"The Passing Dazzle of Each Face"

Eternal vigilance is the price of more context for Sylvia Plath and her mother Aurelia Schober Plath. In March came up for sale a set of college yearbooks for 1926, 1927, and 1928, for the college Aurelia attended, the years she was there, and I bought them. Yes, Aurelia Plath went to college. Her college yearbook was called the Sivad.

Although not Aurelia's personal copies, Aurelia inscribed in them personal notes to owner Muriel Brigham, fellow 1928 graduate of Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, called by its students "P.A.L." Muriel Brigham (1898-1983) majored in English. She and Aurelia were both members of the college's Writers Club.

The 1928 Sivad -- Aurelia Schober, editor-in-chief -- is scarce and insanely priced when auctioned. A blurry, faulty scan costs $99; I would not pay that. I secured all three yearbooks for less. Star and valedictorian of her class, Aurelia appears in each volume. How instructive to see Aurelia's face among those of a few hundred of her peers (sadly, none interviewed while it was possible) and good photos of the campus and dorm rooms as she knew them. I learned that not only Aurelia but some classmates staffed Camp Maqua in Maine in summer 1927 -- when Aurelia invited her 43-year-old boyfriend for a week and sneaked around. Will present Aurelia's inscriptions next week.

The yearbook had to go to press in early spring, so Aurelia's late-spring honors are published in the 1929 Sivad, in which Aurelia is called "Daughter of the Dawn." Think you that I am joking? Here it is:

The Junior year in many ways was the most active of the lot, filled as it was with college work, a wonderful SIVAD and a Prom that has glittered as only Betelgeuse has glittered on the shoulder of Orion. In the midst of this radiance that Daughter of the Dawn, Aurelia Schober, shone as editor-in-chief of SIVAD, adding many new features . . .

I'm seeking a copy of Aurelia Schober's 1928 valedictory speech, delivered June 6, 1928. Do you know where I can find it? It's not in the yearbooks or the Winthrop, Mass. newspapers.

Pushed Off the School Bus

School bus, 1918

Aurelia Plath's preface to Letters Home sets her "early childhood" in a "primarily Irish-Italian neighborhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts during World War I." She remembered those schoolmates jeering her for speaking only German, and during the war they called Aurelia "Spy-face" and once pushed her down the school bus steps and left her sprawling, while the bus driver looked the other way.

Yet Aurelia lived from birth in 1906 until she was 12 not by the sea in Winthrop but in the Boston neighborhood Jamaica Plain. There she first went to school and was promoted from first grade to third. The Schobers moved in 1918 to Shirley Street in Winthrop, their neighbors almost all Anglos. "Schober" was most non-Anglo name on the block. [1] Census records show that the Irish and Italian schoolmates Aurelia placed in Winthrop were in Jamaica Plain. If she was assaulted in Winthrop it was by Anglos.

Few with German names or heritage escaped pan-Germanic harassment during World War I -- scholar Otto Plath in California got grilled by the FBI -- and given Aurelia's tendency to sugarcoat, it was probably worse than Aurelia said. Sylvia wrote that Aurelia was stoned for speaking German. One of Sylvia's fictional mothers dreads a second war with Germany not because it's war but because she remembers the U.S. during World War I.

Because Aurelia's narrative of her childhood is unreliable -- so many forces were at work on her as she was writing it -- and there is no other source, I wondered if I ought to try to believe the school bus incident happened in Winthrop, if Winthrop even had a school bus in 1918.

It turns out Winthrop had a Shirley Street school bus as early as 1910.

Caption says "About 1910. 'School Bus' of those days on Shirley Street . . . Girl in gingham dress inside right rear 'bus' is Evelyn Floyd Clark."

Evelyn Floyd is listed with Winthrop High graduating class of 1913, with 165 graduates, mostly with Anglo surnames such as Floyd and Clark. There are some Irish and Jewish surnames. Only one graduate has an Italian surname (Monafo). That was Winthrop before the Schobers moved in.

Aurelia Schober graduated from Winthrop High School in 1924. There were 146 graduates. They had Anglo, Irish, Jewish, and a sprinkling of Germanic surnames. Only one graduate had an Italian surname (Carro). That was Aurelia's Winthrop, with a school bus more like the enclosed one at the top of this post.

Aurelia's letters to her many correspondents do not give more details about her childhood. Nor do the archives she assembled that she made publicly available. By contrast Aurelia saved everything about her daughter Sylvia Plath's childhood. In the Letters Home preface Aurelia moved on from a brief discussion of her childhood to describe what she liked to read. I'm reminded of what Sylvia wrote her mother from summer camp in 1949: "Tell me something personal in your postcards. I don't care about book reviews as much as you and the family."

[1] 1920 United States Federal Census, Massachusetts, Suffolk, Winthrop, District 0676, p. 49.

Credit Where It's Due

Vera Zorina as Ariel with Arnold Moss in The Tempest, 1945.

As my eyes continue to open I see critical essays about Sylvia Plath using the passive voice and just plain disregard to delete her mother from her life. Biography is subjective; so is scholarship. Neither genre can include every detail. The dodge happens most, though, when Aurelia Plath was not a detail, or she is due some credit:

"Plath's own copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra is much annotated, and its importance for her creative work is shown in her 1955 poem "Notes on Zarathustra's Prologue". . . Where did Plath get her own copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra, so important? From her mother. For Christmas 1949.

"Plath's upbringing may have been strongly pacifist." If true, who brought her up that way?

"The Tempest in Boston was the first play that Plath ever saw." It was January 20, 1945 and Plath was 12. The experience resonated throughout her life. Who bought the tickets to that play?

"Sylvia and Ted went to Paris on their honeymoon." Yes, but the newlyweds tagged along, all day for eight days, with Aurelia, who had planned to tour Paris by herself.

Family photo from Sylvia's wallet

At the time of her death Sylvia had in her purse Aurelia's Christmas card from 1955, printed with a photo of Sylvia and Warren. Aurelia said so. That's so poignant it might not be true. We know for sure Sylvia carried in her wallet a photo of herself with her brother and their mother.

"From childhood Sylvia showed a talent for poetry." In childhood, showed whom?

"Unsurprisingly, for someone brought up with Unitarian beliefs, Sylvia's intellectual development was not inhibited by any narrow religious dogma." Then credit Aurelia for bringing up her kids as open-minded Unitarians.

I do not blame critics of years past for not having the information we do. I do wonder what made and still makes for unease about acknowledging Aurelia Plath's presence when she was present, or as a sometimes positive factor in her daughter's life and artistry.

Tempest photo by Eileen Darby: Special Collections, Cleveland State University Library. "her wallet": Plath's wallet with its contents was auctioned in 2018.

The Mysterious Gap of 1958

Aunt Aurelia bought us a parakeet!

There are no letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother Aurelia between August 13, 1958 and July 9, 1959. Aurelia in Letters Home said that Sylvia and her husband Ted had moved to Boston and "We were close enough to visit often, and used the telephone." (322)

Sylvia wrote that Aurelia phoned ("the usual depressing call from mother") and visited. But knowing how militant Aurelia was about presenting her family as conflict-free, I think Sylvia in that 11-month gap must have mailed her mother something, at least one thing, that has been removed. There is not even a December happy-birthday note to Sylvia's Grampy. 

Aurelia was conscious of that gap and tried to fill it in Letters Home with three excerpts from her own journal, dated August 3, September 9, and September 20, 1958. Aurelia's editor at Harper & Row published only the August 3 entry (348).

In one of Aurelia's notebooks her reflections on autumn 1958 have been razored out.

All this made me suspect dirty family laundry.

Aurelia maybe didn't want us to know that in 1956 she dismissed from her house her 75-year-old widower father, "Grampy," after his 12 years in residence, telling her sister Dotty and brother Frank that it was now their turn to host him.

Grampy was also going blind. None of his three adult children wanted him. Sylvia wrote her brother that Aurelia faced Grampy's resentment along with Dotty's and Frank's. Sylvia's letter is dated April 23, 1956; Grampy's wife wasn't even dead yet.

They sound like a typical American family.

Dotty lived near Wellesley and Frank in Pennsylvania, and both had spouses and kids. In June 1956 Grampy went to Dotty and lived on a porch enclosed to make a room. [1] Aurelia from then on did only respite care, taking Grampy to Bermuda and doing summer Dad-sitting. Aurelia wrote a friend in 1959 that she abandoned the novel she was writing, to keep her father company. [2]

Grampy was a burden. But whoever hosted Grampy got access to his pot of retirement money.

Dotty and Frank's "underhanded business with Grampy's money" -- as Sylvia described it; we don't know the details -- was perhaps exposed or fought over in autumn 1958. In 1959 Frank and Dotty both bought really nice new houses; Dotty's a second house. Sylvia's letter to Aurelia (January 16, 1960) comments on Aurelia's report that Dotty ducked questions about the purchase.

Shipped away to Frank's house, Grampy stayed only eight months because Frank became seriously ill. Grampy went back to Dotty's.

What Grampy wanted is not known. But Aurelia wrote a friend that she bought Grampy a parakeet, an unpredictably noisy little gift and hard for a man with low vision to care for.

Aurelia and siblings were willing to offload and carousel their elderly dad so they might enhance their own lives with his money. If this wasn't the issue, whatever it was, Aurelia wiped it from written records. Meanwhile, in autumn 1958 Sylvia was entangled in her own agonizing problems, described in detail in her journal.

While Aurelia was in England in summer 1962, Dotty put Grampy in a nursing home. On August 27 Sylvia wrote to Aurelia, who was back in the U.S., "I am glad to hear that Grampy is better off in the home and think that decision was the best & only one."

[1] "a converted porch," Harriet Rosenstein transcript of K. Goodall interview on 24 June 1974, Special Collections #1489, Box 3, Folder 3, Emory. [2] "the novel," ASP to Miriam Baggett, 6 February 1960, Smith.

So Glad You Liked My Poem

How many poems did Sylvia Plath enclose in her letters to her mother Aurelia and which poems were they? I can name 36. Please send any corrections! Sylvia asked Aurelia for feedback on some of them.

1943: 20 March, "Plant a little seedling"; "I have a little fairy,""You have to have my fairy ears"; "I found a little fairy"

1945: 7 July, "At night I watch the stars above"; 9 July, "Camp Helen Storrow"

1946: 16 July, "The Lake"; 19 July, "Mornings of Mist"

1947: 8 September, "Missing Mother"

1950: 5 October, "Gold leaves shiver"

1951: 8 October, "gold mouths cry"; 3 November, "Sonnet" ("see what you can derive from this chaos")

1953: Before 1 March, villanelles including "Mad Girl's Love Song"; 11 April, opening stanza of "Dialogue en Route"; 22 April, "Parallax," "Admonition" and "Verbal Calisthenics" ("Tell me what you think"); 30 April-1 May, "Oh bother!" Before April 25, "To Eva Descending the Stair" ("the one you like so much")

1954: 16 April, "Doom of Exiles," "The Dead" ("tell me what you think of them")

1955: 2 February, "Apparel for April," "Temper of Time," "Winter Words" ("Read aloud for word tones, for full effect.")

1956: 9 March, "Pursuit," "Channel Crossing" ("eager to hear what you think of these"); 19 April, "Metamorphosis"; 21 April, "Ode for Ted," "Song"; 20 April, "Strumpet Song," "Complaint of the Crazed Queen," "Firesong"; 2 October, "Epitaph for Fire and Flower"

1957: 8 February, "The Lady and the Earthenware Head"; 23 April, "Happy Birthday to You"

1958: 22 March, "Battle Scene From the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer," and "Departure of the Ghost" 

Below, the poems we know Aurelia liked, because Sylvia wrote:

"Glad you liked the New Yorker poem" (22 June 1960) ("Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows")

"So glad you liked the poems in Poetry." (16 April 1962) ("Face Lift," "Widow," "Heavy Women," "Love Letter," and "Stars over the Dordogne," April 1962 issue)

Without specifying which poems she was referring to, Sylvia wrote:

"It's too bad my poems frighten you" (25 October 1962)

Poems that Aurelia had copies of and in the margins indicated that she did not like:

"Snowman on the Moor" (published in Poetry, July 1957)

"Zeitgeist at the Zoo" (c. 1956; unpublished. Aurelia wrote: "Awful!")

"My Mother Is My Best Friend" -- Uh, No

Reacting in 1972 to an article called "My Parents Are My Friends," Aurelia Plath judged it "excellent and was my aim in life because my mother was my best friend!" Aurelia and her parents shared a house for 40 of Aurelia's first 50 years, so warm feelings or feigning them was required, but being friendly with parents is one thing and "best friend"-level intimacy with one's mother is another. 

Sylvia wrote that her mother was "always a child" while her grandmother lived, but let's take Aurelia's word that Aurelia and her mother were each other's best friends. For exploring what mother-daughter "best friends" meant in the Plaths' house, we have what Aurelia wrote in 1982:

Maybe parent-child friendship was once an ideal, but today it's widely agreed that children feel emotionally burdened when their parents try to be friends and confidants. Thank goodness Millennial parents know better:

The emotional burden of "best friendship" with parents usually falls on daughters. Did "friend for life, such as I was for my mother" oblige the daughter to fulfill the mother's needs?

Sylvia's letters home are "intimate correspondence" as Aurelia said, and they read like best-friend letters, but Sylvia was not into fulfilling Aurelia's needs. Aurelia fulfilled Sylvia's needs and hid or downplayed her own. She liked keeping Sylvia close, but didn't depend on Sylvia for best-friendship because Aurelia had her own good friends who valued and helped her.

Aurelia had friends from her decades-ago college days and high-school teaching days. A friend from the 1920s, a novelist, in 1969 wrote her editor about Aurelia's idea to publish Sylvia's letters as a book. When the time was ripe, it happened! Friends in 1953 had hosted Aurelia for two weeks and six weeks, and in the 1970s, hosted her five days a week for three years while Aurelia taught at Cape Cod Community College. Sylvia's juvenile diaries mention Aurelia slipping out of the house to visit the "Ortons," meaning the Nortons, Aurelia's intellectual equals and, for her first ten years in Wellesley, her very good friends.

As friends and family members, including Sylvia, died, moved away, or distanced themselves -- the family saw close-up Aurelia's faults and critical side -- new people such as playwright Rose Leiman Goldemberg even wanted to be Aurelia's friend. Goldemberg was concerned that it might be asking too much. Others weren't so concerned and pretended friendship, love, and goodwill to get closer to the late great Sylvia Plath. 

Pretending she did not know some pen friends were opportunists, Aurelia feigned affection as long as both parties could keep it up. To us this seems strange and unnecessary. To women of Aurelia's time, it was only polite.

Bereft of old friends and increasingly injured as Sylvia's meaner words about her were published, aging Aurelia hungered for love and friendship. Her move into senior housing in 1984 separated her from neighbors who esteemed her and set her among people unfriendly because of what Sylvia had written. She had counted on family to love her as she had loved them. Only daughter-in-law Margaret Wetzel Plath regularly wrote Aurelia, and arranged for her an 80th birthday party. She made Aurelia feel loved, and according to Aurelia's last good friend, Dr. Richard Larschan, Aurelia was desolate when Margaret died of cancer in her fifties.

Sylvia was not around to be Aurelia's best and lifelong friend.

What a Hot Bath Won't Cure

AliExpress.com

Sylvia Plath's first act of artistry was to create with colored tiles, on the family's living-room rug, an outline of the Taj Mahal resembling the image woven into the family bath mat. Otto so liked toddler Sylvia's artwork that weeks passed before he allowed his wife Aurelia to vacuum. In Letters Home, Aurelia described Otto fawning over what Aurelia critiqued as Sylvia's "art without perspective, of course"-- Sylvia was only two years old! -- signaling unfinished business of a bitter sort. It seems Otto admired his daughter's artwork while giving his three-dimensional wife nothing but orders.

Most likely the Plaths did not imagine their daughter's face printed on a bath mat. Nor would they have a sense of humor about it.

I think Aurelia must have chosen a Taj Mahal bathmat because that is what new wives do, or because she was the artsy one of the couple, or bought it with hope or irony because the Taj is a monument to a happy marriage. Or secretly she chose it -- my favorite explanation -- because her former boyfriend Karl, an engineer, her true love, had rhapsodized to her about the Taj's flawless foundational engineering. 

Otto Plath too had his ideals. One was to sire superior children. For such a parent it is never too soon to show kids the wonders of the world, so maybe he bought the Taj Mahal bath mat -- and for such a parent it is never too soon for kids to perform like superior kids.

Not quite believing 1930s Taj Mahal bath mats ever existed, I looked in vain online for a vintage example. Instead, I found  Sylvia Plath towels and yoga blankets (sold out!; but you can get a Ted Hughes yoga mat). Or you can wear or tote or drink beverages from items with stylized versions of Sylvia's image, or photographic images fondly imagined to be Sylvia, such as the barefoot woman in slacks absorbed in reading or Olwyn Hughes, as in the battery chargers pictured.

 

Plath is far from being the only celebrity blasphemed with a bath mat. You can step buck-naked and sopping wet onto the face of Jesus or Emily Dickinson. You can James Dean your toilet; Eminem the whole bathroom; or buy a Harriet Beecher Stowe shower curtain, or a pretty Beecher Stowe yoga mat that I rather like. Is your own goal fame and fortune? Behold your fate.

From the Plath Archives: Dark of the Moon

In 1926, Aurelia F. Schober, 20 years old, “to make a black day brighter” bought a copy of Sara Teasdale’s newest book of poems, Dark of the Moon. On the flyleaf Aurelia wrote her name and “December 29, 1926.” With an ultra-fine pen she underlined, checkmarked, and bracketed titles, lines, and stanzas. Sprinkled throughout the book’s 91 pages are 14 annotations in the tiniest Gregg shorthand I have ever seen.

 

Two decades later Aurelia’s daughter Sylvia Plath affixed her bookplate to the same flyleaf, signing it in her distinctive rounded hand and heavy black ink. That ink appears elsewhere in the book only as a checkmark in the Table of Contents alongside the title “Effigy of a Nun.” Aurelia had long before judged that poem as “really very excellent and it’s different.” Sylvia could not read her mother’s shorthand but singled out that poem too.

 

Dark of the Moon is the only book in Lilly Library’s Sylvia Plath archive claimed and autographed by mother and daughter. [1] Aurelia’s shorthand annotations show her weighing her attachment to “Karl.” My research identified him as a professor of engineering, Aurelia’s first love, 22 years older than she. In October 1926 Aurelia brought Karl home to meet her parents. He also spent Christmas with the family. In his diaries he described these as heartwarming occasions. By December 29, Aurelia’s mother had told her Karl was too old and to tell him goodbye. Privately, in shorthand her family could not read, Aurelia made her own decision, which I transcribed and placed in context in the table below. As a decoy for any nosy parent or sibling, Aurelia wrote one comment in plain English.

 

Sylvia discovered her mother’s copy of Dark of the Moon at age 14 and exclaimed in her diary, “What I wouldn’t give to be able to write like this!” Teasdale’s poem “An End” frames Sylvia’s first published short story “And Summer Will Not Come Again” (1950). It’s a cruel little tale: Girl meets Boy, then one day sees him with another girl and jealously confronts him. Girl loses Boy and it’s all her own fault. The end of the story quotes the poem:

 

With my own will I turned the summer from me

And summer will not come to me again.

 

The first line of Teasdale’s poem “Appraisal” echoes in Sylvia’s early poem “Ballad Banale”:

 

Never think she loves him wholly.

 

Others have documented Teasdale’s influence on Sylvia’s poetry, but how and why this book got to Sylvia only the shorthand tells.

 

[1] There were other such books, not in the Lilly Library’s Plath collection.

Click to clarify and enlarge the transcription table [it has a second page]:

Another Suicide in Sylvia Plath's Family

Sylvia's maternal grandmother, "Grammy" Greenwood Schober (b. 1887) had six siblings. All left Vienna, Austria, for the United States. Grammy's brothers Joseph Greenwood (b. 1876) and Otto Greenwood (b. 1877) settled in St. Louis, Missouri, and worked as waiters in hotels. In 1951 Otto Greenwood hanged himself. He was 74, married, and 15 years retired from his waiter job. The Missouri death certificate says "Suffocation by hanging in his house Dec. 28 1951 about 12 noon."

Otto Greenwood was Aurelia Plath's uncle and Sylvia Plath's great-uncle. There is no reference to him or his death in any known Plath documents. He had a wife, Angela, and two grown children. Like Aurelia Plath's waiter father Frank Schober, Otto Greenwood belonged to the International Geneva Association for hospitality workers. [1] Greenwood was cremated on Dec. 31, 1951.

The Gregg shorthand character preceding the coded designation "974X" under "How did injury occur?" says "respiration."

[1] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 December 1951, p. 13.

Hype: The Sales Numbers of Ariel

"Published last year in Britain, the last poems of Sylvia Plath sold 15,000 copies in ten months," says a 1966 review of Ariel, and you will find that figure repeated everywhere, but below are reports for the British edition of Ariel covering 1) 1965; Ariel was first published March 11 of that year; 2) the first half of 1966; 3) the second half of 1966. 

Publisher Faber & Faber sent these royalty statements to Olwyn and Ted Hughes. The royalty money accrued to the children. For a book of poems these are excellent sales figures, but if these reports are accurate, we can henceforth revise that stupendous "15,000 in ten months" downward by four-fifths.

 

969 copies sold up to December 1965.

999 copies sold from January through June 1966. Notice how after 1000 total copies had been sold, the royalty was bumped up from 12.5 percent to 15 percent of the cover price; that is typical.

 

1,010 copies sold in Britain in July-December 1966. At this time, the first printing of 3100 copies would have sold out; demand enough for a second printing of another 3100 copies.

  

Ariel the book was no runaway hit with the British public. Excepting Plath's personal friends, early British reviewers had never read such a book, didn't know what to make of it, called it "sick" and "violent." Reviewers mentioned Sylvia Plath's "early death" and "fascination with death," but it was October 1965 before any British reviewer dared to out Plath as a suicide. That inspired the Times of London and its Times Literary Supplement to review the book in November 1965, TLS calling it "one of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time."

 

The U.S. publisher Harper & Row published Ariel in June 1966. The claim of "15,000 copies" in Britain, "almost as many as a bestselling novel," originates in the U.S., in a hypersensational review of Ariel in Time magazine, one that fetishized the suicide for a readership numbering in the millions. The Time review (June 10, 1966) can be read in full here. The story about the reviewer's meeting with Aurelia Plath is here. I couldn't possibly be the first to have seen these statements in the archives. If you can prove that Ariel sold 15,000 copies in Britain in ten months, please let me know.

 

The above Faber royalties from 1965-66, added up, would in 2023 amount to about 5000 British pounds or 6000 American dollars.

Bringing Up Baby Sylvia

October 1932 issue

“I was totally imbued with the desire to be a good mother,” said Aurelia Plath, and a pink satin Baby Book now in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library shows full-time new mother Aurelia recording joyfully on its pages her infant Sylvia's every gain.

 

Baby Books emerge in the U.S. around 1880. They require literacy and leisure and parents who expected children to grow up; in 1900, that’s three children out of four. Mass-produced baby books reached peak popularity around the time Sylvia was born in 1932. Among the mothers of the twenties and thirties faithfully tracking in writing their children’s progress was Rose Kennedy, inspired by The Care and Feeding of Children (1894), a bestseller by a New York hospital pediatrician who made patient “charts” mandatory after seeing nurses keeping them.

 

Intensified scientific interest in child rearing—the phrase “child care” first appears in 1915—designated “early childhood” the most critical phase. Writing in baby books (kept almost exclusively for firstborns!) made new middle-class mothers feel scientific but anxious, and therefore willing to pay for expert advice. Aurelia subscribed before Sylvia’s birth to Parents’ magazine.

 

Most fatefully for Sylvia, Parents’ in the 1930s mainstreamed in the U.S. the quite novel idea that the goal of education was for children to be happy. Aurelia, like her contemporaries, was raised “to be good,” meaning “to bow to authority.” “Happiness” was incidental; the root of “happy” means “good fortune,” and no parent can guarantee happiness. That churchmouse Aurelia was an ultra-modern mother, raising her children “to be happy” starting with feedings on demand and continuing along the lines set out by Friedrich Froebel, founder of “kindergarten.” He said children should have creative toys, sing and read and hear stories, be reasoned with, and follow their own interests.

A modern Baby Book, 2023 ($27).

 

But it seems that after the kindergarten stage Aurelia imposed happiness as a household norm. Sylvia learned to hate it when Aurelia kept repeating that she only wanted her children to be happy.

 

Sylvia Plath as a mother consulted the manual Baby and Child Care (1946), which moved the child-rearing goalposts: It said the goal was to make children feel loved. Sylvia was rarely happy and did not feel loved, and Aurelia, “good” by any lights but her daughter’s, met the same fate.

 

[1] Founded in 1922, Parents ceased publishing its print edition in 2022.

Too Busy To Drink Sylvia's Blood

"Sylvia" the movie, 2003

Aurelia Plath taught five days a week during the academic year and usually summer school at Boston University. When her children Sylvia and Warren were in college Aurelia also tutored on weekends so they could buy clothing as good as their peers'. [1] When we realize that from 1942 Aurelia worked full time with a twice-daily 40-minute commute, plus evenings at home with two dependent parents and student papers and class planning to do, plus seeing friends and paying bills, and having (please note!) a son she cared for as much as she did her daughter, and personally liking to read and needing to sleep, Aurelia didn't have much time to suffocate Sylvia and drink her metaphorical blood.

Sylvia only imagined Aurelia was preoccupied with Sylvia. Like a much younger child, Sylvia seemed unaware that her mother's life was already full.

From her girlhood summer camp days until her death Sylvia wrote her mother weekly, often more. What if instead of saying Sylvia wrote so many letters because her mother needed reassurance, try taking the view that Sylvia was the insecure one, wanting to occupy the center of her mother's world and consume her time and resources despite the miles between them. 

(No working woman of forty-five needs an eighteen-year-old's reassurance.)

Aurelia told a reporter in 1979, "They say [Sylvia] wrote the letters to keep me happy, to hide the darker side. Sylvia? Putting herself out day after day? The reason she wrote those letters was to get a reply, and she always did. I wrote them on my lunch hours, with my sandwich beside me." [2] We learn from Sylvia's volumes of letters about Sylvia's dependence on Aurelia not only for letters but for favors and support: typing and mailing manuscripts, banking, giving feedback about her new poems, shopping and sending money and packages.

Sylvia wrote from college so often that Aurelia sometimes had little to report except that Grammy had baked a cake last night. Sylvia read her mother's letters aloud to her roommate Marcia Brown to make fun of such trivia [3]. Although only ten mailings from Aurelia to Sylvia survive, from those and from Sylvia's replies we can see Aurelia's letters typically described family news, or books Aurelia was reading, and gave advice that Sylvia read as infantilizing or manipulative.

If genuinely bothered by her mother's letters Sylvia could have replied to them less often or not at all--or with honesty. But she did not. Casually we say "Sylvia wrote only what her mother wanted to hear," but read the letters and see how often she wrote her mother about distressing happenings and fearful moods; and no one knows what Aurelia wanted to hear. Maybe Aurelia wanted her lunch hour for her lunch. Sylvia's was the almost physical dependence, calling her mother's letters a "sustaining life force," and, when asking Aurelia for a quick reply, "Well do send me an infusion of energy, it will do me more good than thyroid."

[1] ASP to Leonard Sanazaro, Lilly.

[2] Robertson, Nan; NYT Book Review, October 9, 1979.

[3] Harriet Rosenstein's interview with Marcia Brown Stern, Emory.

"I Love Her Work, I Hate Her Mom"

Looking for the root of the general contempt for Aurelia Plath, I thought some popular article or influential essay, some Ur-takedown, must have seeded it. Whether Aurelia deserves contempt is not the issue here. Contempt is in place before Sylvia's abridged Journals (1982) reveal Sylvia's now-canonical "hate her hate her" entry. It precedes the Letters Home backlash (1975). It precedes "Mrs. Greenwood's" appearance in The Bell Jar (U.S., 1971), "her face a perpetual accusation," the review in the New Yorker  said, although the novel does not say that.

Critical contempt was in place by 1970, when researcher Harriet Rosenstein, planning a Plath biography, interviewed Aurelia in Wellesley. Previous interviewees briefed Rosenstein on the whole tragic Plath story, and Rosenstein's interview notes show frustration at what Aurelia did not say (Aurelia never said "suicide") and judged what lay beneath what Aurelia did say: bitterness, resignation--nothing good. No other interviewee, of about sixty in all (and we are very grateful for these interviews), gets treated as if they failed a test of character. Rosenstein later reminded herself that her book's purpose was not to nail Aurelia to the wall but to explain the Ariel poems.

The Bell Jar in German, 1968

Rosenstein's biography was never published. In her early twenties, a feminist and up on the trends, she had read The Bell Jar in its U.K. edition and learned Esther hated her mother. Rosenstein located a short German review (1968) of the German translation of The Bell Jar. It said, "the mother smiles, suffering and forgiving and being a little too sweet." That scrap of a critique must have been reassuring, since U.K. reviews of The Bell Jar (1963) and subsequent essays, even one titled "An American Girlhood," do not mention a mother. At all! Instead they spotlight Buddy Willard, or Esther Greenwood's frequent references to babies. 

By 2003, Mrs. Greenwood looms very large:

In the novel The Bell Jar, Sylvia depicted her mother as a dominating, soul-destroying woman responsible for a good deal of the psychological pain that eventually led to Sylvia's suicide at the age of 30. [1]

The novel's text does not support such a reading. Re-reading shows Mrs. Greenwood's role in the novel is quite small.

Reviews and essays about Ariel's debut (1965, 1966) focus mostly on suicide and the poem "Daddy." Mom was such a bit player in this father-daughter drama that she is absent from the decade's Anglophone lit-crit except as a nameless factor in Sylvia's Electra complex. Critics didn't even know her name. M.L. Rosenthal in 1967 read The Colossus and wrote about the poem "The Disquieting Muses" as if it were about Sylvia's muses! In 2016 even the best of us firmly believed the same poem is "a fateful family romance" making it "easy to see what is wrong with Aurelia." [2]

My best efforts did not locate any "root." I saw instead faddish pop psychology expanding precisely alongside of Sylvia Plath's rise to fame. Sylvia in the 1950s knew Freudian theory was insubstantial but when troubled she returned to it, as to a faith, and in the 1960s put it in her novel. That fellow poets of the era wrote about their mental health problems and treatments made Sylvia Plath an ideal case study. Armchair analysis boils down to blaming mothers for whatever on the globe is wrong. Plath scholar Jacqueline Rose protested exactly this in her 2018 book Mothers (for example, governments blame mothers for having "too many children" or "not enough"). Yet Rose still manages to blame Aurelia Plath for quoting from Plath's "Three Women" lines other than the ones Rose thinks she should have.

The difference pop psychology has made between the 1960s and today is the difference between early Plath critics' dismay at the poem "Daddy"'s appropriation of the Holocaust and today's readers saying, "Sylvia's husband cheated on her and left her, and that was her personal holocaust. And her mother actually being there only made the breakup worse. Probably even caused it."

[1] Anita Gales, "What's My Motivation, Mom? Oh, It Must Be My Anger at You." New York Times, 7 September 2003, p. AR69.

[2] Pollack,Vivian. Our Emily Dickinsons. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016.

Aurelia Plath Is Still a Bad Mother

They're called secondary sources for a reason.

Look into Sylvia Plath’s tie with her mother and you will often find little intimations of murder. That’s a very serious charge. Lacking proof we say Aurelia Plath killed her daughter psychologically. In Marianne Egeland’s Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure (2013) the chapter "Psychologists" shows how we were fed our certainty that Aurelia wrecked her daughter's life and caused her suicide.

I am quoting at some length the book’s page 191 to entertain you. Plus a bonus. Egeland writes:

". . . to appease [Sylvia’s] sibling jealousy when Mrs. Plath was caring for her baby son, Mrs. Plath encouraged Sylvia to read the newspaper. What the busy mother with her hands full perhaps just devised as a way to redirect attention in specific situations, [psychoanalyst Benigna] Gerish invokes as: 

 

"a desymbolizing and resymbolizing process in Plath’s inner world in which the emotionally loaded experience (jealousy and anger) is inadequately redirected into a world of symbolic speech, which binds and masks the emotion only enabling its distorted expression. (739) [1]* 

 

"[Gerish adds that] the eczema Sylvia Plath supposedly suffered from as a child was very likely a consequence of her mother’s profound ambivalence towards her. At the same time, the alleged eczema is not an issue addressed in any of the biographies, and Gerish gives no sources to confirm either its importance or its existence.** Aurelia Plath describes her daughter as “a healthy, merry child -- the center of attention most of her waking time” (Letters Home, 13)."***

 

"[A study by Lisa Firestone and Joyce Catlett proposes that their] "Voice Therapy" would have made Plath “able to feel the death wishes that her mother must have felt toward her (on an unconscious level) throughout her childhood” (1998, 687). Firestone and Catlett write that Aurelia Plath and Ted Hughes “both claimed to love her, while criticizing and attempting to control her life.”* They further maintain that Plath’s hostile attitudes to herself, to others, and to life in general were more representative of her mother’s views than her own (673).* No sources are stated in support of their pronouncements on either Mrs. Plath or Hughes.**

 

"[In the hypothetical Voice Therapy session] . . . “S.P.” gratefully confides to her therapist that the negative voice which has told her so many times how worthless and what a no-good writer she is, actually came from her mother, together with “the final command” to kill herself."* [2]

 

Bonus:

"Sylvia Plath’s rage at her abandoning husband and at her late beloved father was partly a displacement of anger toward her loving but smothering mother.* Her schizoid pathology resulting from the symbiosis (along with her bipolarity) helped prompt her suicide.* . . . In Ariel Plath attempted and succeeded in turning herself into a tragic, mythic heroine, eventually drowning herself in a gas oven as she would have in the ocean -- a key metaphor for her mother."*

 

[1] Gerish, Benigna. "This is Not Death, It Is Something Safer:" A Psychodynamic Approach to Sylvia Plath, Death Studies, 22 (7), 1998, 667-692.

[2] Firestone, L. & Catlett, J. (1998). The treatment of Sylvia Plath. Death Studies, 22 (7), 1998, 667-692.

[3] Fierstein, F. A Psychoanalytic Study of Sylvia Plath. Psychoanalytic Review, February 2016, 103-26.

 

*But that's true, that's fact, I just know it!

**How rude to suggest that scholars cite sources.

***That's a barefaced lie!

Four Generations of Rebel Weddings

I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath really stuck it to her mother by announcing, the day Aurelia got off the boat, that she and Ted Hughes (who was there) were getting married in three days: as if triumphantly quashing her mother's dream of a tame and crew-cut son-in-law. Didn't agree then, thinking Sylvia might have been too ecstatic to be mean, but I agree now because I found a pattern of defiant little weddings in her family. Four generations:

• Sylvia's "Grammy" and "Grampy," Aurelia Greenwood and Frank Schober, defying her father, got their marriage license July 3, 1905, the day the bride turned 18 and did not need parental permission. They wed as soon as legally possible: Monday, July 10 at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
  
• Otto Plath in a Nevada courthouse really stuck it to his estranged and hated first wife with a quick-and-dirty divorce-mill divorce and by marrying Aurelia Schober on the spot the same day: January 4, 1932.
  
• Aurelia's daughter Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes told her mother, arrived in London for a visit on June 13, 1956, that they were marrying June 16. Aurelia puked up her dinner that night. She was the couple's only guest at St. George the Martyr church in London. (Glimpse its inside, in the church's promotional video.)
  
• Fast-forward to 1979, when Sylvia's daughter Frieda Hughes, "now 'engaged,' will be 19 on April 1," Aurelia Plath wrote a penpal, as if "engaged" was her granddaughter's teenage daydream, and maybe forgetting her own mother married at 18. But Frieda at 19 married a farmhand. It was a rebellious marriage and short. Ted moaned in a letter to a friend that his daughter was divorced at 23.

The Perfect Set-Up (for Aurelia and Otto's First Date)

Let's say your German professor, tall and good-looking, has been favoring you the whole semester, and after you hand in your master's thesis he asks you for a date: a weekend on a farm owned by friends.

Let's get to know each other.  

Your hosts will be two professors who taught your undergrad German courses, really great people: Mr. Haskell and Mrs. Haskell, whom you count among your friends. Every year, undergrads from the grimy Boston campus picnicked for a day on the Haskells' farmette in Walpole. So you have been there four times with classmates and with German professors invited for the day. 

But Plath wasn't your professor then. Today he smells of pomade and aftershave. He is 20 years older than you are, but so was your engineering professor boyfriend, Karl. Your first love. Two years together. Then just before your college graduation, at dinner on your birthday no less, like heaving a brick through glass Karl said he was leaving for the summer, then going home to Austria. Pointedly he did not ask for your hand in marriage.

Two years passed, and then a month ago everyone in town read the newspaper and saw that your ex, Karl -- rich, top of his profession, future chief consultant on the Aswan Dam that stoppers the Nile; you'll secretly keep until the day you die the portrait showing his dueling scar -- is marrying a Radcliffe graduate student, a geologist. Your Bachelor of Secretarial Sciences degree blanches. This master's degree in English and German ought to temper it so no one will ask again whether you qualify to teach languages in high school.

So.

Busy typing your 98-page bilingual thesis, substituting quotation marks for umlauts, you aren't aware that Mr. Plath was doing his homework too. As a graduate student often around the German department, you have chatted with Mr. Haskell, asking after Mrs. Haskell, who teaches B.U.'s vocational students. To Otto Plath they've spilled the tea about your glittering undergraduate career: valedictorian and yearbook editor '28, officer of this and that, faultlessly organized, employed now teaching high school, and as far as they knew not seeing anybody else. Mrs. Haskell met your ex and knows it kills you that he's marrying, but keeps mum. Otto crows about making extra money teaching Middle High German: Miss Schober got 15 students to register when Otto said he'd teach it if she got 10, doubting she'd persuade even five. He doesn't know you chaired the girls' debate team in high school.

(Fifty years later, talking to an audience, event caught on tape, earliest available recording of your voice, you are halting and cowed, fumbling, not at all like you were; and everybody hates you.)

Otto has also asked the dean of liberal arts, a pharaoh among men, Dr. William Marshall Warren, about dating a student, and he said to wait until she finished her coursework. History chair Dr. Warren Ault, Otto's age, right then had a graduate-student fiancee Aurelia's age. Ault said her Latin and typing were excellent. [1]

Otto liked the idea of a warm-hearted intelligent young wife with secretarial and editorial skills. Plus, Miss Schober, Mr. Plath approves of your strong tall frame. You don't know Latin but he will see to it that you learn. You like the idea of having a man take your mind off Karl, for once.

The Haskells offer to host Otto and his prospective date for a weekend after the semester's end. He has only to ask her. Come on, the Haskells say. It's ideal. She won't be scared.

[1] bakerhistoryblog.com, June 18, 2021.

What's In Biographer Linda Wagner-Martin's Archive?

Linda Wagner-Martin wrote and published Sylvia Plath: A Biography in 1987, and for many years it was the best Plath biography, enriched by details Aurelia Plath provided. Wagner-Martin first contacted Aurelia in 1984, sending her a draft subtitled A Literary Biography, and then interviewed her. Wagner-Martin secretly tape-recorded an interview and admitted to doing it. Aurelia was hurt and angry. Wagner-Martin's husband immediately returned the tape with apologies.

Aurelia forgave Wagner-Martin and kept in touch until 1990. Wagner-Martin also contacted other people acquainted with Sylvia Plath. In the Wagner-Martin files at the Lilly Library I found information and observations new to me, most of them not in any published biography:

Aurelia, age 13, in 1919 took on the care of her siblings, including her infant brother (born September 1919), while their mother was still weak from influenza and double pneumonia. This experience made Aurelia long to become a mother. (March 9, 1986)

Sylvia's classmate Donald Junkins, quoted as saying that Sylvia in Robert Lowell's poetry workshop looked "mousy," after reading the biography described Sylvia as "all silkwormy and opera-lonely and mono-blonde in that thin straggly way she had with her brain competing with everything in sight." Her lively classmate Anne Sexton outshone her. (Jan. 10, 1988.)

Eddie Cohen wrote Wagner-Martin (Sept. 3, 1985; Oct. 14, 1985) that Sylvia kept all letters she received, meticulously, as her mother did, and kept copies of her own letters. Cohen wrote to Aurelia after Letters Home was published in 1975, and from her first learned the details of Sylvia's ruined marriage and how Sylvia destroyed her second novel.

Regarding Plath biographies, "It is strange that nowhere have I read about my own education," Aurelia wrote Wagner-Martin on September 1, 1984. But that was Aurelia's own fault: "In those days a girl who made high grades kept the fact to herself -- it was unpopular to be a 'green stocking'! So the secret has been kept all these years that I [w]as Salutatorian of my high school class and Valedictorian of my college class. . . I am a retired Associate Professor Emerita -- really!" Wagner-Martin quoted this letter in this biography and a later one.

Gordon Lameyer, Sylvia's boyfriend in 1953 and '54, wrote Wagner-Martin in 1987 complaining that everyone he met, including Anne Sexton, asked him about Sylvia's virginity. Lameyer's unpublished memoir said Sylvia had sex with him only after secretly losing her virginity to a stranger because, Lameyer said, Sylvia was afraid to seem to her boyfriend like a beginner or unskilled.

Senior housing. Aurelia probably added the "Peace" sticker.

Dido Merwin criticized Wagner-Martin and Letters Home for not mentioning astrology when astrology had been essential to the Hughes-Merwin friendship. What Dido wrote in this 1985 letter about Ted and Sylvia's visit to Lacan is retold in grating detail in Dido's postscript to Anne Stevenson's 1989 Plath biography Bitter Fame.

The senior-housing complex where Aurelia lived her final ten years, North Hill, had 454 residents, most of them strangers to Aurelia. The Wagner-Martin archive includes a Christmas greeting picturing the complex (Dec. 9, 1985; pictured) and a postcard photo of North Hill (June 25, 1990).

Elizabeth Sigmund alleged in a phone interview that Ted deliberately moved Sylvia to their Devon country home, "the most alien place he could have put her," to keep her isolated.

"I have read, weeks ago, your [manuscript]. . . I am very pleased with most of it. . ." Aurelia wrote to Wagner-Martin in June 1984. Aurelia objected chiefly to the the portrayal of herself. She told Wagner-Martin she had not been an absent parent but was always home when school-aged Sylvia and Warren came home from their extracurricular activities.

Perry Norton's ex-wife Shirley (Mrs. Tom Waring) wrote on March 28, 1985 that Mrs. Mildred Norton, mother to young Sylvia's friends Perry and Dick, was a "charming but manipulative mother" whose sons had to excel academically, win scholarships, and become doctors. "And from Mildred too was the frantic message against physical attraction" that made sensitive Perry a worrier. Mildred sent eldest son Dick away to boarding school because he was becoming attracted to a girl.

It was known in the 1980s that a character named "Esther Greenwood" appears in a 1916 short story, "The Unnatural Mother," by first-wave feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman. ("Greenwood" was Sylvia's grandmother's maiden name, and Sylvia had a cousin Esther in Boston.)

Aurelia congratulated Wagner-Martin on her "most attractive book" on October 29, 1987, but not without bitterly criticizing again the portrayal of herself, which caused her a "pressure-heart attack." On January 10, 1989, Aurelia wrote a thank-you note for two copies. And thanked the author again on June 25, 1990, for sending the "fine English paperback."

A sample of Ted's and Olwyn's objections to Wagner-Martin's manuscript.

Young Sylvia and Warren were always invited to "professors' kids" summer picnics and Christmas parties, according to a July 13, 1984 interview with C. Loring Brace (1930-2019). Aurelia at these events met Loring's mother Margaret, a Boston University graduate who "may have had a class from Otto Plath. She befriends Aurelia and always felt sorry for her, married to Otto. He was a real tyrant, and Aurelia suffered. So her need for companionship of other educated women was real. Mildred Norton and Margaret Brace were sorority sisters at B.U. . . Made the Plath-Norton connection much easier." Wagner-Martin paraphrased this information, leaving out the reference to Otto.

The thickest folder in the Wagner-Martin Box 1 holds letters from Olwyn Hughes, starting in 1982. In 1986 Olwyn read Wagner-Martin's final draft and sent the biographer 15 pages of deletions and changes [a sample is pictured] required by Ted and herself. Olwyn kept requesting changes until Wagner-Martin balked. Olwyn then denied Wagner-Martin permission to quote from Sylvia's poems. Despite the Plath Estate's efforts, Wagner-Martin's biography was published and she went on to publish another, more specifically literary biography, Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (1999; second edition, 2003) and four other Plath-related books I know of.

Aurelia's Edits to Sylvia's Letters: A Sample

Is it okay with you that Aurelia Plath in Letters Home (1975) quoted one of Sylvia’s letters as saying:

 

Aurelia Plath, 1960s

  Had a sad, longing . . . letter from Dick

 

when Sylvia’s original said:

 

  also a sad, longing pathetic letter from dick

 

Sylvia’s steady boyfriend Dick Norton had been hospitalized for tuberculosis. Sylvia visited him once and wrote her mother on February 25, 1953, that she did not want to visit him again. Her reason, in the Letters Home version:

 

  The thing I am afraid of is that he will try to extort a promise to him to try again when he comes out . . .

 

while the original says:

 

  The thing I am afraid of is that he will propose to me when he sees me face to face, will try to extort a promise to him to try again when he comes out . . .

 

Aurelia should have indicated with ellipses her deletion of “propose to me when he sees me face to face,” but she did not. This is called a silent edit. It is not the only one in the book.

 

To see how much editing, and what kind of editing, Sylvia Plath’s mother Aurelia did when crafting her selection of Sylvia’s letters titled Letters Home, I compared it with the original Plath letters that a team meticulously transcribed and published in two volumes in 2017 and 2018. As my sample, I selected at random the span of Plath’s letters from February 25 to May 15 of 1953.

 

Sylvia was then a junior at Smith College, doing her schoolwork, writing and sending out new poems, and dating Myron Lotz while breaking up with Dick Norton, one of three sons of close family friends. The Nortons and Aurelia had hoped Dick and Sylvia would marry. Sylvia’s letter of February 25 explains why it won’t happen. Here is another excerpt from that letter in Letters Home. The words within the brackets were cut and replaced with ellipses:

 

“I could never be happy married to him: physically I want a colossus; <hereditarily, I want a good sane stock;> mentally I want a man who isn’t jealous of my creativity in other fields than children.” 

 

Aurelia’s edit did let readers know why Sylvia thought Dick fell short of her ideals. But Sylvia’s opinion that the Norton family’s genetics were less than good or sane got cut. This was not to make Sylvia seem like a nicer girl. The statement, were it published, fits the legal definition of libel: 1) it is not true 2) it smears living people and 3) might cause mea$$$urable damages to the prospects of the Norton clan for generations to come. In 1975 the Nortons were all living and rich enough to sue, as were most of the people Sylvia in her letters had made rude remarks about.

Sylvia’s breakup ruined Aurelia’s treasured friendship with Mrs. Norton. Aware of this, Sylvia in the next letter home explained her reasoning at length. Aurelia omitted from Sylvia’s letter of 28 February-1 March 1953:

 

  as you may imagine, the whole dick affair distresses me no end. I feel a great pity for him, and a sad sort of maternal fondness; but you know how fatal that has been to love in the past. I feel, ever since I made the irrevocable decision not to marry him last summer, that I am suddenly, blissfully free of an overwhelming bear trap. for one thing, as I said, I wouldn’t want to marry perry’s brother because I have always been fond of perry, even though I would never marry him either because he is too intensely singleminded for me (and I am very happy he has found shirley, because I like her: she is my type of person.) as much as I love the nortons, I am glad I’m not marrying into their family. barring the hereditary liabilities involved in tying up with dick, I feel that our protracted togetherness would be abrasive, more than anything else. we are too alike in the unfortunate ways. I have analyzed this thing for two years now in my notebook, and I am soon going to need another notebook. in case you are ever over at the Harvard Coop, or could persuade Mr. Aldrich to get it for you, I would like an exact duplicate in the form of my book now: about the size of typing paper, ruled, etc. 

 

Assigned to choose among and abridge Sylvia’s letters, Aurelia deleted boring or repetitive material, including the next 1200 words from the above letter. The topics were Dick, his brother Perry, Sylvia’s date with Myron to see maple sugaring, and her position as secretary on her college’s electoral board. What remains of that letter in Letters Home tells of a Smith student gushing to Sylvia that she had read Sylvia’s work and was a fan. And Sylvia was glad Aurelia liked her villanelles. This suggests that Aurelia prioritized for Letters Home Sylvia’s mentions of writing and publishing; that is, Aurelia shaped the material for readers interested in her daughter as a writer.

 

Deleted from Sylvia’s original letter of March 9, 1953 is her disgust that Dick had gained weight in the hospital. Sylvia wrote that she and Myron “both hate fatness.” Did readers need to know this? Is this deletion proof that Aurelia in Letters Home hid Sylvia’s unhappy and unpleasant side? Would you reinstate it?

 

Was Aurelia slighting Sylvia’s creativity when in Letters Home, letter of March 17, Aurelia corrected “Myron Michael Lotz thinks I am brilliant creative and beautifulallatonce” to “Myron Michael Lotz thinks I am brilliant-creative-and-beautiful-all-at-once”? Or was that just Aurelia’s pedantry? I think it’s pedantic to fifty years later rip Aurelia and Letters Home for imperfect fealty to Sylvia’s text when portraiture rather than fealty was the plan.

 

In the letter of April 25, Aurelia silently moved a sentence from one place to another. “Mentally, I dedicate this Harper’s triumph to you, my favorite person in the world” was placed in front of “The Atlantic and the New Yorker remain my unclimbed Annapurnas.” There are more such cut-and-paste edits in Letters Home but too few and minor to harp on when the whole book ended up a cut-and-paste threats-and-lawyers free-for-all so fraught that Aurelia once considered substituting for Letters Home a book of Sylvia’s letters paraphrased.

 

The most frequent edits in the sample were capitalization and punctuation. Aurelia changed periods to exclamation points and vice versa. Letters Home replaced Sylvia’s original ellipses with dashes. Ellipses in the published Letters Home indicate deletions made by Aurelia, by Ted Hughes (who suggested cutting “drastically” in his letter of July 16, 1974), and Aurelia’s editor, advised by lawyers about living people’s right to privacy. Cut, cut, cut; then reinstate some cuts. The same issue of The New York Times Book Review that printed a negative review of Letters Home (page 1) printed the editor’s explanation (page 37) of how and why the book’s content had been compromised.

 

The Letters of Sylvia Plath set out to collect and print every single letter Sylvia wrote to anyone, unabridged and exactly as she wrote it. Letters Home had a different goal.

Is that okay with you? 

 

Finding Barbara Greenwood, Sylvia's Great-Grandmother

Aurelia Plath's maternal grandparents Mathias and Barbara Greenwood, parents of Sylvia's "Grammy," were both over 50 when they came from Vienna and settled in Denver, Colorado. Aurelia definitely met them; she and her mother took a road trip out West in 1922. 

Barbara Greenwood's children on official papers had given Barbara's maiden name as Meier, Beier, Heimer, and Hemmer. [1] According to Vienna church records, Barbara's maiden name was Bayer (pronounced "byer"). Her father Franz was Hungarian and in Vienna changed his name from Paier (also spelled Pajer) to Bayer. Through Franz, Sylvia was part Hungarian.

Barbara married Matthias Grunwald, a waiter, and at age 54 left Vienna to join him and their children in the U.S. and arrived with her daughter Barbara, age 27, and son Richard, 12. [2] In the 1910 census Mathias and Barbara, last name "Greenwood," were renting a house in Denver. Barbara spoke English; Mathias did not. Their daughter Aurelia Romana Greenwood had come to the U.S. and married waiter Francis Schober, and in 1906 they had a baby girl named Aurelia, who became Sylvia Plath's mother.

In the 1920 census, Barbara Greenwood, 65, is called "Betty," a nickname for Barbara. Barbara Greenwood was buried as "Betty Josephine Greenwood" in Nebraska, which is why it took me ages to confirm any basics about her. Aurelia said her mother's mother had been an orphan; that is proven true. Roman Catholic parish records from the 1700s to the 1900s show absolutely no Jewish family background.

Barbara and Mathias rest in adjacent plots in North Platte Cemetery, which fronts on the Lincoln Highway in Lincoln County, Nebraska. This information is from that cemetery's records:

Mathias Greenwood: Born 19 February 1849 in Vienna. Died 19 June 1926, age 77. Barbara Greenwood: Born 24 September 1854, place not stated. (Her baptismal record says Vienna.) Died 24 May 1945, age 90.

Why should a great-parent matter? Because Sylvia Plath didn't appear out of nowhere. None of us do. 

[1] "Bayer" is confirmed on the marriage record in the Vienna Austria Catholic Church Records 1600-1960, ancestry.com. "Hammer" was Mathias's mother's maiden name.

[2] Richard was in fact the son of 27-year-old Barbara, Junior (1879-1966). The 1930 U.S. census records that Barbara Junior's age at first marriage was 15. In the U.S. she married Henry A. Davis who had a son, Frank. Richard as an adult moved to Michigan and Aurelia, later in life, visited her cousin and his family there.