Red Comet

by Heather Clark

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  IN THE POPULAR IMAGINATION it is Otto, the absent father, who haunts and torments his daughter. The roots of this phenomenon go back to the first sentence of the first biography of Sylvia Plath, Edward Butscher’s 1976 Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness: “For Sylvia Plath, as even the most casual reading of her poetry demonstrates, the central obsession from the beginning to the end of her life and career was her father, Professor Otto Emile [sic] Plath.” Butscher suggested that Plath would not have become a poet had her father not died. “A situation was needed,” he wrote, “a plot ripe with secret tension and geared towards a climax of destruction, betrayal, a re-enactment of an ancient tragedy to forge the tragic poet.”93 Plath’s poem “Daddy”—and Ted Hughes’s 1998 collection, Birthday Letters—have strengthened the common assumption that Otto’s ghost lay at the source of Sylvia’s genius and her “madness,” and that her suicidal drive was in part an effort, as she writes in “Daddy,” to “get back, back, back” to him.

  Yet it was Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia, who had the more lasting and significant impact on her daughter. Sylvia and her mother had a close, complicated, and often difficult relationship, especially after Otto’s death. Sylvia shared a bedroom with her for most of her late childhood and adolescence. Aurelia recognized the relationship’s mixed blessings, noting, “Between Sylvia and me there existed—as between my own mother and me—a sort of psychic osmosis which, at times, was very wonderful and comforting; at other times, an unwelcome invasion of privacy.”94

  Aurelia was her daughter’s confidante, sounding board, model of womanhood, and moral guide. She also embodied the demure, submissive self that blocked access to the deeper, subversive poet-self. Aurelia stood for a particular aesthetic that, from the late fifties on, seemed to Sylvia a vestige of her own early, meticulously crafted, safe verse. Both Plath and Hughes wanted to infuse a more Lawrentian aesthetic into contemporary Anglo-American poetry. Their joint project meant exploring an alternative moral structure—self-expansion rather than self-sacrifice—of which Aurelia would have disapproved. Where Plath sought originality, her mother valued conformity. When Sylvia famously told Dr. Beuscher, in 1958, that she hated her mother, she was also expressing her disgust with the self that had sought her mother’s approval for so many years, and the self that had written the kind of poetry that would appeal to her mother’s parochial taste. When Marianne Moore criticized the sexual imagery in Hughes’s The Hawk in the Rain, Plath saw a mirror of her mother’s attitude. Moore’s grumbles strengthened Plath’s determination to write a bolder, less decorous poetry.

  Aurelia has been portrayed in biographies, movies, the media, criticism, and Plath’s own writing as a meddler—someone who was wary of Ted Hughes; whose visits to her daughter’s British household provoked anxiety; and whose epistolary platitudes Sylvia grimly endured in an endless stream of letters. She is the devil whispering in Sylvia’s ear that she is not sufficiently demure, popular, modest, or wealthy. Aurelia, the story goes, put so much pressure on her daughter to excel that Sylvia felt the only way to win her mother’s love was to outperform herself again and again; because she could not sustain this cycle, she had no choice but to give up. The main source of this narrative is Plath’s own novel, The Bell Jar, in which Esther Greenwood’s icy, critical mother seems partly to blame for her daughter’s breakdown and suicide attempt. The novel was a source of unending grievance to Aurelia.

  Whether or not Aurelia’s high expectations damaged her daughter will always be a matter of debate. Sylvia’s childhood and college friends defend Aurelia fiercely. Sylvia’s closest Wellesley confidante, Betsy Powley Wallingford, said, “Aurelia certainly was aware of all her daughter’s gifts and made darn sure those gifts were properly used and encouraged, which can be seen as being pushy.” But she insisted this was not the case, and was upset that many thought Sylvia had a “nasty relationship with her mother….Whatever Aurelia did was for Sylvia’s benefit. She sacrificed her whole self for her children.” Betsy felt that Aurelia had become a “scapegoat” who was unfairly vilified in order to give others “a reason” for Plath’s suicide and “a feeling of power over the story.”95 Sylvia’s Wellesley friend Phil McCurdy called Aurelia a kind, “hardworking widow,” while other friends like Janet Salter Rosenberg and Ellie Friedman Klein also described her as quiet and generous, formal but warm.96 Perry Norton, another close Wellesley friend, remembered Aurelia as “somewhat shy,” a “very sweet, decent, hardworking person. Domineering does not apply.” Perry’s father was a history professor at Boston University, and the two families had gotten to know each other through faculty social events when Otto was still alive. Perry felt that both his and Sylvia’s parents expected their children to succeed, but that these kinds of expectations were typical in their professorial milieu. Academic success, rather than material wealth, was the currency such families valued: they were “decent people who had done their best and tried their hardest” to pass on their humanistic, intellectual values to their children.97 Sylvia’s brother, Warren, did not believe that his mother pushed his sister to excel. In 1975 he told a biographer, “Sylvia didn’t need any pushing.”98

  As with Sylvia herself, there seems to be only one version of Aurelia in the popular imagination. Yet Aurelia’s own letters and writings present a more complicated portrait of a woman whose intellectual and creative aspirations were thwarted by a culture that derided female ambition. Like Otto, Aurelia inherited an intense work ethic, which she passed down to her daughter. Aurelia’s father, Francis, or Frank, Schober (b. 1881), was one of thirteen children, born in Bad Aussee, Austria. His mother, who came from a wealthy family, died when he was only ten, leaving him, her favorite child, a fortune that his father quickly spent on a Viennese showgirl. The family’s finances became so precarious that Frank was forced to leave home at fourteen.

  After brief stints in Italy and Paris, Frank found his way to England; by the time he was twenty, he spoke four languages and worked as a servant in Westgate-on-Sea, Kent.99 He arrived in Boston on June 1, 1902, at the age of twenty-one, to join a friend he had made in England, Josef Grünwald.100 Frank helped Josef run a boarding house he had opened in South Boston. Josef brought over his two sisters, Aurelia (senior) and Annie, from Vienna, their hometown, in April 1904.101 Frank welcomed the anxious teenagers inside the boarding house—Aurelia, Sylvia’s future grandmother, was just sixteen—and reassured them that all would be well in America. He married Aurelia a little over a year later and became an American citizen in 1909.102 Two more Grünwald siblings, Ernst and Otto, came to America in 1905. Ernst, who lived to be 101, settled in Jamaica Plain, where Sylvia visited him as a child.

  All the Grünwalds changed their surnames to Greenwood upon arriving in America. (Plath would eventually choose this surname for Esther, the protagonist of The Bell Jar.) While anglicizing foreign names was not unusual, the family may have wanted to distinguish themselves from the many Jewish Grünwalds pouring into America from Austria and Hungary at this time. As for Plath’s identifying herself with Jewish Holocaust victims (“I may be a bit of a Jew”), the Grünwald name and the speed at which it was abandoned may have caused her to wonder whether there had in fact been a Jewish relative in her maternal line.103 In her brief introduction of “Daddy” for a 1962 BBC program, she wrote that the poem’s speaker’s mother was “very possibly part Jewish.”104 Indeed, Aurelia said that her maternal Viennese grandmother, Barbara Meyer, was an orphan, and possibly Jewish.105

  Frank Schober married Aurelia Greenwood in July 1905, a week after her eighteenth birthday. A daughter, Aurelia Frances, was born on April 26, 1906. In the decades that followed, Aurelia Sr. ran the home while Frank worked as a waiter and, later, as an accountant for the Dorothy Muriel Company. By 1920, he had earned enough to move his young family from the Boston suburb of Jamaica Plain into a three-bedroom, two-thousand-square-foot rented house at 892 Shirley Street, on Point Shirley in Winthrop. The house, buil
t in 1900, provided plenty of space for three children—Aurelia Frances, Dorothy, and Frank Jr. Uncle Ernst, his American wife Pauline, and their two sons lived nearby in Jamaica Plain.

  Winthrop, a coastal suburb north of Boston, was then populated by working- and middle-class Catholics of mainly Irish and Italian descent, with smaller pockets of Protestants and Jews. While many of its homes faced the Atlantic, the lots were small and the neighbors close. Flanked by Boston’s main airport to the west and Deer Island Prison to the south, Winthrop would never develop into an affluent town like nearby Marblehead. But it was safe, clean, and unpretentious. The Schober house, perched between the beach and Boston Harbor, had a spectacular view of the sea that would leave an indelible impression on the young Aurelia Schober and, eventually, her daughter. Before Logan Airport became a busy international hub, Winthrop was quiet and the seawater clean enough for swimming. On Point Shirley, Sylvia lived with her grandparents during Otto’s illness and began her love affair with the sea.

  Aurelia writes in her memoir that she grew up in a “peaceful, loving home,” but her childhood was marked by moments of crisis. She entered school as a native German speaker with no English, and recalled “how isolated I felt at recess as I stood by myself in a corner of the schoolyard.” From this time on, the family spoke English at home, but the family’s Austrian heritage meant that neighbors regarded them suspiciously during the First World War. Despite the fact that the Schobers were American citizens, Aurelia said she was “ostracized by the neighborhood ‘gang,’ called ‘spy-face,’ and…pushed off the school bus steps and dumped on the ground, while the busdriver, keeping his eyes straight ahead, drove off.” (Plath would later draw on this story when writing “The Shadow” and “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit.”) More than sixty years later, these incidents still upset Aurelia: “I felt this prejudice was completely unjust for my parents’ sake as well as my own, for they were ardent converts to American democracy.”106 Aurelia was eight when the First World War began and twelve when it ended—formative years to come of age as an “other” who was unfairly bullied. This dislocating experience helps explain her reluctance to cause trouble later in life, or to question the dominant certainties of her age. Aurelia’s embrace of mainstream American values and her frequent suppression of anger—habits that would grate mightily on her daughter—grew partly out of her experience as an ostracized Austrian American girl during the First World War.

  On account of disastrous investments in the stock market, Frank Schober brought the family close to financial ruin during the 1920s. When he was laid off from his accounting job in the late 1930s, Aurelia’s mother demanded control of the family’s finances—a move that broke Frank’s spirit.107 He had to scramble for work and was lucky to find a position as the maître d’hôtel at the elite Brookline Country Club in 1940. Aurelia remembered that she and her two younger siblings “grew up in a matriarchy”—just as Sylvia would after her father’s death. Aurelia, the good girl and peacemaker, took pride in her high marks and the pleasure they brought her parents, who made her education a top priority: “Support at home compensated for outside unpleasantness, as well as did success in the classroom.” She was allowed to skip the second grade, “a great boon for me.”108 The same cycle—praise from parents and teachers making up for “outside unpleasantness”—would again play itself out between Aurelia and her daughter years later.

  Aurelia forged her identity around her intellect from an early age. When she was not playing with her siblings, going to museums, or visiting her uncle’s family in Jamaica Plain, she spent most of her free time reading Horatio Alger, Harold Bell Wright, and Gene Stratton-Porter. Her favorite book was, notably, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. She preferred novels in which “the poor and the virtuous always ultimately triumphed,” perhaps because of her own battles with the neighborhood gang some years before. Later, she devoured “all the romantic historical novels I could find in the public library.” She took pains, in her memoir, to portray herself as a reader:

  Emily Dickinson’s poetry became my new bible; the novels of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, the Brontës, Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, Galsworthy, Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James—in fact, the world of American and English prose and poetry burst upon me, filling me with the urgency to read, read. I lived in a dream world, a book tucked under every mattress of the beds it was my chore to make up daily; a book in the bathroom hamper, and the family’s stock answer to “What’s RiRi [my nickname] doing?” was “Oh, she’s reading again.”109

  Aurelia suggests in this memoir that Sylvia inherited her literary precociousness, and perhaps even her literary talent, from her. Indeed, when Aurelia later gave Sylvia books by Friedrich Nietzsche and James Frazer at Christmas, she reaffirmed the sense that they shared an intellectual bond. But Sylvia was the voyager; Aurelia could only wave from the shore with a mix of envy and pride. Aurelia once told an interviewer, “I had hoped to become a writer once, but I didn’t feel that I could expose my children to the uncertainty of a writer’s success or failure.”110

  Aurelia graduated salutatorian of her 1924 high school class. She wanted to study at Wellesley College, but the cost was prohibitive.111 She later regretted not applying for a scholarship and made sure her daughter did not repeat the same mistake. She settled on a liberal arts degree from Boston University to prepare for a career teaching English. Her father, however, had other plans for her. “I was to be a ‘business woman.’ ”112 In the end, they compromised: after Aurelia finished the two-year vocational course, she completed two more years at the university studying the humanities. There, she served as the president of the German Club and participated in student government, the English Club, and the Writers’ Club.113 She graduated valedictorian of her college class in 1928.

  Aurelia then pursued a master’s degree in English and German at Boston University, where her “most memorable” class was “The Philosophy of Faust,” taught by Marshall Perrin.114 She met Otto, the professor of her Middle High German class, in 1929. She thought him “a very fine-looking gentleman…with extraordinarily vivid blue eyes, and a fair, ruddy complexion.” On the last day of class, as Aurelia said good-bye to him, he shyly invited her to a picnic at a friend’s farm the next weekend. “It was a bolt out of the blue,” Aurelia wrote. That weekend, she learned that Otto “could be spontaneous, jolly, and certainly was confiding.” He told her he admired her thesis on the Renaissance physician and alchemist Paracelsus, which he had read and which, he said, “proved we had much in common.” He “astounded” her by revealing that he had a wife from whom he had been separated for thirteen years, but that he would get a divorce were he “to form a serious relationship with a young woman now.”115 This was perhaps the real “bolt out of the blue”: Otto was already thinking about marrying Aurelia on their first date.

  The couple separated for the summer while Aurelia worked as an office manager at a camp in Pine Bush, New York. The two corresponded throughout July and August, then began dating in earnest in the fall of 1930. Aurelia’s recollection of their courtship recalls the early promise of the marriage:

  From the fall of 1930 on, our friendship developed and deepened. Weekends found us hiking through the Blue Hills, the Arnold Arboretum, or the Fells Reservation. The worlds of ornithology and entomology were opening for me, and we dreamed of projects, jointly shared, involving nature study, travel, and writing. “The Evolution of Parental Care in the Animal Kingdom” was our most ambitious vision, planned to be embarked upon after we had achieved some lesser goals and had established our family of at least two children. I succeeded in interesting Otto at that time in the fine productions then given at the Boston Repertory Theatre—Ibsen, Shaw, and modern plays of that era—as well as sharing my enthusiasm for literature.116

  In 1932 they traveled to Nevada so that Otto could obtain a formal divorce from his first wife. Divorces were difficult to obtain, and the
whole affair contained a whiff of scandal. Otto and Aurelia married on the same day the divorce was granted, January 4, in a rushed civil ceremony that probably disappointed the bride, who had a deeply sentimental side. (Both of Aurelia’s siblings eventually married in festive, family-centered ceremonies.)

  After the wedding, Otto asked Aurelia to give up a promising career as a teacher of English and German at Brookline High School, one of the state’s best public schools, to become, as she put it, “a full-time homemaker.”117 Otto’s request reflected the mores of the time: before the Second World War, twenty-six states had laws prohibiting married women from working.118 Otto respected Aurelia’s intellect enough to ask her to ghostwrite sections of his scientific work, but, as a college professor, he saw no need for her to remain in the workforce. Indeed, a “working wife” in the 1930s carried a stigma.

  Aurelia claimed that the first year of her marriage was almost exclusively devoted to “THE BOOK”—Bumblebees and Their Ways. “After Sylvia was born,” she wrote, “it was ‘THE CHAPTER.’ ”119 This was a chapter on “Insect Societies” that Otto was preparing for The Handbook of Social Psychology. Aurelia said she wrote the entire first draft of this chapter from Otto’s notes. In this respect, Otto and Aurelia’s marriage bears some resemblance to Sylvia’s marriage to Ted Hughes. Both marriages began in academic settings, and both women were initially content to put their own ambitions aside to help their foreign husbands. The two highly educated couples embarked on their relationships in a collaborative spirit: Ted and Sylvia sought to become the most important poets of their generation, while Otto and Aurelia also saw themselves as partners in a joint intellectual and scientific endeavor. Sylvia’s friend Ruth Freeman Geissler picked up on this connection: “Sylvia helped Ted many times…the same as Aurelia had helped Otto a generation before.”120