Red Comet Read online

  Otto got word that the FBI wanted a meeting, and he called at the FBI office on the morning of October 22, 1918. He gave Nix a short summary of his life to date, including his various residences and degrees. When Nix questioned him about his opinion regarding Germany’s involvement in the war, he noted that Otto “assumed a rather indifferent attitude.”57 But Otto denied that he had ever told McCay he wanted to return to Germany. In fact, he told Nix, he “would never dream of going back to Germany,” though he had considered going to South America. He also explained that he had not been fired from Sills Grocery, and that he had not bought Liberty Bonds because he was “$1400 in debt on which he was paying 5 and 6% interest, and that he was attempting to earn a living and do work at the University at the same time and did not feel that he could afford to do so.” He denied having corresponded with anyone in Germany since he had left in 1900.

  Otto said that his parents left Germany for a better life in America because “some things are rotten in Germany, but not all; that the German people and their character is not altogether rotten, but that they are misled.” He told Nix that he hadn’t read a single newspaper between 1903 and 1910—the years he was a student at Northwestern Prep and College—and had no idea that he was required to report his change of address to the police. He had signed a Loyalty Pledge when he registered at Berkeley, but admitted to Nix that “he took several weeks to think it over to make absolutely sure, as he believes that Roosevelt’s saying that a man cannot be 50-50 now—must either be 100% American or not American at all, and this he believes is true.” This was a dangerous but honest admission. Otto also told Nix that he had lost his chance at an instructorship in biology at Berkeley because of his enemy alien status, and that “he is being persecuted without just cause.”

  Nix then interviewed Otto’s references at the university, one of whom, Dr. Cort, told him Otto was an excellent scientist but a poor teacher—“very nervous and not being able to interest students.” Cort admitted, however, that the university had passed a rule forbidding the employment of Germans on the faculty, and that this rule was partly to blame for Otto’s failure to land the instructorship. Dr. Schilling, a professor in the German department who had worked with Otto before the war, told Nix that Otto felt “slighted” when he was passed over for a permanent position. He believed that Otto was loyal but that “his main trouble is not being a good sport and being able to take hard luck the way a man should take it.” At this point Otto knew all about hard luck: though he had taught in university classrooms since 1911, he now found himself working menial jobs stacking groceries and operating elevators for twenty cents an hour because he was German.

  The next day Otto reported his change of address to the Berkeley police, which seemed to satisfy Nix. He closed the case, and ended his eight-page report on Otto:

  I could not find any further evidence against this man, and as he seemed to be a man who makes no friends, and with whom no one is really well acquainted, was not able to locate any one knowing him intimately….The indiscreet remarks he has probably made at times, and the indifference he seems to have towards the War, are due in my opinion to his being interested in a very narrow field, and to his very nervous and morbid disposition.

  Otto filed naturalization papers in 1921.58 He renounced Germany and Poland, and became an American citizen in 1926, a move that may have protected him from similar suspicion in the late 1930s.59

  Otto was one of thousands of German aliens who were questioned—and in some cases arrested and sent to detention camps in Utah and Georgia—during the First World War. In June 1917, during his Flag Day speech, President Woodrow Wilson emboldened Americans to root out “vicious spies and conspirators” in “unsuspecting communities”; the following year, a German coal miner, Robert Prager, was lynched by a mob of two hundred.60 Otto’s German background would have made him a target of constant harassment, and he shrank from socializing. Already someone had reported him to the FBI on false pretenses. Under normal circumstances, Otto could be personable and warm. George Fulton, a former graduate student of Otto’s who eventually became the chair of the Boston University biology department, remembered him as a “friendly and very talkative person.” He described Otto as a “kind” mentor to him and his other graduate students, whom he treated to convivial faculty lunches.61 In 1966, after an article on Sylvia Plath appeared in Time, another of Otto’s former students, Thomas Clohesy, wrote to Aurelia to express his frustration with how Otto had been portrayed by both his daughter and the media:

  Otto was not the fearful Teuton which Sylvia apparently thought him to be. I remember Otto Plath with great fondness, having first met him in 1939 when I became a student of German at Boston University. Another friend and I thought him a very unusual man, and we respected his political opinions even though they did not prevail at that time. Much of what he has predicted has since come to pass, and I have often felt that his analysis of Germany’s position in the world was a correct one. Were he with us today, I am sure he would feel vindicated in many of his beliefs. He was certainly not the “ogre” that the poem thinks he was. I shall never forget his kindness to me when he suggested that I might tutor a student of his who was having difficulties in German. At that time jobs were extremely scarce, and his kindness will never be forgotten.62

  Far from being a Nazi sympathizer, it seems Otto saw through Hitler’s rhetoric and surmised the horror that awaited Europe at a time when Neville Chamberlain was still proclaiming he had secured “Peace for Our Time.” Aurelia, too, thought “Daddy” a betrayal, and would later write to the poetry critic Helen Vendler (whose mother Aurelia had befriended in the 1930s) that Sylvia’s “barbed writing” was a way of finding “catharsis” by “lashing out in poetic form,” often using “exaggerations” to make her point: “Her father never had any affiliation with the Nazi party and was utterly revolted by any departure from ‘reverence for life.’ ”63 Sylvia’s childhood friend Ruth Freeman Geissler, who knew Otto, claimed that the Nazi figure in “Daddy” was “very much a fantasy.”64 Aurelia told a close friend that Otto would never have let Sylvia join the Girl Scouts, had he lived, because he so abhorred militaristic uniforms.65

  After his FBI interrogation, Otto again left the West Coast. He took up an assistant in zoology post at Johns Hopkins; then, in 1921, he began his studies in biology at Harvard, where he earned a master of science in 1925 and a doctorate of science in 1928.

  Otto was forty when he began working on his Harvard doctorate, but he seemed even older to the eleven young graduate students he lived with at Harvard’s Bussey Mansion, near the Bussey Institution.66 One thought of him as a “permanent Bussey fixture.”67 Acquaintances from the Harvard years remembered Otto as a “sentimental” dreamer fascinated by what he called the “wonders of nature.”68 George Salt, who lived with Otto at the Bussey Mansion for four years, recalled, somewhat condescendingly, “He was a German teacher with biology interests. He cared not for Science but for bumblebees, rather like a clergyman with a butterfly collection.”69 While Prof. W. M. Wheeler’s students discussed the exciting new field of genetics, Otto seemed to care only about his bees. His “blinkers” became a running joke in the biology department, though his cohorts remember that he applied himself rigorously to his work.70 The only other passion Otto’s Bussey housemates recognized was his love for the German language. One night a housemate was having trouble translating a German word and asked Otto, who still spoke with a slight German accent, for help. Otto became a different person before his eyes: “he rolled the idiom off his tongue as though relishing it and read the German words with intense and longing pleasure.”71 Another housemate remembered that Otto was “very meticulous, even fussy, in his use of words. I recall that one evening he came to my room and debated for a long time the question of whether he should entitle a forthcoming research paper ‘The Bee-eating Propensities of the Skunk’ or ‘The Bee-eating Proclivities of the Skunk.’ ”72
<
br />   Some of the “Bussey Boys,” as they called themselves, thought Otto “awkward,” a “timid outsider,” as he tried to join their conversations in the sitting room each evening. Most of them never really got to know the “slight, thin, gentle man who smiled at the edges of their dinnertime conversation.”73 When Germany’s role in the First World War came up at these communal meals, Otto vacillated between defending Germany and criticizing it.74 His lack of conviction was unusual for a Harvard scientist. But being questioned by the FBI and losing his position at Berkeley likely made Otto wary of speaking his mind and forming close friendships. It was better to agree than to raise suspicions; better to keep a distance than to share intimacy. It is perhaps no accident that both of Otto’s wives spoke German, or that once he had children he sought to keep them, Aurelia remembered, “absolutely isolated”—he did not want them even to attend dance classes.75

  Bussey contemporaries remembered that he always seemed to have a cold (a predisposition Sylvia inherited) and had little luck with women. His experience with Lydia left him bitter about marriage: one housemate said that Otto was “consumed with hate for his ex-wife, whose faults…he extended to the entire sex.”76 He spoke of himself as “a romantic” and said his first wife was “cold.”77 Being older than the other graduate students, he fancied himself an expert on sex and would sometimes tell “salacious” stories on the subject.78 Others remembered his special diets and food fads, his neat clothes, his honesty, his frugal nature, and his passion for his work. A housemate recalled that, like his daughter, “He frequently worked to the point of extreme fatigue.”79

  Otto’s closest friend at the Bussey Mansion, Philip Darlington, felt that there were a few students who were disliked, “but Otto was not one of these. He was a bit obtuse and a bit too literal; we teased him a little but not too much; and we accepted him and liked him….he was neither domineering nor high-handed with us.”80 Some of the Bussey Boys remembered his speaking angrily about religion and the years he had wasted in the seminary, but they generally found him “gentle by nature,” “serious, but with a sense of humor,” “over-sensitive,” “not an aggressive person,” and certainly not violent.81

  Otto was “seldom jovial,” but one friend remembered him “relaxed and happy” while making “home brew” in the Bussey Mansion basement. Otto claimed to have a specialist’s knowledge of beer brewing and took pride in his batch’s high alcohol content. The Bussey Boys spent a sunny day outside at the Arboretum drinking Otto’s beer. “I had never seen Plath so sociable nor such amity between him and the others,” one recalled.82 Ralph Singleton, who “knew Otto rather well and liked him very much,” said he was generous—Otto frequently lent him money to tide him over.83 Clyde Keeler, the illustrator of Otto’s groundbreaking book, Bumblebees and Their Ways, recalled his close friend’s compassion: one rainy night, Otto welcomed a stray cat, crying pitifully outside, into the mansion. He even constructed a box with a cushion for her. This same friend remembered Otto’s insecurity—he put off his oral doctorate exam for years on account of nerves. Keeler finally convinced him to go through with it. “Otto went to the exam with his knees shaking. When he returned there was a grin on his face. ‘It was easy,’ said Otto.”84 A Bussey housemate who went on to become the president of the University of Hawaii stated, “To many he seemed cold, distant, and arrogant, but in reality he was a warm-hearted rather shy person.”85 They found it hard to reconcile the quiet, gentle man they knew with the Nazi father in Plath’s poem “Daddy.”

  After the 1934 publication of Otto’s monograph, Bumblebees and Their Ways, based on his Harvard doctoral thesis, he became a highly respected entomologist. He was appointed a full professor at Boston University, where he taught from 1922 until his death in 1940, and published in journals such as The American Naturalist, the Biological Bulletin of the American Naturalist, the Annals of the Entomological Society of America, and the Handbook of Social Psychology, among others. Some of his findings even made their way into the popular press, where he was cited as an authority on bee stings and insect behavior.86 A former graduate student described him as being “ahead of his time” in his research and suggested that he would now be called an expert in behavioral biology.87

  At Boston University, Otto seems to have been a conscientious and thorough teacher, though, as one former student remembered him, somewhat inflexible.88 Another student remembered him as a “good teacher…very considerate to students,” who had “a sense of humor.” (Otto liked to tell students about the time the Bussey Boys, experimenting with concepts of taste, ate rat stew for dinner—a sight which made Otto vomit.)89 Seniors at BU wrote of him warmly in their yearbooks, referring to him as the Bienen-König—the bee king. In the 1929 BU yearbook he was described as a professor who “makes subjects interesting. If you don’t believe it, watch the crowds which flock into his classes in Ornithology, Entomology, and even German! If you want to spend an interesting half-hour just get him to talking about birds and insects. You’ll not consider it time wasted, we assure you.”

  In the introduction to Bumblebees and Their Ways, Otto discusses the origins of his interest in bees and beekeeping. Part of this passage is worth quoting at length, for it offers a rare chance to hear Sylvia Plath’s father discoursing passionately in his own words. After discussing how he transferred several bee colonies to his backyard while a young boy in Germany, he writes,

  My interest in bumblebees constantly grew, and when I found that even my teacher in natural history knew very little about the complex life of these fascinating Social Hymenoptera, I decided to write a short treatise on their life-history and habits. This youthful ambition was interrupted rather suddenly, however, when I was sent to live with some relatives in New York City, and it was not until the summer of 1920, that—due to the accidental discovery of two bumblebee colonies at Berkeley, California—my former interest was again awakened. On June 15 of the following year, I began to make detailed observations on the New England species at the Bussey Institution. The facilities which this school of research and the adjoining Arnold Arboretum offer for the study of bumblebees are probably not surpassed anywhere in the world. On the approximately three hundred acres belonging to these two departments of Harvard University, I have taken thirteen of the seventeen bumblebee species recorded from the New England States. During the past thirteen years there were also discovered more than 250 bumblebee colonies on, or near, the grounds of these two institutions. Of this large number of colonies…about 200 were transferred to nest-boxes for further study. In addition, I have made extensive observations on the activities of these industrious insects out in the fields. This work has resulted in the disclosure of many new and significant facts.90

  The missionary impulse has been applied to science rather than religion; the book is as close as Otto would ever come to spiritual autobiography.

  Bumblebees and Their Ways was Otto’s life work and was all that remained of the man after his death. Sylvia, who was only eight when he died, would eventually write a celebrated series of poems about bumblebees. She often discussed her father’s bee studies in letters to others, and in 1962 she raised bees herself in Devon. While Aurelia Plath is often blamed for pressuring her daughter to scale increasingly perilous heights of achievement, the legacy of Otto, the Harvard-educated professor, may have exerted its own pressure. Indeed, Sylvia later told her psychiatrist, Dr. Ruth Beuscher, that Otto was “a brilliant professor who would have expected them to be outstanding.”91 Bumblebees and Their Ways was evidence that her father was a “great man” whose insights had moved his scientific field forward, but it also laid the groundwork for the portrait of Otto in “Daddy”—a pedant who looms “at the blackboard” with his “Aryan eye,” always ready to correct or punish. It is not just Otto’s German heritage that connects him to Nazism in “Daddy,” but his role as a professor and scientist. These were occupations Sylvia respected when she was young, but, as her resentment
toward her father and her husband grew in the early sixties, they appeared more sinister. By then, her father’s occupation had become an embodiment of patriarchal authority. Bumblebees and Their Ways unwittingly laid the groundwork not only for Plath’s bee poems, but also for “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus.” The respected entomologist who kept, as he wrote, “more than fifty colonies under observation…on boards on the shady side of a partly covered, abandoned cellar,” would become the model for Plath’s “Herr Doktor,” who tortures defenseless creatures.92

  Bees were always connected to the memory of the father Sylvia loved—she would suggest as much in her poem “The Beekeeper’s Daughter”—but who she felt had abandoned her. In the uplifting “Wintering,” which was supposed to be the last poem in Ariel, Plath chose her father’s totem as a talisman of recovery and resilience during her own bleak winter:

  Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas

  Succeed in banking their fires

  To enter another year?

  What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

  The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

  This literary evolution suggests that near the end of her life Sylvia had perhaps begun reconciling with her father’s ghost. Although Ted Hughes changed the order of the Ariel poems after her death, Plath was adamant that her book end on a note of hope and renewal with the word “spring.” And, indeed, we are far from the red-hot anger of “Daddy” in “Wintering.” We cannot know for sure whether Plath’s original order in Ariel was meant to suggest a narrative of recovery from anger, depression, and self-punishment. But her placement of “Wintering” at the collection’s end hints that she believed she was becoming more resilient, and that she may have begun, before her own death, to forgive her father for dying.