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An undated, untitled prose work of Sylvia Plath

A friend recently let me know about a typescript page of some unidentified, untitled prose of Plath's wondered if I had seen it before. The answer was no, not really. However, after reading said typescript and Googling a random phrase, I learned that it was in fact published in the 1982 abridged edition of The Journals of Sylvia Plath (published in the US only). 

Said text was printed in the Cambridge years section (1955-1957) under the heading of "Novel" on pages 150-51 of the abridged edition. It followed a subsection entitled "All the Dead Dears" and a "Poem" idea on page 149. The interlude from Plath's actual journals continues with the rather famous 25 February 1956 entry "Hello, hello. It is about time I sat down and described some things: Cambridge, people, ideas..." (151).

For those with the unabridged Journals, the "All the Dead Dears" notes appears in an appendix on page 579; and the "Poem" idea a bit lataer on page 583. The "Novel" parts are a jotting down of ideas that begins "Every person I see..." and on page 583 as well.

But---back to the 1982 edition---then the editors of the abridged edition moved into this loose piece of stream of consciousness writing that could hardly be considered or classified as "novel"-like.  

The text begins, "Into the dark room, blind-windowed, car light goes gondoling along wall, slanting, curved bent in corner, then gone." It concludes, "Slumbering long within their plumdark sheathes of dumb flesh, blood stopped, they mind not mold soft mouths." As far as I know it is the only instance in Plath's writing that she uses the word "fatidical" (about a ferret), though she spelled it in her typescript as "fatilidical".  

The single sheet of paper is held in Box 19, Folder 29 with another leaf of paper containing Plath's holograph writing about rain, fog, wakefulness, the sun, tiredness etc. which might have been written during her first years at Smith College. Did Plath store this paper with the other journal fragments cited above? We may never know. This portion of the Sylvia Plath Collection at Smith College includes other miscellaneous notes on topics like Jung, German, Ibsen, some Melville quotations, and notes concerning Marvin Kane, to name a few. 

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