Sappho the Cat (1959-1975)

Aurelia Plath with Sappho, c. 1972

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in 1959 acquired a tiger kitten but could not keep it: That summer the couple traveled the U.S., spent autumn at a writers' retreat, and in December packed up and moved to England. Sylvia had named the cat, a female, Sappho, and on 21 January wrote Esther Baskin from Boston:

"Did Ted or I tell you we are owners of a kitling? Granddaughter on one side of a cat belonging to Thomas Mann . . . The minute she walked into our apartment she went straight for a book of poems lying flat on the lowest bookshelf and possessed it."

Guess who fostered Sappho while her owners traveled, and inherited Sappho when her owners left the country less than a year after adopting her.

Fortunately, Aurelia Plath liked pets. Otto Plath had not allowed any. Aurelia quoted eight-year-old Sylvia as saying, "I'm so glad Daddy died; now I can have a cat." The family adopted one, named it Mowgli, and Sylvia loved him and dressed him up in baby clothes. Mowgli went missing in 1945. There's a photo of Warren and Sylvia with Sylvia holding Mowgli's mother Mitzi.

In letters sent to Aurelia from London, Sylvia inquired often after Sappho, who grew into a "huge" adult and in 1960 gave birth to triplets. Sappho the cat was not a burden but a happy note and a comfort in Aurelia's life as it collapsed all around her. Neighbor and friend Beth Hinchliffe much later wrote a poem remembering Aurelia around 1971, suggesting that Sappho's imperturbable presence served as a kind of therapy:

And now there is only Sappho for Aurelia . . .

And through it all, through Aurelia's blinding fury,

the madness of anguish, the desperate scrabbling

to keep her memories untouched by ugliness,

Sappho sits. Kneads. Watches.

Among Aurelia's snapshots in the Plath Family Papers at the Beinecke Library was a dime-sized photo of Sappho's face, cut from another photo. The fragment was too small to photograph, but it looked like a duplicate or alternate of the one shown above: a memento only Aurelia could have gone to the trouble to make and put there. And now I have a good idea why Aurelia's American granddaughters sent her, in 1980, stationery printed with a cartoon of a large self-satisfied tiger cat.

Aurelia had to ask someone to care for Sappho while she took annual trips to England in the early 1960s. Most likely some neighbors did. On returning to Wellesley in 1964 (July 2): "My kitchen was a smelly mess; Sappho's liver dish never washed and putrid." On returning to Wellesley in 1965 (30 June) Aurelia wrote, "Sappho, glad to see me, but unforgiving; when I pick her up, stiffens spine!"

The above photo is dated 1972. On 19 August 1975, Aurelia had terminally ill Sappho, age 16, put to sleep and grieved her, but not because Sappho had been Sylvia's cat. "I have lost the one living creature to whom I was the most important living being." In 1981 Aurelia still missed her cat and lets us know what else in life she had lost and valued: "Oh, Sappho, if only you were  here to pet, to make happy, have you lick my hand, my cheek & stretch out before the fire in blissful contentment -- greet me when I return home. Something to love and be trusted and loved by!" 

Beth Hinchliffe's Unpublished Sylvia Plath Biography

How differently we would read Sylvia Plath's work and life story had Elizabeth Hinchliffe's Plath biography been completed and published, showing Sylvia and Otto and Aurelia at their weakest and most helpless, portrayals that other biographies have tried to avoid.

Part One of The Descent of Ariel, 58 pages, depicts Sylvia, in London in her final winter, as a nuisance who pounded on her downstairs neighbor's door until he opened it and wailed for his help: Would he please crawl over the roof and through a window because she'd locked herself out of her flat? Did he know a plumber? Clearly we're getting the neighbor's view of Sylvia. (In this manuscript he's called "Evans.") Hinchliffe notes that when snowbound, Sylvia had no other adult besides "Evans" to talk with; she didn't yet have a telephone.

I don't believe everything I read unless I can find corroboration and I had to find my own because this manuscript has no footnotes.

Corroboration: Sylvia's anguished letters from fall and winter 1962 and '63, and Dr. Anita Helle, a Plath relative: "Sylvia was almost beside herself with grief and terror in her last months."[1]

In the next chapter Otto Plath's fellow graduate students at Harvard's Bussey Institute describe Otto as a a timid, sniffling outsider who agreed with whatever anyone said and defended himself by quoting other people. A nice guy, someone said, who didn't "carry the guns" to be a scientist. Feared completing his dissertation because then he would have to defend it.

This matches the Otto of the 1918 FBI report: a nervous, morbid man who made no friends, lied that he thought he was a U.S. citizen, and when asked about the war did not say he was a pacifist. 

Otto saved his "Daddy" act for home. His kids learned to shed their real selves at the door and became quiet, well-mannered robot children so he wouldn't yell at them the way he yelled at their mother. They'd assume this outer armor for the rest of their lives.

Aurelia described her own parents as sources of love and laughter -- not as Austrian immigrants who shut out neighbors and tried to re-create Austria in their living room, speaking only German, teaching obedience to authority, to hide one's emotions, work hard, and expect the worst. I'd add that Aurelia's parents were Roman Catholics, a faith centered on sacrifice. They were taught to believe that mother pelicans, when they had to, tore their own flesh to feed the blood to their children. Although pelicans don't really do that. 

Interesting: It was Aurelia's mother who looked for houses and found the one on Elmwood Road. Aurelia was at work, of course. Aurelia's mother had a car and was the household's only driver. So quit saying Aurelia chose the WASPiest house she could find because becoming a WASP was her ambition.

About Aurelia Plath -- plainly the source and link to much of this information -- the unfinished biography says Aurelia wanted her children to have the fun and freedom her own childhood did not. It doesn't mention Aurelia's job or college years, or any of her triumphs; in fact portrays her as friendless. So even a neighbor and professional journalist was another in a long line of biographers who didn't ask Aurelia about herself. 

The text is well-woven, well written and absorbing.

The manuscript, in the Fran McCullough archive at the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland-College Park, is 123 pages and incomplete. It includes a few photos. It's undated. There is more to it, but those pages are kept at the British Library. If you are able to see them, please let me know.

[1] A. Helle, "Family Matters," Northwest Review, Vol. 26 No. 2, 1988.