The Living Archive: Sylvia Plath’s “Ocean 1212-W”

In 1975, 12 years after Sylvia Plath’s death, Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s mother, published Letters Home,  a collection of letters written by Sylvia Plath between her time at Smith College in the ’50’s, her time in England, up until the time of her death in 1963.

On the inside of the book cover, Aurelia Plath included various pictures from her daughter’s childhood, with captions written by Sylvia herself. While the dates are not included, one can conclude from the style of writing that Sylvia was quite young when she wrote them (most likely before and right up to her father’s death, when she was 8 years old).  There is also included a specific section that appears to be a journal entry in which Sylvia wrote about her passion for the sea, established during the years she lived in Winthrop, MA:

“As a young child I had many gay experiences. My uncle Frank built a large sailboat and often took us riding on the wild blue waves. I gradually developed a love for the stormy, turbulent ocean  that few people can understand. I enjoyed lying for hours in the bright, white sand, gazing at the sparkling blue-green waves bounding on the wet beach, and the silvery seagulls dipping for fish on the crest of a frothy white-cap before it broke and washed among the pebbles. I speak so much of the ocean because it was an important part of my heritage and environment, and my love for it is hard to explain. The ocean seemed to be a spirit of a person to me, and nothing else in this world fascinated me as much as it, for nothing and no one has such a personality as the rough, mysterious sea.”

If you ever take the time to read Plath’s poetry or prose, the presence of sea imagery is constant. While my goal in this post is not to analyze all of those images, one important thing to keep in mind for those of you who may be interested in Plath as a writer is how influential the sea was for Plath, not only as a writer, but as a child as well. As she grew older and developed as a writer, Plath utilized these images of the sea to capture her childhood, an age of innocence, her connection to her grandparents, to her mother, to her deceased father.

In a later journal entry, dated June 20, 1958, Plath wrote about her “longing to revisit [my] first hometown,” which for her was “Winthrop, not Wellesley, Jamaica Plain, even: the names are become talismans.”

The definition of a talisman, in simplest terms, is “an object held to act as a charm to avert evil and bring good fortune; something producing apparently magical or miraculous effects.”

It’s important to think about her choice of the word talisman because there was, and is, an inherent spirituality in the way Plath not only thought about the ocean but how she wrote about it as well. This is mirrored in the earlier entry I quoted, especially when she wrote that the “ocean seemed to be a spirit f a person to me.” The spirit of the ocean became a character in its own right in her writing. It also became such an important metaphor, one that was able to recreate the charm and innocence of her childhood, one that had an almost transcendental effect on the characters and personas in her writing. It most certainly acted “as a charm to avert evil” in her writing, as well.

There are two other notable entries that focus not only on this need, spiritually and emotionally, for Plath to return to her childhood by the sea but that also point out how she felt about using these experiences as a writer as well.

The first entry was written on January 04, 1958.  The entry is essentially a list of memories from Plath’s younger years with  a specific focus on the home on Johnson Avenue. She wrote about the ‘raspberries and daisies,’ the ‘catalpa trees.’ Her reflection on these lists of images, though, is what interested me the most. She wrote:

“Each memory dragged up drags up another. Exercise: not just naming but recreating. Lights of Boston airport & places […] How everything shrinks on return—you can’t go home again. Winthrop shrunk, dulled, wrinkled its dense hid: all those rainbow extensions of dreams lost luster, shells out of water, color balancing out. Is it that our minds colored the streets and children then & do so no longer? We must fight to return to that early mind…”

In an excerpt from a letter to Gordon Lameyre in February 1954, while Plath was attending Smith, she wrote about the “parts of actual living” that stood out “like unique trees along a roadway which is now rough, now level, now leading through a wasteland.” She goes on to describe the “bits of colored watersmoothed glass we collected on the beach and pounded up not blue, red, and green powders which we stored in glass jars; a green rock became a boat, a castle, an island in our fertile imaginations […] battling high waves in a storm in trying to climb aboard our little tippling sailboat, squatting in the blazing noon sun setting strawberry runners and wishing for water.”

Beyond the memories evoked in these entries, there is, most importantly, the focus on writing using those experiences. This is because, Plath was, always, an active writer. She was constantly trying to push herself in that vein and this is what the point of the whole “exercise” portion of the first entry. Don’t just name the flowers, the images, the experiences: recreate them. In the letter, the details from her childhood were what stood out to her the most as an adult, and those details are ones filled with the language of imagination and childhood innocence. As a a reader, I couldn’t help but connect this to how she ended the previous entry, with this urge to “return to that early mind.”

In the short essay “Ocean 1212-W,” we, as readers, see this recreation in action. I say recreation because it was purposeful. According to the research of Crowther and Steinberg, Plath was working on this piece of prose with Leonie Cohn of the BBC’s Talk’s Department, for a segment entitled “Landscape of Childhood” This was a commissioned piece of writing, one that would eventually be broadcast on the BBC’s Third Programme. Unfortunately, Plath died in February of 1963, so it was read by June Tobin in August 1963 instead.

In Ted Hughes’ introduction to the Johnny Panic collection, he wrote about Plath’s desire to not only write stories, novels, and poetry, but also to write more journalistic non-fiction and “Ocean 1212-W” is one example. He wrote of her wish to “become a proficient freelance journalist, who could wander about the world and finance her adventures by writing about them. One might imagine there could have been few writers so naturally endowed to become a readable travel writer […] during her last year, the liberation that occurred in her poetry and in her fictional prose occurred also in her journalism. The three or four commissioned pieces she wrote then seemed to me amount her freest things.”

In the Johnny Panic collection, “Ocean 1212-W” is dated as being written in 1962. While it is described as an essay and it does indeed capture detailed descriptions of the events and people from her childhood by the sea, Plath’s artistry as a writer is still on full display, specifically with the way she reflects back on these experiences. Her rich use of imagery and metaphor jump out of the page and the way she is able to still link these experiences to one of the major conflicts that pervades her writing, that conflict of the self, the I am I, provides Plath readers with a new perspective of what her writing voice was able to accomplish in a completely different genre. In this way, I can see why Hughes wrote that in these essays, Plath was able to achieve a kind of freedom that she couldn’t always achieve in her poetr

I cannot represent the essay as a whole, but what I wanted to do was to at least give you small glimpses into the world she was able to recreate and the evident skill in which she was able to do so:

“I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own. I pick it up, exile that I am, like the purple ‘lucky stones’ I used to collect with a white ring all the way round, or the shell of a blue muscle with its rainbows angel’s fingernail interior; and in one wash of memory the colors deepen and gleam, the early world draws breath” (21)

“Like a deep woman, it [the sea] hid a good deal; it had many faces, many delicate, terrible veils. It spoke of miracles and distances; if it could court, it could also kill” (21)

“Even my grandfather…He stalked off his sneakers, wounded too, but whistling. I waited till his shape rounded Water Tower hill and dwindled in the direction of the sea promenade; its ice-cream and hot-dog stalls were boarded up still, in spite of the mild pre-season weather. His lyrical whistle beckoned me to adventure and forgetting. But I didn’t want to forget. Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin. I trusted off on my own, in the opposite directions toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everthing. I felt the wall of my skin: I am I. The stone is stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over” (24).

“And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth” (27).


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I want to return briefly to the work of Crowther and Steinberg. When I decided to return to writing academically about Plath, I started rereading works I worked with while writing my MA Thesis. I was, and still am, also introducing myself to works I hadn’t encountered during my studies, and Crowther and Steinberg’s Ghostly Archives is one example. I will admit I haven’t finished it yet, but for the purpose of this post, I want to point out something in the introduction that will help me to enter into my narrative for this second section.

In their introduction of their archival work, Crowther and Steinberg introduce readers to the concept of the living archive. They write: “By this, we mean those places in the physical environment that Plath visited and lived in that became important contribution to her life and work […] we argue that the archive exists as history on the ground. A place, a house, or even a room can contain an archive because it houses time, event, memories, and past histories.”

While this blog will often focus on my academic interest in Plath, one of the main reasons I wanted to start a blog focused on my experience reading Plath is simply because I am an avid fan of her writing. I joke and tell my students I’m a super-fan. This means that I have already been to Wellesley to just get an idea of the town where she grew up as an adolescent. I also “visited” the house on Elmwood that she lived in, where she first attempted suicide. I write visited that way because I literally just sat in my car. While this may put me in the category of stalker, that quote above helped me to better understand WHY I needed to go there. It was a visual representation of a part of Plath’s life, one that I can only visit now, far past the time Plath was alive. While I’ve read so much about her life up until that point, being able to be in that space physically, even if at a distance, was something of an emotional journey for me to feel connected to her.

In September of 2018, I took a drive up to Point Shirley in Winthrop for this same reason. Because that place and that ocean “became [an] important contribution to her life and work,” it was a trip I had longed to take for some time. One may argue that I could’ve taken it much sooner, seeing as I only live 40 miles south of Winthrop. While I won’t go into much detail, I will admit that I suffer from generalized anxiety and chronic panic attacks and for some time, this affected my ability to drive long distances. Therefore, this trip was not just about Plath. It was also about confronting a debilitating fear that kept me from driving on the highway for some time. It was a way for me to take ownership of that fear, to accept it and live with it, because this place was just that important for me to take the existential risk my brain had convinced me it would be.

I wasn’t disappointed. Part of my inclination to Plath was that she was, always at heart, a Massachusetts girl. She was raised here and she went to school here. So to know that in just an hour drive I could stand on that same pebbled shore as she had done as a child some 75+ years ago, well, it was powerful. Her words followed me, especially as I sat under the Water Tower watching Olive, my then 2 year old lab running into the ocean, chasing after seagulls, unleashed and free. It gave me the space to just absorb the real beauty of the space, immortalized by Plath’s words. While I will never be able to meet her, having the opportunity to, at the very least, visit those spaces in which she lived, in which she grew through the experiences that shaped her as a writer, it gave me the ability to experience that living archive. And in the photos I was able to capture, I hope that I was also able to capture the magic and beauty of that space.


Sources:

Crowther, Gail and Peter K. Steinberg. These Ghostly Archives: The Unearthing of Sylvia Plath. Fonthill Media, 2017.

Plath, Sylvia. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts. HarperPerennial, 2008.

                        —Letters Home. Ed. Aurelia S. Plath. Harper & Row, 1975.

                        —The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Karen V. Kukil. Anchor Books, 2000.

                        —The Letters of Sylvia Plath. Ed. Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil. Harper Collins, 2017