Fusing them into a polished crystal ball
Where I can see the moon and flashing sun.44
The lines bring to mind the tropes of dissolution and rebirth in Plath’s “The Stones,” “Ariel,” and “Lady Lazarus.” After her first suicide attempt, Plath would work hard in therapy to recover her “scattered selves,” but in her poems and novel she regarded this retrieval process with more cynicism.
Teasdale was an important early female literary role model. Shortly after the Teasdale diary entries, Sylvia described roaming about her house “storing descriptions and thoughts in my mind to be taken out at random some day in the future. I feel a poem coming on soon, too.”45 Later, though, Teasdale would serve a darker mentorship as one of the “brilliant women—neurotic” who committed suicide, about whom Plath wrote in her journal.46 (Plath eventually wrote her own poem titled “Crystal Gazer” in 1956, after she married Ted Hughes, transforming Teasdale’s self-satisfied sibyl into a dark reflection of horror: “Each love blazing blind to its gutted end— / And, fixed in the crystal center, grinning fierce: / Earth’s ever-green death’s head.”)
In late November Sylvia began art lessons with a respected local teacher, Miss Hazelton, in addition to her regular art class in school. Sylvia never felt her drawings were good enough, but Aurelia praised them. Indeed, Sylvia had real talent. That spring she would learn that two of her watercolors won a spot at the Massachusetts Regional Art Exhibit in Boston. One even went on to earn a place at the National High School Art Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh and was ranked eighth in the nation. Her school principal, Mr. Thistle, delivered this “bombshell” in person, along with the news that a poem of hers won honorable mention in the National Poetry Contest.47
Though Sylvia admired and respected her art teacher—she would visit Miss Hazelton at Newton-Wellesley Hospital in 1953 and feed her as she lay dying48—she couldn’t resist a few barbs in her diary, calling her “a tiny, wizened old lady” with skin “like wrinkled yellow parchment.”49 That same month she delighted in berating a teacher who had offended her, describing her “sardonic, implacable smile.” She referred to another teacher as “old Dope.”50 A story she wrote for English class that December, “From the Memoirs of a Babysitter,” objected to the common feminine description of little children as “angelic” and instead described them as “bothersome” and “a nuisance.”51 She later called a boy at a dance a “fat old puff.”52 Plath was beginning to develop the blasphemous voice that would propel some of her most memorable writing.
As 1946 drew to a close, however, glimpses of this “other” Sylvia were still rare. The writer who would cast a harsh light on Cold War America was still moved by jingoistic patriotism and scientific propaganda. When she saw a movie called America the Beautiful during a school assembly, she nearly wept with pride. “How wonderful it is just to live in AMERICA!”53 She was fascinated by a “thrilling” school lecture on the atomic bomb that May. The audience was breathless as the presenting scientist, Dr. White,
turned on a sounding machine and said, “Now listen to the voice of God.” When he said this, we all heard a series of little sharp clicks. These were cosmic bullets. He put various stones over the Geiger counter and each one either increased the count or remained the same. He told us that if the count ran together and the clicks got up to 235, the whole school would blow up!54
Plath’s poems connecting patriarchy, fascism, and science were far in the future. She remained an obedient daughter who received certificates for book reports and perfect attendance at Sunday school. She continued to send her work to contests and frequently won. No contest was too obscure—she received $5 worth of music recordings that fall from a local shop for an essay about Daniel Boone.
Margot Loungway came for a visit two days after Christmas 1946. They attended a party at the Nortons’ house, where Sylvia trusted Perry to play “nice, clean games—pencil and paper games, guessing games, and puzzles etc.”55 But someone else at the party inspired less innocent feelings: Perry’s brother Dick. “(Pant! Pant!)”56
She and Margot enjoyed walking through the woods during a blizzard: “It was a dry, hushed cold, and all we could hear was the ceaseless sifting of the snow through the tree branches. We thought that we might get frozen to death like some famous explorers, but—no such luck.” The purity of winter landscapes always mesmerized Sylvia.
Today was fit for a poem. The world was etched in frosty lace. The trees were soft, powdery skirts, and the air was like a crystal breath—I mean extraordinarily clear. Over all was a fragile blue sky, and a far-off sun set the icicles to twinkling like myriads of stars or sparklers. I tracked about in the snow, heedless of anything else except the beauty of this glorious world.57
Plath’s poetic inclinations still gestured toward dramatic natural landscapes. Years later, “Ariel” would feature an early-morning gallop over the moors through “blue / Pour of tor and distances.” The poem echoes the pure, unadulterated joy Sylvia experienced coasting down the snowy hills of Wellesley: “We sped on fleet silver wings over snow and ice. We felt as if we were birds soaring in the blue, blue sky for one brief morning.”58
* * *
SYLVIA LOST THE ELECTION for school secretary in January 1947, but she had better luck in the school spelling bee that year; she came in second, after losing on “apparel” to a ninth-grade boy. She pasted the Wellesley Townsman clipping about the spelling bee in her scrapbook with the caption, “I was glad that Bill got first prize because I always like having a boy ahead of me!”59 She repeated the sentiment in her diary: “I had hoped he would win, for its [sic] always nice to have a boy ahead.”60 When Plath reread her diary as a young woman, she would place an asterisk above this sentence, as she often did above naive or well-mannered entries that seemed absurd to her in hindsight. She often wrote “Ha!” in pencil above her polite entries about the Norton boys.
Sylvia still preferred the company of books to that of boys; in early 1947, she was particularly impressed by Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. A day after a school dance, she wrote “Fireside Reveries,” a manifesto of her own literary ambition, which concluded:
I’m dreaming dreams by the fireside,
A book of poems in my lap;
…………………..
While through the living screen of fire
I see gold castles in the air,
My thoughts to shining fame aspire
For there is much to do and dare.
Just as I reach the summit’s height,
And gaze down far below,
The vision fades into the night,
But still the embers flow.61
Here, writing poetry is construed as a risky act, a “dare” akin to playing with fire. The public expression of this desire—Plath published “Fireside Reveries” in the Phillipian—was remarkable at a time when modesty was considered an essential female virtue. “Didn’t you know I’m going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world?” she wrote in her diary that March.62 Aurelia had recently given her books about female artists such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Wanda Hazel Gág, and Anna Pavlova, and Sylvia and her mother developed a close rapport that winter. There were long walks through the Wellesley woods, afternoons making molasses candy and hot chocolate, and evenings typing up poems together. Sylvia brainstormed with her “angel-of-a-mother” when she suffered from writer’s block: “mother planted some ideas after long minutes of thought, and accordingly I began to write a story.”63 (The story was “Mary Jane’s Passport,” for which Aurelia also provided the title.)
Yet Sylvia was beginning to move, ever so slowly, out of Aurelia’s shadow. In early February 1947 she revised her fairy story, Stardust, in a way that would not have pleased her mother, who was fond of morally uplifting narratives: “I’ve decided not to make it all goody-ish, preachy, or moraly [sic].”64 Inde
ed, an event that March caused Sylvia to question her mother’s moral judgment for the first time. Her old Winthrop friend, William Sterling, who took Sylvia to a school dance that March, read her diary during a sleepover party and saw that she had called him “shallow.” Aurelia told Sylvia that he had been “terribly hurt” by the revelation and implied that she should have had better manners. Sylvia, miserable and embarrassed, felt that Aurelia’s criticism was unfair. “Heaven knows I write things in here that I don’t mean two minutes later—but!”65 William eventually apologized for reading her diary, but Sylvia was learning that Aurelia would not tolerate her sharp, critical voice, and she sensed a double standard. Why was it all right for the boys to read through her private diary but not for her to write honestly about her feelings? A few days later she practically dared William—and Aurelia—to admonish her: “I think he is nauseating, and if he ever reads this again and sees what I think it will serve him right for being so conceited and nosy!…Mother says I have to be nice to him! Phooey!@*!!”66 The same pattern would play out to disastrous effect during Sylvia’s relationship with Dick Norton, a “nice” boy whom Aurelia wanted her daughter to marry. The personal attacks in The Bell Jar were a kind of “writing back” to those who had upset her during the years she had dated Dick.
By 1947, Plath’s diary was becoming more of a working writer’s notebook than a daily record of events. She longed for drama but found it hard to invent such scenarios when she had so little “experience.” Because the only dramatic events that ever seemed to happen in Wellesley revolved around the weather, her lyrical descriptions of snow and storms and sunsets were often more impressive than her fictional vignettes, which were still derivative. Before she turned to plot and character, she learned to write by describing landscapes. These descriptions also—perhaps in a subconscious or coded way—describe her mood, a practice that would intensify as she matured. In a summer entry, whose atmospherics bring her masterful late poem “Sheep in Fog” to mind, she writes, “Today had quite an eerie, though tiring atmosphere. A uniform gray sky hung low and oppressing overhead, deadly quiet. Occasional wraith-like mists drifted here and there.”67
If Sylvia lacked experience she found it in unexpected places, for she simply had to write. “Once I write it is so hard to stop. There are so many things that I feel deeply about and want to get written down in here before it is to [sic] late and they have slipped away.”68 And again, a few days later, “I feel so much like writing tonight that I have to stopper my feelings up tight so that they won’t leak out because I haven’t enough time to use them.”69 She was beginning to see dramatic potential in mundane situations, like taking the subway to Ruth’s house: “The air was foul with the smell of smoke and wetness, and the subway seemed to be full of evil-looking men who gazed at innocent me from out of shifty, bloodshot eyes.”70 She began having “wonderful technicolor dreams” in which she played the heroine—rescuing her “friends from drowning on a huge ice flow in Antarctica,” or a “detective-ess who solved the ghostly murder of a young man.”71 She identified closely with the hot-tempered Scarlett O’Hara that year when she saw Gone with the Wind (“I was Scarlett”), and she envied Rudyard Kipling’s experience living in India.72 She loved the “throbbing rhythm” of his “Mandalay”: “I’m all in the mood for thundery poetry now. I wish I had the experience to write about it. It’s so sad to ache to write wonderful poems and not have things to do with it!”73 The “coarse language” of “Gunga Din,” her favorite Kipling poem, thrilled her, and she quoted him in her diary: “ ’E’ll be squattin’ on the coals / Givin’ drink to pore [sic] damned souls, / An’ I’ll get a swig in hell from Gunga Din!”74 Kipling was a refreshing change from Teasdale. By late July, she was writing stories that were “quite passionate and rather lustful,” though she admitted this only in her secret “Obbish” diary code.75
Sylvia raced through her assignments in order to lounge in bed with David Copperfield, The Mysterious Island, The Man with the Iron Mask, Ivanhoe, or her diary. In May 1947, she created a scrapbook of her poems—an activity she would repeat each year as her collection grew. She was proud of the twenty-four poems that made the cut, which she called “very good,” unlike her “silly little jingles!”76 That spring, she was “in the poetry mood” and wrote five new poems.77 The best was the Gothic “Steely-Blue Crags,” with its Hughesian description of cliffs, “Eerie and strange,” full of “rough-hewn crags.”78
In April, Sylvia wrote a poem, “I thought that I could not be hurt,” about a pastel drawing her grandmother had accidentally smudged. For months Sylvia had struggled to earn Miss Hazleton’s praise in art class; as time passed her teacher became “stricter than ever about every little speck of color going in the right place.”79 Finally, in the spring of 1947, Miss Hazleton began to compliment her efforts. A drawing of a Tiffany glass vase, for example, “pleased because I really got the feeling of the luminosity of the gleaming glass!”80 In May, Miss Hazleton told Sylvia that a still life of a Chinese jug was her “best pastel yet.”81 Unequivocal praise from a teacher with such exacting standards thrilled her.
I took it home proudly, and immediately showed it to mum, who was very pleased. However, someone accidentally rubbed a cloth against it and destroyed part of the clear coloring. I was heart broken. I patched it up again, but, you know, nothing like that is as good as new. However, I wrote a poem about it (my best one yet) in a very new, modern style.82
Plath turned pain into art and proved to herself that nothing is truly lost as she produced this substitute “best” composition:
I thought that I could not be hurt;
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to suffering—
immune to mental pain
or agony.
The poem goes on to describe how the speaker’s “world turned gray” when “careless hands” destroyed her “silver web of happiness.” But the poem contains a surprisingly astute moment of self-reflection about the fragility of human emotion:
(How frail the human heart must be—
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing—
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)83
Previous biographers have presented “I thought that I could not be hurt” as a piece of verse that foreshadows Plath’s future neuroses.84 Anne Stevenson began her famously negative biography of Plath with a discussion of this poem, which she noted was occasioned by a “minor mishap.”85 Without any knowledge of Plath’s struggles to earn Miss Hazelton’s praise, or an understanding of the pleasure she derived from using “experience” to create poems, “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt” does seem melodramatic. But placed back in its original context and read through the lens of Sylvia’s own diary description, it stands out as a creative experiment and an artistic turning point. “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt” represents a courageous turn, for it is the first poem in which Plath dares to write in the first person about “mental pain” and “agony”—risky terrain for a daughter raised in a household that had tried to banish the specter of tragedy. Sylvia recognized that the poem was “new, modern”—an exciting departure from the emotionally safe landscape poetry of her juvenilia. For the first time, her poem’s speaker refuses to keep quiet about anger and disappointment. Plath has left Plato’s shadow cave to emerge into the bright glare of a world in which suffering occurs, and is deeply felt. The poem sounds, at times, like elegy; in mourning the loss of her perfect art, she hints obliquely at a deeper, unspoken grief. This poem, far from being neurotic, was a healthy way to redeem and transform her disappointment into art.
* * *
IN JUNE, Sylvia graduated from junior high school and won the much-coveted Wellesley Award, for which she received Cleanth Brooks’s and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry, a foundational New Critical text. She was also, as she had hoped,
the first student to ever receive a sixth “letter” award for academic achievement. Yet she described the ceremony as a “nightmare of continually going up on the stage to get awards and certificates.”86 She was nervous that so much academic publicity would ruin her chances of joining the popular crowd, but her fears were unwarranted—she received more than seventy-five signatures in her yearbook. As usual, she was greeted by “an enthusiastically appreciative family” after the ceremony.87 Now that her days were free, she turned to writing. She was composing a radio play she called The White Mantle Murders. Sylvia noted Aurelia’s aversion to the genre (“Mum hates murder stories!”), though she was reading Edgar Allan Poe that summer.88 Sylvia spent many hours working on the plot; as she flirted with her crush Tommy Duggin on the bus, she “deliberated silently who I should murder in my new story.”89
In late June she traveled by train and ferry to Martha’s Vineyard, where she spent two weeks at a Girl Scout–affiliated sailing camp in Oak Bluffs. The camp was nestled in the woods on the shores of a calm lagoon where the girls sailed each day. She reveled in the drama of sailing, “coming about and hard-a-leeing…skimming over the green waves and cutting through the lagoon with a dash of spray.”90 She loved her long bike rides to East and West Chop and Chappaquiddick, and languorous afternoons lying on the beach, where she could meditate in silence.
She began experimenting with different looks. She donned a new hairstyle, parted on the side and braided, and even took on a new name. “Everybody calls me ‘Sherry’ and I feel like a different person without any old restrictions,” she wrote Aurelia. “If someone says something mean about me (which no one does, thank goodness) I can just go back home and start being ‘sylvia’ [sic] again.”91 Years before her Smith College thesis on “the double,” she was already interested in dualities.
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