Kazin from 26 April 1961. In 2011 when I first visited the Berg I was told this letter was "lost". In 2013 I followed up and it was still "lost". In 2015, when that video was aired, they had the letter. Perhaps I should have followed up again? It is disappointing it is not in Volume II of the Letters, but at least we know it has been found.

One of the main things I wanted to see again was Plath's copy of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. I did work with it ages ago but once was not enough and I have long dreamed of seeing it again. The book was given to her by Richard Norton. I love the fact that the first Quartet is "Burnt Norton", and using modern parlance for insulting someone... she burned Norton, alright, in The Bell Jar.

I also spent heaps of time with Plath's sporadically heavily annotated copy of Louis Untermeyer's Modern American and British Poetry (1955 edition). I have not yet really worked with the photographs I took but there are probably annotations to north of 180 pages.

I find it so useful and important to visit and revisit (and revisit again) archives. Don't you?

Before leaving I looked in at the JD Salinger exhibit which opened that morning. Lots of great stuff in there but my time was running out before I had to go. I felt goddamn phony, if you want to know the truth.

All links accessed 16 and 19 October 2019.

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'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...

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