Bones to Pick With Dick Norton

Sylvia Plath and Dick Norton

Found among Aurelia Plath's papers: a handwritten list of graceless/boneheaded comments aired by Sylvia's boyfriend Dick Norton, comments first made to Sylvia, who seethed and told her mother. Aurelia overheard at least one. Aurelia wrote down and numbered each and titled the list "Bones to Pick with Dick N.", that title in Gregg shorthand so we know Aurelia was its author.

1. "A poem is an infinitesimal speck of dust."

2.  "Anybody who can read can major by himself in English. Waste of time!"

3.  On Sylvia's arrival at Raybrook (where she was hoping to catch up on work and put on paper a story that was fermenting within her) -- "Well, you haven't grown any shorter!"

4. "A zircon looks like a diamond from a little distance. A large one would be impressive."

5.  "I suppose your grandfather looks forward to a visit with his cronies." [Aurelia continued:] That settled dad's visiting with the N.s in the living room after dinner. Of course poor Grammy had to plead weariness and retire upstairs, too! (I was blamed for snobbishness.) 

Document, black ink on a half-sheet of white paper, date unknown.

"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.

Sylvia Plath Had Black Cousins

Uncle Christopher J. Nicholson checked "Negro" on his draft card, 1918. (Click image to enlarge.)

Sylvia Plath had African-American second cousins who were first cousins to her mother Aurelia Schober Plath. Using public records and genealogical tools, I drilled down into Sylvia's Austrian-born maternal relatives the Greenwoods and Schobers, and discovered:

Sylvia's great-aunt -- her grandmother's sister Anna Johanna Greenwood, from Vienna -- in Boston in 1906 married African-American waiter Christopher Nicholson.

Interracial marriages were legal in Massachusetts, but rare. Sylvia Plath's writings, and what we have of her mother's writings, never mention an Aunt Anna or Annie. I had thought that odd because Aurelia Plath and her mother so much valued contact and visits with relatives. Sylvia's future grandmother with her sister Annie as teenagers left Vienna in 1904 and together crossed the Atlantic to Boston, where they moved in with their brother. Both girls soon married professional waiters. Annie married Christopher J. Nicholson, born in Boston of parents from North Carolina.

In 1907 the Nicholsons moved to Philadelphia, where in November Christopher Jr. was born. The state of Pennsylvania registered the baby as "mulatto." Their daughter Deborah's birth certificate says "1/2 black, 1/2 white."

The federal census for 1910 shows the Nicholsons living in a South Philadelphia boarding house, its head and tenants all designated black except for Nicholson, 28, his wife, 26, and their son and daughter, all designated white. In 1911 the family moved to New Jersey. Its 1915 state census says Nicholson and the children are black.

Nicholson worked steadily as a waiter at Atlantic City's Royal Palace Hotel. In September 1918 he registered for the draft as Christopher Jessee Nicholson, checkmarking the category "Negro," and on the back of the card, the categories "Slender" and "Tall."

The couple had another son, Melvin, and a daughter, Martha. Seeking what happened to them led me to this horrifying photo:

The Nicholson children, ages 11, 8, 5, and 3, all died in October 1918, probably of influenza, and are buried in Atlantic City Cemetery, Pleasantville, New Jersey.

Their parents survived. Nicholson lost his waiter job in 1919 and Atlantic City directories show him employed as a laborer through 1923. Then he is a waiter again, but after 1925 I found no further records in Atlantic City. Anna Nicholson surfaces, alone, in the 1928 directory, working as a domestic. In 1932, as Anna Greenwood she married British-born Joseph Campbell in New York City. The couple moved to England in 1939. The story of their later life is posted here.

Sylvia's Plath's mother Aurelia Schober was 12 when her four cousins died. Did she know about them? Could anyone keep secret such a family tragedy? I think Aurelia, who lived with her mother for 40 years, probably knew. Did Sylvia know that she had African-American relatives? Probably not. But we do.

The Nicholson family should be added to Sylvia Plath's family tree.

Draft registration card: https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/3:1:33S7-8BRR-L4C?i=3882&cc=1968530&personaUrl=%2Fark%3A%2F61903%2F1%3A1%3AKZJ7-ZNJ  Headstone: Findagrave.com. "England as of 1939": In January 2024 I researched Anna's later life and the story is posted here.

Soul Murder By Toxic Astro-Babble: Ted and Olwyn

Space bathmat with dust clouds, Walmart.com

 

Olwyn Hughes gloried in playing malicious games to shut out her brothers’ wives and girlfriends and redirect their attention to herself. Sylvia Plath said that on a visit to her in-laws Olwyn talked around and through her as if she were not there, and Ted Hughes, as if mesmerized, ignored Sylvia’s desperate signals to end it. Olwyn’s hostility drove Gerald Hughes’s wife to pack her bags and head for the train station. On occasion Olwyn snagged Ted’s attention by “talking astrology,” highly technical discourse that astrologers Olwyn and Ted understood, but Sylvia and most people did not.

Suzette Macedo, friend to both Sylvia and Assia Wevill, told interviewer Harriet Rosenstein that Olwyn shut out Sylvia by saying, “‘Ted, Teddy—you remember Neptune in the seventh house.” They’d continue to talk astrology as if no one else was present. Macedo said, “It creates an entity, a mystery, binding them together. And she spins this and draws him in.” Macedo guessed that the siblings had shared a private language in childhood.

Monopolizing Ted was the point. At a gathering in the 1960s, Macedo saw Olwyn triangulate Ted’s girlfriend Assia, who broke down crying:

Nobody could say actually what had happened. It sounds completely crazy and irrational but everybody who was present had felt it. . . All that was happening was that Olwyn was talking to Ted in this code language. Unless you’ve seen her do it—it’s something you have to experience to see what it is—she calls up a time in their lives when they communicated through—I don’t know what it is—and it’s just horrible, absolutely horrible. Everybody in that room was ill. [1]

Olwyn taught Ted astrology. That is not so weird given their time and place and their mother’s interest in the occult. British astrologers gave astrology its modern form. Sun-sign astrology dawned when a London paper in 1930 had an astrologer read Princess Margaret’s character and future through her birth chart. [2] In the 1950s Ted sent Olwyn letters studded with astrological symbols and hand-drawn astrological charts as spot-on as today’s computerized charts. But whoever taught Olwyn how to chart did not convince her that astrology ought never to be weaponized.

Yes, astrologers have ethics. Professionals learn they must do no harm. They may not share the birth data of living private individuals, precisely because this data, revealing a person’s proclivities, can be weaponized. [3] Ted shared with Olwyn Sylvia’s birth chart soon after they married, pointing out Sylvia’s “suicidal” Saturn placement. [4] Maybe Hughes thought it casual, but a chart is private info you don’t want a jealous sister-in-law to know and savor.

When Olwyn said in Sylvia’s presence, “‘Ted, Teddy—you remember Neptune in the seventh house,’” she was covertly criticizing Sylvia as a wife and reminding him she was a mental case. Sylvia’s birth chart in fact has Neptune in the astrological seventh house that represents marriage and partnerships. In astro-lore that signifies inflated expectations or delusions regarding marriage and the spouse. Sylvia really did say that she had found the perfect husband and marriage was to her “the central experience of life.” [5] But responsible astrologers don’t judge character using only one factor in a birth chart. If they did, they’d point out that Olwyn had a pretty sad Neptune herself.

Sylvia was angered, and Assia very hurt, by the Hughes’s astro-babble, which Macedo says Ted did not call a halt to. It made Olwyn smile. Macedo called it evil.

[1] Collection 1489, folder “Macedo, S.” Rose Library, Emory.

[2] https://www.vogue.co.uk/arts-and-lifestyle/article/princess-margaret-horoscopes. Both Olwyn (b. 1928) and Ted (b. 1930) were born before Sun-sign astrology was invented, but as an adult Ted came under its influence.

[3] So well known for astrological references in his art, Ted Hughes closely guarded his own birth data. See Diane Wood Middlebrook, Her Husband, chapter “His Family.”

[4] Ted Hughes to Olwyn Hughes, October 1956.

[5] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, May 7, 1957.

Above All, Does It Pay? The Plaths' Financial World

Otto Plath died in 1940. Aurelia Plath said he left his family a $5,000 life-insurance policy. In 2021, the equivalent of that payout would be $93,000.

 

The cost of a typical funeral in the US in 1940 was about $800; $650 of that was for the casket. Burial is a separate expense; Aurelia paid $375 for Otto's burial, about $7,000 today. A typical funeral/burial package in 2021 costs $12,000.

 

Fee for leg-amputation surgery in 1940 is unknown; in 2021, it’s $20,000 to $60,000. A prosthesis is a separate expense.

 

Aurelia Plath’s Money:

 

Aurelia did substitute teaching at $25/week in 1941, equivalent to $420/week in 2021. At that rate a 40-week school year would pay Aurelia our equivalent of $16,880/year. The average US public-school teacher in 1940, working 40 weeks, made $1,435/year, or about $36/week.

 

Aurelia in 1942 became a full-time instructor at Boston University at $1,800/year, the equivalent of $30,250/year today. (Letters Home, 29) This put their household of five below today’s poverty level ($31,000). Aurelia taught summer school and tutored to earn more, and there were Grampy’s earnings, amount unknown.

 

A survey of 158 US colleges and universities for 1947-48, the year Aurelia was promoted to assistant professor, showed the median salary of assistant professors to be $3,000/year. In 2021 dollars that’s a bit over $36,000.

 

Aurelia in 1953 wrote Olive Higgins Prouty she earned $3,900/year. The 2021 equivalent is $38,000.

 

Associate Professors in 1968-69, shortly before Aurelia retired with that title, made a national median salary of $12,151/year; $93,300 in 2021 dollars. But counting only faculty salaries in non-public colleges such as Boston University, the median salary sank to $7,662, or, in 2021 terms, $59,000/year. As a female, Aurelia would likely have been paid about 70 percent of whatever her male colleagues made.

 

A publisher’s $5,000 advance payment in 1975, such as Aurelia got for Letters Home, would equal $25,000 today.

 

Sylvia Plath’s Money

 

In 1947 if Sylvia earned $25, that would be like $302 today.

 

The $850 Olive Higgins Prouty scholarship given Sylvia in 1950 would equal $9,400 today. (SP to ASP, 31 October 1950)

 

A “classic pair of silver closed pumps” priced at $12.95 in 1953 would cost $126 today. (SP to ASP, 3 March 1953)

 

In a May 21, 1955, letter to her mother, Sylvia summed up her past year’s earnings from writing: $470, which would look like $4,585 in 2021.

 

Smith College paid Sylvia $4,200 to teach Freshman English for nine months. The equivalent today would be $39,640 (SP to ASP, 12 March 1957). The median pay for instructors in 1957 was $4,562, equivalent today to $40,300. Women’s colleges were known for paying lower salaries all across the board.

 

Sylvia and her friend Anne Sexton’s 70-cent cafeteria meal would be $7 in 2021.

 

What was, in 1959, a $15 eagle tattoo would cost $135 today.

 

In 1960, the US median monthly apartment rental was $71; in Massachusetts, $74. Source.

 

Sylvia’s $100 bonus for signing a New Yorker contract would equal $874 today. (SP to ASP, 1 March 1961)

 

1000 British pounds in 1962 would today equal $22,500 US. (SP to ASP, 9 October 1962)

 

The $700 check Sylvia received from her Aunt Dot was the equivalent of $6,000 in 2021 money. (SP to ASP, 29 November 1962)

 

The book Lord Byron’s Wife, in 1962 priced at $6.50, would be priced at $56 today. (SP to ASP, 29 November 1962)

 

The equivalencies were calculated with the DollarTimes.com Inflation Calculator. Median salaries for college and university faculty are from the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbooks for 1949, 1951, 1959, 1970-71, accessed through “Prices and Wages by Decade,” https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages. Federal poverty guideline information here. There were no US federal poverty guidelines until 1963.

"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).

A Friend of the Family

 

“Robert J. Roberts, teacher of gymnastics,” pictured above, witnessed and signed Francis Schober’s Petition for Naturalization papers in Boston in February 1909. Francis "Frank" Schober, born in Austria, was Aurelia Plath's father and Sylvia Plath's grandfather and father figure.

 

I looked up "Robert J. Roberts," expecting nothing, and got a surprise.

 

While employed at the Boston YMCA for 40 years, athletics director Roberts revolutionized the gym, installing floor mats, mirrors, and the first indoor track. He invented pulley weights and the “ring” shower head for the one-minute showers he recommended after exercise. Roberts coined the terms “body building” and “medicine ball.” In youth, Robert Jenkins Roberts (1849-1920) modeled for the iconic "Minute Man" statue at Concord, Massachusetts, sculpted by Daniel Chester French.

 

Before Roberts, gyms were “gymnastic” as in the sport of gymnastics: parallel bars, pommels, rings, swings, tumbling; acrobats and ropewalkers used gyms and taught there. Skinny “pigeon-breasted” Roberts in his teens lifted huge heavy “strong man” weights (the only type available) to develop his chest and shoulder muscles, neglecting his back, and learned the hard way how unsafe and unhealthy that was. He conceived of the gym as a place not for stunts but for Everyman to exercise, mildly and daily, all muscle groups for physical, mental, and spiritual health. His ideas caught on. In the above photo, taken in 1901, Roberts was age 51 or 52.

“All exercises,” Roberts opined, “must be safe, short, easy, beneficial, and pleasing.” Roberts invented the 20-minute workout – with light dumbbells; he loathed heavy ones. That daily 20 minutes was all the exercise the body needed, he said. He recommended four small meals a day rather than two large ones, and deep breathing, stretching, fresh air, and daily spiritual reading. Roberts also invented those little cards at the gym on which to record changes in one’s measurements. Roberts was 5’5”, waist 32” and chest 43".

 

It is not known how Roberts met Frank Schober, a waiter then in his late 20s, but nightly at 8:00 the Boston YMCA invited visitors to watch the famous light-dumbbell workout class. Six months' acquaintance was required to serve as a petitioner's character witness, and Schober was granted the favor by this avatar of the Y's founding principles of "muscular Christianity" and helping young immigrants assimilate. Scraps of information do exist about Frank Schober’s athletic interests, and we know "Grampy" swam expertly, Sylvia clinging to his back when she was a child.

Roberts led classes for gym instructors, who spread his ideas nationwide; the YMCA, founded in London in the 1840s, spread them worldwide. The book The Body Builder (1916; reprinted 1921) was compiled and published by the YMCA in Roberts' honor and preserves Roberts’ exercise routines and sayings such as, "Men should look their best in their birthday suit until old age wears it out."

Sylvia Plath's Mad Grandmother's Ashes

One of 3500 cans of ashes. Photo by "Kim" at Findagrave.com.

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath died at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum") in 1919, and her ashes in a canister sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years with 3500 other such canisters holding the ashes of state-hospital patients. This forgotten "Library of Dust" was the subject of a 2011 documentary film of that name, and the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper editorial published in Oregon in 2005.

When patients' death certificates became available, an Oregon-based contributor to the site Findagrave.com volunteered to locate living relatives willing to receive the ashes. One of the certificates was for Ernestine Kottke Plath. The researcher, Phyllis Porter Zegers, learned that Ernestine's granddaughter Sylvia Plath became a poet and killed herself, but Zegers focused on finding Ernestine's living descendants.

A family member claimed Ernestine's ashes, finally, in September 2020. It's like Lady Lazarus risen.

[View Ernestine Plath's hospital photo, taken c. 1916, discovered in 2024.]

Sylvia Plath's father Otto Plath was Ernestine's eldest child. While his mother lived, Otto made himself scarce, leaving home for the U.S. at age 15 and then, when his parents and siblings came to the U.S., attending schools far away from them. Aurelia Plath later wrote that Otto stayed bitter about Ernestine's bad mothering. Ernestine's husband Theodor Plath committed Ernestine to the asylum in Salem, Oregon, in 1916. Zeger wrote that according to hospital records Ernestine was admitted suffering from overwork and a leg ulcer, had two "attacks" of something, and dementia. After three years in the crowded mental hospital, Ernestine died there of tuberculosis.

Sylvia Plath knew little or nothing about Ernestine. Aurelia kept secret from Sylvia her Aunt Frieda's information about Ernestine's mental illness. But we carry our ancestors' imprint always, in ways we might not know. 

Theodor Plath's Last Will and Testament

Theodor Plath, Sylvia Plath's paternal grandfather, died on Nov. 5, 1918. He had filed his will (No. 2876) in Clark County, Washington State, on May 26, 1918. It's worth reading, and there's a surprise inside:

IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN! I, Theodor Plath, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, and not acting under the fraud, duress or influence of any person or persons, make this will.

I request that all my just debts against my estate including my funeral expenses and the expenses of my last sickness be promptly paid.

I give to my beloved wife Earnestine $100.00.

I give to my son Otto $1.00.

I give to my son Paul $1.00.

I give to my son Max $1.00.

I give to my son Hugo $1.00.

I give to my daughter Martha $1.00.

All the rest and residue of my property which I may own, die possessed of, or have a right to dispose of at my death I give and devise to my daughter Frieda.

I hereby appoint my son Max executor of this last will and request that no bonds be required of him, as such, by any Court or Judge.

Theodor Plath (SEAL)

Signed and sealed by Theodor Plath, testator, and by him declared to be his last will in our presence, who have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses in his presence and in the presence of each other at his request, at Oregon City, Oregon, this 26th day of May 1918.

Witnesses: Maud Davis (of Oregon City), Annie Stribley (of Portland, OR). [1]

Five days before filing this will, on May 21, 1918, Theodor Plath had filed at the Vancouver [WA] Land Office a Homestead Act claim (aka "patent") to 120 acres in Clark County, Washington, near Salmon Creek, a bit north of Portland, Oregon. [2] As Homestead Act land it was free, although the owner was given a certain number of years to improve it. U.S. homesteading, mostly on formerly Indian lands, was available from 1862 to 1976. Below, in the orange square within the square, is Theodor Plath's 1918 property:

and, from the Bureau of Land Management, Theodor's title or "patent" on that land, dated 5/21/1918. Of course the land has been bought and sold since then:

Bequeathing children $1.00 was not always a "disinheritance" or insult. Were that the case, Theodor probably wouldn't have named his son Max as his will's executor. Theodor might have distributed his assets already, and the will was a formality. Or the $1.00 acknowledged that the offspring were self-supporting adults, or proved that the testator was sound enough of mind to list all family members and give them a token. Frieda Plath, the youngest, in 1918 was 21 or 22 years old and in a Chicago nursing school. Sylvia met her Aunt Frieda in 1959 and liked her. Ernestine Plath, Sylvia's paternal grandmother, in 1918 was in an Oregon mental hospital and survived Theodor by less than one year.

According to a March 1980 letter from Aurelia Plath to Mary Ann Montgomery, Otto Plath owned property in San Francisco that he sold or otherwise tended to while the Plaths were on their honeymoon. Any record has yet to be found.

[1] Washington State Archives (Olympia, Washington); Probate Place: Clark, Washington, pp. 112-113.

[2] https://glorecords.blm.gov/details/patent/default.aspx?accession=630759&docClass=SER&sid=2frdqc0a.3b2

Otto Plath and Lydia Bartz Plath, Voter Registration Rolls, 1914

Let's retire the fiction that Otto Plath and first wife Lydia Clara Bartz Plath, married in Washington State in August 1912, were together for three weeks only, because records continue to show it was closer to three years. In 1914 Otto was teaching in Berkeley, California, living with Lydia, and both were registered to vote -- as Progressives. Here's their voter-registration page. [Click the image to enlarge.]

Wait, but it's 1914, so women in the U.S. can't vote!?! In California they could and did.

Otto and Lydia are still at that address in 1915 as she enrolled in UC-Berkeley's summer school.

Source: California State Library; Sacramento, California; Great Register of Voters, 1900-1968.

Otto Was a Rebound

Aurelia Schober was a Boston University undergraduate when in 1926 she started secretarial work for an M.I.T. guest professor 22 years her senior and a native of Austria. They fell in love, dated for two years, nearly married, and he -- Dr. Karl von Terzaghi -- wrote at length in his diaries about their relationship as it happened, leaving an unprecedented record of Aurelia's life before she became a Plath.

Karl was Aurelia's first love and he, M.I.T.'s engineering genius-in-residence, introduced Aurelia to his friends, took her to her junior prom, sat at her hospital bedside. They hiked, dined, camped, danced, went to museums and concerts. She was dazzled; his feelings confounded him. "What shall I do with my love for this child?" he asked his diary. He called her "Lilly," a nickname for an idealized German-speaking girl. A civil engineer in mid-career, Karl often traveled to consult at distant construction sites and, in summer 1928, just after Aurelia's college graduation, he spent four months in Central America working for the United Fruit Company. Aurelia, age 22, worked that summer at Camp Maqua in Maine, hating it and worrying that her 44-year-old Karl didn't need her anymore.

Karl returned to Boston in September 1928 to a stack of job offers. He took what he had planned, a professorship in Vienna, and would be moving to Europe in a year. Already in April he had confided to his diary that he would not ask Aurelia to marry him. In November 1928 the couple had the dreaded "talk" and broke up. Devastated, Aurelia cried and asked Karl, "What will become of me if you leave?" On their final date they saw the Chicago Opera Company's Carmen. He wrote about their evening, “It was like a farewell and symbolic. [Aurelia] does not want to be an 'episode' and I can offer no more. The dear little girl. She takes life so seriously.” [Footnotes are the end of this post.]

Not three weeks later, on December 18, 1928, Karl met with and dined with a smart, independent female college student Aurelia's age: Radcliffe graduate student Ruth Doggett. Smitten -- the more so because Ruth was a geologist -- Karl fought for a year his impulse to propose, but finally proposed to Ruth from half a world away.

The word "rebound" meaning "post-relationship phase" has been around at least since 1818, so yes, in the 1920s it helped drive people's choices as it does today. After a breakup, sometimes long afterward, people resembling the lost one tend to catch our eye or attract us.

Boston Herald, April 1, 1930, p. 4

About the news clipping pictured above, from The Boston Herald, April 1, 1930: It says Miss Ruth Doggett at Cambridge City Hall was denied a license to marry her fiance Karl Terzaghi of Vienna because he lived overseas. A reporter noticed Karl's still-newsworthy name. 

 

Boston was Aurelia's hometown, the daily Herald had printed Aurelia's name frequently during her college years, and later printed her daughter Sylvia Plath's first published poem. So most likely at least one of Aurelia's classmates, friends, neighbors or family members, all of whom had known Karl Terzaghi as her beau, read the Herald and saw "Radcliffe Girl to Wed Viennese Professor" and told Aurelia, or Aurelia herself read that Karl was engaged. Maybe she already knew.

How Aurelia felt about this we do not know. The Herald story was no April Fool's joke: Karl and Ruth wed two months later. We do know that around April 1, 1930, Aurelia was completing her Boston University master's degree and bilingual thesis about Paracelsus as a literary figure, consulting with her German instructor Professor Otto Plath -- like Karl, a fine-looking, German-speaking, divorced European-born professor of science two decades older than she. On the semester's final day, Otto asked Aurelia for a date: a weekend with him and his professor friends who owned a farm. "I was ready for some fun," Aurelia recalled in Letters Home, so she agreed to go.

During the year-plus that she and Otto Plath dated, if Aurelia noticed any "red flags" she ignored them or married Otto in spite of them. They married on January 4, 1932, and were not happy.

SOURCES:

Goodman, Richard E. Karl Terzaghi: The Engineer as Artist.  Reston, VA: ASCE Press, 1999, pp. 108-121.

Norwegian Geotechnical Institute (Oslo), Karl Terzaghi Library, Terzaghi Diary 26.1: entry 24 August 1926, "Miss A. Schober, unmarried, every evening until dinnertime and I thoroughly enjoyed the company of the warmhearted, clever girl"; Diary 27.1: 13 May 1927, junior prom;  29 September 1927: "What should I do with my love for this child?"; 2 October 1927, "In the evening three hours in the Homeopathic Hospital at the bedside of my girl"; 4 December 1927, "The poor one still needs her crutches"; Diary 27.2: 6 April 1928, "Thought seriously about marriage. Settled for me"; 6 November 1928, "hated Maqua," "What will become of me if you leave?"; 3 December 1928, "I can offer no more"; 27 April 1929, "Back to 1928: Dec. 18. Phone call from Miss Doggett. . .Called in my office 5:00 p.m.  . . Dinner at University Club"

Plath, Aurelia S., ed. Letters Home by Sylvia Plath, Harper & Row, 1975, pp. 6-10.

Plath, Aurelia S., to Mary Ann Montgomery, 21 April 1980, re the hospitalization: Mrs. Plath wrote that she broke her ankle at age 10 and again at age 20. In October 1927 Mrs. Plath would have been 21.

"first published poem," "Poem" by Sylvia Plath, Boston Herald, August 10, 1941.

"Herald had printed Aurelia's name frequently," "Studying Aurelia Plath," blog post May 14, 2019.

"The word 'rebound'": "The heart was caught, Miss Edgeworth says, on the rebound" Letter to S.E. Williams, December 8, 1818, A.G.K. L'Estrange, ed. The Life of Mary Russell Mitford, Told by Herself in Her Letters to Her Friends, vol. 1. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1876. Mitford used "rebound" in that sense in a novel she published in 1830 (OED).

Aurelia Schober in the News, 1926-1932

During her college years in the 1920s, The Boston Herald daily newspaper, relying on press releases from the student Press Club at Boston University's College of Practical Arts and Letters, mentioned Aurelia Schober more often than one might imagine. It was not unusual for students to have so many extracurricular interests. The surprise is that Aurelia had such a high profile.

1926, May 25, p. 31: "B.U. Writers' Club Elects Officers" -- Aurelia Schober, elected Writers' Club vice-president, was also "president of the college German Club, and is well known for her ability in dramatic work."

1927, February 3, p. 28: "B.U. German Club to Present Play" -- "Miss Aurelia Schober of Winthrop has been assigned the leading part of Strubel in Sudermann's play "Die Ferne Prinzessin," to be produced by the German Club of the Boston University College of Practical Arts and letters Friday night, in place of Miss Emmi Koster of Hamburg, Ger., who is ill." [In this one-act comedy, "Strubel," a male poet, declares his hopeless love for a princess to a male who is actually the princess in disguise.]

1927, May 23, p. 4: "Who's Who in B.U. Yearbook" -- Under "Senior Honors" bestowed by peers at the College of Practical Arts and Letters, Aurelia Schober ranked third in the category "Busiest," second in the category "Most Studious," and first in the category "Class Dictionary."

1928, May 25, p. 3: "Miss Schober to give B.U. Class Valedictory" -- ["Class" means College of Practical Arts and Letters, class of 1928.] Besides being valedictorian, Miss Schober "was editor-in-chief of the junior yearbook, and has served as president of the German Club, and as a member of the student government board, the English Club, the Writers' Club, and Sigma." [Sigma was a scholastic society for seniors; according to the College's yearbook for 1929, page 44, Aurelia had been elected to that society as a junior, an honor granted to one student per year. Graduation day was June 6.]

1932, September 13, p. 13: "B.U. Alumni Directors Meet This Evening" -- "Mrs. Aurelia S. Plath, '28, Jamaica Plain" is listed as one of two women representing College of Practical Arts and Letters alumni. Mrs. Plath was then pregnant with Sylvia, to be born on October 27.

"Medusa's Metadata" - Plath Conference Paper

Nearly 700 letters from Sylvia Plath to her mother, Mrs. Aurelia Schober Plath, are held in the Sylvia Plath mss. II files at the University of Indiana’s Lilly Library. Mrs. Plath, a professional instructor of Gregg shorthand, wrote on these letters and their envelopes scores of comments and notes to herself and to posterity. One hundred fifty-nine annotations in the Plath mss. II correspondence are in in Gregg shorthand. Never before cataloged or transcribed, the shorthand annotations on Plath’s letters, labeled “unreadable” and ignored, provide new metadata about Plath—who rather famously never learned shorthand—and her uneasy relationship with her only surviving parent and provider.

The transcriptions include Mrs. Plath’s most urgent and personal responses to her daughter’s needs, marriage, suicide, and posthumous fame; bitter negotiations with Ted Hughes over the U.S. publication of The Bell Jar; and detail Mrs. Plath’s role as curator of her daughter’s correspondence: with friends (“Share with Gordon if the time is right,” 30 August 1954), family (“Do not let Mother [Granny] see this!” 2 February 1956) and ultimately the public (Letters Home, 1975). That role does not end with the publication of two volumes of The Complete Letters of Sylvia Plath. In fact, Mrs. Plath is that collection's first cause.

"Aurelia": What's in a Name?

In the periodic table of elements, "Au" stands for gold. The name "Aurelia" means "golden." It comes from the Latin adjective aureus, from the root word aurum: "gold." That in turn refers to the color yellow, specifically the color of the dawn; thus "Aurora," "goddess of the dawn, [who] renews herself every morning and flies across the sky, announcing the arrival of the sun," is a related name (Wikipedia). Julius Caesar's mother was named Aurelia. All accounts of her say she was respectable.

Aurelia Schober Plath, born in the U.S. in 1906, was the namesake of her own mother, Aurelia Grunwald (later Greenwood) Schober, born in Austria in 1887, when the name's popularity was near peaking in the U.S. according to census records. By 1906 the name was uncommon, ranking #496 in the Social Security Index tally of girls' names. It's trending upward in 2013, although it still isn't among the top 100 baby names.

Variants on the name Aurelia include Aurella, Auriel, and Aurielle.

Plath's volume Ariel (I'm using The Restored Edition here, but it's also true of the other edition) is stuffed with references to gold. Its first line says "Love set you going like a fat gold watch." Next page, "A ring of gold with the sun in it?" Then, "[i]n twenty-five years she'll be silver/ In fifty, gold." "The pure gold baby," "A gold filling," "my gold beaten skin/ Infinitely delicate," "gold-ruddy balls"-- you get it.

And of course if you've read about the poem "Medusa" you know "medusa" (Greek for "guardian or protectress") is a jellyfish grown to the familiar "dangling tentacles" stage, and that "Aurelia" is a genus of jellyfish, the most common kind, seen on the Atlantic beaches near Boston. Both Aurelia Plath and Sylvia knew that. Today we know there is a jellyfish discovered to be immortal.

Primary Materials About Aurelia Plath

Seeking primary materials by and about Aurelia Plath, I've learned:

1) Sylvia Plath is said to have burned all her mother's letters to her ("upward of a thousand") in a bonfire in Devon in 1962. Only ten survive in the archives at Lilly Library at Indiana University and at Smith College. One interesting item is a Christmas card Sylvia kept in her purse, given by Ted to Warren and Maggie Plath at the time of Sylvia's funeral in 1963. Bridget Anna Lowe unearthed its story and wrote about it in Plath Profiles 5: Summer 2012.
2) There is no Aurelia Plath archive.
3) The JSTOR database lists no scholarly articles about Aurelia Plath. One unpublished thesis, "The influence of Aurelia Plath on Sylvia Plath: an interpretative biography," was written in 1977.
4) Aurelia kept her own journals, but they are not in any archive.
5) Aurelia's post-1977 letters are at Smith College; the ones actually sent to Ted Hughes are at Emory, although some drafts and carbons are at the Lilly Library.
6) Chief among Aurelia's primary materials is Letters Home, of course, but according to a review of Lessons from the Archive: Sylvia Plath and The Politics of Memory in Feminist Studies (Vol. 31, No. 3, 2005), "the full text of Aurelia Plath's intended introduction has not been published." That is true! Omitted is an anecdote about young Sylvia's sense of humor, and a passage saying the Plath children's questions about sex were always honestly answered and discussed. Lilly Library and Smith hold original and revised Letters Home typescripts.
7) Aurelia was interviewed by journalists and at least two filmmakers. At Washington University I found and copied an interview that was listed but had not been digitized: "Sylvia Plath's Letters Home: Some Reflections by Her Mother," by Robert Robertson in The Listener, Vol. 95, 1976, p. 515. In it Aurelia describes watching Sylvia build a bonfire and burning her second novel and "much else." This contradicts what The Other Ariel (page 57) says: "Aurelia Plath, visiting her daughter from June 21 to August 3, leaves no account of the incident immortalized by the poem ["Burning the Letters"].
8) Aurelia Plath's "Letter in the Actuality of Spring," in Ariel Ascending (1985), edited by Paul Alexander (pp. 214-217) is called an essay, but a footnote explains it's an excerpt from a letter. Alexander provided the title and received Aurelia's permission to print it as an essay.