A Hun Named Attila

Attila Kassay, M.B.A. Harvard, 1957.

Sylvia Plath was a schoolgirl when the Cold War started in 1946. She saw communist Russia pulp Eastern Europe into a featureless "bloc" and rule it with no end in sight. The next generation thought Russians invented communism because no one told us otherwise. In school we saw no educational films about "communist countries" and heard not a peep about their histories or cultures, with one exception: Hungary.

Schools allowed us Hungary in small doses: a folk tale, or "Hungarian dances" as a piano-lesson staple. Americans even tolerated Hungarian TV stars who made fun of themselves: Ernie Kovacs, Zsa Zsa Gabor. Hungary was special. It got a pass. My heritage Eastern European to the core, I sensed this but I had not the tools of reason, and the forces ruling us did not intend to equip us.

But they didn't stop middle-schoolers from ordering selected paperbacks for fifteen cents or a quarter through a service called Junior Scholastic. I bought and read to tatters I Am Fifteen and I Don't Want to Die (1966) a Hungarian girl's World War II survival story, and James Michener's The Bridge at Andau (1957), about the failed 1956 revolution. Hungarians, I learned, were anti-communist homeland patriots. That they were not Slavs but Magyars was in their favor. Russia was Slavic, tainting all other Slavs. We were taught nothing about them except they brainwashed kids to be godless communists. This was our parents' worst nightmare. [1] In Cold War politics the enemy could be anywhere--on your block, in Cuba, in protest songs, in outer space. Only a radical might translate Polish poetry and pester us to read it. I see now that in 1954 Sylvia Plath's choice of Dostoevsky for her thesis topic was a daring one.

Plath's pre-Cold War juvenile diaries show her teachers promoting cultural exchange, which Plath adopted as one of her values. May through July 1945 Plath read three Hungary-themed children's books by author-illustrator Kate Seredy, who wrote The White Stag (1938), a folk tale impressively illustrated with great historical tableaux and the noble deeds and steeds of tribal Huns and Magyars. [2] This cultural exposure, however mild, prepared Sylvia to care or feign care about later events in Hungary.

Westerners thought warmly of Hungary even before the Iron Curtain. Several thousand Hungarian elites after their 1848 war on Austria moved to the United States. Nicknamed "Forty-niners," their refinement made a favorable impression. Another wave post-World War I brought artist Kate Seredy. Hungarian intellectuals in the 1930s fled the Nazis rather than join them. It's a nation's intellectuals and artists who write and sing their history, so we heard about Hungarian exiles' and immigrants' world-class contributions to filmmaking and design, and winning every category of Nobel Prize except for Peace. Communists after World War II seized control of Hungary's universities, purging them of Jews and bourgeoisie. Student Attila Kassay (b. 1928), University of Budapest, was one of them. [4]

A federal student-exchange program in 1949 brokered for Kassay a $425 scholarship to Boston's Northeastern University. It covered a year's tuition. [5] Kassay arrived in April 1950. Through his U.S. senator, Kassay in 1953 was able to apply for permanent residence. [6] He met and dated Sylvia Plath, who got swoony over Continentals with exotic names. [7] He joked that he was King of the Huns and this amused her. She loaned him ten cents so he could buy a comb. (MAYBE THE ISSUE FOR HER WAS THAT ATTILA WAS BROKE?) Four years older than Sylvia, he was worldly, suave, and ready for the long term, but Sylvia was not, wanting mostly "to conquer the cosmopolitan alien before I return to the rustic boy-next-door. Feminine vanity?" (Journals, 145). An Anglophile at heart, she later married Ted Hughes.

Kassay finished his Business Administration degree with honors and in 1957 his Harvard MBA. [8] In 1959 he married Sylvia Coutts. They settled in Worcester, Massachusetts and had four children. Known professionally as corporate vice-president Allan Kassay, he died in 1973, only 45 years old, but his Plath contact has made him as immortal as his name.

[1] They had their reasons. Unlike us they'd witnessed or heard firsthand how communism in practice got people killed.

[2] That fifth-century Huns and ninth-century Magyars together founded Hungary is a medieval legend, popular but false. Huns and Hungary are not related.

[3] Genealogical research shows Plath had Hungarian ancestry through her great-grandmother Barbara Greenwood. In her poem "Daddy," Plath styled Barbara as a "gypsy ancestress," in line with the stereotype of Hungarians as gypsies.

[4] Northeastern's yearbook "The Cauldron," 1955, says Kassay attended too the University of Innsbruck. 

[5] Background from Medalis, Christopher N., "American Cultural Diplomacy: The Fulbright Programs in U.S.-Hungarian Higher Education," diss. Columbia University, 2009. $425 in 1950 funded one year of full-time tuition at Northeastern. Kassay did hold student co-op jobs.

[6] The Refugee Relief Act of 1953 was specifically for refugees from communist countries. Kassay's request is in the Congressional Record, U.S. Senate 13 April 1953, page 2964, "Bills Introduced by Mr. Saltonstall."

[7] Plath also had fantasies about Polish males, embarrassing even to read.

[8] Boston Globe, 13 June 1957, p. 16. 

Book Review: Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume I, by Carl Rollyson

Sylvia Plath Day by Day, Volume I (1932-1955), by Carl Rollyson, University of Mississippi Press (2023), 400 pp., $24.14 at Amazon.com.

If you want Sylvia Plath without poetry, dip into this timeline of gleanings from diaries, letters, personal calendars, and other Plath biographies and sources, spanning her life from birth to September 1955. Biographer Carl Rollyson has published 40-plus books including two Plath biographies which elided Plath's early years. Currently he is completing a biography about Plath's early years. Sylvia Plath Day by Day Vol. 1 assembles his source facts, quoting the published and unpublished. According to Rollyson this chronicle restores "precious details" and the objectivity lost when biographers shape facts into narratives. His introduction says:

In effect, you are presented with the raw data, without commentary, so that you become the biographer.

Rollyson edited this raw data, so it is not raw data. The introduction explains:

The entries in this book are shorter than the sources they are taken from. My principle of selection has been to record the most striking events and comments that reveal Plath but also to minimize repetition, except when repetition . . . seems important . . .

Examples (I'm choosing interesting ones):

1946

October 14: Writes up the program of a school assembly, featuring a reading, a piano solo, choral singing and reading, a harmonica solo, a skit, a vocal trio, tap dance, and an accordion solo.

October 15: A sixteen-line poem for Miss Cox, which ends "But behind the cold, white stillness / There's the promise of a spring."

October 16: Clippings about World Series games, visual-aid education, physical exams.

October 17: "World news is really discouraging--wish I could run things for a while."

October 18: Orchestra rehearsal, pleased to realize she has left her ancient history book at home, "Oh! Well! I'll get along."

October 19: Wears a yellow evening gown with black velvet bows to a dance. One boy steps on her toes, but she has fun dancing with another partner who is "very nice" [drawing of a heart].

October 20: "All the girls were talking about last night happenings and were comparing partners."

October 21: "Dear Diary, I don't know what possesses me to mess you up by such scribbling. Some old nagging things inside me prompts me to waste such nice paper. . . . From now on I won't let the weak side of my character hold sway."

1953

April 28, 9:30 a.m.: "Hair."

10:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.: News office.

2:00-6:00 p.m., 7:00-10:00 p.m.: "STUDY MILTON."

April 29, 8:30 a.m.: Chapel.

9:00-10:00 a.m.: In News Office.

10:00 a.m.- 12:30 p.m.: Studies Milton.

2:00 p.m.: "Davis paper due."

3:00 p.m.: "Milton Exam."

6:00 p.m.: Press board banquet, Auden in attendance.

April 30, 8:00 a.m.: "Activities board."

9:00 a.m.: Audits science class.

10:00 a.m.: Bells.

Hampshire Book Shop.

2:00 p.m.: Class with Professor Davis.

3:00 p.m.: Milton class.

4:00-6:00 p.m.: Sally.

"Phi Beta Banquet."

Day by Day is the first Plath bio to poach lots of direct quotations from Plath's childhood diaries, so I focused there. Those diaries remain unpublished because they are boring. From art teachers to camp counselors, every authority every hour dangled rewards and awards for doing as they asked. Plath responded like a trained seal. The flip side was that she grew up firmly disciplined and knowing her own value. She could control the situation when "parking" with dates. Plath fighting off a rapist (December 3, 1950) Day by Day however renders as "She strongly rejects the idea."

I did like Day by Day's glimpses of Plath's grandfather, who gave her hugs, gifts of money, and violets for planting. Extremes of mood, symptoms of Plath's mental illness, emerged when she was 16 or 17.

It is a standard joke that writings about Plath must be faultless, so I will fine-tooth and fume over Day by Day's errors, and omissions not only of childhood events I think significant but those important enough for Dr. Heather Clark to flesh out in her definitive biography Red Comet. For example, Red Comet (p. 93) gives most of a paragraph to Sylvia's diary entry of July 25, 1947, a rare hateful one calling her mother a stinker and a "damn cuss'd old thing" for not buying her a dress she wanted. Sylvia then recanted her angry words. Rollyson's version reads:

July 25: "It's good to be able to spread out and stretch again, knowing that I have a new diary waiting." Buys "a dream of a dress" at Filene's "aquamarine with black bands around the neck, waist, the sleepers, and a narrow black-square outline all through the material."

Maybe these are not the same diaries?

Understanding that the text I read was in galleys, I think if Rollyson had taken a minute to check the first few pages of Plath's Letters Vol. 1 he'd know it's incorrect to say that "Plath's first extant letter to Aurelia Plath is a postcard dated July 14" [1944] (note 102, p. 329). It was Aurelia Plath, not Sylvia, who inscribed Sylvia's diary with "Not to be written in after 8 p.m." Visitors designated Uncle Henry and Aunt Elizabeth "Aldrich" -- the surname of Plath's neighbors -- were in fact Sylvia's blood relatives Henry and Elizabeth Schober (9, 31). And "Grampy" died in 1965, not 1963.

Now I feel better. (What made me feel better?)

The accuracy improves and, oddly, interest heightens as the timeline enters and atomizes familiar territory. I was grateful that author comments were few. When in May 1945 12-year-old Plath rescued and fed a baby bird, a comment says this prefigures the baby bird that Plath and her husband tried to save in 1958. This has nothing to do with her art and growth, and in this world of real fire and bombs through the roofs I felt it should be embarrassing to care.

And I wonder how every detail about Sylvia Plath's life has come to be so precious there's a market for barrel scrapings and granules ever smaller, as if by crafting lists and footnotes and smartmaps instead of prose we stay safe.