In my previous trip to the Lilly Library in March 2015, where much of the research went into The Letters of Sylvia Plath, I skimmed the surface of the typescript pages for Aurelia Schober Plath's Letters Home. In it were located copies of two letters that Sylvia Plath sent to Margaret Cantor, her employer for the second half of the summer of 1952. But an exhaustive search through the typescripts could not be undertaken due to more pressing research needs. Finding two letters was wonderful, and I knowingly passed on the chance to look page by page for any other letters.
On Monday and Tuesday of this week I did do such a chore. And it was a chore but it did provide a nice break from standing up and from taking photographs. The paper is ludicrously thin and hard to handle. It also does not stack nicely and neatly, which is frustrating to someone like me who prefers things orderly and squared. The paper is largely either pink in color, or green. Transcriptions of the letters to Warren Plath are on a thicker pink paper. There is one folder per part of the book and one folder for the preface. There is a rather large folder for notes that are on just scrap pieces of paper.
In the typescript, Mrs. Plath did not seem to label Part One as anything in particular.
Part Two at one point is called "The Road Back."
Part Three was called "A New Life in the Old World". In this one, on one page, Mrs. Plath wrote in the margin, "Sylvia was incapable of writing an ordinary letter." I failed to note the letter to which this refers. Mrs. Plath also annotated a transcription of her daughter's 5 April 1956 postcard depicting the River Seine and Quai d'Anjou where she writes of having "a silouhette cut as a present amid crowds of onlookers in the central square" (LV 1, p1158). Mrs. Plath's annotation reads "Found these." "Well," I wrote in my notes, "where are they?"
Part Four has two sections, "Notes From a Spanish Honeymoon" and "The Golden Year."
Part Five has several: "Return to the 'Promised Land'," "The Other Side of the Desk," "Cross-Country Camping Trip," and "Yaddo."
Part Six also has several sections: "On the SS United States," "The Beacon," "The Song of Frieda Rebecca," "Trilogy," "Notes from a French Holiday," and then back to "Trilogy."
Part Seven is much the same, "Trilogy in a New Setting," "The Advent of Nicholas Farrar," and "Betrayal", which was renamed to "Conflict." Interestingly, perhaps for "Conflict," the flimsy thin paper is gone and is now a more firm kind, in fact the same type and color to those from Warren Plath. The emotion of calling Part Seven "Betrayal" was obviously real; but rather foolish, too, considering that Ted Hughes retained rights for some decisions. In the end, the Parts were just called "Part #", each one representing a period of years.
There were some "commentary" sections---whereby Mrs. Plath broke the narrative of her daughter's letters to insert some kind of information---that do not appear to be in the finished book Letters Home. I have not read through them in full to compare them (the writing is sometimes helpful, sometimes sanctimonious). But if I ever do review my photographs of them and compare them to the finished book, I will write a blog post about it, perhaps.
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