"Sylvia Plath's Cambridge-era Prose: A Survey" is a talk I prepared for Emily Van Duyne's Sylvia Plath and Trans-Atlanticism Symposium held on 20 May 2022.
Via Southampton where her ship the Queen Elizabeth docked, Sylvia Plath arrived in London on 20 September 1955. She left England, also at Southampton and also on the Queen Elizabeth, on 20 June 1957. That means Plath's first stint in Europe lasted 640 days. Her primary country was obviously England, but she traveled to and through France, Germany, Italy, Austria, and the principality of Monaco, where she lost $3 at a roulette table in Monte Carlo.
In her first term at Newnham College, Plath did little creative writing, concentrating at the time on writing letters---she wrote at least 240 of them during those 640 days---and having experiences such as joining up with the Amateur Dramatics Club and much socializing, including vigorous dating. It was during these first months in Cambridge that she started writing a journal again, the first known journal writings in fact since her July 1953 entries preceding her first suicide attempt. But they were not standard journal pieces, no. Her first entry was an excerpt from a letter to Richard Sassoon on the 22nd of November, 1955. There was another on the 11th of December. When she was in France during the Christmas and New Year's holiday season, she kept a "journal fragment". Plath's January 1956 journals are also excerpts from three letters to Sassoon on the 11th, 15th, and 28th. After this, her first intentional journal piece was the 19th of February, but that was also in the form of a letter addressed "To whom it may concern". In addition to letters and journals, Plath made numerous sketches, maintained several personal pocket and desk calendars, and wrote several dozen poems during her Fulbright years.
"The New Yorker makes me rather scared, and just a little sick; there are these great long articles, bristling scrupulously with facts, history and incredible Naming of Names: a long letter from Jaipur (the secret is to go where noone’s ever been and write for “Our Far-Flung Correspondents”) and a tender piece explaining why the cedars in Bermuda are all dead…"
She never broke into the New Yorker in this genre, but she did for her geographic and nature poems such as "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor", "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows", "The Net-Menders", to name a few.
In September and October 1956, in Yorkshire and then back at Cambridge, Plath was again trying short fiction. Two surviving stories—"All the Dead Dears" and "The Wishing Box"—date to this time period. A third story, "The Invisible Man", is a fragment, only. Emory University has pages two through eight; and Smith College has page 15. Plath writes about it in good detail in a letter written to her husband on the 9th of October 1956. See page 1292, specifically, in Volume 2 of The Letters of Sylvia Plath.
Plath covered the Poppy Day parade in Cambridge on the 10th of November 1956. Reading the nine-paged typescript held by the Lilly Library is like walking a map. She wrote it up on the 11th and sent it immediately to The New Yorker but they rejected it. I like to imagine Di Beddow organizing annual walking tours to follow Plath's route in the same way that people do Leopold Bloom's journey through Dublin in Ulysses on the 16th of June.
In her first term at Newnham College, Plath did little creative writing, concentrating at the time on writing letters---she wrote at least 240 of them during those 640 days---and having experiences such as joining up with the Amateur Dramatics Club and much socializing, including vigorous dating. It was during these first months in Cambridge that she started writing a journal again, the first known journal writings in fact since her July 1953 entries preceding her first suicide attempt. But they were not standard journal pieces, no. Her first entry was an excerpt from a letter to Richard Sassoon on the 22nd of November, 1955. There was another on the 11th of December. When she was in France during the Christmas and New Year's holiday season, she kept a "journal fragment". Plath's January 1956 journals are also excerpts from three letters to Sassoon on the 11th, 15th, and 28th. After this, her first intentional journal piece was the 19th of February, but that was also in the form of a letter addressed "To whom it may concern". In addition to letters and journals, Plath made numerous sketches, maintained several personal pocket and desk calendars, and wrote several dozen poems during her Fulbright years.
It was only after her first term ended and after the long vacation traveling on the Continent, that Plath commenced writing with the aim of publication. Once she did, Plath was prolific both with her pens and typewriters. Her journals, letters, and poems are worthy topics on their own, but this paper surveys the nearly two dozen works of prose that Plath wrote during her Fulbright term in three genres: short fiction, nonfiction journalism, and a book review.
Without much warning, Plath notes in her calendar on the 13th of January 1956, that she "began article on Cambridge." This became "Leaves from a Cambridge Notebook", published in two parts in the Christian Science Monitor in March, with a sketch of the row of houses visible from the toilet in Whitstead. It was later published as "Cambridge Vistas" in the Institute of International Education News Bulletin in December 1958. It should be remarked upon that the byline for this second publication was Sylvia Plath Hughes, the only known publication under her married name. The article was completed within two days. On the 16th of January, she wrote to her mother, "just finished 2 8-page reportorial essays, one on cambridge, one on paris & nice, from which stories will grow (the vence matisse cathedral one has several possibilities as article, story & essay)" (1081). The article on Paris and Nice may not be extant. However, by early February, Plath had written "The Matisse Chapel", a short story based on her experiences with Sassoon in Vence. The story was north of twenty pages at one point, but not much survives now: just four pages amongst notes held by the Lilly Library. A nice companion piece to what we know of the story and the real events likely portrayed in it is Richard Sasson's 1962 rendition entitled "In the Year of Love and unto Death, the fourth--an Elegy on the Muse." We owe a debt of gratitude to Andrew Wilson for knowledge of this piece. Also in February, Plath made a notation in her pocket calendar to writing "Side Hall Girl", a short story based on her June 1952 experience at the Belmont Hotel in West Harwich, Massachusetts. She conceived of the idea for the story at the time, but there is no evidence she wrote it until on her Fulbright. Just one page appears to survive: Typescript page 2—on the verso of which is Ted Hughes' "Chronicle of Fallgrief"—which is held by the University of Victoria.
By April, Plath was writing for Varsity, the Cambridge newspaper. She published three journalistic articles: "An American in Paris" based on her Spring Break travels in March and April, "Smith College In Retrospect", a rewriting of "Social Life Without Sororities: A Profile of Smith College" first composed in January 1955 and submitted to and rejected by the Yale Gargoyle, and rather famously "Sylvia Plath Tours the Stores and Forecasts May Week Fashions" which includes several photographs of Plath the fashion model in evening gowns and bathing suits. Two other pieces were written. She published "Cambridge Letter" in the Oxford magazine Isis, and wrote-up her experience attending a Communist Party event in London for Bulganin and Khrushchev. The former is a response to a Woman's Sunday Mirror article entitled "Guess Where It's Heaven to Be a Girl!" The latter article, "B and K at the Claridge", was first submitted to and rejected by The New Yorker, but was accepted by and published in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly later in the year.
From mid-May to about mid-July Plath was otherwise occupied, largely with Ted Hughes but also with courses, writing and submitting poetry, and preparing for her mother to arrive in June. Between her letters and her pocket calendars, one can reconstruct a very busy person maximizing on life and experience.
Once married and established in Spain, with time as big as the ocean-view from their first residence in Benidorm, Plath sought to write prose. From July into September, by which time she and Hughes were in Yorkshire, she worked on stories called "The Black Bull" about a bullfight she witnessed with her husband in Madrid and "Remember the Stick Man", both of which survive in very incomplete format. Both stories were sent to The New Yorker, but were returned not accepted. It is hard to describe "Remember the Stick Man" but it has characters called "Mardie" and "Carmen" and Plath wrote in her pocket calendar on the 11th of August:
"met Swiss wife
Sylvia gates – revealing evening –
ward – crippled painted husband –
brat Mardie – queer baby
Carmen – maid Cecelia…"
The next day, the 12th, is when Plath outlined "Remember the Stick Man."
Also that late summer and early autumn, Plath was at work on stories called "Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags" and "The Invisible Man", both of which are extant as incomplete typescripts. When she started "Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags", Plath wrote in her pocket calendar that it was "slight & subversive."
Before some of these, though, Plath wrote a rather long story called "That Widow Mangada" about her and Hughes' first landlord in Benidorm. She started it around the 3rd of August and finished it in Yorkshire around the 13th of September. She sent it along with "The Black Bull" and "Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags" to Mademoiselle and to The Atlantic, both of whom rejected it—goodness I am saying that a lot! As information about the Widow Mangada is abundantly available both in the Journals and the Letters, as well as the story itself being printed in full in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, that is all to be said about this composition in this venue.
In early September, Plath again tried her hand at journalistic reporting and she found success. Her piece "Sketchbook of a Spanish Summer" was sent to the Christian Science Monitor along with some of her original ink sketches. Like "Leaves from a Cambridge Notebook", "Sketchbook of a Spanish Summer" was published in two parts. In fact, this is cute, they were published exactly eight months apart. "Sketchbook" included four of Plath's drawings.
Plath understood that these travel pieces had a market in American publications. She wrote in a letter to her husband that:
Without much warning, Plath notes in her calendar on the 13th of January 1956, that she "began article on Cambridge." This became "Leaves from a Cambridge Notebook", published in two parts in the Christian Science Monitor in March, with a sketch of the row of houses visible from the toilet in Whitstead. It was later published as "Cambridge Vistas" in the Institute of International Education News Bulletin in December 1958. It should be remarked upon that the byline for this second publication was Sylvia Plath Hughes, the only known publication under her married name. The article was completed within two days. On the 16th of January, she wrote to her mother, "just finished 2 8-page reportorial essays, one on cambridge, one on paris & nice, from which stories will grow (the vence matisse cathedral one has several possibilities as article, story & essay)" (1081). The article on Paris and Nice may not be extant. However, by early February, Plath had written "The Matisse Chapel", a short story based on her experiences with Sassoon in Vence. The story was north of twenty pages at one point, but not much survives now: just four pages amongst notes held by the Lilly Library. A nice companion piece to what we know of the story and the real events likely portrayed in it is Richard Sasson's 1962 rendition entitled "In the Year of Love and unto Death, the fourth--an Elegy on the Muse." We owe a debt of gratitude to Andrew Wilson for knowledge of this piece. Also in February, Plath made a notation in her pocket calendar to writing "Side Hall Girl", a short story based on her June 1952 experience at the Belmont Hotel in West Harwich, Massachusetts. She conceived of the idea for the story at the time, but there is no evidence she wrote it until on her Fulbright. Just one page appears to survive: Typescript page 2—on the verso of which is Ted Hughes' "Chronicle of Fallgrief"—which is held by the University of Victoria.
By April, Plath was writing for Varsity, the Cambridge newspaper. She published three journalistic articles: "An American in Paris" based on her Spring Break travels in March and April, "Smith College In Retrospect", a rewriting of "Social Life Without Sororities: A Profile of Smith College" first composed in January 1955 and submitted to and rejected by the Yale Gargoyle, and rather famously "Sylvia Plath Tours the Stores and Forecasts May Week Fashions" which includes several photographs of Plath the fashion model in evening gowns and bathing suits. Two other pieces were written. She published "Cambridge Letter" in the Oxford magazine Isis, and wrote-up her experience attending a Communist Party event in London for Bulganin and Khrushchev. The former is a response to a Woman's Sunday Mirror article entitled "Guess Where It's Heaven to Be a Girl!" The latter article, "B and K at the Claridge", was first submitted to and rejected by The New Yorker, but was accepted by and published in the Smith Alumnae Quarterly later in the year.
From mid-May to about mid-July Plath was otherwise occupied, largely with Ted Hughes but also with courses, writing and submitting poetry, and preparing for her mother to arrive in June. Between her letters and her pocket calendars, one can reconstruct a very busy person maximizing on life and experience.
Once married and established in Spain, with time as big as the ocean-view from their first residence in Benidorm, Plath sought to write prose. From July into September, by which time she and Hughes were in Yorkshire, she worked on stories called "The Black Bull" about a bullfight she witnessed with her husband in Madrid and "Remember the Stick Man", both of which survive in very incomplete format. Both stories were sent to The New Yorker, but were returned not accepted. It is hard to describe "Remember the Stick Man" but it has characters called "Mardie" and "Carmen" and Plath wrote in her pocket calendar on the 11th of August:
"met Swiss wife
Sylvia gates – revealing evening –
ward – crippled painted husband –
brat Mardie – queer baby
Carmen – maid Cecelia…"
The next day, the 12th, is when Plath outlined "Remember the Stick Man."
Also that late summer and early autumn, Plath was at work on stories called "Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags" and "The Invisible Man", both of which are extant as incomplete typescripts. When she started "Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags", Plath wrote in her pocket calendar that it was "slight & subversive."
Before some of these, though, Plath wrote a rather long story called "That Widow Mangada" about her and Hughes' first landlord in Benidorm. She started it around the 3rd of August and finished it in Yorkshire around the 13th of September. She sent it along with "The Black Bull" and "Afternoon in Hardcastle Crags" to Mademoiselle and to The Atlantic, both of whom rejected it—goodness I am saying that a lot! As information about the Widow Mangada is abundantly available both in the Journals and the Letters, as well as the story itself being printed in full in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, that is all to be said about this composition in this venue.
In early September, Plath again tried her hand at journalistic reporting and she found success. Her piece "Sketchbook of a Spanish Summer" was sent to the Christian Science Monitor along with some of her original ink sketches. Like "Leaves from a Cambridge Notebook", "Sketchbook of a Spanish Summer" was published in two parts. In fact, this is cute, they were published exactly eight months apart. "Sketchbook" included four of Plath's drawings.
Plath understood that these travel pieces had a market in American publications. She wrote in a letter to her husband that:
"The New Yorker makes me rather scared, and just a little sick; there are these great long articles, bristling scrupulously with facts, history and incredible Naming of Names: a long letter from Jaipur (the secret is to go where noone’s ever been and write for “Our Far-Flung Correspondents”) and a tender piece explaining why the cedars in Bermuda are all dead…"
She never broke into the New Yorker in this genre, but she did for her geographic and nature poems such as "Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor", "Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows", "The Net-Menders", to name a few.
In September and October 1956, in Yorkshire and then back at Cambridge, Plath was again trying short fiction. Two surviving stories—"All the Dead Dears" and "The Wishing Box"—date to this time period. A third story, "The Invisible Man", is a fragment, only. Emory University has pages two through eight; and Smith College has page 15. Plath writes about it in good detail in a letter written to her husband on the 9th of October 1956. See page 1292, specifically, in Volume 2 of The Letters of Sylvia Plath.
Plath covered the Poppy Day parade in Cambridge on the 10th of November 1956. Reading the nine-paged typescript held by the Lilly Library is like walking a map. She wrote it up on the 11th and sent it immediately to The New Yorker but they rejected it. I like to imagine Di Beddow organizing annual walking tours to follow Plath's route in the same way that people do Leopold Bloom's journey through Dublin in Ulysses on the 16th of June.
Plath's last prose works during her Fulbright term at Newnham College includes a book review and at least four pieces of fiction. The book review was probably written sometime in the late winter of 1957 and was a review of Faber poet C. A. Trypanis' book The Stones of Troy. It was printed in the Spring 1957 issue of Gemini, an Oxford and Cambridge jointly produced periodical. In February 1957, Plath was at work on longer form prose that she hoped to mold into a novel. Two titles for this are "Venus in the Seventh" and "Hill of Leopards". The typescripts are single-spaced, densely packed pages that closely follows Plath's own excursion to France and through Germany and Austria to Italy and a flight back to London. So like most of her creative works, these writings are based on personal experiences. In May of 1957, Plath revised a 1955 story she claimed she sent "to every magazine in America" entitled "The Smokey Blue Piano". She wrote to her brother that the revision "changed the background to London", to make it "cosmopolitan" (LV2 130). She also drafted, and later revised a piece called "The Laundromat Affair" which she sent to the Ladies Home Journal, who liked it and wanted a revision, as well as to Good Housekeeping. Plath revised "The Laundromat Affair" during her summer stay at Eastham, Cape Cod, but it was never published, and like so many of her short stories from the time she was at Cambridge until her death, only pieces remain.
Plath's efforts at authoring prose—both her desire to write in the genre and the titles of many works—are well-documented in her own words in her letters and journals. Between 1940 or 1941 and 1963, Plath wrote north of 215 pieces of prose that either survive as complete works or fragments. At Cambridge, Plath produced about ten percent of her total prose output. Thank you.
Plath's efforts at authoring prose—both her desire to write in the genre and the titles of many works—are well-documented in her own words in her letters and journals. Between 1940 or 1941 and 1963, Plath wrote north of 215 pieces of prose that either survive as complete works or fragments. At Cambridge, Plath produced about ten percent of her total prose output. Thank you.
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