More Sylvia Plath materials to Utica University

Following the sale last year of all my books by and about Sylvia Plath (including works by and about Ted Hughes, Frieda Hughes and Assia Wevill, too), this blog post is to announce that more materials are now at Utica University. I am grateful to Distinguished Professor of English Gary Leising for getting a Plath course permanently a part of the curriculum, and to James Teliha, Dean of the Library & Learning Commons, for their willingness to acquire these items. 

This collection of materials consists of the following:

• Archival copies of 172 poems (plus a few other poem-related things);
• Archival copies of 177 prose works;
• Archival copies of letters to, from, and about Sylvia Plath (more than 1,890 items);
• Photocopies of periodical and early book appearances (view list here);
• A few odds and ends like copies of unpublished manuscripts (biography, memoir, etc.);
• A digital collection on a flash drive of 455 photos of SP; and
• 296 Printed photographs I took of Plath's houses and other places relevant to her life and works*

*Included in the box of photographs are shells and a bit of rock from Berck-Plage, though they can be tossed if desired.

These are the papers that I compiled and worked with for years upon years. They formed the basis for nearly everything I produced, be it content for the website A celebration, this is, this Sylvia Plath Info Blog, content for Twitter, and for articles, essays, and books such as Sylvia Plath (2004, Amazon), These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath (2017, Amazon), The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume I: 1940-1956 (2017, 2019, Amazon), The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume II: 1956-1963 (2018, 2019, Amazon), and The Prose of Sylvia Plath (forthcoming).

I met Gary in Binghamton, New York, at a diner, as you do, a short while back to transfer the stuff from my car to his. In all Utica took possession of four bankers boxes of Plath items and relieved my office of 124.8 lbs of materials. If anyone is interested in the complete contents of this archive compiled of materials from archives (is it a meta-archive?), I or Utica can provide a list.

Going through all this material took about six months to review and catalog. I forgot about some of the materials I acquired over the years, such as this nugget from a letter in April 1983 that Aurelia Schober Plath wrote to a friend Mary Ann Montgomery: "Lois Ames never wrote a biography, although she had a grant to do so, interviewed me during a whole summer and stole both materials (manuscripts of Sylvia's) and snapshots from me" (Montgomery mss, Lilly). Holy highly raised eyebrows! It will be interesting to see if and when the late Lois Ames' estate offers her Plath research materials to an archive or via an auction; to see if any pilfered Plath is included.

Or the printout from a scan of a handmade newsletter that Plath and Ruth Freeman made in the December 1945 that no archive has. It features news stories, poems, and drawings by Plath and her then best friend.

One of the unpublished manuscripts warrants a little discussion here as it is likely not on anyone's radar. In December 2022, I located at Duke University's David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library an undated manuscript by a man called John Seeyle (1931-2015, obituary) entitled: "Careless Love: My Days and Nights with Sylvia Plath (A Memoir Mostly)" which is in their John Seelye Papers, 1862-2015 and undated, bulk 1955-2007. Plath had classes and taught in Seeyle Hall when at Smith. 

Seelye graduated high school from the Vermont Academy in 1949 and attended Wesleyan University, where he studied English and graduated in 1953. You can read a bit more about him at the Academy's website.

In "Careless Love", which was written after the publication of the unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath in 2000, most likely around 2002 or 2003, Seelye recounts several encounters with Plath both as an intentional blind date and in weird happenstance chance meetings. Seelye's chronology can sometimes be suspicious, but that is hardly ever surprising when trying to recall events from 50 years earlier. For example, he has Plath discussing the idea that went into her poem "Bluebeard" in January 1951. But there is only one typescript of "Bluebeard" that exists with an address: Lawrence House, dating it to 1952-1953 or 1954-1955. There are two additional typescripts of the poem that appear on the versos of stories Plath wrote in 1955 (with no House/address information on them). This does not mean Plath did not in fact have the idea in January 1951 and did not discuss it with Seelye. She very well might have. 

Do not bother to check the indexes of the Journals or the Letters (Volume I), you will not find Seelye's name mentioned; and references to Wesleyan are minimal. The apparently spontaneous visit Plath made to Wesleyan in Spring 1951 is never commented on in either of these sources; it also seems to me to be completely uncharacteristic. Plath did take the train from New York to Wellesley on Sunday 1 April 1951 but her calendar does not record more information that just that. But from what Seelye recalls, it could have happened in the fall semester of 1952 on Plath's return to Smith from her weekend at Princeton. 

I hope these archival materials aid in the research that Gary Leising, his students, and others at Utica University conduct on Sylvia Plath. And too I hope that it gives them an idea of what it is like to work with archival materials, albeit in photocopy, before they go on to explore 'real' archives. 

All links accessed 4 March 2023.