Could Aurelia's Letters to Sylvia Still Exist?

Somebody wiped Aurelia Plath's letters to Sylvia Plath off the face of the earth. Who was it?

When biographers have guessed -- no one has proof -- that Sylvia Plath in 1962 made a bonfire of "all of her mother's letters," allegedly burning "upwards of a thousand," they make an odd assumption. [1] When Sylvia moved to England with Ted Hughes in 1959, she left at her mother's house in Wellesley her schoolbooks, manuscripts, childhood diaries, scrapbooks, letters from former boyfriends and Ted, her artworks, and all the letters Sylvia had written to Aurelia up to then. The bonfire story asks us to believe that Sylvia packed up her mother's letters, ten years' worth (c. 1950-1959), hauled them across the Atlantic to store in the couple's small London apartment, then three years later at her country house, Court Green, burned them all at once. We don't know why, so biographers have guessed "to symbolize her liberation from maternal influence."

Sylvia moved overseas in part to get away from her mother. Aurelia might have mailed to Sylvia from Wellesley a box of mother-letters, or brought them when visiting, but that sounds unwieldy and costly. Whatever happened, the voidance of Aurelia's side of the mother-daughter correspondence is so near perfect as to suggest it was methodical, and only one person in the Plath story was that methodical and had the opportunity to wipe the whole shebang: Aurelia.

Ten letters from Aurelia to Sylvia are all that exist in Plath archives. [2] Those archives hold dozens of letters Aurelia wrote to everyone else in her life, letters both sent and unsent, originals and carbon copies. Sylvia moved house six times between 1955 and the end of 1959, and was not the "pack rat" her mother was, or as sentimental. The bonfire story asks us to believe Sylvia sentimentally maintained and carried with her to England an accumulation of her mother's letters. I don't believe it.

Even the burning of "all" Aurelia's letters at Court Green in July 1962 would leave six months of letters Aurelia mailed to Sylvia after that time. Let's say Sylvia did burn all her mother's letters in the yard at Court Green, not in July but before she moved to London the first week of December. Sylvia had yet to receive letters Aurelia sent in late December and in January 1963. Sylvia received those, because she wrote replies. But they are missing too.

Aurelia had the right to take from London or Court Green in 1963, or on subsequent visits to England, any of her own letters to Sylvia that she could find, and destroy them if she liked. But Aurelia kept thousands of other Sylvia-related papers, even scraps, now in Plath archives. Aurelia thought highly of her own writing skills and evidence indicates she planned to include some of her own letters to Sylvia in her edit of Letters Home (1975), to show a loving mother-daughter relationship. Either the Hugheses or her own editor shot that idea down.

But that would mean that Aurelia had kept at least some of her own letters well into the 1970s.

Sylvia's poem "Burning the Letters" is dated August 13, 1962, so Sylvia did burn letters, once, and the poem makes them sound like Ted's. But all accounts of "bonfires" (and Sylvia dancing around them like a witch, etc.) in that turbulent period are suspect. Aurelia told The Listener in 1976 that at Court Green in July 1962 she watched Sylvia burn in the yard an armful of papers and Sylvia's new ("second" and "happy") novel in manuscript titled The Hill of Leopards, dedicated to Ted. [3] No trace of that "happy" novel has ever been found. Aurelia in 1976 said it had hurt her to watch, but she had to hold the children. She did not say Sylvia burned her letters.

If Sylvia destroyed a thousand of Aurelia's letters, in front of her or not, Aurelia would likely have told someone about her hurt or anger, or what a tragic loss it was, over her next 30 years of intimate letter-writing and friendships. Richard Larschan said Aurelia told him she was sad they had been burned, but I think a large, perhaps selective, portion still exists and could tell us much.

Did no biographer or critic ask Aurelia while she lived, "Where are your letters to Sylvia?"

[1] Rough Magic (1991, p. 286) says "upwards of a thousand" and that Aurelia watched Sylvia burn them; it cites no sources, but the book's second edition (1999) says the author spent a lot of time with Aurelia. Aurelia wrote others that the biographer's presence over three days had annoyed her; she might have lied to him. Clarissa Roche said Sylvia told her she made a bonfire of Ted's papers a few days before Roche arrived for a visit in November 1962; but also that Sylvia told the story jokingly.

[2] The ten known surviving Aurelia-to-Sylvia mailings are cataloged on page 3 in Bridget Anna Lowe's essay "Burning Free" in Plath Profiles, 2012.

[3] Unpublished anecdote from a draft of Aurelia's Letters Home introduction, Sylvia Plath collection, "Aurelia Plath," Box 30, Folder 66a/b, Smith College, written c. 1975. The anecdote says Aurelia verified the event and date, July 10, 1962, by consulting her travel diary, but this too is suspect.

Aurelia's Basement Tapes

Screen grab from Voices & Visions, 1988

Aurelia Plath in 1986 spoke on audiotape about Sylvia while rehearsing for an interview with Voices and Visions, a TV series about poets (PBS, 1988). PBS really wanted Aurelia on videotape, but first she said no, then maybe. Her friend since 1982 and U.Mass. professor of English, Dr. Richard Larschan, suggested they practice audiotaping some conversations about Sylvia’s life and poems. Aurelia was more forthcoming on tape than on paper, he says; and at age 80 she didn’t give a fig anymore for what the neighbors thought, and that’s a bonus for us. Here they discuss Sylvia’s first published poem from 1941, when Sylvia was 8 years old:

 

“Every Sunday she looked for the children’s page in the Boston Herald, which I had shown her in the newspaper. And she thought she’d send her [poem] in.”

“So, in other words, it was self-initiated?”

“It was self-initiated.”

“And this is at the age of…?”

“Oh, about 8.”

“That’s very interesting because she’s taking initiative and trying to get public recognition, it seems to me, at the age of 8.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Why else would you print something?”

[Several-second pause.] “She wanted the dollar.”

 

In 1983 Aurelia had announced she would no longer speak publicly about her daughter. Yet three years later Voices and Visions got Aurelia on video: a coup for its producers and for us an encounter with a primary source.

 

Short clips from the six hours of Larschan’s “practice,” “amateur” audio and videotapes went into two half-hour educational videos about Sylvia’s poetry, produced in 2000 by U.Mass. and televised for remote college credit. One discusses Sylvia’s “mother poems,” the other her “father poems.” Writer and narrator Larschan assumes the viewer can accept that Plath’s father and mother poems have elements of myth. That’s how Plath transformed literal truth into emotional truth. In “The Myth of the Monstrous Mother” video, Aurelia throws both light and shade on poems such as “Medusa” (“The ‘stooges’ were Sylvia’s friends!”) and recites ecstatically from “Three Women.”

 

The two Larschan videos were on VHS only, and rare. They are now viewable through this site, the posting of June 7, 2022.

Above All, Does It Pay? The Plaths' Financial World

Otto Plath died in 1940. Aurelia Plath said he left his family a $5,000 life-insurance policy. In 2021, the equivalent of that payout would be $93,000.

 

The cost of a typical funeral in the US in 1940 was about $800; $650 of that was for the casket. Burial is a separate expense; Aurelia paid $375 for Otto's burial, about $7,000 today. A typical funeral/burial package in 2021 costs $12,000.

 

Fee for leg-amputation surgery in 1940 is unknown; in 2021, it’s $20,000 to $60,000. A prosthesis is a separate expense.

 

Aurelia Plath’s Money:

 

Aurelia did substitute teaching at $25/week in 1941, equivalent to $420/week in 2021. At that rate a 40-week school year would pay Aurelia our equivalent of $16,880/year. The average US public-school teacher in 1940, working 40 weeks, made $1,435/year, or about $36/week.

 

Aurelia in 1942 became a full-time instructor at Boston University at $1,800/year, the equivalent of $30,250/year today. (Letters Home, 29) This put their household of five below today’s poverty level ($31,000). Aurelia taught summer school and tutored to earn more, and there were Grampy’s earnings, amount unknown.

 

A survey of 158 US colleges and universities for 1947-48, the year Aurelia was promoted to assistant professor, showed the median salary of assistant professors to be $3,000/year. In 2021 dollars that’s a bit over $36,000.

 

Aurelia in 1953 wrote Olive Higgins Prouty she earned $3,900/year. The 2021 equivalent is $38,000.

 

Associate Professors in 1968-69, shortly before Aurelia retired with that title, made a national median salary of $12,151/year; $93,300 in 2021 dollars. But counting only faculty salaries in non-public colleges such as Boston University, the median salary sank to $7,662, or, in 2021 terms, $59,000/year. As a female, Aurelia would likely have been paid about 70 percent of whatever her male colleagues made.

 

A publisher’s $5,000 advance payment in 1975, such as Aurelia got for Letters Home, would equal $25,000 today.

 

Sylvia Plath’s Money

 

In 1947 if Sylvia earned $25, that would be like $302 today.

 

The $850 Olive Higgins Prouty scholarship given Sylvia in 1950 would equal $9,400 today. (SP to ASP, 31 October 1950)

 

A “classic pair of silver closed pumps” priced at $12.95 in 1953 would cost $126 today. (SP to ASP, 3 March 1953)

 

In a May 21, 1955, letter to her mother, Sylvia summed up her past year’s earnings from writing: $470, which would look like $4,585 in 2021.

 

Smith College paid Sylvia $4,200 to teach Freshman English for nine months. The equivalent today would be $39,640 (SP to ASP, 12 March 1957). The median pay for instructors in 1957 was $4,562, equivalent today to $40,300. Women’s colleges were known for paying lower salaries all across the board.

 

Sylvia and her friend Anne Sexton’s 70-cent cafeteria meal would be $7 in 2021.

 

What was, in 1959, a $15 eagle tattoo would cost $135 today.

 

In 1960, the US median monthly apartment rental was $71; in Massachusetts, $74. Source.

 

Sylvia’s $100 bonus for signing a New Yorker contract would equal $874 today. (SP to ASP, 1 March 1961)

 

1000 British pounds in 1962 would today equal $22,500 US. (SP to ASP, 9 October 1962)

 

The $700 check Sylvia received from her Aunt Dot was the equivalent of $6,000 in 2021 money. (SP to ASP, 29 November 1962)

 

The book Lord Byron’s Wife, in 1962 priced at $6.50, would be priced at $56 today. (SP to ASP, 29 November 1962)

 

The equivalencies were calculated with the DollarTimes.com Inflation Calculator. Median salaries for college and university faculty are from the US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Outlook Handbooks for 1949, 1951, 1959, 1970-71, accessed through “Prices and Wages by Decade,” https://libraryguides.missouri.edu/pricesandwages. Federal poverty guideline information here. There were no US federal poverty guidelines until 1963.

Otto Plath Was Disowned Because . . .

A personal insight: Aurelia Plath's Letters Home introduction tells us that Otto Plath's Lutheran grandparents financed his college education on the condition that he become a minister. When Otto told them he could not as a matter of conscience continue at the seminary, his grandparents disowned him and struck his name from the family bible.

That seems exceptionally harsh, but I'm from Wisconsin, in the general area of Milwaukee, 50 miles from Watertown, where Otto lived and attended Northwestern College. Wisconsin was and still is full of Lutherans of German descent, and the Wisconsin Synod is so extremely strict that it will not cooperate with other Lutheran synods on matters of doctrine.

A folk belief among these Lutherans was that if a boy became a minister, God granted his parents automatic tickets to heaven. The first time I met the Lutheran parents of a boy I was dating in the 1970s, they told me this. My date's younger brother was attending Northwestern College, preparing for the ministry; the parents spoke of him with pride. My date was majoring in pre-medical studies and his parents were soooo disappointed that he was not studying to become a minister, and told him so repeatedly. In his junior year of college they were still pestering him to become a minister. They threatened not to strike his name from the family bible but to cut off funds.

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.

Things Aurelia Plath Did Not Say to Sylvia:

Buy your own damned bras.

 

You picked him!

 

I will marry again if I feel like it.

 

Say hello to your new father!

 

Sorry to hear that good nannies are hard to find.

 

I’ve been too busy to answer your letters.

 

Can you bail me out?

 

I need my own bedroom.

 

I’ll knock some sense into you.

 

Don’t come crying to me about it.

 

It’s my turn to buy new clothes.

 

After forty-five rejections I think it’s time you find something else to do.

 

Try applying yourself to that chemistry class.

 

Bills came due and yours was the only account with money in it.

 

Fix me a double martini.

 

Too bad you feel depressed, but that’s life.

 

I’m so tired of your drama.

 

It’s your birthday?

 

I threw out all the clutter you left here.

Was Sylvia Plath a Witch?

A solid quartz or lead-crystal ball 7 inches across weighs about 22 pounds.

Was Sylvia Plath a witch? References in Sylvia Plath’s creative work to the supernatural, weird, and mythic are in fact typical of her time and place, the era of plays and Hollywood movies called I Married a Witch, The Bad Seed, and Bell, Book, and Candle. [1] Plath’s references to the unseen do not mean or prove Plath was a witch. That idea first emerges in the USA and UK around 1970 when faddish interest in the occult, and cute media portrayals, made witches trim and beautiful, feminist and cool. [2] Popular fiction and film have since kept their modern witches young and appealing. Everyone who feels stronger owning an Isis poster or consulting Tarot cards, or takes pride in their zodiac sign, as Plath did -- is a witch an occultist.

For those pursuing the “Was Plath a witch/mystic/psychic?” question, precise definitions of “what she was” are crucial.

An occultist seeks power or advantage through rituals or tools such as Tarot cards, crystals, chanting, Ouija, or horoscopes; the use of such tools for those ends is called magic(k). A person can do occult work with and for other people. Most major religions prohibit occultism. An occultist is not automatically a witch.

A mystic (from a Greek root meaning “with eyes or lips closed”) looks inward, is receptive, seeks personal spiritual union with a higher power, and wants less from the material world rather than more. [3] Therefore Tarot cards, crystal balls, charms, prayers, and so on used to cull deliverables, such as predictions or good health, are not in fact “mystical.” One cannot do mystical work for other people. Major religions revere their mystics, and they are few. Being an occultist or being spiritual or intuitive does not make someone a mystic.

“Mysterious,” “mystical,” and “magical,” are not synonyms. An example to show that word choices matter: Which slogan would the Disney Corp. likely choose?

-Disney World is mysterious.

-Disney World is mystical.

-Disney World is magical.

A psychic (noun) has clairvoyant, healing, mind-reading or prophetic ability. Such ability, on call and consistent enough to make a reputation and money, is extremely rare. It is rarer yet to possess more than one such ability. Psychic (as an adjective) “seers” supported by cards, crystal balls, pendulums, drugs, fire, and so forth are occultists, not psychics. Most “psychics” are, alas, performers. Intuition is not psychic. Intuition originates in the body.

One’s psyche is defined as the totality of one’s mind or spirit or soul; the being, without the body. That we all have a psyche is a useful philosophical concept, but not a fact. Unfortunately the adjectival form of “psyche” is “psychic,” which makes people think of crystal balls and mind-reading. Plath’s post-breakdown “psychic regeneration” is not related to occultism.

A witch is a person of any gender who self-identifies as a witch. Plath never called herself a witch. No one is a witch just because someone says or thinks so. Things we call “witchy,” such as dancing around a bonfire, or using Tarot cards or bibliomancy to reveal desired information (“divination”), do not make Plath a witch. They make her an occultist, like her idol, poet William Butler Yeats.

All the above labels have been muddled, misused, corrupted, sensationalized, and contradicted, because people read Harry Potter and watch Disney and The Craft and anime and Buffy, playful fictions drawn from misinformation. Sylvia Plath herself was misinformed about the differences between “psychic” and “occult” and “intuitive.” She wrote in a 1956 letter to her mother Aurelia Plath:

[a]ll my horoscope points to my psychic, occult powers, & certainly if I give them play, I should at least, with my growing “woman’s intuition” be able to join Ted in becoming a practising astrologist. [4]

Plath soon found out that casting horoscopes is not intuitive or psychic but instead required her to do math, so Ted Hughes remained their house astrologer while Plath elected to use Tarot cards. Friends say Sylvia used Tarot ever more obsessively as her life came to a close. Using Tarot cards or playing Ouija (a Victorian parlor game, trademarked in 1902), still do not make Plath a witch, a psychic, or a mystic. They make her an occultist. Collecting and burning Hughes’s stray hairs and nail clippings for spite is something Plath read in The Golden Bough. [5]

Sylvia Plath only dabbled in the occult. Ted Hughes, through his mother, had lifelong occult interests, but no one asks “Was Ted Hughes a witch?” That suggests that Plath’s gender has encouraged this line of Plath-as-witch inquiry. Even asking the question is frivolous, because whatever the answer, it does not matter. Nor (as Hughes would have it) was his wife bedeviled by “psychic gifts,” seemingly never used except to catch him cheating.

Plath’s writings show a character hyper-rational, practical, keen-eyed, and worldly. The “Mystic” of her eponymous poem after one big moment falls to Earth with a thud. The speaker of “Witch Burning” is “a dartboard for witches” and never admits to being one. It was poet Anne Sexton who in a poem (“Her Kind”) called herself a witch. Maybe “Plath was a witch” persists because people still suspect, as in the witch-burning days, that “black magic” is how high-achieving women get their edge.

Plath above all was a dedicated and hard-working writer. Writers experience inspirations and breakthroughs to higher  levels – not of spirit, but of confidence, nerve, and skill. Such breakthroughs are part of a working writer’s experience: remarkable, but not mystical or magical at all. Sylvia’s hard work on the Ariel poems is documented in the many drafts of them archived at Smith College.

Eternity bores me, 

I never wanted it.

[1] Plath saw the play Bell, Book, and Candle and wrote her mother about it on 21 January 1953. Her letter of 13 December 1954 says she had just seen the play The Bad Seed in New York.

[2] Examples: U.S. TV sitcom Bewitched (1964-72), openly based on a 1942 Paramount comedy starring beautiful Veronica Lake as a witch; U.S. TV program, animated, Sabrina the Teenage Witch (1970-74). Sabrina stars in her own comic-book series starting in 1971. Read here about the U.K. “witchploitation” TV and media fad of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

[3] https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/other-religious-beliefs-and-general-terms/religion-general/mystic 

[4] Sylvia Plath to Aurelia Plath, October 28, 1956. “Astrologist” and “astrologer” are synonyms; the former is rarely used. 

[5] Plath's copy of this book is held by Smith College. https://libguides.smith.edu/c.php?g=1227026&p=8978322