Aurelia Plath's Childhood

1 Roslyn Place, Jamaica Plain, built 1910. Aurelia wrote that family visits to her uncle here were among "the sweeteners of my childhood."

Only two sources about Aurelia Plath's childhood presently exist: Aurelia's own narrative in Letters Home and Beth Hinchliffe's unpublished Plath biography for which Aurelia was a primary source. The latter is painful reading, yet rings true:

. . . the family was disciplined into formal Germanic obedience, an almost martyr-like acceptance of hard work and self-deprivation . . . 

. . . acquiescent exterior . . . nursing the old grievances, remembering the persecutions and loneliness, seeing the world in terms of black and white and expecting the worst . . .  

Aurelia in other interviews and letters says nothing about her childhood and little about her parents, with whom she lived for forty years. Unless there is more in the Plath Family archive soon to open at Beinecke Library we must say Aurelia withheld her childhood for a reason.

The Letters Home preface says Aurelia's immigrant parents, the Schobers, headed by her father Frank, sent Aurelia to school speaking only German. Did he have no inkling she'd be treated like a freak? Frank spoke English. If he wasn't ignorant, what was he thinking? "From that time on," Aurelia wrote, "we always spoke English at home." 

Given English, Aurelia bloomed at school, but home was no picnic. In Letters Home Aurelia said she had no playmates, not saying her parents shut out the neighbors. In her book's one full childhood scene Aurelia's father spanks her. He then begs her forgiveness. I think the latter is whitewash: Hidebound patriarchs of a century ago did not apologize to five-year-olds. The Hinchliffe manuscript says Aurelia hid her anger and never forgot and was always slow to forgive. 

Frank and Aurelia Greenwood Schober were married ten months when daughter Aurelia Frances was born in 1906. Being named for both parents suggests she was conceived and born to prove a point. Baby Aurelia's mother, eighteen, had married without her wife-beating father's permission. Her sisters spited their father too: One had a baby at fifteen and the other married an African-American. Burdened with a child, the Schobers waited five years to have another. They never prospered -- Letters Home styles Frank, who was a waiter, as a "cost accountant" -- and lived with widowed Aurelia and their grandchildren. Spite begat spite: After her mother died in 1956, Aurelia ejected her father from her house and went to Europe where Sylvia was surprised to see her careworn mother suddenly as effervescent as a girl.

Hinchliffe's manuscript describes the Schober household as insular and humorless, so it is no wonder that Aurelia escaped into the alternate reality of books, preferring self-help and stories of survival. In summer 1918 Aurelia's family moved from Jamaica Plain to a remote landspit with the ocean front and back. We know why: In December 1917 the wartime U.S. declared Austro-Hungarians like the Schobers "enemy aliens" just like Germans. That the Schobers were citizens did not matter: The local "gang" of kids called Aurelia "spy-face" and pushed her off the schoolbus, and Sylvia remembered hearing from her mother that the kids threw stones. 

So we know approximately how much Letters Home sanitized Aurelia's childhood. If there isn't any text, maybe the archive's family photos will open a new route into her childhood and biography.

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).

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 research 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