Otto Plath in the News

I'd thought a Nevada divorce was your own business and no one else's, so was surprised to read about Otto's in the old Boston American, January 5, 1932.

According to "dispatches"? From whom and where it didn't say. Otto Plath had divorced the day before, January 4. That news arrived in Boston overnight? Did Otto phone the Boston papers to tell them? Did Aurelia's mother phone in to get ahead of any gossip? Was Otto so well known? The fancy biology professor divorced in Sin City, U.S.A. some Lydia gal. Who knew?

The tattlers were Reno's squad of part-time newspaper "stringers." These freelance reporters wrote up and telegraphed to papers news too minor for full-time journalists. Stringers in Reno got the list of the day's divorces -- public information. They chose and distilled them, then wired them overnight to the parties' hometowns(!). A published dispatch paid the stringer $2, or $5. For a celebrity's divorce, maybe $10.

The Plath divorce notice again appeared January 8 in The Boston Post, specifying Carson City, Nevada. Not a peep about Otto and Aurelia marrying there.

Otto Plath wasn't in the newspapers much. He spoke to a beekeepers' society in 1923, gave a few other public talks. Aurelia took little Sylvia to hear Otto speak at Boston University, I think on February 23, 1935. The Boston Transcript said his topic was "Nature Study." Maybe it's that memory Sylvia wrote about in her short story "Among the Bumblebees":

Alice had thought, then, of the great hall at college where her father stood, high upon a platform. She had been there once with Mother, and there had been hundreds of people who came to listen to her father talk and tell them wonderful strange things about how the world was made.

Contusions: What Purple Means in Sylvia Plath

Medical Illustration by Dr. Ciléin Kearns (Artibiotics)

How a bruise works: an impact breaks the capillaries. Gradually the pooled blood breaks down into its components, as illustrated. Can't think of another writer besides Plath so taken with bruises. The crown jewel of the lot is her poem "Contusion," written February 4, 1963, Plath's third-to-last poem. The poem's speaker watches a bruise develop. The speaker doesn't say it's theirs. This bruise is somehow decisive: a minor injury elevated by its formal, medical name, it portends a death.

 

Sylvia Plath’s works include far more bruising than most writers describe by age 30. In The Bell Jar, a male escort’s grip on Esther Greenwood’s arm leaves purple fingerprints. Esther describes her injured face as “purple and bulged out in a shapeless way, shading to green along the edges, and then to a sallow yellow.” The writer knows bruises, has studied them. Plath's journal says her first night with Ted Hughes gave her a "battered face smeared with a purple bruise" (26 March 1956). Over time, the bruises in Plath's work increase and so does her artfulness in describing them:

O adding machine--

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?

Must you stamp each piece in purple,

 

Must you kill what you can? ("A Birthday Present")

 

In October 1962 a jealous Plath wrote in the “The Swarm,” the most nebulous of Ariel’s bee poems, these heated and personal lines, like nothing else in the poem:

 

Jealousy can open the blood,

It can make black roses.

 

Admired for her evocative use of the colors red, black, and white, even yellow, the color purple in Sylvia Plath’s writings ranges from "wormy purple" in "Poem for a Birthday" to "The Ravaged Face" ("Grievously purpled, mouth skewered on a groan") to The Bell Jar's decorously sick Miss Norris who wears only purple. Emily Dickinson used the adjective "purple" more than 50 times, connoting, as it had for thousands of years, "priestly" or "princely," or like violets, which Dickinson loved. The first synthetic purple dye was patented in 1856: after that, anyone could wear it. I think Plath, who grew up without priests or princes, redefined the "royal color" as morbid or livid: Cadavers are purple-black. Berries bleed purple. "Fat purple figs" shrivel and rot.

In a draft of Plath's poem "Fever 103,º" purple did signify authority, the priestly type:

 

O auto-da-fe! 

The purple men, gold crusted, thick with spleen, 

Sit with their hooks and crooks and stoke the light.

 

Plath deleted that stanza after recording the poem for the BBC.

 

In Plath's view (then and now widely shared) purples render commoners worse than common. Esther Greenwood's mother wore "a dress with purple cartwheels," and "looked awful." Esther's boss Jay Cee in a lavender suit, hat, and gloves "looked terrible, but very wise." (39) "Irwin's" friend "Olga," a professor's wife, wears purple slacks when she calls on Irwin, who has Esther as his guest instead. (227) Esther more authentically wears the color on her flesh, "bruised purple and green and blue" from insulin injections. (191) Purple, once so exclusively for royals that non-royals were killed for wearing it, Esther wears on her butt.

 

Plath's purples are fleshly and literal. In other Ariel poems one finds a purple tongue and a surgeon's description of the "purple wilderness" exposed during surgery. Plath made the color corporeal. And linked it with women's injuries.

I'm hoping someone will enrich the world with deeper thinking so I don't have to read Jonathan Bate (Ted Hughes: The Unauthorized Life) or his kind saying or quoting, "For Plath, desire was a purple bruise; for Hughes, poetry was the healing of a wound," when Plath's purples communicate something else. [1]

[1] Martin Rubin, review of Ted Hughes: The Unauthorised Life, SFGate, 19 November 2015.