Aurelia's Basement Tapes

Screen grab from Voices & Visions, 1988

Aurelia Plath in 1986 spoke on audiotape about Sylvia while rehearsing for an interview with Voices and Visions, a TV series about poets (PBS, 1988). PBS really wanted Aurelia on videotape, but first she said no, then maybe. Her friend since 1982 and U.Mass. professor of English, Dr. Richard Larschan, suggested they practice audiotaping some conversations about Sylvia’s life and poems. Aurelia was more forthcoming on tape than on paper, he says; and at age 80 she didn’t give a fig anymore for what the neighbors thought, and that’s a bonus for us. Here they discuss Sylvia’s first published poem from 1941, when Sylvia was 8 years old:

 

“Every Sunday she looked for the children’s page in the Boston Herald, which I had shown her in the newspaper. And she thought she’d send her [poem] in.”

“So, in other words, it was self-initiated?”

“It was self-initiated.”

“And this is at the age of…?”

“Oh, about 8.”

“That’s very interesting because she’s taking initiative and trying to get public recognition, it seems to me, at the age of 8.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why else would you print something?”

[Several-second pause.] “She wanted the dollar.”

 

In 1983 Aurelia had announced she would no longer speak publicly about her daughter. Yet three years later Voices and Visions got Aurelia on video: a coup for its producers and for us an encounter with a primary source.

 

Short clips from the six hours of Larschan’s “practice,” “amateur” audio and videotapes went into two half-hour educational videos about Sylvia’s poetry, produced in 2000 by U.Mass. and televised for remote college credit. One discusses Sylvia’s “mother poems,” the other her “father poems.” Writer and narrator Larschan assumes the viewer can accept that Plath’s father and mother poems have elements of myth. That’s how Plath transformed literal truth into emotional truth. In “The Myth of the Monstrous Mother” video, Aurelia throws both light and shade on poems such as “Medusa” (“The ‘stooges’ were Sylvia’s friends!”) and recites ecstatically from “Three Women.”

 

The two Larschan videos were on VHS only, and rare. They are now viewable through this site, the posting of June 7, 2022.

Beyond "Medusa" and "Mrs. Greenwood": From the Rosenstein Papers

Notes and tapes of 1970s interviews with Sylvia Plath’s friends, dates, and teachers, now in the Harriet Rosenstein research files at Emory University, are wonderfully valuable Plath resources, and include random comments and observations about Aurelia Plath. Interviewees such as Marcia Brown Stern or Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, whom Sylvia prepped to dislike Aurelia Plath before ever meeting her, had harsher things to say, but I sought first-hand impressions that went beyond “Mrs. Greenwood” and “Medusa”:

Marcia Brown Stern, Sylvia’s college friend: “Bitter and careworn” Aurelia was “struggling every minute of every day of every year to pay the bills and to keep herself together – just holding on for dear life – and there is no room for color – in her tone of voice or her hairdo or her aprons or her living room or inside her head.”

J. Melvin Woody, Sylvia’s date from Yale: Sylvia insisted he accompany her from New Haven to her Wellesley home “so she wouldn’t be with her mother alone. I found that a little hard to understand when I met Sylvia’s mother, who seemed harmless . . . . an intelligent, alert woman who was probably much better qualified to deal with a daughter like that than most women.”

Richard Sassoon, Sylvia’s boyfriend, met Aurelia once: “I remember her as sort of cold and academic and I suppose repressed. New England style.”

Pat O’Neill Pratson, Sylvia’s friend since tenth grade, a frequent visitor to the Wellesley house: Aurelia Plath served as a “bridge” between her own Austrian-immigrant parents and her Ivy-League children. Aurelia “recognized things she might like to have done that she saw the children doing in her place. It was very lonely for her.”

Peter Davison, Sylvia’s “summer romance” in 1955: Aurelia was “Terribly eager for her girl to get ahead. And very interested in someone [Davison] who worked for the Harvard University Press.”

Jon K. Rosenthal, one of Sylvia’s dates: Aurelia was “a very attractive woman at that time. Almost statuesque.”

Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, describing Aurelia visiting Devon in the summer of 1962: “And Mrs. Plath – ‘These are my grandchildren. You come to Grammy – Grammy will read it to you – Grammy will do it—’” 

Nancy Hunter Steiner, Sylvia’s college roommate: Aurelia was “sweet and well-meaning and very intimidated by Sylvia.”

Susan Weller Burch, Sylvia’s Smith classmate: Aurelia “just seemed to slip into the shadows.”. . . “gone at work most of the time. Grandparents in residence.”

Wilbury Crockett, Sylvia’s high-school English teacher: “Mrs. Plath was very much in control. I always had the feeling that she was very much aware of Sylvia’s gifts and considered Sylvia a precocious child. I think she was driven by the thought that Sylvia and Warren might not get all that they ought to have. Financial security was a very real factor.”