Letters Home Page 2

  Because Otto refused to sell a certain kind of wine that cost more in one bottle of a particular shape than it did in a plainer bottle, his uncle wrote to the boy’s grandparents, when his nephew was about to leave for Wisconsin, that “Otto is a good boy, but a poor businessman.”

  Otto’s A-B record (majoring in classical languages) at Northwestern pleased his grandparents, but they did not realize what his extracurricular reading was doing to form his philosophy. Darwin had become his hero and when Otto entered the Lutheran seminary (Missouri Synod), he was shocked to find all Darwin’s writings among the proscribed books. Worse still, this comparatively naïve newcomer to the land of the free discovered that most of the candidates for the ministry had never actually been verbally “called” or visibly given a “sign” from God that they had been “chosen” to preach His gospel. Instead, the students gathered in one of the dormitory rooms and discussed the varied and interesting ways each would announce he had been divinely informed. For six months, “miserable months of agonizing doubt and self-evaluation,” he told me, Otto tried his best to conform, but succeeded only outwardly and that was not enough. He then decided that the ministry was not for him, but, with a flash of joy and hope that he could make it right with his grandparents, chose teaching for his profession. In this work he felt he could serve and hold to his integrity, be his own man.

  However, another shock lay in store for him. His grandparents did not share his point of view; in their eyes he had broken his promise. If he adhered to this infamous decision, he would no longer be a part of the family; his name would be stricken from the family Bible. And so it was done. He was on his own for the rest of his life. When his parents and his three brothers and two sisters came to America, he visited with them only briefly, and by the time of our marriage, his parents were dead and all sibling connections severed. (His youngest sister, Frieda Heinrichs, however, for whom Sylvia’s daughter is named, wrote me right after our marriage, and we two corresponded regularly until her death in 1966.)

  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. I enjoyed teaching German and English in Brookline High School until January 1932, when Otto and I were married in Carson City, Nevada. Then I yielded to my husband’s wish that I become a full-time homemaker.

  Otto and I wanted to start our family as soon as possible, he hoping our first child would be a daughter. “Little girls are usually more affectionate,” he said. As soon as I was certain I was pregnant, I began reading books related to the rearing of children. I was totally imbued with the desire to be a good wife and mother. At mealtimes we discussed the varying, and often conflicting, theories of child rearing. Had I been inclined to rigidity in the early training of my children, my husband, who believed in the natural unfolding of an infant’s development, would have strongly opposed me. He constantly voiced his recollections of his mother’s type of child care (he was the oldest of six children). I quietly followed the “demand feeding” accepted as modern today and labeled old-fashioned in the 1930’s, though I would never confess to it in front of my contemporaries, who conscientiously followed the typed instructions of their children’s pediatricians. Both my babies were rocked, cuddled, sung to, recited to, and picked up when they cried.

  Aurelia Plath, 1930, when she was teaching in Brookline, Mass.

  Sylvia was born October 27, 1932, a healthy eight-and-a-half-pound baby. At a luncheon that day, her father told his colleagues, “I hope for one more thing in life—a son, two and a half years from now.” Warren was born April 27, 1935, only two hours off schedule, and Otto was greeted by his colleagues as “the man who gets what he wants when he wants it.”

  Otto thoroughly enjoyed observing the development of his daughter, both as a father and as a scientist. When he held her at the age of six months against a rope fastened verticially to a bamboo shade on the porch, he was delighted by the fact that her feet grasped the rope in the same manner as her hands—to him proof of man’s evolutionary process as well as the gradual loss of flexibility when man started to wear shoes and used his feet only for walking.

  The first year and a half of our marriage saw the expansion of my husband’s doctoral thesis into book form. It was published in 1934 by the Macmillan Company, under the title Bumblebees and Their Ways. In 1933 Otto was invited to write a treatise on “Insect Societies,” which appeared as Chapter IV in A Handbook of Social Psychology.* We worked together on this; my husband outlined the sections, listing authors and their texts to be used as reference (there were sixty-nine authors), and I did the reading and note-taking along the lines he indicated, writing the first draft. After that he took over, rewriting and adding his own notes. Then he handed the manuscript to me to put into final form for the printer. By this time I felt I had had an intensive and fascinating course in entomology.

  Otto soon found the study he set up for himself in our apartment too gloomy as it faced north, so he moved all the materials he needed for the writing of “Insect Societies” into the dining room, where they remained for nearly a year. The seventy-plus reference books were arranged on top of the long sideboard; the dining table became his desk. No paper or book was to be moved! I drew a plan of the arrangement and managed to have friends in occasionally for dinner the one evening a week that my husband gave a course at Harvard night school, always replacing every item correctly before his return.

  Social life was almost nil for us as a married couple. My dreams of “open house” for students and the frequent entertaining of good friends among the faculty were not realized. During the first year of our married life, all had to be given up for THE BOOK. After Sylvia was born, it was THE CHAPTER. Fortunately my family was welcome, and during the summer months preceding Sylvia’s birth and the one following, they lived with us while renting their house in Winthrop.

  Sylvia attached herself to “Grampy” at once and was his greatest delight. He wheeled her out into the Arnold Arboretum while Otto and I worked on “Insect Societies,” and both Dad and Mother added their humor, love, and laughter to what would otherwise have been too academic an atmosphere. Sylvia was a healthy, merry child—the center of attention most of her waking time.

  Otto insisted on handling all finances, even to the purchasing of meat, fish, and vegetables at the Faneuil Hall Market once a week, knowing that there he could get the best food at the lowest prices. Despite the fact that he was only sixteen when he arrived in the United States, the Germanic theory that the man should be der Herr des Hauses (head of the house) persisted, contrary to Otto’s earlier claims that the then modern aim of “fifty-fifty” appealed to him. This attitude, no doubt, was inherent and reflected his own home life, where his mother, a rather melancholy person as he described her, was weighed down with the care of six children and an ulcer on her leg that never wholly healed (I did not understand the significance of that problem until the summer of 1940). His father, I was told, was energetic, jovial, inventive.

  The age difference between us (twenty-one years), Otto’s superior education, his long years of living in college dormitories or rooming by himself, our former teacher-student relationship, all made this sudden change to home and family difficult for him, and led to an attitude of “rightful” dominance on his part. He had never known the free flow of communication that characterized my relationship with my family, and talking things out and reasoning together just didn’t operate. At the e
nd of my first year of marriage, I realized that if I wanted a peaceful home—and I did—I would simply have to become more submissive, although it was not my nature to be so.

  When I was pregnant in the winter of 1934–35, I told Sylvia that she was going to have a brother or sister (a Warren or an Evelyn) and that I wanted her to help me get ready for the baby. The project fascinated her, and once as she laid her ear against my side when the baby was moving, the thrust must have been audible to her, for her face lit up as she cried, “I can hear him! He is saying, ‘Hó da! Hó da!’ That means ‘I love you; I love you!’”

  Sylvia in Winthrop, Mass., 1936

  Sylvia, 1937

  I spent a week with Sylvia in my mother’s home before the baby’s birth in order to get Sylvia thoroughly established there with the grandparents she knew and loved so well. I left her on April 27, the day of Warren’s birth. When told she had a brother, Sylvia pulled a wry face and pouted. “I wanted an Evelyn, not a Warren.”

  When we were reunited as a family, the one difficult period was when I nursed the baby; it was always then that Sylvia wanted to get into my lap. Fortunately, around this time she discovered the alphabet from the capital letters on packaged goods on the pantry shelves. With great rapidity she learned the names of the letters and I taught her the separate sounds of each. From then on, each time I nursed Warren, she would get a newspaper, sit on the floor in front of me and pick out all the capital letters to “read.” In her baby book, I found the note that it was in July (at the age of two years and nine months), as we waited to cross the street to enter the Arboretum with Warren in the carriage, that Sylvia stared at the big STOP sign with fascination. “Look, Mummy,” she cried, pointing to the sign, “Look! P-O-T-S. It says ‘pots,’ Mummy; it says ‘pots!’”

  Sylvia treasured a collection of small mosaic tile squares that had been given her and spent much time arranging them in designs. One Saturday, while I was baking in the kitchen, she was unusually quiet as she played with these in the living room. My husband went in there to see what she was up to, then called to me very excitedly. I stared in amazement for she had reproduced unmistakably the simplified outline of the Taj Mahal, the picture of which was woven into a mat in our bathroom. There were the four minarets terminating in domes like that of the center building—it was art without perspective, of course, but to us a definite sign of visual memory developing at an early age.

  While Otto did not take an active part in tending to or playing with his children, he loved them dearly and took great pride in their attractiveness and progress. Once, as we looked in upon our sleeping two, he remarked softly, “All parents think their children are wonderful. We know!”

  *

  The year after Warren’s birth, Otto began to draw more and more into himself and into his fears concerning his own health. There was ample reason. He was losing weight, had a chronic cough and sinusitis, was continually weary, and easily upset by trifles. He continued teaching—even in the summer—but the effort exhausted him, and he did his class preparation and correcting lying on the couch in his den. He steadily refused to consult a physician, pushing aside all such suggestions and pleas from me, my family, and his colleagues. He told me he had diagnosed his own case and that he would never submit to surgery. I understood the significance of what he said, for he had recently lost a friend who had succumbed after several operations to lung cancer.

  Otto Plath, 1930

  I even telephoned my friendly family doctor in Winthrop, the town to which we moved in 1936, and asked him to drop in for a visit, but he said that in view of Otto’s attitude it would be both unwise and unethical to do this. I sensed Otto’s unspoken diagnosis: lung cancer.

  Our move from Jamaica Plain in the fall of 1936 to Johnson Avenue, Winthrop Center, Massachusetts, had been a completely happy one for the children. They enjoyed living close to a beach and near their grandparents’ home at Point Shirley, only a few miles away. The children enjoyed roaming over the “flats” at low tide, gathering shells or digging in the coarse sand. Warren was still a toddler and kept close to me, but Sylvia wandered off to explore shallow pools teeming with miniature sea life, and to find sizable rocks to climb.

  From this time on, however, it was heartbreaking to watch a once-handsome, powerfully built man lose his vigor and deteriorate physically and emotionally. Appealing to him to get medical diagnosis and help only brought on explosive outbursts of anger. I kept an “upstairs-downstairs” household when both Otto and the children were indoors, partly so their noisy play and squabbling would not upset him, but mostly so that he would not frighten them, for he now occasionally suffered intense cramping spasms in his leg muscles, which would cause him to moan in pain. I had a local girl several mornings in the week take care of the ironing and general housework while I cooked, mended and did what work I had on hand for my husband—abstracting material to update his lectures, correcting German quizzes, and attending to his correspondence.

  Otto was determined to keep on teaching and, apparently, kept himself functioning and controlled throughout these working sessions. However, his nerves paid the price when he came home, for on his return he often collapsed on the couch in his study, and many times I served him dinner there.

  On the days Otto was home, he lived in this large study, and it was then I took the children to the beach so that they could run and shout and join their playmates, David and Ruth Freeman, whose mother, Marion, had become my closest and very understanding friend. Mr. and Mrs. Freeman, with their two children, David, six months Sylvia’s senior, and Ruth, a year her junior, had moved into the neighborhood in the spring of 1937, and our two families became fast friends. The four children practically lived together in one home or the other—the relaxed, cheerful atmosphere of the Freeman home becoming a refuge in inclement weather when Otto was at home. Warren struggled hard to keep pace with the three older children, who were often impatient with him, but as time went on, the discrepancy diminished due to the youngest one’s determination.

  The largest bedroom upstairs in our home was made into a playroom. Here I invented the bedtime stories centered on Warren’s favorite teddy bear, “The Adventures of Mixie Blackshort,” which ran into nightly installments for several years. The children had their supper in this room, sitting at a little maple table by a large window, from where we once watched the thrilling progress of an eclipse of the moon. It was here that I read to them poems by Eugene Field, Robert Louis Stevenson, A. A. Milne, and over and over again from the children’s favorite anthology, “Sung Under the Silver Umbrella.” This reading progressed through Dr. Seuss’s hilarious Horton Hatches an Egg to such books as Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Both children made up their own rhymes and limericks, patterned on those I read to them.

  After supper and their bath, they amused themselves in the playroom while their father and I had dinner. Then they would come down into the living room for about a half hour to be with us both before going to bed. This was the time Sylvia played piano for her father or improvised dances; both children would show him their drawings and recite the poems they remembered or the rhymes they had made up.

  Sylvia’s exuberant monopolizing of the luncheon conversation after each school session prompted Warren (then two and a half years old) to invent his “Other Side of the Moon” adventures (referred to years later in one of Sylvia’s unpublished stories). The first tale beginning with “On the other side of the moon, where I was nine years old and lived before I met you, Mother,” completely captured even Sylvia’s attention.

  At this time, Warren developed many allergies to foods, pollens, dust, etc. In the winter of 1938–39 he suffered two serious bouts with bronchial pneumonia and began having asthmatic attacks. Otto was steadily losing weight; his health continued to deteriorate, and between attending to him and Warren, I seldom knew an unbroken night’s sleep. This was a period when my parents took care of Sylvia whenever Warren was ill. Her attachment to Grampy deepened, for he not only played games with
her but took her swimming with him, an event she later described as a memorable experience with “daddy.” It was the beginning of her fusion of characters that occurred periodically in her writing. The first example of this takes place in an unpublished story, “Among the Bumblebees,” where the fusion of father and grandfather occurs several times, the story ending with her recollection of her father in his final illness. The swimming episodes with her grandfather are here attributed to her father:

  Sylvia and Warren Plath at the beach in Winthrop, Mass., 1940

  September, 1940: Sylvia dressed to help the nurse who was caring for her father, who died shortly after this picture was taken

  First father would go for a swim himself, leaving her on the shore….

  After a while she would call to him, and he would turn and begin swimming shoreward, carving a line of foam … cleaving the water ahead with the powerful propellers of his arms. He would come to her and lift her onto his back, where she clung, her arms locked about his neck, and go swimming out again. In an ecstasy of terror, she would hold to him, her soft cheek prickling where she laid her face against the back of his neck, her legs and slender body trailing out behind her, moving effortlessly along in her father’s energetic wake.