This month’s ‘From the archives’ blog post is a guest piece from Peter K. Steinberg who shares some of the research methods he used while compiling the footnotes for The Letters of Sylvia Plath and he questions what actually is an archive? What can we class as an archival document?

The Archival Stretch

Peter K. Steinberg

One of the aspects most enticing about Sylvia Plath is her archive. Remembering my first visit to Smith College in May 1998, I saw for the first time that I knew nothing about the poet and writer. Happy I had been with Collected Poems, Letters Home, and the [abridged] Journals.[i] But that first visit opened new metaphorical doors. More realistically, it opened new works, new photographs, and so much more. But Smith is a small piece of the confusing puzzle with some pieces here and some pieces located quite a bit farther away.[ii]

However much we try to grasp what these traditional archives hold, we must also remember they are massively incomplete. Neither Plath nor, more alarmingly, her mother saved every scrap of paper generated. We know of absences. There are some infamous ones. For example, where is Plath’s note saying she was going for a long walk (or hike) from 24 August 1953? Where is the telegram Ted Hughes sent to Plath’s aunt Dorothy Benotti announcing her death? Perhaps still with the Plath family? Perhaps understandably not retained for the emotional pain they undoubtedly recall.

In These Ghostly Archives, Gail and I introduced our notion of the ‘living archive’. I will not go into that here, but certainly do encourage you to read about it there. With this post, however, I hope to stretch further, still, what we consider the Plath archive. In this instance I want to discuss the admittedly more tangential, ephemeral ‘things’ that Plath encountered. In my work as a co-editor of the Letters of Sylvia Plath, identifying text that warranted explanation as well as the writing of the footnotes fell nearly exclusively to me. I made use of so many of Plath’s own documents but these told me, and subsequently you, only so much. So as a matter of routine I would need to seek other materials such as magazines, books, newspapers, and more such as student, departmental, and corporate files in many archives to obtain as much contextual information I could for the footnotes. And it is this material that I think stretches the Sylvia Plath archive just a bit farther.

On 7 November 1955, Plath writes to her mother, ‘Also went out to dinner at the Union (the one place in Cambridge where women are not allowed unless escorted: the debate club) and saw a rather good repertory production of my favorite “I Am a Camera” (which you remember we saw with Mrs. Cantor and the Braggs, I think) which made me want to turn immediately to writing again’ (Letters, Volume 1: 1003). It was the first mention of I am a Camera but though written  in 1955, sent me back to 1953. I found a reference in Plath’s 1953 calendar where on 4 April it reads, ‘Chinatown – rice & sweet & sour pork / “I am a Camera” – Cantors Mrs Bragg’s’.

This still was not everything. For the footnotes I always tried to provide the locations of places Plath visited, largely, in part, because this information is interesting to me; and as an editor, I felt I had the obligation to take as much work off the readers’ shoulders. This instance required finding out both where Plath saw the performances: at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge (via Cambridge Review) and at the Wilbur Theatre in Boston (via Boston Globe).

The folder that I kept of this supporting documentation contains to 551 files. I still refer to them to this day even though the project is done. I am not a camera, but I am curious: do you consider these kinds of documents to be a part of the Plath archive? Or, is it a stretch?

Endnotes:

[i] Actually, that is a patently false statement as I was completely dissatisfied with Letters Home.

[ii] I try to keep an up-to-date list of Plath’s archives on my website. To this end, in September or October, I am going to publish a Google Spreadsheet called the ‘Sylvia Plath Archival Documents Hub’ that lists the location of all of Plath’s creative works (poetry and prose), letters, and photographs. The goal is to have, in one place, textual access to each retained document in those genres.  It will be flexible, and in time I hope to add more content to it. Documents like the journals are not in there as they are held in just a couple of places.