Beth Hinchliffe's Unpublished Sylvia Plath Biography

How differently we would read Sylvia Plath's work and life story had Elizabeth Hinchliffe's Plath biography been completed and published. It reminds me that "text" means "woven." It's vivid and intimate.

Part One of The Descent of Ariel, 58 pages, depicts Sylvia, in London in her final winter, as a nuisance who pounded on her downstairs neighbor's door until he opened it and wailed for his help: Would he please crawl over the roof and through a window because she'd locked herself out of her flat? Did he know a plumber? Clearly we're getting the neighbor's view of Sylvia. (In this manuscript he's called "Evans.") Hinchliffe kindly points out that during the worst of that winter, snowbound, Sylvia had no other adult to talk with; she didn't yet have a telephone.

Now, I don't believe everything I read unless I can find corroboration (from Latin, "to strengthen completely") and I had to find my own because this manuscript has no footnotes.

Corroboration: Sylvia's anguished letters from fall and winter 1962 and '63, and Dr. Anita Helle, a Plath relative: "Sylvia was almost beside herself with grief and terror in her last months."[1]

In the next chapter Otto Plath's fellow graduate students at Harvard's Bussey Institute describe Otto as a a timid, sniffling outsider who agreed with whatever anyone said and defended himself by quoting other people. A nice guy, someone said, who didn't "carry the guns" to be a scientist. Feared completing his dissertation because then he would have to defend it.

This matches the Otto of the 1918 FBI report: a nervous, morbid man who made no friends, lied that he thought he was a U.S. citizen, and when asked about the war did not say he was a pacifist. Otto saved his "Daddy" act for home. His kids learned to shed their real selves at the door and became quiet, well-mannered children so he wouldn't yell at them the way he yelled at their mother. They'd assume this outer armor for the rest of their lives.

Aurelia described her own parents as sources of love and laughter -- not as Austrian immigrants who shut out neighbors and tried to re-create Austria in their living room, speaking only German, teaching obedience to authority, to hide one's emotions, work hard, and expect the worst. I'd add that Aurelia's parents were Roman Catholics, a faith centered on sacrifice. They were taught to believe that mother pelicans, when they had to, tore their own flesh to feed the blood to their children. Although pelicans don't really do that. 

It was Aurelia's mother who looked for houses and found the one on Elmwood Road. Aurelia was at work, of course. Aurelia's mother had a car and was the household's only driver.

About Aurelia Plath -- plainly the source and link to much of this information -- the unfinished biography says Aurelia wanted her children to have the fun and freedom her own childhood did not. It doesn't mention Aurelia's job or college years, or any of her triumphs; in fact portrays her as friendless. So even a neighbor and professional journalist was another in a long line of biographers who didn't ask Aurelia about herself.

The manuscript, in the Fran McCullough archive at the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland-College Park, is 123 pages and incomplete. It includes a few photos. It's undated.

[1] A. Helle, "Family Matters," Northwest Review, Vol. 26 No. 2, 1988.

Poems About Aurelia Plath

Perseus isn't finished with Medusa until he turns his mother's suitor into stone.

"Sappho" by Beth Hinchliffe. America magazine, 29 June 2023. This poem was a runner-up in the Jesuit magazine's annual poetry contest. Aurelia Plath's friend and neighbor, journalist and author of an unpublished Plath biography, Hinchliffe said this was the first poem she ever wrote.

"Cottage Street, 1953" by Richard Wilbur describes Aurelia and a very depressed Sylvia having tea at his mother-in-law Edna Ward's house on Cottage Street in Wellesley. Mrs. Ward was Aurelia's friend. Hear Wilbur read the poem (and defend it).

"Aurelia Plath Confesses" by Lisa Mullenneaux, published in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer 2019. Mullenneaux is a poet, scholar, translator, and professor of writing, best known for the essay "Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath."

"Medusa" by Sylvia Plath (1962).

Frieda Hughes wrote several poems about her grandmother Aurelia. You've probably read some. Here are quotations from four different poems:

1. "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the least dead / Of us all?// You loved me not, just saw / A copy of the face / You gave birth to."

2. "Come live with me!" it cried, / Nostrils spread above like nose wings / As if the face would take off from its neck-end / Like a ghastly bald crow."

3. "Chipping away at her / As if she were an egg, / to be broken and beaten / And turned into something else."

4.  "She is the gypsy / Whose young have rooted / In the very flesh of her scalp. // Her eyes are drill-holes where / Your senses spin, and you are stone / Even as you stand before her."

Now match each quotation with the poem's title:

A) "Preparing the Ground"

B) "Medusa" 

C) "Thief"

D) "Granny"

Although Ted Hughes wrote at least one poem centered on Aurelia, Birthday Letters offers only glimpses. His poem "Night-Ride on Ariel" makes a typically chilling reference: "Mother / Making you dance with her magnetic eye / On your Daddy's coffin"

Answers: 1.D, 2.C, 3.A, 4.B

Her Parents' Graves

I traveled to Boston to view Plath-related sites and saw Otto's grave in Winthrop Cemetery and Aurelia Plath's in Wellesley's Woodlawn Cemetery. Both cemeteries are well-kept, tree-shaded, quiet and bewildering. Winthrop Cemetery has three terrace-like sections separated by streets and Otto is buried in the bottom-most terrace, the one not yet filled, which abuts a golf course. At Otto's grave I was alone. What came to mind was "He died like any man." There's no mythic aura unless you bring your own.

It's right off the path as Sylvia said. See it for yourself (video, 21 seconds).

At Aurelia Plath's grave in Wellesley I left a thank-you note near Aurelia's "flush marker," that is, a stone flush with the ground, not even a 3-D brick like Otto's. I used Findagrave.com's coordinates and map to find the Schober plot where Aurelia is buried at her parents' feet. Crabgrass partly obscures Aurelia's marker. Only garden tools could clean it up. I brought the thank-you note thinking gratitude is all any mother really wants. (I don't know what fathers want.) I weighted the note with a stray chunk of marble, and had my picture taken there for social media.

Woodlawn Cemetery, Wellesley, 2024

I had prepared to travel on to Linden, New Jersey and photograph the grave of Aurelia's African-American uncle Christopher Nicholson, buried in Rosedale-Rosehill Cemetery there. Burials in Manhattan are unlawful, so its dead end up in the boroughs or New Jersey. Phoned the cemetery, learned Nicholson has no marker and the only info is the date he was buried: October 31, 1956. The Manhattan death record says Nicholson was 70. In fact he was 73, but apparently he had no one close enough to know that, least of all his niece and great-niece Aurelia and Sylvia.

I didn't go to New Jersey.

Neither parent's gravestone has a quotation or says "beloved" or anything, and neither had any tributes such as plastic flowers, coins, or little flags. I should have brought and planted American flags on all three graves.

Because how these three people became family, Sylvia Plath's family, is a very American story.

Contusions: What Purple Means in Sylvia Plath

Medical Illustration by Dr. Ciléin Kearns (Artibiotics)

How a bruise works: an impact breaks the capillaries. Gradually the pooled blood breaks down into its components, as illustrated. Can't think of another writer besides Plath so taken with bruises. The crown jewel of the lot is her poem "Contusion," written February 4, 1963, Plath's third-to-last poem. The poem's speaker watches a bruise develop. The speaker doesn't say it's theirs. This bruise is somehow decisive: a minor injury elevated by its formal, medical name, it portends a death.

 

Sylvia Plath’s works include far more bruising than most writers describe by age 30. In The Bell Jar, a male escort’s grip on Esther Greenwood’s arm leaves purple fingerprints. Esther describes her injured face as “purple and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow.” The writer knows bruises, has studied them. Plath's journal says her first night with Ted Hughes gave her a "battered face smeared with a purple bruise" (26 March 1956). Over time, the bruises in Plath's work increase and so does her artfulness in describing them:

O adding machine--

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?

Must you stamp each piece in purple,

 

Must you kill what you can? ("A Birthday Present")

 

In October 1962 a jealous Plath wrote in the “The Swarm,” the most nebulous of Ariel’s bee poems, these heated and personal lines, like nothing else in the poem:

 

Jealousy can open the blood,

It can make black roses.

 

Admired for her evocative use of the colors red, black, and white, even yellow, the color purple in Sylvia Plath’s writings ranges from "wormy purple" in "Poem for a Birthday" to "The Ravaged Face" ("Grievously purpled, mouth skewered on a groan") to The Bell Jar's decorously sick Miss Norris who wears only purple. Emily Dickinson used the adjective "purple" more than 50 times, connoting, as it had for thousands of years, "priestly" or "princely," or like violets, which Dickinson loved. The first synthetic purple dye was patented in 1856: after that, anyone could wear it. I think Plath, who grew up without priests or princes, redefined the "royal color" as morbid or livid: Cadavers are purple-black. Berries bleed purple. "Fat purple figs" shrivel and rot.

In a draft of Plath's poem "Fever 103,º" purple did signify authority, the priestly type:

 

O auto-da-fe! 

The purple men, gold crusted, thick with spleen, 

Sit with their hooks and crooks and stoke the light.

 

Plath deleted that stanza after recording the poem for the BBC.

 

Worn by commoners, purples render them worse than common. Esther Greenwood's mother wore "a dress with purple cartwheels," and "looked awful." Esther's boss Jay Cee in a lavender suit, hat, and gloves "looked terrible, but very wise." (39) "Irwin's" friend "Olga," a professor's wife, wears purple slacks when she calls on Irwin, who has Esther as his guest instead. (227) Esther more authentically wears the color on her flesh, "bruised purple and green and blue" from insulin injections. (191) Purple, once so exclusively for royals that non-royals were killed for wearing it, Esther wears on her butt.

 

Plath's purples are fleshly and literal. In other Ariel poems one finds a purple tongue and a surgeon's description of the "purple wilderness" exposed during surgery. Plath made the color corporeal. And linked it with women's injuries.

I'm hoping someone will enrich the world with deeper thinking so I don't have to read Jonathan Bate (Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life) or his kind saying or quoting, "For Plath, desire was a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound," when Plath's purples communicate something else. [1]

[1] Martin Rubin, review of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, SFGate, 19 November 2015.

"I Am the Same, Identical Woman" (or Am I?)

Sylvia's paternal grandmother

Courtesy of a descendant, here is Ernestine Kottke Plath (1853-1919), Otto Plath's mother and Sylvia's grandmother. Inscribed on the reverse, "Earnestine Kottke," suggesting this photo was taken before she married in March 1882, when she was 28. It might have been cut from a group photo or her wedding photo. The photo's owner has other vintage family photos all inscribed with the names of those pictured.

The Gibson-girl hairdo suggests the photo was taken after 1880: It's typical to fix one's hair stylishly when sitting for a photo. Where the photo was taken is not known.

I can barely reconcile this image with a known image of Ernestine, age 62, taken at Oregon State Hospital (formerly "for the Insane") in 1916. Another descendant shown the "young" photo had never seen it, could not confirm it was Ernestine Kottke although it was so labeled. What do you think? The older Ernestine seems to be toothless. Here is information about how aging alters one's nose.

There exists a third photo of Ernestine Plath posed with her husband, taken in Oregon between 1911 and 1916, showing features their son Otto inherited.

Theodor and Ernestine Plath had seven children: the first died in infancy, and Otto was born next, in 1885. Ernestine was first hospitalized for depression, sleeplessness, and "persecution" in 1905, three years after moving with her family from Prussia to North Dakota. In Oregon her diagnosis was dementia. Just another "sad Plath woman"? I don't think so. In both photos I see spirit.

The Light of the Mind

"Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest." -Teju Cole

Usually I'm in some archive or library thrilled to be hunting out Plath material and am rarely photographed in such places. Here I am at the Merseyside Maritime Museum in Liverpool, England, viewing old photos of the R.M.S. Lake Ontario, a boat first designed to carry mail. Measuring 400 feet by 45 feet, it was re-fitted to carry 600 steerage passengers, among them Sylvia Plath's grandmother Ernestine and five of her children, who crossed from Liverpool to Canada in 1901.

The R.M.S. Lake Ontario was an old banger built in 1887, twice damaged in collisions, and scrapped in 1905.

Nine million European emigrants passed through Liverpool. Those who began their journey at the port of Hamburg usually first landed at Hull, near London. From there they were packed into trains that delivered them directly to Liverpool.

Bones to Pick With Dick Norton

Sylvia Plath and Dick Norton

Found among Aurelia Plath's papers: a handwritten list of graceless/boneheaded comments aired by Sylvia's boyfriend Dick Norton, comments first made to Sylvia, who seethed and told her mother. Aurelia overheard at least one. Aurelia wrote down and numbered each and titled the list "Bones to Pick with Dick N.", that title in Gregg shorthand so we know Aurelia was its author.

1. "A poem is an infinitesimal speck of dust."

2.  "Anybody who can read can major by himself in English. Waste of time!"

3.  On Sylvia's arrival at Raybrook (where she was hoping to catch up on work and put on paper a story that was fermenting within her) -- "Well, you haven't grown any shorter!"

4. "A zircon looks like a diamond from a little distance. A large one would be impressive."

5.  "I suppose your grandfather looks forward to a visit with his cronies." [Aurelia continued:] That settled dad's visiting with the N.s in the living room after dinner. Of course poor Grammy had to plead weariness and retire upstairs, too! (I was blamed for snobbishness.) 

Document, black ink on a half-sheet of white paper, date unknown.

Sylvia's Grandmother's Mental Hospital, Jamestown, North Dakota

Sylvia Plath's grandmother Ernestine Plath spent five years in this North Dakota mental hospital: 1905 to 1910. The print says, "Main Bldg, N.D. Hospital for the Insane, Jamestown, N. Dak." Somebody printed picture postcards of the North Dakota state insane asylum? Hey, it was handsome and modern. Few or no locked rooms, chains, or cages: The hospital's director, a progressive, instead of confining patients gave them jobs. While Ernestine was here, the hospital was Jamestown's largest employer. 

Crowded with more than 600 patients, the Hospital for the Insane in 1904 stopped admitting females except for the sickest. Ernestine Plath was one of them. "Jamestown" was the first of two mental hospitals in which Ernestine spent a total of eight years.

Sylvia Plath's Black Relatives: Atlantic City Waiter

Century Association, 7 West 43rd St., New York

Sylvia Plath's black great-uncle Christopher Nicholson once worked in an exclusive arts-and-letters men's club, the Century Association in Manhattan, a palazzo with a Gilded-Age interior stuffed with books. Members ate and drank there, could stay there, tended by a staff that today numbers 42: cooks, "food runners," housekeepers, bookkeepers. 

From 1896 to 1934 "Negro" Elijah Hicks was the club's "hallman" and greeter, so highly esteemed that The New York Times published a tribute and seven "Centurions," all white, went to Harlem for his funeral.

Century Association renovation, 2000s

Christopher Nicholson claimed to be working at the Century in 1942 (hiring date and position unknown). Its members and guests, some famous, weren't always white: Ralph Ellison liked the club's martinis. I hope Nicholson borrowed and read books. In 1904, age 21, Nicholson had worked as a hallboy at -- believe it -- the Brookline, Massachusetts country club where Sylvia's grandfather Frank Schober was maitre d' in the 1940s and '50s.

It is little remarked that writer Sylvia Plath sprang from professional waiters and deli owners and deli workers, her own father having sold groceries in New York and lopped sausages in San Francisco. Did Sylvia know about her great-uncle Christopher? He was uncle to Sylvia's mother Aurelia. We don't know if Aurelia met him, but from the 1920s on Aurelia showed mild yet definite affinities for integrated YWCA camps and the brotherhood of man. By contrast, Sylvia in The Bell Jar described a black server so insolent that Esther Greenwood just had to kick him.

After Brookline, Nicholson worked his way up to waiting tables at Boston's elegant Hotel Touraine. Meanwhile Boston hotels were replacing black waiters with Europeans, such as Plath relatives the Schobers (Frank and Henry) and a Greenwood (Ernest), all Austrians and waiters at the Hotel Thorndike nearby.

In 1906 Nicholson married Austrian-born Anna Greenwood, a domestic. This gave her parents, her six siblings, and the Schobers a black in-law and his own family a white one. The Nicholsons soon left Boston for Philadelphia. After the 1910 strike and race riot the Nicholsons, now with children, moved to Atlantic City. Its tourists liked seeing black waiters and service workers, it made them feel good, so the work was steady.

Yet the jobs had their tensions. Poet Countee Cullen worked summers as a busboy in Atlantic City and in his first book (Color, 1925), published:

Of his busboy work Cullen wrote that it was "just a job, but it gives me time to study some of the vermin of the race, and since three-fourths of every race is vermin, I am in with the masses."

Multiplying the Nicholsons' difficulties was their legal but uncommon interracial marriage. Outside of New England their marriage was a crime. Confusion and conflict pervade the public records: Their son's November 1907 birth record calls both parents "mulatto." The 1910 federal census, taken at a black-owned boarding house, says the Nicholsons and their children are white. The 1915 New Jersey census says Anna is white and Christopher and their four kids are black.

The deaths, from influenza, of all four Nicholson children in October 1918 must have further strained the marriage. Shock, mourning, or going on strike with fellow African-Americans in 1919 cost Nicholson his waiter job. His brother Sylvester then joined the household and in 1920 both worked at Atlantic City's gasworks.

In 1925 Christopher was once again a waiter. It's my guess that around then Anna began an affair with a white British ironworker. It was serious enough that Christopher packed up and moved, most likely to New York. Anna stayed in Atlantic City, cleaning houses, until 1929, when the ironworker got U.S. citizenship, and they married in Manhattan in 1932.

Anna on her second-marriage document gives her maiden name, Greenwood, and her birthplace not as Austria but as Scranton, Pennsylvania. The couple moved to England. Christopher Nicholson's job at the Century did not last; Association archivist Brynn White found a list of staff dated 1946 and Nicholson isn't on it. Nicholson roomed in Harlem and never remarried because it seems he and Anna never divorced. City records indicate that Nicholson died in Manhattan in October 1956. [1] He was 73.

[1] New York, New York, U.S., Death Index, 1949-1965, p. 266.

If Sylvia Plath Were Elly Higginbottom

Imagine that Sylvia Plath was orphaned at birth and grew up in a Boston orphanage, a public charge with no relatives. She is just as talented and furious as we know her to be.

Sylvia Plath, without any family:

Never becomes interested in bees

Never lives in Winthrop or Wellesley

Has no grandparents

Never meets Mr. Crockett

Is not expected to attend college

Receives no encouragement to pursue the arts

Is on her own at age 18 

(Her choice then is either a job or marriage. Let's guess she chooses independence and gets a job as a waitress or a typist.)

Has no one and no place to count on as a "safety net"

Can't borrow a car

Writes very few letters and no one keeps them

If granted a scholarship to Smith College cannot earn enough to cover expenses so does not graduate

Has no family doctor

Can't afford psychiatric treatment

Dies in a basement at age 20

Or if by chance she survives, resides in a state mental hospital and no one visits

The advantage of being Elly: People would love orphan Elly for "her sweet, quiet nature. They wouldn't be after me to read books and write long papers on the twins in James Joyce." Plus everything bad that ever happened to Elly can be blamed on the awful lady at the orphanage. (The Bell Jar, 134)

Otto's Gangrene

The Plath family doctor brought surgeon Halsey B. Loder to the Plaths' house in Winthrop to examine Otto Plath's gangrenous foot. Gangrene is rotting flesh and looks and smells like it, and hurts so terribly that patients can't bear the weight of a bedsheet. Dr. Loder told Otto's wife Aurelia that to save Otto's life he needed his leg amputated from the thigh.

Aurelia Plath's Letters Home narrative of Otto's decline describes a textbook case of untreated diabetes, two or three miserable years start to finish. Their children barely knew a healthy father. All the same Otto, a biologist, refused to see any doctor until his toes turned gray and black. The amputation was performed at Boston's Deaconess Hospital on October 12, 1940.

Halsey Beach Loder (1884-1966) was a "society surgeon" held in the highest esteem among New England physicians and patients. A visiting and consulting surgeon at nearly every Boston-area hospital, Loder was an employee of none: He was his own boss, in 1939 working 42 weeks. [1] Otto had the best available care. Yet three weeks after surgery Otto had not yet gone home. On Nov. 5 Loder phoned Aurelia to say Otto had died. Then Aurelia had to pay the medical bill and funeral expenses. [2]

Before Otto left home for the surgery, seven-year-old Sylvia Plath made two haunting pencil drawings of her sick father at home in his bed. Each image centers on Otto Plath's dreadfully swollen foot sticking up from his cover sheet. Sylvia drew the same scene twice and one is more finished. Bonham's auctioned and sold those drawings, not to me, so view them here. 

Aurelia captioned and dated the drawings (October 7, 1940) and in one of them, traced over Sylvia's outline of Otto's affected foot.

It was Dr. Loder who had said to Aurelia, "How could such a brilliant man be so stupid."

[Photo] The Boston American, Sept. 18, 1926, p. 2. Caption: "Dr. Loder is the surgeon who amputated the leg of Mrs. Pauline LeRoy French, New York and Newport society leader."

[1] U.S. federal census 1940, Mass., Suffolk, Boston, 15-213.

[2] Aurelia Plath to Linda Wagner-Martin, 27 March 1988: “I set aside the $2,000 out of the $5,000 (which was all the insurance [Otto] had) and the private room, the nurse, the operation fee (which Dr. Loder made very modest)”. $2,000 in 1940 equals $45,000 in 2024.

"My Mother, a Sea-Girl Herself"

Aurelia Schober, c. 1927

We've all seen photos of Sylvia Plath lounging on the beach, so here is her mother, as 21-year-old college student Aurelia Schober, having her own bathing-beauty moment. Her boyfriend/lover Karl Terzaghi's diary says: "Enjoyed seeing [Aurelia] in bathing suit, well built and very pretty."

Aurelia loved the ocean and beaches, lived in oceanfront Winthrop from 1918 through 1931, and in 1936 persuaded her husband Otto Plath to move their family there. The Plaths would have continued to live in Winthrop, but breadwinner Otto refused health care and died, forcing Aurelia to reconfigure her family and move. 

Source: Sivad yearbook, 1928

Plath Family Baby Names

NamePlayground.com

Time was if in the U.S. you heard the name "Sylvia" the next word was "Plath." U.S. Social Security baby-name stats tell us "Sylvia" was never a common name: It peaked in 1937 at #56 on the popular-name list and hit its low in 2003. Since then Hispanic families in particular are restoring "Sylvia" to the top 500 U.S. girl names. The same is true of "Aurelia," currently #371, up 117 places from 2022. "Aurelia" peaked in 1908 and hit its rock bottom in 1999 at position #2,680.

Of course Aurelia Plath, born in 1906, was named not for a fad but for her Austrian-born mother. "Sylvia" was emphatically not a family name but a conscious reference to the natural world her parents Aurelia and Otto Plath hoped to study and write books about. They also made the unusual choice to give Sylvia, born in 1932, no middle name.

That likely avoided a minefield of creaky family names. "Ernestine," Otto's mother's name, means "serious" or "battle to the death." Their fathers were Francis and Theodor; Aurelia was already Aurelia Frances. The most faddish girls' names of the 1930s were Mary, Betty, and Barbara, and Otto's name feminized is "Ottilie" -- none compatible with Sylvia's first name.

"Otto" means "wealthy" and "Emil" means "rival," "industrious," or "to excel." Sylvia as a mother-to-be considered the baby name "Emily" and hoped to name a second daughter Megan (pronounced "meg-un," she told her mother). She liked those names and "Nicholas" twenty years ahead of their mass popularity. "Frieda," Germanic for "peace" or "joy," reached its U.S. peak in 1896 -- the year Sylvia's Aunt Frieda was born in Germany -- and despite a few vogue years in the U.K. the name is currently ranked around #4,000 there and in the U.S.

We do know that Sylvia's brother Warren (meaning "protective enclosure") was named for William Marshall Warren, dean of Boston University's College of Liberal Arts, where professor Otto Plath received the dean's counsel. B.U. had several distinguished Warrens, first names and surnames. As a baby name for boys, "Warren" peaked in 1921 at #24. Surprise, it's on the rise as a gender-neutral name.

I had kind of hoped the "Ariels" I met were named for a book of poems.

Re Sylvia's fictional characters: "Esther" is Persian for "star," but compared with Queen Esther's Hebrew name "Hadassah" it grates on the ear. It's Sylvia's cousin's name. One Bell Jar oddity is that Esther Greenwood has no nickname, even among intimates such as Buddy Willard. "Esther" topped out in 1896 at #31 and sank to its low in 1970. Girls' name "Dody" ("dodo," "doughy," "dowdy") never ranked higher than in 1959 at #2,303. "Dody" seems a very un-Lawrentian name for the Lawrentian protagonist of Sylvia's first, unfinished novel, unless she was referencing "doughty" or "do-or-die."

Pop singers and prominent characters in fantasy fictions and video games are reviving old-man old-lady names, so expect more of the above to catch fire and to meet a young Sylvia soon.

"Johann" and "Ernestine" dominated Prussian baptismal records in 1853.

In The Polish Town

My first trip overseas was to Poland and I'd move there except my house is Polish already, with a flowering meadow across the lane, etc. Finding Sylvia Plath's grandmother's Polish home address I Google-Mapped it. Ernestine Kottke Plath died in an Oregon mental hospital in 1919 but her childhood home still stands: 12, Strozewo (a village).

I saw the address in Ernestine Plath's Oregon State Hospital record.

Just six miles away is a Plath landmark town, under German rule spelled "Budsin," today in Polish spelled "Budzyn," population 2,000. It's Plath's grandfather's hometown. Sylvia called it a "manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia." Theodor Plath married local girl Ernestine in 1882 and settled there. I think Ernestine gave birth to Otto in Grabowo because she had relatives there, but Otto grew up in Budsin, and tired of maps I wanted to see the place.

"Strolling" through the older part of Budsin I saw where the Plaths might have raised their children, not quite to their adulthood. The year Otto was born the German Empire's increasingly menacing army started cleansing the empire of Russians, Poles, and Jews. Masses of ethnic Germans like the Plaths were already leaving for the U.S., partly to escape conscription. Otto was 15 when he went to the U.S. His father, and then his mother and five siblings, ages 4 to 13, left Prussia the following year, 1901.

Traditional Polish houses are stone covered in paintable stucco. I learned Gmin means local government, and this is Budzyn's City Hall at the center of town.

Poles put flowers wherever they feel like it. It's a celebratory thing.

For the address of the Plath house in Budsin I'd need church or civil records not readily accessible. But I like Poland for itself and felt at home there. My mother's parents were Polish immigrants. They died when I was very small but I remember the Polishness of their house and ours. I hope you too grew up amid abundant cabbage-rose decor.

Why an Aurelia Plath Biography is Impossible (For Now)

Analyze the appeal to young women of this creative collage-style ad (1957)

Here's what's derailed my longtime goal to write a book-length Aurelia Plath biography in the classic birth-to-death mode:

-Insufficient material. After ten years I find Aurelia's childhood a blank except for what she tells in Letters Home. Hundreds of Aurelia's letters to Sylvia are missing. I'll wager that Aurelia withheld from archives and filed away some crucial letters and writings, hers and Sylvia's, and they're privately owned. Aurelia kept diaries or journals, she said so, but they'd look anemic alongside of Sylvia's. Aurelia's associates and friends didn't write and publish memoirs.

-Aurelia was a polite, generous, hard-working lady and caring mother and neighbor who did her best. I found in her life some exciting episodes and prefigurements and secrets, yet the lives of unglamorous people who never wrote poems or held office lack drama and are unlikely to sell.

-Lack of funds. I've funded most of my own research because I think it's worth it, but don't want in my lap a multi-year book project without a sponsor or publisher's backing. Lucky you if you have a working spouse.

-Permissions. I asked the distinguished Plath biographer Dr. Heather Clark about the hardest thing she faced while writing Red Comet, and she said "Permissions." What was difficult for Dr. Clark would drive an independent scholar insane.

-Shifting perspectives. Increasingly I'm viewing Aurelia and Sylvia Plath less in terms of their personal trivia and more in the context of the cards they were dealt and the forces acting on and against them. I'm thinking that they maintained their bond -- incomprehensible to most -- because they needed it.

I'll think of alternatives!

From Germany to the Pacific Northwest

Sylvia Plath's story is so New England that links to the Pacific Northwest seem sort of odd. A true Bostonian, she saw England and France before venturing west of the Hudson. In 1910 her future dad Otto Plath left Wisconsin for grad school in Seattle despite universities aplenty nearer by and out east. Otto's classmate inspired his move to Seattle, where in 1912 he got a master's degree and his first teaching job and first wife. But I think it mattered too that Otto's parents and three brothers were already in the Pacific Northwest. 

Although Otto's grandfather disowned him, his family stayed in touch and asked him whether he'd take in his sickly brother Paul. Otto said no.

Otto had been getting kid-glove fine schooling while his family came from Prussia straight to the North Dakota plains where Otto's blacksmith uncle had prospered. After eight lean years, the Plaths in 1910 joined the rootless hundreds of thousands picturing the far-western forests they could mill, mountains to mine, ocean to harvest, friendly neighbors and homesteading land purged of natives. And some good universities. The Northern Pacific Railway made it easier to migrate west than north or south -- and easy to go back if anyone had to.

The railroad further baited its hook with discount ticket prices for passengers going west to the end of the line.

The Plaths like every family in the Northwest labored at lumber mills, paper mills, smithing, shipping, repair shops, contracting, and farming. This map helped me understand why they chose the Pacific Northwest, where some of their descendants still live.

Northern Pacific Railway, 1910. Otto would have got aboard at St. Paul.

Ernestine Plath's Extreme Mental Illness

Sylvia Plath's mentally ill grandmother, Ernestine Plath, was much sicker than we ever knew, a mental hospital veteran when her husband signed her into the Oregon State Hospital in autumn 1916 (see her photo in last week's post). Ernestine was then 62, diagnosed with senile dementia, and died in the hospital in 1919, and I have a copy of her hospital files including the chilling photo with the black eye.

Ready to post this week about domestic violence, I took time to consult other sources and learned:

1)  That photo probably wasn't from the day of intake. Although it's undated I'd assumed that, and thought Ernestine's husband or sons had beaten her. Hospital historian Jessica Cole told me a photographer came to the hospital every few months, and the staff lined up new patients for mugshots one after another: efficient. The black eye -- terrible in any case -- then might have come from anywhere.

2) Ernestine had lived in North Dakota from 1902 to 1905 when she was admitted to the state insane asylum at Jamestown, N.D., staying until 1910. I wanted proof of a five-year stay. I found it in the 1910 federal census listing the inmates of the Jamestown women's ward. All inmates gave their first and last names while Ernestine gave the name "Mrs. Antonio Plath." That's why she hadn't shown up in searches of that census. There was no Antonio Plath in the family. Yet Ernestine's surname and demographics matched her husband's answers to the Oregon hospital's questionnaire:

Patient ever insane before? "Yes, one time five year in Jamestown N. Dakota." First symptoms: "1905, head-ache, sleep and appetite loss, and anxious an [sic] persecution."

The Oregon state hospital could not get Ernestine's Jamestown records, and we don't have them, so we've had the illusion that Ernestine's second, documented, hospitalization was the first one, the only one, or the really big one, and that her illness was mostly from aging when it was cyclic and chronic.

Although Sylvia wasn't told about her paternal grandmother's illness, she was terrified of becoming chronically mentally ill and a charity case in state mental hospitals.

Ernestine Plath, Sylvia's Grandmother, Oregon State Hospital

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Plath, photograph c. 1916 from her file at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum"). Read about her fate here.

This is the second known photo of Ernestine Plath. The first known photo, c. 1907, I found and published in 2022.

Five Reasons Why We Hate Aurelia Plath

Witch, bloodsucker, martyr -- and she probably voted for Eisenhower. She's not a writer, not talented. She was manless, not sexy, not a real professor. She had bad taste in clothes, furniture and wallpaper: Photos prove it. She gave her daughter Sylvia Plath advice she didn't ask for, was a terrible role model, a helicopter parent who nearly suffocated Sylvia out in the suburbs -- except Sylvia got away and became a great creative artist!

That narrative of Aurelia's evil banality is so embedded I can only build on it. I wondered why trolling Aurelia -- even now! -- is so easy and popular that anyone can do it. It must come down to trolling basics:

1) Sexism. Sylvia's father was her important, influential parent, yadda yadda, and his death was her life's most important event; next-most important was marrying a man. Aurelia had no man and thus no life worth looking into. Sylvia believed that, and as she came of age under patriarchy scorned her mother and allies as hags and rivals. She wrote that being like her mother was the worst that could happen. First Worlders aware that starvation or prison might be worse can sort of sympathize, because of:

2) Freudian cultural debris. Yes, we are post-Freudians but still vigorous individualists and deep down blame our own and other people's parents for all ills. We can't forgive Aurelia or our own mothers for not letting us be ourselves and other psychic injuries. We experience Sylvia's hate-my-mother rants as quintessential and truthful, not political or cultural or even a problem.

3) Snobbery. Aurelia's immigrant parents did not go to college, had three kids and no money and had Aurelia choose either secretarial college or no college. Exceeding expectations Aurelia got a bachelor's and master's and became a teacher and married a man with better degrees than hers, which makes him brilliant but her not. Widowed, Aurelia moved her family from the oceanfront to a boring suburb and taught business subjects and never had sex with strangers or did anything cool that we know about.

4) Ageism. Letters Home, published in 1975, was Aurelia Plath's debut as a public figure. She was 69 years old. Sylvia, dead at 30, is a forever young and ageless rebel -- just like us! Otto, being male, looked seasoned, never old. The old battle-ax kept sorting and doing and saying things of no value until she had to be put away.

5) Cultism. Venerating Sylvia's every word and thing, we annotate, edit, air our views and skip what doesn't fit our narrative. We identify with Sylvia and sentimentally cling to any trace of her. Our view is the only accurate view. Polite and passive-aggressive in public, among ourselves we are judgy and pissy. In short, we are Aurelia.

Otto Plath's Wives and His Sister Frieda Plath

Frieda Anna Plath and brother Hugo, Sylvia's aunt and uncle, c. 1918 [1]

Otto Plath blamed and hated his first wife, Lydia Bartz Plath, but gosh, it seems she tried to be a good wife, and at UC-Berkeley where Otto was teaching German and working toward his doctoral degree, Lydia too took courses, passing a two-credit course in German and the noncredit "Phys Ed 4a" and "Household Econ 6" and a first-level course in Graphic Art. [2]

Part of Otto's complaint was that Lydia was not educated, and that is true: The first high school in her hometown, Fall Creek, Wisconsin, opened in 1913, the year after she'd married Otto and moved west with him. But Lydia was not stupid or lazy, and when Otto in 1915 went East to graduate school and did not send for her as he had promised, she went home, earned college credit from a University of Wisconsin correspondence course, and enrolled in a Chicago hospital's nursing school where Otto's younger sister Frieda -- who had grown up in her aunt's house in Wisconsin -- was a year ahead of her.

Frieda Plath befriended and encouraged both of Otto's wives. They needed the solidarity. Lydia's only work experience was as a clerk in her hometown's general store. She liked Frieda well enough to join her at nursing school. After Otto married Aurelia, Frieda wrote the new well-educated wife and they exchanged letters as long as Frieda lived. Frieda sent gifts to her niece Sylvia and nephew Warren, and was the only Plath relative Sylvia ever met, out in California, where Frieda had married Walter Heinrichs, M.D. Aunt Frieda left a good enough impression that Sylvia, pregnant when they met in 1959, named her daughter Frieda. Up for auction not long ago was an ugly little German hymnal owned by Aunt Frieda (1897-1970) and passed down to her namesake. Frieda Plath Heinrichs and her husband had no children.

Otto had left Lydia owing her money. He told people she had been sexually "cold." (Always, when defaming a woman, reference her sex life!) Lydia Plath by 1924 was an operating-room supervisor at Luther Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a title she held until retirement. In the 1930 federal census, although still married she called herself "single," probably to keep her job; all the hospital's nurses are listed as single, and that was still true in 1940. In 1950 Lydia declared herself divorced.

Laws made life hard for women. Sylvia Plath's life was bounded and frustrated by laws governing birth control, marriage, and divorce. Inheritance and copyright laws still dog her estate. Aurelia Plath dated married man Otto because Lydia wouldn't divorce him, and Aurelia couldn't marry him until new Nevada laws opened a way. After marrying, Aurelia would not leave Otto -- Sylvia's big complaint about her mother -- because Depression-era law gave any open jobs to men or single women -- and separated-with-kids was not "single," as Sylvia found out. 

While Otto Plath pursued his academic dreams, Lydia kept writing him, proof that she had not legally deserted him. He hated her letters. I'd love to read them. There is one sample of Lydia's writing in researcher Harriet Rosenstein's archive at Emory University, dated 12 July 1975:

Dear Miss Rosenstein,

In reply to your letter, I have just two things to say:

1) My life with Otto Plath became a closed book when we were divorced; and so, under no circumstance, would I give out any information about him.

2) You had your nerve sending me an open copy of a letter, which you had addressed to me, to the village clerk.

Yours truly,

Lydia Plath [3]

Rosenstein, undaunted, did a workaround, and in February 1977 the Fall Creek village clerk Marjorie Shong spilled the tea about Otto's investing and losing his wife's and in-laws' money, and that Otto wanted his sick brother to move in with them and Lydia said no, and that Otto got to thinking he was too good for her. But by 1977 Rosenstein had given up on writing a Plath biography.

Years after separating, Lydia still had to mop up after Otto when she -- born in Wisconsin -- had to petition for U.S. citizenship. Under the law, Lydia had become a German citizen when she married German citizen Otto. Otto was naturalized in 1926, but by then the laws had changed so that wives married under the old law had to petition for naturalization on their own.

On 15 September 1931 Lydia Bartz Plath renounced The German Reich, and a Wisconsin circuit court restored her U.S. citizenship. [4] After fifteen years estranged, Otto, she wrote, was still "my husband." But not for long.

[1] Studio photo taken in Chicago, dated by its former owner 1917, but Hugo Plath first enlisted in the army on 29 July 1918 and was discharged on 23 December 1918: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs BIRLS Death File, 1850-1910.  [2] Wisconsin State Board of Health Application for Registration, Wis., dated 5 December 1924; U.S. Employment Records, 1903-1988. [3] Rosenstein mss. 1489, Plath, Otto, circa 1927-, "Otto Plath Colleagues Bussey"[4] Wisconsin, County Naturalization Records, 1807-1992, Eau Claire, Petitions, v. 4-13 1927-1943, p. 73.

Toxic Handwriting

Sylvia Plath's distinctive handwriting

A professional handwriting analyst in 1953 assessed Sylvia Plath's character through a sample of her handwriting: 

"Strength: Enjoyment of working experience intense; sense of form, beauty and style, useful in fields of fashion and interior decoration. Eager for accomplishment. Weakness: Overcome superficiality, stilted behavior, rigidity of outlook."

Was he right? We can discuss that all day.

There are few online images of Aurelia Plath's handwriting, and as far as I know it's never been analyzed. So here is a sample from her college's yearbook of 1928, when she was Aurelia Schober. On top is a classmate's inscription (to the yearbook's owner), to compare with Aurelia's inscription at bottom left.

The yearbook's owner, named Muriel, asked each classmate to write "something original." Aurelia's text says, "Dear Muriel: It's hard to be original during exam time, so I'll just hope that you'll recover from them & have a delightful summer. Here's to the day when we wear cap and gown. Sincerely, Aurelia."

In Muriel's 1927 yearbook, Aurelia had drawn a pointer to herself in the group photo of the English Club. She printed rather than using cursive, again using very tiny lettering, here taking up 1.5 vertical inches of the page's inner margin.

It says, "Here's to two more years of joy and struggle at P.A.L. Like Browning we must get our joy out of the struggle. Sincerely, Aurelia"

"P.A.L." was short for Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, founded as a women's business and vocational college. To help pay her way, Aurelia after her sophomore year got a summer job as a secretary and translator for an M.I.T. guest professor in his forties. In his diary he noted his young secretary's handwriting. He saw in it "something stiff and sober I cannot well digest.”

He digested it anyway, and he and Miss "Sober" soon fell into a red-hot two-year love affair (described in his diaries) you can read about here. He and Aurelia nearly married. He married someone else. Aurelia on the rebound dated and married Boston University professor Otto Plath.

So, our analysis?

How about: "The Plath women lived in a culture that presumed to judge women through isolated examples of their writings and their effing handwriting."

Notes: The analysis of Sylvia Plath's handwriting by Herry O. Teltscher, 1953, for Mademoiselle magazine, is in the Plath mss. II at the Lilly Library. Quotation from the Karl Terzaghi Diaries, October 1926.

"The Passing Dazzle of Each Face"

Eternal vigilance is the price of more context for Sylvia Plath and her mother Aurelia Schober Plath. In March came up for sale a set of college yearbooks for 1926, 1927, and 1928, for the college Aurelia attended, the years she was there, and I bought them. Yes, Aurelia Plath went to college. Her college yearbook was called the Sivad.

Although not Aurelia's personal copies, Aurelia inscribed in them personal notes to owner Muriel Brigham, fellow 1928 graduate of Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, called by its students "P.A.L." Muriel Brigham (1898-1983) majored in English. She and Aurelia were both members of the college's Writers Club.

The 1928 Sivad -- Aurelia Schober, editor-in-chief -- is scarce and insanely priced when auctioned. A blurry, faulty scan costs $99; I would not pay that. I secured all three yearbooks for less. Star and valedictorian of her class, Aurelia appears in each volume. How instructive to see Aurelia's face among those of a few hundred of her peers (sadly, none interviewed while it was possible) and good photos of the campus and dorm rooms as she knew them. I learned that not only Aurelia but some classmates staffed Camp Maqua in Maine in summer 1927 -- when Aurelia invited her 43-year-old boyfriend for a week and sneaked around. Will present Aurelia's inscriptions next week.

The yearbook had to go to press in early spring, so Aurelia's late-spring honors are published in the 1929 Sivad, in which Aurelia is called "Daughter of the Dawn." Think you that I am joking? Here it is:

The Junior year in many ways was the most active of the lot, filled as it was with college work, a wonderful SIVAD and a Prom that has glittered as only Betelgeuse has glittered on the shoulder of Orion. In the midst of this radiance that Daughter of the Dawn, Aurelia Schober, shone as editor-in-chief of SIVAD, adding many new features . . .

I'm seeking a copy of Aurelia Schober's 1928 valedictory speech, delivered June 6, 1928. Do you know where I can find it? It's not in the yearbooks or the Winthrop, Mass. newspapers.

Sylvia Plath's Black Relatives: More

The Nicholsons rented 116R North New Jersey Ave., Atlantic City, in 1915. The storefront and rear extension are additions; more typical houses c. 1910 sit to its right and left. [1]

Their marriage lasted 20 years -- from the wedding in Boston in 1906 to sometime after 1925, when the husband, a waiter, was last listed in the Atlantic City directory. In 1928 the wife was still using his surname, "Nicholson" -- in various papers rendered as "Nichols," "Nicholason," and "Nicholas." Husband Christopher J. Nicholson also gave his birth year as 1881, 1882, and 1883, making his later years yet harder to trace.

Something led Nicholson to leave his wife, nee Anna Greenwood, on her own in Atlantic City -- where their four children had died in 1918, of influenza, all four names carved on a single gravestone. Perhaps he sought a better job or a marital separation. Anna remained in Atlantic City, working as a domestic.

Anna was Sylvia Plath's blood relative, the Viennese great-aunt who had married a black American. I have learned that more than any other U.S. city, fin de siecle Boston saw unskilled white immigrant females like Anna marry African-American men employed in skilled occupations. For young women from Europe not yet seized by the very American horror at "miscegenation" (word coined in 1863) it was a step up.

Christopher Nicholson's 1942 draft registration card -- the next obtainable document -- shows him in New York City, working downtown and lodging in Harlem. Anna, under her maiden name, had remarried in New York in 1932, to a white British ironworker formerly employed in Atlantic City. They'd moved to England.

U.S. federal census takers missed Nicholson in both 1930 and 1940. Nicholson filed for Social Security benefits on 23 August 1948, giving what is probably his real birthday: 21 August 1883. [2] The 1950 federal census shows him retired, at the same address as in 1942; his marital status is "separated." I found no divorce in New York legal records, only a civil suit Nicholson filed in the Bronx, in 1953, against one Dominick DeLillo, the nature of which I don't know.

Nicholson's death record still eludes me.* Nicholson's niece Aurelia Plath never mentioned any Nicholsons in letters or papers we have access to.

It weighed on me that I had told Anna's story and not Christopher's. Now I have told all I know.

[1] This is the only Nicholson family address still standing. The 1915 New Jersey census shows a racially integrated neighborhood.

[2] Nicholson's 1918 draft registration card gives his birthday as 4 July 1881. It was common for men to claim to the draft board that they were older. Otto Plath's brother did the same.

*Update, July 2024: The New York City death record says Nicholson died in Manhattan on 26 October 1956. He was buried on 31 October in Rosehill-Rosedale Cemetery in Linden, New Jersey. The cemetery confirmed that his grave has no marker.

Pushed Off the School Bus

School bus, 1918

Aurelia Plath's preface to Letters Home sets her "early childhood" in a "primarily Irish-Italian neighborhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts during World War I." She remembered those schoolmates jeering her for speaking only German, and during the war they called Aurelia "Spy-face" and once pushed her down the school bus steps and left her sprawling, while the bus driver looked the other way.

Yet Aurelia lived from birth in 1906 until she was 12 not by the sea in Winthrop but in the Boston neighborhood Jamaica Plain. There she first went to school and was promoted from first grade to third. The Schobers moved in 1918 to Shirley Street in Winthrop, their neighbors almost all Anglos. "Schober" was most non-Anglo name on the block. [1] Census records show that the Irish and Italian schoolmates Aurelia placed in Winthrop were in Jamaica Plain. If she was assaulted in Winthrop it was by Anglos.

Few with German names or heritage escaped pan-Germanic harassment during World War I -- scholar Otto Plath in California got grilled by the FBI -- and given Aurelia's tendency to sugarcoat, it was probably worse than Aurelia said. Sylvia wrote that Aurelia was stoned for speaking German. One of Sylvia's fictional mothers dreads a second war with Germany not because it's war but because she remembers the U.S. during World War I.

Because Aurelia's narrative of her childhood is unreliable -- so many forces were at work on her as she was writing it -- and there is no other source, I wondered if I ought to try to believe the school bus incident happened in Winthrop, if Winthrop even had a school bus in 1918.

It turns out Winthrop had a Shirley Street school bus as early as 1910.

Caption says "About 1910. 'School Bus' of those days on Shirley Street . . . Girl in gingham dress inside right rear 'bus' is Evelyn Floyd Clark."

Evelyn Floyd is listed with Winthrop High graduating class of 1913, with 165 graduates, mostly with Anglo surnames such as Floyd and Clark. There are some Irish and Jewish surnames. Only one graduate has an Italian surname (Monafo). That was Winthrop before the Schobers moved in.

Aurelia Schober graduated from Winthrop High School in 1924. There were 146 graduates. They had Anglo, Irish, Jewish, and a sprinkling of Germanic surnames. Only one graduate had an Italian surname (Carro). That was Aurelia's Winthrop, with a school bus more like the enclosed one at the top of this post.

Aurelia's letters to her many correspondents do not give more details about her childhood. Nor do the archives she assembled that she made publicly available. By contrast Aurelia saved everything about her daughter Sylvia Plath's childhood. In the Letters Home preface Aurelia moved on from a brief discussion of her childhood to describe what she liked to read. I'm reminded of what Sylvia wrote her mother from summer camp in 1949: "Tell me something personal in your postcards. I don't care about book reviews as much as you and the family."

[1] 1920 United States Federal Census, Massachusetts, Suffolk, Winthrop, District 0676, p. 49.