"Loyalty"

Young Aurelia Schober was Winthrop High School Class of 1924's salutatorian and at graduation had to give a speech. She chose the topic "loyalty" and her speech was what anyone there would have expected, in no way radical. Although "obedience" and "virtue" and "Woodrow Wilson" today would seem strange coming from an 18-year-old, the text is so boilerplate classic I got AI to write me a 21st-century graduation speech about loyalty for comparison.

"Loyalty," by Aurelia F. Schober, salutatorian, Class of 1924, printed in The Winthrop High School Echo 1924, pp. 30-31.

 

Loyalty

 

Aurelia: Loyalty is that quality which makes a man a friend and a worthy citizen, for loyalty is fidelity to our superiors, to duty, and to love. No man can be of any true value in this world unless he is loyal to God, to his fellow men, and to his own highest ideals. It is the one requisite demanded of every human being that he be loyal to the one great Master who made him. No real friendship can exist without loyalty on both sides. It is the duty of everyone to guard his friend’s interests as though they were his own. How far should this loyalty go? We all remember the answer of Christ when asked, “How often should I forgive my brother? Seven times?” Christ’s answer, “Until seventy times seven,” means, as we all know, that there should be no limit to one’s forgiveness.

 

AI: Today, as we stand on the threshold of a new chapter in our lives, I want to take a moment to reflect on a value that has been pivotal in shaping our journey together: loyalty. In a world that often prioritizes speed, convenience, and individual achievement, loyalty remains a steadfast anchor, reminding us of what is truly important. Loyalty is not merely a word; it is a commitment to those we care about, to our values, and to the principles that guide us. As we celebrate our accomplishments today, let us consider how loyalty has woven itself into the fabric of our experiences here.

 

Aurelia: In the same way there should be no limit to our loyalty to our friends. If we are loyal to the good and  noble characteristics of friendship, loyalty should be bounded only by our friend’s need and our power. As we demand that our friends “ring true” we should first be sure that we are giving them the one great gift of friendship—loyalty.

 

AI: To our families, thank you for your unwavering support and guidance. You have stood by us through our triumphs and challenges, reminding us that loyalty is not just about being present during good times, but also about being there when the road gets tough. Your belief in us has inspired us to push through adversity, to strive for excellence, and to remain steadfast in our goals. Today, we celebrate not only our achievements but also the unwavering loyalty you have shown us.

 

Aurelia: Conflicting loyalties in friendship often occur. Should we forsake our own sense of honor in order to be loyal to our friends? Lovelace expresses this thought in the oft-quoted couplet:

 

“I could not love thee, dear, so much

Loved I not honor more.”

 

AI: To our teachers, your dedication to our education has been a testament to the loyalty you hold for your profession and for your students. You have invested your time, energy, and passion into shaping our minds, nurturing our talents, and cultivating our character. Your loyalty to our growth has ignited a flame of curiosity within us, encouraging us to explore, to question, and to learn. As we leave this institution, we carry with us the lessons you have imparted, and we are grateful for the loyalty you have demonstrated to our futures.

 

Aurelia: In friendship we give our loyalty to those we love, but there is a loyalty that is demanded of us—loyalty to our superiors. This means we must obey those to whom obedience is due. If this were not an unbreakable rule, no army could endure for a day. The quicker and better we obey orders the more quickly and certainly shall we show ourselves fitted to give them when the time comes. The man or woman who cannot obey can never govern.

AI: As we navigate the complexities of adulthood, we will inevitably face choices that test our loyalty. In a rapidly changing world, it is essential to stay true to our commitments—to our loved ones, our friends, and our values. Loyalty requires courage; it requires us to stand by our principles even when the winds of change threaten to sway us. It asks us to remain faithful, not only to others but also to ourselves.

 

Aurelia: Loyalty means obeying orders in the spirit as well as in the letter. To be successful in life one must be loyal to one’s self. This loyalty is usually termed “self-respect.” Unless we have self-respect, we cannot hope to win the respect of others. Above all, we must be true to ourselves. 

 

AI: Let us remember that loyalty is a two-way street. It thrives on mutual respect, trust, and understanding. When we are loyal to others, we inspire loyalty in return. We foster relationships built on a foundation of integrity, and we create environments where collaboration and support flourish. In our personal lives and professional pursuits, let us always strive to be individuals who honor our commitments and uplift those around us.

 

Aurelia: There is not a better place to begin this loyalty than in school. There we meet the temptation, probably for the first time, to do a thing in a way that is easier although not quite so “square” as the right way. By overcoming those sometimes termed “insignificant” temptations, we become loyal to the unwritten law of “fair play” and it is the surest display of proper school spirit. Every temptation overcome strengthens the character and helps us to be victorious over even greater battles. Well has Shakespeare said, “To thine own self be true, and it must follow as the night the day, thou cans’t not then be false to any man.”

 

AI: As we embark on this new journey, I urge each of you to carry the spirit of loyalty with you. In a world that often feels fragmented, let us be the glue that binds. Let us cultivate loyalty in our friendships, our families, and our workplaces. Be the person who shows up, who listens, and who stands by others, for it is in these moments that we forge lasting connections that enrich our lives.

 

Aurelia: Loyalty when practiced in everyday life helps us to answer the call of a great cause during a great crisis—the call of loyalty to our country in time of war. Here is where small practiced loyalties in school and business help us to obey greater and more difficult orders. The habit of loyalty and obedience, when once fixed, may save thousands of lives or turn a defeat into a victory.

 

AI: Together, let us embrace the future with loyalty in our hearts and determination in our souls.

 

Aurelia: One of our greatest helps in learning to face duty rightly and to prevent conflicting loyalties is to review the lives of those who lived in the past, and thereby profit by their example. This is the value of true hero worship. Abraham Lincoln was true to God, true to his fellowmen, and true to himself. Loyalty was the secret of his success. Honesty and his name have become proverbs. Woodrow Wilson was loyal to his highest ideals, and, while he did not live to accomplish his end, he died working for his ideal. Surely the world must be getting better when future generations have such noble influences as may be gained by loyalty to the heroes of the past. A great man [Daniel Webster] has said, “If we work upon gold, it will perish; if upon brass, time will efface it; if we raise temples, they will crumble into dust. But if we work upon immortal minds—if we imbue them with high principles, with the just fear of God, with manhood and womanhood and the respect of it—we engrave on those tablets something which no time can efface, but which will grow brighter through all eternity.”

 

Aurelia: If loyalty has played and yet plays such an important part in all lives, may not loyalty be called the “summum bonum” or greatest thing in the world? Unswerving loyalty means courage; and courage is an essential of a high character. If you wish to be successful, you must be loyal. The upright man, the loyal man, fears not to meet and cope with whatever difficulties are in store for him.

 

AI: Together, let us embrace the future with loyalty in our hearts and determination in our souls.

 

Aurelia: Phillips Brooks [Boston-based Episcopal clergyman, 1835-1893, famous preacher] expressed this sentiment when he said, “Do not pray for easy lives! Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers; pray for powers equal to your tasks! Then the doing of your work shall be no miracle but you shall be a miracle. Every day you shall wonder at yourself, at the richness of life which has come in you by the grace of God.”

 

AI: In conclusion, as we celebrate our graduation today, let us not only commemorate our accomplishments but also the lessons learned along the way. Loyalty will be our guide as we navigate this uncharted territory. May we always remain loyal to our dreams, our communities, and to each other. Thank you.

 

[Aurelia's speech was followed by a speech on “The importance of athletics.”]

Killing Her Kids

-Did Sylvia Plath in her final days really think about killing her children?

What Plath thought, nobody knows. We know what Plath wrote in her first draft of the poem "Edge," probably the last poem she wrote: "She is taking them with her." It seems to say that the dead woman "who wears the smile of accomplishment" has killed her children along with herself.

Click to enlarge

"She is taking them with her" appears only in that draft. Plath chose to delete that line. It's not in the finished poem. Nor did Plath take her children "with her" when she killed herself. She took care that they survived.

-But if Plath had killed them, could she be held responsible? She was in such a state, post-partum depression, taking poisonous prescription drugs, suicidal, deserted --

You mean we play "court of criminal law" and exonerate Plath, our favorite writer, our idol, of having written that line, on the basis of insanity? Deny that a sane Plath could ever have thought that awful thought? Did the line "The illusion of a Greek necessity" not hint that the poem might be metaphorical, a creative work, not 100 percent literal? Even if Plath did mean it, why does what did not happen engross you? Does this unpublished, deleted, sensational line somehow reflect so badly on Plath that it reflects on you?

Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath had a unique denial strategy for the deleted line first exposed in Judith Kroll's Plath study Chapters in a Mythology (1976). Aurelia wrote in her copy of Kroll's book a response to a footnote. Kroll's footnote explaining "Edge" says in part:

The children must be dead in order for the woman's history to be perfected, for she regards them as extensions of herself; that is why she speaks of folding them "back into her body."

Alongside that, Aurelia wrote "not correct." Taking the line literally, Aurelia wrote that it "really meant" that Sylvia folded the future children she wanted, two unconceived that she had already chosen names for, "back into her body." Aurelia further clarified:

"These are 'Jacob' and 'Megan', the two she still hoped to bear." Aurelia added as a reference "1961 & 2."

From Aurelia's copy of Chapters in a Mythology. She and Kroll had been in mutually respectful correspondence about the manuscript. Click to enlarge.

Beth Hinchliffe's Unpublished Sylvia Plath Biography

How differently we would read Sylvia Plath's work and life story had Elizabeth Hinchliffe's Plath biography been completed and published, showing Sylvia and Otto and Aurelia at their weakest and most helpless, portrayals that biographies have tried to avoid.

Part One of The Descent of Ariel, 58 pages, depicts Sylvia, in London in her final winter, as a nuisance who pounded on her downstairs neighbor's door until he opened it and wailed for his help: Would he please crawl over the roof and through a window because she'd locked herself out of her flat? Did he know a plumber? Clearly we're getting the neighbor's view of Sylvia. (In this manuscript he's called "Evans.") Hinchliffe notes that when snowbound, Sylvia had no other adult besides "Evans" to talk with; she didn't yet have a telephone.

Now, I don't believe everything I read unless I can find corroboration and I had to find my own because this manuscript has no footnotes.

Corroboration: Sylvia's anguished letters from fall and winter 1962 and '63, and Dr. Anita Helle, a Plath relative: "Sylvia was almost beside herself with grief and terror in her last months."[1]

In the next chapter Otto Plath's fellow graduate students at Harvard's Bussey Institute describe Otto as a a timid, sniffling outsider who agreed with whatever anyone said and defended himself by quoting other people. A nice guy, someone said, who didn't "carry the guns" to be a scientist. Feared completing his dissertation because then he would have to defend it.

This matches the Otto of the 1918 FBI report: a nervous, morbid man who made no friends, lied that he thought he was a U.S. citizen, and when asked about the war did not say he was a pacifist. 

Otto saved his "Daddy" act for home. His kids learned to shed their real selves at the door and became quiet, well-mannered robot children so he wouldn't yell at them the way he yelled at their mother. They'd assume this outer armor for the rest of their lives.

Aurelia described her own parents as sources of love and laughter -- not as Austrian immigrants who shut out neighbors and tried to re-create Austria in their living room, speaking only German, teaching obedience to authority, to hide one's emotions, work hard, and expect the worst. I'd add that Aurelia's parents were Roman Catholics, a faith centered on sacrifice. They were taught to believe that mother pelicans, when they had to, tore their own flesh to feed the blood to their children. Although pelicans don't really do that. 

Interesting: It was Aurelia's mother who looked for houses and found the one on Elmwood Road. Aurelia was at work, of course. Aurelia's mother had a car and was the household's only driver. So quit saying Aurelia chose the WASPiest house she could find because becoming a WASP was her ambition.

About Aurelia Plath -- plainly the source and link to much of this information -- the unfinished biography says Aurelia wanted her children to have the fun and freedom her own childhood did not. It doesn't mention Aurelia's job or college years, or any of her triumphs; in fact portrays her as friendless. So even a neighbor and professional journalist was another in a long line of biographers who didn't ask Aurelia about herself. 

The text is well-woven, well written and absorbing.

The manuscript, in the Fran McCullough archive at the Hornbake Library at the University of Maryland-College Park, is 123 pages and incomplete. It includes a few photos. It's undated.

[1] A. Helle, "Family Matters," Northwest Review, Vol. 26 No. 2, 1988.

"My Mother, a Sea-Girl Herself"

Aurelia Schober, c. 1927

We've all seen photos of Sylvia Plath lounging on the beach, so here is her mother, as 21-year-old college student Aurelia Schober, having her own bathing-beauty moment. Her boyfriend/lover Karl Terzaghi's diary says: "Enjoyed seeing [Aurelia] in bathing suit, well built and very pretty."

Aurelia loved the ocean and beaches, lived in oceanfront Winthrop from 1918 through 1931, and in 1936 persuaded her husband Otto Plath to move their family there. The Plaths would have continued to live in Winthrop, but breadwinner Otto refused health care and died, forcing Aurelia to reconfigure her family and move away from the ocean she loved.

Source: Sivad yearbook, 1928

"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.

How to Research Family History

A while back I heard that Sylvia Plath's ancestry had been researched and written up but mostly cut from the final draft of Red Comet (2020), the very fine Plath biography. Another biography declined to discuss Plath's family and childhood to concentrate instead on Plath's "intensity." But where did she get that intensity?

Such questions led me to research Plath's family history (the "stock" or pedigree Sylvia found important when judging her boyfriends), finding patterns and plenty of drama:

Sylvia and Aurelia had African-American cousins. Aurelia's aunt's 1906 marriage to an African-American fits what is now a five-generation family pattern of marriages made to defy a parent or a family.

The first known photo of Otto Plath's parents, Theodor, and Ernestine, Sylvia's grandmother, who died in a mental hospital, I found on a genealogy website. Aurelia Plath, keeper and handler of Plath-Schober-Greenwood-Hughes dirty laundry, kept Ernestine's illness a secret so Sylvia could continue to idealize her dead father, a "pacifist" who to his wife and family was verbally abusive.

Sylvia had no Jewish ancestor. Sylvia had a German father, but she's also Polish, Austrian, and Hungarian. Plath's intelligence and no-nonsense work ethic came to her from both sides of the family. (She wrote: "I don't have time to be intelligent in a fluid, versatile way. I'm too nose-to-the-grindstone.")

For research I used most often two genealogy databases that anyone seeking their own family history can use:

On the free-of-charge database Familysearch.org view billions of pages of digitized info about a billion ancestors, each linked with documentation: census, immigration papers, birth/baptism, marriage, military, and death records, if any exist. That is its advantage over other genealogy sites. Site is run by the Mormon church (also called LDS). Free, but you must register on Familysearch.org as a user.

A good feature: Each ancestor on FamilySearch is assigned a short alphanumeric label so you can be sure, for example, that your ancestor "Anna Campbell" is the same "Anna Campbell" who is listed among 30 different Anna Campbells all born around the same time.

The site Ancestry.com is a gold mine of digitized records. Home subscriptions are costly, but my public library subscribes, and at the library I use it free. Libraries also subscribe to other helpful historical databases such as Newspapers.com. Ask your librarian.

You'll hit walls where there are no records or confusing records. I've learned that guesses are always wrong. These are human records of human beings, so sometimes inaccurate. My stepfather's gravestone says "1916" when he was born in 1919 because when he got his first job in the U.S. there was a mistake when he signed up for Social Security, and he wouldn't correct even the gravestone (ordered years in advance), fearing Social Security would find him out. 

My own record says I lived in Ferguson, MO, a place I never even went. I think it's where my landlord had his office. So trust but verify.

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!

Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother, Mother

I thought that for a poet who hated her mother, Sylvia Plath wrote surprisingly few poems of mother-hatred or mother-criticism -- true! -- and that Plath's better-known poems of "father-worship" (her phrase) meant she used the word "mother" rarely -- false! [1] Detail of page 326 from A Concordance to The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (by Richard M. Matovich, NY: Garland Publishing, 1986):

This concordance is for the 1981 edition of The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath that we know did not collect them all. Plath fans look forward to the publication in 2024 by Faber & Faber of The Poems of Sylvia Plath -- 500-plus poems with 500-plus pages of notes -- edited by Karen Kukil and Amanda Golden.

[1] "father-worship": Sylvia Plath to Lynn Lawner, 18 February 1960.

Maybe You Too Have Felt Like This and Know It's Not a Joke

Unable to look on the bright side. Aurelia is 22.

While I take a week's break from posting, here is a yearbook photo of Aurelia Schober with Melrose High School's faculty, winter 1928-29. Distanced and then dumped by her boyfriend that November, Aurelia cried, despaired, then angrily told him she did not want to be "an episode." He said, too bad. Unlike her colleagues in this photo she is too dispirited to rustle up a smirk or close her coat.

But the sting wakes her up. Aurelia, 22, resolves to next year earn a master's degree, lines up a summer job waitressing at a fancy resort to make tuition money, envisions a teaching career like the world has never seen, and so on.

Aurelia Plath in 1984 recalled that while she was teaching a high-school English class a school inspector came by to observe her. Aurelia had memorized and was acting out, word for word, for her students, all the parts of the most dramatic scene in the novel Ivanhoe. The students loved it and eagerly took up the original. Afterward, the inspector came up to Aurelia, “shaking his head in wonderment,” and said to her, “Sheer genius; sheer genius.” [1]

[1] AP to L. Sanazaro, 2 December 1984.

So Glad You Liked My Poem

How many poems did Sylvia Plath enclose in her letters to her mother Aurelia and which poems were they? I can name 36. Please send any corrections! Sylvia asked Aurelia for feedback on some of them.

1943: 20 March, "Plant a little seedling"; "I have a little fairy,""You have to have my fairy ears"; "I found a little fairy"

1945: 7 July, "At night I watch the stars above"; 9 July, "Camp Helen Storrow"

1946: 16 July, "The Lake"; 19 July, "Mornings of Mist"

1947: 8 September, "Missing Mother"

1950: 5 October, "Gold leaves shiver"

1951: 8 October, "gold mouths cry"; 3 November, "Sonnet" ("see what you can derive from this chaos")

1953: Before 1 March, villanelles including "Mad Girl's Love Song"; 11 April, opening stanza of "Dialogue en Route"; 22 April, "Parallax," "Admonition" and "Verbal Calisthenics" ("Tell me what you think"); 30 April-1 May, "Oh bother!" Before April 25, "To Eva Descending the Stair" ("the one you like so much")

1954: 16 April, "Doom of Exiles," "The Dead" ("tell me what you think of them")

1955: 2 February, "Apparel for April," "Temper of Time," "Winter Words" ("Read aloud for word tones, for full effect.")

1956: 9 March, "Pursuit," "Channel Crossing" ("eager to hear what you think of these"); 19 April, "Metamorphosis"; 21 April, "Ode for Ted," "Song"; 20 April, "Strumpet Song," "Complaint of the Crazed Queen," "Firesong"; 2 October, "Epitaph for Fire and Flower"

1957: 8 February, "The Lady and the Earthenware Head"; 23 April, "Happy Birthday to You"

1958: 22 March, "Battle Scene From the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer," and "Departure of the Ghost" 

Below, the poems we know Aurelia liked, because Sylvia wrote:

"Glad you liked the New Yorker poem" (22 June 1960) ("Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows")

"So glad you liked the poems in Poetry." (16 April 1962) ("Face Lift," "Widow," "Heavy Women," "Love Letter," and "Stars over the Dordogne," April 1962 issue)

Without specifying which poems she was referring to, Sylvia wrote:

"It's too bad my poems frighten you" (25 October 1962)

Poems that Aurelia had copies of and in the margins indicated that she did not like:

"Snowman on the Moor" (published in Poetry, July 1957)

"Zeitgeist at the Zoo" (c. 1956; unpublished. Aurelia wrote: "Awful!")

"My Mother Is My Best Friend" -- Uh, No

Reacting in 1972 to an article called "My Parents Are My Friends," Aurelia Plath judged it "excellent and was my aim in life because my mother was my best friend!" Aurelia and her parents shared a house for 40 of Aurelia's first 50 years, so warm feelings or feigning them was required, but being friendly with parents is one thing and "best friend"-level intimacy with one's mother is another. 

Sylvia wrote that her mother was "always a child" while her grandmother lived, but let's take Aurelia's word that Aurelia and her mother were each other's best friends. For exploring what mother-daughter "best friends" meant in the Plaths' house, we have what Aurelia wrote in 1982:

Maybe parent-child friendship was once an ideal, but today it's widely agreed that children feel emotionally burdened when their parents try to be friends and confidants. Thank goodness Millennial parents know better:

The emotional burden of "best friendship" with parents usually falls on daughters. Did "friend for life, such as I was for my mother" oblige the daughter to fulfill the mother's needs?

Sylvia's letters home are "intimate correspondence" as Aurelia said, and they read like best-friend letters, but Sylvia was not into fulfilling Aurelia's needs. Aurelia fulfilled Sylvia's needs and hid or downplayed her own. She liked keeping Sylvia close, but didn't depend on Sylvia for best-friendship because Aurelia had her own good friends who valued and helped her.

Aurelia had friends from her decades-ago college days and high-school teaching days. A friend from the 1920s, a novelist, in 1969 wrote her editor about Aurelia's idea to publish Sylvia's letters as a book. When the time was ripe, it happened! Friends in 1953 had hosted Aurelia for two weeks and six weeks, and in the 1970s, hosted her five days a week for three years while Aurelia taught at Cape Cod Community College. Sylvia's juvenile diaries mention Aurelia slipping out of the house to visit the "Ortons," meaning the Nortons, Aurelia's intellectual equals and, for her first ten years in Wellesley, her very good friends.

As friends and family members, including Sylvia, died, moved away, or distanced themselves -- the family saw close-up Aurelia's faults and critical side -- new people such as playwright Rose Leiman Goldemberg even wanted to be Aurelia's friend. Goldemberg was concerned that it might be asking too much. Others weren't so concerned and pretended friendship, love, and goodwill to get closer to the late great Sylvia Plath. 

Pretending she did not know some pen friends were opportunists, Aurelia feigned affection as long as both parties could keep it up. To us this seems strange and unnecessary. To women of Aurelia's time, it was only polite.

Bereft of old friends and increasingly injured as Sylvia's meaner words about her were published, aging Aurelia hungered for love and friendship. Her move into senior housing in 1984 separated her from neighbors who esteemed her and set her among people unfriendly because of what Sylvia had written. She had counted on family to love her as she had loved them. Only daughter-in-law Margaret Wetzel Plath regularly wrote Aurelia, and arranged for her an 80th birthday party. She made Aurelia feel loved, and according to Aurelia's last good friend, Dr. Richard Larschan, Aurelia was desolate when Margaret died of cancer in her fifties.

Sylvia was not around to be Aurelia's best and lifelong friend.

Sylvia Plath's Parents Fall in Love

"Unter den Linden" is a boulevard in Berlin lined with linden trees. "Unter der Linden" is the signature lyric of the greatest German poet before Goethe, troubador Walther von der Vogelweider (1170-1230). The poem's gist:

Under the linden tree / on the moorlands . . . there’s a patch of crushed grass and crushed flowers, and passersby might see that and smile, but what really happened there only my boyfriend and I truly know, and maybe a little bird. . .

Professor Otto Plath taught "Unter der Linden" in his Middle High German course in autumn 1929. He taught too the epic romance Tristan and Isolt and the Nibelungenleid (starring Siegfried and Brunhilde) and the Arthurian Parzival. Over texts like these, Professor Plath of Boston University, a self-confessed romantic, decided he might like to know better his poetry-loving graduate student Aurelia Schober.

Middle High German was the only graduate course in German that Otto taught during Aurelia's fateful graduate year, 1929-30. [1] Her A.M. degree in German and English would net her an enviable job teaching at Brookline High School and a suitor, two decades older than she, who b.s.'ed the idealistic young woman about their future as equals.

Otto Plath taught the Middle High German course, part one, in autumn, and part two in the spring -- if at least ten students enrolled. Aurelia wrote that she persuaded 15 students to enroll, a story I have always doubted. Yet it might have been so in spring 1930, when the German department was offering fewer than its usual 11 graduate courses -- because the prof who taught six of those courses was on leave. [2]

The "2" signifies "2-credit course."

How would I know that, or which poems our star-crossed lovers read? Last week I secured a rare 900-pp. Boston University Course Catalogue for the academic year 1929-30. It's a picture window into their world. Surprises for me mean surprises for you!

[1] Graduate course listings, pp. 817-818. Otto, instructor in German at B.U. since 1922, became Assistant Professor of Biology in 1928 (772). [2] Dr. Marshall Perrin (1855-1935, one of Aurelia's favorite profs) was on leave in spring 1930 (248).

Aurelia Goes to a Poetry Reading

Aurelia Plath's medical-secretarial student sat down with her for tutoring and then Aurelia said, Do you mind if just this once we cut this short and double up next time, because there's a poetry reading on campus I want to go to. Would you like to come with me? Aurelia also hoped to talk with the poet. The student went, but doesn't remember his name.

1977. Antifa AF. Read the title poem here.

This Cape Cod Community College senior, 1973, took several courses with Mrs. Plath and was tutored her senior year. I am tracing and talking with Aurelia's Boston University and Cape Cod former students because 1) it's never been done and 2) for firsthand witnesses it's now or never. I was curious which poet Aurelia interrupted their work for.

It was April 11, 1973 and they heard John Beecher (1904-1980), gritty political poet, Deep South labor and civil rights activist (related to those Beechers), "a premature antifascist writing about black oppression since the 1920s when people didn't want to hear about it. Even a lot of black people didn't want to hear about it," he told the college paper. His Collected Poems (Macmillan) were in press.

I never heard of John Beecher even though he went to Harvard. Somehow Aurelia had. John Howard Griffin, his friend, had a doctor dye him black and wrote Black Like Me (1961), and Aurelia had read it and wrote Sylvia about it (6 December 1962). It took stunts like Griffin's and demonstrations and oral-tradition poets like Beecher declaiming race murders and maimed workers to stir middle-class America --  morally, and its young people first. Beecher was an old white radical field-agitator academic serious as hell with no sacred cows. He'd be chased off of campuses with pitchforks now.

Those with delicate ladylike sensibilities probably would not alter their schedules to see and hear him.

Currently we have only scraps of info about Aurelia Plath's politics, but with this discovery they are now consistent across six decades.

Beecher recorded these LPs for Folkways in 1968 and 1977, now on the Smithsonian website; see the two albums' liner notes (PDFs) to read the poems for free and in full.

What Is a Traumatic Death?

Would you agree that a death (which is always a loss) is an especially traumatic loss if:

·      it occurs without warning

·      is untimely

·      involves violence

·      there is damage to the loved one’s body

·      the survivor regards the death as preventable

·      the survivor believes that the loved one suffered

·      the survivor regards the death, or manner of death, as unfair and unjust [1]

 

If you agree that any sudden needless untimely death, especially your child’s, is particularly grievous, then imagine Aurelia Plath’s grief after her daughter Sylvia died, overseas, at age 30. Told at first that Sylvia died of pneumonia, Aurelia learned days later that it was suicide, and son Warren told Aurelia the context and the details.

 

Aurelia wrote a brief angry note to a London newspaper that says those responsible for Sylvia’s death “know who they are.” She did not mail it, but kept it; it’s in archives. For future readers of this unsent letter, Aurelia added the initials of the suspect parties.

 

I can’t find in Sylvia Plath studies any respect or allowance for Aurelia’s trauma and grief. Her trauma would be as severe and multidimensional as ours if authorities phoned right now to say they found our child dead by suicide on a kitchen floor.

 

Rather than empathy (meaning, feeling what others feel) or sympathy (saddened by what others must be going through), Plath biographies and essays imply that Sylvia’s U.S. death notices – few and short because Sylvia wasn’t famous yet -- do not say “suicide” because prim Aurelia hoped to hide the real cause. No reason besides her personal character flaw.

 

We will be called to account for our assumptions.

 

Studies of mothers whose children died by suicide say mothers have not only the grief of suddenly losing a child but a burden of guilt, and, on top of that, they are judged. Even people who know suicide is never simple still suspect that a young suicide’s parents did not love them enough or in the right way, or were not prescient enough, or present enough, to stop them.

 

Aurelia in 1963 sent Sylvia’s friend Elizabeth Compton a note that was less about Sylvia than Aurelia’s own grief. Compton was offended and later sent Aurelia’s letter to a biographer as an example of Aurelia’s true personality. In summer 1963 Aurelia went to England. Her son-in-law, unable to think of any good reason a parent might want to visit their dead child’s former home and grave and children, thought Aurelia was coming for an “investigation.” And that she might dump too much love on her grandchildren. Remember he too was bereaved, as were the grandchildren.

 

Sylvia’s readers sympathize with her loss of her father and how his death changed her. It would be a truer picture if we saw that his death disrupted and changed her whole family. Sylvia’s 1953 suicide attempt shocked and terrified them. Aurelia wrote that she dreaded a recurrence. For her and her son 1963 was the second time around, only worse. Two families became survivors of a suicide and to this day they have not heard the end of it.

 

The National Alliance on Mental Illness says each suicide directly affects about 115 people and one in five (=23)  are devastated.

 

Living in a time of epidemic suicide we know that survivors of traumatic loss might cope by saying or writing tasteless vengeful unhinged or sentimental things, or frame the death as a murder, point fingers, or try everything to fix or explain it and never heal. A percentage will commit suicide themselves. Sylvia’s traumatic death very obviously colored all that occurred afterward, not much of it worth celebrating.

 

Sylvia suffered. But so did her family.

 

[1] “Traumatic Bereavement: Basic Research and Clinical Implications,” M. Barle, C. Wortman, J.A. Latack, 2017.

Did Sylvia Plath Look Like Her Mother? You Decide

Only once have I heard "She looks like Aurelia," and the speaker sounded horrified. Never have I read or heard any more about the mother-daughter resemblance.

Aurelia was 19 in the photo above, and Sylvia Plath was 20. Sylvia hated the above image of herself, which she scissored from its context, but 1) it is not as horrid as she said and 2) it was the only comparable photo, showing Sylvia close in age, facing the camera, and unsmiling. In Aurelia's time there was no cultural mandate to smile for every photo.

Both women were four or five inches taller than average, with sturdy frames. They wore each other's clothes.

Looking Austrian and Polish as all getout.

So what do you say, did Sylvia look like her mother? In photos taken later, Sylvia's face a bit lived-in, I think so, except Sylvia had that "lemony" look indicating Eastern European blood: her father's. Worshipful authors tend to cleanse Sylvia of any but her father's German heritage (they don't like to say "Prussian" because they aren't sure what it is) and favor photos of her doing very white-American ritual activities: bridesmaid; tanning; Yellowstone; aboard a luxury liner. Bitter Fame, of course, tried to show Sylvia as unappealing.

Yes, Plath fans play politics with images. I am doing it by showing young Aurelia and young Sylvia side by side. Have you ever seen them this way? Those with stock in Sylvia Plath have created or emphasized distance between them -- as if the apple fell so far from the tree that it was the tree's fault, or the apple created itself. Mother and daughter were close. Both women said they were.

Happy birthday, Aurelia (April 26). On this page you are reunited with your girl.

Business Class: Aurelia's Final Years at Boston University

Boston University yearbook, 1967

Aurelia Plath’s teaching job at Boston University’s College of Business Administration began dissolving in 1959 when a new dean dismissed all secretarial-program faculty except for five aging tenured females. Aurelia was 52.

With 13 years left before BU retired her, Aurelia prepared to teach in a different department, taking a night course in German and then courses in teaching remedial reading. [1] She could have quit BU for a medical-secretarial job, her field of expertise, but even in her teens Aurelia wanted a teaching career, ideally in languages and literature. Her daughter Sylvia wrote that Aurelia secretly hated teaching typing and shorthand, yet 1) Aurelia taught more advanced courses than those, and 2) regardless of subject, Aurelia liked educating and advising young people. It was Sylvia who had secretly hated teaching.

 

Shocked in September 1962 by the new College of Business course catalog with none of her courses in it, Aurelia was not sure she was still employed. Sylvia in England was “appalled to hear your department is closing.” Secretarial studies as a college major was everywhere dying on the vine. Yet however marginalized, BU’s secretarial major persisted and so did Aurelia’s job. She was lucky; she needed the money a tenured associate professor could make. During 1962 she bought Sylvia a Bendix and lent her 500 English pounds to pay off Sylvia's house in Devon and paid her own way there and back; and Aurelia then offered a very troubled Sylvia, deserted by her husband, $50 a month.

 

BU’s yearbook for 1967 pictures 232 College of Business Administration graduates, 53 of them female. Of these, ten had secretarial degrees: nine “executive secretarial,” and a lone “medical secretarial.” One would think Aurelia sat around with no students. Yet 22 more of the 53 graduating females were Business Education majors. Taught secretarial and business skills and communications, they were also educated to teach those subjects in high schools or vocational programs where typing and shorthand were flourishing.

 

Business Education graduates thus bypassed secretarial jobs for teaching careers better respected and paid. Essentially they studied to become new Aurelias. Freshmen from Aurelia’s 1963-64 shorthand courses were in 1967 taking her course, limited to Bus Ed seniors, in how to teach shorthand. BU’s 1967 yearbook lists seven College of Business fields of concentration. Secretarial and Business Education were not among them. The end had come: the last secretarial students enrolled in 1968, and Bus Ed moved to the School of Education. [2]

 

Entitled to a leave of absence, Aurelia took it in fall 1970, six months before she turned 65, when BU would retire her. During her leave Aurelia quietly worked at her new job: teaching medical-secretarial at a community college eager to have her teach until she was 70.

[1] ASP to Miriam Baggett, 6 February 1960; Sylvia Plath to ASP, 17 March 1960.

[2] Thus the College of Business Administration (later, School of Business; later, School of Management) was purged of female faculty, as the 1973-74 Bulletin shows, and of a large percentage of its female students. For a time.

Bringing Up Baby Sylvia

October 1932 issue

“I was totally imbued with the desire to be a good mother,” said Aurelia Plath, and a pink satin Baby Book now in the Sylvia Plath archives at the Lilly Library shows full-time new mother Aurelia recording joyfully on its pages her infant Sylvia's every gain.

 

Baby Books emerge in the U.S. around 1880. They require literacy and leisure and parents who expected children to grow up; in 1900, that’s three children out of four. Mass-produced baby books reached peak popularity around the time Sylvia was born in 1932. Among the mothers of the twenties and thirties faithfully tracking in writing their children’s progress was Rose Kennedy, inspired by The Care and Feeding of Children (1894), a bestseller by a New York hospital pediatrician who made patient “charts” mandatory after seeing nurses keeping them.

 

Intensified scientific interest in child rearing—the phrase “child care” first appears in 1915—designated “early childhood” the most critical phase. Writing in baby books (kept almost exclusively for firstborns!) made new middle-class mothers feel scientific but anxious, and therefore willing to pay for expert advice. Aurelia subscribed before Sylvia’s birth to Parents’ magazine.

 

Most fatefully for Sylvia, Parents’ in the 1930s mainstreamed in the U.S. the quite novel idea that the goal of education was for children to be happy. Aurelia, like her contemporaries, was raised “to be good,” meaning “to bow to authority.” “Happiness” was incidental; the root of “happy” means “good fortune,” and no parent can guarantee happiness. That churchmouse Aurelia was an ultra-modern mother, raising her children “to be happy” starting with feedings on demand and continuing along the lines set out by Friedrich Froebel, founder of “kindergarten.” He said children should have creative toys, sing and read and hear stories, be reasoned with, and follow their own interests.

A modern Baby Book, 2023 ($27).

 

But it seems that after the kindergarten stage Aurelia imposed happiness as a household norm. Sylvia learned to hate it when Aurelia kept repeating that she only wanted her children to be happy.

 

Sylvia Plath as a mother consulted the manual Baby and Child Care (1946), which moved the child-rearing goalposts: It said the goal was to make children feel loved. Sylvia was rarely happy and did not feel loved, and Aurelia, “good” by any lights but her daughter’s, met the same fate.

 

[1] Founded in 1922, Parents ceased publishing its print edition in 2022.

Aurelia Plath's Heart Attacks

"A heart attack laid her mother out two months ago," Ted Hughes wrote to Al Alvarez in November 1971. He meant Sylvia's mother Aurelia Plath. In September of that eventful Plath year Aurelia, age 65, had a heart attack. Today we call her ailment "broken heart syndrome" or takotsubo cardiomyopathy. Its trigger is sudden and grievous stress.

What happens: One heart ventricle balloons. "Takotsubo" means "octopus pot." No joke.

Aurelia described "long periods of excessively rapid and irregular heart episodes," pain and unconsciousness. The doctor prescribed bed rest 12 hours out of 24 and no stress. Neither was possible. The Bell Jar U.S. rollout in spring 1971 made Aurelia's daughter's novel the talk of the nation, and Aurelia felt ashamed as its Boston-area characters were matched to her neighbors and to Sylvia's dates, classmates and mentors, and herself.

Aurelia also made it her business to keep Sylvia's benefactress Olive Higgins Prouty, then almost 90 and unwell, from ever reading The Bell Jar, a task because Prouty lived until 1974. As of July 1971 forcibly retired from Boston University after 29 years, broken-hearted or not Aurelia had to work, commuting weekly to a community college on the Cape. On October 30, 1971, a month after the heart attack, she wrote:

Five days a week I walk the hill from the parking lot to the College, then the 43 steps up to my office (no lifts!)—slowly and with pauses. If, between classes, I have no student to counsel and I feel exhausted, I lock my door, take a pillow from my chair and stretch out on the rug on the floor to relax and gain enough energy to continue. I drive the 100 miles from Brewster to my dear home in Wellesley only about once a month now.

 

Aurelia wrote a friend the following year that "I did not expect to reach Christmas '71 alive." Olwyn Hughes, who published the U.S. Bell Jar over Aurelia's protests, wrote a letter feigning concern and suggesting yoga. Aurelia replied just as insincerely, blaming her heart attack on Sylvia's old boyfriend Gordon Lameyer's unpublished memoir in manuscript. By contrast The Bell Jar's portrayal of clueless mother figure "Mrs. Greenwood," read by thousands that year, cost Aurelia friends, social standing, and any sympathy for the mother of a suicide. The book probably factored into Sylvia's decision to die. It spoiled other lives too. Only the Hugheses got any money, and they were not the happier for it.

Takotsubo can kill, but most patients recover within weeks. Aurelia's next "pressure heart attack" was in 1987, after reading a draft of Linda Wagner-Martin's Plath biography. Aurelia objected to hints about Sylvia's birth as "three weeks early" and that she had been an absent parent. "You have hurt me deeply," Aurelia wrote Wagner-Martin. "You did a massive undertaking well, except for the portrayal of me." Whether this heartbreak was a medical event or a guilt trip is not clear.

Top Research Posts of 2022

August 16, 2022: First Known Photo of Otto Plath's parents

July 12: Four Generations of Pop-Up Weddings

June 7: Digitized video footage of Aurelia Plath, permission of Dr. Richard Larschan

April 12: Photo of Otto Plath's first wife and his in-laws

MOST POPULAR POST: January 25, "Otto Plath Was a Pacifist, Not"

PERSONAL FAVES: April 26, Aurelia Schober's college days reconstructed from day planners purchased from eBay; April 19, reviewed the 1986 French-language film of Letters Home, directed by Chantal Akerman

In 2022 this blog had 35 posts. Coming in 2023: "The Lost Lines of 'Eavesdropper,'" and much more.

In March 2022 I chaired a session for "Sylvia Plath Across the Century" and over the conference's two-day span heard many inspiring presentations. In April, I researched recordings and Linda Wagner-Martin's files at the Lilly Library; in July translated Sylvia's German essay into English. In late April, a first and a landmark: The Bloomsbury Handbook to Sylvia Plath was published, with my essay introducing Aurelia's shorthand annotations. In June, transcribed for Dr. Gary Leisig Aurelia's shorthand marginalia on Sylvia's published poems. In October, attended via Zoom definitive sessions of the Sylvia Plath Literary Festival in Hebden Bridge, U.K. In November, consulted with a British author on her draft of Mothers of the Mind, a forthcoming study of the mothers of Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, and Agatha Christie. A personal fave: Dr. Amanda Golden at the Woodberry Poetry Room discussing Sylvia Plath's use of pink paper (March 8, 2022; on YouTube here).

A thrilling year in Plath World! As always, English transcriptions of the shorthand on Sylvia Plath's papers can be downloaded from this site at Marquette.edu and viewed.

Four Generations of Rebel Weddings

I read somewhere that Sylvia Plath really stuck it to her mother by announcing, the day Aurelia got off the boat, that she and Ted Hughes (who was there) were getting married in three days: as if triumphantly quashing her mother's dream of a tame and crew-cut son-in-law. Didn't agree then, thinking Sylvia might have been too ecstatic to be mean, but I agree now because I found a pattern of defiant little weddings in her family. Four generations:

• Sylvia's "Grammy" and "Grampy," Aurelia Greenwood and Frank Schober, defying her father, got their marriage license July 3, 1905, the day the bride turned 18 and did not need parental permission. They wed as soon as legally possible: Monday, July 10 at Boston's Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
  
• Otto Plath in a Nevada courthouse really stuck it to his estranged and hated first wife with a quick-and-dirty divorce-mill divorce and by marrying Aurelia Schober on the spot the same day: January 4, 1932.
  
• Aurelia's daughter Sylvia Plath with Ted Hughes told her mother, arrived in London for a visit on June 13, 1956, that they were marrying June 16. Aurelia puked up her dinner that night. She was the couple's only guest at St. George the Martyr church in London. (Glimpse its inside, in the church's promotional video.)
  
• Fast-forward to 1979, when Sylvia's daughter Frieda Hughes, "now 'engaged,' will be 19 on April 1," Aurelia Plath wrote a penpal, as if "engaged" was her granddaughter's teenage daydream, and maybe forgetting her own mother married at 18. But Frieda at 19 married a farmhand. It was a rebellious marriage and short. Ted moaned in a letter to a friend that his daughter was divorced at 23.