Sylvia Plath & the Art of Pilfering Paper

We heard of today, and welcome, the return of Court Green, now as an independent, online literary magazine (previously attached to Columbia College Chicago) and edited by Tony Trigilio, David Trinidad, with managing editor Cora Jacobs. Among the stellar lineup in this revamped issue, we found an intriguing essay by Peter K. Steinberg, co-editor of The Letters of Sylvia Plath, regarding the purchase of a book from the library of Charles Monteith (Faber and Faber editor and chairman) and once borrowed by Sylvia Plath herself. The hidden treasure in this 1933 edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen? A pink bookmark with Plath's notation: "Wilfred Owen / 'Arms & the Boy'." Steinberg takes the opportunity to discuss the provenance of the famed pink paper found throughout the Plath archives. A look inside:

The book was The Poems of Wilfred Owen (London: Chatto and Windus, 1933) and formerly belonged to Faber and Faber editor and chairman Charles Monteith (1921-1995). Monteith was Ted Hughes' first editor at Faber and Faber, and in the course of that editorship he and Plath met on several occasions between 1957 and her death. On 23 June 1960, Plath and Hughes attended a cocktail party at Faber's for W. H. Auden. The next day, Plath wrote to her mother:

During the course of the party Charles Monteith, one of the Faber board, beckoned me out into the hall. And there Ted stood, flanked by TS Eliot, WH Auden, Louis MacNiece on the one hand & Stephen Spender on the other, having his photograph taken. 'Three generations of Faber poets there,' Charles observed. 'Wonderful!'

Monteith thoughtfully sent Plath flowers after her appendectomy on 28 February 1961. After Plath's death, Monteith became her editor when Hughes moved The Bell Jar and The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) from Heinemann to Faber.

What makes this copy particularly special is that tucked between pages 58 ("Arms and the Boy") and 59 ("The Show"), on a piece of pink Smith College Memorandum paper, is a holograph note in Plath's bold black pen that reads "Wilfred Owen / 'Arms & the Boy'."

It is something to own anything in Plath's handwriting and something even more special that it is on a sheet of her famously fetishistic pilfered pink paper. Plath taught three sections of Freshman English at Smith College in the 1957-1958 academic year. After deciding to leave teaching to live and work as a full-time writer in Boston, Plath began stealing the pads of paper from a supply closet in one of Smith's academic halls. On 3 March 1958, Plath wrote in her journal:

Got a queer and most overpowering urge today to write, or typewrite, my whole novel on the pink, stiff, lovely-textured Smith memorandum pads of 100 sheets each: a fetish: somehow, seeing a hunk of that pink paper, different from all the endless reams of white bond, my task seems finite, special, rose-cast . . . & have already robbed enough notebooks from the supply closet for one & 1/2 drafts of a 350 page novel. (344)

A week later Plath wrote, "must be up early, to laundry & to steal more pink pads of paper tomorrow" (348).

You'll want to head over to Court Green to read all the ways in which Plath used the pilfered pink paper. And because we can't get enough Plath memorabilia, take a look back at this post from David Trinidad about his own collection of Plath artifacts. Finally, take a gander at the Wilfred Owen poem that Plath conscientiously marked, "Arms and the Boy."