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.