Aurelia Plath's Heart Attacks

"A heart attack laid her mother out two months ago," Ted Hughes wrote to Al Alvarez in November 1971. He meant Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath. In September of that eventful Plath year Aurelia, age 65, had a heart attack. Today we call her ailment "broken heart syndrome" or takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Its trigger is sudden and grievous stress.

What happens: One heart ventricle balloons. "Takotsubo" means "octopus pot." No joke.

Aurelia described "long periods of excessively rapid and irregular heart episodes," pain and unconsciousness. The doctor prescribed bed rest 12 hours out of 24 and no stress. Neither was possible. The Bell Jar U.S. rollout in spring 1971 made Aurelia's daughter's novel the talk of the nation, and Aurelia felt ashamed as its Boston-area characters were matched to her neighbors and to Sylvia's dates, classmates and mentors, and herself.

Aurelia also made it her business to keep Sylvia's benefactress Olive Higgins Prouty, then almost 90 and unwell, from ever reading The Bell Jar, a task because Prouty lived until 1974. As of July 1971 forcibly retired from Boston University after 29 years, broken-hearted or not Aurelia had to work, commuting weekly to a community college on the Cape. On October 30, 1971, a month after the heart attack, she wrote:

Five days a week I walk the hill from the parking lot to the College, then the 43 steps up to my office (no lifts!)—slowly and with pauses. If, between classes, I have no student to counsel and I feel exhausted, I lock my door, take a pillow from my chair and stretch out on the rug on the floor to relax and gain enough energy to continue. I drive the 100 miles from Brewster to my dear home in Wellesley only about once a month now.

 

Aurelia wrote a friend the following year that "I did not expect to reach Christmas '71 alive." Olwyn Hughes, who published the U.S. Bell Jar over Aurelia's protests, wrote a letter feigning concern and suggesting yoga. Aurelia replied just as insincerely, blaming her heart attack on Sylvia's old boyfriend Gordon Lameyer's unpublished memoir in manuscript. By contrast The Bell Jar's portrayal of clueless mother figure "Mrs. Greenwood," read by thousands that year, cost Aurelia friends, social standing, and any sympathy for the mother of a suicide. The book probably factored into Sylvia's decision to die. It spoiled other lives too. Only the Hugheses got any money, and they were not the happier for it.

Takotsubo can kill, but most patients recover within weeks. Aurelia's next "pressure heart attack" was in 1987, after reading a draft of Linda Wagner-Martin's Plath biography. Aurelia objected to hints about Sylvia's birth as "three weeks early" and that she had been an absent parent. "You have hurt me deeply," Aurelia wrote Wagner-Martin. "You did a massive undertaking well, except for the portrayal of me." Whether this heartbreak was a medical event or a guilt trip is not clear.