Update from the Archive Day 3: The Plath Family Papers

After leaving the Beinecke yesterday, I thought it might be poetic, or perhaps even prosaic, to talk a short walk up Prospect Street. Plath stayed at 238 Prospect Street and writes about it in The Bell Jar. During Esther Greenwood's visit to Buddy Willard, they "walked very slowly" in "the cold, black, three o'clock wind" from downtown New Haven "to the house where I was sleeping in the living-room on a couch that was too short because it only cost fifty cents a night instead of two dollars like most of the other places with proper beds" (1963, 63).

It was dark when I got there as the library closed after sunset.

This house is directly opposite Yale's chemistry facilities, and so you can imagine I wanted to go all the way, just like Buddy wanted to and visit the chemistry lab. It was, of course, famoulsy behind the Chemistry Lab where Buddy first kissed Esther Greenwood, chapped lips and all. There has been appreciable construction since I was last here in the early 2000s, but that visit was during the day. Being there at night...well, even though I was very much alone, it was capital-R Romantic Let. Me. Tell. You.

Greenwood continues, "And sure enough, there was a sort of hilly place behind the chemistry lab from which you could see the lights of a couple of the houses in New Haven.

"I stood pretending to admire them while Buddy got a good footing on the rough soU. While he kissed me I kept my eyes open and tried to memorize the spacing of the house lights so I would never forget them" (63).

I mean, total Swoon Moment. And I do not know about you, but I always try to memorize the spaces between houses when I am getting smooched on behind chemistry labs.

For what it is worth, this is the area back in the early 2000s.

Right. Day 3!

The day started slowly with the boxes as the main focus was seen to on Tuesday and Wednesday. I rummaged through Plath and Schober geneaolgy papers and looked at lots of newspaper clippings... primarily looking at materials not originated by Sylvia Plath, I guess. Spots here and there had her handwriting, which is always a kind of electrifying jolt.

The focus has been on taking photographs of materials that I can read at leisure once I am home. But I do spot read things from time to time. Such as the stories of Mixie Blackshort made famous first in Plath's "The Disquieting Muses":

And this gem in a notebook regarding corrections to Letters Home (there is a ton of information on the creation and trials and tribulations of producing that book):

Last day tomorrow.

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Some final photographs of Sylvia Plath

Susan O'Neill-Roe took a series of photographs of Sylvia Plath and her children from October to late November (or maybe early December) 1962 while she was a day nanny/mother's help at Court Green. From nearby Belstone , it was a short drive to North Tawton and the aid she provided enabled Plath to complete the masterful October and November poems and also to make day or overnight trips to London for poetry business and other business. Some of O'Neill-Roe's photographs are well-known. However, a cache of photographs formed a part of the papers of failed biographer Harriet Rosenstein. They were sold separately from the rest of her papers that went to Emory. I was fortunate enough to see low resolution scans of them a while back so please note these are being posted today as mere reference quality images. There are two series here. The first of the children with Plath dressed in red and black. (This should be referred to in the future, please, as Plath's Stendhal-c...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...

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