Memoir Sylvia Plath Remembered

By Max Gaebler

Sylvia Plath wrote a short autobiographical piece that was commissioned by the BBC in late 1962. It is a charmingly nostalgic account of her childhood in Winthrop, Massachusetts, a town many people have seen with-out being aware of it, since it lies on the north side of Boston Harbor, and passengers on every plane taking off from or landing at Logan Airport toward or from the east have looked down out of the plane’s north windows at Winthrop and its easternmost tip, Point Shirley. It was on Point Shirley, a narrow strip of land just wide enough for one street and a row of houses on either side, that Sylvia’s maternal grandparents, the Schobers, lived. And it is their telephone number, the first telephone number she knew or used, that she chose as the title for her little piece for the BBC. “Ocean 1212-W” She ends the piece with this short paragraph:

And this is how it stiffens, my vision of that seaside childhood. My father died, we moved inland. Whereupon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.

It was during these years of her early childhood that I knew Sylvia best, a childhood I remember as beautiful, surely, but not as a myth. It was very real; and one of the many tragedies of her tragic life is that it should have seemed to her, at least at times, so inaccessible and cut off from her later years.

I saw Sylvia a few times during her school years in Wellesley, a time or two while she was a student at Smith College, and only once after her marriage to Ted Hughes. It is the little girl and her brother whom I held on my lap and to whom I read stories that I remember best.




Sylvia’s father, Otto Emil Plath, grew up in the small town of Grabow in that part of East Prussia known in my youth as the Polish Corridor. His grandparents had earlier emigrated to America and settled on a farm near Watertown, Wisconsin. Learning that their grandson was a bright and promising student, they invited him to come to America and offered to send him to school at Northwestern College in Watertown, provided he would promise to prepare himself for the Lutheran ministry. As Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia, told the story, Otto arrived in New York at the age of sixteen, lived there with an uncle for a year, then went on to his grandparents’ home in Watertown and entered Northwestern College, where he and my father met.

The college was really a classic German Gymnasium. It was called a preparatory school and college, but the eight [p. 29] classes went by the old Latin names: sexta, quinta, quarta, tertia, unter und ober secunda, unter und ober prima. All instruction was in the German language; indeed, I still have some of my father’s textbooks from which he learned Latin and Greek auf Deutsch. The expectation that Otto would go on to enter the Lutheran ministry was not unusual; my father was one of only two students in his Northwestern College class of 1907 who did not go on to the Wisconsin Synod seminary in Thiensville. As a matter of fact, my father wasn’t even a Lutheran!

At any rate, the hopes of Otto Plath’s grandparents were doomed to be shattered. While still a boy he had already formed the scientific interests which were to shape his career, and after reading Darwin his mind was made up. He felt if he were to become a teacher rather than a minister, it would be acceptable to his grandparents. But they did not share his enthusiasm and felt betrayed by his change of course. They decided that “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.”

It was there at Northwestern College that Otto Plath and my father met. So close was their friendship that a couple of years later, when my father accepted a teaching fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle, Otto Plath decided to head for the Pacific Northwest also. Though their paths soon separated, Otto Plath and my father maintained their friendship through the years. So when I arrived in Boston as a sixteen-year-old freshman in 1937, Otto Plath, my father’s old friend, was there to meet me at South Station.

In Boston we headed straight for Rowe’s Wharf, where we boarded the ferry for East Boston. There we got on the narrow-gauge train that took us to Winthrop, where the Plaths had purchased a home the preceding spring. I stayed with them for a week, my first week in New England. The Plath house was near the water, one house removed from Boston Harbor. It was brown stucco with a large sunporch on the harbor side. It was on the porch that I slept.

Sylvia was not quite five at the time; her brother, Warren, was two and one-half. They were delightful children and a revelation to me. My own brother was a good deal younger than I; he was by this time nearly twelve and seemed a generation beyond these two youngsters. They were bright and sunny and eager, a wonderful audience for any story a visitor chose to read them and spirited companions for a walk on the beach or a visit to the playground. It is easy for students to forget that children and old people also exist. For me, frequent visits to Winthrop brought me in touch with the Plath children and Aurelia’s parents, happy and wholesome reminders that the world contained more than students and professors.

During that first week Otto Plath took me with him to visit the classroom at the Boston University building where he taught. It was just off Copley Square, as I remember, on the site now occupied by the New England Mutual building. He was a rather well-known entomologist whose book, Bumble Bees and Their Ways, is written in a style that makes it of more than scientific interest. He was interested in what he called “animal psychology” and “animal sociology,” and the social insects in particular had captured his attention. His was a rather lonely voice in those days, but in recent years his work has attracted renewed attention from scholars interested in what is now called sociobiology.

That same day he took me to lunch at Pieroni’s Sea Grill, another vanished landmark in Park Square. And on the way home we stopped at the markets near Faneuil Hall to buy fresh vegetables and meat. Otto did most of the family marketing, especially on Fridays and Saturdays, when the operators of the North End stands offered bargains rather than running the risk of having produce spoil over the weekend.




I visited Winthrop often, especially that first year. Aurelia and Otto had issued a standing invitation to come whenever I wished, and they provided a real home-away-from-home for this very young and inexperienced college freshman. I talked a lot with Aurelia, who reminded me in many ways of my own mother. She was much younger - really about midway between my mother and me in age. But thirty-one seemed middle-aged to me then. Aurelia shared my mother’s fascination with words and used them with the same fastidiousness. And she enjoyed her two children in ways that reminded me of the joy my mother took in my brother and me.

I talked with Otto frequently and on occasion took short walks with him around the neighborhood. He complained often of his health. He attributed it to age, at least in that first year or two I was around. Later he decided he had cancer, though he steadfastly avoided going to see a doctor and getting the medical examination he so badly needed. I remember laughing at his assumption that his age was catching up with him, even though fifty-two, which is what he was in 1937, seemed pretty old to me then. I remember his asking me how my father was. Remarkably well, I replied. So he went on to ask: “But how old is he now?” “He’ll be fifty-one in December,” I answered. “Well,” said Otto, “that explains it. He’s still only fifty and I’m fifty-two. A couple of years can make a big difference.”

On every visit to Winthrop I enjoyed the children. Sylvia and Warren loved stories, and they never forgot a single detail. They had a cat named Mowgli after the hero of Kipling’s Jungle Book. And I remember, a few years later, giving them for [p. 30] Christmas Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s wonderful story The Yearling. Many five-year-olds have vivid imaginations, but I have never encountered one so active and fruitful as Sylvia’s. Warren held his own very well, too. When Sylvia spun out her fantastic images, Warren would respond with tales of his adventures “on the other side of the moon, when I was nine.” I don’t recall anything specific, but I do remember being impressed with Sylvia’s precise and pictorial description of people and events she had imagined. She always described things in terms of color, a characteristic of her writing throughout her life. In those days of her childhood, perhaps understandably, I remember more of her drawing and painting than of her first literary efforts. It was her art work that first won the praise of her teachers and her parents

Warren and Sylvia Plath in front of the house in Winthrop, Massachusetts, with their cat Mitzi, Mowgli’s mother. Courtesy the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. © Estate of Aurelia S. Plath.




Naturally, I was invited to spend my first Thanksgiving away from home with the Plaths and Aurelia’s parents, the Schobers. I made my way out to Winthrop that morning by way of the ferry from Rowe’s Wharf and the narrow-gauge from East Boston. Aurelia had baked the pumpkin pies that morning, and around mid-day we headed for her parents’ home on Point Shirley. While we waited for dinner, I went for a walk with Aurelia’s brother, Frank, youngest of the three Schober children, just two years older than I and a freshman at Northeastern University. The traditional football game between Winthrop and Revere always was scheduled for Thanksgiving morning, and he told me all about it.

For the next seven years I spent every Thanksgiving with the Schobers and Plaths, first in Winthrop and later in Wellesley. Beginning in 1943 I was joined on these Thanksgiving Day expeditions by my brother, who came to Boston as a college freshman that year. The food, of course, was thoroughly traditional - New England traditional. Squash, boiled onions, pumpkin pie - these were fixtures along with the turkey and cranberry sauce.

Quite a crowd sat down to this holiday feast. Aurelia and Otto and their two children, Mr. and Mrs. Schober, Frank, Aurelia’s younger sister, Dorothy, and, later on, Dorothy’s husband, Joe Benotti - all these plus a Gaebler or two filled the places at the Schober table. Long years later, after we were living back in the Midwest, my brother and I regularly sent special greetings to the family in Wellesley on Thanksgiving.




When I returned to Boston in September of 1938 to begin my sophomore year, I went out a few days early in order to spend time with the Plaths. It was during those days that a great hurricane struck New England. In “Ocean 1212-W” Sylvia places that hurricane in 1939. True, a hurricane did hit New England that next fall, but it wasn’t the one she remembered. The winds were actually a bit stronger in that 1939 blast, but the tide was out when the winds came. In 1938 the tide was in, and the wind created a tidal wave that swept over Providence and Buzzard’s Bay, then hit Boston Harbor with a fury natives talk about to this day. The peak of the storm came in early evening, about eight o’clock. But sleeping there on the sunporch facing the full force of the wind from the south, it didn’t feel as though it had let up in the least bit by the time I finally went to bed around ten o’clock, well equipped with candle and matches in the event of a power outage.

The next morning was beautiful and sunny. Aurelia and her two children and I went walking. “The wreckage the next day,” the adult Sylvia recalls, “was all one could wish - overthrown trees and telephone poles, shoddy summer cottages bobbing out by the lighthouse and a litter of ribs of little ships.” The incongruity of the beautiful and benign aspect of the world that morning with the visible reminders everywhere of the awful and untamable power of the elements all about us remains with me vividly.




During my upper-class years I went out to Winthrop less often. For Thanksgiving, of course; but when I was a junior, Thanksgiving was my first visit of that year. So I was not really [p. 31] witness to Otto’s worsening health. It was mid-August in 1940, the following summer, when a minor accident revealed the desperate extent of his illness and got him finally to the doctor, who quickly discovered that it was not cancer but diabetes which had been ravaging his body.

I had not been out to Winthrop or seen any of the family that fall. Aurelia did call me once to let me know how serious Otto’s condition was and that he faced the amputation of his leg, already gangrenous. I communicated this word to my family back in Wisconsin, but it never occurred to me to go to the hospital to see Otto. Not long afterward Aurelia called again, this time to tell me of Otto’s death. She told me not to make any effort to come to the funeral; naive young man that I was, I took her word literally and didn’t go. I called my parents, of course - the kind of long-distance call limited in those days to occasions of real emergency. And I sent flowers from our family. The senselessness of his illness and death had not been lost on him any more than on those close to him. Aurelia realized it needn’t have happened. And the doctor simply wondered how such a brilliant man could have been “so stupid.”

Otto had died on November 5. Only two or three weeks later I went out to Winthrop for the annual Thanksgiving observance. His absence muted the event, but everything proceeded exactly as usual, except that this time we ate at Aurelia’s home. It was almost two years before she and her parents sold their Winthrop houses and joined forces to acquire a home in Wellesley - the “move inland” as Sylvia called it.

That was in the fall of 1942, when Sylvia, who was a grade ahead of her age in school, would have entered the sixth grade in Winthrop. Her mother decided to have her repeat the fifth grade in her new school in Wellesley so that she might be with children her own age. The school principal in Wellesley, Aurelia records, “was very understanding and agreed with my multiple reasons for the request, adding, ‘It is the first time in my teaching experience that a mother has requested an all-A pupil be put back a grade.’ However, it worked out well, for the texts and methods differed completely from those in Winthrop.”




I met my wife, Carolyn, in 1944. When our interest in each other became serious, one of the first things I wanted to do was to have her meet the Plaths and Schobers. It must have been some time in September that I took her out to “meet the family.” Aurelia’s father was home on his two-day weekly break from his work at the Brookline Country Club, and Mrs. Schober prepared one of her typically wonderful dinners.

Carolyn recalls that after dinner Sylvia, then twelve years old, played something on the piano especially for her and admired her black silk dress. Aurelia adds that after we had left, Sylvia burst out in adolescent enthusiasm with that widely current advertising slogan: “She’s lovely, she’s engaged!”

In fact we were not yet formally engaged. That came a month later, after we had returned to the Midwest and met each other’s families. We were married the following February, and soon after our return to Boston I was invited to preach one Sunday at the Unitarian church in Wellesley Hills. After moving to Wellesley, Aurelia and her children had become active in that church, where - as Sylvia’s friend and biographer, Lois Ames, records, “Sylvia and Warren… on Sunday went to the First Unitarian Society of Wellesley Hills where their mother also taught Sunday school.” Aurelia was in church that Sunday, and we went home with her after the service for dinner with the family.




In the summer of 1948, when Sylvia had just completed the tenth grade, we moved to Davenport, Iowa, and contacts with New England friends, including the Plaths and Schobers, were pretty much limited to an exchange of holiday greetings. So we weren’t around for Sylvia’s graduation from high school or her first years at Smith College. But in 1953 we did go back to the Boston area for the summer. It was the summer following our first year in Madison, Wisconsin (where we have lived ever since). We were fortunate to get the use of an apartment in the home of friends who were in the orchard business.

Imagine our consternation when we drove into town one August morning to pick up groceries at Knowlton’s store and noticed on the front page of the Boston Globe a news item about the disappearance of a Smith student. My heart leaped into my throat and I took in the whole story almost in a single look. It was Sylvia all right, and the story sounded pretty grim. Police were scouring the woods near their home, and with each passing hour the prospects became more desperate.

We rushed back to the apartment and called Aurelia. When I suggested that we come, she jumped at the idea. So we made arrangements for our children and headed in. Bill Rice, the Unitarian minister in Wellesley, was at the house when we got there, and he helped explain what had happened. He suspected foul play and feared the worst. After he left we stayed on, sitting there in the living room with Aurelia and her mother looking at family pictures, recalling incidents from the past the way one does when someone dies, trying to reinforce whatever shreds of realistic hope we could identify. Finally we left, promising to keep in touch.

We did call several times, and finally, two days later, we had a call telling us that Sylvia had been found, alive, in a crawl space underneath the downstairs bedroom floor of Aurelia’s home. I don’t recall whether it was Aurelia or Bill Rice who phoned, but we were enormously relieved to learn that Sylvia was now in the hospital recovering from the effects of an overdose of sleeping pills and receiving intensive psychiatric attention. How remarkable, indeed almost miraculous, we agreed, that her life had been saved simply because she took too many sleeping pills and her stomach couldn’t hold them.

We returned to Madison very shortly after that and did not see Sylvia during the brief interval before leaving. We spent no more summers in the Boston area, and trips east were infrequent in those days of overnight railroad travel.

[p. 32]

I saw Sylvia only one more time; it must have been in May of 1959. Sylvia was married by then, and Aurelia and I went down to visit her and her husband, Ted Hughes, in their apartment on the back side of Beacon Hill. It was the only time I ever met Ted. They served us tea, and we had a pleasant conversation. Aurelia had told me how hard they were working, and I recall Sylvia and Ted talking about the rigors of the writing schedule they had set for themselves.

Sylvia died in London on February 11, 1963. I don’t remember just when or how we got the word. The first sketchy report was that she had died of pneumonia. Though our suspicions were aroused immediately, it was eight or ten months before the facts were generally known. And it was much longer before their full meaning became the subject of so much analysis and speculation.




During Sylvia’s lifetime her poems and stories had appeared here and there, principally in periodical publications. The few things I had seen I did not find particularly pleasant or, in some cases, easy reading. So while I shared her family’s pride in Sylvia’s obvious talent and the gathering prospects for her success as a writer, I did not read very much of her work.

As a matter of fact, there wasn’t a great deal to read: a volume of poems, The Colossus, and a few pieces scattered through various periodicals. That is all there was. Far more of her work has been published posthumously. Indeed, it was only with the publication of Ariel, the remarkable collection of poems she wrote at fever pitch during the last weeks of her life, that the true scope and quality of her genius became evident. That was in 1965, and ever since then the volume of serious critical attention to her work has continued to grow.

In recent years I have read a good deal of that critical work. More important, I have read far more of Sylvia’s own writing. And my personal connections quite aside, I have been variously deeply moved, edified, and disturbed by her words. She is best known as a poet, and rightly so. I find much of her prose remarkable, too.

Sylvia Plath, age six or seven, on the beach. Courtesy the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. © Estate of Aurelia S. Plath.




But the Sylvia who remains in my memory is not the justly celebrated writer, surely one of the finest talents of her generation; neither is she the complicated, tortured, and intense personality who became one of the most famous suicides of our time; nor yet is she the aspiring, gifted, conforming, troubled heroine of The Bell Jar. Rather she is the imaginative, lovely child I knew in Winthrop so many years ago.

Perhaps it is I who want to seal that period off “like a ship in a bottle - beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.” Perhaps it is a reluctance on my part to face the wild forces which so deeply troubled the child I knew as she grew older. I was not really present during those later years; I did not know her well as adolescent or student or adult, surely not as professional writer, as wife and mother. It was the child I knew - a wonderful, happy child who romped the beach on the shore of Boston Harbor and reveled in the fallen trees after the great hurricane and listened intently as I read stories of long ago and far away. That little girl is the Sylvia I shall always remember.




Sources

Ames, Lois. “Notes toward a Biography.” In The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

McCullough, Frances, ed., and Ted Hughes, consulting ed. The Journals of Sylvia Plath. New York: Dial Press, 1982.

Plath, Sylvia. Letters Home. Correspondence, 1950-1963. Selected and ed. Aurelia Schober Plath. New York: Harper and Row, 1975.

Plath, Sylvia. “Ocean 1212-W.” The Listener, 29 August 1963, p. 312.

Steiner, Nancy Hunter. A Closer Look at Ariel: A Memory of Sylvia Plath. Intro. George Stade. New York: Harper’s Magazine Press, 1973.