Sylvia Plath: A Biography (2 page)

Despite her closeness to her grandparents and the hours of preparation for the new baby’s birth, Sylvia reacted angrily to her brother. She felt rage at his invasion of her territory. As she recalled much later, “A baby. I hated babies. I who for two and a half years had been the center of a tender universe felt the axis wrench and a polar chill immobilize my bones. I would be a bystander....” She may have been, but she was also an outright trouble-maker. Whenever her mother fed Warren, Sivvy became her most demanding. Special toys were purchased for her. Scarcely three, she read letters arranged into words, sometimes in newspapers. She built replicas of structures such as the Taj Mahal with blocks. Her mother recalled that — before three — Sylvia read the STOP sign on the corner as “pots.” And at the same time she dug holes under the fence and crawled away to freedom.

The Schober house continued to be a refuge. Sylvia asked to go there much of the summer following Warren’s birth, and Aurelia took the children there to live during the extremely hot summer of 1936. Plath’s memory of the house shows the protective quality it had taken on for her. “The road I knew curved into the waves with the ocean on one side, the bay on the other; and my grandmother’s house, halfway out, faced east, full of red sun and sea lights.” As fantasy-like as the mermaids she believed in as a child, the Schobers’ was truly a
safe
house, the place where Sylvia was petted and coddled, no matter what the circumstances were at her own home.

Another part of her fantasy as a child was that the sea would always protect her. The Schober house was a haven partly because of its location on the ocean edge. All the family loved the sea. They would spread blankets on the shore and picnic there, their entertainment the movement and changing colors of the water. That the grandparents’ telephone number also suggested the sea (it was Ocean 1212-W, which Sylvia used as the title of a late essay) created for her a fusion of her family and the sea itself.

The sea was also a place she could be alone, walking carefully along the beach, gauging the limits of the water’s reach. She was curious about sea and plant life and loved to explore with her grandfather. In his casual way, he would let Sylvia play in his garden. She would dig, hoe, prune and harvest the flowers and vegetables he grew. She played nurse to starfish which had lost arms, begging empty jam jars from her grandmother and filling them with water.

Sylvia’s time with the Schobers increased during the mid-1930s. Not only was her brother sickly, but Otto had begun suffering from an undiagnosed illness. Aurelia’s energies had to be devoted to her infant and her increasingly debilitated husband, but she worked hard to give Sylvia special times. The child loved movies and her art class at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Despite her love for her grandparents, her hurt at being sent away from her own home to their house seems clear in letters written during the spring of 1938. Sylvia was five-and-a-half, and she was living at the Schobers’ because Warren was ill.

Aurelia wrote her daughter letters, telling her she was lucky to be able to live with her grandparents. She also wrote instructive letters, sending Sylvia pictures to color or directions to read and follow. She reminded her to behave, to stay within the lines when she colored, and to do her best at all times. And once Sylvia started school, there was even more admonition: “I am so proud of the fine coloring you are doing. Try to write as nicely as you color. Try to
write
words instead of
printing
them.” From these letters, one might conclude that staying within the lines was more important than any other part of a child’s development.

During the fall of 1936 the Plaths bought a house on Johnson Avenue in Winthrop Center, near the Schobers’ home on Point Shirley. Sylvia’s childhood was now lived within a true extended family. The Schober family included Aurelia Plath’s sister Dorothy (“Dot”), younger than she by five years, and Frank, Jr., her handsome younger brother who was only thirteen years older than Sylvia. She idolized her young uncle who played tag, carried her piggy-back, and later let her help him and his fiancée build a sailboat. One of her childhood highlights was being flower girl in Frank’s wedding, but exposure to chicken pox almost prevented her from participating. When one small spot appeared the day before the wedding, Sylvia convinced her family that it was only a pimple. The day of the ceremony she marched as proudly down the aisle as if she were the bride. The next day, however, she was blanketed with the pox.

Sylvia’s early childhood alternated between her feeling lonely (which she was even at the Schobers’ house) and being the center of attention. Because she was afraid of being abandoned, she learned to develop the language skills that won her parents’ attention. She talked early, she spoke in complete sentences, she had a large vocabulary, she made up rhymes and stories, and she “read” — and, later, wrote. But she also misbehaved sometimes: she ran away, locked herself in rooms, and had temper tantrums.

Her father, the dominant parent, much preferred a “good” daughter. He praised Sylvia’s intellectual and verbal accomplishments and was more at ease with his daughter as she grew older than when she was a child. Otto saw his role in the family as mentor, financial manager, and adviser. He shopped for groceries (often on Saturdays, when he could find bargains before the Sunday closings), but he preferred to eat his meals without the children. He created experiments for them as they were growing, but he seldom read to them or took them for walks.

One of the things Otto did enjoy with Sylvia was discussing his day. She met him in the hallway as he came in. Sometimes he brought her a treat. After dinner, while Aurelia bathed Warren or sat with him as he went to sleep, Sylvia watched her father correct papers. The red ink marks fascinated her. Otto’s approach to raising his children was to involve them in
his
life, rather than becoming a part of their lives. In some ways, he treated Sylvia as if she were a miniature wife. The situation was complex. Because Sylvia saw how much time Aurelia spent with Warren, she campaigned diligently for her father’s attention. One of her tactics was making Warren look younger than he was — she pinched him or kicked him under the table to make him cry. In contrast, “Sivvy” was capable, energetic, happy, and, by implication, better loved.

In the spring of 1937, the Freeman family moved into the neighborhood. Sylvia’s friendship with David, six months her senior, and Ruth, a year younger, made her less dependent on her family. Sometimes Warren tagged along but more often the three older children played in one yard or the other or, often, in the Freeman home. Plath’s friendship with Ruth would continue past their college years.

Mrs. Freeman tried to help Aurelia. The constraints of having Otto working at home, a practice that increased as his health, declined, were more and more obvious. Aurelia found the natural noise of two small children in the house unbearable sometimes, and she took them to the ocean, the Arboretum, her parents’ home, and the Freemans’ whenever she could. They made these outings if Warren was in good health, but he suffered from food allergies, and he was subject to bronchial pneumonia as well as asthma. Or the children stayed in the upstairs play-room and told stories about Mixie Blackshort (Warren’s creation), or heard tales read by Aurelia from Robert Louis Stevenson, Kenneth Grahame, and A. A. Milne. Poems by Eugene Field, limericks, rhymes, and poems from
Sung
Under
the
Silver
Umbrella
were later supplemented with Dr. Seuss books and Tolkien’s
The
Hobbit
.

It was fairly common for Sylvia and Warren to be sick simultaneously and, when they were, Aurelia put the two of them into the twin beds in her room and entertained them with surprises while they listened to the radio. For the children, “being sick” at the Plaths’ was a pleasant, attention-getting experience.

Otto Plath’s illness, which dominated the family’s life in the late 1930s, had begun in 1936, the year after Warren was born. Otto suspected that he had cancer. A close friend had died of lung cancer and Plath had vowed never to undergo such trauma. Even when he realized that he was seriously ill, he did not go to a doctor. Countless arguments with his wife had no effect. It was the summer of 1940 before Otto admitted that he needed medical help.

During the four previous years, he had managed to teach his classes, but hardly with the brilliance he had been known for earlier. Plath was a sociologist as well as a scientist; he prided himself on keeping his students interested, thinking about relationships as well as facts. Early in a course, he tested his students’ assumptions by skinning and cooking a rat, which he then ate, to prove that most human reactions are learned. Why eat one kind of animal and not another? But once he became ill, Otto could no longer teach with such dedication. He relied on Aurelia to do much of his work. She kept his class notes current, found bibliography for his research, graded papers, and — with his help — corrected graduate theses. Once he returned home from campus, Otto visibly collapsed. He lived in his study and often ate meals there. He withdrew from the normal life of the family almost entirely.

Perhaps for twenty minutes in the evening he would be strong enough to see the children. Then Sylvia and Warren would show off. They discussed what they had learned that day, recited poems, made up stories, performed. Hardly a normal interchange, this kind of session created the image of father as critic, judge, someone to be pleased. It robbed the children of the chance to know their father in the way they knew Grampy Schober or to see him as a loving and supportive parent.

Growing up in this kind of household prepared the Plath children for performance-oriented schoolrooms, and excelling at school became an extension of normal behavior for them. Academic success was second-nature, but so far as personal development was concerned, their family experience was disastrous. Under Otto’s careful eye, rewards were given for exceptional achievement. When Sylvia gave up taking piano lessons, there was a hint of failure in her explanation that she was “never very good.” Doing things for the fun of doing them was less important than doing them because she could do them better than most people. It was a lesson that could end only in defeat and deprivation.

When she started school, Sylvia was her most excitable. She was a bit frightened to be leaving her mother but thrilled to be a part of other children’s lives. Aurelia walked her to the Sunshine School, a private kindergarten close to home. Sivvy looked around with her wide-eyed calm, smiled, and told her mother sternly that she could go back home. She was genuinely at ease at school. For years she had watched children walk past her house, and she had played school with the Freemans and with Warren. Now she was eager to prove how good and how bright she was in the real setting.

Sivvy’s straight-A record in the Winthrop schools indicates that she was both motivated and gifted, and suggests that her friendships with other children helped her survive the increasingly confusing circumstances at home. She played “Superman” games with David Freeman and listened to both that serial and “The Shadow” on the radio. She traded playing cards at recess, played marbles and dodgeball, jumped rope, and led an imaginative life with other children. Hungry for the knowledge that both her parents valued, she poured her energy into achieving grades that her father and mother would praise. If her effort in school was not so precocious as her preschool achievements had been, that was perhaps better for her psyche. After all, this was the child who, when scarcely more than a toddler, had learned the polysyllabic Latin name for an insect so that she could pronounce it glibly when Otto “tested” her in public.

One of the more memorable episodes from Plath’s first year in school was the September 21, 1938, hurricane. She recalled the near-hysteria of the adults and her own trauma at being in a situation that even her parents could not control. She worried most about the Schober house, built directly beside the ocean, but her primary reaction was curiosity. She described being “pale and elated” waiting for the storm to hit and, after it had, “The wreckage the next day was literally all one could wish.” Even though there was a dead shark in her grandparents’ flower bed, their sea wall had held. When Plath re-created this memory in her poems “Point Shirley” and “The Disquieting Muses,” she focused on two separate parts of the experience. In the first poem, Grammy is the heroine creating order in the aftermath of the hurricane, as she sweeps up debris with her broom and dustpan. In the second poem, however, the children are frightened as they watch the twelve windows in their father’s study belly in “Like bubbles about to break.” Nothing helps. Although their mother makes Ovaltine and sings about the nightmare winds (“Thor is angry: boom boom boom! / Thor is angry; we don’t care!”) the children do not sing along. They are tense, locked into a situation that provokes both their fear and the anxiety they sense around them. Sylvia sensed that there were many things about the world that her parents could not, finally, control, and her growing fears about her father were only reinforced by the near-doom the hurricane had created.

Even at age eight, Sylvia could see that her father was becoming a different person. His continuous tiredness, his short temper, his almost complete withdrawal from the family’s life left her lonely and abandoned. As Otto grew more and more weary from the long battle with illness, Sylvia was less often welcome in his study. One can imagine the confusion in her mind as she received the conflicting messages: Otto loved his children, yes, but he loved them best when they were absent.