Book Review: Loving Sylvia Plath by Emily Van Duyne

I could treat you to the notes I took as I read and re-read Loving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation, by Emily Van Duyne.

Or I could tell you my opinion, but it'd be only one of many.

Then I wondered, what is the purpose of a book review? I learned early on that reviews exist so readers can pretend to have read recent books, preparing themselves for cocktail conversations or the MLA.

What value does criticism have after a book is published? It's as Gertrude Stein said, "Criticism always comes too late."

I could link you to an article I wish I had written, about the trend toward literary "auto-criticism" that does not pretend to objectivity but loves its subject. We know that "emotionless" "objectivity" always granted the reviewer liberty to savage the book or damn with faint praise or embed little digs at the book or its author, or complain (as I wished to) that the book took insufficient notice of my point of view. Some reviews are weapons against a certain school of thinking, or showcase how erudite or in the Zeitgeist the reviewer is.

To review a Plath book is also a chance to "whatabout" my pet concerns such as Sylvia Plath's privilege and amorality and Ted Hughes's blaming the solar system for the couple's fate. Or I could harp on critics' suspension of judgement or squelching of inquiry because Plath is too special, holy, smart, for mortals to judge or edit, gung-ho to publish every word she wrote, much of it like Elvis's Greatest Shit, an LP compiling the King's most ludicrous recordings such as "Do the Clam" (from Girl Happy) and studio outtakes. 

Critical "objectivity" has guessed Plath killed herself having all sorts of diseased or existential motives. An early one, taken seriously by Al Alvarez and others, was "Her poetry killed her," a statement so absurd I wonder why no one jeered -- while proscribing inquiries such as: Why does Loving Sylvia Plath, so eloquent and persuasive about Plath's experience of domestic abuse and the silencing of abused women in general -- erase Sylvia's mother? Aurelia Plath was a woman too, in an abusive marriage. That's not my opinion or new discovery. Aurelia -- she who wrung her hands about what the neighbors thought -- described her abusive marriage at length in Letters Home, published fifty years ago. Critics labeled her a "martyr," the bad kind.

There is evidence that Plath's domestic abuse is part of a family pattern: quick, defiant weddings followed by brutalization, traceable through five generations of Greenwoods and Plaths. Domestic violence is Plath's heritage and remains a family concern. A poem by her daughter Frieda Hughes, who like Plath uses poetry as expose and retribution, describes being "livid" with bruises and seeking shelter with her stepmother, who won't take her in. [1] Frieda's cousin Susan Plath Winston, who is Warren's daughter, is a lawyer representing victims of domestic violence. [2]

Loving Sylvia Plath focuses on Plath and Assia Wevill as victims of Ted Hughes, whose own mental warp required vows of silence from everyone he knew and, in partnership with sister Olwyn, hiding or destroying evidence of intimate partner violence or his portion of responsibility for intimate partners' suicidal despair. As far as I know, critics have not explored the likelihood that Hughes came from a violent family, information about his father, William, being exceptionally scarce. (Maybe more will come to light when Hughes-worshipping gets old.) Loving Sylvia Plath does say Olwyn, tireless tormentor and manipulator of lots of people, had an abusive alcoholic boyfriend and married him. [p. 185]

And a small example of inexplicable Aurelia erasure:

Van Duyne writes [p. 114] that the church sexton witnessed the wedding of Plath and Hughes. Aurelia Plath was a witness too. That's fact. Go look at the photograph of the registry (courtesy of scholars Di Beddow and Ann Skea). Why is the sexton credited as a witness but Aurelia not?

There are more such erasures, but I want to avoid nits and off-topic arguments such as, "Whoa, there; Plath's achievement is not equivalent to Virginia Woolf's." [p. 21] Better, "If Van Duyne read Harriet Rosenstein's acidic notes about her interview with Aurelia Plath, notes archived at Emory, Van Duyne surely read in that same document Rosenstein's notes about Sylvia's maternal great-grandmother":

“Miss Meyer (Beyer? What was her first name, Esther?) was married by grandfather, Greenwood, who felt that he’d stooped.” . . . “ONE OF THE FEW TIMES SHE [Aurelia] SHOWED STRONG EMOTION. BRUTALITY OF GREENWOOD. Treated Grandmother wretchedly. She bore nine children, raised seven of them, ran the store in Vienna. He did nothing but be charming and feel destroyed by improvident marriage. BRUTAL, IRRESPONSIBLE, CHARMING MEN" [3]

Possibly the editors suggested Van Duyne cut out Aurelia or family stuff. So domestic abuse looks as if it hit Sylvia from out of the blue.

I changed my approach to: "What can I offer that might build on this book's many merits, such as good scholarship, an unusual approach, and bold argumentation?"

I'll link you to that thoughtful article about the trend toward book-length "auto-criticism," which discusses Van Duyne's open affinity with Sylvia Plath, and addresses the problems of the auto-critical approach. (Every approach has problems.) [4]

I am not persuaded Sylvia's "violent marriage" was always violent and that in life she was only a victim. She married Ted Hughes knowing he "bashed people around," admired "such violence, and I can see why women lie down for artists." Plath knew she fused Hughes's personal presence and power with what she recalled of her father. So her family had a role in her choice of mate and marriage dynamics, and it's worth looking into.

Her family's gift to her, as far as we can prove, because physical abuse at home was not then a crime -- was verbal abuse. Sylvia Plath raised verbal abuse to a fine-art form. That's why we love the Ariel poems and The Bell Jar and Journals. That's why we get our dopamine ya-yas no matter how many times we read her.

Those who in life loved Sylvia Plath got burnt really badly.

[1] "Twenty-Third Year, 1982," pp. 45-46 in 45: Poems (Harper Collins, 2006).

[2] https://www.wral.com/story/sylvia-plath-a-postwar-poet-unafraid-to-confront-her-own-despair/17403369/

[3] Harriet Rosenstein's notes on her interview with Aurelia Plath (1970), p. 2, Manuscript Collection 1489, Stuart Rose Library, Emory.

[4] Lindemann, Frances. "Reading Oneself: Auto-Critics and the Sylvia Plath Problem," The Drift, issue #13, 19 July 2024.

Scary Prussian Art

Plath family heirloom c. 1881, 24" wide. Click to enlarge.

Otto Plath left Prussia before he was old enough to serve in the Imperial German army, but his uncle Emil Adolph Plath (b. 1859) had served, and as a parting gift the army gave Emil this personalized lithograph with three uniformed Emils posed in three phases of his service. 

Each pose has an identical face, cut from duplicate photographs of Emil, and pasted where his face ought to be. Headgear was hand-painted on. The leftmost figure's original face peeled or tore away and was restored but without headgear.

Cross the popular American prints by Currier & Ives with the typically heroic paintings of Prussian battle scenes and you get this official military lithograph, c.1881, a fantasia abristle with weapons and heraldry. [1] Crown Prince Frederick, Emperor Wilhelm I, and another noble occupy the lunettes. The white ribbon at bottom center says, "A reminder [memento] of my service." At the very bottom, barely visible in this photo, is the name Emil Plath. Descendant Rod Pope told me Great-Grandfather Emil had served with the palace guards and the background aligns with that.

In 1885 Emil Plath, honorably discharged, with his parents and sister Maria left an increasingly militant Imperial Germany for the U.S. [2] Emil married Martha Ebert in 1889 and they were the first whites to settle in Maza, North Dakota, where much of the Plath family story unfolded. Otto's mother Ernestine and his five siblings traveled from Prussia to Maza in 1901. [3] Otto's father Theodor, already in the States and traveling for work, had told Ernestine to lie to immigration officials that Emil was her husband. She did. [4]

A blacksmith, the family profession, Emil died in in 1922, leaving his customized work of art to his descendants who hid it during World War II. It was rescued from a closet where it spent the past quarter-century.

This family photo of Emil Plath in Maza, at right, was probably taken around 1920 when he sold his smithy and moved to Oregon. Old newspapers say his business had survived a tornado, blizzards, and the drought years that plagued Maza's short life as a North Dakota boomtown. Joyriders also stole Emil's car and drove it to Minnesota. He got it back.

There's a lifetime of hard work in Emil's face. Does he look at all like his nephew Otto Plath?

[1] The only similar German military portrait lithograph I found appears on eBay and is precisely dated "1881."

[2] Ship's manifest, heritage.statueofliberty.org, 1885, ship: Belquenland; passengers John Plath, 60, Carolina Plath, 60, Emil, 25, Maria, 17; all from Budsin; destination Chicago.

[3] Hadler, Mabel Lyles Jacques, North Dakota: Towner [County] Genealogies, 1700-1900, Image 711, calls Emil Plath "first resident of Maza." "Maza" is a Lakota word meaning "metal" or "iron." A Lakota named Chante Maza ("iron heart") operated a general store near the site of Maza, ND.

[4] Ship's manifest at right, 1901.

Thanks to Rod Pope for sharing the family photos and history.

Warren

We don't know Warren Plath very well. After his sister Sylvia's death he refused interviews, even those proposed by his own daughters. At Aurelia's memorial service he spoke not at all, thinking someone might capitalize on whatever he said. Warren was within his rights. He was the one who had to see his dead sister in her coffin and face her husband, who had treated her badly.

We've been so blinded by Sylvia that we forgot her brother Warren, raised alongside of Sylvia and cared for just as much.

From what Aurelia Plath wrote we learn that Warren could be irritable and hated to be told what to do; rather, one should ask him to do things. After learning from his wonderfully detailed obituary that teenage Warren had been a "candy striper" (hospital volunteer), I saw that when in summer 1953 Aurelia suggested Sylvia try the same, she was holding up Warren as a model, and most likely that happened more than once.

Sylvia was in New York at Mademoiselle and couldn't attend Warren's June graduation from Phillips Exeter. But the Boston Globe preserved it all (15 June 1953):

Which one is the little angel?

Warren J. Plath, son of Mrs. Aurelia S. Plath of Wellesley, won the Faculty Prize for General Excellence awarded to the senior "who is recognized on the grounds of scholarship and general character as holding the first rank." Among the Greater Boston boys who won college scholarships were: Harvard National Scholarship, Warren J. Plath of Wellesley; Harvard Competitive Prize Scholarship, Earl J. Silbert of Brookline; Teschemacher Scholarship to Harvard, Warren J. Plath of Wellesley. . .

After those awards, Warren graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1957 and got his Ph.D. at Harvard, too, although in 1959 when Sylvia whined to her psychiatrist that Warren was at Harvard but she was not, his path through grad school had been interrupted by a Fulbright year at the University of Bonn, where he learned to speak German.

Sylvia's original "rival," Warren was perceived as such even as their mother was nursing him. To my surprise I realized that the authentic part of Sylvia's memoir "Ocean 1212-W" was the toddler narrator's violent jealousy and hatred of the new baby about to displace her as the center of her family's attention. That mattered an awful lot to her, although it happens to eldest children every day. The memoir says she sought from the ocean a sign of her "specialness." In real life the ocean did not give one. But her memoir delivers to her a wooden carving of a "sacred baboon" which to me sounds rather comical.

Displaced she was. The story "Among the Bumblebees," which Sylvia wrote in college, describes her family life after Warren was born. "Warren" in the story, as in life, was blond and angel-faced. (Sylvia, frankly, was not as cute.) At a family supper, "Alice," age five or six, feeling jealous, quietly kicks "Warren" in the shins, making him cry. Then:

 

"Good lord, doesn't he do anything but cry?" Alice's father scowled, lifting his head, and making a scornful mouth. Alice glared at Warren in safe contempt.

"He is tired," her mother said, with a hurt, reproving look at Alice. Bending over the table, she stroked Warren's yellow hair. "He hasn't been well, poor baby. You know that." . . . The light made a luminous halo of his soft hair. Mother murmured little crooning noises to quiet him and said, "There, there, angel, it is all right now. It is all right."

 

With elaborate and passive-aggressive cooing and care, Mother takes Warren upstairs and Alice bonds with her father, who saw her kick her brother and tacitly approved; they have both felt deprived of the mother's attention. [1] This "pacifist" household loaded Sylvia Plath's emotional toolbox with propensities to punish, control, compete, and claim the center of attention. We know little about young Warren's emotions except that he had a short fuse and rigid habits. He grew up to be a computer genius.

Warren was smarter than Sylvia, proven at age 2-1/2 when he bested her storytelling with his own. In college the memory still stung; she wrote about it. [2] Aurelia Plath in her Letters Home preface soft-pedals her children's sibling rivalry, saying only “[t]here were many times when each made the other miserable; and Sylvia, as the older, was the more dominant and the more culpable.” That the conflict-avoidant Aurelia even mentioned their conflict means it was much worse than she said. Sylvia's Dr. Beuscher, paraphrasing Sylvia's case notes to a biographer, said that Sylvia's teasing "went beyond normal." Picking on or even hitting a new sibling is normal. But Sylvia had tried to choke Warren and stuff cloth down his throat. [3] No surprise, then, that Aurelia wrote of 1938-39, "Warren develops many allergies, food, grasses, pollen, etc. He has two serious bouts with bronchial pneumonia and an asthmatic condition develops." [4] Warren had asthma attacks well into his teens.

The siblings sometimes played nicely, but where did Sylvia learn to ridicule and kick shins and bite people, and to cut her brother's neck with an ice skate, and think to strangle him? She hadn't yet seen any wartime movie newsreels. Television did not exist. I hate to think the model for such behavior was her family. We will never know how Warren recalled Sylvia's teasing, which persisted until he grew taller than she.

Eventually Sylvia came to love and confide in her brother because as well as being taller he had mastered fields of knowledge not her own. Warren was a dutiful son who kindly helped Aurelia edit Letters Home and when he had his own family saw his mother three times a year. He was no fan of the older Aurelia. When she sent Warren letters he had his wife Margaret answer them.

[1] On a carbon copy of this story kept in the Plath archive at Smith College, Aurelia Plath wrote in Gregg shorthand "realistic."

[2] Composition written in German for a Smith College German course, 1955; read it in English here.

[3] Audio recording and written notes c. 1970 by Harriet Rosenstein of Ruth Beuscher reading case notes from a February 1959 session with Sylvia Plath, Emory.

[4] "Chronology" document by Aurelia Plath, Smith College Special Collections.

"Plath" Versus "Platt": Her Real Last Name

Otto Plath's Ellis Island entry record, September 1900

A couple of biographers say Sylvia Plath's family name is really "Platt," and they did not make that up; they can point to two federal documents, one calling Sylvia's future father "Otto Platt" (above), and the 1910 U.S. census calling her grandfather "Theodor Platt." Yet dozens of other documents, U.S. and German, including signatures, say "Plath" back to 1826. The Plaths knew their own name. "Platt" was a clerical error, common in U.S. official papers. But then . . .

"Plath" was not a rare name. Wisconsin was crawling with Plaths, unrelated, when Sylvia's father started college there. "Plath" or "Platt," meaning "flat" or "low," indicates origins in northern Germany's lowlands and wetlands (see the red in the map, its original here). Plath versus Platt? The German language's historic consonant and vowel shifts did not reach the north, so the north's Low German dialect has the "th" that High German famously does not except for words borrowed from Greek such as Bibliothek and Mathematik, and names such as Theodor or Goethe. It's "t" with a little puff of air.

Now, the exception: The Plath who became a Platt after threatening to kill folks he said owed him money. [1]

January 1914

What we know of Otto's youngest brother Hugo Friedrich Plath suggests one who had big plans. Born in 1890, fourth of six children, Hugo did not want to farm in Oregon with his father and brothers Paul and Max. In 1911, age twenty, Hugo returned to the U.S. from Canada where he'd tried to cash in on a building boom. At the border he claimed to have no relatives [2] and then moved restlessly between Oregon and Washington state. Three years later Hugo threatened -- idiotically, in writing -- to kill a father and daughter. Hugo in 1917 claimed exemption from the draft because his parents were his dependents. [3] They probably weren't; his mother was in a public mental hospital. I wondered if Hugo was mentally ill, but the army found him sane enough to enlist him in July 1918. In December 1918 he was discharged with a 12.5 percent disability for an injured eye. [4]

Hugo "Platt" married briefly and divorced. [5] (The Plaths, for their era, had a high divorce rate: Otto, 1; Max, 3; Hugo, 1, and younger sister Frieda Plath married a divorced M.D. whose wife had alleged "extreme cruelty"). [6] Hugo maybe alternated between "Plath" and "Platt" to dodge the warrant and any demands for alimony. Hugo "Platt" in the 1940 census was jobless after working on a WPA highway project. By 1942 he had settled in a Long Beach, California, trailer park, naming a lawyer as his next of kin. [7] In the 1950 census "Platt" lives in his trailer, unable to work. He died in 1974, age eighty-three, outliving all his siblings.

The army recorded two names for him (see card below). [8] The State of California issued two death records, one for Hugo "Platt" [9] and one for Hugo "Plath."

[1] Oregon Daily Journal [Portland], 18 January 1914, p. 8.

[2] "Plath, Hugo F., Contractor," U.S. Border Crossings, Port of Eastport, Idaho, August 1911.

[3] Plath, Hugo Friedrich, WWI draft registration card, 5 June 1917.

[4] Oregon, U.S., State Military Records 1846-1977, WWI Army Statement of Service Cards 1917-1919, image 25794.

[5] The Recorder [San Francisco] 21 January 1924; 11 February 1925. Her name was Edith.

[6] The Recorder [San Francisco], 21 September 1931, p. 1.

[7] Platt, Hugo F., WWII draft registration card, 1942.

[8] U.S. Veterans Administration Master Index, 1917-1940.

[9] California death certificate #36677.

Flying Over Baghdad With Sylvia Plath

U.S. Army Sergeant Paul David Adkins packed poetry books for his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. While nighttime artillery shook his container housing unit, he read by flashlight The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath and other poets "who pulled me from the fire, fed me bread and wine in the dark, warm corners of their books." Adkins responded to each poet with a poem of his own, collected and published by LitRiot Press as Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath.

I could not resist that title!

Adkins (B.A. history, M.F.A. poetry; jobless, he joined the army; today, he teaches) was my grad-school classmate, now the author of six poetry books and chapbooks, the latest, Sound and Fury, giving voice to the victims of Attica's prison rebellion. Like Plath's his poems irradiate their subjects down to their subatomic particles, and readers feel it. Paul and I recently met again after 30 years. In this video (6:33) he reads from Flying Over Baghdad a poem inspired by Adrienne Rich's poem about Ethel Rosenberg and the deadly nature of the powers that be.

Paul says: "You are who you read."