Images from the Plath Family Papers

Aurelia Plath's last diary. These pages from 1989 show variations in Aurelia's handwriting as she struggled with macular degeneration. Emotionally she has just been knocked sidewise after reading the new Plath biography Bitter Fame. 

On the leftward page she noted "Nov. 10 The OPENING OF THE WALL Between East and West Germany! Is light coming to this part of the world as I continually lose my sight?" Just above that, a late-in-life realization: "I should have worked for my own 'career.' Regret so not accepting the 'Dean of Women' post at Northeastern. Bleeding ulcers were still with me then." Young Sylvia had also guilt-tripped Aurelia about taking that job, saying, "For your own self-aggrandizement you would leave us complete orphans!" On the rightward page, on November 12 "(Full Moon!)" Aurelia and her neighbor, financial professional Bill Cruickshank, worked on her accounts until 5:30 p.m. "Think Positive!" she told herself, and under November 17 wrote a catty little note about "uneducated" Dido Merwin, whose searing short memoir about Sylvia is appended to Bitter Fame.

The baby is Aurelia's sister Dorothy, born in May 1911. Aurelia is on the right. They are with their mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober. If the photo is from 1911, Aurelia was five and her mother 23.

The label on this palm-sized diary says "1962 - Catastrophe at Court Green." During the week Ted and Sylvia's marriage fell apart their houseguest Aurelia kept quiet, tended her grandchildren, and wrote in this diary very little of consequence. On July 11 Sylvia shut herself away to write a novel and Aurelia served her dinner in the study. No further details. You'd never know except by reading a later diary that during that week Sylvia angrily told Aurelia, "You are of no use to me here!" and ordered her to move out. The only trace of that in the 1962 diary is a page with names and phone numbers of nearby hotels. It was midsummer and hotels were all booked. Housed with midwife Winifred Davies, Aurelia passed the time reading a book of home remedies, copying out numerous uses of cider vinegar. (I'm not making that up.) Invited back to Court Green a few days later, Aurelia recorded in Gregg shorthand that Sylvia, unable to sleep, eat, or care for her children was sedated by the local doctor. 

The above is the older of two diaries Aurelia definitively censored, this one by ripping out pages and noting, "Tore out all the sad notes made from 1936-40." Wish she hadn't. The other injured diary has several pages from autumn 1958 razored out. Letters from Sylvia hint that was a period of conflict having nothing to do with Sylvia: Aurelia was fighting with her siblings.

A frank and lengthy discussion about reading Aurelia Plath's diaries is free at Substack.

I Hoped This Was Aurelia Plath's Poem

Before she married Otto Plath, Aurelia Schober wrote poetry and fiction. Two published poems survive: one from her high-school days and one from college. This poem was in the folder with her first diary, 1924-28, in the Plath Family Papers at Yale University.

I'd gone to see those papers hoping to find Aurelia kept notebooks full of her poems. We could compare with Edna St. Vincent Millay's or Sara Teasdale's -- the top female poets of the time, and Aurelia owned their books. And maybe consider how Aurelia's poems might relate to her daughter Sylvia's poems. Oh, I hoped this poem was Aurelia's, until I read it.

I thought if Aurelia preserved this poem it was hers, but "A.C.M." is credited and her initials then were "A.F.S." Today most poets want credit for their poems but for some reason A.C.M. lay low. Maybe the reason was modesty. Aurelia attended a women's college and its yearbooks 1926 through 1928 each devote pages to creative writings, all unsigned. Much later, Aurelia identified her own poem "A Child's Wish" in the 1928 yearbook [1], but the typeface here matches that of Winthrop High School's yearbook and Aurelia graduated from there in '24. 

This rough-hewn poem lacks the formal polish of Aurelia's "Forbidden Fruit" (1923; she was seventeen), which she had credited to her and it is reproduced here. Call it "banal" but I like it and it's better than "Bits of Gold." The issue then is why Aurelia kept this clipping. Possibly it was a student's very early work, like, "Ode on an Ag'd Vase."

Aurelia had no classmates with the initials A.C.M. Whoever the author was I hope that like Sylvia they kept writing poems until they got the knack.

[1] Aurelia photocopied "A Child's Wish" for researcher Harriet Rosenstein c. 1970 but it seems Rosenstein did not receive it and it is with other materials in Aurelia Plath's papers at Smith College Libraries.

I Was Playing Paper Dolls

Aurelia in Sarasota, Florida, Easter 1967

Early in the Plath Family Papers research I saw I’d been working with paper dolls and of course I had, because between Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and Aurelia Plath and I there had never been anything but paper. 

Although they had been real living people, what I’d read determined the faces I gave them and how I clothed them. Gwyneth Paltrow in the movie Sylvia wore upper-middle-class clothes, as if the costumers never met anyone like Sylvia Plath who bought off the rack aspirational clothes not quite so expensive or  flattering. And a whole generation now thinks Sylvia had blue eyes when they were plain common brown. 

That only proved that Sylvia imagined is not a person with an eye color. She is a cutout to be costumed: The Marilyn Monroe of literature, if you like. A feminist. A mystic. Political. Suicidal Esther Greenwood. Clothe her however you want. And instead of outgrowing our Sylvia Plath paper doll we got farther and farther away from the doll and deeper into the paper. Thinking Sylvia is her paper we generate more paper arguing whether paper equals truth. Any eight-year-old can tell you that’s a misapprehension.

In the new Plath Family archives I’m at my keyboard as at a sewing machine upstyling some old togs papered onto Sylvia, Ted, and Otto -- they're all in the archive -- and trying to craft for Aurelia a face and presence I am now privileged to see. Reading Aurelia's diaries and the lists of hundreds of friends in her bursting address book and seeing notes and inks and photos she cherished I felt as if her live warm body was stirring and arose as after a long sleep. She is more alive, more colorful and collected, more Queen Elizabeth II, than the Aurelia on whose life I thought myself an expert.

December 9, 1959

A reminder that today is the anniversary of Ted and Sylvia Plath Hughes's departure from the U.S. to England on the U.S.S. United States. The above was a sticker or tag for outbound boxes or luggage. Aurelia Plath kept this particular tag and it's in the Plath Family Papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale, opened for research this past December 3.

Aurelia liked to annotate. Sometimes her annotations are helpful or revealing, but this "Dec 1959" annotation up top puts me in mind of a brain floating around without a brain stem. Or a little cloud on a blue horizon. But who knows she felt remembering her daughter, alive and adventurous?

Sylvia was optimistic although the move was risky, especially for her, because she was leaving her network/safety net of friends, relatives, well-wishers, the psychiatrist she trusted, and her native country: almost everything. Yet on that December 9 she was looking forward, not back. In her journal she'd written, "I really want this." [1]

[1] Journals, 20 January 1959.

A Place for Mom

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother (1852-1919)

I think now that this photo is exactly what it looks like: Somebody hit the old lady. This is Otto Plath's mother, Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath, photo taken in 1916 in Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Hospital for the Insane") at Salem.

I'd learned that its new patients lined up every few weeks for a traveling photographer. If the photo was not taken the day of admission, I thought it fair to imagine Ernestine had walked into a doorframe or something, but context changed my mind, especially:

What are the odds that among three known photos of Sylvia's grandmother, one shows her with a black eye? Not makeup or a trick of the light. And likely it wasn't the first she'd ever had.

A immigrant from Prussia and mother of six, Ernestine first broke down in 1905 while living in North Dakota with husband Theodor and their five younger children. Depressed, anxious, and feeling persecuted, Ernestine walked the floor all night with a leg ulcer that only hurt more when she lay down. Her frightened family had her judged insane and sent to the state mental hospital at Jamestown. When Theodor signed her out in 1910 Ernestine didn't want to leave. Theodor had been chasing opportunity in Harney, Oregon, where he'd failed at homesteading and was back to working as a blacksmith. Yet machines had evolved from iron to steel, and horsepower to steam, and in 1911 Theodor was 60, late in life for a master blacksmith to learn another trade.

The couple's eldest son Otto told his wife Aurelia he had been raised without love, and in particular he "constantly voiced his recollections of his mother's type of child care," I guess trying aloud to process trauma forty years past. Family lore says that Ernestine communicated "absolutely nothing to her children for the last thirty years of her life." If literally true, Ernestine went silent in Prussia in 1889 when Otto was four and her two youngest not yet born. If not literally true, we get the idea that six children were too many for her.

In 1911 Theodor, Ernestine, and grown sons Paul and Max left arid eastern Oregon and shared a small house in Oregon City where Max, the only able-bodied one, found work with a lumber company. Theodor and Paul looked for jobs and came home to their sick wife and bad mother now aging and complaining of overwork. Maybe to reduce the tension, the family between 1912 and 1915 tried to place Paul, always sickly, with Otto and his wife in San Francisco. Otto and his wife said no. By 1916 Paul and Max couldn't tolerate their mother and Max wanted to move out and get married. There followed a turbulent scene that ended with Ernestine at the mental hospital begging the staff to please take her in, not to send her back home.

Her diagnosis was dementia. A physician making rounds a year later called Ernestine a harmless old lady. Her nurse noted that Ernestine knew enough to use the toilet. If she'd been battered at home -- we call it elder abuse -- the institution might have been preferable. Tuberculosis killed her in 1919 and her ashes sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years, her tin among hundreds unclaimed and forgotten. 

Theodor might seem like the family's rock and good guy but he was no prize parent either. If his father Johann and son Otto are indicators, Theodor with family was rigid and punitive, the type Sylvia memorialized in her poem "Daddy." To spite his grown children Theodor willed the first five of them a dollar and left the youngest 120 acres in Washington State. Theodor died in Oregon City, alone; a neighbor found his body. He was buried in a pauper's field with no marker.

After Otto Plath died, his long-suffering widow Aurelia went on living as if he had never existed; as Sylvia said, "buried him in her heart." Sylvia hated this and got revenge on her mother in print. Sylvia herself became an abused wife. This was part of a larger pattern of generational and spousal abuse and resentment that can sink not only marriages but children and families.