Plath Profiles

Essays

Plath Profiles vol. 11 4 “I Never Will Need ” Sylvia Plath and Speedwriting by Catherine Rankovic

In an aerogramme from London “Shorthand,” also called dated September 23, 1960, 27-year- “stenography,” denotes a written old poet and short-story writer Sylvia language—using symbols, which Plath asked her mother, Mrs. Aurelia was developed for professional Plath, to find among Plath’s note-taking for business purposes. In possessions back in Wellesley, the U.S., and in the writings of Sylvia Massachusetts, her yellow Plath, “shorthand” refers almost paperback speedwriting book, and always to Gregg shorthand—the mail it.1 An American living in most efficient of several competing London with her husband and infant, 20th-century shorthand systems. A Plath was competing for informal stenographer typically met with her temporary clerical jobs and finding boss and, using shorthand, captured them closed to applicants without his dictated words, verbatim, and in shorthand or another kind of rapid- handwriting, ideally kept pace with writing skill. In Britain, the most basic the normal speaking speed of about clerical title was not, as in the United 120 words per minute. Mastering States, “typist” or “secretary,” but Gregg shorthand requires six “shorthand typist,”2 spelling out the months to two years of study and skills required. practice, and this is as true now as it was a century ago when Gregg was new.3

1 The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2, p. 513. 3 “The Four Shorthand Pitfalls,” Shorthand and Typewriter News, vol. 2, 2 Cryer, P. (n.d.) Shorthand-Typing: A no. 2, February 1914, p. 30: “Make up Common Employment for Women in your mind that you cannot expect to 1950s Britain [Web log post]. Retrieved become much of a shorthand writer in September 9, 2016 from less than a year of hard work; the www.1900s.org.uk.; and Plath, S., letter chances are that it will be nearer to Aurelia Plath, January 27, 1961; eighteen months before you are ‘worth Letters, vol. 2, p. 571. your salt’.”

Plath Profiles vol. 11 5 Over the 2000 years stenography has been known to exist, it had most Soon after the first mass entry of of the time been used by males; women into the U.S. business mainly for courtroom reporting or its workforce, most office jobs for equivalent. As such, it was females were clerical and most considered an accomplishment and clericals female, and that was the a manly art. Samuel Pepys and case in Plath’s time and now.6 In the Charles Dickens, for their own mid-20th century, even the most reasons, wrote in shorthand. highly educated women expected to President Abraham Lincoln’s two start their careers as clericals. Plath male secretaries took his dictation in wrote in her journal of June-July shorthand. Female stenographer- 1953, “When I apply for jobs after typists entered the full-time U.S. college, or after graduate school, I workforce in significant numbers will want to know typing and between 1870 and 1880. By 1890, shorthand. . . my bargaining power the business-office hierarchy was will be much better” (The Journals of stratified by gender into those who Sylvia Plath, 543; ellipsis in original). dictated and those who took dictation and typed it up; already Sylvia Plath resisted learning the percentage of stenographer- shorthand and in fact never learned typists who were female was 64 it. In The Bell Jar, Plath’s percent and typewriting and autobiographical novel set in the shorthand skills were devalued year 1953, Plath’s protagonist Esther proportionately.4 Stenography Greenwood, a college English major became aspirational not for males, like Plath, is repelled by her glimpse but for females. In a popular youth of Gregg shorthand symbols in one novel published in 1904, eight-year- of her mother’s teaching textbooks old Nan Bobbsey, a businessman’s daughter, declares she is going to 6 England, Kim and K. Boyer, “Women’s become a stenographer when she Work: The Feminization and Shifting grows up. Nan’s father has a female Meaning of Clerical Work.” Journal of 5 stenographer. Social History, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 307- 340; and Kurtz, Annalyn, “Why 4https://www.officemuseum.com/office_ Secretary Is Still the Top Job for gender.htm, table “US Stenographers Females.” CNN Business, January 31, and Typists, 1870-1930.” Retrieved 19 2013. November 2017. https://money.cnn.com/2013/01/31/ne ws/economy/secretary-women- 5 The Bobbsey Twins: Merry Days jobs/index.html?iid=HP_LN, retrieved Indoors and Out, p. 8. June 18, 2019. Web.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 6 (The Bell Jar, 61). They remind her of Yet the job market finally forced the “hideous, cramped, scorpion- Sylvia Plath to acquire skill in lettered formulas” and something resembling shorthand: abbreviations, such as those in the speedwriting. periodic table, taught in her college physics and chemistry courses. Speedwriting is a form of rapid Esther explains, “What I couldn’t writing using the Roman stand was this shrinking everything . Technically, then, it is into letters and numbers” (29). longhand rather than shorthand. But Gregg’s silent language of speedwriting could be learned in “scribbled little curlicues” was a weeks rather than months or years, ticket for ambitious young women and in a pinch could pass as into clerical jobs better paid than “shorthand” on the job. Learning those without it, or jobs more speedwriting wedged open one of compatible with their interests. the few doors that Plath found Esther cannot imagine herself in any closed to her. job using shorthand (100).

Fig. 1. Speedwriting, in black; the identical words in Gregg shorthand in red.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 7 While living with her husband Ted adult psychiatry.8 The job would Hughes in Boston in 1958—both of prove pivotal to her creative work. them beginning to try to write full- time—Plath for the first time wanted Why Plath Hated Shorthand a clerical job to “give [her] life a kind of external solidity and balance” it In The Bell Jar Plath, through her apparently did not have on its own protagonist, details her reasons for (Complete Letters, vol. 2, 266). resisting from all quarters pressure Unused to an unprecedented to learn shorthand. For aspiring amount of unstructured time, she writers Sylvia Plath and Esther agonized in her journal about feeling Greenwood, who narrates The Bell unable to write fiction. In her journal Jar, “shorthand” carried baggage on Sunday, September 14, Plath beyond being gendered, servile, resolved to follow a strict writing utterly foreign-looking and schedule starting the next day. It commended by their mothers—the dissolved in panic and creative real and the fictional—who both paralysis. She wrote that she had not taught shorthand professionally at a lived enough to have something to business college. Esther says her write about. “I don’t want a job until mother told her that “Nobody I am happy with writing—yet feel wanted a plain English major” unless desperate to get a job—to fill myself she knew shorthand (Bell Jar, 61). up with some external reality” (Journals, 420, 422). She wrote to Esther internalizes this pressure. By the Smith College vocational office comparison with business-college in September 1958, asking for help students who have learned and giving references, but received shorthand, Esther, a student at an no answer until she wrote again in elite women’s college and a April 1959.7 prizewinning writer with professional editorial experience, judges herself In the meantime, Plath went to an as unskilled and unprepared for the employment agency that, in job market she must face after October 1958, placed her in a graduation, in which bosses, almost temporary job in Massachusetts always male, literally dictate to General Hospital’s department of female clericals (Bell Jar, 62).

7 Sylvia Plath to Alice Norma Davis, letters of September 24, 1958 (Complete Letters vol. 2, 277) and April 28, 1959 (Complete Letters vol. 2, 315). 8 Journals, October 14, 1958, 424.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 8 A taker of shorthand must also mentioned planned summer transcribe the boss’s dictation and shorthand lessons in a letter to her polish it using exacting language mother dated April 24, 1953 (Letters protocols and editorial skills, then vol. 1, 596); her tone is light. Plath format and type the document to spends June in New York City perfection. Only perfection would working in her dream job, returning do. Mid-century employers seeking home disillusioned and depressed. clericals, in want-ad columns labeled That and a disappointment related “Women,” asked for quantifiable to her writing has her imagining a skills such as typewriting and future so diminished that learning shorthand, but tended to gloss shorthand that summer is a must, skilled language labor as “attention something to cling to (Journals, to detail,” and allied with other “soft Appendix 5, pp. 543-546). skills” such as congeniality or According to Mrs. Plath, Sylvia after neatness: traits desirable in a clerical four lessons showed no aptitude for worker yet not worth recognizing or shorthand and was only more deeply compensating. When the boss depressed when they agreed to give accepted and signed the finished up (Letters Home, 124). Mrs. document, he was claiming his Greenwood talks her depressed clerical’s language skills as his own. daughter into learning shorthand starting that same evening, the same The prospect of learning shorthand day Esther tried and failed to start threatens Esther more than most writing a novel (The Bell Jar, 99). because pressure to accept female- gendered para-literary jobs feels to Esther Greenwood cuts short her her like pressure to surrender one and only shorthand lesson, whatever authorial agency she has pleading a headache, and goes to and prepare for an amanuensis role. bed but lies awake considering “I wanted to dictate my own thrilling multiple new life plans. That night letters,” she says (Bell Jar, 62). she imagines strangling her sleeping, snoring mother, whose Plath’s journal entries from 1953 and pincurls gleam “like a row of little Esther’s first-person narrative, also bayonets” (Bell Jar, 100). Even while taking place in 1953, show both sleeping, Mrs. Greenwood is a accepting shorthand lessons as a partisan for the system that would way of salvaging a disappointing welcome Esther only as a scribe for summer that both hoped to devote men. to creative writing. Yet their capitulations are not the same. Plath

Plath Profiles vol. 11 9 Sleepless Esther attempts to read Finnegan’s Wake, the topic she has In July 1958, five years after her chosen for her senior thesis, but the mental breakdown, two years into letters on the page, as if animated, her marriage and less than a month take on “fantastic, untranslatable into her writing year, Plath consulted shapes, like Arabic or Chinese” (Bell her mother about possible jobs both Jar, 102) or like the chemical and interesting and lucrative. Mrs. Plath mathematical symbols Esther has gave her shorthand-resistant already told the reader she loathes, daughter information about yet or like Gregg shorthand. Finding another rapid-: with Finnegan’s Wake that even the stenotyping, or keyboarded eludes her, Esther shorthand. It required formal considers changing her college training. Plath considered it but major and track. Despairing of that, wrote to her mother she did not she thinks of taking a break from want to have to take a course to college and working full-time for a qualify for a job.10 year. Yet as Esther sees it, a female who has not learned shorthand has Esther Greenwood had been only two job options: waitress or annoyed that Gregg shorthand typist (Bell Jar, 103). reduced perfectly fine words into crabbed little “curlicue” symbols. Esther’s conclusion about the job When compelled by the job market outlook for women in the summer of to learn some form of rapid writing, 1953 might now seem reductive and learning speedwriting instead of outdated, but only because in the shorthand allowed Plath at least to 21st century we call a waitress a use the language she had mastered, server and a clerical an not a language she hadn’t. And her administrative assistant. Clerical choice spited or at least bypassed work in 2018, 65 years later, was in her mother because speedwriting the U.S. the third most common occupation for women and the most “Why Secretary is Still Most Common gendered of the top ten full-time Job for Women,” 9 occupations: 94.1 percent female. https://money.cnn.com/2013/01/31/ne ws/economy/secretary-women- 9U.S. Department of Labor Women’s jobs/index.html?iid=HP_LN retrieved Bureau, Most Common Occupations for June 18, 2019. Women: https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/employm 10 The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2 ent-earnings-occupations.htm - (August 1, 1958), 267. largestshare, retrieved June 18, 2019;

Plath Profiles vol. 11 10 was neither shorthand nor stenotyping, and Plath taught herself from a yellow paperback self- teaching manual.

What Is Speedwriting?

Speedwriting in its trademarked form was developed by Emma Belle Dearborn (1874-1937), a shorthand instructor whose students complained that learning shorthand was time-consuming and expensive. Dearborn announced what she called “Brief English” in 1923.11 She renamed the product Speedwriting in 1924 and sold it directly to the Dearborn’s was not the first such public as a correspondence course. system, but with similar, persistent Below is a detail of an advertisement advertising that by 1928 had cost for Speedwriting in the November her company nearly half a million 1924 issue of Popular Science dollars, Speedwriting became a magazine. It contrasts Gregg and stunning success. Hundreds of Pitman (the standard shorthand in schools in the U.S. and Canada the United Kingdom) with bought franchise rights to teach it Speedwriting:12 [Figure 2] under that proprietary name. Endorsements from Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., and Admiral Richard E. Byrd—whose polar-exploration team Dearborn taught in person— 11 “Woman Inventor”. (1923, October helped pitch Speedwriting to males 22). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, p. 28. and management for whom Retrieved September 4, 2017 from 13,14,15 www.newspapers.com shorthand was women’s work.

12 “Can You Read This?” 13 Brett, H. “‘First the Public, Then the [Advertisement]. (1924 November). Schools!’ Key to Success of a Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 105 No. Remarkable Woman”. (1928, October 5, p. 25. The first 34 pages of this issue 28). Business Journal, p. 16. Retrieved are advertisements, including September 3, 2016. classifieds. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10 .1080/23722800.1928.10771228

Plath Profiles vol. 11 11 leaped from windows in New York Dearborn’s thriving Speedwriting City that day. She was 63.17 business suffered during the Great Depression and from numerous School of Speedwriting ads, much imitations and piracy. In 1931 a smaller than those of the 1920s, circuit court ruled that Speedwriting continued to appear, demoted to had no claim to copyright because it the glamorless classified-ad pages in was not a system but merely a way the back pages of magazines. A to string letters together.16 During a classified ad in the September 1944 setback in the economy, on July 28, issue of Popular Mechanics, page 1937, Dearborn jumped from her 53A, lists Speedwriting’s selling apartment window. She was among points after 20 years in business: the eight suicides who reportedly SHORTHAND in 6 weeks at home. Famous Speedwriting system, no signs or symbols. Easy to learn; easy to write

and transcribe. Fast

preparation for a job. 14 “Getting Ready to Write South Pole Story” [Captioned newspaper Surprisingly low cost. photograph]. (1928, August 9). Brooklyn 100,000 taught by mail. Daily Eagle, p. 2. Retrieved July 27, Used in leading offices and 2017. civil service. Write for free booklet. Speedwriting, 15 “Modern Woman a Radical in Dept. 1510, 274 Madison Business Says Anne Morgan—‘No’ Says Ave., New York 16. Roosevelt”. (1927, March 21). The Daily Notes (Canonsburg, PA). Web. In the same issue of September http://i.imgur.com/m7egntq.jpg. 1944, large illustrated ads, picturing Retrieved July 27, 2017 from males, advertised all types of i.imgur.com vocational courses, including 16 Brief English Systems vs. Owen, U.S. stenography, as preparation for Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit postwar employment. Despite - 48 F.2d 555 (2d Cir. 1931) (1931, April Speedwriting’s targeted 6), campaigning, stenography was http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/app ellate-courts/F2/48/555/1569115. 17 “Eight Killed in Falls from N.Y. Retrieved August 2, 2017 from Windows”. (1937, July 30). Ottawa law.justia.com Journal, p. 1. Retrieved August 2, 2017.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 12 women’s work. To see that, all Shorthand or speedwriting to many anyone had to do was enter a women meant not a step down into business office. In 1930, 96 percent servility but a step up from what of all stenographer-typists in the U.S. otherwise might be literal were female; in 1964, counting the servanthood. stenographer-typists by that time more commonly called School of Speedwriting ads “secretaries,” 97 percent.18,19 targeting females featured photos of Sylvia Plath’s era, and the social well-groomed young women and class her education permitted her to the now iconic Speedwriting slogans access, framed shorthand as a skill “bkm a steno & gt a gd jb & hi pa” educated women could deploy (later revised to say, “bkm a sec & gt should more ambitious career plans a gd jb”) in general-interest and fail, so for Plath and Esther women’s magazines and on placards Greenwood learning shorthand was in buses and subway cars. These preparing for defeat. Yet what The persisted until the 1970s, when in Bell Jar does not say or see is that the U.S. inexpensive portable for women without college dictation machines such as the educations, rapid-writing skill Dictaphone and Dictabelt eroded offered an alternative to domestic the market value of rapid-writing service or other physically taxing credentials. The latest School of employment. Until 1940 the largest Speedwriting ad I could find category of employment for women appeared in the September 1977 in the U.S. was domestic service.20 issue of Mademoiselle. It said, in plain block lettering, “Yes, I went to college. But Speedwriting got me 18 Gender and the office. Retrieved my job.” August 2, 2017 from http://www.officemuseum.com/office_g The Speedwriting slogan’s ender.htm rewording, from “bkm a steno” to

19 Wirtz, W. Willard, U.S. Department of “bkm a sec,” reflects also the Labor. Background Facts on Women advancement of the job title Workers in the . (1965, “secretary” over “stenographer.” September). p. 8. Retrieved August 2, The single female business-office 2017 from fraser.stlouisfed.org “steno,” not a sidekick or Gal Friday but a professional, was occasionally 20 May, Vanessa. “Domestic Workers in glamorized in books and movies up U.S. History.” Oxford Research through the 1930s; one aspired to Encyclopedias, “American History.” become a stenographer as one Web. Retrieved June 19, 2019.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 13 might aspire to become a nurse. The Quickhand (1953), the School of title and profession of Speedwriting’s authorized update, “stenographer” dissolved into the Speedwriting Shorthand (1954), catch-all title and job of “secretary,” Forkner Alphabet Shorthand (1955), formerly a title for males. The Bell and Carter Briefhand (1957). Jar tells us that by 1953 stenography was an entry-level skill. Because no samples of Plath’s speedwriting have been discovered Plath’s Choice it isn’t certain which system she chose to learn, but Emma Dearborn’s Speedwriting Dearborn’s School of Speedwriting correspondence course, in six ads reliably appeared for Plath’s slender volumes, like Gregg entire lifespan in the women’s shorthand inspired dozens of magazines Plath read, wrote for, and competitors. These courses fed a always aimed to write more for— demand for vocational rapid-writing including the issue of Mademoiselle training so enormous it is hard to Plath guest-edited, August 1953— imagine today. Profits came from and Plath and her mother both textbook sales. Speedwriting-type capitalized “Speedwriting” when alphabetic systems introduced in the writing the word, Mrs. Plath the most 1950s include Stenoscript (1950), consistently. [Figure 3]

Plath Profiles vol. 11 14

[School of Speedwriting ad from Mademoiselle, August 1953, p. 375 (detail), with an exaggerated claim about Speedwriting speed. Cursive lettering’s backstrokes and ligatures forced Speedwriting’s high end down toward about 80 words per minute. Gregg shorthand dispensed with such obstacles.]

Some employers weeded out into jobs gendered male. Rapid- humbler applicants by making writing systems proliferated as they shorthand, a lengthy and expensive did because, like Esther Greenwood, course of study, a job requirement females seeking employment either whether the position demanded it or learned a form of rapid writing or not. That was my own experience. faced futures as waitresses or typists, Rapid-writing skill also confirmed the who forewent the extra dollars candidate’s lack of resistance to shorthand skill could bring. When preparing for and accepting highly former Fulbright scholar, Smith skilled, responsible, and gendered College and Cambridge graduate work with a gendered salary and and former Mademoiselle guest little to no chance of advancement editor Plath sought office work in

Plath Profiles vol. 11 15 Boston and later in London, even Court reporters master highly those qualifications did not allow her specialized stenotype keyboarding to defy job-market norms. Plath able to record up to 225 words per briefly considered learning minute, and can decipher its cryptic stenotyping. Plath’s August 1, 1958 output [Figure 4] journal entry shows Plath urging herself to work on both writing women’s short fiction and “even stenotyping.” Any zest for stenotyping was fleeting. On December 12, 1958, Sylvia fumed in her journal that for her birthday [October 27] her mother had offered her $300—in 2017 dollars, $2,500— to take a stenotyping course. By this, Plath wrote, her mother had insultingly implied that because Ted Hughes seemed uninterested in regular gainful employment, Plath would have to be the family breadwinner (Journals, 434). Mrs. Plath was acting on a longstanding The Hugheses were living in London concern. In a marginal note written with their six-month-old daughter in Gregg shorthand on Plath’s when Sylvia on November 19, 1960 letters—Mrs. Plath made many such wrote a second time to her mother notes—Mrs. Plath left proof of her that by brushing up her worry about the Hughes’s financial speedwriting she could qualify for future even before the couple had “amusing” odd jobs (Letters, vol. 2, married. On a letter from Sylvia 542). Plath nagged her mother for dated May 16, 1956, in reference to the speedwriting book in further Sylvia’s typewritten words “Our letters dated December 17 and children will have such fun,” Mrs. December 24, 1960, suggesting Plath wrote in Gregg, “if they don’t finally, “Couldn’t you invent some starve first.”21 (The couple married pretext to get the book from the on June 16, 1956.) school as a teacher? I never will need shorthand as this will would 21 Rankovic, Catherine, “Aurelia Plath Shorthand Transcription Table from Correspondence in the Lilly Library epublications.marquette.edu/AureliaPla Plath Archive Plath mss. II”, ID #76, th, accessed June 19, 2019. Web.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 16 cover all my needs. I’m dying to get hold of it.”22 The “Johnny Panic” Breakthrough

Mrs. Plath hadn’t been lax about Plath was elated by her new finding and sending the book. She temporary secretarial job in the habitually responded to her Adult Psychiatric Clinic at daughter’s requests without delay. Massachusetts General Hospital. She The book Plath wanted wasn’t interviewed incoming patients, among the items Plath had left in transcribed doctors’ case notes and Wellesley because it wasn’t her letters, and kept patients’ records. In book. In Letters Home, page 348, in her October 14, 1958 journal entry a note appended to Plath’s letter to she wrote that her job: her of August 1, 1958, Mrs. Plath wrote that Plath in 1958 taught gives my day, & Ted’s an objective herself speedwriting from books lent structure . . . the job is good for me by “a mutual friend,” identified in . . . my objective daily view of Mrs. Plath’s original manuscript of troubled patients through the Letters Home as author Mary records objectifies my own view of Stetson Clarke, and this is confirmed myself. I shall try to enter into this by letters of thanks Sylvia Plath and schedule a wedge of writing—to Mrs. Plath sent to Clarke in spring expand it. I feel my whole sense & 1959. Both letters say Ted Hughes understanding of people being provided Plath with dictation for deepened & enriched by this: as if I practice.23 had my wish & opened up the souls of the people in Boston and read 22 Letters of December 24, 1960, The them deep (Journals, 424). In other Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2, words, the job was a win-win. p. 556.

By December 16, 1958 Plath had 23 Plath mss. II, Box 9, folder 8, p. 45, finished the first of two short stories Sylvia Plath Archive, Lilly Library, Indiana University-Bloomington; Aurelia inspired by her hospital job Plath to Mary Stetson Clarke, letter, March 15, 1959; The Complete Letters and Aurelia Plath says in Letters Home of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 2, letter, Sylvia Plath (348) that the “books” were lent. Linda to Mary Stetson Clarke, April 10, 1959, Wagner-Martin states in Sylvia Plath: A p. 309-310. Footnote 2 on p. 309 of Biography (1987; p. 157) that Plath in Complete Letters says Clarke bought 1958 “relearned” speedwriting, but for Plath “a book on learning there is no evidence that Plath learned shorthand,” but Plath herself in the April it before 1959. 10 letter calls it a speedwriting book,

Plath Profiles vol. 11 17 (Journals, 441). The narrator, never 542), but never wrote in fact or named, of “Johnny Panic and the fiction about using speedwriting at Bible of Dreams” is a clerical worker the hospital, although Mrs. Plath who transcribes, types, copies and claims Sylvia used it there (Letters compiles psychiatric patients’ Home, 348). The audiograph was accounts of their fearsome dreams, one of a growing family of office both as part of her job and secretly. machines soon to drive rapid writing She does this in the service of an out of the workplace. invisible authority, Johnny Panic, god of fear. Plath actually did keep Recording technologies for office her own private notes about work were not new. In her patients’ ills and dreams. As she had introduction to Letters Home, Mrs. wished, she discovered in her job Plath wrote that during the summer raw material for her writing (Journals, between her high school graduation Appendix 14, “Hospital Notes,” and college, the summer of 1924, 624-629). The story’s narrator she had her first full-time job: interviews new patients and takes transcribing dictation from dictation from recordings made and recordings made on wax cylinders. played back on an audiograph She swore then that no child of hers (Johnny Panic and the Bible of would have to do such dull and Dreams, 160), an office machine grueling work (Letters Home, 5). probably trademarked Audograph, then the most common make. Plath In the story “Johnny Panic and the refers again to an audiograph in a Bible of Dreams” Plath’s first-person 1959 story about hospital clerical narrator spiritualizes her clerical job. workers, “The Daughters of Blossom By imagining herself the scribe of a Street” (Johnny Panic,129). god, not a man, her nine-to-five job in a psychiatric clinic is not mundane The boss using an audiograph can or servile but an indispensable voice-record at any hour dictation source of valued material she onto a vinyl disk the typist can play smuggles home, where she is and replay. Boss and typist need editing a bible of horrifying dreams. never meet, and encoding communications in handwriting and In a routinized and clinical work then transcribing them is not environment dedicated to easing necessary. Plath wrote her mother suffering, the narrator alone about having used speedwriting appreciates patients’ agonizing while employed at Harvard dreams and fears as Johnny Panic’s University (Complete Letters, vol. 2, artworks, copying them into

Plath Profiles vol. 11 18 notebooks or memorizing recorded monstrous secretary, Miss dictation for later transcription into Millravage. Also present are Johnny her bible (Johnny Panic, 160). It Panic’s priests, in straitjackets; the seems she began her secret narrator, clutching her notebook and copywork along with her job, hoping they recognize her, raises it because she fears being caught and and says to them, “Peace. I bring to “losing my job and all my source you. . .” “None of that old stuff, material” (164). For patients who sweetie,” says Miss Millravage present no dream, the narrator (Johnny Panic, 170). unearths one, relishing the chance. Her own “dream of dreams” is of Crooning “My baby,” Miss viewing, from above, a reservoir Millravage embraces the narrator, filling with all humanity’s bad who fights. Once subdued, the dreams, a turgid cesspool of narrator is stripped and robed in dragons, snakes and floating body sheets for electroshock therapy parts, a “sewage farm of the ages” intended to punish and cure her (158). Working all day with devotion to Johnny Panic. Miss distressed people and systematically Millravage fits the narrator’s head keeping records, meanwhile she with “a crown of wire” and on the dreams of a smoking, chaotic narrator’s tongue lays “the wafer of landscape inhabited only by forgetfulness.” Electroshock therapy monsters. The narrator credits her is presented as a Christ-like torture, god Johnny Panic with injecting “a and in its throes the narrator has an poetic element into this business epiphany, seeing Johnny Panic in all you don’t often find elsewhere. And his glory. He has not abandoned for that he has my eternal gratitude” her. (161). This story of a clerical worker Christian imagery—a device later to reaches farther than any other into function exquisitely as fretwork in Plath’s imagination, fantasies and Plath’s poetry—begins to swamp the memory. She did not write another story when the male Clinic Director like it. Looking back, Plath fans discovers Plath’s narrator reading might excitedly call “Johnny Panic” and transcribing old case studies a preview of The Bell Jar, yet in the after hours. Firmly taking her arm, context of 1958 “Johnny Panic” was the Clinic Director escorts the a story about a creative narrator to a fourth-floor hall “empty nonconformist sacrificed to a as a church on Monday” (167) and to conformist environment by enforcers its Observation Ward and its of the status quo. Although nimbly

Plath Profiles vol. 11 19 told, the story’s theme was a trope than Plath, nourished by her of that era, the beatnik era. Its two- employment and retaining her dimensional rendering—like a fable personal agency even while taking it has no subplot, and the narrator dictation. She keeps an has no past, no friends or family, and uncompromising sense of mission in never mentions money—and tone- an anti-creative environment. Plath’s deaf religious references did not fictional clericals, including the appeal to any of the publishers Plath secretary in the 1962 verse play sent it to. The story was not Three Women, are not unhappy published in her lifetime. Plath in workers yet recognize their October 1960 disparaged “Johnny workplaces as fundamentally Panic” as “a sort of mental hospital inhumane, and transgress by saying monologue ending up with the so. religious communion of shock treatment” (Letters vol. 2, 530). From February through April 1959 Plath worked at a second part-time Plath until “Johnny Panic” labored job, in which she did use to write fiction about adolescents or speedwriting. On May 2 she wrote in young couples. Her journals of one day The Bed Book, a children’s summer 1958 show her struggling to book (Journals, May 3, 1959, 480). take a step forward. “Johnny Panic” On May 31 she wrote in her journal, is Plath’s step forward, tied by “I have written six stories this year, subject and date of composition to and the three best of them in the the secretarial job begun in last two weeks!” (Journals, 486). The October. Plath wrote on December three includes “This Earth Our 16, 1958 that the story was Hospital,” later published under her complete and polished. She did not new title, “The Daughters of have high hopes for it, calling it Blossom Street.” It is again a first- “queer and quite slangy,” (Journals, person hospital story, but realistic 441), a voice she does not yet and without flair. A group of hospital recognize as her own—not at all. In secretaries responsible for the February 1959 Plath wrote in her paperwork about the hospital’s journal that she will have made a dying and dead cannot bring step forward when she writes a story themselves to acknowledge for Ladies’ Home Journal (471). morbidity when facing it—which even their lowly office boy can do. The story’s narrator, however, is a The story’s narrator is one of the new figure in Plath’s fiction: an adult secretaries, and no different. In wage-earning female, age 33, older November when she sold the story

Plath Profiles vol. 11 20 Plath wrote The London Magazine’s however, bears her re-reading editor giving her new choice of title (Journals, 515). saying it better described “the Secretaries being almost ritual, Getting There attendant figures in the euphemistic ceremonies softening the bare fact In her January 10, 1961 letter of death.”24 (Complete Letters, vol. 2, p. 567), Plath thanked Mrs. Plath for sending The Second Voice of Three Women, a Speedwriting book, and on a dramatic poem about pregnancy January 27 wrote her mother about and birth written in 1962, is a enjoying her temporary job doing pregnant secretary who criticizes her copyediting and layout for the male co-workers in the office as special spring issue of The “cardboard” and “flat”: Bookseller, London’s “organ of the book trade” (p. 571). In 1976 its That flat, flat flatness from which editor remembered Plath’s initial ideas, destructions, visit to the office: Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed, What I recalled particularly Endlessly proceed – and the cold was the real indignation with angels, the abstractions. (Collected which she insisted that she Poems, p. 177) was offering no literary qualifications but formidable To herself, Plath called “The typing and shorthand skills.25 Daughters of Blossom Street” her best story, “full of humor, highly Plath seemed confident that her colored characters, good, rhythmic refreshed speedwriting skill could conversation. An amazing advance pass for shorthand. Whether she from ‘Johnny Panic’” (Journals, May used speedwriting on that job is not 31, 1958, 487). This is an known. On February 2, 1961, Plath overestimation. By October 6 her thanked her mother for the yellow journal entry lumps it with other speedwriting book, and then on stories she has written that prove February 9 for “all the speedwriting “duller than tears.” “Johnny Panic,”

24 Letter to John Lehman, November 25 The Bookseller, March 27, 1976, p. 12, 1959, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, 1761. News clipping held by Smith vol. 2, p. 368. College.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 21 books,” and does not mention Psychiatrist Roger Gould wrote that speedwriting again.26 “One of the appeals of a business career is that the business world has Plath had a miscarriage on February banned human frailty.” It sanitized 6, 1961, and would have an the workplace biologically and also, appendectomy on February 28. She for the successful, expunged from wrote the poem “Tulips,” which Ted their record any human flaws.28 If Hughes called a breakthrough poem that is true, Plath’s office stories and and herald of her “Ariel voice,” on references to office life and practice March 18. In April she began are critiques from the unexpected drafting The Bell Jar, which opens point of view of one whose minor by describing her office co- role in the business world was workers.27 destined and enforced, who could therefore afford to explore human Plath’s office jobs fed her confidence frailty in such settings, and in and the confidence fed her fiction. It common language anyone could can be argued that after read. hospitalizations for her own ills Plath wrote poems inspired by those stays, from a patient’s point of view, simply writing what she lived soon after she lived it. But her medical poems are not critiques of the medical world. They are contemplative.

26 The upper- and then lower-case “s” in “speedwriting” are Plath’s own. See also Letters Home, p. 400. Mrs. Plath in her editing of Plath’s letters created consistency by capitalizing all instances of the word “Speedwriting,” suggesting that Plath learned the version trademarked by Emma Dearborn.

27 Letter from Sylvia Plath to Ann 28 Gould, Robert, Transformations: Davidow-Goodman and Leo Goodman, Growth and Change in Adult Life, p. April 27, 1961, Letters vol. 2, 614). 230.

Plath Profiles vol. 11 22 WORKS CITED

Conde Nast Publications, Mademoiselle: The Magazine for the Smart Young Woman, Vol. 83, September 1977, p. 141; August 1953, p. 375.

Gould, Roger. Transformations: Growth and Change in Adult Life. New York: Touchstone, 1979.

Hope, Laura Lee. The Bobbsey Twins, or Merry Days Indoors and Out. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1904.

Hughes, Ted, ed. (1981). The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath. New York: Harper & Row.

Kukil, K., ed. (2000). The Journals of Sylvia Plath, 1950-1962. London: Faber and Faber.

Plath, A., ed. (1975). Letters Home by Sylvia Plath. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Plath, S. (2000). Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams. New York, NY: Harper Perennial.

Plath, S. (1971). The Bell Jar. New York, NY: Harper & Row.

Steinberg, P., and Kukil, K., eds. (2017). The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 1, 1940- 1956. London: Faber and Faber.

Steinberg, P., and Kukil, K., eds. (2018) The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 2, 1956- 1963. London: Faber and Faber.

Wagner-Martin, L. (1987). Sylvia Plath: A Biography. NY: Simon and Schuster.

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