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.