Cultural Debris in Aurelia Plath's Archives

Meet Aurelia Plath's Joys of Jell-O cookbook (1962). Among her last effects and sharing a packing box with Great Short Stories of the World, this volume testifies to how, with one-quarter of a stomach, Aurelia lived days, weeks, and months on fruit-flavored gelatin mixed with whatever she could tolerate. Featured recipes include "Ring-Around-the-Tuna Salad" and the timeless "Broken Glass" dessert.

What's cultural debris? The leavings and tag ends of fads and fashions inconsistent with the level of discourse. Aurelia Plath's papers have few such items. She never mentions pop music or coffee brands or her era's entertainers. Only one fad really swept her away:

To Linda Wagner-Martin, 9 December 1985

 

 

In Aurelia's copy of "Bumblebees and Their Ways"

Aurelia Plath to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia started in the 1970s drawing "smiley faces" next to written or printed remarks, a pox-like American habit now faded but not extinct. The sun-colored "smiley" symbol that in the '70s defaced every manner of consumer item lived on to sire the whole emoji tribe. On a Christmas 1965 letter from Ted Hughes, Aurelia drew a "sad face" because Ted had canceled her upcoming annual visit with her grandchildren. (He wasn't ready to explain Assia Wevill's baby.) Aurelia drew that teary "sad face" on Ted's letter well after first reading it, because she used a type of marker not available in 1965.

Aurelia to Mary Ann Montgomery, 1980

Aurelia had to explain "Paper from granddaughters" because the image was so uncomfortably inconsistent with who she was. Artist Bernard Kliban (1935-1990) drew tabby-cat cartoons printed by the millions on stationery, greeting cards, and tee-shirts ("Love to eat them mousies. . .") and the Kliban Cat still has fans. Of the examples of cultural debris in Aurelia's papers, the popularity of this nameless solitary cat (never a comic strip character, never animated) most defies political analysis. 

What else? Aurelia tried to quote in Letters Home Khalil Gibran's famous prose poem, "On Children" ("Your children are not your children"), made mawkish by overuse. Her editor stopped her. Online you will find a quotation from the popular prose poem Desiderata("You are a child of the universe") credited to either Sylvia or to Aurelia. Aurelia had quoted the poem in a letter to Sylvia, who liked it enough to quote it in her journal. [1]

Sylvia Plath on the other hand practically drowned in cultural debris, reading formulaic stories in women's magazines, in New York City vomiting beautifully sculpted food, and while wearing queerly-cut dresses watched food stylists using toothpicks to prop up melting scoops of ice cream.

[1] Journals, 27 February 1956. "Desiderata" (1927), an inspirational work by Max Ehrmann, was ever more widely quoted and reprinted in the 1960s and 1970s as a sort of creed for the counterculture.

How the "Letters Home" Playwright Changed the World

Montage from The Burning Bed, starring Farrah Fawcett, 1984

Imagine living in a time and place when it was legal and even good to beat your wife.

Sylvia and Aurelia Plath lived in that patriarchs' paradise, and their husbands abused them. We find this horrifying. But domestic abuse was common, and a victim's speaking out was called "He said she said" and was therefore nothing. Until.

Playwright and screenwriter Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote the TV movie The Burning Bed (1984). It was the first really raw and bloody TV portrayal of a battered wife tried for murdering her husband. More than 50 million people watched its premiere. [1] The result: criminalization, in the U.S., of domestic violence and marital rape. The latter, considered a separate issue, became illegal in all 50 states in 1993. The federal Violence Against Women Act, passed in 1994, has since updated its language and scope.

Before The Burning Bed, if police saw no violence they didn't make arrests. Clergy counseled married women despite broken jaws and shiners to remember their vow to honor their men. Shelters for women and children were few. There were some domestic-violence phone helplines. A 1-800 number appeared at the movie's end. Tens of thousands phoned that evening.

Rose Leiman Goldemberg

Goldemberg died July 21 at age 97. Her link with Sylvia Plath is her adaptation of Letters Home, a selection from Sylvia's letters edited by her mother Aurelia Plath. The two-character play debuted in New York in 1979, went to London and Paris and onward, and there is a very good closed-captioned French-language film of it (1986). Goldemberg earned Aurelia Plath's trust with a staged reading in Warren Plath's living room. Aurelia received 50 percent of each production's profits and letters document the women's friendship. But Goldemberg had to move on to her next book, play, or movie. She wrote a lot of each. [2]

As with The Burning Bed, Goldemberg often dramatized biographies and hustled to sell her scripts and see them produced. In the 1980s all three commercial television networks aired prime-time made-for-TV movies. All rejected the Burning Bed. They said no big female star wanted to appear disheveled and bruised to play a battered wife and mother. Except Farrah Fawcett. Fetishized for her pin-up photo and iconic hairdo, Fawcett had left what was called "jiggle TV" for gritty roles in off-Broadway plays such as Extremities. She gave a performance so memorable people still watch it.

Hollywood actors then asked Goldemberg to write them similar star vehicles with serious themes. She wrote Stone Pillow (1985), about a homeless woman, for Lucille Ball. All three networks then exploded with TV movies exposing the harm done by incest, stalking, parental kidnapping, and psychiatric treatment, which Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar had made a women's issue. These TV movies are now on YouTube and exist because women writers had and used their nerve.

Success felt strange. In a note to herself written two weeks before Letters Home premiered, Goldemberg, temporarily away from home, 1) longed to talk with Aurelia but didn't want to burden her and 2) felt insecure, yet exhilarated. "I am fifty, and old enough to know something," she mused. "Do we keep discovering?" [3]

Some of Goldemberg's earlier plays now seem dated. The Plath play was her only international hit. She wrote novels and screenplays few people ever heard of. It is easy for writers to think that a life spent writing what they were moved to write was mostly wasted.

Note to self: It never is. 

[1] "Francine Hughes Wilson," New York Times obituary 31 March 2017, says 75 million.

[21 See roseleimangoldemberg.com, her New York Times obituary (30 July 2025), and a full-length interview with Goldemberg (2011) opening with a discussion of The Burning Bed, on YouTube.com.

[3] "Thoughts at Barbara's typewriter," 12 September 1979, Rose Leiman Goldemberg Papers, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library.

 Actor Doris Belack, Letters Home's original "Aurelia," and Aurelia Plath at the American Place Theater, New York, September 1979. (That's not Sylvia's necklace.) 

A Hun Named Attila

Attila Kassay, M.B.A. Harvard, 1957.

Sylvia Plath was a schoolgirl when the Cold War started in 1946. She saw communist Russia pulp Eastern Europe into a featureless "bloc" and rule it with no end in sight. The next generation thought Russians invented communism because no one told us otherwise. In school we saw no educational films about "communist countries" and heard not a peep about their histories or cultures, with one exception: Hungary.

Schools allowed us Hungary in small doses: a folk tale, or "Hungarian dances" as a piano-lesson staple. Americans even tolerated Hungarian TV stars who made fun of themselves: Ernie Kovacs, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Hungary was special. It got a pass. My heritage Eastern European to the core, I sensed this but I had not the tools of reason, and the forces ruling us did not intend to equip us.

But they didn't stop middle-schoolers from ordering selected paperbacks for fifteen cents or a quarter through a service called Junior Scholastic. I bought and read to tatters I Am Fifteen and I Don't Want to Die (1966) a Hungarian girl's World War II survival story, and James Michener's The Bridge at Andau (1957), about the failed 1956 revolution. Hungarians, I learned, were anti-communist homeland patriots. That they were not Slavs but Magyars was in their favor. Russia was Slavic, tainting all other Slavs. We were taught nothing about them except they brainwashed kids to be godless communists. This was our parents' worst nightmare. [1] In Cold War politics the enemy could be anywhere--on your block, in Cuba, in protest songs, in outer space. Only a radical might translate Polish poetry and pester us to read it.

Plath's pre-Cold War juvenile diaries show her teachers promoting cultural exchange, which Plath adopted as one of her values. May through July 1945 Plath read three Hungary-themed children's books by author-illustrator Kate Seredy, who wrote The White Stag (1938), a folk tale impressively illustrated with great historical tableaux and the noble deeds and steeds of tribal Huns and Magyars. [2] This cultural exposure, however mild, prepared Sylvia to care or feign care about later events in Hungary. [3]

Westerners thought warmly of Hungary even before the Iron Curtain. Several thousand Hungarian elites after their 1848 war on Austria moved to the United States. Nicknamed "Forty-niners," their refinement made a favorable impression. Another wave post-World War I brought artist Kate Seredy. Hungarian intellectuals in the 1930s fled the Nazis rather than join them. It's a nation's intellectuals and artists who write and sing their history, so we heard about Hungarian exiles' and immigrants' world-class contributions to filmmaking and design, and winning every category of Nobel Prize except for Peace. Communists after World War II seized control of Hungary's universities, purging them of Jews and bourgeoisie. Student Attila Kassay (b. 1928), University of Budapest, was one of them. [4]

A federal student-exchange program in 1949 brokered for Kassay a $425 scholarship to Boston's Northeastern University. It covered a year's tuition. [5] Kassay arrived in April 1950. Through his U.S. senator, Kassay in 1953 was able to apply for permanent residence. [6] He met and dated Sylvia Plath, who got swoony over Continentals with exotic names. [7] He joked that he was King of the Huns and this amused her. She loaned him ten cents so he could buy a comb. (Was he broke?)  Four years older than Sylvia, he was worldly, suave, and ready for the long term, but Sylvia was not, wanting mostly "to conquer the cosmopolitan alien before I return to the rustic boy-next-door. Feminine vanity?" (Journals, 145). An Anglophile at heart, she later married Ted Hughes.

Kassay finished his Business Administration degree with honors and in 1957 his Harvard MBA. [8] In 1959 he married Sylvia Coutts. They settled in Worcester, Massachusetts and had four children. Known professionally as corporate vice-president Allan Kassay, he died in 1973, only 45 years old, but his Plath contact has made him as immortal as his name.

[1] They had their reasons. Unlike us they'd witnessed or heard firsthand how communism in practice got people killed.

[2] That fifth-century Huns and ninth-century Magyars together founded Hungary is a medieval legend, popular but false. Huns and Hungary are not related.

[3] Genealogical research shows Plath had Hungarian ancestry through her great-grandmother Barbara Greenwood. In her poem "Daddy," Plath styled Barbara as a "gypsy ancestress," in line with the stereotype of Hungarians as gypsies.

[4] Northeastern's yearbook "The Cauldron," 1955, says Kassay attended too the University of Innsbruck. 

[5] Background from Medalis, Christopher N., "American Cultural Diplomacy: The Fulbright Programs in U.S.-Hungarian Higher Education," diss. Columbia University, 2009. $425 in 1950 funded one year of full-time tuition at Northeastern. Kassay did hold student co-op jobs.

[6] The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 was specifically for refugees from communist countries. Kassay's request is in the Congressional Record, U.S. Senate 13 April 1953, page 2964, "Bills Introduced by Mr. Saltonstall."

[7] Plath also had fantasies about Polish males, embarrassing even to read.

[8] Boston Globe, 13 June 1957, p. 16. 

Only Perfection Will Do

For Aurelia Plath only perfection would do -- her ideas of perfection. Which were others' ideas of perfection. These overwhelmed her. Where Aurelia had control, she fixed matters, wary of what other people might think and say. She took criticism very personally, dreading it, warding it off. Sylvia when criticized got furious. No one would so fear criticism unless there were real and painful penalties for falling short of expectations. 

Was Aurelia a born conformist? No. She had pranced around onstage in men's clothes. She had a premarital sexual affair with a man her father's age. She dated a married man and in sinful Nevada lied that she lived there, and after his instant divorce instantly married him. Wife of a Jekyll-and-Hyde, Aurelia became hypervigilant and learned subterfuge and shutting up. And the longer Aurelia lived the more chance of criticism, because standards for womanhood and motherhood rose so eye-wateringly high, and kept rising, that criticism tipped over into judgement.

Judgement: deciding who a person is, based on one trait or incident. Such as a hairdo.

The above portrait of Sylvia is her lovely college graduation photo, signed by photographer Eric Stahlberg, taken in Northampton, 1955. He retouched the photo's glass negative, covering Sylvia's facial scar and the bobby pin that anchored her wave. Not so you'd notice.

It wasn't perfect enough. I have it on good authority, plus photos, that like many (most?) midcentury women, Aurelia was very conscious of the look of her hair. Everybody knew that hair is a woman's crowning glory -- Plath's portrait is all about her hair -- and if it's neat and tamed so is the woman, and if it's been coifed, she's a somebody. And ideally women had curls or at least a wave. And were blond. That was a lot to ask, but for this milestone photo, Sylvia or Aurelia or both cared enough to want it all.

Aurelia reproduced her personal print of the photo in Letters Home. I took a photo of it good enough (above) to show that the split ends at the back of Sylvia's head had been painted out. Enlargement showed beneath the bobby pin words in cursive, hard to read. Those must have been drawn on the negative after printing the print sold by Sotheby's.

When greatly enlarged (and the image flipped vertically, not shown) I saw on the retouched version, between the set of short lines pointing upward and downward, the words "Retouch marcel."

Close-up at Sylvia's temple: Can you see the writing?

It isn't clear whether Aurelia or Sylvia ordered this done. Both were perfectionists, and I can't tell you how much women of the time -- and later -- aspired to perfect immunity from criticism by those they knew, and feared judgement by those they didn't. Meanwhile mother and daughter spoke snidely of others and were super-critical of themselves. 

Sure, retouch the flyaway strands. Yet the request was to widen and deepen the wave or "marcel" in Sylvia's hair, so brightly studio-lit one can't tell if she was blond  or brunet. I always thought -- maybe you did too -- this photo showed her blond. But then why darken the bottom of the hairdo, thickly repainting it a cloudy black, obscuring individual strands? Compared to Stahlberg's print, the book version's higher contrast and taming create almost a zebra effect.

This must have satisfied, or Aurelia wouldn't have reprinted the photo.

"Sylvia Died Yesterday"

"Sylvia died yesterday," said the cablegram from Ted Hughes to Sylvia Plath's aunt Dorothy on 12 February 1963. Dorothy called Sylvia's brother Warren. The pink page above is Aurelia Plath's carbon copy of "Last Commentary," written in 1974, describing how she learned about Sylvia's death. Aurelia wanted this published in Letters Home. Her editor reduced it to its first sentence.

Aurelia's is the only report of this event. It's in the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College. The complete page, with its handwritten annotations, says:

(Last Commentary)

[[in black ink]] -- as it really was 

[[in pencil, upper right corner]] from Final Account Folder 6/7/74 

On February 12, 1963, my sister received a cablegram from Ted, stating, "Sylvia died yesterday," and giving time and place of funeral. No mention of the cause of death or of the whereabouts and condition of the children!

When I came home, later than usual, for I had stopped to have a hair shampoo and set after I had left Boston University, I saw Warren's car parked outside of my house. Thinking they had come for a surprise visit, I dashed joyously into the house, greeting both Warren and Margaret happily. They were very quiet, I noticed. We sat down in the living room and exchanged a few inconsequential remarks. Then I became aware of the tense atmosphere, the constraint evident in each of them. "You've come to break bad news to me," I then said, giving them the opening they were seeking. They told me of the cablegram Dorothy had received that morning. "The children," was my first cry. "What of the children!"

"Margaret called the British Consul in Boston, and we have learned they are alive and being cared for," Warren assured me. Then he told me he and Margaret were planning to go to England immediately. I wanted the children to be in our joint care. They promised they would do all they could to achieve this arrangement, urging me not to join them, persuading me that my presence might make such arrangements more difficult. My minister, the late Reverend William Brooks Rice, agreed with Warren and Margaret. [[added in blue ink]] so did my physician, Dr. Robert Brownlee. 

That's Aurelia's story. [1] In real life she was probably stunned and sickened to hear that her daughter was dead and guessed at once that it was suicide. Aurelia likely raved about Ted's cowardice in routing the shocking news through Dorothy and not naming any cause. I bet she argued long with Warren before conceding that she should not go to England. And in this account she proper-named her minister and doctor, I think to quash readers' suspicions that they weren't consulted.

Like all of Aurelia's elaborations this account is defensive. She wanted readers to know that titled authorities approved of her skipping the funeral, lest readers think she didn't go because she didn't care. The shampoo-and-set excuse backs Aurelia's claim that she was habitually home from work by 3 p.m. to greet Sylvia and Warren after school, not an "absent parent." Had the "bring the children to America" plan come through, instead of seizing and smothering the kids Aurelia would have nicely co-parented with Warren and Margaret.

The text seems to suggest that concern for her grandkids eclipsed her concern for her daughter, but by 1974 Aurelia knew better than to write about Sylvia's death: Ted would edit it out. Aurelia, aware of every dirty detail, had to keep silent or he'd deny her visits with the kids. And Ted sure didn't want us to know he'd burdened Dorothy and Warren with breaking the news -- although if I were Dorothy I'd probably have tried phoning Aurelia first. What Aurelia wanted publicly known is that she put the children's welfare above all.

Most of Aurelia's 1960s journals, or those that survive, convey much the same, recording only her annual visits with Frieda and Nick. She once called the children "pieces of Sylvia." That sounds awful, but for Aurelia the children were more than that. They were vessels for Aurelia's love, which Aurelia expected to be returned. It wasn't. She believed, or pretended to believe, in her century's campaign to persuade women that families were bound by love and members ought to love each other: the spiritual equivalent of painting little red hearts on everything. 

[1] AureliaPlath.info followers already know how to read Aurelia's anecdotes. If you don't, please see "It's Aurelia's Story and She's Sticking To It," Aureliaplath.info, 11 February 2025.

Sylvia Plath's Despair: It's Academic

Eighteen-year-old Sylvia Plath had written her mother Aurelia about exhaustion, sleeplessness and thoughts of suicide during her first semester at Smith College. On Sunday 10 December 1950 she wrote her mother about a fellow freshman who was suicidal over the college's academic demands. Reading between the lines, Aurelia wrote, in Gregg shorthand, on that letter's envelope:

Go to Dr. Booth Sylvia should go with her. If she wants they can should see Dr. Booth Tuesday. Girl will then be brought analyzed in one another presence. 

Aurelia, clearly rattled, seemed to misunderstand psychiatric treatment, yet wasn't ignorant or cold regarding Sylvia's depressions and was sharply aware that Sylvia needed something like analysis. Sylvia's previous letter (7 December 1950) had signaled Aurelia with triggering words:

. . . hoping that I can make it to Xmas vacation without going completely insane -- you know that sort of morbid depression I sink into. . . 

Whether the girls met with Dr. Booth, the college's psychiatrist, I don't know, but not 24 hours after writing the December 10 letter Sylvia wrote Aurelia that her friend seemed much better.

Getting all "A" grades was a distinction Sylvia wanted whatever its price. As a scholarship student, she only worked harder. Aurelia later told psychiatrists and journalists that overwork -- and not sexual matters -- had driven Sylvia to a breakdown. Academics were a double-digit percentage of Sylvia's trouble in summer 1953. In Sylvia's journal, October 1951, her sophomore year, Sylvia had written:

But worst of all I have this terrible responsibility of being an A-student. . . and I don't see how I can keep up my front. [1]

The tripwire for Sylvia's suicide attempt was academic: being denied admission to Frank O'Connor's writing course at Harvard. Sylvia tried killing herself in late August, the timing suggesting she dreaded returning to Smith for an extra-demanding senior year requiring an honors thesis about a novel, Finnegan's Wake, she hadn't yet read, and comprehensive English-lit exams she wasn't prepared for. [2] Which was her own fault. Esther Greenwood says:

I'd skipped [a course in eighteenth-century literature]. . . . They let you do that in honors, you were much freer. I'd been so free I'd spent most of my time on Dylan Thomas.  (TBJ, 139) 

She might even fail those exams. Or score less than brilliantly and not get a summa cum laude to go with her Phi Beta Kappa and college writing prizes, and so on.

Sylvia spent the fall '53 semester in mental hospitals and had electroshock treatments until in December she suddenly felt much better. In 1959 she pondered:

Why, after the 'amazingly short' three or so shock treatments did I rocket uphill? [3]

Sylvia wrote that the few treatments felt like sufficient "punishment." She doesn't say that if she claimed to be healed she could return to college for a gently scheduled extra semester to correct her path toward a triumphant senior year.

[1] Journal Fragment 17-19 October 1951, Journals.

[2] In the 1950s through the '60s, James Joyce was every English department's darling. Joyce scholars were the giants of the discipline (and acted the part). Sylvia wanted to be counted among them. Realizing she might not succeed, she chose another topic.

[3] "Therapy Notes," 3 January 1959, Journals. 

Otto Plath in the News

I'd thought a Nevada divorce was your own business and no one else's, so was surprised to read about Otto's in the old Boston American, January 5, 1932.

According to "dispatches"? From whom and where it didn't say. Otto Plath had divorced the day before, January 4. That news arrived in Boston overnight? Did Otto phone the Boston papers to tell them? Did Aurelia's mother phone in to get ahead of any gossip? Was Otto so well known? The fancy biology professor divorced in Sin City, U.S.A. some Lydia gal. Who knew?

The tattlers were Reno's squad of part-time newspaper "stringers." These freelance reporters wrote up and telegraphed to papers news too minor for full-time journalists. Stringers in Reno got the list of the day's divorces -- public information. They chose and distilled them, then wired them overnight to the parties' hometowns(!). A published dispatch paid the stringer $2, or $5. For a celebrity's divorce, maybe $10.

The Plath divorce notice again appeared January 8 in The Boston Post, specifying Carson City, Nevada. Not a peep about Otto and Aurelia marrying there.

Otto Plath wasn't in the newspapers much. He spoke to a beekeepers' society in 1923, gave a few other public talks. Aurelia took little Sylvia to hear Otto speak at Boston University, I think on February 23, 1935. The Boston Transcript said his topic was "Nature Study." Maybe it's that memory Sylvia wrote about in her short story "Among the Bumblebees":

Alice had thought, then, of the great hall at college where her father stood, high upon a platform. She had been there once with Mother, and there had been hundreds of people who came to listen to her father talk and tell them wonderful strange things about how the world was made.

Plath Ancestry, Solved

Plath ancestors. Sylvia's complete family tree is at FamilySearch.org.

Used to be that the Plath family tree went back only to 1826, the birth year of Sylvia's great-grandfather Johann, the man who disowned his grandson Otto. That's 200 years. It wasn't enough.

I recently added two confirmed generations to Plath ancestry, back to the 1700s.

Johann Plath and wife Caroline came to the U.S. from Prussia in 1885, bringing two young-adult children, Emil and Marie. According to locals, the Plaths arrived in Wisconsin "very poor people." I figured they had fled German/Prussian persecution. In fact Johann's brother had died in 1884 and Johann intended to run his brother's farm. When Johann retired he rented a house. By 1899 he was able to pay Otto's passage to America and for the boy's tuition. The string attached was that Otto had to become a Lutheran minister. When Otto, college graduate, told Johann he'd rather be a teacher, Johann crossed Otto's name out of the family Bible and cut him loose.

Otto might not be the only offspring Johann disowned. Either he or Caroline told the 1910 federal census-taker that they had eight children, five still living. [1] Documentation shows only two of the eight were dead: a son who died in childhood and Marie, dead in 1895. Johann, maybe along with his wife, considered one of his six surviving children dead to him.

Which child? Don't know. But if this wasn't a miscalculation it offered more of a sense of how Johann's love and money were contingent on obedience, even from a grandson who in 1910 was 25.

They said out of their eight kids only five were living.

Of old Johann's father, U.S. records said only that his name was Julius, and there the Plath family trail went cold. There were many ethnic-German "Julius Plaths" all over Prussia, and none a match.

A Plath descendant had met with this same genealogical "roadblock," and last year I promised I would scour German/Prussian records to find our man. Three weeks ago I found Julius and a bonus -- his parents' names and their wedding date.

Born in Luebbersdorf in northern Prussia, Julius Plath (1791-1847) was baptized Andreas Julius Plath, after his two baptismal sponsors. Other local records call him "Andreas Julius" and "Julius Andreas," but he went by "Julius" and his own kids didn't know otherwise.

Julius was copying his own father, Johann Heinrich Plath (born 1766) who amid the tons of other "Johanns" in the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin chose to be called "Heinrich." Below is Julius's 1791 baptismal record. Heinrich's name starts beneath the inkblot, and the entry ends with his wife's name, Regina Maria Schroeder (b. 1763) whom Heinrich married in 1785. [2]

The name "Heinrich Plath" starts on the line below the ink blot.

Google Lens solemnly told me it couldn't read the above. So I applied my experience, and bingo.

The land that in Otto's time became the Polish Corridor has twelve (yes, a dozen) towns and villages named "Grabow." Via the Julius inquiry I was finally persuaded that Otto Plath's birthplace was the "Grabow" specifically in district Mecklenburg, Otto's now well-documented North German ancestral home. Then I tried finding a record of Otto's birth. The books covering his birth year, 1885, and a few adjacent years are missing.

[1]  United States, Census, 1910," FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:MPVY-J66 : Thu Mar 07 18:28:20 UTC 2024), Entry for John Plath and Caroline Plath, 1910.

[2] I replaced the umlauts in the text with the "ue" and "oe" just for now.

Sylvia Plath family tree at FamilySearch.org. 

Pleased With Everything: Plath Family Papers at Yale

The Plath family has gifted Aurelia and Warren Plath's literary estates to Yale University's Beinecke Library. This donation ended my seven years of being bound by a non-disclosure agreement. 

I saw and photographed Aurelia Plath's estate materials, then privately owned, back in 2018, and despite temptation have kept quiet all this time, praying that the letters, postcards, photo albums, artwork, realia, and Aurelia's journals -- ranged across 22 different notebooks, entries dated 1924 to 1990 -- might not rot in boxes or be auctioned off piece by piece, that the archive would stay whole, a gift to all Plath scholars. I am grateful.

Aurelia's journals for 1963, photographed in 2018. I used the ruler for scale.

In 2018 I spent only two days with the 20-plus boxes of Aurelia's estate so couldn't see every bit, but it included treasures I hope haven't been sold or withheld. We will at last see what Aurelia did not sell to Indiana University or donate to Smith but kept until she died. Yale's archivists are currently processing the materials and told me they expect to finish in autumn. I plan to be there and report to you. I don't expect a mob. This is the stuff Aurelia valued and you know how she has been valued. My impression was that Aurelia was a very critical and love-hungry adult (so was Sylvia) and she could keep a secret.

Remember this is once again Aurelia-curated material. It might or might not alter the narratives we are used to.

Such a thrill, of the sort researchers get! And what a relief. For two days after I learned about this gift to Yale I quivered all over and couldn't sleep or eat. Call me a geek, but I'm a happy one.

The Beautiful Mrs. Plath: Rare Photos

Otto Plath's first wife Lydia Bartz, as she looked when they met.

Here's a new-found photo of Otto Plath's first wife, Lydia Bartz, in 1910 a clerk at the Fall Creek, Wisconsin, general store her father founded. She married Otto in Spokane, Washington, in 1912. The couple then moved to Berkeley, California, where in 1915 Otto split for New York without her, complaining that she was "not educated" and sexually cold.

Not only was Lydia Bartz "very pretty," as the town clerk told Harriet Rosenstein she was: Lydia was diligent. [1] When Otto abandoned her, owing her prosperous family a crippling amount of money, Lydia with Otto's sister Frieda enrolled in a Chicago nursing school, graduated in 1918, went to Ohio for post-graduate studies, moved back home, and soon supervised the surgical unit of Luther Hospital in Eau Claire, the city nearest Fall Creek. Below, in 1953, Lydia is honored by her college's alumnae for her years of service and for teaching "more than 500 nurses," but her service wasn't over; she passed her final annual nursing-license exam in 1960, age 71.

April, 1953

Yet Lydia's life wasn't anywhere near finished; she lived until 1988, dying at age 99. She was the only one of five Bartz sisters to marry, and even after a 15-year separation from Otto and no children she refused to divorce him, making his life difficult. Otto -- immortalized by his daughter Sylvia Plath as "Daddy" the fascist and "brutal male," doubtless deserved it, because Lydia, and Otto's second wife Aurelia Schober, learned to hate him, and Sylvia as a child "many times wished that he were dead." [3]

1. "very pretty": Fall Creek town clerk Marjorie Shong to Harriet Rosenstein, 22 February 1977, Emory.

2.  Luther is now a Mayo Clinic satellite campus.

3. Journals of Sylvia Plath, p. 293. 

Photo credits: 1910 photo from Henke, Patricia: Sights and Sounds of the Valley: A History of Fall Creek (1978); Eau Claire (WI) Leader-Telegram, 16 April 1953. 

Sylvia Von Platho

Baroness Charlotte Sophie von Platen und Hallermund (1669-1725)

Plath family lore says Sylvia Plath's paternal great-grandfather Johann, when he came from Prussia to America, gave his name as Johann von Plath, the "von" indicating descent from a line of nobles, specifically barons, who for 900 years had lived on land grants from Prussian rulers. An American official scolded Johann, "We do not allow titles in America."

Not contented to live the rest of his life as a common Wisconsin farmer, ten years later for his daughter Mary's death certificate Johann Plath gave his surname as "von Platho." His father and brother and his children and grandchildren were all from birth surnamed "Plath," none of them "von Plath," or "von Platho," which sounds like a made-up name anyway. But it's a real name.

Sylvia Plath's paternal line shared its home territory with generations of nobles surnamed von Platho, von Platen, von Plotho, von Plato (many scholars have that name), von Plathe -- all from the German root "plat," meaning "flat." The "plat"-rooted names were geographical, "von" meaning "from." So all those names, which in German sound much alike, mean "from the lowlands of northern Germany." That area's also called Pomerania, which is Polish and means "on the sea."

While everyone wishes to have noble or royal ancestry, and Johann Plath, Otto Plath's illiterate grandfather, was a status seeker, no evidence links Sylvia Plath with Prussian or German gentry. German chancellor Otto von Bismarck in the 1870s and 1880s liked handing out the "von" title to flatter and keep the loyalty of wealthy industrialists and parvenus, but Sylvia's family of farmers and small-town blacksmiths was unlikely to receive even that lowest of noble titles. [1] The surname "Plath," with no "von," is very very common.

[1] Spring, David, ed. European Landed Elites in the Nineteenth Century. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977. 

Sylvia Plath's Hair Ribbons and Headbands

Sylvia Plath, 1937.

The cut-out photo below is from Aurelia Schober's college yearbook 1928, and I wonder if it's really her; as that yearbook's editor-in-chief, Aurelia surely pasted her own photo, unlabeled, into a yearbook page titled "When We Were Very Young," showing about 30 childhood photos of women in her graduating class.

Sheesh, I thought; that white bow on the kid, big as her head! Leftover Victorian fashion! Dissuading little girls from playing, swimming, running, napping: enforcing feminine passivity.

The reproachful face makes me think this is Aurelia, around 1912.

Yet most little American girls wore ribbons and bows in the 1910s, '20s, and '30s, when grown American women wore them only to keep their hair out of their faces and and food. In the 2020s exhausted parents tug pink elastic bands onto the sensitive skulls of newborns just to show they are female. Such symbols of femininity and innocence can look cute, and some girls did like wearing ribbons and hairbands, or at least didn't hate them. They maybe thought every female wore them. Here's Sylvia, age three, and her mother at Winthrop in 1936:

I thought Sylvia's mother or grandmother forced her to wear ribbons and bows. But Sylvia spent her life wearing ribbons (pink for her wedding; pale blue for the childhood ponytail her mother cut off and archived), plus bandanas and bands that tamed and trained her hair. That famous "dip" over Sylvia's left eye -- worn long before she went blond in 1954 -- needed a hairpin to anchor it. Where's Sylvia's facial scar in the photo below? It's hidden beneath some quite obvious retouching:

Plath's accessories were pivotal. Her hairpins and watch were removed before electroshock. As you know, Ted Hughes tore off Sylvia's hairband and earrings when they first met. Sylvia mourned "my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I will never again find." [1] I'd love a Sylvia Plath fanfiction about her hairband and earrings and how she got them back or lost them forever. 

It's in the nature of ribbons and hairbands to get lost and replaced. But because Sylvia so often wore hairbands we will always know that this bookstore finger puppet/fridge magnet, even if its tag goes missing, is Sylvia Plath.

Finger puppet. They're British! They don't ship to USA.

In Sylvia's poem "Parliament Hill Fields," an ordinary dimestore barrette makes the first appearance of its kind in literature:

One child drops a barrette of pink plastic; / None of them seem to notice. [2]

In the context of the poem, Plath made that moment resound.

While there are some articles and book passages about Sylvia's apparel, I hadn't noticed that about half the photos of her show her hair controlled with bandanas and headbands. I didn't even see that Sylvia so often wore headwear until I saw the monstrous white bow on what I think is Aurelia Schober. [3] That child's forlorn expression and wavy, light-ish hair have me thinking it's her. About Aurelia's childhood we as yet have no photos and know almost nothing.

By 1962 Sylvia's hair grew long enough to be braided and coiled into its own headband; the style is called a "crown braid" or "coronet." Sylvia exulted over hers and is wearing it in the famous "daffodil" color photos taken in April '62. Poet Amanda Gorman in 2021 started a media fuss by wearing a red headband crownlike, as if women aren't supposed to do that. It's regal.

A coronet. How to make one?

[1] Journals, 26 February 1956.

[2] "Parliament Hill Fields," written February 1961.

[3] For really small photos of little Sylvia's really monstrous bows, see the Plath family photos of Sylvia on the endpapers of Letters Home.

What's Missing From Sylvia Plath Archives

You can buy this for $135K USD. Free shipping.

The primary Plath archive at Indiana University's Lilly Library isn't pure Sylvia Plath. It's her mother Aurelia Plath's edit of her accumulation of Sylvia's papers and memorabilia, 3000 pieces spanning Plath's lifetime, plus letters Aurelia wrote and received up to 1974. Generous, remarkable. Yet Plath scholar Dr. Anita Helle nails it when she writes, "It is in the character of the modern archive to be both overflowing and incomplete." [1]

Here then are some of the items I and others see "missing" from Sylvia Plath archives. In print are thousands of pages, millions of words, of Plath's writings, drawn from multiple archives and coaxed out of private collections, so much we can hardly read it all, but it's just human to fixate on what's missing, like the shepherd with 99 sheep.

These exist but can't be accessed: 

Telegram to Ted Hughes, February 1957, from New York's Poetry Center, saying Hughes has won the prize of publication for his manuscript The Hawk in the Rain.

Aurelia Plath's own journals, referenced in Letters Home, were part of a Plath family donation to Yale's Beinecke Library and might someday be available. 

A few letters from Sylvia to Aurelia and to acquaintance Lynne Lawner.

Ted Hughes around 1990 began hinting that he did not destroy Sylvia Plath's last journal. In a recent Substack interview [2], archivist and Plath editor Peter K. Steinberg said he knows where the last two missing journals are, and in an online talk added that they are sealed until 2063. In fact they are sealed until 2059.

Of Aurelia Plath's letters to Sylvia, some survived into the 1970s, because Aurelia had wanted to publish a few in Letters Home. In the 1980s Aurelia told Dr. Richard Larschan that nearly all her letters to Sylvia -- only ten are in archives -- had been burned, but never said Sylvia burned them. I say a better candidate for the "burning" is Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and Plath's censorious "literary agent." Larschan said that Aurelia spoke sadly of the loss but said no more. 

Absent from the Lilly archive's file of Sylvia's unpublished short stories are the manuscripts of "The Mummy" and "The Trouble-Making Mother," both written in 1959. Sylvia must have carried them to England. Olwyn Hughes in 1989 asserted that "The Mummy," in her custody, "went missing 20 years ago." [3] Peter K. Steinberg found a fragment of that story at Emory University's Hughes archive and it appears in The Collected Prose of Sylvia Plath (795-96).

Where these are, I don't know: 

Some very consequential communications were possibly destroyed soon after creation or receipt because they caused such pain:

-Telegram, February 1963, from Ted Hughes to Sylvia's aunt Dorothy Benotti, saying "Sylvia died yesterday."

-Letter, July 1953, from Harvard University Summer School denying Sylvia admission to Frank O'Connor's short-story-writing class.

Missing: Records from autumn 1958 when Aurelia and siblings Dottie and Frank argued over housing their aging father and spending his cash. Sylvia briefly mentioned the conflict but Aurelia certainly withheld specifics or conveyed them to Sylvia over the telephone.

Missing: Some tell-all letters Sylvia wrote to her in-laws when Ted left her, letters supposedly stolen by one of Ted's girlfriends. [4]

Missing: Hours before her suicide, Sylvia paid her downstairs neighbor for stamps so she might mail some letters, but the letters were in her flat, unsent, when she died. Ted did open and read the letter addressed to Aurelia, because later he advised Aurelia not to read it. Aurelia told Richard Larschan she did not read it.

Lost: 

The draft, written in 1962, of Sylvia's unfinished novel Doubletake, or Double Exposure, about an artist whose husband cheats on her. [5] Ted and his sister Olwyn and Assia Wevill all read this draft, variously said to be "60" or "130" pages, before it was lost. Ted said Aurelia stole it, but that makes no sense because Aurelia couldn't publish or sell it: Ted held the copyright.

Draft pages of Aurelia Plath's attempt at a novel about her mother's girlhood, its working title Teena Marie, are mentioned in a letter Aurelia wrote in 1960 and in an interview from 1975. And any other creative writings she attempted. Sylvia mentions a radio play Aurelia wrote for a contest she did not win.

Plath-Hughes divorce papers.

Sylvia Plath's letters to Chicago confidant Eddie Cohen. 

Most likely never existed:

Unabridged Journals editor Karen V. Kukil says "Sylvia Plath did not keep a journal her senior year at college" (p. 89). Some fans insist this break in journaling is out of character and a journal for 1954-55 must exist. For the curious, Sylvia documented that eventful year in her letters, and many friends such as Nancy Hunter, Peter Davison, Richard Sassoon, and Gordon Lameyer are quoted in Plath biographies or wrote memoirs covering that time.

Of Plath's "second novel of joy and romance," which Aurelia said was titled Hill of Leopards and Sylvia read to her and then burned, no trace has been found.

For sale, if you want to buy them:

Painting, signed by Sylvia Plath [top of page], $135,000, AbeBooks. Painted when Plath was 16. On the same page are about 20 other Sylvia Plath collectibles at scary prices. 

Ebay has a few vintage first-edition copies of The Bell Jar by "Victoria Lucas" (1963) and by "Sylvia Plath" (1966) plus many other Plath-adjacent items. If a book is a "first edition" but also a "second [or later] printing," or minus a jacket, it is of dubious resale value. 

[1] Helle, Anita. "Reading Plath Photographs" in The Unraveling Archives (2007), Helle, ed., p. 184.

[2] Turrell, James, "James Meets Peter K. Steinberg," Substack titled "James on. . . Everything," 4 October 2024. 

[3] Hughes, Olwyn, "Sylvia Plath's Biographers," New York Review, 7 December 1989. 

[4] Trinidad, David,  "Hidden in Plain Sight: On Sylvia Plath's Missing Journals," Plath Profiles, Vol. 3, Autumn 2010.

[5] Clark, Heather, Red Comet, p. 825.

How I Critique Essays About Sylvia Plath

The tears of a Weeping Scholar Tree (Sophora japonica).

Planning a post this week about why Sylvia Plath loved food, I read the essays  "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops: Sylvia Plath and Food" by Lynda K. Bundtzen, anthologized in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath (2022) and "Plath and Food," by Gerard Woodward, published in Sylvia Plath in Context (2013), edited by Dr. Tracy Brain.

I'd avoided for years sitting down with Sylvia Plath in Context, pouting because a book with that title should include an essay about Plath's background and family. Didn't those count as context? To me they do. Please note that I am such a Tracy Brain fan I had her autograph my copy of The Other Sylvia Plath.

They look a bit like Ted and Sylvia.

But I now read "Plath and Food." Poet and novelist Woodward chose to count Plath's references to food and eating, finding that about one-third of Plath's poems refer to one or the other ("black as burnt turkey"). As we say in Missouri, "Well, butter me and call me a biscuit," because I had planned to state that there's no Plath poem about food, although this unpublished early poem, soon to be seen in The Complete Poems, would probably qualify:

(Wondering if Plath was told, 'You will sit here until you eat it'

) 

Woodward wrote with English authority about postwar English recipes Plath lampooned as "Lard and stale bread pie, garnished with pig's feet." Ted Hughes praised her fine cooking but complained when meals were too fancy or too light.

Bundzten's "Lucent Figs and Suave Veal Chops" feasts us on Plath's descriptions of the foods Plath bought, anticipated, cooked, served, and savored, the poet even providing for them dazzling new adjectives. And she packed her face when eating other people's food. Delightful. Maybe Plath would have conquered the  'slicks ' as a food writer. 

Not only a "woman singer," Plath was the offspring of food-service and hospitality workers. Plath's maternal great-grandparents boarded tourists in their Tyrolean pension. Her "Grampy" was a headwaiter. Her German father Otto worked in a New York grocery and a deli. Plath's Viennese grandmother worked in her parents' store and cooked hearty European food and bakery, which Plath replicated in her own household. Plath's uncle Henry's deli in Boston employed several other Schobers, and Henry and three Greenwood uncles scattered across the U.S. were professional waitstaff and restaurant managers.

We picture fin-de-siecle immigrants as miners and subsistence farmers, but the Plaths, Greenwoods, and Schobers arrived from Europe as service workers, white people visible and legible to the white privileged class. This, plus marriages to U.S.-born citizens, created for Sylvia's generation a great advantage: access to those privileges, but only if the kids did everything right.

So Plath's generation was assigned to do everything right. That's the struggle she lived with and wrote about, not about the German-speaking family she felt burdened by and did not live to appreciate beyond its work ethic and its food. Each time I read a new Plath essay, I wonder if it will acknowledge the fullness of her heritage, which shows up in her life in other and more consequential ways. 

Plath Scholars Who Were Poets

Plath biographer Paul Alexander (photo c. 1990) wrote plays.

The links below lead you to Plath scholars' and critics' own poetry. When I could not find published works I gave documentation. Let's celebrate these academics-critics-biographers and their creative-writing practice, past or present. This list of names doesn't include all of them. First, the poets, in no particular order:

Janet Malcolm, young New Yorker poet

Peter Davison

Edward Butscher [NSFW!]

[Francis] George Steiner

Al Alvarez

Peter K. Steinberg

Amelia Rosselli

David Trinidad

Sandra M. Gilbert

Sarah Ruden  

Emily Van Duyne

Anne Stevenson

Janet Malcolm

Diane Wood Middlebrook

Catherine Rankovic

Rosalind Constable

Aurelia Plath

Who were poets in their Youth:

Karen V. Kukil [she told me]

Anita Helle [The essay "Family Matters" in Northwest Review, Vol. 26:2 (1988), says that teenaged Helle sent her grandaunt Aurelia Plath a booklet of her poems. Aurelia read it and replied with a warning: "There is a price for such sensitivity."]

Gail Crowther

Fiction/Drama Writers:

Dido Milroy Merwin (playwright)

Tracy Brain (novelist)

Heather Clark (novelist)

Paul Alexander (playwright)

Every writer has written in more than one genre. Professionals work through a decade or two before finding their genius: Sylvia Plath is a case in point.

I confess I looked hard for any poems by Olwyn Hughes, whose spite and fury I think sprang from frustrated artistic ambitions.

The Working World

Boston University, class of 1967

Troubled Esther Greenwood "had always looked down on" the city college where her mother taught, because "it was coed, and filled with people who couldn't get scholarships to the big eastern colleges." We now know author Sylvia Plath was imperfectly disguising Boston University, a private university where her mother Aurelia was a tenure-track professor, although The Bell Jar doesn't say that. And if all we know about its students is Sylvia Plath's impression, we don't know those students at all.

From Boston University yearbooks for female College of Business graduates 1967 and 1968 I drew names, photos, and hometowns, tracing about 40 alumnae. I then mailed requests for an interview about Boston University's campus life and its College of Business Secretarial Studies degree program in its waning days, the middle 1960s, when Aurelia taught there.

So far, one graduate responded: Rose Casparro Williams, B.U. College of Business, 1967; M.S. in counseling, Northeastern University. She still has her B.U. transcript, diploma, and class ring. In her hometown, Lowell, Mass., Rose says it was taken for granted that women had to get jobs and support themselves.

Interview with Rose Casparro Williams

You’re one of the Business Education secretarial-program graduates who actually went on to a business education teaching career. After graduating I taught in New Hampshire for three years at a business college, then for twenty years in Medford, Mass., then worked in New Hampshire guidance counseling.

Courses you taught? Typing, shorthand, accounting, business math, business English and Office Practice, where we ran the classroom as an office and the students each had positions with my company, so to speak.

How did you choose a business education major? We started at B.U. at the College of Basic Studies and took our liberal arts courses for the first two years, and then transferred to our specialty school in the B.U. system. One day there was a sign at B.U. looking for young ladies – they didn’t include the guys then – to type papers, for extra cash. Most of the girls could type but the guys couldn’t, and they paid to have their papers typed. It was fun and interesting. We tried to teach the boys how to type, but then it clicked in my mind that teaching was something I could pursue. And I did.

What B.U. courses do you remember? Another typing class, shorthand, and some marketing and accounting classes. I failed economics and had to repeat the class, but the second professor approached it from a mathematics angle and I aced it.

Who was on the faculty? I had Virginia Waller as a typing instructor. She was tough. She made it tough on us so that we really learned from her. The other was Elizabeth Hemmerley. She was excellent as well.

As you planned your career did you ever consult with faculty members about your future or your opportunities? Virginia Waller used to say she was preparing us for a world of work, whether we chose to be secretaries or to teach business courses. And she would find out what you wanted and steer you toward what classes you needed or how to approach things so you would be either a good secretary or a good teacher. If you were going to teach, you were going to do it well.

Do you remember your shorthand? My group of friends -- we were referred to as the "Uneven Dozen," because the thirteen of us hung out together. One of them lives now in London, and we still communicate back and forth and do it in shorthand. We still do!

I was mystified by shorthand. Like, wow: I can do this! We used to get a magazine every month that was tied in with one of our courses, a whole magazine in shorthand, and it had a story in shorthand, and we couldn’t wait to get that magazine to read the next installment.

Did people look down on you for studying secretarial work rather than studying to be a business executive? I would always say to them, if you know how to type you could always get a job no matter what. And from there you can go anywhere.

What swayed you to the educational rather than the secretarial track? I can remember my mother telling me that when we used to play school I wouldn’t let anybody else be the teacher. It was either that or nursing, and I gravitated more toward teaching. I can’t say teaching is magical, but it is. When you teach a concept and they finally get it, it’s like, wow, I gave them something they can hold onto and take with them.

Tell me more about The Uneven Dozen. We were all in business ed, and all commuter students. I came from Lowell, 45 or 50 miles from B.U. We talked about our classes and the instructors, and all hoped to find a teaching position close by and not lose contact with each other. Our goals were to get through school, graduate, and take the next step of finding a position, a job. Some of the girls said, we’re gonna find a husband, find a husband, and two of my friends married, but the rest took time to work before settling down.

Did you have  a scholarship, or did you pay your way? My parents helped me out and I worked during the summers and I also worked for a temporary agency, and for two summers in Bedford, Massachusetts, for the aerospace industry.  There was also a company called Miter that did government work, and I worked for them one summer.

I can't believe you commuted 45 miles each way every school day. It wasn’t bad. We got to know the people on the train who were going to Boston to work, and they were delightful. On the days they knew we were having exams, nobody on the train spoke, it was very quiet, because they saw us studying our books. They really knew us. Lots of times they would bring us coffee or doughnuts or a little something. We got to know them very well over the course of our commuting time. And a couple of times, like, if we forgot to buy a pass – instead of a daily ticket, we would buy a pass, it was easier -- the conductor would just let us take the train and get our pass later.

The Armchair Nazi

About Aurelia Plath's opinion of Sylvia's poem "Daddy" which so shocked readers when it appeared in Ariel (1965 UK; 1966 USA): "It was the poem that sold the book." Strangers phoned Aurelia, asking "Was Otto Plath really a Nazi?" Aurelia denied it, and truly, Otto was not, but there are clues that he behaved like one. Sylvia recalled in a journal entry (8 December 1958) which is famously bitter about her upbringing, that Otto had "heiled Hitler in his own home."

I don't think Sylvia made that up.

Like Aurelia, we like to deny that Otto ever heiled Hitler, but the context makes me think he did, at least once, and available examples of his pacifism are limited to when there were uniforms or insects around. Aurelia also reported that he said he'd take up arms, but only in defense.

Aurelia in Letters Home and personal letters, and Sylvia in poems, described Otto as autocratic, verbally and loudly abusive, obsessed with control. I think he was like modern-day would-be domestic dictators who raise their fists in solidarity with the meanest-looking movie villain, the ill-mannered, the assassin, the big bruiser, the dominator with the power to punish and destroy. And in the late 1930s, during the two-plus years it took him to die, Otto Plath, coughing and growing thin, barely got through his day of teaching before "collapsing" on the couch in his study. 

I had a husband who took two and a half years to die of esophageal cancer, and as he lost weight, height, and hair he only got meaner, mouthier, and more controlling, and fried himself pounds of forbidden bacon and ham. Late in his illness came a startling change of spirit: He began preaching about Jesus. 

Unaccustomed to, in fact flailing in his weakness, he tried to align with whatever power was most available, no matter how bizarre or out of character.

In the poem "Daddy" there is also the husband-is-a-Nazi factor ("I made a model of you") that critics ignored and Aurelia identified only in a marginal note. And I find Sylvia's introduction to the "Daddy" BBC recording a clue to her parents' marriage.

While fading away, Otto Plath heard on the radio Hitler's barking in German, and maybe Otto raised his fist and heiled in solidarity not exactly with Hitler or the Nazi party -- Otto left Germany 20 years before the party was formed -- but with the desire to rule the world, although all he could rule was his household.

Jerks know they are being jerks and it makes them hate themselves, and those around them, even more. Aurelia told McLean Hospital that Otto never yelled at the children until the last year of his life. I think that was enough time to yell. Remember, Sylvia and Warren barely knew a healthy father.

And by being ill and refusing treatment, and dying, Otto displaced his children as the family's focus and power center.