Aurelia's Edits to Sylvia's Letters: A Sample

Is it okay with you that Aurelia Plath in Letters Home (1975) quoted one of Sylvia’s letters as saying:

 

Aurelia Plath, 1960s

  Had a sad, longing . . . letter from Dick

 

when Sylvia’s original said:

 

  also a sad, longing pathetic letter from dick

 

Sylvia’s steady boyfriend Dick Norton had been hospitalized for tuberculosis. Sylvia visited him once and wrote her mother on February 25, 1953, that she did not want to visit him again. Her reason, in the Letters Home version:

 

  The thing I am afraid of is that he will try to extort a promise to him to try again when he comes out . . .

 

while the original says:

 

  The thing I am afraid of is that he will propose to me when he sees me face to face, will try to extort a promise to him to try again when he comes out . . .

 

Aurelia should have indicated with ellipses her deletion of “propose to me when he sees me face to face,” but she did not. This is called a silent edit. It is not the only one in the book.

 

To see how much editing, and what kind of editing, Sylvia Plath’s mother Aurelia did when crafting her selection of Sylvia’s letters titled Letters Home, I compared it with the original Plath letters that a team meticulously transcribed and published in two volumes in 2017 and 2018. As my sample, I selected at random the span of Plath’s letters from February 25 to May 15 of 1953.

 

Sylvia was then a junior at Smith College, doing her schoolwork, writing and sending out new poems, and dating Myron Lotz while breaking up with Dick Norton, one of three sons of close family friends. The Nortons and Aurelia had hoped Dick and Sylvia would marry. Sylvia’s letter of February 25 explains why it won’t happen. Here is another excerpt from that letter in Letters Home. The words within the brackets were cut and replaced with ellipses:

 

“I could never be happy married to him: physically I want a colossus; <hereditarily, I want a good sane stock;> mentally I want a man who isn’t jealous of my creativity in other fields than children.” 

 

Aurelia’s edit did let readers know why Sylvia thought Dick fell short of her ideals. But Sylvia’s opinion that the Norton family’s genetics were less than good or sane got cut. This was not to make Sylvia seem like a nicer girl. The statement, were it published, fits the legal definition of libel: 1) it is not true 2) it smears living people and 3) might cause mea$$$urable damages to the prospects of the Norton clan for generations to come. In 1975 the Nortons were all living and rich enough to sue, as were most of the people Sylvia in her letters had made rude remarks about.

Sylvia’s breakup ruined Aurelia’s treasured friendship with Mrs. Norton. Aware of this, Sylvia in the next letter home explained her reasoning at length. Aurelia omitted from Sylvia’s letter of 28 February-1 March 1953:

 

  as you may imagine, the whole dick affair distresses me no end. I feel a great pity for him, and a sad sort of maternal fondness; but you know how fatal that has been to love in the past. I feel, ever since I made the irrevocable decision not to marry him last summer, that I am suddenly, blissfully free of an overwhelming bear trap. for one thing, as I said, I wouldn’t want to marry perry’s brother because I have always been fond of perry, even though I would never marry him either because he is too intensely singleminded for me (and I am very happy he has found shirley, because I like her: she is my type of person.) as much as I love the nortons, I am glad I’m not marrying into their family. barring the hereditary liabilities involved in tying up with dick, I feel that our protracted togetherness would be abrasive, more than anything else. we are too alike in the unfortunate ways. I have analyzed this thing for two years now in my notebook, and I am soon going to need another notebook. in case you are ever over at the Harvard Coop, or could persuade Mr. Aldrich to get it for you, I would like an exact duplicate in the form of my book now: about the size of typing paper, ruled, etc. 

 

Assigned to choose among and abridge Sylvia’s letters, Aurelia deleted boring or repetitive material, including the next 1200 words from the above letter. The topics were Dick, his brother Perry, Sylvia’s date with Myron to see maple sugaring, and her position as secretary on her college’s electoral board. What remains of that letter in Letters Home tells of a Smith student gushing to Sylvia that she had read Sylvia’s work and was a fan. And Sylvia was glad Aurelia liked her villanelles. This suggests that Aurelia prioritized for Letters Home Sylvia’s mentions of writing and publishing; that is, Aurelia shaped the material for readers interested in her daughter as a writer.

 

Deleted from Sylvia’s original letter of March 9, 1953 is her disgust that Dick had gained weight in the hospital. Sylvia wrote that she and Myron “both hate fatness.” Did readers need to know this? Is this deletion proof that Aurelia in Letters Home hid Sylvia’s unhappy and unpleasant side? Would you reinstate it?

 

Was Aurelia slighting Sylvia’s creativity when in Letters Home, letter of March 17, Aurelia corrected “Myron Michael Lotz thinks I am brilliant creative and beautifulallatonce” to “Myron Michael Lotz thinks I am brilliant-creative-and-beautiful-all-at-once”? Or was that just Aurelia’s pedantry? I think it’s pedantic to fifty years later rip Aurelia and Letters Home for imperfect fealty to Sylvia’s text when portraiture rather than fealty was the plan.

 

In the letter of April 25, Aurelia silently moved a sentence from one place to another. “Mentally, I dedicate this Harper’s triumph to you, my favorite person in the world” was placed in front of “The Atlantic and the New Yorker remain my unclimbed Annapurnas.” There are more such cut-and-paste edits in Letters Home but too few and minor to harp on when the whole book ended up a cut-and-paste threats-and-lawyers free-for-all so fraught that Aurelia once considered substituting for Letters Home a book of Sylvia’s letters paraphrased.

 

The most frequent edits in the sample were capitalization and punctuation. Aurelia changed periods to exclamation points and vice versa. Letters Home replaced Sylvia’s original ellipses with dashes. Ellipses in the published Letters Home indicate deletions made by Aurelia, by Ted Hughes (who suggested cutting “drastically” in his letter of July 16, 1974), and Aurelia’s editor, advised by lawyers about living people’s right to privacy. Cut, cut, cut; then reinstate some cuts. The same issue of The New York Times Book Review that printed a negative review of Letters Home (page 1) printed the editor’s explanation (page 37) of how and why the book’s content had been compromised.

 

The Letters of Sylvia Plath set out to collect and print every single letter Sylvia wrote to anyone, unabridged and exactly as she wrote it. Letters Home had a different goal.

Is that okay with you? 

 

Finding Barbara Greenwood, Sylvia's Great-Grandmother

Aurelia Plath's maternal grandparents Mathias and Barbara Greenwood, parents of Sylvia's "Grammy," were both over 50 when they came from Vienna and settled in Denver, Colorado. Aurelia definitely met them; she and her mother took a road trip out West in 1922. 

Barbara Greenwood's children on official papers had given Barbara's maiden name as Meier, Beier, Heimer, and Hemmer. [1] According to Vienna church records, Barbara's maiden name was Bayer (pronounced "byer"). Her father Franz was Hungarian and in Vienna changed his name from Paier (also spelled Pajer) to Bayer. Through Franz, Sylvia was part Hungarian.

Barbara married Matthias Grunwald, a waiter, and at age 54 left Vienna to join him and their children in the U.S. and arrived with her daughter Barbara, age 27, and son Richard, 12. [2] In the 1910 census Mathias and Barbara, last name "Greenwood," were renting a house in Denver. Barbara spoke English; Mathias did not. Their daughter Aurelia Romana Greenwood had come to the U.S. and married waiter Francis Schober, and in 1906 they had a baby girl named Aurelia, who became Sylvia Plath's mother.

In the 1920 census, Barbara Greenwood, 65, is called "Betty," a nickname for Barbara. Barbara Greenwood was buried as "Betty Josephine Greenwood" in Nebraska, which is why it took me ages to confirm any basics about her. Aurelia said her mother's mother had been an orphan; that is proven true. Roman Catholic parish records from the 1700s to the 1900s show absolutely no Jewish family background.

Barbara and Mathias rest in adjacent plots in North Platte Cemetery, which fronts on the Lincoln Highway in Lincoln County, Nebraska. This information is from that cemetery's records:

Mathias Greenwood: Born 19 February 1849 in Vienna. Died 19 June 1926, age 77. Barbara Greenwood: Born 24 September 1854, place not stated. (Her baptismal record says Vienna.) Died 24 May 1945, age 90.

Why should a great-parent matter? Because Sylvia Plath didn't appear out of nowhere. None of us do. 

[1] "Bayer" is confirmed on the marriage record in the Vienna Austria Catholic Church Records 1600-1960, ancestry.com. "Hammer" was Mathias's mother's maiden name.

[2] Richard was in fact the son of 27-year-old Barbara, Junior (1879-1966). The 1930 U.S. census records that Barbara Junior's age at first marriage was 15. In the U.S. she married Henry A. Davis who had a son, Frank. Richard as an adult moved to Michigan and Aurelia, later in life, visited her cousin and his family there.

"Be Sure That You Conform to the Rules"

The student handbook from Aurelia’s alma mater divided its rules into sections:

• Rules
• College Rules
• Dormitory Rules
• Miscellaneous College Rules
• Reminders

“Remember that you are being watched”

These rules, formulated by the college’s student government, include a 5 percent reduction in your final grade for each unexcused absence from class, and 2.5 percent off for tardiness. The dormitory had mandatory study hours and curfews. The handbook said that more important than good grades were high standards of personal conduct and character.

“to be very strictly enforced”

 

My point is that at Aurelia’s all-female college in midtown Boston in the 1920s and early 1930s caution and conformity were not unusual values. Nor were they Bostonian or working-class values; handbooks from women’s colleges in all regions, including Smith College, said much the same. [1] So what Plath fans like to call “Aurelia’s Victorian values” were not Aurelia’s own inventions or her personal failings. They were cultural and institutional norms. [2]

 

I was delighted to find on eBay three consecutive Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters (CPAL) handbooks/personal appointment calendars for the school years beginning in 1932, 1933, and 1934. That was not too long after Aurelia’s graduation in 1928. CPAL student Gudrun Hetzel owned and wrote in all three of them brief personal notes about her classes, campus events, and social life. I hoped Hetzel’s cellphone-sized handbooks would bring me nearer to understanding Aurelia Schober Plath’s undergraduate experience.

 

Hetzel noted that CPAL tuition in 1932 was $180 per year; textbooks $1-$5 each; lunch 25 cents. On Hetzel’s calendar were dances, sorority rush, the German Club play, teas, numerous meetings of clubs and classes. She took and proctored exams. She wondered, “Is a real Christian ever blue?” Every Wednesday a mandatory assembly featured a guest speaker. In 1932-33 Hetzel penciled several pages of undated notes about Richard B. Harrison, African-American actor who at 65 had his first Broadway role as “De Lawd” in Green Pastures. The performance was so celebrated it landed him on the cover of Time. [3] Hetzel’s calendar does not say she saw the play.

 

From year to year CPAL rules did not change, but the 1932 handbook’s gleeful pages about earning pins and letters for CPAL athletics were reduced and moved to the back of the handbook in 1933-1934, the worst year of the Great Depression. Hetzel made these notes:

 

1933, February 4: “all banks in country closed for bank holiday – no one can draw out money except for payrolls and necessities after holiday ends”

 

1933, March 13: “Poverty party” [4]

 

1933, March 18: “Papa stopped working”

 

Hetzel said no more about her home or family. CPAL had opened in 1919 as a business-science a.k.a. secretarial school, but like Aurelia, Hetzel was a “degree student” preparing to become a teacher of languages. Hetzel’s senior-year courses in fall 1934 were Philosophy, Foreign Affairs, French, German Drama, and German 13-14. In spring 1935 Hetzel studied Psychology of Education, French, “Soc,” Shakespeare, and Ethics.

Hetzel’s calendar, September 1934. Sat. 29 says, Picnic at Haskell’s Farm, the shorthand says “with Sam”. Sun. 30 says, “Football game in the afternoon, supper, movies in the evening.”

 

Several of Hetzel’s notes are in Gregg shorthand. Hetzel met a man named Sam in December 1933. In February he brought her Valentine candy. I liked seeing their romance unfold week to week. Sam became her only date for dances. They also went sledding, and to a Red Sox game, and horseback riding. Just before graduation in 1935 Hetzel wrote, “Engaged to Sam.” Her Gregg shorthand notes say nothing scandalous, and only one surprised me:

 

In her senior-year handbook Hetzel wrote that a Mr. Benson recommended her to the North Andover (MA) school district to teach German, or French and English. He might have been the one who advised her:

 

Applying for position

• smooth appearance
• no nail polish
• Type-write letter 
• [in Gregg shorthand] religion will make a difference
  

 

[1] For example, North Carolina College for Women handbook, 1929-30: “The best things in life must necessarily come from service and self-sacrifice.” Typical of men’s-college handbooks was the dean’s message to Amherst’s class of 1933 stressing how others had sacrificed so that they might flourish. https://acdc.amherst.edu/view/asc:1407028/asc:1407057

[2] Gordon Lameyer’s unpublished memoir, p. 214, refers to “her rigid, Victorian values” (but wanted Aurelia to be his mother-in-law anyway).

[3] Time magazine, March 4, 1935, retrieved 24 April 2022.

[4] Guests at a poverty party wear ragged or dated clothing and hairdos, speak with ethnic or regional accents, take refreshments in tin cups, etc. Usually such parties were fundraisers.

N.B.: Gudrun Hetzel and Sam Hodges married in June 1936 and had three children. Gudrun died in 1988 and Sam in 1991, both in Florida, and were buried in the Hetzel family plot in Woburn, Massachusetts.

The Movie of Letters Home (1986): Four Stars Out of Five

Letters Home (1986)

Directed by Chantal Akerman

In French with English subtitles. 104 minutes

Playing on Mubi.com; free viewing with a 7-day trial

 

Sit through the first few minutes of the film Letters Home and it will get better. I could not believe that playing over the opening credits of Letters Home was the old English nursery rhyme/street song “Hot Cross Buns,” repeated until my initial shock and distaste gave way and the lyric came through: “If you have no daughter, give them to your son.”

 

Realizing the song must refer somehow to Sylvia and Aurelia Plath, I began to overthink it. Street vendors sold hot-cross buns on Christian Good Fridays and still do. The song is short, simple, cloying, rhyming. Female voices sing it in English for a French-language film; the song, attested from the eighteenth century, is in the public domain. It asks for pennies. The song is—it’s—it’s trivial! It’s trivializing Sylvia Plath!

Outraged but unable to think of any music I might prefer in its place, reason at last stripped away from my thinking all but the plainest facts about Sylvia Plath. She was human, a child, flesh and bone and fat, a daughter and sister in a family that earned its daily bread. She had heard the banalities all children hear, and those that young women hear (cue Brenda Lee singing her hit “I’m Sorry”). Sylvia married, had children, and died, and that is ordinary too. Eventually it gets through to me that the film is not about a legend but about a life.

Then I hear the typewriting. We are shown a small stage. It will be a filmed play. A Sylvia figure, in near-silhouette, scampers in, wearing a bronze-colored strapless top and tulle skirt, fairylike except that her feet pound the bare floor. The backdrop is blue sky with white clouds. Oh, no, I thought. The cliches . . . of arty videos made in 1986, their colors now faded and mossy, aqueous . . . Having said nothing, Sylvia scampers off, and I am about to click away . . .

Then arrives, like a great ship in a harbor, a middle-aged Aurelia in a chic skirt suit, pumps, and pearls, blond hair in a perfect French roll. She seats herself, faces the camera and in French (because it’s a French movie) first thanks Warren and Margaret Plath, and Ted Hughes for giving copyright permission, and dedicates her book to her grandchildren Frieda, Nicholas, Jennifer, and Susan: real people. These are in fact the opening words of Rose Leiman Goldemberg’s play Letters Home (1979); this movie, based on the Paris production, is its only filmed version. Immediately, then, there is tension between the real and the dramatized, embodied in the Aurelia figure.

Act II: “We can hardly see each other over the mounds of diapers and demands of babies”

Playing the Aurelia role is European-avant-garde actor Delphine Seyrig, star of Last Year at Marienbad (1961), later the founder of a feminist film collective and a director herself. Letters Home director Chantal Akerman had at age 25 directed Seyrig in Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), (“the first masterpiece of the feminine in cinema” –New York Times). Akerman’s News From Home (1976) featured her own mother’s letters mailed from Belgium to New York where young Akerman was living on the cheap and making experimental films. English speakers might not recognize these names. But be assured that the film knows exactly what it is doing, and after the first few minutes it reveals what a good play Rose Leiman Goldemberg wrote and what an intense movie Akerman made from Aurelia Plath’s edit of Sylvia Plath’s Letters Home (1975).

Because the two actors voice only the written words of Aurelia and Sylvia Plath, viewers can sense what it was like to live Sylvia’s life but also how it might have felt to receive  these letters churning with anxiety and pathos and giddy with Sivvy’s love, not for her mother—love cannot grow in this desert of a stage set—but for fairy-tale moments such as Maureen Buckley’s coming-out party, the scene that will hook you. In the stage play and film, mother and daughter, in a verbal duet, revel in Sylvia’s lyrical retelling (“There is a sudden glorying in womanhood, when someone kisses your shoulder and says ‘You are charming’. . .”). Later, though, when Sylvia rhapsodizes about being Mrs. Edward James Hughes, Aurelia, having been Mrs. Otto Emil Plath, knows better. As Sylvia expends the energy of her one and only life on her husband, her bébés, and country house, the soundtrack writhes: more nursery songs, Charlie Parker’s sax, crying infants, snippets from classical music, while Sylvia articulates for her mother her ambitions and troubles.

There are no poems in the script. Every word is from Sylvia’s letters as they appear in the book Letters Home and from Aurelia’s preface and headnotes. In another stage production each character sat at her own desk, suggesting Aurelia too was a writer. The script gives them equal face time. This annoyed some critics. We go to Letters Home for Sylvia and only Sylvia. Yet once in a while the drama Letters Home makes us see and hear her mother. Or Sylvia addresses her brother Warren, reminding us that Sylvia came from a home and a family. Like most people, while wanting independence from her family, she replicates it.

“I am so happy, so encouraged!” Act II

Coralie Seyrig, Delphine’s real-life niece, plays Sylvia Plath, the forces that shaped her expressed with clever costumes: A button-front dress with earrings and a pillbox hat for a month in New York becomes a bathrobe for the summer of 1953. The Sylvia of Act II wears a braid. Aurelia, though, never alters. She pages through letters and photo albums, even while grieving is cucumber-cool, as we know Aurelia Plath was not. In summer 1962 a humiliated Sylvia sends Aurelia away and enforces the distance. With an ocean of space between them, for a time they talk over one another, helpless not to. Then there is only Aurelia left to speak her daughter’s words.

With Goldemberg’s script in hand, I can tell you that the movie makes deletions, mostly in Act II, largely from script pages 24 and 26, referring to Smith College in 1954 and 1957. They are good deletions.

• Chantal Akerman (1950-2015) directed 40 films, created artworks, wrote books, and taught. Personally, Akerman was so enmeshed with her mother, a Holocaust survivor, she lived only a year after her mother’s death, dying of suicide at 65. Letters Home is not mentioned in critical works or obituaries. It seems to have been a made-for-television movie.

• Rose Leiman Goldemberg (b. 1928), playwright, had her greatest international success with the Plath stage play Letters Home and as a screenwriter, notably of the made-for-television movies The Burning Bed (1984, starring Farrah Fawcett) and Stone Pillow (1985, starring Lucille Ball). The acting edition of Letters Home: A Drama by Rose Leiman Goldemberg is available here.

N.B. Yes, I caught on the soundtrack in Act II the German lyric “mit ein Schiessgewehr” [lit., “with a gun”], from a children's song that says never to play with a gun; it might be loaded.

A Photo of Otto's First Wife and In-Laws

Here is a family photo of Otto Plath's first wife, Lydia Bartz, with her sisters and their mother Mathilde Kluck Bartz, taken near their home at Fall Creek, Wisconsin, on July 22, 1912. Soon afterward, Lydia left home for Washington State and married Otto Plath on August 7, 1912.

Besides the daughters in the photo, mother Mathilde (1855-1941; second from left) gave birth to four sons and a younger daughter, for a total of ten children. Three of the sons and the younger daughter died in infancy. The son who lived to adulthood, Rupert, introduced his sister Lydia to Otto Plath.

Pictured, left to right: Alma (b. 1887); proud mother Mathilde; Dora (b. 1885); Caroline (b. 1895); Lydia (b. 1889), and Odelia (b. 1892). A published, captioned photo shows Caroline and Odelia Bartz with a friend on the day of their high-school graduation; they were in the local high school's first graduating class.

Of all of Mathilde's girls only Lydia married, and at the time of this photo Lydia had worked for two years as a clerk in a general store; she wrote "clerk" on her marriage license. Lydia and Otto separated within a few years of marriage, but did not divorce until much later. None of the girls had children. Rupert (b. 1890) married and had two children.

When Mathilde Kluck married August Bartz (1839-1901), a U.S. Civil War veteran, he was a widower with seven living children. Lydia's half-sister Pauline Bartz Robinson, along with Rupert, witnessed Lydia and Otto's wedding in Spokane. August and Mathilde were both born in Posen, Prussia, the area Otto Plath and his family came from. The source of the above photo is an Ancestry.com gallery that stated the date the photo was taken and identified each woman. 

More about Lydia Bartz Plath's life and career.

Who Am I? Your Host Tells All

Paying my respects at the William S. Burroughs centennial, St. Louis.

I am Catherine Rankovic, living in Missouri USA within driving distance of the Lilly Library Plath archives and easy flying distance from Emory. In my twenties I lived in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote for newspapers and magazines, drank and vomited in Kenmore Square (a crowd was cheering me! That’s Boston!) and haunted Harvard Square bookstores. A friend and I, radical feminists, saw John Updike in Harvard Square and yelled after him, “We hate your books!”

 

How did you get interested in Sylvia Plath?

 

My high-school friend pinched her mother’s copy of The Bell Jar. I read that flirty Lois Ames endnote about Plath’s poetry and suicide. My Ariel paperback I inscribed with the date “6-10-74.”

 

That was a long time ago.

 

Back when typewriters made noise and telephones rang I read Plath books as they were published and watched Plath fandom and scholarship unfold. I published my first Plath article in 1982; where were you? But time and only time equipped me for the honor of doing Plath studies a service. Many thanks to those who crowd-funded the first days, in 2013, of my Aurelia Plath shorthand transcription project, encouraging my further inquiries and the creation of this online Aurelia biome.

 

What are your academic credentials?

 

B.A. Journalism, Marquette University; M.A. English Literature, Syracuse University; M.F.A. poetry, Washington University in St. Louis. I left Boston, age 29, for graduate studies that cost me nothing; both schools paid my way. Syracuse was stringent: huge reading loads and criticism about criticism and transcribing medieval manuscripts. Washington University paid my train ticket to visit the campus. My host Eric Pankey and I were in the department hallway when Howard Nemerov shuffled up, in blue felt bedroom slippers, saying, “Did you hear? Did you hear?” He had just been named U.S. Poet Laureate. I could drop you names galore. Derek Walcott quit needling me after I called him a tyrant. Diane Wood Middlebrook talked to me for three hours about her Anne Sexton biography. I studied with and interviewed for print all types of poets, fiction writers, and biographers. Thirteen interviews are collected in my (fourth) book, Meet Me: Writers in St. Louis. Sylvia’s favorites T.S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Sara Teasdale were all born in St. Louis. You can see here also Kate Chopin’s house and the Tennessee Williams Glass Menagerie Apartments.

 

How can we trust someone with no Ivy League ties or Ph.D.?

 

Assuming that one must be so certified, so tinselled, must belong to that club to write about Plath, who was kinda-sorta a member of that club although she decided it sucked, has left gaps and enormous blind spots in Plath scholarship. [1] Aurelia is one of those blind spots. It would still be that way were I not here.

 

What are your languages?

 

German, helpful with Plath studies if I keep it up. Rusty Russian but enough to tell a rare-books library that their manuscripts were not Marina Tsvetayeva’s. Gregg shorthand. My mother’s parents were Poles from Belarus. A clerk-typist, Mom had me trained as a secretary. Neither of my parents was college educated. Dad was Serbian. A blacksmith’s apprentice, he went to war and was a prisoner in Germany from 1941 to 1945. He arrived at Ellis Island in 1950 and worked in a foundry with other displaced persons, who became family friends. Dad was proud that his kids, all U.S.-born, got “real high educated.” But it was crucial that Mom was an American and employed outside the home.

Serbian refugees enjoying life in America, studio photograph. The drinks and food are studio props. My stepfather, top row, fourth from left.

 

Why do you focus on Aurelia Plath?

 

Aurelia has a place in Plath studies. I’m not sure of its magnitude; it will take more than one scholar to assess that. I understand that Sylvia is a career but Aurelia is not, so in the past 40 years there had been no incentive to probe: What did Aurelia do? Where did she study? Do Sylvia’s letters prove that theirs was a sick relationship? Did Aurelia really “never have much of a life”? Compared to whose? Why is it, when viewing a photo of Sylvia and her brother, that scholars see only Sylvia? What are the facts? Primary materials engage me most.

 

Do you love Aurelia?

 

No. She did her job. While admiring Sylvia’s writing and striving I also see she had every advantage available. I value objectivity. The unnoticed and unsaid intrigue me. Aurelia was the first to notice Sylvia’s talent and nurture it. Sylvia was Otto’s mini-me, a difficult daughter for Aurelia to raise. Yet theirs was an alliance, the most durable Sylvia had, and it worked.

 

Why don’t you emote more? Like, describe your deep feelings or how Sylvia’s handwriting looks like brass knuckles or how intensely you identify with Sylvia or dream about her?

 

Don’t I emote? I once dreamed I received a Sylvia Plath kit. All it contained was a pair of ears and a pair of eyes.

 

[1] No study has yet addressed Plath's anti-academic stance, as expressed in her letters of 1/29/57, 3/12/57, 11/5/57, and 11/28/57, for starters.

Otto Plath Was "A Good Boy, But a Poor Businessman"

This Berkeley newspaper classified ad is so over-thought and overwrought it first made me laugh. Otto Plath, “Going East” in May 1914, offered an 80 x 130 urban lot for sale at below market value. Its virtues include proximity to the post office.

Berkeley Evening Gazette, May 30, 1914, p. 6

In May 1914 Otto Plath was 29, a graduate student at U.C.-Berkeley, and unhappily married. He said his first wife Lydia was “cold,” meaning sexually, but it was her and her sisters' money he lost trying to deal in real estate, and she was angry. Otto was going east, without his wife, to Columbia University in New York, to study there toward a Ph.D. in German. Despite this promising career plan, war with Germany derailed it and pauperized Otto through no fault of his own.

Most anyone will tell you that land by itself is a poor investment. It might one day be sold at a profit but no one can say when, or how much of a profit, or what might be erected next door. Meanwhile it produces no income or benefit yet is taxable. That said, immigrants such as Otto or his father Theodor arriving in the U.S. with only what they could carry--that was the rule at Ellis Island--might deeply value being able to say they owned land. The Europe that Otto and Theodor came from measured wealth in terms of land ownership. In the United States, wealth meant having money in the bank. Otto’s attempt at flipping land to put money in the bank bridged the old world and the new.

Looking into this, I quit laughing. Otto was trying to accumulate wealth using the only money available to him. American banks did not lend to immigrants with no collateral or credit history. So for loans of all types, immigrants went to their families, in-laws, or fellow immigrants. Some ethnic communities had their own loan associations. At least they spoke your language. A loan shark was another alternative. For a financial foothold with no money down, the U.S. government invited all citizens, excluding only rebels, to claim 160 acres of free public land purged of Indians. Under the 1862 Homestead Act, claimants had five years to turn the land into a farm or ranch. After that they owned it and could sell it. It was a great opportunity and an enormous gamble.

Otto Plath’s father Theodor Plath came to the U.S. in 1901. A traveling master blacksmith, he settled his wife and five of their six kids and finally himself on a North Dakota farm. There his wife showed signs of mental illness. Around 1907, Theodor moved to Harney County in southeastern Oregon and was a blacksmith there. This is sagebrush desert land at an altitude of 4000 feet. Annual rainfall is 10 inches, and the gravelly soil is good only for raising cattle and sheep and grasses to feed them. In all of Harney County's 10,000 square miles there were two towns. Today those towns are cities. There are still only two.

Harney County's Pueblo Mountains area. Irrigation efforts failed. [1]

Given the challenges of staging and funding a whole new life in inhospitable places, an immigrant’s living apart from a spouse or leaving children with relatives or simply going mad was (and still is) not unusual. The 1910 federal census shows Theodor, without his wife, in Harney County with his son Paul, and son Max was a hired man nearby. Two daughters remained in the Midwest, one a servant, the other with an aunt. Theodor’s immigrant parents in Wisconsin were paying for Otto’s education: a student loan. Otto defaulted by changing his major and the family cut him off. As Aurelia put it, he was on his own for the rest of his life.

Otto’s marriage in August 1912 got him access to money. Parted from his wife, Otto borrowed from friends or worked low-level jobs. One of his very rare letters (I’ve seen two) asks a friend for more time to repay $30. [2] In 1917 he was $1400 in debt -- the equivalent of $30,000 today. In 1920 he was 35 years old and the federal census says he was unemployed. When Otto, at last fully employed, married Aurelia Schober in 1932 he and Aurelia took a side trip to San Francisco where Aurelia said he sold or disposed of an urban property with an ocean view. She gave no further details.

Five days before writing his will, broke and sickly Theodor Plath claimed homestead acreage in Washington State, not to dwell there but to own it without buying it and leave it to his younger daughter. Theodor was buried in a pauper’s lot with no headstone. His wife died in an insane asylum. As a graduate student on a new degree track, Otto in his thirties kept borrowing from housemates and obsessing about interest rates. He pinched pennies, but any nest egg he ever had he sank into stocks and lost. He gambled with his health and died miserably, maybe in part because doctors cost money.

Otto’s uncle had rightly called him “a good boy but a poor businessman.” Consider along with his bumblebees and their ways that Sylvia Plath’s father was 51 before he was able to buy a house. He left Aurelia to dispel with starch and sunshine the carnage of the immigration experience and by herself lift Otto’s children permanently into the middle class.

[1] State of Oregon Harney County history, retrieved 7 April 2022. The area Theodor lived in is now ZIP code 97720.

[2] Otto Plath to Hans Gaebler, 18 October 1917. (Smith)