"Sylvia Bites"

Bitten plum / photo by Marco Verch

Sylvia Plath, as a kid, was violent—so much that Aurelia Plath had to keep Sylvia and her brother Warren apart. Sylvia kicked her brother, choked him, stuffed cloth down his throat. Sylvia said this to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher in a February 1959 therapy session, and Beuscher around 1970 read the therapy notes to Harriet Rosenstein, who audiotaped the interview.

Sylvia, age 26, told Dr. Beuscher her vivid memories of hating Warren from his birth, and published those memories in her essay “Ocean 1212-W.” Sylvia wrote in her journal (15 June 1951) that she had pelted Warren with tin soldiers, “gouged his neck” with an “careless flick” of an ice skate. You can’t carelessly flick an ice skate. Aurelia said Sylvia’s bullying became a neighborhood problem after her father died, but if Sylvia’s short story “Among the Bumblebees” is as thinly fictionalized as most of her fictions, the original of young Alice Denway was kicking her brother’s shins under the family dinner table to impress a father who was there. In other Plath fictions, girl-child narrators bite a playmate on the leg, bully a Jewish boy, are accused of ruining a neighbor girl’s new snowsuit. The real Sylvia had a rough enough reputation so that when the real-life neighbor girl’s parents came asking for money, Sylvia’s family sadly paid.

Aurelia’s Letters Home preface gets cagey and Latinate about her children’s infighting, signaling that she is suppressing much worse. Aurelia wrote: “[t]here were many times when each made the other miserable; and Sylvia, as the older, was the more dominant and the more culpable,” and does not say, but we know, she sent her daughter to live with her grandparents. Sylvia bit people. A police report in the Boston Globe (23 August 1938) says at the Plath house in Winthrop a dog “severely” bit on the nose a two-year-old guest. The Plaths did not own a dog. The dog was a neighbor's, but that Sylvia might have done it crossed my mind. Later when Sylvia first met Ted Hughes she bit his cheek until her teeth nearly met and the blood ran.

It is normal for children to be jealous of younger siblings and sometimes hurt them. Ruth Beuscher noted that Sylvia’s sibling rivalry went beyond normal. At age 26 Sylvia was bothered that Warren was at Harvard and she was not. Sylvia fought with her husband—“violent disagreements,” she told her mother; “snarlings and bitings,” she told her journal; “sprained thumbs and missing earlobes,” she told her brother. That was two adults in love. She had rushed to marry a “violent Adam,” “a breaker of things and people,” yet complained piteously after they broke up that he had beaten her. A line deleted from a draft of the poem “Edge” (“She has taken them with her”) suggests she considered killing their children along with herself, but on February 11, 1963, killed only herself.

Or so we say. In July 1964, Ted Hughes wrote about their two-and-a-half-year-old son, “Nick is a very tough-minded little bloke—altogether a very strange & violent little kid, a little Napoleon.” “I have a violence in me,” Sylvia wrote, “that is hot as death-blood.” That is true of many others. The difference is that Sylvia knew herself and spoke honestly about how bullying could get her what she wanted.

Why Sylvia Plath Loved to Tan

Boston's L Street Beach and Bathhouse, 1915

Sylvia Plath in her story/memoir “Among the Bumblebees” described how her big strapping father swam expertly and let her cling to him, but Aurelia Plath in Letters Home (22) clarified that it was Sylvia’s grandfather, Aurelia’s father Francis Schober, who took Sylvia on those memorable swims. In 1914 Schober was one of four Boston hotel waiters in the support boat as fellow waiter Charles Toth aced the Boston Marathon of open-water swim challenges: Charlestown Bridge to the Boston Light[house] on Little Brewster Island, 11-plus miles. Toth swam it in six hours and 42 minutes. [1]

 

The following year Toth swam the same route as a round trip, in 15 hours 47 minutes. Toth in 1923 became the fifth person to swim the English Channel and the first American to swim it from France to England. Toth famously trained for the Channel swim by towing a rowboat full of passengers, the tow rope in his teeth. Toth was built like a bear. Still he felt he ought to call himself Bavarian when his surname and all immigration papers declare he was born in Hungary.

 

The Boston Light race began in 1907 and was suspended from 1941 to 1976 because Boston Harbor was so filthy. The race’s route today begins at the venerable oceanfront L Street Bathhouse [pictured], home of Boston’s “L Street Brownies” who every January 1 since 1907 have taken an icy dip in the water. This has inspired others nationwide to do the same.

 

And the reason: In 1910, recent immigrants, mostly Europeans such as Schober and Toth, were a solid 30 percent of Boston’s population. They imported the habit of a steam bath followed by a plunge in icy water, for their health. Some swam almost every day of the year. These were called “Brownies” because of their perpetual suntans. Photos show Sylvia Plath in the 1950s enjoying beaches and sun. She equated tanning with health and her mother Aurelia did too. [2] It wasn’t for the view alone that Frank Schober bought a house on Point Shirley. And, unlike non-swimmer Otto Plath, Sylvia’s Grampy had several very athletic friends.

 

Before air-conditioning, those in urban housing had only the beach to cool down. The above photo, taken in 1915, is titled “Big Crowd at the L Street Bath House, Boston, on a 94 Degree Day.” You can tell the European-born from the Americans by their swimwear. The photo appears here with the permission of the Estate of Leslie Jones, Boston Herald photographer.

Photo: Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection

[1] "Charles Toth Waiter-Athlete Swims to Light," Boston Herald, September 21, 1914, p. 11.

[2] Aurelia Plath made sure baby Sylvia was well tanned. (See the Baby Book, Lilly Library.) Sylvia Plath, from summer camp, to Aurelia Plath, July 5, 1947: "When I come home please do not expect me to have a very dark tan since I don't."