Plath and Sleeping Pills

Sylvia Plath mentioned sleeping pills in numerous letters. The pills were barbiturates, some available over-the-counter.

From Sylvia Plath's Letters, Volume 1:

28 June 1949 to Aurelia Plath: "I really don't need any sleeping pills by the time the day is over." (Plath at the time is 16 years old.)

29 October 1950 to Aurelia: "I have taken a hot bath and a sleeping pill"

3 December 1950 to Aurelia: "I'm going to take two little pills and be asleep by nine o'clock"

31 January 1951 to Aurelia: "I guess I'll take sleeping pills till after exams are over"

18 October 1951 to Aurelia: "It's wonderful how comfortable strong nosedrops, hot compresses and penicillin and sleeping pills can make a sinus sufferer."

20 October 1951 to Aurelia: "I was dosed with pirivine [nose drops] and pyribenzamine [antihistamine] and sleeping pills"

3 March 1952 to Aurelia: "I took two sleeping pills two hours apart, as you said"

19 July 1952 to Aurelia: "It now being 10:30 p.m., I am sitting in bed (phenobarb duly taken)" 

17 November 1952 to Aurelia: "got the first good night's sleep (with the aid of a phenobarb) for weeks." 

(Plath takes sleeping pills prescribed by her aunt/family doctor, Francesca Racioppi, M.D., for most of spring semester 1953. That summer, Racioppi prescribes for Plath a stronger sleeping pill. In August, Plath overdoses on sleeping pills and barely survives.)

28 December 1953 to Eddie Cohen: "I became immune to increased doses of sleeping pills"

27 October 1955 to Elinor Friedman: "Gone are the good old Smith days with cocaine, codeine, and sleeping pills" [1]

Journals, 5 November 1957: "First I couldn't sleep without pills, now I can" 

In Letters, Volume 2, as Sylvia's marriage falls apart she becomes addicted to sleeping pills and knows it.

27 January 1960 to Aurelia: "I am taking iron pills & every so often sleeping pills (not barbiturates) like those you gave me"

31 March-1 April 1960 to Aurelia and Warren Plath: "Well, just twelve hours ago I woke up groggy from two sleeping pills"

29 December 1961 to Aurelia: "I've started taking sleeping pills for my arms have been a bother--all pins & needles & often so painful I can't lay them anywhere at all: evidently a normal symptom of some pregnancies" 

12 January 1962 to Aurelia: "The doctor's sleeping pills are very good" 

29 September 1962 to Kathy Kane: "I can't sleep without pills." The same day, Sylvia mentioned sleeping pills in letters to Aurelia and to Ruth Beuscher.

12 October 1962 to Aurelia: "Every morning when my sleeping pills wear off, I am up about 5, in my study with coffee, writing like mad."

16 October 1962 to Aurelia: "I live on sleeping pills"

14 December 1962, to Dorothy Benotti: "I hope to get off sleeping pills"

26 December 1962, to Daniel and Helga Huws: "I am going to the doctor this week to see if he can help me get off those sleeping pills"

22 January 1963, to Olive Higgins Prouty: "I am still on sleeping pills & tonics to help me eat" 

4 February 1963, to Ruth Beuscher: "I am living on sleeping pills and nerve tonic"

Because most of Sylvia's mentions of sleeping pills are in letters to her mother, I think her mother, who herself took sleeping pills, got her started on them. There are very few studies about Plath and drugs.

[1] U.S. pharmacies legally sold cocaine and the morphine derivative codeine most of the 20th century, at first over-the-counter and then by prescription. Sylvia Plath was prescribed cocaine for sinus pain.

A Talented Mother

Aurelia Schober's college classmates read, sort of sub rosa, the pop-psychology book The Nervous Housewife (1920) by neurologist/psychiatrist Abraham Myerson. He wrote:

One of the commonest and saddest transformations is the change of the gay, laughing girl, radiant with love and all aglow with the thought of union with her man, into the housewife of a decade -- complaining, fatigued, and disillusioned.

This was an open secret, but no one had ever put it quite that way before. I thought of Aurelia Schober, her college class's valedictorian, yearbook editor, German-language actress, voted by her peers "Most Studious," with a dashing Austrian boyfriend who was one of the century's greatest engineers, and in her sophomore year her headshot was published in The Boston Transcript:

Aurelia, 19, in The Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926.

Much of Aurelia's creativity and spunk got shell-shocked and died during an almost-nine-year marriage to human land mine Otto Plath, a behavioral scientist, at home a thrower of tantrums and a monocrat. The lasting effect on Aurelia was perpetual anxiety. I believe that from her marriage and husband's needless death Aurelia had PTSD. The day after his death she signed a contract drawn up by her eight-year-old daughter never to marry again. And never did.

 

Then Aurelia had to support her children on a single woman's salary. Good thing she had prepared herself with a master's degree and let her parents do live-in childcare. From their births Aurelia supported her children's education and growth in every possible way, was positive and honest with them: Aurelia was a talented mother.

Aurelia Plath couldn't become a writer but seems to have used a surviving part of her dramatic talent and resonant voice to read aloud to family and friends Sylvia's and Warren's letters from college. Her children knew their letters were shared, and wrote accordingly.

 

Aurelia also used part of her talent for her 29-year university teaching career: Teaching can feel like performance, and the show must go on whether your stomach aches or your daughter killed herself. In retirement she edited and published a bestselling book of her talented daughter's letters and recited her talented daughter's poetry on video.

 

Abraham Myerson (1881-1948), who thought socio-cultural pressures triggered addictions and mental illness, published other books for laymen such as The Foundation of Personality, and one of his dozens of papers appeared in The American Journal of Insanity, later renamed and still known as The American Journal of Psychiatry.

I Am the Jew

Family photo, 1920; the baby is my future stepfather.

After proving that Sylvia Plath was not a Jew -- her maternal ancestry is 100 percent Central European Roman Catholic -- it turns out I was the Jew.

Found out my maternal great-grandmother's surname was Goldmann.

Of course I am not a real Jew unless my great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother practiced Judaism. Grandma and Mom were so Polish Catholic they pinned hankies on our heads. In 1886 Josepha Goldmann in Prussia married a Polish Catholic, the church wedding record giving her maiden name as "Josepha Goldmann alias Wlodarczyk." "Alias" is so very unusual in such records, and the handwriting so cramped, that a searcher before me transcribed Josepha's name as "Goldmannalias." [1]

My mother had once said we were really Jews and I rolled my eyes because European immigrant families, including the Plaths, often tell of a Jew in the family, just as longtime U.S. residents claim Cherokee Indian blood. Furthermore Mom said that her father's older brother, resentfully serving in Russia's army, stole the Czar's horses. Nearly every family has its horse thief.

Genealogy is a hobby. I've been at it about a year, taking lessons in the software, learning as I go, and I know that Jewishness is passed down through mothers.

Then I looked up online why a Jewish girl might get a Polish alias and marry a Polish Catholic named Ludovicus Ziolkowski and have two kids and then emigrate to Chicago and have ten more kids before disappearing from official records. Maybe she ran away. Ludvik, an iceman, then remarried, siring a total of two sons and 14 daughters, two named Josephine. My grandmother was the one born in 1896, according to pages I tore from the family bible.

I told my sister we had a Jewish female ancestor, and she told her daughter, who thanks to other people's research can now also qualify as a Daughter of the American Revolution because her father's 6X great-grandfather was a captain in the Revolutionary War. My father's family records were destroyed in World War I, but new databases of World War II Nazi Persecutees and Displaced Persons let me follow his progress from camp to camp to Ellis Island. Dad had us raised as Eastern Orthodox Christians, whose priests blessed us with herbal incense and holy water, and we had all sorts of rituals, some cognate with Jewish ones.

What was different now that I was Jewish? Earlier in life I might have cared more. I respect Judaism and Jewish authors, the latest Sylvia-Plath-related book I read being Alfred Kazin's lyrical depth-charge A Walker in the City (1951) about growing up Jewish in Brooklyn. Kazin was Sylvia's teacher. She had to have read the book. Her memoir "Ocean 1212-W" has similarities.

But back at the family tree some days later I saw I had identified the 1896 daughter named Josephine Ziolkowski with her father Ludvik through the 1900 U.S. census. Polish baptismal records show my genuine grandmother was born in 1893, to Francizek, not to Ludvik, and no Ludvik, no Jew. I had also confused Francizek's wife Mary Kotwica (b. 1864) with another Mary Kotwica (b. 1865), both emigrants to Chicago and both buried in the same cemetery.

I cleaned up my family tree, merging and purging and trying to match genuine great-grandfather Francizek, b. 1858, with the 30 or so "Francis" "Franz" "Franciscus" and "Frank" Ziolkowskis born around then. Not finding him I couldn't find his parents so couldn't ascertain whether Ludvik who married the Jew might be Francizek's relative.

Then I double-checked the name Goldmann and learned that "Goldmann" with two "n"s is a German name denoting a goldsmith or gilder. The Jewish version of the name is Goldman.

So Josepha was not a Jew who masqueraded as Polish -- as some girls did -- but a Germanic woman who assumed a Polish alias so as not to be mistaken for a Jew. Which is what Sylvia Plath's immigrant grandparents did when they anglicized their surname, Grunwald, to Greenwood.

I spent hours, having once again to learn: Guesses are always wrong.

I make mistakes. But this one -- the very idea -- confirmed for me that I could use a vacation.

[1] "Alias" in Polish names sometimes signifies a pseudonym chosen to disguise political activity.

Aurelia Plath's Political Group

On 9 January 1953 Sylvia Plath, her leg in a cast, wrote from Smith College to her mother that she was less depressed after persuading the college to let her audit the science courses she so dreaded that she had talked suicide. Meanwhile, in a nation battered by the Red Scare and war in Korea and the new hydrogen bomb, with Eisenhower’s inauguration days away, Sylvia’s mother Aurelia Plath, Boston University professor, scribbled on the envelope’s verso:

subjects questions for political discussion group

1. religion

2. Are sororities and fraternities democratic.

3. Is liberal education desirable for everybody.

4. college education open to all / should a college education be public as one will be to high school students?

5. heredity or environment

6. are students taking advantage of the opportunities around them.

7. what will be religion’s should place [sic] in the modern world.

8. is there a course or lessons needed for college education work.

9. communism and how it affects us.

10. current events

11. the American negro [1]

 

Because “religion” and “sororities and fraternities” top the list, the political discussion group was for college students, possibly fellow Unitarian congregants or at Boston University where Aurelia taught. “The American negro” as a topic implies all group members would be white. A subject “1” on the list implies that the group had not yet formed or met.

 

Was this group Aurelia’s own brainstorm, or are these notes, written in Gregg shorthand, from a planning meeting? Regardless, the list opens a window onto Aurelia Plath’s politics.

 

Most discussion items center on Aurelia’s areas of expertise: religion, education, college life.  Topics 2 through 8 are formulated as questions, most with her own answers implicit -- yet open for discussion. Topics 9 through 11, nationwide and nonspecific, conclude the list because they were either too explosive for initial group discussions or rearmost in Aurelia's awareness. Yet the plan to start the group is activist. And the agenda does not sound prescriptive.

 

Biographers assume that Aurelia voted for Eisenhower in 1952 because Sylvia supposed her mother had, but that’s not proof, and "Republican" back then didn't mean the insanity it means now. Aurelia wrote in Letters Home that her Austrian-born parents “believed [in] every word their idol, Theodore Roosevelt, ever wrote or uttered" and voted Republican ever after. Why? Possibly because Roosevelt was “the only candidate in whose veins flows German blood, who has received part of his education in Germany,” said the German-American Roosevelt League. [2] Otto Plath and his first wife Lydia registered to vote as Progressives in 1912 when Roosevelt's Progressive party ran him for re-election on a very liberal platform.

 

Aurelia's political discussion group never met. A crisis erupted in Aurelia’s household: Her mother was diagnosed with gastric cancer. Aurelia took summer 1953 off from teaching to care for her mother, and Sylvia, disheartened by a month as a guest editor in New York City, chose to spend July and August at home and became suicidally depressed.

 

[1.] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, 9 January 1953, Lilly Library.

[2.] Gable, J. The Bull Moose Years, Kennikat, 1978. When Roosevelt was 15 his parents sent him and two siblings to Dresden, Germany for five months, to learn German. Roosevelt did not become fluent.