Aurelia Plath's Childhood

1 Roslyn Place, Jamaica Plain, built 1910. Aurelia wrote that family visits to her uncle here were among "the sweeteners of my childhood."

Only two sources about Aurelia Plath's childhood presently exist: Aurelia's own narrative in Letters Home and Beth Hinchliffe's unpublished Plath biography for which Aurelia was a primary source. The latter is painful reading, yet rings true:

. . . the family was disciplined into formal Germanic obedience, an almost martyr-like acceptance of hard work and self-deprivation . . . 

. . . acquiescent exterior . . . nursing the old grievances, remembering the persecutions and loneliness, seeing the world in terms of black and white and expecting the worst . . .  

Aurelia in other interviews and letters says nothing about her childhood and little about her parents, with whom she lived for forty years. Unless there is more in the Plath Family archive soon to open at Beinecke Library we must say Aurelia withheld her childhood for a reason.

The Letters Home preface says Aurelia's immigrant parents, the Schobers, headed by her father Frank, sent Aurelia to school speaking only German. Did he have no inkling she'd be treated like a freak? Frank spoke English. If he wasn't ignorant, what was he thinking? "From that time on," Aurelia wrote, "we always spoke English at home." 

Given English, Aurelia bloomed at school, but home was no picnic. In Letters Home Aurelia said she had no playmates, not saying her parents shut out the neighbors. In her book's one full childhood scene Aurelia's father spanks her. He then begs her forgiveness. I think the latter is whitewash: Hidebound patriarchs of a century ago did not apologize to five-year-olds. The Hinchliffe manuscript says Aurelia hid her anger and never forgot and was always slow to forgive. 

Frank and Aurelia Greenwood Schober were married ten months when daughter Aurelia Frances was born in 1906. Being named for both parents suggests she was conceived and born to prove a point. Baby Aurelia's mother, eighteen, had married without her wife-beating father's permission. Her sisters spited their father too: One had a baby at fifteen and the other married an African-American. Burdened with a child, the Schobers waited five years to have another. They never prospered -- Letters Home styles Frank, who was a waiter, as a "cost accountant" -- and lived with widowed Aurelia and their grandchildren. Spite begat spite: After her mother died in 1956, Aurelia ejected her father from her house and went to Europe where Sylvia was surprised to see her careworn mother suddenly as effervescent as a girl.

Hinchliffe's manuscript describes the Schober household as insular and humorless, so it is no wonder that Aurelia escaped into the alternate reality of books, preferring self-help and stories of survival. In summer 1918 Aurelia's family moved from Jamaica Plain to a remote landspit with the ocean front and back. We know why: In December 1917 the wartime U.S. declared Austro-Hungarians like the Schobers "enemy aliens" just like Germans. That the Schobers were citizens did not matter: The local "gang" of kids called Aurelia "spy-face" and pushed her off the schoolbus, and Sylvia remembered hearing from her mother that the kids threw stones. 

So we know approximately how much Letters Home sanitized Aurelia's childhood. If there isn't any text, maybe the archive's family photos will open a new route into her childhood and biography.

Aurelia Plath's Heart Attacks

"A heart attack laid her mother out two months ago," Ted Hughes wrote to Al Alvarez in November 1971. He meant Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath. In September of that eventful Plath year Aurelia, age 65, had a heart attack. Today we call her ailment "broken heart syndrome" or takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Its trigger is sudden and grievous stress.

What happens: One heart ventricle balloons. "Takotsubo" means "octopus pot." No joke.

Aurelia described "long periods of excessively rapid and irregular heart episodes," pain and unconsciousness. The doctor prescribed bed rest 12 hours out of 24 and no stress. Neither was possible. The Bell Jar U.S. rollout in spring 1971 made Aurelia's daughter's novel the talk of the nation, and Aurelia felt ashamed as its Boston-area characters were matched to her neighbors and to Sylvia's dates, classmates and mentors, and herself.

Aurelia also made it her business to keep Sylvia's benefactress Olive Higgins Prouty, then almost 90 and unwell, from ever reading The Bell Jar, a task because Prouty lived until 1974. As of July 1971 forcibly retired from Boston University after 29 years, broken-hearted or not Aurelia had to work, commuting weekly to a community college on the Cape. On October 30, 1971, a month after the heart attack, she wrote:

Five days a week I walk the hill from the parking lot to the College, then the 43 steps up to my office (no lifts!)—slowly and with pauses. If, between classes, I have no student to counsel and I feel exhausted, I lock my door, take a pillow from my chair and stretch out on the rug on the floor to relax and gain enough energy to continue. I drive the 100 miles from Brewster to my dear home in Wellesley only about once a month now.

 

Aurelia wrote a friend the following year that "I did not expect to reach Christmas '71 alive." Olwyn Hughes, who published the U.S. Bell Jar over Aurelia's protests, wrote a letter feigning concern and suggesting yoga. Aurelia replied just as insincerely, blaming her heart attack on Sylvia's old boyfriend Gordon Lameyer's unpublished memoir in manuscript. By contrast The Bell Jar's portrayal of clueless mother figure "Mrs. Greenwood," read by thousands that year, cost Aurelia friends, social standing, and any sympathy for the mother of a suicide. The book probably factored into Sylvia's decision to die. It spoiled other lives too. Only the Hugheses got any money, and they were not the happier for it.

Takotsubo can kill, but most patients recover within weeks. Aurelia's next "pressure heart attack" was in 1987, after reading a draft of Linda Wagner-Martin's Plath biography. Aurelia objected to hints about Sylvia's birth as "three weeks early" and that she had been an absent parent. "You have hurt me deeply," Aurelia wrote Wagner-Martin. "You did a massive undertaking well, except for the portrayal of me." Whether this heartbreak was a medical event or a guilt trip is not clear.