Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Sylvia’s younger brother, Warren, was born on April 27, 1935, two and a half years to the day after her birth. Afflicted throughout toddlerhood with asthma and bronchial pneumonia, Warren required near constant attention from Aurelia. Sylvia was often sent to her grandparents’ home in Winthrop while her mother tended to her sickly infant son; when she was home, Sylvia sought out Otto’s attention in an attempt to become his “pet,” just as she believed Warren was Aurelia’s.

  While Aurelia was nursing Warren, Sylvia occupied herself by finding capital letters in newspapers and reciting them to her mother. She read her first word (a Stop sign, which she read as “pots”) at three and displayed artistic talent early. Otto was excited when one day he found her quietly outlining the Taj Mahal on a bath mat with small mosaic tiles—“to us a definite sign of visual memory developing at an early age.”21 Aurelia remembered, “My husband wouldn’t let me vacuum clean. He had that down for weeks.”22 Otto took special pleasure in teaching and observing his daughter, who could recite on command the Latin names of the insects he was studying. “Bombiculanus!” she would exclaim when she saw a bee. Aurelia recounted that one night, while gazing down at his sleeping children, Otto said, “All parents think their children are wonderful. We know!”23 A family friend said that Otto spoke to Sylvia as if she were his intellectual peer; she was, for him, “the recipient, the chosen one.”24 Otto may have been a loving father, but he was not playful. He seemed most interested in Sylvia when she excelled. Aurelia recalled, “She never played with Daddy, she never went out with Daddy, never went on the beach with Daddy except in the evenings she would play piano. And then when he was ill she dressed up in a nurse’s uniform and brought him drinks and so forth.”25

  Aurelia and the children spent most of the hot summer of 1936 with the Schobers in Winthrop while Otto taught summer school at Boston University. She commuted back to Jamaica Plain weekly to do housekeeping and spend time with Otto, who had begun to complain about increasingly alarming symptoms: “constantly tired; develops chronic cough; sleeps poorly,” Aurelia recorded.26 She worried that what at first seemed like fatigue from a long commute by railway, boat, and subway into Boston was something more serious. But Otto stubbornly refused to see a doctor. In fact, wrote Aurelia, he had “no personal physician and boasted that he had never been to a doctor in his life.”27 Otto had seen a friend die from lung cancer after several operations, and he was determined to avoid the same fate. “I know what my ailment is, and I’m not going to submit to any butchering,” he told Aurelia.28 He decided he was terminally ill. Otto’s self-diagnosis and deeply pessimistic refusal to seek medical help, as well as his reclusive domestic habits, suggest that he may have been suffering from depression. “Why me?” he would ask despondently.29

  That fall, Aurelia kept the children in Winthrop with her parents while she nursed Otto in Jamaica Plain. The Plaths soon moved to their own seven-room stucco house in Winthrop at 92 Johnson Avenue, only two miles from the Schober house on Point Shirley. Aurelia called it “spacious.”30 Sylvia would have felt the bracing wind of the sea from her earliest days: only one house stood between the new Plath home and the ocean. She would have seen light change as it refracted off the ocean over the course of an afternoon, “full of red sun and sea lights,” as she later wrote.31 She would have heard the sound of gulls constantly. It was here that she chose to sanctify her earliest memories, here that she began an infatuation with the sea that would become a touchstone throughout her life.

  She learned to swim three months before her fifth birthday; photographs from this time show her at the beach, wading in the water or standing against a sea wall looking happy and tan.32 She beams for the camera as she stands in her swimsuit on the bow of Uncle Frank’s sailboat, holding a six-and-a-half-pound cod. Aurelia remembered her “roaming over the ‘flats’ at low tide, gathering shells or digging in the coarse sand,” exploring “shallow pools teeming with miniature sea life,” and climbing rocks.33 Later, in her 1940s scrapbook, Sylvia described her relationship with the ocean:

  I gradually developed a love for the stormy, turbulent ocean that few people can understand. I enjoyed lying for hours in the bright, white sand, gazing at the sparkling blue-green waves bounding in on the west beach, and the silvery seagulls dipping for fish on the crest of a frothy white-cap before it broke and washed among the pebbles. I speak so much of the ocean, because it was an important part of my heritage and environment, and my love for it is hard to explain.34

  Parts of her early short story “The Green Rock,” written in 1949 when she was sixteen or seventeen, seem to come straight out of her scrapbook:

  Something within her soared at the sight of the cloudless sky and the waves washing on the shore with a scalloped fringe of foam….As she stared out at the ocean, she wondered if she could ever explain to anyone how she felt about the sea. It was part of her, and she wanted to reach out, out, until she encompassed the horizon within the circle of her arms.35

  In her memoir “Ocean 1212-W,” Plath wrote, “I sometimes think my vision of the sea is the clearest thing I own.” “Ocean 1212-W” was Plath’s attempt to write her own creation myth. When Aurelia first set her down on the beach, Sylvia “crawled straight for the coming wave and was just through the wall of green when she caught my heels.” Later, she claimed she taught herself to swim: “I should, according to mother, have sunk like a stone, but I didn’t.” The sea protected her, and brought her a “sign of election and specialness” when Aurelia was in the hospital giving birth to Warren: “I was not forever to be cast out.”36 Sylvia’s childhood friend Ruth Freeman Geissler remembered that Otto, too, loved the sea—he “sat in the sun at the beach every day” in the summer. When Ruth’s father saw Otto at the beach, Otto would say, in his German accent, “I’m storing up health vor the vinter.”37

  Plath described with particular relish the “sulphurous afternoon” when the deadly hurricane of ’38 struck, “the sea molten, steely-slick, heaving at its leash like a broody animal.” She and Warren watched the destruction that night out their window: “Nothing could be seen. The only sound was a howl, jazzed up by the bangs, slams, groans and splinterings of objects tossed like crockery in a giant’s quarrel.” (Aurelia remembered that her young daughter always found storms “exciting and dramatic.”)38 The morning after the hurricane, Sylvia remembered seeing upended telephone poles and fallen trees, even small cottages floating out at sea. It was, she wrote, “all one could wish.” Her grandmother’s Winthrop house survived the storm intact, despite nature’s best attempt to send it out to sea: “My grandfather’s seawall had saved it, neighbors said….a dead shark filled what had been the geranium bed, but my grandmother had her broom out, it would soon be right.”39 Plath identified equally with the raging sea and the Germanic stoicism that held its destructions at bay.

  At night Aurelia read to the children in the brightly decorated upstairs playroom equipped with an art easel, paint, clay, and a record player on which she played classical and children’s music. She put money toward a “book fund” and built up a “respectable” library for the children, augmented by Otto’s two thousand scientific books and her own collection of German, English, and American literature.40 She read the children Robert Louis Stevenson, Eugene Field, A. A. Milne, Dr. Seuss, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Wind in the Willows were favorites. She also made up stories about a teddy bear named Mixie Blackshort and read the children poems from an anthology called Sung Under the Silver Umbrella. They, in turn, composed their own poems. Aurelia read poetry to both children from the time they were born, for she “believed that even babies responded to the cadence of poetry.” In addition to children’s verse, she recited “John Donne, Browning, Yeats, Tennyson, Coleridge, Rupert Brooke, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, T. S. Eliot and many others.”41 Sylvia’s toddlerhood was intensely literary.

  Aurelia referred to the work of Emily
Dickinson as her “bible,” but Plath remembered that her first literary frisson was Matthew Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman.”42 She loved the rhyme and cadences:

  Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,

  Where the winds are all asleep;

  Where the spent lights quiver and gleam;

  Where the salt weed sways in the stream;

  Where the sea beasts rang’d all round

  Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground;…

  The poem tells of a human wife who abandons her merman husband and children to pray at the village church on Easter Sunday. Despite the family’s pleas, she never returns to the sea. “Children’s voices should be dear / (Call once more) to a mother’s ear; / Children’s voices, wild with pain. / Surely she will come again.” But she does not come—she remains on land, committed to God. “Come away, children, call no more,” says the merman.

  Sylvia, a young child, felt “gooseflesh” on her skin after Aurelia read her the poem. “I did not know what made it. I was not cold. Had a ghost passed over? No, it was the poetry. A spark flew off Arnold and shook me, like a chill. I wanted to cry; I felt very odd. I had fallen into a new way of being happy.”43 Plath would later use ocean imagery to explore the themes of parental abandonment and childhood grief in her 1958 poem “Full Fathom Five,” in which the landlocked daughter is forsaken by her sea-dwelling, changeling father: “I walk dry on your kingdom’s border / Exiled to no good. // Your shelled bed I remember. / Father, this thick air is murderous. / I would breathe water.” The poem owes an obvious debt to Shakespeare’s The Tempest, but its dramatic trajectory also suggests Arnold’s “The Forsaken Merman.”

  Aurelia’s ambitious reading program quickly yielded dividends. In 1937, at only five years old, Sylvia was reading and writing. She wrote her first poem, the two-lined “Thoughts,” in December 1937: “When Christmas comes, smiles creep into my heart. / I’m always happiest when I’m singing a song or skipping along.”44 Inspired by the progressive ideas of Montessori and Fröbel, who eschewed rote learning, Aurelia enrolled Sylvia at a local progressive preschool, the Sunshine School. There, Sylvia made a lifelong friend in Ruth Freeman. Marion Freeman, Ruth’s mother, became Aurelia’s closest friend at this time; Sylvia later wrote that she became “a sort of ‘second mother’ to me.”45 Aurelia remembered that the “children practically lived together in one home or the other” and called the “relaxed, cheerful” Freeman home “a refuge in inclement weather when Otto was at home.” (Ruth would eventually live with the Plaths for some months when Marion was hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.) Sylvia also became friendly with Ruth’s brother David, who inspired the character of Ben in her short story “The Day Mr. Prescott Died.” David, Ruth, and Sylvia spent hours playing at the beach, where Sylvia made up “romantic tales of far-fetched adventure.” Otto seemed to David “a stern, severe person” who preferred Sylvia to Warren. (Otto would purr “Seeel-vya” and bark “Wrn!”) Another neighborhood playmate, William Sterling, remembered long afternoons sitting on the shore with Sylvia, half-watching the construction of Logan Airport as they hunted for horseshoe crabs and searched for shells. He remembered that at age eight or nine, he, along with Sylvia and a few other children, sneaked into the Reynolds Funeral Home, near their church, after choir practice. Inside, they saw a cadaver, which terrified them.46 Most of the neighborhood kids, William said, were rough. Sylvia did not make any close friends besides himself and the Freemans—all bookish types.

  Another regular visitor to the Plath household was Max Gaebler, the son of Otto’s old friend Hans Gaebler. When Max entered college in Boston in 1937, Otto took him under his wing: he treated Max to lunch and joined him for walks around Faneuil Hall, initiating him “into the mysteries of academic life.” Otto offered Max a “standing invitation” to come to Winthrop, and the Plath home became his refuge in the late 1930s and early ’40s. The family seemed warm and loving to Max; he never forgot the sumptuous Thanksgiving feasts Aurelia and her mother prepared. He remembered Sylvia as “bright and sunny and eager” and was impressed by her vivid imagination and skillful drawings. During the hurricane of ’38, he slept, slightly terrified, on the Plaths’ sun porch, which faced the ocean. The next morning he walked around the neighborhood with Sylvia, Warren, Aurelia, Uncle Frank, Marion Freeman, and her children to take stock of the destruction. He photographed a delighted Sylvia climbing and playing on the fallen trees.

  Otto frequently complained to Max about his health. In 1937–38, he “attributed it to age,” but closer to 1940 “he decided he had cancer.”47 The rambunctious young children were not allowed to play in the house while Otto was working. Aurelia’s short record of the 1938–39 year suggests tension: “Warren developed many allergies to foods, pollens, dust, etc….he suffered two serious bouts with bronchial pneumonia and began having asthmatic attacks. Otto was steadily losing weight; his health continued to deteriorate….I seldom knew an unbroken night’s sleep.”48

  By 1938, Aurelia realized that her husband was seriously ill. Day after day, Otto came home from work so exhausted he could barely walk; he corrected papers and planned his classes while reclined on the den sofa, where he also ate when he was too weak to sit at the dinner table. Aurelia’s attempts to persuade him to seek a doctor’s opinion “brought on explosive outbursts of anger.” Undeterred, she consulted a doctor in Winthrop about Otto’s worsening condition, but the doctor refused to see him, saying it would be “both unwise and unethical” to do so without her husband’s consent.49 Aurelia did not have much choice but to watch helplessly as the tragedy unfolded. A call from a husband about a stubborn sick wife would have yielded a completely different outcome, of course. Otto’s despondent arrogance and Germanic stoicism may have inspired Plath’s Nazi comparison in “Daddy.”

  Aurelia shepherded the children out of the house when Otto was home and allowed them only a few minutes each night with their father before bedtime. She called theirs an “upstairs-downstairs” household—by separating the children from Otto she ensured that they would not bother him with “noisy play and squabbling.”50 Nor would his painful moans, caused by leg cramps, frighten them. The children ate apart from their mother and father at their own table upstairs in the playroom, for Otto found it “more restful” to eat without them. After dinner, the children came downstairs to perform for their father. This half hour, Aurelia recalled, was “the one time of the day we were together as a family for the last four years of my husband’s life.”51 Sylvia, then, had no real spontaneous interaction with her father for four years. She would play the piano, draw, and recite poems she had memorized or written herself. Sometimes she would leave poems under his napkin at dinner. Her dying father was her first audience.

  Aurelia endured the daily torment of watching her husband grow closer—as they now both assumed—to death. Meanwhile, she had to care for her young asthmatic son. In the age before the mass production of penicillin, the pneumonia he suffered from was one of the leading causes of death in children. Aurelia, possibly on the brink of losing both her husband and her son, tried to keep up appearances for her young daughter’s sake. When the strain became too great, she would send Sylvia to the Schobers’ house at Point Shirley. There, she mailed her six-year-old daughter letters praising her for good behavior and high marks, while trying to convey the gravity of the situation: “You are a lucky girl to be with grandmother. She takes better care of you than I could now. You see, Warren is still in bed and needs me all the time.”52 Aurelia’s letters give the impression that she was writing from a great distance rather than two miles away. There are vague promises of reunion: “When he [Warren] is well, we shall all be together again. Then what happy times we shall have. When the weather gets warm, we shall play on the beach together”; “I love you, sweetheart, and I am looking forward to Easter Sunday. Probably we shall all be well together on that happy day.”53 The equivocal “probably” must have disappointed S
ylvia. But caring for Warren and Otto took a heavy physical and emotional toll on Aurelia. She was treated for an ulcer not long after Otto’s death.

  Aurelia sent Sylvia poems and illustrated stories to cheer her up. One poem, about a doll named Rebecca, attempted to make Sylvia understand the demands and sacrifices of mothering:

  I have a doll, Rebecca,

  She’s quite a little care

  I have to press her ribbons

  And comb her fluffy hair.

  I keep her clothes all mended,

  And wash her hands and face,