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| "Darkness is not empty. It is information at rest." -Teju Cole |
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.
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| Sylvia Plath and Dick Norton |
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 newsprint, has to be from the 1950s.
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.
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| Century Association, 7 West 43rd St., New York |
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.
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| Century Association renovation, 2000s |
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:
Atlantic%20City%20Waiter%20-%20Wikisource,%20the%20free%20online%20lib_%20-%20en.wikisource.org.jpg) |
| 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.
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)
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.
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. The final medical bill must have been colossal.
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 the affected foot.
It was Dr. Loder who had said to Aurelia, "How could such a brilliant man be so stupid."
[1] U.S. federal census 1940, Mass., Suffolk, Boston, 15-213.
[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."
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| 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
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| NamePlayground.com |
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.
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| I had kind of hoped the "Ariels" I met were named for a book of poems. |
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.
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| "Johann" and "Ernestine" dominated Prussian baptismal records in 1853. |
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).
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| I saw the address in Ernestine Plath's Oregon State Hospital record. |
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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.
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| Analyze the appeal to young women of this creative collage-style ad (1957) |
-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!
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.
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| Northern Pacific Railway, 1910. Otto would have got aboard at St. Paul. |
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.
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.
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.
%20-%20Find%20a%20Grave%20Memorial_%20-%20www.findagrave.com.jpg) |
| Frieda Anna Plath and brother Hugo, Sylvia's aunt and uncle, c. 1918 [1] |
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 [4]
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. [2] 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 in July 1918 and was discharged in December 1918. [2] Wisconsin State Board of Health Application for Registration, Wis., dated 5 December 1924; U.S. Employment Records, 1903-1988. [3] Wisconsin, County Naturalization Records, 1807-1992, Eau Claire, Petitions, v. 4-13 1927-1943, p. 73. [4] Rosenstein mss. 1489, Plath, Otto, circa 1927-, "Otto Plath Colleagues Bussey"
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| 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.
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.
"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 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.
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| 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] |
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. The Social Security Death Index does not have it. A "Christopher Nicholson" was buried in New Jersey in 1956, but no birth date was given and several people share that name. 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.
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| 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.
Sylvia Plath met her only African-American friend at Cambridge in autumn 1955, when both were new students on scholarships there. Nathaniel "Nat" LaMar (1933-2022) while still at Harvard had published a short story in The Atlantic. He'd been at Phillips Exeter prep school with Sylvia's brother Warren. Plath wrote her mother Aurelia, "I begged some boys at pembroke [College] to introduce me to him . . . he is a lovely, light-skinned negro" [29 Oct. 1955].
The ambitious young writers became friends. On 7 November Plath wrote her mother, "I saw a good bit of that outgoing, creative negro boy, Nathaniel LaMar (from Exeter and Harvard) and went to coffee with him Monday."
Plath's association with the wonderfully colored and credentialed LaMar is today sometimes cited as proof that Plath was personally not a racist, although her creative works and private writings include racial and ethnic slurs and "othering."
In letters to her mother, Plath laid it on thick that her feelings for Nat were fraternal. LaMar and his school friend would guard her from the perils of Paris when Plath made her first trip there at Christmas break 1955:
"most happy to have made a very warm, good friend in Nat Lamar, the negro writer from Harvard, who is a wonderful sort of psychic brother. . . . [Nat is] already flying to Paris to stay with his very attractive, intelligent, Clem-Moorish type friend at the Sorbonne, they will look around and get me a cheap, good place to stay. . . Then we plan to see Paris together . . I like the idea of having two "brothers" to go around with, both as guides and sort of champion protectors" [21 Nov. 1955].
Besides denying any attraction, Plath was heavy-hinting that Nat was gay. What a gal.
What LaMar's family in Atlanta thought about his friend Sylvia, we can only wonder. Plath assured her mother that a meeting in her dorm room included a chaperone:
"I had dear, lovable Nat LaMar over for tea with Mallory and the three of us had a most pleasant time. . ." [10 December 1955]
To other correspondents, while touting LaMar's virtues or feeling that she must because he was African-American, Plath stressed that the relationship was platonic:
"Nat LaMar. . . has already gone over [to Paris] to visit his friend Steve at the Sorbonne (by the way, Nat is a really lovely person). . . " [to Warren Plath, 11 Dec. 1955]
"most of my good friends are men. There's the American Negro from Harvard, Nat LaMar (whose story 'Creole Love Song' I may have pointed out in the Atlantic, who is simply a dear: friendly, open, & wonderfully frank. We have periodic bull sessions like brother & sister (he went to exeter & knew Warren" [to Gordon Lameyer, 12 Dec. 1955]"I have been very lucky, however, in making some special friends: There is Nathaniel LaMar, a warm, friendly Negro boy from Harvard . . ." [to Olive Higgins Prouty, 13 Dec. 1955]
"I am getting to know some magnificent people: there's friendly, vital Nathaniel LaMar (whose story 'Creole Love Song' was in the Atlantic), the negro writer who knew Warren at Harvard & Exeter. . . [Nat] is good for simple, frank 'American talk.' " [to Marcia Stern, 14 Dec. 1955]
To a close female friend, Plath wrote a bit differently:
"am flying to paris to hang tinsel on eiffel tower under escort of negro writer from harvard, nat lamar ('creole love song' in atlantic)" . . . [to Elinor Friedman, 12 Dec. 1955].
Plath wrote her grandparents on 20 January 1956 about "the warm, friendly negro writer from Harvard, and a few other more casual acquaintances. . ."
Further letters to her family warbled:
"My dearest friend in Cambridge is Nat LaMar. I had a wonderful coffee-session with him Sunday" [25 Jan. 1956]
"Nat LaMar, who is a blessing. I had a good talk with him" [29 Jan.]
"Dear Nat LaMar is such a pleasure; I see him for coffee about once a week." [6 Feb.]
"I am gifted with the dearest, most wonderful friends: Nat LaMar, Gordon, Elly Friedman . . ." [10 Feb.]
Elinor Friedman said Plath told her she and Nat had "a brief affair" in Paris. [1] In her journal, Plath wrote that she used her love for Richard Sassoon, who was in Paris, to excuse herself from deeper involvement with Nat, having used that excuse to dial it down with other men:
"Richard," I say, and tell Nat, and tell Win, and tell Chris, as I have told Mallory, and Iko, and Brian, and Martin, and David: There Is This Boy In France." [Journals, 19 Feb. 1956]
Plath was devastated when Sassoon dumped her after Christmas. She met and fell for Ted Hughes in late February, and in agony over whether Hughes too had abandoned her, she asked herself what to do next:
"Let me know where and to whom to give: to Nat, to Gary, to Chris even, to Iko, to dear Gordon in his way: to give the small moments and the casual talk that very special infusion of devotion and love which make our epiphanies." [Journals, Mar. 6, 1956]
It seems Plath hoped to minimize previous romantic or sexual contacts to clear the decks for serious involvement with Sassoon or with Hughes, if one of the two would have her.
Nathaniel Reid LaMar lived 88 years and never wrote a Sylvia Plath tell-all. He said only that they had been friends. Both were creative writers; both wrote senior theses on "doubles." [2] Yet what sounds like a meeting of true minds was finished when she met Ted Hughes. LaMar completed his post-graduate year and in 1957 was writing a novel with a grant from The Atlantic. When the money ran out he joined the army. This proved fatal to his creative writing. He worked for publisher McGraw-Hill from 1960 to 1980.
 |
| Nat LaMar lived most of his life in Brooklyn, New York. |
Never married, with a gay partner who predeceased him [3], LaMar amassed $8 million in real-estate holdings, and LaMar after his death made news because a court-appointed guardian had failed to report his passing, kept taking payouts, and sold his house. This delayed the distribution of "millions of dollars LaMar had bequeathed to the
Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, Cambridge
University, Howard University College of Medicine where LaMar's father
went to medical school, and Phillips Exeter Academy."
[1] Clark, H. Red Comet, 387.
[2] LaMar, N., "The Duality of Macbeth: A Breach in Nature," Harvard University thesis, 1955.
[3] See Lichtblau, J., "The Value of an English Garden in Brooklyn," The Common, 15 Dec. 2020.
Plath's letters are quoted from Kukil, K. and Steinberg, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 1, 2017.
 |
| Summa cum laude, Harvard, 1955. Before Phillips Exeter, LaMar attended a segregated high school. |
After her children died of influenza and her husband vanished, Anna Greenwood Nicholson lived alone in Atlantic City and was working as a domestic when the Great Depression hit. Anna's whole family had come to the U.S. from Vienna, and Boston was her only American hometown, but her married sister there had a full house and would soon have a granddaughter named Sylvia Plath. Anna's mother and brothers knew Anna had married a black American and they never forgave her. Anna left Atlantic City but cannot be found anywhere in the U.S. census of 1930. She was 45.
Two years later in Manhattan, registering as Anna Greenwood, Anna married Joseph Campbell, born in Lancashire, England of Irish parents. Anna Campbell filed with Social Security in 1938. That was the last U.S. trace of her until her mother's obituary (1945) called Anna "Ina Champee of London, England," and her brother's obituary (1957) called her "Mrs. Joseph Chappell, England."
This told me that 1) Anna's family knew she had remarried but was unsure of her name. 2) Anna was alive in 1957 and had moved to England. 3) For a while Anna shared an island with her great-niece Sylvia Plath. So Sylvia wasn't the first in her family to reverse-emigrate: It was the errant, whispered-about great-aunt she never met -- who couldn't be, could she, the "gypsy ancestress" who got around?
Hard-to-get British records (below) show Joseph and Anna in 1939 lived far from London, in the Lancashire shipbuilding town Barrow-in-Furness, population then about 75,000: the industrial north as Orwell described it in Wigan Pier. Anna was ninth in a household of nine, six of them Campbells. I hope she liked these relatives better. Joseph worked as a "boiler fireman, heavy." The town survived two 1941 bombardments, and Joseph died in Barrow-in-Furness in 1959 and Anna in 1964. Joseph has a grave. Anna doesn't.
British National Archives register, 1939, address 12 Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria, E.B., Lancashire, England. Anna's identity is confirmed by her birth date, 28 March 1888*, and her husband's. Housewives were listed as "unpaid."
*Anna's baptismal record says she was born 28 March 1885, but much of her life she used the date 1888.
If you want Sylvia Plath without poetry, dip into this timeline of gleanings from diaries, letters, personal calendars, and other Plath biographies and sources, spanning her life from birth to September 1955. Biographer Carl Rollyson has published 40-plus books including two Plath biographies which elided Plath's early years. Currently he is completing a biography about Plath's early years. Sylvia Plath Day by Day Vol. 1 assembles his source facts, quoting the published and unpublished. According to Rollyson this chronicle restores "precious details" and the objectivity lost when biographers shape facts into narratives. His introduction says:
In effect, you are presented with the raw data, without commentary, so that you become the biographer.
Rollyson edited this raw data, so it is not raw data. The introduction explains:
The entries in this book are shorter than the sources they are taken from. My principle of selection has been to record the most striking events and comments that reveal Plath but also to minimize repetition, except when repetition . . . seems important . . .
Examples (I'm choosing interesting ones):
1946
October 14: Writes up the program of a school assembly, featuring a reading, a piano solo, choral singing and reading, a harmonica solo, a skit, a vocal trio, tap dance, and an accordion solo.
October 15: A sixteen-line poem for Miss Cox, which ends "But behind the cold, white stillness / There's the promise of a spring."
October 16: Clippings about World Series games, visual-aid education, physical exams.
October 17: "World news is really discouraging--wish I could run things for a while."
October 18: Orchestra rehearsal, pleased to realize she has left her ancient history book at home, "Oh! Well! I'll get along."
October 19: Wears a yellow evening gown with black velvet bows to a dance. One boy steps on her toes, but she has fun dancing with another partner who is "very nice" [drawing of a heart].
October 20: "All the girls were talking about last night happenings and were comparing partners."
October 21: "Dear Diary, I don't know what possesses me to mess you up by such scribbling. Some old nagging things inside me prompts me to waste such nice paper. . . . From now on I won't let the weak side of my character hold sway."
1953
April 28, 9:30 a.m.: "Hair."
10:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.: News office.
2:00-6:00 p.m., 7:00-10:00 p.m.: "STUDY MILTON."
April 29, 8:30 a.m.: Chapel.
9:00-10:00 a.m.: In News Office.
10:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.: Studies Milton.
2:00 p.m.: "Davis paper due."
3:00 p.m.: "Milton Exam."
6:00 p.m.: Press board banquet, Auden in attendance.
April 30, 8:00 a.m.: "Activities board."
9:00 a.m.: Audits science class.
10:00 a.m.: Bells.
Hampshire Book Shop.
2:00 p.m.: Class with Professor Davis.
3:00 p.m.: Milton class.
4:00-6:00 p.m.: Sally.
"Phi Beta Banquet."
Day by Day is the first Plath bio to poach lots of direct quotations from Plath's childhood diaries, so I focused there. Those diaries remain unpublished because they are boring. From art teachers to camp counselors, every authority every hour dangled rewards and awards for doing as they asked. Plath responded like a trained seal. The flip side was that she grew up firmly disciplined and knowing her own value. She
could control the situation when "parking" with dates. Plath fighting off a rapist (December 3, 1950) Day by Day
however renders as "She strongly rejects the idea."
I did like Day
by Day's glimpses of Plath's grandfather, who gave her hugs, gifts of
money, and violets for planting. Extremes of mood, symptoms of Plath's mental
illness, emerged when she was 16 or 17.
It is a standard joke that writings about Plath must be faultless, so I will fine-tooth and fume over Day by Day's errors, and omissions not only of childhood events I think significant but those important enough for Dr. Heather Clark to flesh out in her definitive biography Red Comet. For example, Red Comet (p. 93) gives most of a paragraph to Sylvia's diary entry of July 25, 1947, a rare hateful one calling her mother a stinker and a "damn cuss'd old thing" for not buying her a dress she wanted. Sylvia then recanted her angry words. Rollyson's version reads:
July 25: "It's good to be able to spread out and stretch again, knowing that I have a new diary waiting." Buys "a dream of a dress" at Filene's "aquamarine with black bands around the neck, waist, the sleepers, and a narrow black-square outline all through the material."
Maybe these are not the same diaries?
Understanding that the text I read was in galleys, I think if Rollyson had taken a minute to check the first few pages of Plath's Letters Vol. 1 he'd know it's incorrect to say that "Plath's first extant letter to Aurelia Plath is a postcard dated July 14" [1944] (note 102, p. 329). It was Aurelia Plath, not Sylvia, who inscribed Sylvia's diary with "Not to be written in after 8 p.m." Visitors designated Uncle Henry and Aunt Elizabeth "Aldrich" -- the surname of Plath's neighbors -- were in fact Sylvia's blood relatives Henry and Elizabeth Schober (9, 31). And "Grampy" died in 1965, not 1963.
Now I feel better. (What made me feel better?)
The accuracy improves and, oddly, interest heightens as the timeline enters and atomizes familiar territory. I was grateful that author comments were few. When in May
1945 12-year-old Plath rescued and fed a baby bird, a comment says this
prefigures the baby bird that Plath and her husband tried to save in
1958. This has nothing to do with her art and growth, and in this world of real fire and bombs through the roofs I felt it should be embarrassing to care.
And I wonder how every detail about Sylvia Plath's life has come to be so precious there's a market for barrel scrapings and granules ever smaller, as if by crafting lists and footnotes and smartmaps instead of prose we stay safe.