Sylvia Plath Collections: "No"

There are a fair number of memories of Sylvia Plath in the Rosenstein collection now at Emory that are, for lack of a better way to put it, negative. I may be on an island about this, but I actually like that and appreciate it. I do not think Plath was a saint, and what I take away from these recollections is that she was, simply, complicated. That she made a different impression on different people throughout the course of her life is fine. I am also, possibly, on an island because the general tone of Bitter Fame is Olwynian, and I do not mind that book. For the simple fact that Sylvia Plath had flaws and I believe it is better to know them.

In yesterday's post I related two such negative comments on Plath by former housemate Lisa Levy and friend Clarissa Roche. There are a number of negative comments, too, about Plath's parenting (see Leonard Baskin and Nancy Axworthy, among others).

In addition to the positive and negative memories that Rosenstein (and others) have recorded, there is a third category of memory: those who refuse to give them. Two people that opted not to answer any questions, though they had the decency to respond to inquiry letters, are Carol LeVarn McCabe and Richard Norton. Both were parodied in The Bell Jar, as Doreen and Buddy Willard, respectively.

In the Knopf folder (Box 1, Folder 1), McCabe wrote on 28 June 1974:

It is a source of deepening depression to learn the number of ambitious persons who are anxious to use Sylvia Plath's life for their own personal gain, as she used our distress for hers.

Perhaps that's a kind of Amerlit justice. Be that as it may, I want no part of it and my answer to you is the same as my answer to the other hundreds of hopefuls who have written similar letters: No.

Rosenstein wrote to Richard Norton in 1971 and 1973 and received two replies declining to help. In the first instance, Norton replied that he has "a firm policy of not discussing Sylvia Plath". In the second instance Rosenstein asked specifically about their experience of seeing a baby born and working on cadavers. She was hopeful he might write his memories---anonymously if so desired---for a book that, like her biography of Plath, was never accomplished. He wrote that he did not have the time to help her and claimed "I recall no details of her watching either a birth or dissection".

Boston Lying-In Hospital

Plath visited the Boston Lying-In hospital with Norton on 1 February 1952. She was home after taking finals in January, between semesters. She wrote about going with Norton in a letter to Ann Davidow-Goodman, saying "Dick & I stood two feet away to watch a baby born" (Letters, Volume I, 416). She held test tubes for blood being drawn and later found out Norton was not a virgin. A few years later, Plath wrote to Gordon Lameyer on 6 February 1954 that two experiences she can lay claim to was "seeing a baby born . . . [and] cutting up the lungs of a human cadaver" (680). Plath mentioned both events, too, in her Smith College scrapbook on page 5. Featured on that page is a photograph of the said Norton dissecting lungs...

While Norton had memories to give he chose not to do so, which we must respect, he has maintained a steadfast silence---which has lasted as long as Warren Plath's. McCabe reversed her 1970s decision when she opened up and spoke to Elizabeth Winder for her Pain, Parties, Work (2013).

All links accessed 28 January 2020.