Sylvia Plath: A Biography (3 page)

Despite all Aurelia’s attention, Otto’s condition grew worse. By 1940 it was grave and when, that summer, he injured his toe and inflammation and gangrene set in, a doctor was finally called. The diagnosis was not cancer but diabetes mellitus, a treatable ailment. But by this time the disease was far advanced, and on October 12, 1940, Otto’s leg was amputated at the thigh. Aurelia explained the operation to Warren and Sylvia as a means of saving their father’s life. They discussed the prosthesis and how Otto would learn to walk with it. Sylvia remained silent. Finally, with studied calm, she asked, “When he buys shoes, Mummy, will he have to buy a
pair
?”

Late on November 5, Otto Plath died of an embolus in his lung. Hospitalization practices were such that he had been kept nearly immobile after his surgery, and this postoperative care led to his death. He was only fifty-five.

Aurelia waited until the next morning to tell the children. When she told Warren, he hugged her and said he was glad she was so young and healthy. By that time, in the adjoining room, Sylvia had no doubt guessed the worst. When she was told, she only said dully, “I’ll never speak to God again.” Then she pulled the covers over her head and insisted she was going to school, which she did.

The position of a bereaved young child is complicated. The center of sympathy and attention, the child has had no earlier experience with death, no knowledge of what behavior is expected. In the case of the Plath children, their mother confused them by showing little grief herself. (She remembered having felt lost at seeing her mother cry during her own childhood, and was trying to spare Sylvia and Warren that fear.) But without Aurelia’s grief to witness and respond to, the Plath children had no model for their mourning. Neither did they have an opportunity to mourn: Aurelia decided that Otto’s appearance in the casket was so forbidding that she did not let the children see him. They did not attend the funeral or the burial. Much later, Sylvia showed great anger toward Aurelia, accusing her of having felt no grief at Otto’s death. There is, in fact, some suggestion that Sylvia was disoriented enough by her father’s death, or the circumstances surrounding it, that she wished to die herself — or so she later told friends.

One of the most frightening immediate reactions to Otto’s death was a quick reversal in the family’s financial position. Otto was not entitled to a pension from Boston University, so the only financial resource the family had was an insurance policy, and much of it went for Otto’s medical expenses. After Aurelia spent $375 for a burial plot, she had little money left. She quickly returned to teaching high school languages. For a position that paid $25 a week, she left home at 5:30 a.m. to commute to Braintree High School, where she taught three classes of German and two of Spanish each day, in a post that was considered part-time. Her own health problems worsened and by the next year her duodenal ulcer, which had developed during the last two years of Otto’s life, became serious. Warren and Sylvia were also frequently sick. The week after their father’s death, in fact, they got measles, followed by pneumonia for Warren and sinusitis for Sylvia. The next summer, both children had tonsillectomies.

Financial worry increased within the Schober family too when, a few days after Otto’s funeral, Frank Schober, Sr., lost his job with the Dorothy Muriel Corporation because of management changes. Then he was told that some eye problems from macular degeneration would steadily worsen, so he left accounting completely and took a job as
maitre
d’hôtel
at the Brookline Country Club.

As the older child, Sylvia felt responsible for much of the financial worry her family was experiencing, and she also feared further change. Her reaction to Otto’s death was a natural one — an overwhelming fear of losing the parent who was left. When she came home from school on the day she learned of Otto’s death, she brought a note for Aurelia to sign. It promised that her mother would never remarry. Aurelia willingly signed the note, unthinkingly reinforcing Sylvia’s sense that she was herself an adult. Always central in the life of her family, Sylvia expected events to revolve around her.

Losing Otto, then, made Sylvia heavily dependent on her mother. Her later fiction showed that shifting alliance, from the father as head of the family to the mother as the source of all support and love. No wonder Sylvia was fearful about her standing with her mother: she had in the past been judged more critically, she felt, by Aurelia than by Otto. It was her mother’s letters that urged her to be better, to do more difficult things, to try to excel.

One of the interesting patterns in Sylvia’s writing about her parents is that she consistently described Otto’s death in terms of the
child’s
loss. Her attention remained on the child as she comes to understand absence and on the child as different, as an outsider, because of the absence of a parent. “You will be aware of an absence, presently,” she wrote in a late poem to her own son, after her husband was no longer living with her and the children. In her powerful story “Among the Bumblebees,” written in 1952 for a Smith College English class, she created the picture of a daughter bereft after the death of her father.

The story opens with the, Biblical-sounding “
In
the
beginning
there was Alice Denway’s father, tossing her up in the air until the breath caught in her throat, and catching her and holding her in a huge bear hug.” From that initial comforting image of the father as protector, in control whether he is in the ocean or on campus, Plath describes his descent into illness and death. In the closing scene when the child Alice monitors the weak pulsing of his heart, she realizes that he is about to die, that he has forgotten her as he has withdrawn into the “core of himself.” She has already lost the powerful parent who had earlier made her feel as if, with him, “she could face the doomsday of the world.”

Once her father was dead, Sylvia was less sure about her place in the world, about her mother’s ability to care for her — about her very existence. But she continued to benefit from the love of her strong mother and the Schober family, as well. Her father’s death may have struck like a hurricane, but the efforts of her extended family helped her rebuild her young, promising life.

2 - Adolescence

1940 - 47

“Once I Was Ordinary”

For a time after Otto’s death, Sylvia and Warren had a great deal of attention. They no longer had to share Aurelia’s energy with an ailing husband, and they gained the care of their grandparents as well. When Aurelia went back to teaching, the Schobers moved in with the Plaths at 892 Johnson Avenue, putting their own house up for sale.

The emotional fabric of the new family was quite different. The family before had been characterized by order and control, with Otto Plath the unquestioned patriarchal head of the household. Now it was less formally organized; authority was divided. Aurelia made decisions but she was still, in her mid-thirties, a relatively young daughter and she relied on her parents’ opinions. She was happy within a traditional framework. In effect, Sylvia and Warren had moved back in time at least part of a generation. The household norm became that of their European grandparents as often as it was that of their mother. There are indications that Aurelia was often tired beyond endurance, and that she needed whatever help her family could provide.

Mrs. Schober became particularly influential. Not only was she at home all day, to be with the children and to cook and clean, she was also the licensed driver. Aurelia Plath would not learn to drive for a dozen more years, so the family car, a second-hand Plymouth, belonged to her mother. After some investment losses during the 1920s, Frank had turned control of the family finances over to his wife. The Plath—Schober household gradually became a matriarchy. The change was confusing for Sylvia; she had spent her younger days identifying with her father and grandfather, even preferring zippers on clothes instead of buttons, and now she was surrounded by women’s things and women’s attitudes.

For the Plath-Schober family — certainly for Sylvia 1942 was the year of decision. It was the year that the family moved inland. It is significant that in Sylvia’s recollections, her father’s death and the move to Wellesley came at the same time. In fact, she was eight when her father died in 1940 and nearly ten when the family moved away from Winthrop in 1942. She writes in
The
Bell
Jar
that she was happiest before she was nine. With psychological accuracy rather than factual correctness, Plath the writer fuses many events, any one of which might have created apprehension for a child: her father’s death, her mother’s being away from home teaching, her grandparents’ coming to live with them, her mother’s illnesses, the war, and the move to Wellesley away from the school and the two homes — the Schobers’ as well as the Plaths’ — that had been most familiar to her.

One of the reasons for the move to Wellesley was that Aurelia had been offered a position at Boston University. In a course in Medical Secretarial Procedures, which she created, she taught methods of interviewing patients, the nomenclature of disease, procedures for handling insurance forms, case histories, and office maintenance. The move was also meant to benefit the family’s health — Mrs. Schober’s arthritis and the children’s sinus problems would be better inland. Moving to Wellesley also located the Plaths in an elite upper-middle-class suburb, where education was valued and where Wellesley College might provide a good education for Sylvia.

Soon after they moved, however, Aurelia experienced a frightening gastric hemorrhage. She was hospitalized three weeks in the winter of 1943 and, despite the Schobers’ loving care for the children, Sylvia was terribly afraid her mother would not return from the hospital. Her letters to Aurelia during her hospitalization show clearly that she thought if she were “good,” her mother would return. She lists her “good-girl” behavior: she has practiced the piano, she has bought a homecoming present for Aurelia, she has walked to school with Warren and “defended” him from his schoolmates.

In July of 1943 Aurelia had a second hemorrhage. This time she arranged for Sylvia to spend a month at Scout camp, and for Warren to spend the time with Aunt Dot. Sylvia, not yet eleven, had never been away from family before. She wrote to Aurelia that she missed her terribly. And on July 18, nearly two weeks into her month’s stay, she feels very sorry for herself: “
All
the girls in my tent are going home tomorrow so I feel left out. I didn’t get a letter from you yesterday, I hope you are all right....” Many of Sylvia’s letters are full of bravado. Others include news she knows will please her family — that she has been frugal, conscientious, and that she has been writing. Sometimes this kind of pleasing is combined with accounts of the prodigious amounts of food she has eaten. Perhaps she is trying to gain weight; more likely she is trying to justify the cost of going to camp. Money seems to have been a constant concern, with amounts spent itemized and discussed (“I have washed: 2 pairs of socks, 1 face cloth, 1 jersey, and 1 pair of pants. I have spent about 450 on laundry, about 200 on fruit”). Near the time of her return, she wrote her mother that there have been great changes in her “caracter” and that she hopes they can go to bed at the same time some night so that she can share her camp stories with Aurelia.

The Plath and Schober families had moved to 26 Elmwood Road in Wellesley, a house described in Sylvia’s photo album as “our little white house” and “our cozy white house.” Compared to many of the larger homes in the neighborhood, the house might have seemed smaller than it was. With its center entrance, it had a living room to the right, dining room to the left, a kitchen, a bedroom, and a screened-in porch downstairs, and two large bedrooms and a bath upstairs. Built on a half-acre corner lot edged with trees, it was comparable to many of the houses in the Wellesley Fells division. Sylvia often read and wrote perched in the branches of the apple tree in the front yard.

While it was smaller than their Winthrop house, 26 Elmwood Road provided adequate space for the family of five. The living room was large enough for the upright piano; the dining room served as the family gathering place, its walls decorated with the children’s artwork. The only problem with the home, from Sylvia’s point of view, was the fact that her mother shared her bedroom. The larger of the two upstairs rooms, Sylvia’s was furnished with her grandmother’s antique desk,
[1]
a vanity, chairs, a wooden storage trunk, and twin beds. It was, in fact, larger than her friends’ bedrooms, larger than the Plath living room. Nevertheless, careful as her mother was to use the room “for sleeping purposes only,” the situation was far from ideal. And it continued from the time they moved into the house in 1942 until Warren left for Exeter in 1949. Whenever he was gone, Aurelia slept in his room. For a child who already felt keen pressure to perform, to excel in everything she did, sharing a room with a parent was probably not easy.

Exciting as moving to Wellesley may have been for the family as a whole, the children had reservations about the change. They loved their Johnson Avenue house, especially the large enclosed porch, which Otto had used as his study. The house had been the scene of many of her school triumphs, and it is the house she lamented leaving in her poem “Let the Rain Fall Gently,” written when she was fifteen.

After five years of being inseparable from her friends David and Ruth Freeman, Sylvia hated to leave them. She also hated the fact that when she moved to Wellesley, she had to repeat fifth grade. Her mother was no doubt right in deciding that Sylvia was too young (almost two years younger than students in the sixth grade would be) to go into sixth grade in Wellesley. The more relaxed fifth-grade schedule allowed Sylvia to become a star Girl Scout, earning eleven badges in that single year.

Photographs from the early 1940s show Sylvia as tall and attractive, her dark blonde hair worn in long braids with fluffy bangs. Her legginess was as noticeable as her toothiness, and each gave her a sense of being a little oversized. She was more shy in Wellesley than she had been in Winthrop. She spent much of her time reading books and writing extra book reports, forty of them. There are some signs that Sylvia was already creating the ideal “Wellesley self,” who appeared confident, happy, poised, excited by life. She was a child robbed of her beloved sea and shore, separated from her best friends, and frightened by her mother’s serious illnesses, but she did as she was told and got all A’s in school, despite being the “new girl.”

War darkened 1942 and 1943. For a family as committed to their country as the Schobers and Plaths were, following evening war news on the radio was imperative. The radio voice that could not be interrupted spread its pall of anxiety over the household, especially because young Frank was a lieutenant in the Medical Corps abroad. Sylvia had vivid memories of wartime paper drives, blackouts, rationing.

Life at 26 Elmwood Road eventually stabilized. Aurelia’s health improved, and she felt more confident about teaching college. Her program at Boston University became so successful that she taught there for the next twenty-nine years, teaching one course in shorthand and transcription to make her position full-time. Throughout her teaching years, Aurelia usually returned home before the children. When they came home from school, as a rule, both Aurelias were there to welcome them: their mother the college teacher and their grandmother, whom Sylvia described as “Viennese ... Victorian” at work in the kitchen, humming and thumping bread dough.

Despite the loss of her father, Sylvia’s childhood in Wellesley seemed rich in many ways. She accumulated pets — Mowgli, a tiger alley cat, parakeets, and a tame squirrel. She rode her bike on Wellesley’s wide sidewalks, exploring the Hunnewell fields and tennis courts, Morse’s pond just two blocks away, and Lake Waban. She and Betsy Powley, her new best friend, were intrigued by the woods at the edge of a new subdivision, and sometimes built huts of fern there on summer days.

For all her studious bent, Sylvia was more of an outdoor girl than an indoor one. She responded honestly to weather, hating the cold, opening out into the sunlight as if she drew physical nourishment from it. Sun was as important to her as the sea had been, and even though her yard was shady she managed to sunbathe much of the spring and summer.

After her two years at Marshall Perrin Elementary School, with nearly perfect grades and a reputation for excellence, Sylvia entered the Alice L. Phillips Junior High for her seventh, eighth, and ninth grades. The dull red-brick building was located near the center of town, not far from the Unitarian Church where Aurelia Plath taught a weekly Sunday School class. Sylvia was a serious, intelligent student, interested in achievement and recognition, dutiful about working hard. She was comfortable with older people as well as classmates, and some of her own friends came from associations of her mother’s.

Aurelia had moved to Wellesley partly because several of her friends from Boston University lived there. Long before Otto’s death, Margaret Brace, wife of novelist Gerald Brace, and Mildred Norton, the mother of Sylvia’s friend Perry and his brother, Dick, had made special efforts to befriend Aurelia, suspecting that her marriage was not an easy one. Both wives of Boston University professors and well-educated and competent themselves, they were important to Aurelia’s sense of herself as a professional woman. The three women maintained their relationship through university groups and through the church.

The Nortons lived in Wellesley Hills and belonged to the Unitarian Church; the Braces lived near them for several years until they moved to the suburb of Belmont. The families who were acquainted through Boston University — the Schoonovers, the Despoteses, the Andrewses, along with the Braces, the Nortons, and the Plaths — were drawn together partly because their children were close in age. At gatherings such as picnics or Christmas parties, the Brace and Norton boys played word games, anagrams, board games, and conundrums with Sally Andrews, Poppy Despotes, and Sylvia. The friendships of these children — most of them academically talented, all destined to attend good schools on scholarships — created an important world for Sylvia. They reinforced goals her mother was establishing for her and for Warren.

Aurelia was particularly close to Mildred Norton. Sylvia and Warren called Mrs. Norton “Aunt Mildred,” and the three Norton boys called Mrs. Plath “Aunt Aurelia.” As the families spent time together, the children gradually became good friends.

Even if Aurelia Plath had had no friendships of her own to maintain, she probably would have cultivated the association of the faculty group. Much of her life was motivated by finding what would be best for her children. Whom should they know? What should they learn to do? The Plath family spent hours during these years at the small branch library near Elmwood Road. Aurelia still read aloud to the children (
The
Yearling
and
Johnny
Tremain
were the last books she read before their own reading speeds made them want to read for themselves). Sundays meant services at the Unitarian Church, where both children received perfect-attendance medals each year. Every Christmas, Sylvia found a diary in her stocking, and from the time the children were born, Aurelia put what little extra money there was into a “book fund” for them, believing, as she wrote in an unpublished memoir, “We had no money, save for essentials. Through education we could, however, build a priceless inner life!”

During Sylvia’s junior high years, Aurelia began taking the family to plays and concerts. When Sylvia was in seventh grade, they saw
The
Tempest
with Vera Zorina and Canada Lee at the Colonial Theater in Boston. Both children had read the entire play (when Mrs. Plath gave Warren
Lamb’s
Tales
from
Shakespeare
, he insisted on reading the full version, as Sylvia had). Sylvia’s fascination with Ariel, Miranda, and Caliban, then, dated from January of 1945.
The
Tempest
is not a play she read in school, but the father-daughter relationship, the reunion, the ocean, and the androgynous powers of Ariel made the story especially germane to a young girl fashioning her adolescent self-image.