"I Am More Myself in Letters"

Sylvia Plath was under uniquely monstrous pressure to write happy, reassuring letters home, right?

Dearest Father and Mother! . . . Cable me as soon as you can as soon as you see my latest article in print . . . Your advice is very good, dear mother, I'm keeping my umbrella handy . . .  No, work doesn't really tire me, dearest of parents. But if I do feel fatigue, I stop writing . . .  I really feel very well . . . 

-Theodor Herzl, 1888

. . . I have never met anybody in my life, I think, who loved his mother as much as I love you . . . . the reason I am a poet is entirely because you wanted me to be and intended I should be, even from the very first. You brought me up in the tradition of poetry, and everything I did you encouraged. I cannot remember once in my life when you were not interested in what I was working on, or even suggested that I should put it aside for something else.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay to her mother, 1921

Are you certain that only Sylvia Plath, because she had to, wrote her mother about every little detail?:

I have been in Rome three and a half days and it seems like a whole epoch. I felt at home here more quickly than in other towns I've been to, and I had expected the contrary. Perhaps it is because the first thing I did here was listen to some good music. I arrived about midday on Saturday and congratulated myself on having the rest of the day to look for a hotel. But after I'd got my breath, bought and studied a town-plan and had lunch, it was already 2:30 . . .

-Simone Weil to her mother, 1937

One might argue that these authors' "false selves" wrote these fakey letters full of highlights with no lowlights to please and reassure very needy parents.

Yet on social media we "post" mostly our highlights and successes. Sylvia Plath in her letters "posted" the same.

Give Sylvia some context, such as what other writers wrote to their parents, and how we select our social-media posts, and how often, and it is not so simple as "700 letters means a sick bond with her mother." 

Sylvia had a "following." Aurelia typically read Sylvia's letters aloud to family, friends such as the Nortons and Cantors, or showed them to neighbors or others interested in Sylvia's progress, and Sylvia knew that.

Sylvia said so:

. . . I manage [to write] a weekly vignette to mother and rely on her to disseminate the cultured pearls and grains of sand, such as they are! (to Gordon Lameyer, 12 December 1955)

When Sylvia did not want particular passages "disseminated," she let her mother know:

This is all rather private musing, and I would rather you kept it in the family and shared the most extroverted passages with other people. (to Aurelia, 14 November 1955)

Non-writers might not understand that skilled writers such as Plath could turn up the heat or play it cool depending on their audience. This has nothing to do with a "false self" versus a "true self," as if humans could have only one solid unified self. The self is symphonic!

I think Aurelia savored reading to and sharing with Sylvia's followers to showcase her daughter's success and devotedness. If that is bad, it is just as pathological when modern parents and grandparents showcase brag-worthy offspring to every neighbor and friend and colleague they can collar. Does that mean their lives are empty? No, it means their lives are full. (Before grandparents had cellphones, they bought and carried small photo albums called "brag books," and Aurelia did too.)

Aware that her letters were a family affair, Sylvia liked knowing that while she was under pressure the folks at home cared that she wrote, creatively or otherwise, telling them from England:

I miss that very subtle atmosphere of faith and understanding at home, where you all knew what I was working at and appreciated it, whether it got published or not.

-Sylvia Plath, February 1956

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.