Lovely Light-Skinned Plath Friend, Nat LaMar

Sylvia Plath met her only African-American friend at Cambridge in autumn 1955, when both were new students on scholarships there. Nathaniel "Nat" LaMar (1933-2022) while still at Harvard had published a short story in The Atlantic. He'd been at Phillips Exeter prep school with Sylvia's brother Warren. Plath wrote her mother Aurelia, "I begged some boys at pembroke [College] to introduce me to him . . . he is a lovely, light-skinned negro" [29 Oct. 1955].

The ambitious young writers became friends. On 7 November Plath wrote her mother, "I saw a good bit of that outgoing, creative negro boy, Nathaniel LaMar (from Exeter and Harvard) and went to coffee with him Monday."

Plath's association with the wonderfully colored and credentialed LaMar is today sometimes cited as proof that Plath was personally not a racist, although her creative works and private writings include racial and ethnic slurs and "othering."

In letters to her mother, Plath laid it on thick that her feelings for Nat were fraternal. LaMar and his school friend would guard her from the perils of Paris when Plath made her first trip there at Christmas break 1955:

"most happy to have made a very warm, good friend in Nat Lamar, the negro writer from Harvard, who is a wonderful sort of psychic brother. . . . [Nat is] already flying to Paris to stay with his very attractive, intelligent, Clem-Moorish type friend at the Sorbonne, they will look around and get me a cheap, good place to stay. . . Then we plan to see Paris together  . . I like the idea of having two "brothers" to go around with, both as guides and sort of champion protectors" [21 Nov. 1955].

Besides denying any attraction, Plath was heavy-hinting that Nat was gay. What a gal.

What LaMar's family in Atlanta thought about his friend Sylvia, we can only wonder. Plath assured her mother that a meeting in her dorm room included a chaperone:

"I had dear, lovable Nat LaMar over for tea with Mallory and the three of us had a most pleasant time. . ." [10 December 1955]

To other correspondents, while touting LaMar's virtues or feeling that she must because he was African-American, Plath stressed that the relationship was platonic:

"Nat LaMar. . . has already gone over [to Paris] to visit his friend Steve at the Sorbonne (by the way, Nat is a really lovely person). . . " [to Warren Plath, 11 Dec. 1955]

"most of my good friends are men. There's the American Negro from Harvard, Nat LaMar (whose story 'Creole Love Song' I may have pointed out in the Atlantic, who is simply a dear: friendly, open, & wonderfully frank. We have periodic bull sessions like brother & sister (he went to exeter & knew Warren" [to Gordon Lameyer, 12 Dec. 1955]

"I have been very lucky, however, in making some special friends: There is Nathaniel LaMar, a warm, friendly Negro boy from Harvard . . ." [to Olive Higgins Prouty, 13 Dec. 1955]

"I am getting to know some magnificent people: there's friendly, vital Nathaniel LaMar (whose story 'Creole Love Song' was in the Atlantic), the negro writer who knew Warren at Harvard & Exeter. . . [Nat] is good for simple, frank 'American talk.' " [to Marcia Stern, 14 Dec. 1955]

To a close female friend, Plath wrote a bit differently:

"am flying to paris to hang tinsel on eiffel tower under escort of negro writer from harvard, nat lamar ('creole love song' in atlantic)" . . . [to Elinor Friedman, 12 Dec. 1955].

Plath wrote her grandparents on 20 January 1956 about "the warm, friendly negro writer from Harvard, and a few other more casual acquaintances. . ."

Further letters to her family warbled:

"My dearest friend in Cambridge is Nat LaMar. I had a wonderful coffee-session with him Sunday" [25 Jan. 1956]

"Nat LaMar, who is a blessing. I had a good talk with him" [29 Jan.]

"Dear Nat LaMar is such a pleasure; I see him for coffee about once a week." [6 Feb.]

"I am gifted with the dearest, most wonderful friends: Nat LaMar, Gordon, Elly Friedman . . ." [10 Feb.]

Elinor Friedman said Plath told her she and Nat had "a brief affair" in Paris. [1] In her journal, Plath wrote that she used her love for Richard Sassoon, who was in Paris, to excuse herself from deeper involvement with Nat, having used that excuse to dial it down with other men:

"Richard," I say, and tell Nat, and tell Win, and tell Chris, as I have told Mallory, and Iko, and Brian, and Martin, and David: There Is This Boy In France." [Journals, 19 Feb. 1956] 

Plath was devastated when Sassoon dumped her after Christmas. She met and fell for Ted Hughes in late February, and in agony over whether Hughes too had abandoned her, she asked herself what to do next:

"Let me know where and to whom to give: to Nat, to Gary, to Chris even, to Iko, to dear Gordon in his way: to give the small moments and the casual talk that very special infusion of devotion and love which make our epiphanies." [Journals, Mar. 6, 1956]

It seems Plath hoped to minimize previous romantic or sexual contacts to clear the decks for serious involvement with Sassoon or with Hughes, if one of the two would have her.

Nathaniel Reid LaMar lived 88 years and never wrote a Sylvia Plath tell-all. He said only that they had been friends. Both were creative writers; both wrote senior theses on "doubles." [2] Yet what sounds like a meeting of true minds was finished when she met Ted Hughes. LaMar completed his post-graduate year and in 1957 was writing a novel with a grant from The Atlantic. When the money ran out he joined the army. This proved fatal to his creative writing. He worked for publisher McGraw-Hill from 1960 to 1980.

Nat LaMar lived most of his life in Brooklyn, New York.

Never married, with a gay partner who predeceased him [3], LaMar amassed $8 million in real-estate holdings, and LaMar after his death made news because a court-appointed guardian had failed to report his passing, kept taking payouts, and sold his house. This delayed the distribution of "millions of dollars LaMar had bequeathed to the Brooklyn Queens Land Trust, the Brooklyn Children's Museum, Cambridge University, Howard University College of Medicine where LaMar's father went to medical school, and Phillips Exeter Academy."

[1] Clark, H. Red Comet, 387.

[2] LaMar, N., "The Duality of Macbeth: A Breach in Nature," Harvard University thesis, 1955.

[3] See Lichtblau, J., "The Value of an English Garden in Brooklyn," The Common, 15 Dec. 2020. 

Plath's letters are quoted from Kukil, K. and Steinberg, The Letters of Sylvia Plath, vol. 1, 2017.

Summa cum laude, Harvard, 1955. Before Phillips Exeter, LaMar attended a segregated high school.

Gender-Swapper Aurelia Plath

Researching Aurelia Plath's life means seeking unconventional sources, and more than once I've hit the jackpot on eBay whence came the above press photo from a dealer unaware that it pictures Sylvia Plath's mother. Then college sophomore Aurelia Schober is kneeling in a scene from the German-language play Das Ganschen von Buchenau ("The Little Goose of Buchenau").

College German Clubs liked to perform Ganschen, which in 1926 -- when Aurelia starred in her college's production -- was a two-act chestnut everybody loved. Harvard performed it in 1893.  Radcliffe's program [pictured] from 1904 includes the following synopsis:

"Fink has been sent by his uncle to woo Agnes, but having been told by Silberling that she is coarse and stupid, "ein Ganschen," he behaves in the rudest manner possible, hoping to have his suit rejected. Agnes's grandmother, disgusted by Fink's boorishness, urges her to accept Silberling, a dandy of the town. In spite of all this, Agnes falls in love with Fink. He soon learns how he has been deceived as to her, but not before her hand has been promised to Silberling, who wishes to marry her for her dowry. Agnes discovers how matters stand, and in order to make Silberling free her, pretends to be not only brainless and awkward, but poor as well. Her ruse succeeds. Silberling's true character is exposed; Agnes bestows her hand on Fink, with the full approval of her grandparents."

Aurelia played von Fink. You didn't need to know German to like what I hope was a broadly acted farce and big fun.

Aurelia was the leading "young man" in three annual Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters German Club plays, Ganschen the first. In 1927 she was lovesick poet Strubel in Die Ferne Prinzessin ("The Faraway Princess"); then Prince Goldlande in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1928, years before the Disney movie. 

Tall and big-boned ("statuesque") Aurelia also had a resonant voice comparable to Sylvia's BBC-recorded voice; at least two people who know have said so. Publicity photos exist for Ganschen and Die Ferne with Aurelia and her leading lady in much the same pose. Notice how if Aurelia had stood up she would have towered over her Ganschen co-star, Selma Orlov.

Their college's German Club was no slouch about publicity and distributed press releases and professional photos to newspapers -- which published them, including a headshot of Aurelia Schober as herself, headlined "Star in B.U. Play," and a headshot of Aurelia as mustachioed von Fink. The von Fink headshot, identified as "Miss Aurelia Schober," appeared in Florida and Oklahoma small-town newspapers, evidently for the entertainment value cross-dressing could provide. Aurelia never again looked so rakish in any photo I have seen. 

Aurelia wanted to become a writer, but her artistic talent was for acting, or the stage. That was attested by her peers not only at her college but at Brookline High School, where Aurelia performed as a female with other teachers in the modern comedy The Show-Off in 1930. A very sedate cast photo ran in the Boston Globe. Aurelia wrote that an agent in the audience told her she had talent and mentioned Broadway. Like several anecdotes showing Aurelia as a person who had any talent or success, that anecdote was cut from her preface to her selection from daughter Sylvia's letters, Letters Home (1975).

One of my Shakespeare professors made a career of spinning Shakespeare's cross-dressing characters into transgressive gender-benders (a male actor playing a girl playing a guy!). There might be a Ph.D. in studying Sylvia Plath's mother -- a single mother -- whom Aurelia and Sylvia said had the burden of being, in real life, both a woman and a man.

[Notes: Das Ganschen von Buchenau by Wilhelm Friedrich Reise, c. 1830; "Harvard performed it," Crimson, 3 March 1893; "In 1927," "German Club to Present Play at B.U. Tomorrow," Boston Post, 3 February 1927; "Star in B.U. Play" with photo, Boston Transcript, 12 January 1926; "appeared in Florida," this blog 10 September 2020; "Boston Globe," 8 December 1930 p. 22.]