Another Suicide in Sylvia Plath's Family

Sylvia's maternal grandmother, "Grammy" Greenwood Schober (b. 1887) had six siblings. All left Vienna, Austria, for the United States. Grammy's brothers Joseph Greenwood (b. 1876) and Otto Greenwood (b. 1877) lived in St. Louis, Missouri, and worked as waiters in hotels. In 1951 Otto Greenwood hanged himself. He was 74, married, and 15 years retired from his waiter job. The Missouri death certificate says "Suffocation by hanging in his house Dec. 28 1951 about 12 noon."

Otto Greenwood was Aurelia Plath's uncle and Sylvia Plath's great-uncle. There is no reference to him or his death in any known Plath documents. He had a wife, Angela, and two grown children. Like Aurelia Plath's waiter father Frank Schober, Otto Greenwood belonged to the International Geneva Association for hospitality workers. [1] Greenwood was cremated on Dec. 31, 1951.

The Gregg shorthand character preceding the coded designation "974X" under "How did injury occur?" says "respiration."

[1] St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 30 December 1951, p. 13.

"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.