Rough Magic Read online

  Sylvia proved to be an easy baby who slept well and nursed about every four hours, and her physical and emotional development, documented during regular pediatric checkups, seemed to attest to the success of Aurelia’s approach. She gained weight steadily, jumping from ten to sixteen pounds between the ages of six months and one year; shot up in height at a rate expected for a happy baby, increasing from twenty-two to twenty-nine inches in her initial eighteen months; and acquired ambulatory skills on schedule, crawling first, creeping alone at ten months, and toddling soon afterwards. Indeed, in Sylvia’s infancy, only one distinguishing personality trait emerged, but this—a trait so odd that while diligently chronicling her daughter’s growth in a baby book chockful of observations, dates, and numbers—Aurelia recorded in labored detail. At the age of six or eight weeks, Sylvia began, with purpose and determination, to try to speak. First a vowel, then a consonant, Sylvia gurgled syllable after syllable, bits and pieces of sound she clearly longed to shape into words.

  Early in her marriage, even though she was preoccupied by her pregnancy with and subsequent care for Sylvia, Aurelia also carved out time to assist Otto in rewriting his dissertation, which bore the academic title Bumblebees: Their Life History, Habits, and Economic Importance, with a Detailed Account of the New England Species, into a general-interest volume that a trade publisher could acquire. Because Otto was not particularly adept at writing, Aurelia did the job, though revising a scientific treatise was significantly different from creating the books she had hoped one day to write on her own—novels based on the lives of her parents. Once Aurelia had completed the revision, Otto checked the text for factual accuracy. Pleased with the document, the Plaths showed it to publishers, ultimately selling it to the Macmillan Company. When the book appeared in 1934, under the more commercial title Bumblebees and Their Ways, Plath had added a foreword written by Harvard’s William Morton Wheeler, his friend and teacher, as he described him in the book’s dedication. In his own introduction, Plath tried to humanize the book’s subject matter by tracing the genesis of his curiosity about bumblebees:

  The foundations of this book were laid during my early boyhood in Central Europe, after my interest had been aroused by the discovery that bumblebees make delicious honey. Having repeatedly observed the activities of a neighboring bee-keeper, I thought it might be possible to transfer bumblebee colonies to artificial domiciles, and thus have honey available at all times. This idea was carried out a few weeks later, and during that and the two following summers about twenty-five bumblebee colonies belonging to six European species were placed in cigar-boxes and transferred to the family garden. The method employed in “transplanting” these colonies was rather crude, and so it happened that I was sometimes severely punished by the more vindictive species.

  For her work on the book, Aurelia received nothing approaching coauthor credit, but instead a brief routine nod in the acknowledgments that mentioned how she had “aided [her husband] greatly in editing the manuscript and in proofreading.” Consequently, critics and readers of Bumblebees and Their Ways lavished praise on Otto alone for producing an entertaining book on a subject that in lesser hands could have been dull. In May 1934, for example, Booklist ran a representative notice touting the book as “a real contribution” to “the literature of the subject.” The volume received equally favorable notices when it appeared in Europe, Japan, and Australia. In time, Bumblebees and Their Ways would become, in the estimation of both lay and scientific audiences, nothing short of a landmark study in the field of entomology, a watershed for future biologists.

  As the Plaths were finishing Bumblebees and Their Ways, Carl Murchison, chairman of the department of psychology at Clark University, approached Otto about writing an essay for A Handbook of Social Psychology, an anthology he was assembling for the university’s press. Always anxious to advance his career, Plath agreed. To begin his essay, “Insect Societies,” Plath selected his background material—a cache of some seventy books. But faced with actually gleaning information from those books, Otto turned to Aurelia, who, although absorbed in mothering Sylvia, set aside enough hours to read and take notes on this mound of texts. From her notes Aurelia produced a rough draft, after which Otto wrote a second; finally, Aurelia edited and polished the manuscript. The article completed, Otto submitted “Insect Societies” to Murchison, who happily included it in his anthology, printed by Clark in 1935.

  While they produced “Insect Societies” and basked in the excellent reviews for Bumblebees, the Plaths learned a different sort of good news: Aurelia was pregnant once again. As winter turned to spring and the baby’s due date approached, Aurelia worried how Sylvia, almost two and a half, would respond to a new infant. To prepare her for the birth, Aurelia made the baby real for Sylvia by taking her shopping for baby clothes and by allowing her to press her ear to Aurelia’s stomach to hear the baby kick. In early April, Aurelia arranged for her parents to baby-sit Sylvia. When she took her to Point Shirley later in the month, Aurelia stayed on several nights until Sylvia felt comfortable with her new surroundings. Still, Sylvia cried on the day Aurelia left. On April 27,1935, Aurelia traveled back across the harbor into Boston, checked into Jamaica Plain’s Faulkner Hospital, and, after going into labor, gave birth—again three weeks early—to a boy, whom she and Otto named Warren Joseph.

  By now Otto and Aurelia had been married for three years and four months. In that time, Otto had maintained a demanding teaching schedule, Aurelia had given birth to two babies, and together they had ushered into print a book and a major academic article. They had not, however, built any semblance of a social life. Always outgoing, Aurelia lamented this void, whereas Otto, fiercely career-oriented, content to be alone, and set in his antisocial ways, preferred work. This difference created a tension that had surfaced early in the marriage. But when Aurelia brought up her displeasure with this life of all work and no play, she was startled to learn that Otto cared for no one’s feelings except his own. Throughout their whirlwind courtship, Aurelia— apparently—had overlooked this aspect of Otto’s personality. And when, after their marriage, she called his attention to this ugly streak, she realized that he would never change himself for anybody. His nature, as headstrong as his grandfather’s, reinforced by all those years of bachelorhood, had rendered Otto intractable. “By the end of my first year of marriage,” Aurelia Plath would one day write, “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.” One of the few couples with whom the Plaths did associate was their neighbors George and Helen Hennessy, parents of a daughter, also named Helen. The two mothers often strolled their babies together— Warren in one carriage pushed by Sylvia, Helen, who would grow up to publish literary criticism under the name Vendler, in the other.

  As Aurelia embraced harmony, Otto gloried in his role of der Herr des Houses and controlled almost every aspect of his family’s home life, from plotting their long-term financial security to payiiig monthly bills. Otto even handled the grocery shopping, stopping by Faneuil Hall in downtown Boston on his way to and from school to buy meats and vegetables on the days they were cheapest. (North End vendors usually reduced their prices on Fridays and Saturdays, rather than risk goods’ getting ruined over the weekend.) In addition, Otto expected Aurelia to behave within boundaries that he had carefully prescribed for her. If she did not, she made him angry. In this way too, he seemed to be his grandfather’s grandson. So, if Aurelia dared to invite guests over to supper, the event took on subversive, clandestine overtones, as though it were as exotic as the secret rendezvous of spies. The meal had to occur on the night of the week Otto taught, and had to be finished before he returned home. During the many months the couple worked on “Insect Societies,” Aurelia had to draw a plan of the arrangement of the books, notes, and manuscripts he kept stacked on the dining-room table so that, once she and her guests had finished supper, each item could be returned to its appropriate spot.
Of course, early in her marriage, more than Aurelia’s social life suffered. With each page she wrote for her husband and each diaper she changed, Aurelia lost her drive to try to write fiction. Her dream of novel-writing, destroyed initially by her father and now by Otto, would just have to wait.

  In the spring of 1936, Otto and Aurelia thought about moving, both because they needed more room and because they wanted to buy a home. But before they started house-hunting, summer arrived and it became so hot that Aurelia decided she and the children would escape the heat at her parents’ house on Point Shirley. Previously, in the summers of 1932 and 1933, the Schobers had rented their house to vacationers, but this year they stayed there themselves. Since Otto remained in Jamaica Plain to commute to his summer-school classes, Aurelia, always the good wife, came back from Winthrop to Jamaica Plain each week to prepare food, wash clothes, and spend time with her husband. By the end of the summer, Aurelia, whose love of the ocean had been rekindled, convinced Otto to look at houses in Win-throp. Luckily, one of the first they saw—a spacious seven-room, two-story brown stucco located at 92 Johnson Avenue, only three miles from the Schobers’—was perfect, and its owners, the Rohes, were anxious to sell. Agreeing on a price of ten thousand dollars, of which one thousand would be paid down, the Plaths and the Rohes concluded a deal with such haste that, by the fall of 1936, all legal and financial transactions had been completed and the Plaths had moved into their new home.

  In the mid-thirties, Boston and its suburbs, like the rest of the country, still reeled from the 1929 stock-market crash and the ensuing Great Depression. So, each morning, as he left Winthrop to go by train, ferry, and subway to Boston’s Copley Square, Otto felt grateful for his job. After several weeks, Aurelia had settled in enough to devote much of her attention to Sylvia and Warren again. In particular, she continued an ambitious program of reading books aloud to her children. Beginning with nursery rhymes, fairy tales, and poems in Sun Under the Silver Umbrella, Aurelia had progressed in time to A. A. Milne, J. R. R. Tolkien, Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Seuss, and Kipling’s Just So Stories. Of what she had read so far, Sylvia and Warren’s favorites included The Wind in the Willows, Heidi Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, Byrd’s Christmas Carol, and Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.

  In the spring of 1937, the William Freemans moved in next door to the Plaths. The husbands became acquaintances, but Aurelia and Marion Freeman struck up a close friendship. Both housewives and mothers (Marion had two children—David, six months older than Sylvia, and Ruth, eighteen months older than Warren), they were approximately the same age as well. Soon the Plath and the Freeman children were spending countless hours together in one house or the other. Until summer arrived, that is; then, their mothers with them, the children passed the hot, muggy months playing on the beach. Sylvia learned to swim one day in the early part of the season, when she waded far out into the water, fell into the over-the-head deep, and suddenly started swimming. Later that summer, Aurelia and Marion began to wonder if for the fall they should enroll David and Sylvia, both of whom would be underage, at the Sunshine School, a private elementary school in the neighborhood. Since David would be five, and Sylvia only four, Marion’s decision was easier than Aurelia’s. Finally, because the Sunshine School’s first grade met just half a day and because Sylvia seemed ready (thanks to Aurelia’s reading program, Sylvia could already read simple stories), Aurelia decided to go ahead.

  Each morning beginning in September, Sylvia awoke, dressed, ate breakfast, and walked to the nearby Sunshine School. Dismissed at noon, she came home and, over lunch, exuberantly talked about the morning’s activities with her mother and Warren. Within weeks, as Sylvia performed well, the school staff, specifically Headmistress Hope Cusiter, were congratulating Aurelia on making a wise decision. By the end of the year, Aurelia decided Sylvia was ready for public school. In the fall of 1938, Sylvia entered the Annie F. Warren Grammar School, Winthrop’s public elementary school, which required her to follow a much different schedule. First, the second grade met for both morning and afternoon sessions; second, since the school was farther from her home, Sylvia’s walk to and from school became considerably longer. Even so, her performance did not falter: Sylvia went on to earn excellent grades as well as high recommendations from her teacher.

  Historically, the most memorable event in the lives of the Plaths in the fall of 1938 was not Sylvia’s change of school but an act of nature. On September 21, beginning at five o’clock in the morning, a major hurricane tore through the Boston area, unleashing its force particularly hard on Winthrop, since it is the city’s easternmost suburb. After a restless night, Sylvia and Warren hid with Aurelia downstairs in Otto’s study while, for three frantic hours, they listened to the hurricane roar overhead. Later, the storm having passed, the Plaths emerged from 92 Johnson Avenue to discover boats tossed about the shore, cottages afloat in the harbor, and telephone poles snapped in two like toothpicks. As evidenced by a poem and an essay she would write many years afterwards, this sight—the result of a world suddenly turned on itself—would stick with Sylvia for the rest of her life.

  Compared with its start, the remainder of Sylvia’s second-grade year passed unmomentously. Earning a string of A’s marred by only a sprinkling of B’s, Sylvia advanced to the third grade, where her performance was also judged excellent. And so it was that, by the fall of 1940, when she entered the fourth grade at E. B. Newton, Winthrop’s premiddle school, Sylvia seemingly demonstrated the growth patterns of any bright, motivated youngster. She filled her school days with studying, her summers with outings on the beach, while her mother and maternal grandparents provided her with love and support. In fact, only a profound curiosity in and susceptibility to various art forms distinguished her from her peers. Once, as Aurelia read aloud a poem by Matthew Arnold that contained the lines “Where the sea snakes coil and twine, / Dry their mail and bask in the brine, / Where great whales come sailing by, / Sail and sail, with unshut eye, / Round the world forever and aye,” Sylvia, listening in silence, became visibly shaken by the poem’s music and rhythm. Yet Sylvia aspired to create art as well. One night, while Aurelia and her children stood on the beach and gazed up at a new moon, Sylvia began composing a poem on the spot that in tone and rhythm echoed Arnold’s.

  Sylvia had been writing poetry well before that night on the beach. By age five she was finishing whole poems, short but crafted. Of her early attempts, the first one that she recopied in final form, dated, and saved was “Thoughts,” an unrhymed couplet celebrating Christmas, written in 1937.

  Through faithful practice, Sylvia was producing poems, as of the fall of 1940, at a consistent pace. She considered several—“Snow,” “My Mother and I,” “Perils of Dew”—successful enough to recopy, date, and save, as she had “Thoughts.” Until now her poems had been innocent distillations of daily life. Soon this habit would change. An emerging tragedy had captured her attention. It had started subtly, not long after Warren’s birth. As time passed, it manifested itself more obviously. It concerned her father’s health—how he felt, acted. And to Sylvia, who observed the tragedy with an uninformed yet knowing perception, the ordeal, which culminated in November 1940, came to represent all that was not happy in her happy childhood.

  3

  In the summer of 1935, Aurelia became worried about her husband’s health. Signs of incipient illness—a slight weight loss, a hacking cough, an uncharacteristically low threshold for anger—became detectable to her. A year later, family and friends could remark upon the weight loss; and his anger, now triggered by inconsequential events, threw him into frightening fits of rage. As of the fall of 1937, Otto had deteriorated to the point that, upon returning home from school, he collapsed on the living-room sofa from sheer exhaustion. His daily regimen of lecturing and paper-grading, a routine on which he had thrived for two decades, had become prohibitive, rendering him so feeble he could barely struggle through a week. Around this time, Sylvia and Warrens spirited playing—and sometimes the
children’s mere presence—became a strain on Otto. Because of this, Aurelia implemented an upstairs-downstairs policy in the house, whereby if Otto was home the children remained upstairs, Otto down. At night, then, Sylvia and Warren amused themselves upstairs in their playroom as Otto worked or rested downstairs, usually in the living room or in his study. Later, after the children ate supper at their miniature table and chairs in their playroom, and after she and Otto had eaten their own, separate supper downstairs, Aurelia allowed Sylvia and Warren to come downstairs and spend thirty minutes with their father. These occasions, the only time during the day that the entire family assembled, had a theatrical quality. With Otto as their audience, the children became performers. Warren would sing a song or recite a poem he had written. Sylvia would list the scientific names of insects or recite her own poem. When the children completed their brief revue, Otto hugged each affectionately—otherwise, he seldom touched his children—and Aurelia quickly put them to bed.

  Over the years, Aurelia had begged Otto to see a doctor about his health. He had never gone to a doctor in his life, Otto retorted, and under no condition would he start now. Why? Aurelia wanted to know. Finally, Otto told her. After he had recently watched a colleague die from lung cancer, Otto had concluded that he had similar symptoms. If he was going to die from lung cancer, Otto wanted the death to be as swift as possible. In the late thirties, because the medical community knew next to nothing about the disease—not its cause, or its pathology, much less its cure—a diagnosis of cancer spelled a sure death, which surgery, the current prescribed “treatment,” only delayed. Also, cancer was veiled in mystery; patients and their families often met with ridicule from a public who feared it might “catch” the disease. So, to avoid subjecting himself and his family to humiliation, but mostly to avoid prolonging his life needlessly, Otto refused medical attention. “I know what my ailment is,” Otto would explain, “and I’m not going to submit myself to any butchering.”