This Ghastly Archive: Remembering a Plath Superfan

Claim to Fame

 

Like many dying women she spent her time making collages.

I mean it. Stuffed between oversized scrapbook pages,

  clashes of greeting-card images cut

from the times she had been greeted or congratulated.

None is attractive or makes any sense.

It was late in life that she became an artist and no less;

finally we all get around to making art,

the language when language ends, and the motionless track

travels on while the train puts us out

onto the platform that at any hour is inadequately lit.

 

A boy named Sawyer his mother calls Soya

  brings chimneys of magazines seventy percent advertising,

exactly life’s proportion. Mary Ann must make her mark.

Neighbors interrupt her making-for-posterity

collages, edge-to-edge frustration, a series of barren wants

coupled with annoyances. In her thirties she had written

letters to celebrities asking them for money and tried to sell

to rare-book dealers their angry or astonished replies, events

not in the collages. No words are. Language couldn’t root in them.

The colors red and black did. Frowning, she concentrated.

 

Collage as a claim to fame. If only it had the body’s depths

of bone, sinew and fat. Remarkably she had gone from shameless

begging to graduate school in her fifties, choosing a place

she could go entirely mad, a comparative arts program,

where no one said anything and no judgment was final. Ginsberg’s

penpal, she called herself; everyone knew she was lying.

Ginsberg had replied that her letter was stupid. She ran and begged

Sylvia Plath’s mother to “Tell me something secret about her,”

as Mrs. Plath backed out of her Wellesley driveway

in 1977. She clings to the historical record by fingertips.

 

That is what she approached with scissors and what

she approached the scissors with. To acquire the few letters

from the famous in her files, the archive had to take the lot

and store acid-free cartons of late-in-life collages

in bulk, uninteresting and unattractive, dated,

made daily as she tried to live, Mary Ann Montgomery,
old and sick and living on Social Security in a house

in Michigan she had inherited, magazines to its ceiling, every

scrapbook filled to the limit of its binding with images.

Tired of words and reading, she tried collages, wanting

her name in an archive’s collection, and succeeded.

 

Mrs. Aurelia Plath was usually generous with the Sylvia Plath fans and mourners who came unannounced to her house on Elmwood Road, but one morning in September 1977 Aurelia could not stop to talk with a would-be visitor parking a motor home with a Michigan license plate. The stranger was a 47-year-old ex-nun, music teacher and divorcee trying to live by selling famous people's letters, and obsessed with Sylvia Plath. Terribly hurt that Aurelia didn't speak with her, she sent Aurelia a letter and, each having ulterior motives, they kept up an unctuous correspondence from 1978 to 1989: eleven years. Some of Aurelia's replies include useful biographical information. 

 

Mary Ann Montgomery early on begged Aurelia for "something of Sylvia's, even a letter or scrap" and for Aurelia to tell her something secret that Aurelia had never told anyone else. Aurelia declined. Montgomery sent Aurelia a poem comparing her own life to Sylvia's; she sent unwanted gifts such as flowers (once) and cassette tapes of her piano playing, refusing to take seriously Aurelia's statements that she didn't have time or energy or eyesight enough to correspond. Montgomery visited twice, once bringing a priest friend, once sick with a cold or flu that Aurelia caught.

 

Plath superfan Mary Ann Montgomery, Ph.D. (1931-2022) in the 1990s distinguished herself as a university teacher and donated her letters collection and more to the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Viewing her archive there moved me to write the poem "Claim to Fame," which takes poetic license, but the boxes of collages are real.

Poems About Aurelia Plath

Perseus isn't finished with Medusa until he turns his mother's suitor into stone.

"Sappho" by Beth Hinchliffe. America magazine, 29 June 2023. This poem was a runner-up in the Jesuit magazine's annual poetry contest. Aurelia Plath's friend and neighbor, journalist and author of an unpublished Plath biography, Hinchliffe said this was the first poem she ever wrote.

"Cottage Street, 1953" by Richard Wilbur, first published in 1972, describes Aurelia and a very depressed Sylvia having tea at his mother-in-law Edna Ward's house on Cottage Street in Wellesley. Mrs. Ward was Aurelia's friend. Hear Wilbur read the poem (and defend it).

"Aurelia Plath Confesses" by Lisa Mullenneaux, published in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer 2019. Mullenneaux is a poet, scholar, translator, and professor of writing, best known for the essay "Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath."

"Medusa" by Sylvia Plath (1962).

Frieda Hughes wrote several poems about her grandmother Aurelia. You've probably read some. Here are quotations from four different poems:

1. "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the least dead / Of us all?// You loved me not, just saw / A copy of the face / You gave birth to."

2. "Come live with me!" it cried, / Nostrils spread above like nose wings / As if the face would take off from its neck-end / Like a ghastly bald crow."

3. "Chipping away at her / As if she were an egg, / to be broken and beaten / And turned into something else."

4.  "She is the gypsy / Whose young have rooted / In the very flesh of her scalp. // Her eyes are drill-holes where / Your senses spin, and you are stone / Even as you stand before her."

I think you get the gist.

Although Ted Hughes wrote at least one poem centered on Aurelia, Birthday Letters offers only glimpses. His poem "Night-Ride on Ariel" makes a typically chilling reference: "Mother / Making you dance with her magnetic eye / On your Daddy's coffin"

Contusions: What Purple Means in Sylvia Plath

Medical Illustration by Dr. Ciléin Kearns (Artibiotics)

How a bruise works: an impact breaks the capillaries. Gradually the pooled blood breaks down into its components, as illustrated. Can't think of another writer besides Plath so taken with bruises. The crown jewel of the lot is her poem "Contusion," written February 4, 1963, Plath's third-to-last poem. The poem's speaker watches a bruise develop. The speaker doesn't say it's theirs. This bruise is somehow decisive: a minor injury elevated by its formal, medical name, it portends a death.

 

Sylvia Plath’s works include far more bruising than most writers describe by age 30. In The Bell Jar, a male escort’s grip on Esther Greenwood’s arm leaves purple fingerprints. Esther describes her injured face as “purple and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow.” The writer knows bruises, has studied them. Plath's journal says her first night with Ted Hughes gave her a "battered face smeared with a purple bruise" (26 March 1956). Over time, the bruises in Plath's work increase and so does her artfulness in describing them:

O adding machine--

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?

Must you stamp each piece in purple,

 

Must you kill what you can? ("A Birthday Present")

 

In October 1962 a jealous Plath wrote in the “The Swarm,” the most nebulous of Ariel’s bee poems, these heated and personal lines, like nothing else in the poem:

 

Jealousy can open the blood,

It can make black roses.

 

Admired for her evocative use of the colors red, black, and white, even yellow, the color purple in Sylvia Plath’s writings ranges from "wormy purple" in "Poem for a Birthday" to "The Ravaged Face" ("Grievously purpled, mouth skewered on a groan") to The Bell Jar's decorously sick Miss Norris who wears only purple. Emily Dickinson used the adjective "purple" more than 50 times, connoting, as it had for thousands of years, "priestly" or "princely," or like violets, which Dickinson loved. The first synthetic purple dye was patented in 1856: after that, anyone could wear it. I think Plath, who grew up without priests or princes, redefined the "royal color" as morbid or livid: Cadavers are purple-black. Berries bleed purple. "Fat purple figs" shrivel and rot.

In a draft of Plath's poem "Fever 103,º" purple did signify authority, the priestly type:

 

O auto-da-fe! 

The purple men, gold crusted, thick with spleen, 

Sit with their hooks and crooks and stoke the light.

 

Plath deleted that stanza after recording the poem for the BBC.

 

In Plath's view (then and now widely shared) purples render commoners worse than common. Esther Greenwood's mother wore "a dress with purple cartwheels," and "looked awful." Esther's boss Jay Cee in a lavender suit, hat, and gloves "looked terrible, but very wise." (39) "Irwin's" friend "Olga," a professor's wife, wears purple slacks when she calls on Irwin, who has Esther as his guest instead. (227) Esther more authentically wears the color on her flesh, "bruised purple and green and blue" from insulin injections. (191) Purple, once so exclusively for royals that non-royals were killed for wearing it, Esther wears on her butt.

 

Plath's purples are fleshly and literal. In other Ariel poems one finds a purple tongue and a surgeon's description of the "purple wilderness" exposed during surgery. Plath made the color corporeal. And linked it with women's injuries.

I'm hoping someone will enrich the world with deeper thinking so I don't have to read Jonathan Bate (Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life) or his kind saying or quoting, "For Plath, desire was a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound," when Plath's purples communicate something else. [1]

[1] Martin Rubin, review of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, SFGate, 19 November 2015.

"I Am the Same, Identical Woman" (or Am I?)

Sylvia's paternal grandmother

Courtesy of a descendant, here is Ernestine Kottke Plath (1853-1919), Otto Plath's mother and Sylvia's grandmother. Inscribed on the reverse, "Earnestine Kottke," suggesting this photo was taken before she married in March 1882, when she was 28. It might have been cut from a group photo or her wedding photo. The photo's owner has other vintage family photos all inscribed with the names of those pictured.

The Gibson-girl hairdo suggests the photo was taken after 1880: It's typical to fix one's hair stylishly when sitting for a photo. Where the photo was taken is not known.

I can barely reconcile this image with a known image of Ernestine, age 62, taken at Oregon State Hospital (formerly "for the Insane") in 1916. Another descendant shown the "young" photo had never seen it, could not confirm it was Ernestine Kottke although it was so labeled. What do you think? The older Ernestine seems to be toothless. Here is information about how aging alters one's nose.

There exists a third photo of Ernestine Plath posed with her husband, taken in Oregon between 1911 and 1916, showing features their son Otto inherited.

Theodor and Ernestine Plath had seven children: the first died in infancy, and Otto was born next, in 1885. Ernestine was first hospitalized for depression, sleeplessness, and "persecution" in 1905, three years after moving with her family from Prussia to North Dakota. In Oregon her diagnosis was dementia. Just another "sad Plath woman"? I don't think so. In both photos I see spirit.

Ernestine Plath, Sylvia's Grandmother, Oregon State Hospital

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Plath, photograph c. 1916 from her file at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum"). Read about her fate here.

This is the second known photo of Ernestine Plath. The first known photo, c. 1907, I found and published in 2022.

[In 2024 a family member let me see the third known photo, c. 1880, I published here.]

Otto Plath's Wives and His Sister Frieda Plath

Frieda Anna Plath and brother Hugo, Sylvia's aunt and uncle, c. 1918 [1]

Otto Plath blamed and hated his first wife, Lydia Bartz Plath, but gosh, it seems she tried to be a good wife, and at UC-Berkeley where Otto was teaching German and working toward his doctoral degree, Lydia too took courses, passing a two-credit course in German and the noncredit "Phys Ed 4a" and "Household Econ 6" and a first-level course in Graphic Art. [2]

Part of Otto's complaint was that Lydia was not educated, and that is true: The first high school in her hometown, Fall Creek, Wisconsin, opened in 1913, the year after she'd married Otto and moved west with him. But Lydia was not stupid or lazy, and when Otto in 1915 went East to graduate school and did not send for her as he had promised, she went home, earned college credit from a University of Wisconsin correspondence course, and enrolled in a Chicago hospital's nursing school where Otto's younger sister Frieda -- who had grown up in her aunt's house in Wisconsin -- was a year ahead of her.

Frieda Plath befriended and encouraged both of Otto's wives. They needed the solidarity. Lydia's only work experience was as a clerk in her hometown's general store. She liked Frieda well enough to join her at nursing school. After Otto married Aurelia, Frieda wrote the new well-educated wife and they exchanged letters as long as Frieda lived. Frieda sent gifts to her niece Sylvia and nephew Warren, and was the only Plath relative Sylvia ever met, out in California, where Frieda had married Walter Heinrichs, M.D. Aunt Frieda left a good enough impression that Sylvia, pregnant when they met in 1959, named her daughter Frieda. Up for auction not long ago was an ugly little German hymnal owned by Aunt Frieda (1897-1970) and passed down to her namesake. Frieda Plath Heinrichs and her husband had no children.

Otto had left Lydia owing her money. He told people she had been sexually "cold." (Always, when defaming a woman, reference her sex life!) Lydia Plath by 1924 was an operating-room supervisor at Luther Hospital in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, a title she held until retirement. In the 1930 federal census, although still married she called herself "single," probably to keep her job; all the hospital's nurses are listed as single, and that was still true in 1940. In 1950 Lydia declared herself divorced.

Laws made life hard for women. Sylvia Plath's life was bounded and frustrated by laws governing birth control, marriage, and divorce. Inheritance and copyright laws still dog her estate. Aurelia Plath dated married man Otto because Lydia wouldn't divorce him, and Aurelia couldn't marry him until new Nevada laws opened a way. After marrying, Aurelia would not leave Otto -- Sylvia's big complaint about her mother -- because Depression-era law gave any open jobs to men or single women -- and separated-with-kids was not "single," as Sylvia found out. 

While Otto Plath pursued his academic dreams, Lydia kept writing him, proof that she had not legally deserted him. He hated her letters. I'd love to read them. There is one sample of Lydia's writing in researcher Harriet Rosenstein's archive at Emory University, dated 12 July 1975:

Dear Miss Rosenstein,

In reply to your letter, I have just two things to say:

1) My life with Otto Plath became a closed book when we were divorced; and so, under no circumstance, would I give out any information about him.

2) You had your nerve sending me an open copy of a letter, which you had addressed to me, to the village clerk.

Yours truly,

Lydia Plath [3]

Rosenstein, undaunted, did a workaround, and in February 1977 the Fall Creek village clerk Marjorie Shong spilled the tea about Otto's investing and losing his wife's and in-laws' money, and that Otto wanted his sick brother to move in with them and Lydia said no, and that Otto got to thinking he was too good for her. But by 1977 Rosenstein had given up on writing a Plath biography.

Years after separating, Lydia still had to mop up after Otto when she -- born in Wisconsin -- had to petition for U.S. citizenship. Under the law, Lydia had become a German citizen when she married German citizen Otto. Otto was naturalized in 1926, but by then the laws had changed so that wives married under the old law had to petition for naturalization on their own.

On 15 September 1931 Lydia Bartz Plath renounced The German Reich, and a Wisconsin circuit court restored her U.S. citizenship. [4] After fifteen years estranged, Otto, she wrote, was still "my husband." But not for long.

[1] Studio photo taken in Chicago, dated by its former owner 1917, but Hugo Plath first enlisted in the army on 29 July 1918 and was discharged on 23 December 1918: U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs BIRLS Death File, 1850-1910.  [2] Wisconsin State Board of Health Application for Registration, Wis., dated 5 December 1924; U.S. Employment Records, 1903-1988. [3] Rosenstein mss. 1489, Plath, Otto, circa 1927-, "Otto Plath Colleagues Bussey"[4] Wisconsin, County Naturalization Records, 1807-1992, Eau Claire, Petitions, v. 4-13 1927-1943, p. 73.