Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Plath’s unpublished journals from the 1940s do not contain a single mention of Otto. She later wrote that after he died, “those first nine years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.”81 She never discussed her father with her best friend, Betsy Powley, with whom she shared everything throughout the 1940s.82 Betsy eventually asked how Otto had died and received a vague response about how he had lost a leg to tuberculosis. She never asked again, and Sylvia never offered more details.83 One of Sylvia’s Smith College friends remembered her saying only that she had loved Otto, that he had been a “wonderful father,” and that he had died.84 But Plath wrote about him, many times, starting with “Dirge,” later retitled “Lament,” when she was a student at Smith. It is the first surviving elegy she wrote for her father:

  The sting of bees took away my father

  who walked in a swarming shroud of wings

  and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

  ……………­……………­…..

  He counted the guns of god a bother,

  laughed at the ambush of angels’ tongues,

  and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

  O ransack the four winds and find another

  man who can mangle the grin of kings:

  the sting of bees took away my father

  who scorned the tick of the falling weather.85

  In this villanelle, Plath attempts to bring technical order to chaotic loss. The speaker mythologizes her father as all-powerful, arrogant, and proud—yet he is “taken away” by a bee sting. The image is emasculating; the father’s arrogance is punished, just as Otto Plath’s was in real life. Sylvia may have been justified in thinking that it was not diabetes that killed her father, but arrogance—his false belief that his own self-diagnosis was more accurate than a doctor’s. The tender, elegiac music of “Lament” contains a subtext of anger. “The Colossus” and “Daddy,” too, would contain competing voices, one lacerating and scornful, the other grief-stricken.

  Otto’s death did not set Sylvia on poetry’s path, but it may have exacerbated her chances of suicide. The most significant recent study on the effect of parental death on children, which followed nearly 200,000 bereaved Scandinavian children for forty years, found that “Parental death in childhood is, irrespective of cause, associated with an increased long-term risk of suicide.”86 Bereaved children’s vulnerability to suicide remained high for twenty-five years after the parent’s death.87 Ted Hughes’s intuitive sense that Otto’s ghost lay behind his wife’s depression and eventual suicide may have been partly correct. In another study on the subject, the authors found that the more severe repercussions of sudden parental loss could be mitigated by therapy and counseling during a “critical window of intervention” that occurred shortly after the parent’s death.88 When Max Gaebler joined the family for Thanksgiving just a few weeks after Otto’s death, he found the family “muted,” yet the feast proceeded as usual.89 Aurelia’s strategy of protecting her children from grief and mourning may have been counterproductive.

  Sylvia’s English friend Elizabeth Compton Sigmund, whose father left her family when she was a small child, speculated that she and Sylvia both “felt a burden of responsibility for our mother’s well-being.”90 The young Sylvia wanted to assuage her mother’s grief by being a good daughter. Academic success came easily to her, and winning prizes and publishing poetry was a sure way to win approval. But Plath was at heart an iconoclast who longed for personal and political freedom. The debt she owed her mother clashed with her instinct for self-individuation. Sylvia would struggle all her life to reconcile these dueling instincts, which sometimes made her feel, as she put it, schizophrenic.

  By 1961, when Plath wrote The Bell Jar, with its merciless portrait of Aurelia, the mother-daughter dynamic had morphed into something more destructive. Letters of mutual reassurance across the Atlantic took on the character of an arms race. A Smith friend recalled that Aurelia seemed like a “stage mother” who pushed her daughter to fulfill her own unrealized creative longings.91 Another friend who knew Sylvia in London at the end of her life, Suzette Macedo, said that Sylvia always referred extravagantly to Aurelia as her “demon mother.”92 Suzette was astonished and disturbed by the deference Sylvia showed Aurelia in her letters, when they were published. She could not understand how the same person who had railed against her mother so bitterly could have written those sweet, cheerful notes. Ted Hughes thought he understood. In an unpublished poem about The Bell Jar, he suggested that his wife’s emotional conflicts were forged in the crucible of grief:

  Her mother said: what is past—is past.

  Her mother said: do not mourn: onward.

  Life is for living, Earth is beautiful.

  Do not be unhappy. For you

  There is only happiness: look:

  I will show you happiness because

  I cannot bear you to be unhappy

  Because I love you so much.

  ……………………

  And the I stood, the pale girl stood there

  And could not bear to see her mother unhappy

  She loved her so much. So she obeyed.

  When her mother laughed, she too laughed.

  When her mother said “work,” she worked so hard

  Her schoolmates were alarmed.

  When her mother said: This is the perfect

  Way to be, she was so perfect that—

  All exclaimed: this girl is exceptional.

  This is how she kept her mother happy.

  And she said to her brother: we must never

  Let Mummy be unhappy: unhappiness

  Is the feeling none of us must feel

  Because it is the abyss, where Daddy lies.

  Let us do everything to keep her happy

  And never speak of Daddy & never be sad.93

  3

  The Shadow

  Wellesley, 1940–1945

  Sylvia Plath came of age during a harrowing decade marked by the twin apocalyptic horrors of world war and genocide. When she was twelve, a six-page spread of Nazi atrocities appeared in the May 7, 1945, issue of Life magazine; three months later, she learned with all the world that nuclear bombs had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although she filled her diaries with schoolgirl descriptions of middle-class comforts, the decade’s horror left its mark on her strongest work: her Ariel poems are seared with the imagery of the Holocaust and the bomb.

  Plath’s childhood friend William Sterling remembered that coastal Winthrop “was like an armed camp” in 1940. There were three forts, and the shoreline was blacked out at night. He and Sylvia used to sit on a sea-wall at Point Shirley and watch the Navy convoys form in the afternoon. There were air-raid drills and military target practices. Sometimes house windows shattered from the great guns’ reverberations. The atmosphere was one of danger and anticipation.1

  Aurelia wrote that the period after the United States entered the Second World War was a “tense time” for the family because of their Germanic heritage.2 Only one generation removed from the hardships of old-world poverty and new-world discrimination, the shadow of persecution was never far behind Plath. Two of her short stories, set in Winthrop at the beginning of the Second World War—“The Shadow” (1959) and “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit” (1955)—capture the mood of fear and apprehension within the Plath-Schober household in the early 1940s. “The threat of war was seeping in everywhere,” Plath wrote. “There was no escape. It invaded our radio programs and our games.”3 It invaded school, too: in “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit,” crying children are herded into a dark basement of “cold black stone” during air raid drills, where they are told to put pencils between their teeth “so the bombs wouldn’t make us bite
our tongues by mistake.”4 In both stories, neighborhood children bully young female narrators on account of their Germanic backgrounds. Meanwhile, torture scenes from a newsreel about Japanese prison camps replay over and over in the girls’ nightmares. They begin to fear that they or members of their family will be sent away to a prison camp. What happened to Japanese Americans during the war is well known, but more than eleven thousand Germans and German Americans—including American citizens—were also detained during World War II. As U-boat activity increased along the Atlantic corridor, those living on the East Coast were most vulnerable. A detention center in East Boston, which bordered Winthrop, was eventually filled beyond capacity with German detainees.

  Sadie, the young protagonist of “The Shadow,” struggles to comprehend such xenophobia in language that evokes the plight of Jews in Germany in the 1930s and ’40s, as well as the McCarthy witch hunts that were in full swing when Plath wrote the story in 1959:

  I had an ingrained sense of the powers of good protecting me: my parents, the police, the F. B. I., the President, the American Armed Forces, even those symbolic champions of Good from a cloudier hinterland—the Shadow, Superman, and the rest. Not to mention God himself. Surely, with these ranked around me, circle after concentric circle, reaching to infinity, I had nothing to fear. Yet I was afraid. Clearly, in spite of my assiduous study of the world, there was something I had not been told; some piece of the puzzle I did not have in hand.5

  The “mystery” is solved by a neighborhood child who blurts out, “it’s because your father’s German.” Soon after, Sadie’s German father prepares to depart for a detention camp “out West.”6 Plath’s fantasy of Jewishness in “Daddy” may be partly based on her family’s experiences of being singled out, questioned, scapegoated, and shunned in wartime America. As she wrote in her 1958 notes for “The Shadow,” “Look up German concentration, I mean American detention camps.”7

  Aurelia worried about her children’s welfare in working-class Winthrop amid rising anti-German sentiment. David Freeman remembered that there were not many families of German or Austrian descent in Winthrop; the only such family he knew had a swastika flag raised on their flagpole by “neighborhood kids.”8 Aurelia was also concerned that Winthrop’s damp climate was exacerbating Warren’s bronchial ailments. Determined to improve her family’s prospects, she devoted herself to finding more stable employment that would fund a move. After teaching Spanish and German as a substitute at Braintree High School, in 1941 she finally earned a full-time position at Winthrop Junior High School. There she taught ninth-grade English and managed most of the school’s finances. Although she now had a $1,600 yearly salary and a coveted state pension, she was exhausted by her teaching and administrative duties—when she left, her job had to be shared by three men. Her ulcer worsened.

  Aurelia’s luck changed in the summer of 1942, when she accepted an instructorship at the Boston University College of Practical Arts and Letters, her alma mater, teaching medical secretarial procedures. Betsy Powley Wallingford, who knew Aurelia then, felt that she “could have had a better job…she was capable of more than that.”9 Yet at the time Aurelia thought the offer was “providential.” Though the new job did not then include a pension, it was a step up in money and prestige. She vowed to make the course “fascinating” and took biology classes at the Harvard Extension School to strengthen her credentials. Her salary allowed her to buy a foothold in a more affluent suburb.10

  Aurelia chose Wellesley. The Nortons, another Boston University family, already lived there and would provide a warm welcome, while Aurelia’s sister Dot lived in neighboring Weston. With its top-rated public schools, bucolic parks, easy proximity to Boston, and town-funded scholarships to Wellesley College, it was an obvious—if ambitious—choice. Above all, Wellesley held the promise of civility. There, Aurelia hoped, her children would not be called “spy-face” and pushed off the school bus.

  By merging households, Aurelia and her parents soon realized they could save money and provide a more stable life for the children. Grammy Schober would handle child care, housekeeping, cooking, and driving, while Grampy supplemented Aurelia’s income by waiting tables at the Brookline Country Club, where he boarded during the week. Aurelia sold the Winthrop house at a loss in the fall of 1942 and bought a six-room colonial at 26 Elmwood Road, a “modest” section of Wellesley just a short distance from the town center.11 The street was lined with small, well-kept colonials, a Baptist church, and acres of woods. The Plaths’ white clapboard house had black shutters, a garage, a breezeway, and a quarter-acre yard. It was smaller than the Winthrop house, but its corner lot gave the setting a more expansive feel.12 On the first floor there was a living room, dining room, kitchen, screened-in porch, and a bedroom for Warren; upstairs, a bathroom, a bedroom for the Schobers, and another bedroom that Sylvia shared with her mother. Sylvia would spend many afternoons reading high in the backyard’s apple tree, the next best thing to a room of her own. She called the new house “cosy” and “felt mingled regrets and anticipation as we bade good-by to the Freeman’s [sic].”13 They left Winthrop on October 26, one day before her tenth birthday. Later, Plath spoke of the move with sadness, saying that it sealed her off from her father and the sea. But it also provided a fresh start, and welcome respite from schoolyard whispers about a dead parent.

  Although Sylvia had been enrolled in the sixth grade in Winthrop, Aurelia decided to keep her back a year when they moved. Wellesley’s school system was more rigorous, and Aurelia felt that her daughter would be challenged by the new curriculum. During her first day of school, Sylvia sat across the aisle from a girl with thick braids, just like hers. Her name was Betsy Powley, and from that day through high school, the two were inseparable. Sylvia also made new friends through Girl Scouts, and still saw Ruth Freeman regularly. If she missed her old life, she sensed the privileges of the new: supportive teachers, hardworking peers, a well-stocked town library, top-notch recreation programs, and the possibility of a scholarship to Wellesley College. Sylvia was hungry for all that the town of Wellesley had to offer; but, through the years, she would feel increasingly constricted by its culture of gentility.

  * * *

  BY THE TIME the family moved, Sylvia had been writing poems for about five years. She began sending out her work for publication at age eight, an act that has struck some as an early sign of a “pathological” obsession with achievement.14 Yet the Brontë sisters and Virginia Woolf, among others, began “publishing” their work as children in homemade newspapers. Plath simply sent her work to the children’s page of an actual newspaper. Later, she would try to sell her writing and artwork in order to avoid the cleaning and babysitting jobs she relied on for spending money. When she wrote in her 1944 diary of her attempt to win an art contest sponsored by the Boston Herald, she noted that the $2 prize was twenty times her weekly allowance of ten cents.

  Sylvia did not have to wait long for public recognition. On August 10, 1941, nine months after her father’s death, she published her first poem (titled, simply, “Poem”) on the “Good Sport” page of the Sunday Boston Herald. Plath began her submission with a note to the editor, which was published with the poem: “Dear Editor, I have written a short poem about what I see and hear on hot summer nights”:

  Hear the crickets chirping

  In the dewy grass

  Bright little fireflies

  Twinkle as they pass.15

  Not yet nine, Sylvia was already able to write in near-perfect trochaic trimeter. She was proud of her achievement and later pasted the newspaper clipping in her high school scrapbook. That year, she expanded “Poem” into a longer verse, which she titled “My House.” The stanza she added at the beginning shows dexterity with iambic meter: “I have a little house / Between two trees / And there the birdies always sing / Among the whispering leaves.”16 The Yeatsian image of “whispering leaves” seems a purposeful, slightly unsettli
ng counterweight to the cheerful singing birds. Her ear was already tuned to the darker cadences of Romanticism.17

  In March 1943, Aurelia left her family for a short stay in the hospital on account of her increasingly troublesome ulcer. Sylvia sent her mother highly graded schoolwork and several short poems—many about fairies. Fairies played an important role in Sylvia’s young imagination. In the mid-1940s she began working on a fairy story that was supposed to be her first novel. She planned the book out in chapters and frequently returned to it over the years as the project, which had several different titles, grew in scope. (By 1946 it comprised nine chapters and twenty-six typed pages.) In the first chapter of the first version of the novel, which Plath subsequently titled Stardust, the heroine, Nancy, is a Messiah figure chosen by fairies:

  “I am Star,” she began. “Once, in every generation, my Queen chooses one child on earth who has the strongest belief in fairy magic, and then selects one out of her band of fairies to show this child that magic, good magic, still exists in the world today. I am the fairy who has been given the power to take you on many travels to places that most humans are sure do not exist. But first I must clear away the invisible film over your eyes that prevents you from seeing the fairy miracles that happen each day!” Thereupon the fairy passed her tiny gold wand across Nancy’s forehead. Before Nancy could utter a word, Star gave her a smiling nod, and faded away in the air.18