Rosalind Constable is Why You Are Reading This: Time Magazine's "Ariel" Review

Screen grab from Constable's Warhol screen test, 1964

 

Perhaps you’ve read it:

 

On a dank day in February 1963, a pretty young mother of two children was found in a London flat with her head in the oven and the gas jets wide open. The dead woman was Sylvia Plath, 30, an American poet whose marriage to Ted Hughes, a British poet, had gone on the rocks not long before. . . .

 

But within a week of her death, intellectual London was hunched over copies of a strange and terrible poem she had written during her last sick slide toward suicide. Daddy was its title; its subject was her morbid love-hatred of her father; its style was as brutal as a truncheon. What is more, Daddy was merely the first jet of flame from a literary dragon who in the last months of her life breathed a burning river of bale across the literary landscape. . . . 

 

So begins the review of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel in Time magazine (June 10, 1966; on newsstands June 6). From this unsigned work, the first Ariel review for America’s general public, Plathdom as we know it unfolded. The national newsweekly’s paid circulation was then 3.3 million, newsstand sales 4 million, its worldwide readership 17 million, the 1966 equivalent of going viral; The New York Times and its Book Review had not one-tenth its reach. Time reprinted alongside of the Ariel review the poem “Daddy” in full, and family photos lent by Aurelia Plath.

 

The author was British-born Rosalind Constable (1907-1995), Time’s arts-and-culture correspondent from 1948 to 1967. A talented trendspotter, her reports on the avant-garde helped nudge the edgiest art and artists toward the middle. She wrote for Fortune, The New Yorker, Vogue, Life (Time’s sister publication), Esquire, New York, and Saturday Review. She was friends with Andy Warhol and championed Pop artists. From 1940 she scouted out new artists for gallery owner Betty Parsons, who launched the Abstract Expressionists, and Constable in the 1950s was rebel novelist Patricia Highsmith’s crush.

 

Time’s juicy Ariel review set a trend. Three generations of Plath criticism, highbrow and low, aped this review's narrative architecture, almost helplessly leading with Plath’s suicide followed by a capsule biography. Then, if only to slight it, critics referenced “Daddy,” a poem that in 2021 is just past being interpreted literally. In 1966 this review established “Daddy” as  Plath’s flagship poem and Plath’s father as the core Plath preoccupation -- until the year 2020 when Heather Clark’s Plath biography Red Comet suggested that regarding Otto Plath “myth has overshadowed truth.” This review made Plath’s head in the oven her life’s most basic fact.

 

Constable used advantageously her British sources, reporting that in Britain Ariel, published in March 1965, had sold 15,000 copies in ten months. The Time review also recycled from Britain into the international mainstream crippling buzzwords from a year’s worth of snooty British Ariel reviews: “sick,” “morbid,” “psychotic,” “confessional.” Constable had read The Bell Jar, not available in the U.S.; this enhanced the review's authority and snark. She found and interviewed a witness to Plath’s pathetic final weekend. In March 1966 she interviewed Aurelia Plath in Wellesley.

 

Aurelia had thought Constable’s phone voice “pleasant,” but in person Constable took no notes and asked questions so invasive that Aurelia would not answer. (1) The review is unsigned, and Constable, although she had an office at Time-Life, is not on Time’s masthead, but Aurelia named Constable in a letter and later wrote that only she could have told Constable that three-year-old Sylvia, sighting a bumblebee, would say “Bombus bimaculatus,” a statement the review styled as that of an attention-seeking Daddy’s girl.

 

Time magazine today is of interest only because of its past and because its cover photo makes its subject a celebrity. Plath quoted from Time in a letter dated 11 September 1950. The Bell Jar, set in 1953, described withered copies of Time and Life lying on a coffee table. Let another poet attest to the power and ubiquity of Time (founded in 1923) during its midcentury heyday. In 1956 Allen Ginsberg wrote, addressing America:  

 

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by Time Magazine?   

I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.

I read it every week.

Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore. 

 

Even Time’s covers, with their familiar red borders, made news. The April 8, 1966 cover stunned and riled the readership, baldly asking “Is God Dead?” Time once forged and ruined reputations. In one bruising review that sounds a bit envious, it made Sylvia Plath a household name. (2)

 

1. Aurelia Schober Plath to Olwyn Hughes, March 7, 1966: “The day after your letter arrived, I had a long-distance call from New York and heard Mrs. Rosalind Constable’s pleasant voice for the first time. She is coming to Wellesley this next weekend.” ASP to Ted Hughes, March 29, 1966: “Mrs. Rosalyn [sic] Constable, the reporter and writer of the article on Sylvia for LIFE INTERNATIONAL was here over a week ago . . .  She took no notes to speak of . . .” ASP to Ted Hughes, July 6, 1966: “Only two words from my tapes occur [in the review] and identify the author: Bombus bimaculatus -- and then they are used in such a way as to be utterly ridiculous.” ASP to Miriam Baggett, July 7, 1966: “Last March, when confronted by a reporter (an English woman), I refused to accept her invitation to develop a very disparaging remark .  . . She did not need to sign this brutal, malicious article in TIME; her fingerprint is there unmistakably . . . her revenge.” [ellipsis in original]. 

Read the original review, “The Blood Jet is Poetry,” Time, June 10, 1966, 118-120.

Otto Plath's Family Matrix

Ship's manifest listing immigrants Ernestine Plath and five of her six children, 1901

Here's rare information about Sylvia Plath's extended family on her father Otto's side. Otto Plath was the eldest of six children born to Ernestine and Theodor Plath, residents in the zone of  Prussia called Posen, ethnic Polish territory ruled by the German Empire from 1871 to 1919, when it became part of Poland. Otto had five siblings. From immigration papers, the U.S. Census, city directories, draft cards and other official documents we can learn about their lives. Of all her aunts and uncles, Sylvia met only her Aunt Frieda, briefly, on a 1959 trip to California. Here is the family:

 

Otto Emil Plath: April 13, 1885-Nov. 5, 1940. Ships' manifests show 15-year-old apprentice shoemaker/bootmaker Otto Plath, traveling in steerage, arriving in the U.S. on September 9, 1900, ahead of his father Theodor, a blacksmith who arrived in March 1901. In December 1901, through Canada, came Otto's mother Ernestine with Otto's five younger siblings, ages 3 to 13. They lived on an uncle's North Dakota homestead while Otto lived with Wisconsin relatives. In the 1905 Wisconsin state census, Otto is a boarder in Watertown, WI. Otto marries for the first time in Washington State in 1912. In 1920's federal census, Otto is a boarder in Berkeley, CA. In 1930, Otto, a boarder in Boston, for some reason shaved five years off his age. Otto Plath married Aurelia Schober in Carson City, Nevada, on January 4, 1932. Sylvia was born October 27, 1932. Otto died November 5, 1940, age 55, on the 22nd anniversary of his father Theodor's death.

 

Paul Plath: Dec. 20, 1886-Sept. 24, 1933. Paul in the 1910 census is named Paul "Platt" and is farming in Oregon with his father Theodor Platt (who'd entered the U.S. as "Plath"). Paul's brother Max "Platt" is a "hired man" for their neighbors. Wife and mother Ernestine is not listed in their household in 1910, and neither are the two Plath daughters, Martha and Frieda. Paul "Plath" in 1920 is a laborer in Washington State, and in 1930 a laborer boarding in Portland, Oregon. Paul could not have been born in December 1888 as papers sometimes claim, because his brother Max was born in February 1889. Paul in 1933 married his widowed landlady, Christina, a Russian 10 years his senior. Paul died later that same year, 1933, of pneumonia.

 

Max Theodor Plath: Feb. 15, 1889-Dec. 21, 1953. Max Plath took after his father and was a homesteader and mechanic, then became an inspector at a lumber mill. He moved frequently, living in 1910 with his father in Harney, Oregon, then shared a house with his mother until she was hospitalized in 1916. In 1920 Max lived in Saddle Butte, Oregon; in 1926 in Portland, in the early 1930s in Salem, in 1936 in Eugene, in 1946 in Cottage Grove. Max married Bertie in 1917, then Harriet in Stevenson, Washington, in 1935. The 1930 U.S. census said Max had two children, born in 1928 and 1930.

 

Hugo Fredericks Plath: Dec. 6, 1890-Aug. 17, 1974. Hugo kept the surname "Platt." Around 1911 he visited Canada, it seems on business. His draft card, signed in June 1917, says he both lived and worked at Standard Auto Supply in San Francisco. On that card Hugo asks exemption from the draft, saying his mother and father are his dependents. Hugo enlisted anyway on July 29, 1918, and served until December 23, 1918. The longest-lived of the siblings -- 83 years -- Hugo dwelt mostly in and around Los Angeles, at one point giving his occupation as "carpenter."

 

Martha Bertha Plath Johnson: Feb. 21, 1893-April 8, 1961. Theodor Plath in 1901 sent his wife Ernestine and his five younger children directly from Europe to Maza, North Dakota. As Martha's father and brothers moved farther west, Martha seems to have stayed in Maza, and in 1910 at age 17 works as a "servant" for family there. At 19 Martha marries the town postmaster. She has two daughters, stays in Maza, and is buried, alongside her husband, near what is left of that town.

 

Frieda A. Plath Heinrichs: Mar. 15, 1896-Dec. 19, 1970. In the 1910 census, Frieda, age 13, is not living with her parents but rather is listed as "niece" of the Stapel family in Green Lake County, Wisconsin. Mrs. Stapel was Theodor Plath's sister. Frieda graduated from a Chicago nursing school. She visited her mother Ernestine in the Oregon state mental hospital in summer 1919; Ernestine died there September 28. In 1930 Frieda is a nurse in San Francisco, and by 1935 is married to physician Walter J. Heinrichs. They live in and around Los Angeles. In Letters Home, Aurelia S. Plath incorrectly gives Frieda Heinrichs' death date as 1966. California voter-registration rolls show both Walter and Frieda registered in 1966, but Frieda alone in 1968.

 

The seven Nix brothers in Sylvia Plath's children's book The It-Doesn't-Matter-Suit are named for her paternal relatives. The fictional seven are named Paul, Emil, Otto, Walter (the name of Sylvia's uncle by marriage), Hugo, Johann (the name of Sylvia's paternal great-grandfather), and the central character, Max. Written in 1959, the book was first published in 1996.

 

For sources or to make corrections, please contact me. Official papers and books aren't always right.

 

Theodor Plath lists his minor children on his naturalization papers, filed in North Dakota; Otto at age 22 is not a minor.

 

Sylvia Plath's Mad Grandmother's Ashes

One of 3500 cans of ashes. Photo by "Kim" at Findagrave.com.

Sylvia Plath's paternal grandmother Ernestine Kottke Plath died at the Oregon State Hospital (formerly "Insane Asylum") in 1919, and her ashes in a canister sat in the hospital's basement for a hundred years with 3500 other such canisters holding the ashes of state-hospital patients. This forgotten "Library of Dust" was the subject of a 2011 documentary film of that name, and the subject of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning newspaper editorial published in Oregon in 2005.

When patients' death certificates became available, an Oregon-based contributor to the site Findagrave.com volunteered to locate living relatives willing to receive the ashes. One of the certificates was for Ernestine Kottke Plath. The researcher, Phyllis Porter Zegers, learned that Ernestine's granddaughter Sylvia Plath became a poet and killed herself, but Zegers focused on finding Ernestine's living descendants.

A family member claimed Ernestine's ashes, finally, in September 2020. It's like Lady Lazarus risen.

[View Ernestine Plath's hospital photo, taken c. 1916, discovered in 2024.]

Sylvia Plath's father Otto Plath was Ernestine's eldest child. While his mother lived, Otto made himself scarce, leaving home for the U.S. at age 15 and then, when his parents and siblings came to the U.S., attending schools far away from them. Aurelia Plath later wrote that Otto stayed bitter about Ernestine's bad mothering. Ernestine's husband Theodor Plath committed Ernestine to the asylum in Salem, Oregon, in 1916. Zeger wrote that according to hospital records Ernestine was admitted suffering from overwork and a leg ulcer, had two "attacks" of something, and dementia. After three years in the crowded mental hospital, Ernestine died there of tuberculosis.

Sylvia Plath knew little or nothing about Ernestine. Aurelia kept secret from Sylvia her Aunt Frieda's information about Ernestine's mental illness. But we carry our ancestors' imprint always, in ways we might not know. 

Theodor Plath's Last Will and Testament

Theodor Plath, Sylvia Plath's paternal grandfather, died on Nov. 5, 1918. He had filed his will (No. 2876) in Clark County, Washington State, on May 26, 1918. It's worth reading, and there's a surprise inside:

IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN! I, Theodor Plath, being of sound and disposing mind and memory, and not acting under the fraud, duress or influence of any person or persons, make this will.

I request that all my just debts against my estate including my funeral expenses and the expenses of my last sickness be promptly paid.

I give to my beloved wife Earnestine $100.00.

I give to my son Otto $1.00.

I give to my son Paul $1.00.

I give to my son Max $1.00.

I give to my son Hugo $1.00.

I give to my daughter Martha $1.00.

All the rest and residue of my property which I may own, die possessed of, or have a right to dispose of at my death I give and devise to my daughter Frieda.

I hereby appoint my son Max executor of this last will and request that no bonds be required of him, as such, by any Court or Judge.

Theodor Plath (SEAL)

Signed and sealed by Theodor Plath, testator, and by him declared to be his last will in our presence, who have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses in his presence and in the presence of each other at his request, at Oregon City, Oregon, this 26th day of May 1918.

Witnesses: Maud Davis (of Oregon City), Annie Stribley (of Portland, OR). [1]

Five days before filing this will, on May 21, 1918, Theodor Plath had filed at the Vancouver [WA] Land Office a Homestead Act claim (aka "patent") to 120 acres in Clark County, Washington, near Salmon Creek, a bit north of Portland, Oregon. [2] As Homestead Act land it was free, although the owner was given a certain number of years to improve it. U.S. homesteading, mostly on formerly Indian lands, was available from 1862 to 1976. Below, in the orange square within the square, is Theodor Plath's 1918 property:

and, from the Bureau of Land Management, Theodor's title or "patent" on that land, dated 5/21/1918. Of course the land has been bought and sold since then:

Bequeathing children $1.00 was not always a "disinheritance" or insult. Were that the case, Theodor probably wouldn't have named his son Max as his will's executor. Theodor might have distributed his assets already, and the will was a formality. Or the $1.00 acknowledged that the offspring were self-supporting adults, or proved that the testator was sound enough of mind to list all family members and give them a token. Frieda Plath, the youngest, in 1918 was 21 or 22 years old and in a Chicago nursing school. Sylvia met her Aunt Frieda in 1959 and liked her. Ernestine Plath, Sylvia's paternal grandmother, in 1918 was in an Oregon mental hospital and survived Theodor by less than one year.

According to a March 1980 letter from Aurelia Plath to Mary Ann Montgomery, Otto Plath owned property in San Francisco that he sold or otherwise tended to while the Plaths were on their honeymoon. Any record has yet to be found.

[1] Washington State Archives (Olympia, Washington); Probate Place: Clark, Washington, pp. 112-113.

[2] https://glorecords.blm.gov/details/patent/default.aspx?accession=630759&docClass=SER&sid=2frdqc0a.3b2

Otto Plath and Lydia Bartz Plath, Voter Registration Rolls, 1914

Let's retire the fiction that Otto Plath and first wife Lydia Clara Bartz Plath, married in Washington State in August 1912, were together for three weeks only, because records continue to show it was closer to three years. In 1914 Otto was teaching in Berkeley, California, living with Lydia, and both were registered to vote -- as Progressives. Here's their voter-registration page. [Click the image to enlarge.]

Wait, but it's 1914, so women in the U.S. can't vote!?! In California they could and did.

Otto and Lydia are still at that address in 1915 as she enrolled in UC-Berkeley's summer school.

Source: California State Library; Sacramento, California; Great Register of Voters, 1900-1968.

Aurelia in Drag

"When students of the Boston College of Practical Arts and Letters gave a play recently, Miss Aurelia Schober was the leading man," says the caption.

Discovered in the obscure Eustis [FL, near Orlando] Daily Lake Region newspaper, March 4, 1926, page 8: a unique photo of college girl Aurelia Schober in faraway Boston, Massachusetts, outfitted as a man for her role in her college's German Club play. At the all-female Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters (CPAL) German-Club theatricals, Aurelia was often (always?) cast as a man, being tall and talented. [See an earlier, related post noting her acting.]

The image must have been quite striking for an editor in Eustis, population then 2800, to clip from its original background and print.

Boston University's College of Arts and Letters' well-staffed and industrious Press Club regularly sent press releases with college news to numerous papers. Occasionally the Club's copy or photos were published in the Boston Herald, Boston Traveler, Boston Globe, Boston Evening Transcript. Photos were expensive to print and send, so how did this get to Florida? We do know that CPAL enrolled at least one student from Florida.

Aurelia's stage career extended beyond her college graduation in 1928 to a role (as a female) at Brookline High School in 1930, a performance Aurelia remembered impressed a theatrical agent in the audience.

The Two Aurelias in San Remo, Italy

Aurelia Frances Schober was born in Boston on April 26, 1906 to Aurelia and Francis Schober, both natives of Austria. On February 8, 1909 in Boston, Francis Schober completed his U.S. Petition for Naturalization form: citizenship papers found copied in the Plath archives. Francis filled in its blanks:

My wife’s name is Aurelia. She was born in Vienna, Austria, and now resides at San Remo, Italy. I have one child, and the name, date and place of birth, and place of residence of said children is as follows: Aurelia F., April 26, 1906  Boston Mass.  San Remo, Italy. 

 

What? [Click the image to enlarge.] In February 1909 Aurelia F. Schober is not yet three years old, but away “residing” with her mother on the Italian Riviera? This is never mentioned again in any archives.

 

Located between Genoa and Monte Carlo, San Remo was and still is a residence and retreat for Europe’s wealthy and cultured. Empress Maria Alexandrovna after a visit in 1874 donated the now famous San Remo seaside promenade. Alfred Nobel’s former home there is a museum now. 

 

Francis Schober wrote “San Remo” on this form twice and clearly, so it is unlikely to be an error. 

A ship’s manifest for the Kaiser Wilhelm II, sailing from Bremen on May 18, 1909 and docking at Ellis Island May 26, 1909 yielded, on Lines 13 and 14, two Aurelia Schobers, the younger represented by ditto marks and the designation “ch.” For the adult Aurelia, the clerk scrawled: “U.S.A. Citizen” and “husb U.S.C [citizen].” [1] (By default, wives then took their husband’s nationality.) Aurelia Senior had left the U.S. an alien but returned a citizen, or a soon-to-be one. Francis's full citizenship was granted by the court on July 10, 1909. A handwritten note on Francis's Oath of Allegiance says as of July 6 his new address is 2049 Columbus Avenue, Boston.

 

So mother and daughter Schober were in May 1909 returning from at least four months overseas. If too young to recall that trip, did Aurelia Plath never hear her parents reminisce? Because Francis had a San Remo link too.

 

According to the ship's manifest, when Francis (as “Francois”) Schober left Europe for the U.S. in 1902, boarding the ship Vancouver in Naples [his Petition for Naturalization, dated 1909, says "Genoa"] he listed his last job as “butler” in San Remo. [2] Why in 1909 were his wife, age 21, and small daughter “residing” there? If vacationing, wouldn't their residence be Boston? Was Aurelia Senior “wintering” with relatives she had last seen in Vienna in 1904, bringing her toddler namesake? Did she find a job there? (San Remo's posh Casino Municipale opened in 1905.) Had Francis proudly sent his wife and daughter on a fine vacation? Perhaps they were not in San Remo but somewhere else. A mystery half-solved. 

Notes

[1] Year: 1909; Arrival: New York, New York, USA; Microfilm Serial: T715, 1897-1957; Line: 14; Page Number: 28. Ancestry.com. New York, Passenger and Crew Lists (including Castle Garden and Ellis Island), 1820-1957 (database on-line). Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2010.

[2] The National Archives at Washington, D.C.; Washington, D.C.; Series Title: Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at Boston, Massachusetts, 1891-1943; NAI Number: 4319742; Record Group Title: Records of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, 1787-2004; Record Group Number: 85; Series Number: T843; NARA Roll Number: 052. [Francois Schober is on line 9.]