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.

"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.

Books About Sylvia Plath That I Hate to Love

-Claiming Sylvia Plath: The Poet as Exemplary Figure by Marianne Egeland (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013) An academic work roundly hated by every big name from Al Alvarez on down the alphabet who ever bullshitted about Sylvia Plath. Cohorts grouped as Critics, Biographers, Feminists, Psychologists, and Friends all get bitch-slapped for crafting the Sylvia Plath they liked best or could sell. Also they were crafting and positioning themselves. The original "strong smell" of Sylvia's hair that Alvarez later called a "faint smell" is an example of the type of gaming that has Egeland calling for some ethics around here.

Egeland says cultural change has made it easier for not only highbrows but middlebrows to find in Plath's life and works proofs of whatever one wants to prove. I delight in every word except for the conclusion, “The Sylvia Plath Formula,” explaining why readers still care about Plath. It has to do with ancient hero-worship. Author could not imagine Plath displaced by singer-songwriters. Egeland's scholarship is solid as rock. A book never popular, hard to find and so expensive I considered thievery. Traded a week’s groceries to buy a copy from its publisher--so promptly mailed that I sensed it felt relieved.

-I hate Sylvia Plath novelizations, so when given as a gift Euphoria by Elin Cullhed (Canongate, 2022, translated from Swedish) I opened the book weeks later only to be enthralled as its Sylvia Plath ruminates and rages (“Can’t they see my greatness?”) from December 1961 to December ’62. Thrilling first-person narration of the birth of Nicholas, of the artist picking fights with Ted, her manic desperation at being deserted and unfucked, beset with the care of her beautiful children and pathetically swanning for her nanny. I often dip into this book to marvel at how the author vivified Plath’s mind and motherhood. I genuflect to Jennifer Hayashida, translator. Cullhed clearly drew on recently published primary sources.

-After many years I spent $2 to re-buy and re-read Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness (wait! Keep reading!) by Edward Butscher (Seabury, 1976). This very first Plath biography impressed me with how author Butscher (pronounced “Boo-shay”) before the Internet found his sources--most valuably some people later skittish about interviews or about speaking frankly. Its frame is “Sylvia Plath’s central obsession with her father,” and its engine the unleashing of Plath’s inner “bitch goddess” via the Ariel poems. “Bitch goddess,” an unfortunate phrase to use at the high-water mark of second-wave feminism, got the book sneered at and shoved to the sidelines.

Butscher said his critics were classist and I am weighing that. His interpretations of the poems were never good, and no one knew that the Ariel of 1965 was Ted Hughes making Sylvia look "mad" when Plath’s own edit was really a women’s magazine complete with parody ads. Method and Madness is dense with facts and rich in quotations from Sylvia's letters.

-Letters Home (Harper & Row, 1975), edited by Aurelia S. Plath. Jeered as a 500-page whitewash of The Bell Jar’s caustic author, Aurelia’s selection from Sylvia’s letters was edited to balance the popular novel's “raging adolescent voice” and hide a certain widower's perfidy. Aurelia's preface told more about Sylvia than anyone knew, and instead of being grateful Janet Malcolm twenty years later -- it still wasn't out of her craw? -- thought Sylvia's mom had released a toxic "oil spill.” 

If it were really poisonous, everyone would have loved the book. Instead it was anodyne and focused on Sylvia’s efforts to become a professional writer. How dull. It is best read as a view into a gifted young hothouse female and her mother, survivors of an autocrat who married Aurelia to make her write while he took credit. Sylvia believed Aurelia was doing that to her. At this distance, how Sylvia was patterned by her family is so obvious it's blinding. Published without an index. Letters Home is so far out of favor there’s no electronic download. I wish for an autographed copy.

-Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953, by Elizabeth Winder (Harper Collins, 2013). Yes, the author is a poet, not a Ph.D., meaning I should belittle this girly claret-jacketed book arranged in thematic fragments like a book of poems. I like Winder's substantial interviews with people who met Sylvia and share their impressions and their experience at Mademoiselle magazine and after. By their fruits you shall know them, and this is a tasty read about a time and place long gone yet crucial to Sylvia's biography. Did you know her favorite drink was a strawberry daiquiri? Only this book makes me wish I had been there, or even--never otherwise--wish I were her: 

"As always, she was wearing lots of cherry red lipstick, and Mel got close enough to catch its carnation scent. Sylvia was fetching, but not beautiful enough for her looks to overpower her personality. In the end it was her enthusiasm--her own sexy, leggy sort of optimism--that bewitched. Though he would not see her again for another year, Mel Woody 'fell in love' with Sylvia that night in the Village, in a cloud of hops and smoke and fermented grape."

Facts are not lacking. "Sylvia Plath appears in the issue four times: on page 54 in a silvery strapless frock and deep blackberry lipstick, on page 213 interviewing Elizabeth Bowen, on page 235 in kilted star formation, and again on page 252 dangling a rose."

Could Aurelia's Letters to Sylvia Still Exist?

Somebody wiped Aurelia Plath's letters to Sylvia Plath off the face of the earth. Who was it?

When biographers have guessed -- no one has proof -- that Sylvia Plath in 1962 made a bonfire of "all of her mother's letters," allegedly burning "upwards of a thousand," they make an odd assumption. [1] When Sylvia moved to England with Ted Hughes in 1959, she left at her mother's house in Wellesley her schoolbooks, manuscripts, childhood diaries, scrapbooks, letters from former boyfriends and Ted, her artworks, and all the letters Sylvia had written to Aurelia up to then. The bonfire story asks us to believe that Sylvia packed up her mother's letters, ten years' worth (c. 1950-1959), hauled them across the Atlantic to store in the couple's small London apartment, then three years later at her country house, Court Green, burned them all at once. We don't know why, so biographers have guessed "to symbolize her liberation from maternal influence."

Sylvia moved overseas in part to get away from her mother. Aurelia might have mailed to Sylvia from Wellesley a box of mother-letters, or brought them when visiting, but that sounds unwieldy and costly. Whatever happened, the voidance of Aurelia's side of the mother-daughter correspondence is so near perfect as to suggest it was methodical, and only one person in the Plath story was that methodical and had the opportunity to wipe the whole shebang: Aurelia.

Ten letters from Aurelia to Sylvia are all that exist in Plath archives. [2] Those archives hold dozens of letters Aurelia wrote to everyone else in her life, letters both sent and unsent, originals and carbon copies. Sylvia moved house six times between 1955 and the end of 1959, and was not the "pack rat" her mother was, or as sentimental. The bonfire story asks us to believe Sylvia sentimentally maintained and carried with her to England an accumulation of her mother's letters. I don't believe it.

Even the burning of "all" Aurelia's letters at Court Green in July 1962 would leave six months of letters Aurelia mailed to Sylvia after that time. Let's say Sylvia did burn all her mother's letters in the yard at Court Green, not in July but before she moved to London the first week of December. Sylvia had yet to receive letters Aurelia sent in late December and in January 1963. Sylvia received those, because she wrote replies. But they are missing too.

Aurelia had the right to take from London or Court Green in 1963, or on subsequent visits to England, any of her own letters to Sylvia that she could find, and destroy them if she liked. But Aurelia kept thousands of other Sylvia-related papers, even scraps, now in Plath archives. Aurelia thought highly of her own writing skills and evidence indicates she planned to include some of her own letters to Sylvia in her edit of Letters Home (1975), to show a loving mother-daughter relationship. Either the Hugheses or her own editor shot that idea down.

But that would mean that Aurelia had kept at least some of her own letters well into the 1970s.

Sylvia's poem "Burning the Letters" is dated August 13, 1962, so Sylvia did burn letters, once, and the poem makes them sound like Ted's. But all accounts of "bonfires" (and Sylvia dancing around them like a witch, etc.) in that turbulent period are suspect. Aurelia told The Listener in 1976 that at Court Green in July 1962 she watched Sylvia burn in the yard an armful of papers and Sylvia's new ("second" and "happy") novel in manuscript titled The Hill of Leopards, dedicated to Ted. [3] No trace of that "happy" novel has ever been found. Aurelia in 1976 said it had hurt her to watch, but she had to hold the children. She did not say Sylvia burned her letters.

If Sylvia destroyed a thousand of Aurelia's letters, in front of her or not, Aurelia would likely have told someone about her hurt or anger, or what a tragic loss it was, over her next 30 years of intimate letter-writing and friendships. Richard Larschan said Aurelia told him she was sad they had been burned, but I think a large, perhaps selective, portion still exists and could tell us much.

Did no biographer or critic ask Aurelia while she lived, "Where are your letters to Sylvia?"

[1] Rough Magic (1991, p. 286) says "upwards of a thousand" and that Aurelia watched Sylvia burn them; it cites no sources, but the book's second edition (1999) says the author spent a lot of time with Aurelia. Aurelia wrote others that the biographer's presence over three days had annoyed her; she might have lied to him. Clarissa Roche said Sylvia told her she made a bonfire of Ted's papers a few days before Roche arrived for a visit in November 1962; but also that Sylvia told the story jokingly.

[2] The ten known surviving Aurelia-to-Sylvia mailings are cataloged on page 3 in Bridget Anna Lowe's essay "Burning Free" in Plath Profiles, 2012.

[3] Unpublished anecdote from a draft of Aurelia's Letters Home introduction, Sylvia Plath collection, "Aurelia Plath," Box 30, Folder 66a/b, Smith College, written c. 1975. The anecdote says Aurelia verified the event and date, July 10, 1962, by consulting her travel diary, but this too is suspect.

Errors of Fact in Aurelia's "Letters Home" Introduction

-Aurelia Frances Schober (later Plath) was born and lived her "early childhood" not in Winthrop, Massachusetts, but the working-class neighborhood of Boston called Jamaica Plain. Irish families were settled in Jamaica Plan when Aurelia was born in 1906; Italians began congregating there in 1910. Her family did not move to seaside Winthrop until 1918, when Aurelia would have been 11 or 12, well past early childhood. 

-It was at the close of Aurelia Schober's sophomore year, 1926, when a German-speaking, highly cultured guest professor at MIT hired her as his secretary. Letters Home says this happened "at the close of my junior year (1927)," but his diaries first mention "Miss A. Schober" in August 1926. He was 43, she 20. Aurelia gives broad hints but does not actually name Dr. Karl Terzaghi, or admit that the pair fell in love and dated for two years. Aurelia knew well, from her own notes, that they met in 1926. But placing their first meeting in 1927 makes Aurelia 21 years old instead of 20, shielding Karl, 50 years after the fact, from any jeers about cradle-robbing, and perhaps shielding herself from any side-eye about her naivete

-Otto Plath was born in April 1885 in the "country town of Grabow" in Prussia, but was still an infant when his parents moved 150 miles northwest to Budzyn, where Otto actually "grew up." Otto's five younger siblings were all born in Budzyn, beginning with Paul in December 1886. When Otto arrived in the U.S. he listed his last residence as Budzyn. (8)

-Otto Plath was 15 years old, not 16, when he arrived in the United States on September 9, 1900, according to the ship's manifest. 

-"[w]hen his father, years after his son's arrival here, came to the United States": Correctly, Otto's father Theodor Plath arrived in the U.S. less than a year after Otto did, in March 1901.

-Otto "spoke English without a trace of foreign accent" - those who had met him, interviewed in the 1970s by Harriet Rosenstein, said Otto spoke English with a German accent. (9)

-Frieda Plath Heinrichs, Otto's youngest sister, did not die in 1966 but in 1970. She and her husband's Walter's names appear together in California voter registration rolls until 1968, when Frieda's becomes the only name listed. Walter died May 26, 1967.

-A cost accountant figures out how much money a firm is really spending to put out its product. Aurelia's father Francis Schober was never a "cost accountant" for Boston's Dorothy Muriel bakery company. Rather, in the 1930s the former hotel headwaiter and maitre d' was listed as "manager" of dining rooms; in 1938 it's specifically a Dorothy Muriel bakery-tearoom on Tremont Street, one of a chain of about 50 local Dorothy Muriels. The Boston city directories for the 1940s list a Herman F. Schober, who was a relative, employed as a "cost accountant" for Measurement Engineering and the American Meter Company. Herman F. Schober was born in Boston in 1893, and between 1926 and 1940 the city directory gave his occupation as "foreman." 

Maybe Francis Schober counted the day's proceeds at his own Dorothy Muriel location, but he was never a "cost accountant" for Dorothy Muriel, which had its factory and offices in Allston. (28)

Take Note

-Aurelia Plath is careful to say her two siblings grew up in a matriarchy, but that she as the eldest was the only one of Schobers' children brought up in the European (patriarchal authoritarian) style. The Introduction says: "[m]y father made the important decisions during my childhood and early girlhood" (3) and Aurelia says that it did not occur to her, in her late teens, to argue when her father decreed she would attend either secretarial college or no college.

The Letters Home edition referred to is a hardbacked first edition, 1975.

"Do Not Let Mother See This!"

Sample of Aurelia's shorthand.

It is false to say Sylvia Plath’s “letters home” to Wellesley were written for her mother’s eyes and gratification only. Although addressed to Aurelia Plath, Sylvia’s letters were in fact written for the Plath household, including Sylvia’s brother and grandparents, and Aurelia shared the letters soon after receipt with other relatives and friends, such as Marcia Brown Stern.

 

Sylvia was aware of that, because in some letters she asks Aurelia to keep them confidential. For example, Sylvia’s letter of February 24, 1956, says, “I am being very naughty and self-pitying in writing you a letter which is very private. . .” This suggests Sylvia typically felt obligated to keep her letters family-friendly, but in this case singled out her mother for more intimate communication.

 

The first sentence in Aurelia’s introduction to Letters Home (1975), a book often characterized as “Sylvia’s letters to her mother,” explicitly states that Sylvia wrote the letters to her “family.” Aurelia specifies that “family” includes Warren Plath and Olive Higgins Prouty. Aurelia did not tell readers she acted as a curator, deciding on her own and case-by-case who else should be allowed to read or hear her read Sylvia’s letters. We learn this from Aurelia’s shorthand annotations on some of Sylvia’s original letters, now in the Lilly Library at Indiana University.

 

Aurelia wrote her annotations mostly on envelopes. (Aurelia was the only person in the family able to read or write Gregg shorthand.) I have transcribed all her “share/don’t share” annotations, appearing on seven letters in all, and present here the transcriptions and the date of the letter they’re associated with. Use your copies of Plath’s Collected Letters to figure out why Aurelia might have made these curatorial decisions.

 

·      share with Gordon if the time is right.  1954, August 30 ["Gordon" was Plath's steady boyfriend.]

 

·      do not share   1955, October 5

 

·      (do not share) 1955, November 14

 

·      do not share!  1955, December 5

 

·      Do not let Mother see this!   1956, March 9  [“Mother” means Aurelia’s mother, Sylvia’s “Grammy,” who lived in the household and was then dying of cancer. Sylvia asked Aurelia to keep this letter private.]

 

·      do not let Dot or Frank see this.  1960, January 16 [“Dot” is Aurelia’s sister and Sylvia’s “Aunt Dot”; “Frank” is Aurelia’s brother. Neither lived in the Plaths’ home.]

 

·      don’t share    1962, October 21  [“don’t share” is written twice on this letter, on the inside and the outside.]

 

A few things to know: 1) Dozens of Sylvia’s letters home, especially in her first years at college, were penny postcards and openly readable. 2) We cannot rightly assume that Aurelia shared with others all the letters which she did not mark “do not share.” 3) Aurelia penciled in shorthand on Sylvia’s letter of April 25, 1951, “file in safe in my bedroom.” That letter she really didn’t want to leave lying around. Why? 4) Aurelia also read Warren Plath’s “letters home” aloud to visitors (Sylvia Plath to Warren, July 6, 1955).

Aurelia Plath's Birthplace and the Myth of Her Childhood

2047-2049 Columbus Ave., Boston, today. Built in 1890.

Sylvia Plath's memoir "Ocean 1212-W" says of her grandparents' house at Point Shirley in Winthrop, Massachusetts, "My mother was born and brought up in the same sea-bitten house," and a bunch of biographers have assumed that is true when it's false. Records show that her mother Aurelia's parents, the Schobers, lived from Aurelia's birth in 1906 until 1918 in Boston's landlocked neighborhood Jamaica Plain, moving to Winthrop and the seaside house when Aurelia was 12.

Downtown Jamaica Plain, 1906

For two years, until 1908, Aurelia's parents rented a flat in a three-story rowhouse at 2047 Columbus Avenue [color photo up top], where Aurelia was born. The young family then separated, and in 1909 Aurelia's father, Frank Schober, a waiter, was listed as a roomer at 95 Gainsborough while the toddler Aurelia and her 21-year-old mother left the U.S. and stayed on the Italian Riviera. Reunited in mid-1909, the Schobers moved back into the same Columbus Avenue rowhouse, this time occupying number 2049. Anticipating the birth of Aurelia's sister Dorothy in 1911, in December 1910 Frank bought a duplex at 34 Peter Parley Road in Jamaica Plain.

The addresses 2047 and 2049 Columbus Avenue have adjacent entryways. Housed at the 2049 building in the year 1910 along with the Schobers, who were German-speaking Austrian immigrants, were the Ranks, a German immigrant and his American wife; and the Winslows, an American husband with a German wife and one child. Most neighbors on the block were American-born with Anglo surnames. The 1910 census also shows Irish immigrant families concentrated a few blocks away on Washington Street.

Frank Schober’s brother Henry, also a waiter, lived at the Peter Parley Road address during 1912. In June 1912 Henry married, and in October his wife had a baby girl named Esther. Henry and his family then moved to 1 Roslyn Place, also in Jamaica Plain: a house with a verandah that Aurelia said in Letters Home she liked to visit.

Aurelia's mythical seaside childhood stems from Plath's "Ocean 1212-W," written in 1962, and was reinforced by the phrase "early childhood" in Aurelia's autobiographical introduction to Letters Home (1975), page 4. Before Aurelia ever mentions Winthrop, she narrates her "first day of school" incident and her promotion from first grade to third, events that had to have happened in Jamaica Plain. 

Aurelia then writes that Sylvia Plath's "interest in minorities" grew out of Aurelia's "account of my early childhood in a primarily Italian-Irish neighborhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts, during World War I." Aurelia proceeds to describe schoolmates bullying her for having a Germanic surname, Schober. Such harassment was common during World War I. But even in her first days in Winthrop, Aurelia was past "early childhood" and into girlhood. The families on the Schobers' Shirley Street 800 block in 1920 were named Hagen, Whittier, Fletcher, Somerby, Thompson, Boles, Ryan, Brimsley, Hughes, Ferington, Pert, Walsh, Eaton, and Harwood. By "minorities" Aurelia meant Germans, and she met the Irish and Italians not in her Winthrop neighborhood but at school, which was far enough away that Aurelia rode a bus to get there; and in Jamaica Plain rather than Winthrop.

Sylvia Plath, born to Aurelia and her husband in October 1932, lived in Jamaica Plain until autumn 1936 when the Plaths moved to 92 Johnson Avenue, a middle-class Winthrop neighborhood populated by families with Anglo surnames ("Ingalls," "Tewksbury," "Westcott," "White") and a few Jews. Aurelia implies that Sylvia (in her memoir "America! America!") appropriated as her own her mother's multi-ethnic schoolyard milieu.

Because Aurelia's father was an avid swimmer, Aurelia probably had memories of early-childhood days on Boston-area beaches, or on Cape Cod in summer, or archaic memories of the Riviera. Aurelia loved the sea, and so did Sylvia. But neither was born or reared from infancy at 892 Shirley Street in Winthrop.

Only Aurelia’s much younger brother Frank Schober Jr., born in 1919, spent his early childhood at 892 Shirley Street, between a bay and open ocean, the only home Sylvia had ever known “Grampy” and “Grammy” Schober to have. By 1942 the Schobers had moved in with their widowed daughter and her children Sylvia and Warren Plath, ages nine and seven, to the Johnson Avenue house in Winthrop. Then they all moved, as a unit, west to Wellesley.

Aurelia Plath's First Love

Austrian civil engineer Dr. Karl von Terzaghi was invited to the U.S. in 1925 to teach and establish a program at M.I.T. and, incidentally, to explain why new M.I.T. buildings on the Charles River banks had been sinking an inch per year. Terzaghi (1883-1963) founded two new sciences: soil mechanics (the physics and hydraulics of soils; he proved that soil types, like any other building materials, had principles) and foundational engineering, now called geotechnology. Terzaghi hired "Miss A. Schober" as his secretary in 1926 -- not 1927, as Aurelia has it in her introduction to Letters Home. That's where Aurelia, who never gave his name, wrote about:

". . .[w]orking at the close of my junior year (1927) for a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He had a handwritten manuscript in German dealing with new principles of soil mechanics. As he had a publication deadline to meet, I usually worked into the early evening, so we often had dinner together before I left Boston for home. It was during these meals that I listened, fascinated, to his accounts of travel and colorful adventures, fully realizing that I was in the presence of a true genius in both the arts and sciences. I came away with my notebook filled with reading lists. . ." (6)

She wrote that this self-education would one day benefit her children, but that is not the whole story. The friendship ripened into love.

For two years they enjoyed the theater, museums, hikes, camping, gardens, evenings with Karl's faculty friends, dining and dancing, and conversation most of all. The above photo was taken in 1926, when Karl, 43 and divorced, Boston's most eligible bachelor, chose Aurelia Schober, 20, moved by her innocence, intelligence, and sensitivity. He took her to her junior prom at the Kenmore Hotel on May 13, 1927 and then at 4:00 a.m. in Winthrop ate the post-prom breakfast Aurelia's mother had left prepared for them with instructions, Austrian style. Terzaghi wrote about it in his diary. His 82 volumes of diaries are in Oslo. I learned where his diaries were by reading his biography. ("Aurelia's boyfriend has a biography?")

Terzaghi centennial stamp, Austria, 1983

Shorthand transcription unlocked and confirmed his identity; he's the "Karl" in young Aurelia's lovelorn Gregg shorthand annotations in her copy of poet Sara Teasdale's Dark of the Moon. That book is in Sylvia Plath's personal library at the Lilly Library in Bloomington. Find the transcriptions here.

In 1928 Terzaghi left the U.S. for a prestigious engineering professorship in Vienna. Ten years later when the Nazis expelled his Jewish students and pressured him to work on the German Autobahn he returned to Boston, taught at Harvard and consulted worldwide. His legacy includes the Chicago subway system and the Aswan Dam, plus immortal equations and elegant problem-solving designs. In 1975 Bostonians in certain circles, or engineers, or Aurelia's college friends, could have guessed whom Aurelia was describing in Letters Home -- it's obvious, now that we know.

Their story is heartbreaking. For more of it, click here. Sylvia, taking her cue from her mother, married her own foreign-born male genius, Ted Hughes.

References: Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist (Goodman, 1998); Letters Home 1950-1963 (Plath, 1975); Norwegian Geotechnical Institute Terzaghi Library; Geoengineer.org; Wikipedia: Karl von Terzaghi (mentions Aurelia Schober, future mother of Sylvia Plath); Wikipedia: Ruth Terzaghi; Geotechnical Hall of Fame; American Society of Civil Engineers