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.

Aurelia Plath's Childhood

1 Roslyn Place, Jamaica Plain, built 1910. Aurelia wrote that family visits to her uncle here were among "the sweeteners of my childhood."

Only two sources about Aurelia Plath's childhood presently exist: Aurelia's own narrative in Letters Home and Beth Hinchliffe's unpublished Plath biography for which Aurelia was a primary source. The latter is painful reading, yet rings true:

. . . the family was disciplined into formal Germanic obedience, an almost martyr-like acceptance of hard work and self-deprivation . . . 

. . . acquiescent exterior . . . nursing the old grievances, remembering the persecutions and loneliness, seeing the world in terms of black and white and expecting the worst . . .  

Aurelia in other interviews and letters says nothing about her childhood and little about her parents, with whom she lived for forty years. Unless there is more in the Plath Family archive soon to open at Beinecke Library we must say Aurelia withheld her childhood for a reason.

The Letters Home preface says Aurelia's immigrant parents, the Schobers, headed by her father Frank, sent Aurelia to school speaking only German. Did he have no inkling she'd be treated like a freak? Frank spoke English. If he wasn't ignorant, what was he thinking? "From that time on," Aurelia wrote, "we always spoke English at home." 

Given English, Aurelia bloomed at school, but home was no picnic. In Letters Home Aurelia said she had no playmates, not saying her parents shut out the neighbors. In her book's one full childhood scene Aurelia's father spanks her. He then begs her forgiveness. The Hinchliffe manuscript says Aurelia hid her anger and never forgot and was always slow to forgive. 

Frank and Aurelia Greenwood Schober were married ten months when daughter Aurelia Frances was born in 1906. Being named for both parents suggests she was conceived and born to prove a point. Baby Aurelia's mother, eighteen, had married without her wife-beating father's permission. Her sisters spited their father too: One had a baby at fifteen and the other married an African-American. Burdened with a child, the Schobers waited five years to have another. They never prospered -- Letters Home styles Frank, who was a waiter and restaurant manager, as a "cost accountant" -- and lived with widowed Aurelia and their grandchildren. Spite begat spite: After her mother died in 1956, Aurelia ejected her father from her house and went to Europe where Sylvia was surprised to see her careworn mother suddenly as effervescent as a girl.

Hinchliffe's manuscript describes the Schober household as insular and humorless, so it is no wonder that Aurelia escaped into the alternate reality of books, preferring self-help and stories of survival. In summer 1918 Aurelia's family moved from Jamaica Plain to a remote landspit with the ocean front and back. We know why: In December 1917 the wartime U.S. declared Austro-Hungarians like the Schobers "enemy aliens" just like Germans. That the Schobers were citizens did not matter: The local "gang" of kids called Aurelia "spy-face" and pushed her off the schoolbus, and Sylvia remembered hearing from her mother that the kids threw stones. 

So we know approximately how much Letters Home sanitized Aurelia's childhood. If there isn't any text, maybe the archive's family photos will open a new route into her childhood and biography.

Dispelling Ignorance About Aurelia Plath

Progress. From The Making of Sylvia Plath (2024) by Carl Rollyson.

Before disposing of Kate Moses's Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath (2003) I wanted to share a scene from its Chapter 27, set on a fictional 21 December 1962, a week after the real Sylvia and her children moved into a historic London flat. On the real 14th the real Sylvia wrote her mother Aurelia, "Safely in Yeats's house!" and that she'd never been so happy; on the real 21st she wrote her mother about her new furnishings and: "I spent the rest of Mrs. P's clothes money & feel & look like a million." "Just had two long bee poems accepted by the Atlantic." "I am out of Ted's shadow." "I have never been so happy in my life."

By contrast, Wintering has Sylvia on the 21st collect-calling her mother from a phone booth near a schoolyard. Fictional Aurelia had cabled saying Sylvia must call; it was urgent. Their conversation:

. . . ."So you're all right, sweetheart?" Aurelia asks, stalling.

"Yes!" Sylvia says, impatient. "Tell me what's wrong with you! Is everyone all right? Your cable said it was urgent. What's happened?"

"Oh, darling," Aurelia answers, hesitant, her subterfuge bobbing to the surface. "I was just getting worried. I thought you would call me right away when you got to London."

"Mother, I don't have a phone," Sylvia answers, vexation countermanded by relief. The schoolchildren's shouts rise and fall at random, raucous and piercing. "It's almost impossible to call within this district, let alone to the States. But I wrote to you right away, all the details. You'll see. You should have my letter any day." Six hundred times! Six hundred times she's written to her mother since she left for Smith at seventeen, flooding the envelopes with reassurance, gratitude, filial praise, innumerable dazzling inventories of accomplishments for Aurelia's delectation, the convenient distance of letters keeping their intrusive bond remote, but advantageously--for both of them--intact.

"Well, I was frightened," Aurelia hedges. "There was such a whirlpool of events and decisions to be made, and I hadn't heard. . ."

"Mummy, thank you for being so worried," Sylvia soothes, momentarily unguarded, attracted into the open by the tantalizing lure of maternal sympathy. "But really, we'll be fine. The flat is lovely; the children are happy. I'm relieved to be back in London". . .

Fictional Aurelia then nags Sylvia to bring the children to America for Christmas and offers to "take early retirement" (in real life, nine years early from her tenured-professor job) to serve as Sylvia's mother's helper while Sylvia gets a job teaching.

If you cringed as you read the above, rejoice that Plath studies has evolved.

I preserved that fictional passage to study how in the absence of facts Aurelia was depicted for the public as weak yet domineering, with nothing to do but pursue and harry Sylvia as if she were prey. This fictional Aurelia does only wrong: stalling, hedging, lying, posing, worrying, blandishing, intruding. Selfishly she'd forced poor Sylvia to excel at school and feed 600 happy letters into her motherly maw. Now Aurelia has fooled Sylvia into phoning her. This Aurelia is too lame-brained to have discerned in Sylvia's breathless letters about her busy, spendy new life the manic phase of her daughter's cyclic emotional extremes.

This portrayal also infantilizes the fictional Sylvia, at age 30 still a sucker for her mother's subterfuge. In real life Sylvia at 30 was as yet dependent on her mother's money, gifts, surety, and stateside support.

Aurelia Versus Olwyn, Round 1

Stafford Hotel, London, where Aurelia Plath and Olwyn had a talk.

Aurelia Plath for several reasons did not warm to Olwyn Hughes, who jealous of her brother Ted had treated his wife Sylvia Plath as a usurper and snob. Sylvia wrote Aurelia all about it. After Sylvia's death in February 1963, Ted Hughes appointed a series of caretakers for his children, none long-term until he appointed Olwyn.

In summer 1964 Aurelia visited England for three weeks. She had an eye and ear for all things suboptimal, especially in regard to her grandchildren, Frieda and Nick, extra precious because her Sylvia had borne them. The children were then ages four and two.

In the journals of her visits Aurelia noted, discreetly, in shorthand, what Olwyn was doing wrong.

1964, June: Got Frieda ready for school. Ted left in car. Took Nicky to playing field. [In shorthand:] Olwyn stayed in bed.

1964, June: (After giving Frieda a bath) [In shorthand:] When will she have her next one? Nick filled his pants twice today and made Olwyn mad but she does nothing to train him! 

1964, July: (Four-year-old Frieda touches her own nipples and says) [In shorthand:] "Someday these will stick out way out here!" (This makes me anxious. What has she been hearing.) She said, 'Olwyn can go into Daddy's room without knocking.'"

1964, July: "Breakfast at Stafford Hotel. The audacity of some of Olwyn's statements the first time we were alone. 'Ted just [shorthand] wanted his freedom. He did not want a divorce!' 'I have thought during that time Sylvia reached the height of her writing powers, wasn't it? You have much to be proud of.'"

The following year's visit:

1965, June: "The return to Court Green [shorthand:] & the disorder there was hard for me emotionally. The children are given sweets all the time and don't eat dinner properly. Frieda has two completely decayed back teeth! They brush their own teeth when they feel like it and when I came there was no toothpaste in the house."

Suboptimal.

What Olwyn's thoughts were I as yet do not know. Aurelia's journals do say Olwyn was a good cook. Aurelia did not see the children during 1966.