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).

What a Hot Bath Won't Cure

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Sylvia Plath's first act of artistry was to create with colored tiles, on the family's living-room rug, an outline of the Taj Mahal resembling the image woven into the family bath mat. Otto so liked toddler Sylvia's artwork that weeks passed before he allowed his wife Aurelia to vacuum. In Letters Home, Aurelia described Otto fawning over what Aurelia critiqued as Sylvia's "art without perspective, of course"-- Sylvia was only two years old! -- signaling unfinished business of a bitter sort. It seems Otto admired his daughter's artwork while giving his three-dimensional wife nothing but orders.

Most likely the Plaths did not imagine their daughter's face printed on a bath mat. Nor would they have a sense of humor about it.

I think Aurelia must have chosen a Taj Mahal bathmat because that is what new wives do, or because she was the artsy one of the couple, or bought it with hope or irony because the Taj is a monument to a happy marriage. Or secretly she chose it -- my favorite explanation -- because her former boyfriend Karl, an engineer, her true love, had rhapsodized to her about the Taj's flawless foundational engineering. 

Otto Plath too had his ideals. One was to sire superior children. For such a parent it is never too soon to show kids the wonders of the world, so maybe he bought the Taj Mahal bath mat -- and for such a parent it is never too soon for kids to perform like superior kids.

Not quite believing 1930s Taj Mahal bath mats ever existed, I looked in vain online for a vintage example. Instead, I found  Sylvia Plath towels and yoga blankets (sold out!; but you can get a Ted Hughes yoga mat). Or you can wear or tote or drink beverages from items with stylized versions of Sylvia's image, or photographic images fondly imagined to be Sylvia, such as the barefoot woman in slacks absorbed in reading or Olwyn Hughes, as in the battery chargers pictured.

 

Plath is far from being the only celebrity blasphemed with a bath mat. You can step buck-naked and sopping wet onto the face of Jesus or Emily Dickinson. You can James Dean your toilet; Eminem the whole bathroom; or buy a Harriet Beecher Stowe shower curtain, or a pretty Beecher Stowe yoga mat that I rather like. Is your own goal fame and fortune? Behold your fate.

About Their Marriage Certificate

Click to enlarge.

Otto Plath got a quickie divorce and Otto and Aurelia married January 4, 1932. In Carson City, Nevada. So what's new? A closer look at the marriage certificate. Both claimed they lived in Reno, but courts winked at lies from out-of-staters as long as they brought money for lawyers, legal fees, and so on. During the Great Depression, Nevada only thrived.

And Otto's divorce lawyer witnessed the wedding. E.E. Roberts happened also to be the mayor of Reno. The judge who had just decreed Otto's divorce married the couple. And the certificate is time-stamped: 1:32 p.m.

Because lawyers don't stay around unless they're paid, and because divorce mills waste no time, I'm thinking the Plaths' civil ceremony immediately followed the divorce. Did Aurelia stand by as Otto divorced his first wife by proxy? (A male lawyer served as the proxy and was paid.) Or did Otto trot down the courthouse steps in the January cold to the car -- Esther Greenwood said her just-married parents got into a car -- and say "Hurry up, I'm divorced, the judge is waiting"? Doubtful.

One indicator says they went after the ceremony to Lake Tahoe, then San Francisco; Otto had to sell a piece of land he owned there. If they went by car, Aurelia's mother drove. Having Mother on a honeymoon fries our minds, but the original "wedding journey" was a dutiful round of visits to relatives and friends unable to attend the wedding, and having parents along was not strange. Otto had relatives in Chicago and Reno, Aurelia in St. Louis and Lincoln, Nebraska. These were along the trio's cross-country route. Serendipitous.

More here about their cross-country trip from Boston by car, and Otto's strategic divorce.

How Otto Plath Divorced His First Wife Without Telling Her

Where Otto Plath was divorced and Otto and Aurelia were married, Ormsby County Courthouse. Flickr.com

Daylight was at its briefest, but December of 1931 was mild, more rainy than snowy, and late that month three Bostonians headed west to Reno, Nevada, “Sin City,” just under 3000 miles away. They were a married man of 46, Otto Plath; his 25-year-old fiancée Aurelia Schober; and her mother Aurelia Greenwood Schober, 44, who drove the car.

Otto Plath sought a quick divorce from a wife he hadn’t seen for years and didn’t care to hear from. Socialites and movie stars had been shedding spouses in Reno since a scandal in 1906 made it famous. It so happened that in 1931, the year Otto and Aurelia were ready to marry, Nevada cut its three-month residency requirement for divorce seekers to an unheard-of six weeks. That was headline news, and the year’s B-movies such as Peach O’Reno and The Road to Reno and Night Life in Reno showed how it was done.

Bound by a deadline and a budget, the three could not stay six weeks, but Otto—who was rarely so lucky—had relatives in Reno he had visited before. Those relatives could testify almost honestly that Otto on visits had spent six weeks there in aggregate, or fib that he had been their guest since November. Someone arranged—amazingly—to hire as Otto’s divorce lawyer Reno’s mayor, E. E. Roberts, a colorful public servant who lost more elections than he won, but not for lack of trying.

Nevada divorces worked like this: You or your spouse filed papers charging adultery or cruelty or such, and on your court date, spouse present or not, your lawyer told the judge the charges were true. Judges ignored lies that were not too obvious. But Otto did not have to file any charges, so his wife was never served with papers or notified. Along with Nevada’s six-week law, there was in 1931 a brand-new grounds for divorce, no charges needed: non-cohabitation for five years or more. Otto and his first wife Lydia had lived apart for fifteen years. In the courtroom another attorney simply stood in for her and agreed that the marriage was over.

By chance or by stratagem, the presiding judge was Clark J. Guild, chief proponent of Nevada’s non-cohabitation rule and Mayor Roberts’ crony. Otto’s divorce decree says “Ormsby County” and therefore was granted in Carson City, population 1,600, rather than glitzy Reno, of well-deserved ill fame, in the county next door.

It was Monday, January 4, 1932. No waiting, no blood tests required: Otto Plath and Aurelia Schober were married at the same courthouse that same day. We don’t know what they paid for the divorce, but the cheapest price for a lawyer plus the defendant’s lawyer plus court costs was $150. The wedding announcement sent out later says they married in Winthrop, Massachusetts.

The required legal notice was published only in Nevada, so Lydia Plath in Wisconsin learned of her divorce another way.

Sources: Nevada court costs in 1931: Mella Harmon, M.A. thesis, University of Nevada-Reno, 1998; Winter weather 1931-32; Wikimedia photo via Flickr used under CC by 2.0 license; wedding announcement, Smith College Plath archives; Aurelia S. Plath, preface to Letters Home; Clark J. Guild, Memoirs of Career (1971), University of Nevada Oral History Program; Renodivorcehistory.org. Ormsby County was absorbed into Carson City in 1969.

Errors of Fact in Aurelia's "Letters Home" Introduction

-Aurelia Frances Schober (later Plath) was born and lived her "early childhood" not in Winthrop, Massachusetts, but the working-class neighborhood of Boston called Jamaica Plain. Irish families were settled in Jamaica Plan when Aurelia was born in 1906; Italians began congregating there in 1910. Her family did not move to seaside Winthrop until 1918, when Aurelia would have been 11 or 12, well past early childhood. 

-It was at the close of Aurelia Schober's sophomore year, 1926, when a German-speaking, highly cultured guest professor at MIT hired her as his secretary. Letters Home says this happened "at the close of my junior year (1927)," but his diaries first mention "Miss A. Schober" in August 1926. He was 43, she 20. Aurelia gives broad hints but does not actually name Dr. Karl Terzaghi, or admit that the pair fell in love and dated for two years. Aurelia knew well, from her own notes, that they met in 1926. But placing their first meeting in 1927 makes Aurelia 21 years old instead of 20, shielding Karl, 50 years after the fact, from any jeers about cradle-robbing, and perhaps shielding herself from any side-eye about her naivete

-Otto Plath was born in April 1885 in the "country town of Grabow" in Prussia, but was still an infant when his parents moved 150 miles northwest to Budzyn, where Otto actually "grew up." Otto's five younger siblings were all born in Budzyn, beginning with Paul in December 1886. When Otto arrived in the U.S. he listed his last residence as Budzyn. (8)

-Otto Plath was 15 years old, not 16, when he arrived in the United States on September 9, 1900, according to the ship's manifest. 

-"[w]hen his father, years after his son's arrival here, came to the United States": Correctly, Otto's father Theodor Plath arrived in the U.S. less than a year after Otto did, in March 1901.

-Otto "spoke English without a trace of foreign accent" - those who had met him, interviewed in the 1970s by Harriet Rosenstein, said Otto spoke English with a German accent. (9)

-Frieda Plath Heinrichs, Otto's youngest sister, did not die in 1966 but in 1970. She and her husband's Walter's names appear together in California voter registration rolls until 1968, when Frieda's becomes the only name listed. Walter died May 26, 1967.

-A cost accountant figures out how much money a firm is really spending to put out its product. Aurelia's father Francis Schober was never a "cost accountant" for Boston's Dorothy Muriel bakery company. Rather, in the 1930s the former hotel headwaiter and maitre d' was listed as "manager" of dining rooms; in 1938 it's specifically a Dorothy Muriel bakery-tearoom on Tremont Street, one of a chain of about 50 local Dorothy Muriels. The Boston city directories for the 1940s list a Herman F. Schober, who was a relative, employed as a "cost accountant" for Measurement Engineering and the American Meter Company. Herman F. Schober was born in Boston in 1893, and between 1926 and 1940 the city directory gave his occupation as "foreman." 

Maybe Francis Schober counted the day's proceeds at his own Dorothy Muriel location, but he was never a "cost accountant" for Dorothy Muriel, which had its factory and offices in Allston. (28)

Take Note

-Aurelia Plath is careful to say her two siblings grew up in a matriarchy, but that she as the eldest was the only one of Schobers' children brought up in the European (patriarchal authoritarian) style. The Introduction says: "[m]y father made the important decisions during my childhood and early girlhood" (3) and Aurelia says that it did not occur to her, in her late teens, to argue when her father decreed she would attend either secretarial college or no college.

The Letters Home edition referred to is a hardbacked first edition, 1975.