As a reader of Plath's diaries and letters, the name W. Wayne Sterling was familiar to me. So I was excited to see his folder of interview notes from 1971 to 1974.
While Rosenstein refers to him as William, in Plath's time he went by Wayne and that's how you will see him referred to in Plath's diaries. She knew him from Winthrop, where he lived at 7 Enfield Road, which is nearly a mile from the Plath house on Johnson Avenue.
Sterling mentioned Plath falling off a boat in high school and considered it a sort of suicide attempt. That is fairly sensational, as was his memory that Plath took an overdose of aspirin after her father's death (which he later recanted). While he was from Winthrop, he mentioned Wellesley High School of classmate of Plath's suicide (hanging in the woods of Wellesley College near the pond) which he thinks was the inspiration for Joan's death in The Bell Jar. He mentioned something else which is rather unspeakable which I do not want to mention on the blog involving high school football players behaving atrociously. (These two things are also mentioned by Crockett in his interview.)
Sterling mentions that he and Plath used to exchange poetry. On Plath's process of writing, he says she "used to chisel out poetry as if she were a sculptor working on marble, shipping the words out one by one. She gave herself an emotional work-out as she pushed the words out."
He later in the interview identifies the real people in Plath's "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit." This is great information to have along with with Ruth (Freeman) Geissler has told me.
I was surprised to learned they saw each other well into college, and this is one of the very valuable things in these papers. They were able to get over the incident in March 1947 when Warren Plath gave Sterling Plath's diaries to read.
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| Winthrop, 1939 |
Sterling mentioned Plath falling off a boat in high school and considered it a sort of suicide attempt. That is fairly sensational, as was his memory that Plath took an overdose of aspirin after her father's death (which he later recanted). While he was from Winthrop, he mentioned Wellesley High School of classmate of Plath's suicide (hanging in the woods of Wellesley College near the pond) which he thinks was the inspiration for Joan's death in The Bell Jar. He mentioned something else which is rather unspeakable which I do not want to mention on the blog involving high school football players behaving atrociously. (These two things are also mentioned by Crockett in his interview.)
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| Sterling's 1949 class photo from The Echo (Winthrop High School) |
He later in the interview identifies the real people in Plath's "Superman and Paula Brown's New Snowsuit." This is great information to have along with with Ruth (Freeman) Geissler has told me.
I was surprised to learned they saw each other well into college, and this is one of the very valuable things in these papers. They were able to get over the incident in March 1947 when Warren Plath gave Sterling Plath's diaries to read.