Red Comet

by Heather Clark

A book may lead each girl and boy

  From darkest night to brilliant day.61

  Though she felt she could not afford to buy books at the Hathaway bookshop in Wellesley Square, she managed to amass an impressive book collection for an eleven-year-old: in April she received her one hundredth book and wrote, “I am in a reverie of happiness for I love books.”62

  On March 10, 1944, The Wellesley Townsman published Plath’s first story: “Troop 5 Valentine Party.” She wrote in her diary that she felt “very proud.”63 She continued writing poems and prose steadily, sometimes stumbling on a theme that would resurface years later. “In the Corner of My Garden” (also titled “The Home of Straying Blossoms”) is a two-stanza poem about the relationship between the domestic and the wild:

  In the corner of my garden

  There is a favorite spot,

  Which sun and rain tend faithfully

  And which I planted not.

  Here is the haven of wild flowers,

  The kingdom of birds and bees;

  Here in the silvery moonlight

  Sprites dance ’neath singing trees.64

  Plath’s budding Romantic sensibilities are on full display—the area free from human cultivation is a Yeatsian “haven” inhabited by wildflowers and sprites dancing in moonlight. She is already a poet of the moor rather than the country garden.

  At night she listened to Silver Theatre, The Jack Benny Program, The Great Gildersleeve, Superman, Quiz Kids, Jerry and the Pirates, and The Lone Ranger on the radio. She was supposed to go to bed at eight p.m., but she frequently stayed up late reading and writing in her diary, “unknown to mummy.”65 She saw several movies with friends: The Scarlet Pimpernel, Love Crazy, Madame Curie (“sad but beautiful”), Jane Eyre, Greenwich Village, Holiday Inn, Night of Adventure, Riding High, and What a Woman!, as well as the war films Up in Arms, Passport to Destiny, and Destination Tokyo.66 Some of these films were a little mature for Sylvia, who brought her dolls to the movies and wrote that she was shocked when she heard “swears” on-screen.67 But the sultry glamour of Hollywood starlets spoke to her; she enjoyed playing with her Rita Hayworth paper dolls and pasting magazine photographs of movie stars in her scrapbook. She was thrilled to get Bette Davis’s autograph from a Girl Scout friend who was Davis’s niece. Around this time she began reading magazines such as Ladies’ Home Journal, The American Girl, and Calling All Girls, which she read “cover to cover” when it arrived.68 The magazines imprinted on her notions of femininity that both attracted and troubled her, and inspired her to satire later on.

  There was occasional talk of boys. She listed four in the back of her 1944 diary under the heading “Boys I like”: William Moore (the future president of her high school class), Betsy’s brother Mark, Jack Duffin, Sanford Frazier. But her interest in boys was mostly competitive. She was excited when she beat them on tests, especially in math.69 In April, after getting 100 on a social studies test, she wrote, “I am even with Donald Cheney!!!”70 She frequently wrote about being chased and taunted by groups of boys. By early 1944, she began to fight back. In February she “gave the boys a good lecture and now they won’t take my hat,” while a month later she noted that she and another girlfriend formed a “2 girl army” to “attack” the boys, one of whom, William Moore, she nicknamed “Hercules.”71 She had already formed the habit of giving larger-than-life characteristics and nicknames to her crushes, as in her 1945 poem “King of the Ice”:

  A streak of red, a flash of silver.

  My heroe [sic] on skates speeds by!

  As an arrow fleet

  With wings on his feet

  He races the wind on high.

  The onlookers cry, “A goal! A goal!”

  My heroe [sic] would win at any price,

  ’Twould be a feat

  In hockey to beat

  A star like my King of the Ice.72

  Here, Plath transforms a schoolgirl crush into a “hero,” “king,” “arrow,” and “star.” She compares him to the Greek god Hermes. Dick Norton would be a blond god, Mallory Wober Hercules, Ted Hughes Adam. Even as a young girl, she was inspired by the male muses around her.

  After another stint at Camp Weetamoe in July 1944, Sylvia spent the rest of her summer in Wellesley, sitting by the brook, picking dandelions, and trying to catch dragonflies with her cat, Mowgli. She swam, played with friends, and enjoyed long, leisurely dinners with her family. Aurelia was proud that Sylvia managed to save up $15 to buy herself a bike at the end of August. Her summer respite ended when she began her seventh-grade year at the Alice L. Phillips Junior High School in September.73 She shuffled dutifully through math, gym, chorus, English, lunch, utility, orchestra, social studies, music, and health. She looked forward to slumber parties at Betsy’s house, where the girls told each other ghost stories late into the night.

  Girl Scouts was Sylvia’s most time-consuming after-school activity that year. Founded in 1912 by Juliette Gordon Low and modeled on the British Girl Guides, Girl Scouts had one million members by 1944. Girl Scouts embodied a nonthreatening, almost Victorian ideal of womanhood that emphasized virtue, charity, and service. But it also taught girls strength and self-reliance. Unlike most female civic activities in American life, Girl Scout camps gave young women the freedom to leave the confines of domesticity, if only for a few weeks, and behave like boys. At camp, they too wore uniforms, woke up to bugle calls, made fires, rowed boats, hiked, swam, and learned archery.

  Sylvia spent parts of six summers, 1943–1948, at Girl Scout–affiliated camps. She enjoyed the physical and outdoor camp activities more than her weekly after-school sessions, which revolved around earning badges and community service drives. In May 1944 at her local Girl Scouts award ceremony, she received an attendance star and ten badges—Birdfinder, World Knowledge, Group Music, Childcare, Readers, Scribe, Campcraft, Foot Traveler, Boating, and Weaving. Amassing these badges was not always pleasant. “Good riddance to that,” she wrote after she finished working on her “Scribe” badge that March.74

  Girl Scouts required its young charges to adopt military standards of precision and neatness. When hands were inspected for cleanliness at afternoon meetings, Sylvia was proud that hers were “the neatest.”75 She was equally cheered after winning weekly tent inspections at summer camp. But she also sensed a darker side to such inspections. In her eighth-grade year, she wrote that during her school physical she “stood shivering (stripped to the waist) in a room with open windows and cold drafts” waiting for a doctor—“an old codger, shaking all over”—to examine her.76 Her language suggests that she was already attuned to the situation’s disturbing power dynamics; the scene evokes “Herr Doktor” of “Daddy.” Another teacher that year advised her to walk with perfect posture if she ever hoped to command authority.77 At the time, slovenliness in women was often equated with madness; appearance and mental health were linked in a way that did not allow for the relaxation of what Sylvia, at age twelve, called “gruesome” beauty practices.78 Plath later came to understand how obsession with cleanliness and purity could lead, in extremis, to genocide. In her late poems, she ruthlessly mocked the idea of “purity” with “gruesome” heroines. Lady Lazarus reeks of ash and sour breath; the speaker of “Cut” enjoys being a “Dirty girl”; the heroine of “Fever 103º” asks defiantly, “Pure? What does it mean?” before transcending her “old whore petticoats” to a paradise free of repression. Male doctors, especially in The Bell Jar, are agents of torture rather than healing. Plath occasionally foreshadows such moments in her adolescent diary, as in her 1944 school physical entry, and, later, in an entry about a school nurse who “almost asphyxiated” her while swabbing alcohol on her rash.79

  Sylvia celebrated her twelfth birthday in October 1944 over dinner with girlfriends, including Ruth Freeman, who slept over. She noted somewhat forlornly that she was now “too old” to go trick-or-treat
ing for Halloween. Instead she wrote “Halloween,” a catchy ditty that displayed her ability to alternate smoothly between iambic tetrameter and trimeter:

  A little wind is whistling by,

  Bright leaves are whirling ’round,

  The harvest moon is hanging low

  O’er corn shocks dry and browned.

  The witches are about tonight,

  Above the ground they fly,

  On magic broomsticks with their cats

  They sail across the sky.80

  Though she was leaving girlhood behind, she was gaining confidence in her burgeoning adolescent identity. In October she was asked to write for the school newspaper, the Phillipian, an early ratification of her calling. The invitation probably came through her seventh-grade English teacher, Miss Raguse, who often praised Sylvia’s work and who told her, “ ‘You have a gift in that and should build it up.’ ”81 By late November, Sylvia was so anxious to please Miss Raguse that she wrote ten book reports in three days. She sensed that her teacher was a kindred spirit and, in at least one instance, was impressed by her resistance to jingoism and propaganda. When Sylvia risked reading a Japanese poem aloud in English class in April 1945, she wrote that Miss Raguse “gave me an understanding sort of wink as if to say, ‘It’s beautiful, Japanese or not!’ ”82

  On November 7, 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt was reelected president. In her diary Sylvia wrote “Dewey” all over the page—likely a reflection of her family’s politics—though the next day she happily reported, “Roosevelt’s president!” The family celebrated a traditional Christmas Eve that year with caroling and a “hearty supper,” after which Sylvia and Warren “went out and sat in the apple tree and listened and looked up at the moon, covered now and then by passing clouds.”83 Sylvia received another new journal (in which Aurelia wrote, “Rule: Not to be written in after 8 pm”), clothes, books—including an etiquette book—art supplies, mittens, candy, and pencils. Three days after Christmas, Sylvia wrote about a sledding excursion in language that looks forward to the flight and fall of “Ariel”: “I traveled around quite a bit before I found the perfect hill. I was alone in an ice glittering world. Down the steep slopes I flew! The wind whistled through me. It was better than a mountain in fairyland. I was brought to earth by sunset.”84

  * * *

  ON NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1945, Sylvia awoke early and balanced her budget, pleased to end the year with $2.55. Even at age twelve, she had a strong aversion to debt. Her eagerness to set her accounts right at the start of the new year points to an often overlooked aspect of Plath’s young life: class.

  Sylvia never complained to friends like Betsy or Pat about sharing a room with Aurelia in the merged Plath-Schober household, and many contemporaries remembered Sylvia’s affectionate relationship with Grammy Schober. Nevertheless, Sylvia resented being raised in a matriarchy. While Aurelia was grateful for her parents’ help, the situation had the potential to become infantilizing, and there were probably unspoken tensions in the home over authority. Plath wrote to Dr. Beuscher in 1962, “She was always a child while my grandmother was alive—cooked for, fed, her babies minded while she had a job. I hated this.”85 There would be no reprieve for Frank Schober, either, who lived and worked at the Brookline Country Club during the week—and often through the weekends—to help support the family. Those who came to know the Plath-Schobers in Wellesley, like Sylvia’s friend Pat O’Neil, described a warm, close-knit unit. But Pat saw Aurelia as “a bridge” between the conservative, old-world sensibilities of her Austrian parents and the modern ambitions of her American children. “It was very lonely for her,” Pat said.86

  Sylvia’s Smith roommate Marcia Brown characterized Aurelia as “someone struggling every minute of every day of every year to pay the bills and to keep herself together—just holding on for dear life.”87 Friends like Ruth Freeman Geissler, Perry Norton, and Phil McCurdy went so far as to use the word “poor” to describe the Plath family.88 The label seems an exaggeration given all that Aurelia was able to provide for her children. Indeed, several college friends later noted that while Sylvia was not wealthy by Smith standards, she appeared much better off than most of the other scholarship students in her year. Yet in affluent, “insular” Wellesley, Sylvia felt her class difference, describing her household as “middle-middle class.”89 Phil McCurdy, Sylvia’s Wellesley friend, was also raised by a single mother in precarious financial circumstances. “Aurelia and Sylvia lived in the Fells. It was nearing Natick, which was poverty level….I think both of us picked up easily that we were not second-class citizens, but we were a different cut from the average Wellesley crew….We were poor people, relatively, in Wellesley, and worried a lot about money.” They knew from a young age that they would have to earn scholarships to attend college—Sylvia to Smith, Phil to Harvard. He always felt that money was the “clue” to understanding The Bell Jar. “It’s a big part of it. You can’t romanticize it away.”90 Louise Giesey White, who knew Sylvia throughout her Wellesley and Smith years, said, “I did not think of her as ‘poor.’ But her mother worked. None of our mothers worked….She was probably more vulnerable than people knew. Vulnerable about class, and those distinctions.”91 As Betsy put it, “It was just very evident that Aurelia either worked or starved.”92

  Some of Sylvia’s friends lived in mansions with servants; she was particularly impressed after a visit to Nancy Wiggins’s “gigantic and beautiful house,” where she was “served a delicious luncheon by a ‘Ritzy’ maid.”93 Her own house was small and low-ceilinged, and the Plath-Schobers rarely had household help. Aurelia once said she had released Sylvia from her chores so she could focus on her reading, writing, painting, and music. “Sylvia required the most consideration, the most time, the most money….We all adored her and catered to our ‘prima donna,’ as we teasingly called her.”94 But in her diary Plath wrote about doing housework: “What a job-beds-dishes-dusting-steps-I am worn out.”95 She shoveled the driveway when it snowed, which gave her backaches, and she babysat often. When Mildred Norton was ill, Sylvia helped her with household chores. In a thank-you note to Aurelia, Mildred demurred that her sons were too “busy” to clean the kitchen, which was a “struggle” for them. Sylvia had performed her role, Mildred noted, with ladylike “cheerfulness of spirit.”96

  When Sylvia began seventh grade, she got a job dusting the school offices. She was unsure of her status—student or custodial staff?—and hesitant to dust when the offices were in use: “I rushed through my two dusting jobs and just got back to my homeroom before the last bell. In my first English study period I was called to the office and Miss Bahnor said ‘You didn’t dust the counter on the principal’s desk this morning. Please do it now!’ I could have cried and I did apologize about five times. (I never had dared to do the Principal’s desk while he was sitting at it!)”97 Word got around that she was available for housecleaning. At least one neighborhood woman took advantage of her:

  Mrs. Chapman called me up and asked if I would go to her house for a few hours and help her. I could not refuse so—first she had me shake and sweep by broom all of the rugs in the house….She handed me a basin of soapy water and a cloth….I set to work scrubbing the floors of her lengthy and wide drawing rooms, livingroom, sunporch, and kitchen (backboards too!)…and waxed all the floors by hand (on my knees too) and polished them….I received a dollar for my work which I felt (or rather my body felt) was not too much for all that work!98

  Sylvia was not greedy—that winter she refused a dollar from a neighbor after she helped shovel her driveway—but she knew when she was being exploited. She probably also knew that Mrs. Chapman would not have summoned her school friend Nancy Wiggins, who lived in a mansion, or Arden Tapley, whose father was a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra, to do her cleaning. The day after Sylvia cleaned for Mrs. Chapman, Aurelia took her daughter into Boston, where they spent the afternoon at the Isabella Stewart Gardn
er Museum viewing John Singer Sargent’s The Dancer and listening to the Gordon String Quartet. Sylvia, deeply moved, summed up the experience in her diary with a single word: “Magnificent!” This day of high culture made up for the previous day of hard labor. Plath’s entry, full of exclamation points, is among the happiest in her 1945 diary.

  Sylvia became adept at moving between classes—donning her red velvet dress, “real pearls,” and white gloves for an elegant wedding after an unpleasant morning spent babysitting two toddlers.99 It was a skill that would serve her well as a Smith scholarship student. A 1944 drawing suggests that Sylvia, already attuned to the soft undertones of hypocrisy, saw beyond Wellesley’s gentility to something darker. Her sketch shows two well-dressed matrons conversing in front of a grand house with a white picket fence. In the background, one boy is beating another with a baseball bat as blood spurts from his head. “Oh, Junior has always been a poor loser,” says his mother.100 A story from the mid-1940s, “Mary Jane’s Passport,” also explores class issues in its portrayal of an unlikely friendship between an affluent but sickly teenage girl, Mary Jane, and a poor orphan, Judy, from the wrong side of town. Plath reverses the usual class hierarchy so that it is the rich girl who yearns to enter the poor one’s world. Mary Jane eventually takes on a babysitting job—her “passport” into the working class—in hopes that she will meet Judy, also a babysitter, in the park.101 Both characters have attributes of Sylvia herself—Mary Jane has an overprotective mother, while Judy lives with a widow who must work to support her family.

  Sylvia understood that summer camp, in particular, was a luxury. In a handmade birthday card to her mother in April 1946, she enfolded $7 to help defray camp costs. She attempted to mitigate the complicated implications of her gift, which seemed to embarrass both mother and daughter. On the card’s front flap she wrote, “I’ll give my money to you / (That was supposed to be for your present) / For you to send in for my joy. / (Doesn’t seem very pleasant.)” She drew a picture of herself at camp, with the caption, “Your present, your money.” Inside the card she wrote, “But, ‘Your joy is my joy,’ to me you say / So it’s joy for you in the end—When your daughter comes home healthy / Plumper (no taller) and tanned!” On the back of the card, she drew a daffodil and wrote, as if apologizing, “love, I love you, and Love, not money.”102 Sylvia had to keep up the façade that money did not matter, yet she understood quite well that it did.