Warren

We don't know Warren Plath very well. After his sister Sylvia's death he refused interviews, even those proposed by his own daughters. At Aurelia's memorial service he spoke not at all, thinking someone might capitalize on whatever he said. Warren was within his rights. He was the one who had to see his dead sister in her coffin and face her husband, who had treated her badly.

We've been so blinded by Sylvia that we forgot her brother Warren, raised alongside of Sylvia and cared for just as much.

From what Aurelia Plath wrote we learn that Warren could be irritable and hated to be told what to do; rather, one should ask him to do things. After learning from his wonderfully detailed obituary that teenage Warren had been a "candy striper" (hospital volunteer), I saw that when in summer 1953 Aurelia suggested Sylvia try the same, she was holding up Warren as a model, and most likely that happened more than once.

Sylvia was in New York at Mademoiselle and couldn't attend Warren's June graduation from Phillips Exeter. But the Boston Globe preserved it all (15 June 1953):

Which one is the little angel?

Warren J. Plath, son of Mrs. Aurelia S. Plath of Wellesley, won the Faculty Prize for General Excellence awarded to the senior "who is recognized on the grounds of scholarship and general character as holding the first rank." Among the Greater Boston boys who won college scholarships were: Harvard National Scholarship, Warren J. Plath of Wellesley; Harvard Competitive Prize Scholarship, Earl J. Silbert of Brookline; Teschemacher Scholarship to Harvard, Warren J. Plath of Wellesley. . .

After those awards, Warren graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1957 and got his Ph.D. at Harvard, too, although in 1959 when Sylvia whined to her psychiatrist that Warren was at Harvard but she was not, his path through grad school had been interrupted by a Fulbright year at the University of Bonn, where he learned to speak German.

Sylvia's original "rival," Warren was perceived as such even as their mother was nursing him. To my surprise I realized that the authentic part of Sylvia's memoir "Ocean 1212-W" was the toddler narrator's violent jealousy and hatred of the new baby about to displace her as the center of her family's attention. That mattered an awful lot to her, although it happens to eldest children every day. The memoir says she sought from the ocean a sign of her "specialness." In real life the ocean did not give one. But her memoir delivers to her a wooden carving of a "sacred baboon" which to me sounds rather comical.

Displaced she was. The story "Among the Bumblebees," which Sylvia wrote in college, describes her family life after Warren was born. "Warren" in the story, as in life, was blond and angel-faced. (Sylvia, frankly, was not as cute.) At a family supper, "Alice," age five or six, feeling jealous, quietly kicks "Warren" in the shins, making him cry. Then:

 

"Good lord, doesn't he do anything but cry?" Alice's father scowled, lifting his head, and making a scornful mouth. Alice glared at Warren in safe contempt.

"He is tired," her mother said, with a hurt, reproving look at Alice. Bending over the table, she stroked Warren's yellow hair. "He hasn't been well, poor baby. You know that." . . . The light made a luminous halo of his soft hair. Mother murmured little crooning noises to quiet him and said, "There, there, angel, it is all right now. It is all right."

 

With elaborate and passive-aggressive cooing and care, Mother takes Warren upstairs and Alice bonds with her father, who saw her kick her brother and tacitly approved; they have both felt deprived of the mother's attention. [1] This "pacifist" household loaded Sylvia Plath's emotional toolbox with propensities to punish, control, compete, and claim the center of attention. We know little about young Warren's emotions except that he had a short fuse and rigid habits. He grew up to be a computer genius.

Warren was smarter than Sylvia, proven at age 2-1/2 when he bested her storytelling with his own. In college the memory still stung; she wrote about it. [2] Aurelia Plath in her Letters Home preface soft-pedals her children's sibling rivalry, saying only “[t]here were many times when each made the other miserable; and Sylvia, as the older, was the more dominant and the more culpable.” That the conflict-avoidant Aurelia even mentioned their conflict means it was much worse than she said. Sylvia's Dr. Beuscher, paraphrasing Sylvia's case notes to a biographer, said that Sylvia's teasing "went beyond normal." Picking on or even hitting a new sibling is normal. But Sylvia had tried to choke Warren and stuff cloth down his throat. [3] No surprise, then, that Aurelia wrote of 1938-39, "Warren develops many allergies, food, grasses, pollen, etc. He has two serious bouts with bronchial pneumonia and an asthmatic condition develops." [4] Warren had asthma attacks well into his teens.

The siblings sometimes played nicely, but where did Sylvia learn to ridicule and kick shins and bite people, and to cut her brother's neck with an ice skate, and think to strangle him? She hadn't yet seen any wartime movie newsreels. Television did not exist. I hate to think the model for such behavior was her family. We will never know how Warren recalled Sylvia's teasing, which persisted until he grew taller than she.

Eventually Sylvia came to love and confide in her brother because as well as being taller he had mastered fields of knowledge not her own. Warren was a dutiful son who kindly helped Aurelia edit Letters Home and when he had his own family saw his mother three times a year. He was no fan of the older Aurelia. When she sent Warren letters he had his wife Margaret answer them.

[1] On a carbon copy of this story kept in the Plath archive at Smith College, Aurelia Plath wrote in Gregg shorthand "realistic."

[2] Composition written in German for a Smith College German course, 1955; read it in English here.

[3] Audio recording and written notes c. 1970 by Harriet Rosenstein of Ruth Beuscher reading case notes from a February 1959 session with Sylvia Plath, Emory.

[4] "Chronology" document by Aurelia Plath, Smith College Special Collections.

"Plath" Versus "Platt": Her Real Last Name

Otto Plath's Ellis Island entry record, September 1900

A couple of biographers say Sylvia Plath's family name is really "Platt," and they did not make that up; they can point to two federal documents, one calling Sylvia's future father "Otto Platt" (above), and the 1910 U.S. census calling her grandfather "Theodor Platt." Yet dozens of other documents, U.S. and German, including signatures, say "Plath" back to 1826. The Plaths knew their own name. "Platt" was a clerical error, common in U.S. official papers. But then . . .

"Plath" was not a rare name. Wisconsin was crawling with Plaths, unrelated, when Sylvia's father started college there. "Plath" or "Platt," meaning "flat" or "low," indicates origins in northern Germany's lowlands and wetlands (see the red in the map, its original here). Plath versus Platt? The German language's historic consonant and vowel shifts did not reach the north, so the north's Low German dialect has the "th" that High German famously does not except for words borrowed from Greek such as Bibliothek and Mathematik, and names such as Theodor or Goethe. It's "t" with a little puff of air.

Now, the exception: The Plath who became a Platt after threatening to kill folks he said owed him money. [1]

January 1914

What we know of Otto's youngest brother Hugo Friedrich Plath suggests one who had big plans. Born in 1890, fourth of six children, Hugo did not want to farm in Oregon with his father and brothers Paul and Max. In 1911, age twenty, Hugo returned to the U.S. from Canada where he'd tried to cash in on a building boom. At the border he claimed to have no relatives [2] and then moved restlessly between Oregon and Washington state. Three years later Hugo threatened -- idiotically, in writing -- to kill a father and daughter. Hugo in 1917 claimed exemption from the draft because his parents were his dependents. [3] They probably weren't; his mother was in a public mental hospital. I wondered if Hugo was mentally ill, but the army found him sane enough to enlist him in July 1918. In December 1918 he was discharged with a 12.5 percent disability for an injured eye. [4]

Hugo "Platt" married briefly and divorced. [5] (The Plaths, for their era, had a high divorce rate: Otto, 1; Max, 3; Hugo, 1, and younger sister Frieda Plath married a divorced M.D. whose wife had alleged "extreme cruelty"). [6] Hugo maybe alternated between "Plath" and "Platt" to dodge the warrant and any demands for alimony. Hugo "Platt" in the 1940 census was jobless after working on a WPA highway project. By 1942 he had settled in a Long Beach, California, trailer park, naming a lawyer as his next of kin. [7] In the 1950 census "Platt" lives in his trailer, unable to work. He died in 1974, age eighty-three, outliving all his siblings.

The army recorded two names for him (see card below). [8] The State of California issued two death records, one for Hugo "Platt" [9] and one for Hugo "Plath."

[1] Oregon Daily Journal [Portland], 18 January 1914, p. 8.

[2] "Plath, Hugo F., Contractor," U.S. Border Crossings, Port of Eastport, Idaho, August 1911.

[3] Plath, Hugo Friedrich, WWI draft registration card, 5 June 1917.

[4] Oregon, U.S., State Military Records 1846-1977, WWI Army Statement of Service Cards 1917-1919, image 25794.

[5] The Recorder [San Francisco] 21 January 1924; 11 February 1925. Her name was Edith.

[6] The Recorder [San Francisco], 21 September 1931, p. 1.

[7] Platt, Hugo F., WWII draft registration card, 1942.

[8] U.S. Veterans Administration Master Index, 1917-1940.

[9] California death certificate #36677.

Flying Over Baghdad With Sylvia Plath

U.S. Army Sergeant Paul David Adkins packed poetry books for his tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. While nighttime artillery shook his container housing unit, he read by flashlight The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath and other poets "who pulled me from the fire, fed me bread and wine in the dark, warm corners of their books." Adkins responded to each poet with a poem of his own, collected and published by LitRiot Press as Flying Over Baghdad with Sylvia Plath.

I could not resist that title!

Adkins (B.A. history, M.F.A. poetry; jobless, he joined the army; today, he teaches) was my grad-school classmate, now the author of six poetry books and chapbooks, the latest, Sound and Fury, giving voice to the victims of Attica's prison rebellion. Like Plath's his poems irradiate their subjects down to their subatomic particles, and readers feel it. Paul and I recently met again after 30 years. In this video (6:33) he reads from Flying Over Baghdad a poem inspired by Adrienne Rich's poem about Ethel Rosenberg and the deadly nature of the powers that be.

Paul says: "You are who you read."

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.

How Much Money Aurelia Got For Sylvia's Letters

It was such a big event in Aurelia's life I had to pursue the question although told the answer was confidential, none of my business, they didn't know or they wouldn't say.

Aurelia Plath was paid $190,000 for her daughter Sylvia's letters and other items now in the Sylvia Plath mss. at the Lilly Library at Indiana University at Bloomington.

The sale, through a dealer, was completed in March 1977.

$190,000 in 1977 is worth in 2024 either $985,150 or $1,101,400. In either case, a cool million.

Worth it, for Sylvia's letters home, early short stories, diaries, paintings, and memorabilia: more than 3,000 items. Aurelia opened the Lilly collection to the public having decided what the public should see. I think she removed Sylvia's "lost" short stories "The Trouble-Making Mother" and "The Mummy." But let's admire Aurelia's amazing foresight in amassing and preserving for 45 years this dazzling literary trove and making it available. Many a scholar has made money from it.

Aurelia's writings and correspondence never mention meeting an appraiser or dealer, or negotiations over the price and dealer's fee.

Aurelia -- in 1977, age 70 -- for tax reasons divided the $190,000 into 10 annual payments. [1]

I heard more than once that the dealer held back some items and sold them.

Aurelia at a later time donated further Plath materials to the Lilly Library's Sylvia Plath archive.

[1] In 1977 a single filer with a taxable income of $19,000 (in 2024 money, $100,000) was taxed at 34 percent. $190,000 would have been taxed at 70 percent. TaxFoundation.org.

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.

Poems About Aurelia Plath

Perseus isn't finished with Medusa until he turns his mother's suitor into stone.

"Sappho" by Beth Hinchliffe. America magazine, 29 June 2023. This poem was a runner-up in the Jesuit magazine's annual poetry contest. Aurelia Plath's friend and neighbor, journalist and author of an unpublished Plath biography, Hinchliffe said this was the first poem she ever wrote.

"Cottage Street, 1953" by Richard Wilbur, first published in 1972, describes Aurelia and a very depressed Sylvia having tea at his mother-in-law Edna Ward's house on Cottage Street in Wellesley. Mrs. Ward was Aurelia's friend. Hear Wilbur read the poem (and defend it).

"Aurelia Plath Confesses" by Lisa Mullenneaux, published in Prairie Schooner, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer 2019. Mullenneaux is a poet, scholar, translator, and professor of writing, best known for the essay "Can You Call Her Sister? Amelia Rosselli on Sylvia Plath."

"Medusa" by Sylvia Plath (1962).

Frieda Hughes wrote several poems about her grandmother Aurelia. You've probably read some. Here are quotations from four different poems:

1. "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the least dead / Of us all?// You loved me not, just saw / A copy of the face / You gave birth to."

2. "Come live with me!" it cried, / Nostrils spread above like nose wings / As if the face would take off from its neck-end / Like a ghastly bald crow."

3. "Chipping away at her / As if she were an egg, / to be broken and beaten / And turned into something else."

4.  "She is the gypsy / Whose young have rooted / In the very flesh of her scalp. // Her eyes are drill-holes where / Your senses spin, and you are stone / Even as you stand before her."

I think you get the gist.

Although Ted Hughes wrote at least one poem centered on Aurelia, Birthday Letters offers only glimpses. His poem "Night-Ride on Ariel" makes a typically chilling reference: "Mother / Making you dance with her magnetic eye / On your Daddy's coffin"