Plath Profiles vol. 11
Essays
Plath Profiles
4
Plath Profiles vol. 11
“I Never Will Need Shorthand”
Sylvia Plath and Speedwriting
by Catherine Rankovic
In an aerogramme from London
dated September 23, 1960, 27-year-
old poet and short-story writer Sylvia
Plath asked her mother, Mrs. Aurelia
Plath, to find among Plath’s
possessions back in Wellesley,
Massachusetts, her yellow
paperback speedwriting book, and
mail it.
1
An American living in
London with her husband and infant,
Plath was competing for informal
temporary clerical jobs and finding
them closed to applicants without
shorthand or another kind of rapid-
writing skill. In Britain, the most basic
clerical title was not, as in the United
States, “typist” or “secretary,” but
“shorthand typist,”
2
spelling out the
skills required.
1
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2, p.
513.
2
Cryer, P. (n.d.) Shorthand-Typing: A
Common Employment for Women in
1950s Britain [Web log post]. Retrieved
September 9, 2016 from
www.1900s.org.uk.; and Plath, S., letter
to Aurelia Plath, January 27, 1961;
Letters, vol. 2, p. 571.
“Shorthand,” also called
“stenography,” denotes a written
language—using symbols, which
was developed for professional
note-taking for business purposes. In
the U.S., and in the writings of Sylvia
Plath, “shorthand” refers almost
always to Gregg shorthand—the
most efficient of several competing
20th-century shorthand systems. A
stenographer typically met with her
boss and, using shorthand, captured
his dictated words, verbatim, and in
handwriting, ideally kept pace with
the normal speaking speed of about
120 words per minute. Mastering
Gregg shorthand requires six
months to two years of study and
practice, and this is as true now as it
was a century ago when Gregg was
new.
3
3
“The Four Shorthand Pitfalls,”
Shorthand and Typewriter News, vol. 2,
no. 2, February 1914, p. 30: “Make up
your mind that you cannot expect to
become much of a shorthand writer in
less than a year of hard work; the
chances are that it will be nearer
eighteen months before you are ‘worth
your salt’.”
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
Over the 2000 years stenography
has been known to exist, it had most
of the time been used by males;
mainly for courtroom reporting or its
equivalent. As such, it was
considered an accomplishment and
a manly art. Samuel Pepys and
Charles Dickens, for their own
reasons, wrote in shorthand.
President Abraham Lincoln’s two
male secretaries took his dictation in
shorthand. Female stenographer-
typists entered the full-time U.S.
workforce in significant numbers
between 1870 and 1880. By 1890,
the business-office hierarchy was
stratified by gender into those who
dictated and those who took
dictation and typed it up; already
the percentage of stenographer-
typists who were female was 64
percent and typewriting and
shorthand skills were devalued
proportionately.
4
Stenography
became aspirational not for males,
but for females. In a popular youth
novel published in 1904, eight-year-
old Nan Bobbsey, a businessman’s
daughter, declares she is going to
become a stenographer when she
grows up. Nan’s father has a female
stenographer.
5
4
https://www.officemuseum.com/office_
gender.htm, table “US Stenographers
and Typists, 1870-1930.” Retrieved 19
November 2017.
5
The Bobbsey Twins: Merry Days
Indoors and Out, p. 8.
Soon after the first mass entry of
women into the U.S. business
workforce, most office jobs for
females were clerical and most
clericals female, and that was the
case in Plath’s time and now.
6
In the
mid-20th century, even the most
highly educated women expected to
start their careers as clericals. Plath
wrote in her journal of June-July
1953, “When I apply for jobs after
college, or after graduate school, I
will want to know typing and
shorthand. . . my bargaining power
will be much better” (The Journals of
Sylvia Plath, 543; ellipsis in original).
Sylvia Plath resisted learning
shorthand and in fact never learned
it. In The Bell Jar, Plath’s
autobiographical novel set in the
year 1953, Plath’s protagonist Esther
Greenwood, a college English major
like Plath, is repelled by her glimpse
of Gregg shorthand symbols in one
of her mother’s teaching textbooks
6
England, Kim and K. Boyer, “Women’s
Work: The Feminization and Shifting
Meaning of Clerical Work.” Journal of
Social History, Vol. 43, No. 2, pp. 307-
340; and Kurtz, Annalyn, “Why
Secretary Is Still the Top Job for
Females.” CNN Business, January 31,
2013.
https://money.cnn.com/2013/01/31/ne
ws/economy/secretary-women-
jobs/index.html?iid=HP_LN, retrieved
June 18, 2019. Web.
6
Plath Profiles vol. 11
(The Bell Jar, 61). They remind her of
the “hideous, cramped, scorpion-
lettered formulas” and
abbreviations, such as those in the
periodic table, taught in her college
physics and chemistry courses.
Esther explains, “What I couldn’t
stand was this shrinking everything
into letters and numbers” (29).
Gregg’s silent language of
“scribbled little curlicues” was a
ticket for ambitious young women
into clerical jobs better paid than
those without it, or jobs more
compatible with their interests.
Esther cannot imagine herself in any
job using shorthand (100).
Yet the job market finally forced
Sylvia Plath to acquire skill in
something resembling shorthand:
speedwriting.
Speedwriting is a form of rapid
writing using the cursive Roman
alphabet. Technically, then, it is
longhand rather than shorthand. But
speedwriting could be learned in
weeks rather than months or years,
and in a pinch could pass as
“shorthand” on the job. Learning
speedwriting wedged open one of
the few doors that Plath found
closed to her.
Fig. 1. Speedwriting, in black; the identical words in Gregg shorthand in red.
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
While living with her husband Ted
Hughes in Boston in 1958—both of
them beginning to try to write full-
time—Plath for the first time wanted
a clerical job to “give [her] life a kind
of external solidity and balance” it
apparently did not have on its own
(Complete Letters, vol. 2, 266).
Unused to an unprecedented
amount of unstructured time, she
agonized in her journal about feeling
unable to write fiction. In her journal
on Sunday, September 14, Plath
resolved to follow a strict writing
schedule starting the next day. It
dissolved in panic and creative
paralysis. She wrote that she had not
lived enough to have something to
write about. “I don’t want a job until
I am happy with writing—yet feel
desperate to get a job—to fill myself
up with some external reality”
(Journals, 420, 422). She wrote to
the Smith College vocational office
in September 1958, asking for help
and giving references, but received
no answer until she wrote again in
April 1959.
7
In the meantime, Plath went to an
employment agency that, in
October 1958, placed her in a
temporary job in Massachusetts
General Hospital’s department of
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).
adult psychiatry.
8
The job would
prove pivotal to her creative work.
Why Plath Hated Shorthand
In The Bell Jar Plath, through her
protagonist, details her reasons for
resisting from all quarters pressure
to learn shorthand. For aspiring
writers Sylvia Plath and Esther
Greenwood, who narrates The Bell
Jar, “shorthand” carried baggage
beyond being gendered, servile,
utterly foreign-looking and
commended by their mothers—the
real and the fictional—who both
taught shorthand professionally at a
business college. Esther says her
mother told her that “Nobody
wanted a plain English major” unless
she knew shorthand (Bell Jar, 61).
Esther internalizes this pressure. By
comparison with business-college
students who have learned
shorthand, Esther, a student at an
elite women’s college and a
prizewinning writer with professional
editorial experience, judges herself
as unskilled and unprepared for the
job market she must face after
graduation, in which bosses, almost
always male, literally dictate to
female clericals (Bell Jar, 62).
8
Journals, October 14, 1958, 424.
8
Plath Profiles vol. 11
A taker of shorthand must also
transcribe the boss’s dictation and
polish it using exacting language
protocols and editorial skills, then
format and type the document to
perfection. Only perfection would
do. Mid-century employers seeking
clericals, in want-ad columns labeled
“Women,” asked for quantifiable
skills such as typewriting and
shorthand, but tended to gloss
skilled language labor as “attention
to detail,” and allied with other “soft
skills” such as congeniality or
neatness: traits desirable in a clerical
worker yet not worth recognizing or
compensating. When the boss
accepted and signed the finished
document, he was claiming his
clerical’s language skills as his own.
The prospect of learning shorthand
threatens Esther more than most
because pressure to accept female-
gendered para-literary jobs feels to
her like pressure to surrender
whatever authorial agency she has
and prepare for an amanuensis role.
“I wanted to dictate my own thrilling
letters,” she says (Bell Jar, 62).
Plath’s journal entries from 1953 and
Esther’s first-person narrative, also
taking place in 1953, show both
accepting shorthand lessons as a
way of salvaging a disappointing
summer that both hoped to devote
to creative writing. Yet their
capitulations are not the same. Plath
mentioned planned summer
shorthand lessons in a letter to her
mother dated April 24, 1953 (Letters
vol. 1, 596); her tone is light. Plath
spends June in New York City
working in her dream job, returning
home disillusioned and depressed.
That and a disappointment related
to her writing has her imagining a
future so diminished that learning
shorthand that summer is a must,
something to cling to (Journals,
Appendix 5, pp. 543-546).
According to Mrs. Plath, Sylvia after
four lessons showed no aptitude for
shorthand and was only more deeply
depressed when they agreed to give
up (Letters Home, 124). Mrs.
Greenwood talks her depressed
daughter into learning shorthand
starting that same evening, the same
day Esther tried and failed to start
writing a novel (The Bell Jar, 99).
Esther Greenwood cuts short her
one and only shorthand lesson,
pleading a headache, and goes to
bed but lies awake considering
multiple new life plans. That night
she imagines strangling her
sleeping, snoring mother, whose
pincurls gleam “like a row of little
bayonets” (Bell Jar, 100). Even while
sleeping, Mrs. Greenwood is a
partisan for the system that would
welcome Esther only as a scribe for
men.
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
Sleepless Esther attempts to read
Finnegan’s Wake, the topic she has
chosen for her senior thesis, but the
letters on the page, as if animated,
take on “fantastic, untranslatable
shapes, like Arabic or Chinese” (Bell
Jar, 102) or like the chemical and
mathematical symbols Esther has
already told the reader she loathes,
or like Gregg shorthand. Finding
with Finnegan’s Wake that even the
English language eludes her, Esther
considers changing her college
major and track. Despairing of that,
she thinks of taking a break from
college and working full-time for a
year. Yet as Esther sees it, a female
who has not learned shorthand has
only two job options: waitress or
typist (Bell Jar, 103).
Esther’s conclusion about the job
outlook for women in the summer of
1953 might now seem reductive and
outdated, but only because in the
21st century we call a waitress a
server and a clerical an
administrative assistant. Clerical
work in 2018, 65 years later, was in
the U.S. the third most common
occupation for women and the most
gendered of the top ten full-time
occupations: 94.1 percent female.
9
9
U.S. Department of Labor Women’s
Bureau, Most Common Occupations for
Women:
https://www.dol.gov/wb/stats/employm
ent-earnings-occupations.htm -
largestshare, retrieved June 18, 2019;
In July 1958, five years after her
mental breakdown, two years into
her marriage and less than a month
into her writing year, Plath consulted
her mother about possible jobs both
interesting and lucrative. Mrs. Plath
gave her shorthand-resistant
daughter information about yet
another rapid-writing system:
stenotyping, or keyboarded
shorthand. It required formal
training. Plath considered it but
wrote to her mother she did not
want to have to take a course to
qualify for a job.
10
Esther Greenwood had been
annoyed that Gregg shorthand
reduced perfectly fine words into
crabbed little “curlicue” symbols.
When compelled by the job market
to learn some form of rapid writing,
learning speedwriting instead of
shorthand allowed Plath at least to
use the language she had mastered,
not a language she hadn’t. And her
choice spited or at least bypassed
her mother because speedwriting
“Why Secretary is Still Most Common
Job for Women,”
https://money.cnn.com/2013/01/31/ne
ws/economy/secretary-women-
jobs/index.html?iid=HP_LN retrieved
June 18, 2019.
10
The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2
(August 1, 1958), 267.
10
Plath Profiles vol. 11
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
public as a correspondence course.
Below is a detail of an advertisement
for Speedwriting in the November
1924 issue of Popular Science
magazine. It contrasts Gregg and
Pitman (the standard shorthand in
the United Kingdom) with
Speedwriting:
12
[Figure 2]
11
“Woman Inventor”. (1923, October
22). St. Louis Post-Dispatch, p. 28.
Retrieved September 4, 2017 from
www.newspapers.com
12
“Can You Read This?”
[Advertisement]. (1924 November).
Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 105 No.
5, p. 25. The first 34 pages of this issue
are advertisements, including
classifieds.
Dearborn’s was not the first such
system, but with similar, persistent
advertising that by 1928 had cost
her company nearly half a million
dollars, Speedwriting became a
stunning success. Hundreds of
schools in the U.S. and Canada
bought franchise rights to teach it
under that proprietary name.
Endorsements from Theodore
Roosevelt, Jr., and Admiral Richard
E. Byrd—whose polar-exploration
team Dearborn taught in person—
helped pitch Speedwriting to males
and management for whom
shorthand was women’s work.
13,14,15
13
Brett, H. “‘First the Public, Then the
Schools!’ Key to Success of a
Remarkable Woman”. (1928, October
28). Business Journal, p. 16. Retrieved
September 3, 2016.
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10
.1080/23722800.1928.10771228
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
Dearborn’s thriving Speedwriting
business suffered during the Great
Depression and from numerous
imitations and piracy. In 1931 a
circuit court ruled that Speedwriting
had no claim to copyright because it
was not a system but merely a way
to string letters together.
16
During a
setback in the economy, on July 28,
1937, Dearborn jumped from her
apartment window. She was among
the eight suicides who reportedly
14
“Getting Ready to Write South Pole
Story” [Captioned newspaper
photograph]. (1928, August 9). Brooklyn
Daily Eagle, p. 2. Retrieved July 27,
2017.
15
“Modern Woman a Radical in
Business Says Anne Morgan—‘No’ Says
Roosevelt”. (1927, March 21). The Daily
Notes (Canonsburg, PA). Web.
http://i.imgur.com/m7egntq.jpg.
Retrieved July 27, 2017 from
i.imgur.com
16
Brief English Systems vs. Owen, U.S.
Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
- 48 F.2d 555 (2d Cir. 1931) (1931, April
6),
http://law.justia.com/cases/federal/app
ellate-courts/F2/48/555/1569115.
Retrieved August 2, 2017 from
law.justia.com
leaped from windows in New York
City that day. She was 63.
17
School of Speedwriting ads, much
smaller than those of the 1920s,
continued to appear, demoted to
the glamorless classified-ad pages in
the back pages of magazines. A
classified ad in the September 1944
issue of Popular Mechanics, page
53A, lists Speedwriting’s selling
points after 20 years in business:
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.
Surprisingly low cost.
100,000 taught by mail.
Used in leading offices and
civil service. Write for free
booklet. Speedwriting,
Dept. 1510, 274 Madison
Ave., New York 16.
In the same issue of September
1944, large illustrated ads, picturing
males, advertised all types of
vocational courses, including
stenography, as preparation for
postwar employment. Despite
Speedwriting’s targeted
campaigning, stenography was
17
“Eight Killed in Falls from N.Y.
Windows”. (1937, July 30). Ottawa
Journal, p. 1. Retrieved August 2, 2017.
12
Plath Profiles vol. 11
women’s work. To see that, all
anyone had to do was enter a
business office. In 1930, 96 percent
of all stenographer-typists in the U.S.
were female; in 1964, counting the
stenographer-typists by that time
more commonly called
“secretaries,” 97 percent.
18,19
Sylvia Plath’s era, and the social
class her education permitted her to
access, framed shorthand as a skill
educated women could deploy
should more ambitious career plans
fail, so for Plath and Esther
Greenwood learning shorthand was
preparing for defeat. Yet what The
Bell Jar does not say or see is that
for women without college
educations, rapid-writing skill
offered an alternative to domestic
service or other physically taxing
employment. Until 1940 the largest
category of employment for women
in the U.S. was domestic service.
20
18
Gender and the office. Retrieved
August 2, 2017 from
http://www.officemuseum.com/office_g
ender.htm
19
Wirtz, W. Willard, U.S. Department of
Labor. Background Facts on Women
Workers in the United States. (1965,
September). p. 8. Retrieved August 2,
2017 from fraser.stlouisfed.org
20
May, Vanessa. “Domestic Workers in
U.S. History.” Oxford Research
Encyclopedias, “American History.”
Web. Retrieved June 19, 2019.
Shorthand or speedwriting to many
women meant not a step down into
servility but a step up from what
otherwise might be literal
servanthood.
School of Speedwriting ads
targeting females featured photos of
well-groomed young women and
the now iconic Speedwriting slogans
“bkm a steno & gt a gd jb & hi pa”
(later revised to say, “bkm a sec & gt
a gd jb”) in general-interest and
women’s magazines and on placards
in buses and subway cars. These
persisted until the 1970s, when in
the U.S. inexpensive portable
dictation machines such as the
Dictaphone and Dictabelt eroded
the market value of rapid-writing
credentials. The latest School of
Speedwriting ad I could find
appeared in the September 1977
issue of Mademoiselle. It said, in
plain block lettering, “Yes, I went to
college. But Speedwriting got me
my job.”
The Speedwriting slogan’s
rewording, from “bkm a steno” to
“bkm a sec,” reflects also the
advancement of the job title
“secretary” over “stenographer.”
The single female business-office
“steno,” not a sidekick or Gal Friday
but a professional, was occasionally
glamorized in books and movies up
through the 1930s; one aspired to
become a stenographer as one
13
Plath Profiles vol. 11
might aspire to become a nurse. The
title and profession of
“stenographer” dissolved into the
catch-all title and job of “secretary,”
formerly a title for males. The Bell
Jar tells us that by 1953 stenography
was an entry-level skill.
Plath’s Choice
Dearborn’s Speedwriting
correspondence course, in six
slender volumes, like Gregg
shorthand inspired dozens of
competitors. These courses fed a
demand for vocational rapid-writing
training so enormous it is hard to
imagine today. Profits came from
textbook sales. Speedwriting-type
alphabetic systems introduced in the
1950s include Stenoscript (1950),
Quickhand (1953), the School of
Speedwriting’s authorized update,
Speedwriting Shorthand (1954),
Forkner Alphabet Shorthand (1955),
and Carter Briefhand (1957).
Because no samples of Plath’s
speedwriting have been discovered
it isn’t certain which system she
chose to learn, but Emma
Dearborn’s School of Speedwriting
ads reliably appeared for Plath’s
entire lifespan in the women’s
magazines Plath read, wrote for, and
always aimed to write more for—
including the issue of Mademoiselle
Plath guest-edited, August 1953—
and Plath and her mother both
capitalized “Speedwriting” when
writing the word, Mrs. Plath the most
consistently. [Figure 3]
14
Plath Profiles vol. 11
[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
humbler applicants by making
shorthand, a lengthy and expensive
course of study, a job requirement
whether the position demanded it or
not. That was my own experience.
Rapid-writing skill also confirmed the
candidate’s lack of resistance to
preparing for and accepting highly
skilled, responsible, and gendered
work with a gendered salary and
little to no chance of advancement
into jobs gendered male. Rapid-
writing systems proliferated as they
did because, like Esther Greenwood,
females seeking employment either
learned a form of rapid writing or
faced futures as waitresses or typists,
who forewent the extra dollars
shorthand skill could bring. When
former Fulbright scholar, Smith
College and Cambridge graduate
and former Mademoiselle guest
editor Plath sought office work in
15
Plath Profiles vol. 11
Boston and later in London, even
those qualifications did not allow her
to defy job-market norms. Plath
briefly considered learning
stenotyping. Plath’s August 1, 1958
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
concern. In a marginal note written
in Gregg shorthand on Plath’s
letters—Mrs. Plath made many such
notes—Mrs. Plath left proof of her
worry about the Hughes’s financial
future even before the couple had
married. On a letter from Sylvia
dated May 16, 1956, in reference to
Sylvia’s typewritten words “Our
children will have such fun,” Mrs.
Plath wrote in Gregg, “if they don’t
starve first.”
21
(The couple married
on June 16, 1956.)
21
Rankovic, Catherine, “Aurelia Plath
Shorthand Transcription Table from
Correspondence in the Lilly Library
Plath Archive Plath mss. II”, ID #76,
Court reporters master highly
specialized stenotype keyboarding
able to record up to 225 words per
minute, and can decipher its cryptic
output [Figure 4]
The Hugheses were living in London
with their six-month-old daughter
when Sylvia on November 19, 1960
wrote a second time to her mother
that by brushing up her
speedwriting she could qualify for
“amusing” odd jobs (Letters, vol. 2,
542). Plath nagged her mother for
the speedwriting book in further
letters dated December 17 and
December 24, 1960, suggesting
finally, “Couldn’t you invent some
pretext to get the book from the
school as a teacher? I never will
need shorthand as this will would
epublications.marquette.edu/AureliaPla
th, accessed June 19, 2019. Web.
16
Plath Profiles vol. 11
cover all my needs. I’m dying to get
hold of it.”
22
Mrs. Plath hadn’t been lax about
finding and sending the book. She
habitually responded to her
daughter’s requests without delay.
The book Plath wanted wasn’t
among the items Plath had left in
Wellesley because it wasn’t her
book. In Letters Home, page 348, in
a note appended to Plath’s letter to
her of August 1, 1958, Mrs. Plath
wrote that Plath in 1958 taught
herself speedwriting from books lent
by “a mutual friend,” identified in
Mrs. Plath’s original manuscript of
Letters Home as author Mary
Stetson Clarke, and this is confirmed
by letters of thanks Sylvia Plath and
Mrs. Plath sent to Clarke in spring
1959. Both letters say Ted Hughes
provided Plath with dictation for
practice.
23
22
Letters of December 24, 1960, The
Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 2,
p. 556.
23
Plath mss. II, Box 9, folder 8, p. 45,
Sylvia Plath Archive, Lilly Library,
Indiana University-Bloomington; Aurelia
Plath to Mary Stetson Clarke, letter,
March 15, 1959; The Complete Letters
of Sylvia Plath, Vol. 2, letter, Sylvia Plath
to Mary Stetson Clarke, April 10, 1959,
p. 309-310. Footnote 2 on p. 309 of
Complete Letters says Clarke bought
for Plath “a book on learning
shorthand,” but Plath herself in the April
10 letter calls it a speedwriting book,
The “Johnny Panic” Breakthrough
Plath was elated by her new
temporary secretarial job in the
Adult Psychiatric Clinic at
Massachusetts General Hospital. She
interviewed incoming patients,
transcribed doctors’ case notes and
letters, and kept patients’ records. In
her October 14, 1958 journal entry
she wrote that her job:
gives my day, & Ted’s an objective
structure . . . the job is good for me
. . . my objective daily view of
troubled patients through the
records objectifies my own view of
myself. I shall try to enter into this
schedule a wedge of writing—to
expand it. I feel my whole sense &
understanding of people being
deepened & enriched by this: as if I
had my wish & opened up the souls
of the people in Boston and read
them deep (Journals, 424). In other
words, the job was a win-win.
By December 16, 1958 Plath had
finished the first of two short stories
inspired by her hospital job
and Aurelia Plath says in Letters Home
(348) that the “books” were lent. Linda
Wagner-Martin states in Sylvia Plath: A
Biography (1987; p. 157) that Plath in
1958 “relearned” speedwriting, but
there is no evidence that Plath learned
it before 1959.
17
Plath Profiles vol. 11
(Journals, 441). The narrator, never
named, of “Johnny Panic and the
Bible of Dreams” is a clerical worker
who transcribes, types, copies and
compiles psychiatric patients’
accounts of their fearsome dreams,
both as part of her job and secretly.
She does this in the service of an
invisible authority, Johnny Panic,
god of fear. Plath actually did keep
her own private notes about
patients’ ills and dreams. As she had
wished, she discovered in her job
raw material for her writing (Journals,
Appendix 14, “Hospital Notes,”
624-629). The story’s narrator
interviews new patients and takes
dictation from recordings made and
played back on an audiograph
(Johnny Panic and the Bible of
Dreams, 160), an office machine
probably trademarked Audograph,
then the most common make. Plath
refers again to an audiograph in a
1959 story about hospital clerical
workers, “The Daughters of Blossom
Street” (Johnny Panic,129).
The boss using an audiograph can
voice-record at any hour dictation
onto a vinyl disk the typist can play
and replay. Boss and typist need
never meet, and encoding
communications in handwriting and
then transcribing them is not
necessary. Plath wrote her mother
about having used speedwriting
while employed at Harvard
University (Complete Letters, vol. 2,
542), but never wrote in fact or
fiction about using speedwriting at
the hospital, although Mrs. Plath
claims Sylvia used it there (Letters
Home, 348). The audiograph was
one of a growing family of office
machines soon to drive rapid writing
out of the workplace.
Recording technologies for office
work were not new. In her
introduction to Letters Home, Mrs.
Plath wrote that during the summer
between her high school graduation
and college, the summer of 1924,
she had her first full-time job:
transcribing dictation from
recordings made on wax cylinders.
She swore then that no child of hers
would have to do such dull and
grueling work (Letters Home, 5).
In the story “Johnny Panic and the
Bible of Dreams” Plath’s first-person
narrator spiritualizes her clerical job.
By imagining herself the scribe of a
god, not a man, her nine-to-five job
in a psychiatric clinic is not mundane
or servile but an indispensable
source of valued material she
smuggles home, where she is
editing a bible of horrifying dreams.
In a routinized and clinical work
environment dedicated to easing
suffering, the narrator alone
appreciates patients’ agonizing
dreams and fears as Johnny Panic’s
artworks, copying them into
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
notebooks or memorizing recorded
dictation for later transcription into
her bible (Johnny Panic, 160). It
seems she began her secret
copywork along with her job,
because she fears being caught and
“losing my job and all my source
material” (164). For patients who
present no dream, the narrator
unearths one, relishing the chance.
Her own “dream of dreams” is of
viewing, from above, a reservoir
filling with all humanity’s bad
dreams, a turgid cesspool of
dragons, snakes and floating body
parts, a “sewage farm of the ages”
(158). Working all day with
distressed people and systematically
keeping records, meanwhile she
dreams of a smoking, chaotic
landscape inhabited only by
monsters. The narrator credits her
god Johnny Panic with injecting “a
poetic element into this business
you don’t often find elsewhere. And
for that he has my eternal gratitude”
(161).
Christian imagery—a device later to
function exquisitely as fretwork in
Plath’s poetry—begins to swamp the
story when the male Clinic Director
discovers Plath’s narrator reading
and transcribing old case studies
after hours. Firmly taking her arm,
the Clinic Director escorts the
narrator to a fourth-floor hall “empty
as a church on Monday” (167) and to
its Observation Ward and its
monstrous secretary, Miss
Millravage. Also present are Johnny
Panic’s priests, in straitjackets; the
narrator, clutching her notebook and
hoping they recognize her, raises it
and says to them, “Peace. I bring to
you. . .” “None of that old stuff,
sweetie,” says Miss Millravage
(Johnny Panic, 170).
Crooning “My baby,” Miss
Millravage embraces the narrator,
who fights. Once subdued, the
narrator is stripped and robed in
sheets for electroshock therapy
intended to punish and cure her
devotion to Johnny Panic. Miss
Millravage fits the narrator’s head
with “a crown of wire” and on the
narrator’s tongue lays “the wafer of
forgetfulness.” Electroshock therapy
is presented as a Christ-like torture,
and in its throes the narrator has an
epiphany, seeing Johnny Panic in all
his glory. He has not abandoned
her.
This story of a clerical worker
reaches farther than any other into
Plath’s imagination, fantasies and
memory. She did not write another
like it. Looking back, Plath fans
might excitedly call “Johnny Panic”
a preview of The Bell Jar, yet in the
context of 1958 “Johnny Panic” was
a story about a creative
nonconformist sacrificed to a
conformist environment by enforcers
of the status quo. Although nimbly
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
told, the story’s theme was a trope
of that era, the beatnik era. Its two-
dimensional rendering—like a fable
it has no subplot, and the narrator
has no past, no friends or family, and
never mentions money—and tone-
deaf religious references did not
appeal to any of the publishers Plath
sent it to. The story was not
published in her lifetime. Plath in
October 1960 disparaged “Johnny
Panic” as “a sort of mental hospital
monologue ending up with the
religious communion of shock
treatment” (Letters vol. 2, 530).
Plath until “Johnny Panic” labored
to write fiction about adolescents or
young couples. Her journals of
summer 1958 show her struggling to
take a step forward. “Johnny Panic”
is Plath’s step forward, tied by
subject and date of composition to
the secretarial job begun in
October. Plath wrote on December
16, 1958 that the story was
complete and polished. She did not
have high hopes for it, calling it
“queer and quite slangy,” (Journals,
441), a voice she does not yet
recognize as her own—not at all. In
February 1959 Plath wrote in her
journal that she will have made a
step forward when she writes a story
for Ladies’ Home Journal (471).
The story’s narrator, however, is a
new figure in Plath’s fiction: an adult
wage-earning female, age 33, older
than Plath, nourished by her
employment and retaining her
personal agency even while taking
dictation. She keeps an
uncompromising sense of mission in
an anti-creative environment. Plath’s
fictional clericals, including the
secretary in the 1962 verse play
Three Women, are not unhappy
workers yet recognize their
workplaces as fundamentally
inhumane, and transgress by saying
so.
From February through April 1959
Plath worked at a second part-time
job, in which she did use
speedwriting. On May 2 she wrote in
one day The Bed Book, a children’s
book (Journals, May 3, 1959, 480).
On May 31 she wrote in her journal,
“I have written six stories this year,
and the three best of them in the
last two weeks!” (Journals, 486). The
three includes “This Earth Our
Hospital,” later published under her
new title, “The Daughters of
Blossom Street.” It is again a first-
person hospital story, but realistic
and without flair. A group of hospital
secretaries responsible for the
paperwork about the hospital’s
dying and dead cannot bring
themselves to acknowledge
morbidity when facing it—which
even their lowly office boy can do.
The story’s narrator is one of the
secretaries, and no different. In
November when she sold the story
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
Plath wrote The London Magazine’s
editor giving her new choice of title
saying it better described “the
Secretaries being almost ritual,
attendant figures in the euphemistic
ceremonies softening the bare fact
of death.”
24
The Second Voice of Three Women,
a dramatic poem about pregnancy
and birth written in 1962, is a
pregnant secretary who criticizes her
male co-workers in the office as
“cardboard” and “flat”:
That flat, flat flatness from which
ideas, destructions,
Bulldozers, guillotines, white
chambers of shrieks proceed,
Endlessly proceed – and the cold
angels, the abstractions. (Collected
Poems, p. 177)
To herself, Plath called “The
Daughters of Blossom Street” her
best story, “full of humor, highly
colored characters, good, rhythmic
conversation. An amazing advance
from ‘Johnny Panic’” (Journals, May
31, 1958, 487). This is an
overestimation. By October 6 her
journal entry lumps it with other
stories she has written that prove
“duller than tears.” “Johnny Panic,”
24
Letter to John Lehman, November
12, 1959, The Letters of Sylvia Plath,
vol. 2, p. 368.
however, bears her re-reading
(Journals, 515).
Getting There
In her January 10, 1961 letter
(Complete Letters, vol. 2, p. 567),
Plath thanked Mrs. Plath for sending
a Speedwriting book, and on
January 27 wrote her mother about
enjoying her temporary job doing
copyediting and layout for the
special spring issue of The
Bookseller, London’s “organ of the
book trade” (p. 571). In 1976 its
editor remembered Plath’s initial
visit to the office:
What I recalled particularly
was the real indignation with
which she insisted that she
was offering no literary
qualifications but formidable
typing and shorthand skills.
25
Plath seemed confident that her
refreshed speedwriting skill could
pass for shorthand. Whether she
used speedwriting on that job is not
known. On February 2, 1961, Plath
thanked her mother for the yellow
speedwriting book, and then on
February 9 for “all the speedwriting
25
The Bookseller, March 27, 1976, p.
1761. News clipping held by Smith
College.
21
Plath Profiles vol. 11
books,” and does not mention
speedwriting again.
26
Plath had a miscarriage on February
6, 1961, and would have an
appendectomy on February 28. She
wrote the poem “Tulips,” which Ted
Hughes called a breakthrough poem
and herald of her “Ariel voice,” on
March 18. In April she began
drafting The Bell Jar, which opens
by describing her office co-
workers.
27
Plath’s office jobs fed her confidence
and the confidence fed her fiction. It
can be argued that after
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
Davidow-Goodman and Leo Goodman,
April 27, 1961, Letters vol. 2, 614).
Psychiatrist Roger Gould wrote that
“One of the appeals of a business
career is that the business world has
banned human frailty.” It sanitized
the workplace biologically and also,
for the successful, expunged from
their record any human flaws.
28
If
that is true, Plath’s office stories and
references to office life and practice
are critiques from the unexpected
point of view of one whose minor
role in the business world was
destined and enforced, who could
therefore afford to explore human
frailty in such settings, and in
common language anyone could
read.
28
Gould, Robert, Transformations:
Growth and Change in Adult Life, p.
230.
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Plath Profiles vol. 11
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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