Guest Posts Wanted

I am inviting guest posts about or related to Aurelia Plath and Sylvia, around 800 words or less. Negative or positive, all points of view should be evidence-based and not rants (Sylvia's rants about Aurelia are enough).

New-book excerpts, if about Aurelia or about Sylvia's family, are fine. Those with something new to say or show about Aurelia Plath's life or her context, or about mother and daughter, or with suggestions for future AureliaPlath.info posts, please email Microsoft Word documents to platheducational@gmail.com. Thank you!

The 1950 Censu$ and the Panic of '52

Recently made public, t

Sylvia's high-school yearbook photo, 1950

he 1950 U.S. census tells us more about the Plath household than I thought, slightly altering the overall picture.

Head of household Aurelia Plath, "associate professor" (although her title was assistant professor) stated she worked 25 hours a week, 36 weeks a year, for an annual income of $3,200.

Sylvia and Warren Plath, teenagers, were counted as students. Their live-in "Grampy," Frank Schober, Sr., 69, worked 48 hours a week at the Brookline Country Club, earning $3000 a year.

Those were modest salaries, but in 2023 terms, the five-member Plath household in 1950 earned a tidy $75,000. Yet the two breadwinners seem to have kept their money separate, or nearly. When Grampy retired around November 1952, Aurelia went into crisis mode and took on weekend jobs tutoring and babysitting (Sylvia to Aurelia, Nov. 5 and 11, 1952). Sylvia wrote Warren in May 1953 that financially their mother "was really down to rock bottom" and despite poor health intended to teach summer school. Sylvia wanted to write anything at all that might help her pay her own way and felt increasingly depressed that summer when she produced nothing.

In the 1950 census "Grammy," Aurelia's mother and Frank's wife, is not listed although she lived until 1956. In a much later letter (Jan. 16, 1960) Sylvia mentions Aurelia and Aurelia's sister, Aunt Dot, having clashed over "Grampy's money," suggesting that Grampy and his wife had saved some or all of his earnings for retirement: enough for their daughters to fight over.

"Sylvia Bites"

Bitten plum / photo by Marco Verch

Sylvia Plath, as a kid, was violent—so much that Aurelia Plath had to keep Sylvia and her brother Warren apart. Sylvia kicked her brother, choked him, stuffed cloth down his throat. Sylvia said this to her psychiatrist Ruth Beuscher in a February 1959 therapy session, and Beuscher around 1970 read the therapy notes to Harriet Rosenstein, who audiotaped the interview.

Sylvia, age 26, told Dr. Beuscher her vivid memories of hating Warren from his birth, and published those memories in her essay “Ocean 1212-W.” Sylvia wrote in her journal (15 June 1951) that she had pelted Warren with tin soldiers, “gouged his neck” with an “careless flick” of an ice skate. You can’t carelessly flick an ice skate. Aurelia said Sylvia’s bullying became a neighborhood problem after her father died, but if Sylvia’s short story “Among the Bumblebees” is as thinly fictionalized as most of her fictions, the original of young Alice Denway was kicking her brother’s shins under the family dinner table to impress a father who was there. In other Plath fictions, girl-child narrators bite a playmate on the leg, bully a Jewish boy, are accused of ruining a neighbor girl’s new snowsuit. The real Sylvia had a rough enough reputation so that when the real-life neighbor girl’s parents came asking for money, Sylvia’s family sadly paid.

Aurelia’s Letters Home preface gets cagey and Latinate about her children’s infighting, signaling that she is suppressing much worse. Aurelia wrote: “[t]here were many times when each made the other miserable; and Sylvia, as the older, was the more dominant and the more culpable,” and does not say, but we know, she sent her daughter to live with her grandparents. Sylvia bit people. A police report in the Boston Globe (23 August 1938) says at the Plath house in Winthrop a dog “severely” bit on the nose a two-year-old guest. The Plaths did not own a dog. The dog was a neighbor's, but that Sylvia might have done it crossed my mind. Later when Sylvia first met Ted Hughes she bit his cheek until her teeth nearly met and the blood ran.

It is normal for children to be jealous of younger siblings and sometimes hurt them. Ruth Beuscher noted that Sylvia’s sibling rivalry went beyond normal. At age 26 Sylvia was bothered that Warren was at Harvard and she was not. Sylvia fought with her husband—“violent disagreements,” she told her mother; “snarlings and bitings,” she told her journal; “sprained thumbs and missing earlobes,” she told her brother. That was two adults in love. She had rushed to marry a “violent Adam,” “a breaker of things and people,” yet complained piteously after they broke up that he had beaten her. A line deleted from a draft of the poem “Edge” (“She has taken them with her”) suggests she considered killing their children along with herself, but on February 11, 1963, killed only herself.

Or so we say. In July 1964, Ted Hughes wrote about their two-and-a-half-year-old son, “Nick is a very tough-minded little bloke—altogether a very strange & violent little kid, a little Napoleon.” “I have a violence in me,” Sylvia wrote, “that is hot as death-blood.” That is true of many others. The difference is that Sylvia knew herself and spoke honestly about how bullying could get her what she wanted.

This Famous Plath Happy-Family Photo

I finally read Otto Plath’s book Bumblebees and Their Ways (1934), by a bee geek who spent the 1920s digging up and micromanaging 225 colonies of bees, observing their eating, breeding, and warring and compiling his discoveries. The first 131 pages are prose; the other 70, taxonomy. Otto got stung enough to put him into bed. His introduction says, “It is my ambition and hope to continue the investigations of the past thirteen summers by devoting at least three months each year to the study of bumblebees in various parts of the world.”

Three months per year? One wonders: with or minus the new wife and baby acquired in 1932? Finishing the manuscript – a dissertation he and Aurelia rewrote for lay readers -- got Otto promoted to full professor of biology. Aurelia Plath later wrote about the book: “Won my husband recognition and lost him money.” But before the book was published they hoped it might make them rich.

So the family celebrated in July 1933, taking the only known photo of Sylvia Plath with both her parents and the only one of Aurelia with Otto. They’re on a hillside in the Arnold Arboretum, the park where Otto spent the Jazz Age observing bees and was still not over it. (His book says observations continued until October 1933.) I wonder if Otto’s dream deferred, for lack of funds or excess of human baggage, ultimately made his life seem not worth living.

On this clearly sunny and hot day in Boston, Aurelia is wearing a fur piece over her shoulder. A wintertime photo shows her with a fur scarf – fur was fashionable – but this more substantial piece resembles a wrap or collar. Puzzling over fur in July I have imagined it was Otto’s thank-you for the year and a half he browbeat Aurelia and yelled while they edited the book that ate their marriage (“My, how he lit into me” when she used too many adjectives, she said). Aurelia called this “too academic an atmosphere” for infant Sylvia and brought in her own parents to supply love and laughter [Letters Home, 13]. The other photo from that day shows Aurelia looking much happier posed with her mother and Sylvia, with no fur unless it’s beneath Aurelia’s hat. I don’t want to read too much into Sylvia’s expressions.

Aurelia Schober, Sylvia Plath, Aurelia Plath

Leaving 26 Elmwood Road

In 1983, six years after selling Sylvia’s letters and juvenilia, Aurelia Plath at 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley still had “oceans of papers, out-of-print magazines, clippings of reviews, letters”; “dozens of boxes of family pictures; my notebooks (travel, journals)”; “four three-drawer filing cabinets, three desks, an eight-drawer bureau of papers.” While paging through these, she uncovered yet more. [1]

Age 77, after 40 years in that house Aurelia had to sell it and move to an apartment. She wanted the papers by and about Sylvia to go to the Sylvia Plath archive at Smith College’s library—donated, to get a tax break. Yet the prospect of sorting them was overwhelming.

That summer she told this to Wellesley neighbor and friend Dr. Richard Larschan, who volunteered his help. I asked Dr. Larschan where in the house Aurelia had kept all the papers and memorabilia so vital to Plath studies now.

“I only know that when we were sorting, Aurelia kept it in two walk-in closets in the room where her parents had slept,” he remembered. Self-described “pack rat” Aurelia “kept everything she touched in meticulous order—hundreds of letters neatly organized according to correspondent, and tied with ribbons.”

A U-Mass. professor of English (now Emeritus), Larschan was the right helper for sifting the goods systematically. He said they met “thrice-weekly [for] two- or three-hour sessions, during which Aurelia and I would evaluate the accumulation of 60-plus years, including things from Sylvia’s childhood like the letter opener she had carved, Sylvia’s Girl Scout uniform, Otto’s doctoral certificate, multiple copies of every newspaper clipping and magazine article Sylvia ever published, hundreds and hundreds of letters from readers of Letters Home, et cetera. I would type a list of things Aurelia would either discard, give to me, or donate to Smith and Indiana University after being evaluated by a rare-book expert.”

This task drained Aurelia emotionally. She wrote a friend, “Have to part with most reminders of my past—it hurts, as you know. (Eyestrain slows me down.)” Not only did her eyes hurt, but “Discarding thousands of pages of correspondence tugs at the heart. So many good people have given of themselves!” She means they threw away the fan letters. On the good side, Larschan and Aurelia developed a bond. Like Sylvia, he had had been a Fulbright fellow. At Exeter University in 1962-63 he had lived only fifteen miles from Ted and Sylvia’s Court Green, although they never met. Larschan admired Aurelia’s independence (“a burden to nobody”) while acknowledging her sometimes cloying sentimentality, rather like his own mother’s.

Sentimentality is of course repellent, but the next time you marvel over the rich resources in Plath archives, thank Sylvia’s sentimental mother.

Smith College received the donation in December 1983. Still, not every notable piece of paper went there. “In 1984,” Larschan said, “Aurelia gave me her correspondence with Olwyn Hughes about publishing (or NOT publishing!) The Bell Jar, which I sold to Smith College. She also gave me duplicate copies of Sylvia’s various publications that I sold privately and are now housed at Emory—along with [Sylvia’s] downstairs neighbor Trevor Thomas’s [self-published memoir] Last Encounters, inscribed to me when I lived in England."

Also withheld from the archives were Aurelia's own notebooks and journals, and photos of family members besides Otto or Sylvia: maybe of sister Dottie or son Warren, and so on. Asked if he saw any packets of Aurelia’s letters to Sylvia, Larschan said he did not.

So the task was completed. “When we were through cataloging and evaluating the materials Aurelia donated to Smith, in 1984 [Smith College] President Jill Ker Conway invited Aurelia and me for lunch, and so I drove us to Northampton,” Larschan said. [2] That lunch was their thank-you.

 

[1] ASP to Mary Ann Montgomery, letters of April 1980 and September 6, 1983, Lilly. ASP to Rose Leiman Goldemberg, postcards June and October 1983, Rose Goldemberg Papers, *T-Mss 2016-003, box 8, folder 1, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

[2] Emails, Richard Larschan to the author, December 2 and 4, 2021.

Sylvia Plath's Sacred Baboon

Here's the "sacred baboon" Sylvia Plath found on the beach in Winthrop when she was two and a half years old, and described in her memoir "Ocean 1212-W":

According to "Ocean 1212-W," Sylvia found this "simian Thinker" washed up on the seashore the day her brother was born. She was jealous because she would no longer be her parents' only child. But finding the baboon sculpture on the beach that day was a sign that she was special.

The fact is that Sylvia did not find this sculpture. Her neighbor and playmate David Freeman found it, he said, between the ages of 8 and 14 (before 1946). It had drifted in covered with tar. David's father "figured it belonged to some sailor" and cleaned it. [1] The photograph is courtesy of David's sister Ruth Freeman, via Dr. Richard Larschan.

The ancient Egyptians honored Hamadryas baboons as one of the incarnations of their god of wisdom.  They portrayed these sacred baboons in art and made mummies of them. This particular sculpture was more recent, a remnant of a then-new Western fascination with hominid intelligence and behavior. In the 1920s, U.S. psychobiologist Robert Yerkes adopted chimpanzees, published a book about them titled Almost Human, and founded the first primatology laboratory, at Yale (it's now at Emory). Popular interest, plus the influence of Egyptian art on modern sculpture, culminated in the Baboon Fountain featured at the 1939 New York World's Fair. The photo below shows two of the fountain's five godlike baboon figures, with the fair's iconic Pylon in the background.

[1] Harriet Rosenstein's notes from her interview with David Freeman on 17 July 1974, Emory.