During her second week in Wellesley, however, Sylvia’s heart began to sink. Her $500 from Mademoiselle meant she did not have to work, but the freedom that had seemed so tantalizing while she was “slinging hash” at the Belmont now terrified her.161 She had never before faced weeks of unbroken time, and she was overwhelmed by the “awful responsibility of managing (profitably) 12 hours a day for 10 weeks.”162 In her journal and in letters, she hit on her famous metaphor. “It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockwork-like functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up and float in the inrush, (or rather outrush,) of the rarified scheduled atmosphere—poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. That’s what it feels like: getting shed of a routine.”163
Fearing that she was on the verge of another serious depression, she began scouring local classified ads for work. She wanted to go back to the Cape—she began to miss Dick terribly—but would consider all options: “Anything to give me that intangible self-respect.”164 As much as she loathed the idea of another six weeks of manual labor, she needed to get out of Wellesley, the “suburban rut.”165 Humid, still, and all but empty in summer, it was where she went to convalesce, not to grow. And she needed space from Aurelia, as she told Marcia. “I love her dearly, but she reverberates so much more intensely than I to every depression I go through. I really feel she is better without the strain of me and my intense moods—which I can bounce in and out of with ease.”166 Away from Aurelia, she could escape her guilt. She understood intuitively that working was tantamount to self-preservation. As much as deadlines unnerved her, she foundered even more when they disappeared. She longed, she told Marcia, to be “gaily drunkenly academic again.”167
On July 12, Sylvia drove to the Cape with Mr. Norton for a few days with the family at their Brewster cabin. She had not seen Dick in three weeks. That Saturday night, she and Dick rowed out to the middle of a lake, where they “anchored, swam, watched mammoth shooting stars & a slice of red moon rising over black hills.” The next night they visited a “negro cook” named Otha who worked with Dick at Latham’s. It was the first time Sylvia had socialized with an African American, and she was eager to portray herself to Marcia as tolerant and progressive: “Dick & I felt right at home, drinking beer, eating sandwiches, kibitzing on canasta & merrily exchanging yarns. In twos & threes the other Negroes started leaving about midnight. But Dick & I stayed on till after 1, listening to Otha recount his experiences in New York….I was entranced & went away loving them both as wonderful & sensitive people. It was a new experience for me, being in the ‘minority’ group temporarily.”168 As patronizing as Plath’s account sounds to modern ears, she regarded her breach of the color line as daring, and enlightening.
Sylvia slept inside the same cabin with Dick and Perry—a situation that muddled her thinking about the true object of her affection. Like her, Perry was a virgin. He embodied “security” in a way that Dick, with his “competitive drives,” did not. While she stayed in bed reading and napping alongside Perry, she wondered if she would end up with him after all. One afternoon she turned, half awake, to examine his sleeping body as if for the first time: “his skin a bronze tan, and the red of his hair like strands of copper. Suddenly tender, I thought…: ‘This is the one! After all the while and excitement and gay passionate flames, this is the one I will choose to come home to! The proverbial boy next door!’ ”169 But that summer, she was still—mostly—Dick’s.
After considering a job with an “admirably unscrupulous” real estate agent in Wellesley, Sylvia saw an ad in The Christian Science Monitor for a mother’s helper in Chatham, on the “elbow” of Cape Cod.170 Although she had vowed never to spend another summer babysitting, she was desperate to return to the Cape, with its golden promise of beaches and boys. Sylvia met with Mrs. Cantor in Chatham for an interview on July 13 and got the job on the spot. She returned home for four days, during which time she wrote the first and second draft of her anti-McCarthy story “Initiation.” She sent it, along with seven poems, to The Christian Science Monitor. Not yet a college graduate, Plath had already assumed the habits of a professional writer.
She returned to the Cape on July 19 and began work for the Cantors, who were devout Christian Scientists. She kept house and helped care for three children: Billy, 3; Susan, 5; and Joan, 13. Her duties were more demanding than they had been at the Mayos: each day found her doing laundry, dishes, washing and waxing floors, polishing silver, food shopping, picnic packing, cooking light meals—all while supervising three children. But the Cantors were “much more friendly than the Mayos,” Sylvia told Marcia, and treated her warmly.171 She ate with the adults instead of the children, while Mrs. Cantor handled most of the cooking. Joanie helped her clean up after meals, and the two often listened to records and danced around the kitchen as they washed up. Sylvia came to enjoy packing the enormous picnic lunches she shared with the Cantors during long, sunny afternoons at Nauset Beach and Oyster Pond. She liked Mrs. Cantor, though she was bothered by her Puritan streak. Mrs. Cantor was shocked by the number of boys Sylvia met that summer and, one night, even told a date that he was holding Sylvia too close as they danced. “I felt very trapped and like shouting ‘What the hell do you think I am? Red Riding Hood?’…Never did I appreciate mother’s free rein more.”172 Still, Mrs. Cantor often invited Sylvia to socialize with their dinner guests after the children went to bed, and the two talked “companionably” after the dishes were done.173 Mr. Cantor even paid her extra on nights they threw dinner parties. “This family is so different from the Mayos—so appreciative. It makes work like play,” she told Aurelia.174 Mrs. Cantor was impressed by Sylvia’s ability to do what needed to be done with minimal direction. Sylvia never complained and seemed healthy and happy, though she did tell Mrs. Cantor that she took the job because she wanted to put some distance between herself and Aurelia. “Sylvia felt somewhat trapped because of her [Aurelia’s] sacrifice.”175
The Cantors lived in a large, gray-shingled house near the Chatham Bars Inn, a grand hotel with private beaches and tennis courts. Sylvia was able to use all of their facilities, a perk that made her feel like she was on vacation herself. Her room was delightfully cool, Mrs. Cantor’s lobster and steak dinners were “continuously grand,” and she had plenty of free time to relax at Nauset Beach.176 She especially loved driving the children around for excursions to Orleans, Brewster, and the weekly Chatham band concert in the Cantors’ “powerglide” beach wagon. She felt glamorous behind the wheel. She attended Christian Science church services and Sunday school with the family as an anthropological exercise, and began dating an eighteen-year-old Christian Scientist, Bob Cochran, who drove an MG, took her sailing, and tried to proselytize her. “It would be really fun to try to proselytize him subtly out of Xian Science!” she told Aurelia.177
Christian Science seemed to Plath an absurd religion, though she hid her skepticism around the Cantors. To Aurelia, she released her gleeful, acerbic wit—her “other” voice: “During the service I could hardly help bursting out in chortling laughter as I thought how my meek and sweetly pious face covered a wicked wicked belief in matter and how satan himself was curled up in my left ventricle chuckling at them.”178 Aurelia admonished her for being “smug”; her daughter’s flair for caustic mockery worried her. Sylvia apologized. “I was really only fooling!…what I want is to learn.”179 But she could not bring herself to debunk “matter” as Christian Scientists did; she would always revel in the material world. At the same time, she was intrigued by the premise that one’s attitude affected one’s health, especially mental health. She had often felt that her bouts of depression were her own fault, and that a change in attitude would restore her. Mental health was much on her mind that summer; in late August she read The Story of My Psychoanalysis: The True and Intimate Revelations of a Man Who Uncovered the Secrets of His Unknown Self, by John Knight. She may have wondered whether she woul
d benefit from the practice herself.
She and Dick fell into their old routine of weekly visits, though the twenty-five-mile round-trip bicycle ride to his Brewster cabin was tiring. They saw plays and ballets at the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, and spent languorous afternoons at the beach. His stories of beach parties with Latham Inn waitresses rattled her, but she too had several young men vying for her attention—not just Bob Cochran, but also Attila Kassay, a Hungarian refugee and Northeastern junior; Chuck Dudley, a Boston University freshman; and Art Kramer, a twenty-five-year-old Jewish Yale law student who worked as a security guard for a wealthy dowager in Harwich. (Art’s brother, Larry Kramer, would become a celebrated playwright.) Sylvia sought out men who were as unlike Dick as possible and approached her problem with light humor in her journal: “Will I ever fling myself into the multitudinous perils and uncertainties of life with a passionate Constantine; a witty and sardonic and tempestuous Attila; a proud, wealthy aristocratic Philip?”180
Although Sylvia described Art as short, “very dark, swarthy and Simian,” she found his unabashed intellectualism “most attractive.”181 He had a master’s degree in English from Yale, and the two spoke of Joyce, Hemingway, Shelley, and Mann. He marked out articles for her to read in The New Yorker and The Atlantic, lent her speeches by Adlai Stevenson, and took her out to lobster dinners. She found it “exhilarating to use big words again.”182 They talked about writing, and he advised her on “textures and adverbs and restraint and so on.”183 Normally Sylvia fell for tall, blond “gods,” but she was moved by his stories of childhood anti-Semitism in Connecticut, where he had been the only Jewish boy in his school and had regularly come home with bloody noses until he learned how to fight back.
The Cantors preferred Dick, but Sylvia did not care. She had written about anti-Semitism in her September 1951 short story, “The Perfect Setup,” based on her time with the Mayos. In the story, the nanny’s employer forbids her children to mix with Jews on the beach. The protagonist does not have the courage to challenge the summer colony’s ingrained prejudices, and she obeys her employer’s orders. Even as Sylvia described Art in unconsciously anti-Semitic language in her letters, she dared others to criticize her for dating a Jewish man. “I find him quite wise and brilliant and understanding and gentle and don’t give a darn about his being short and ugly,” she told her mother.184 Art and Eddie, the other Jewish man in her life, seemed to be the only men who took her intelligence seriously, who spoke to her about politics and literature without condescension. So many college boys wanted a Smith girl as a status symbol. But Art and Eddie assumed that the women they dated ought to spar with them about Eisenhower and Machiavelli.185
Art was not the only “outsider” Sylvia met that summer. In early August she visited the Bookmobile, a roving bookshop that stopped in Chatham once a week, where she met Val Gendron, a prolific writer of pulp fiction. Sylvia was “at her feet with questions pouring out.”186 Val gave her advice and told her she would introduce her to her agent in New York if Sylvia could show her some published work. The next week Sylvia went back to the Bookmobile to “pay homage,” and Val invited her to “a bull session at her shack” in South Dennis.187 Here was another female writer, like Mrs. Prouty, whom Plath could “Hero worship.”188 But Prouty’s formal manners and Brookline mansion had intimidated Sylvia. She had more fun at Val’s “rickety” red barn, which she called “a dream of an artist’s Bohemia.” No maid opened the door, as at Mrs. Prouty’s home—just Val, dressed in “an old plaid lumbershirt and paint-stained dungarees,” doing her laundry at the kitchen sink.189
Val showed Sylvia around the yard, where she grew her own food and dried her own herbs. After coffee, grapes, and cake, she led Sylvia upstairs to her writer’s studio, a cozy space littered with “stacks of manuscripts.”190 The two sat cross-legged on the floor and drank strong coffee while kittens played around them. Val let Sylvia read some of her new work and regaled her with stories from her New York days and her friendships with Rachel Carson and Ernest Hemingway’s sister. Plath copied the names and addresses of “about 50” poetry and fiction magazines from Gendron’s writer’s handbook, which gave her a great jolt of energy. “Boy, I’ll get those sonnets printed yet!”191 A blunt practicality tempered Val’s eccentricity. When Plath gave her a copy of “Sunday at the Mintons,” apologizing for its “many faults,” Val scoffed: “Heck, if anyone takes it apart just ask them if they could produce a prize-winner—you’ve got your approval. Don’t apologize for it.”192 Gendron emboldened Plath to trust her aesthetic instincts. They talked until midnight, when Val drove her home in her “old jalopy—us yelling to each other all the way over the noise of the engine.”193 In her journal Plath called Gendron “my First Author.”194
Olive Prouty and Val Gendron embodied the two forces—decorum and iconoclasm—warring silently within Plath. Throughout her life she would try to reconcile these forces in the same way that she tried to reconcile her loyalties to her mother and Ted Hughes. The two pulled Plath in different directions in a symbolic custody battle, with Plath, the dutiful daughter and wife, always trying to please both. Would she hold a proper wedding reception or elope on Bloomsday? Would she get a respectable teaching position or earn a precarious living as a freelance writer? Would she become Prouty or would she become Gendron? In her journal she pondered the question and alighted on a compromise: “I will be no Val Gendron. But I will make a good part of Val Gendron part of me—someday.”195
Sylvia’s grandparents brought her the August edition of Mademoiselle when “Sunday at the Mintons” finally appeared. They had all gathered at the Nortons’ summer cabin in Brewster on July 30. After they ate, Sylvia spent two hours at the beach alone in Brewster, savoring peaches and cherries—and her own sense of fulfillment and joy—as she read her story. She wrote to Aurelia, “I felt the happiest I ever have in my life….I read it, smoothed the page, chortled happily to myself, ran out onto the sand flats and dog-trotted for a mile far out alone in the sun, through the warm tidal water, with the foam trickling pale brown in fingers along the wet sand ridges where the tide was coming in, talking to myself about how wonderful it was to be alive and brown and full of vitality and potentialities.” Dick drove her back to the Cantors’ house after a “perfect day.”196
Years later Sylvia would write to Mrs. Cantor, “I think back on that as the happiest summer of my teens—it just glows gold, the color of the Chatham sands.”197 She picked beach plums in Truro and sailed to deserted islands. She danced to records in the Cantors’ kitchen and took starry night walks with dates. She wore a black dress to dance at the Chatham Bars Inn and called herself a “knockout.”198 Above all, there was Nauset Beach, the place that would become her life’s touchstone for all that was holy—“over 20 miles of pure white sand and powerful bluegreen surf, low dunes,” as she described it to Aurelia—“the most beautiful place on the Cape.”199 It was a stark, almost cruel contrast to the hells that awaited her the following summer in New York and Wellesley.
The Cape’s thundering Atlantic beaches brought out her best self: “The tide was dead low, so for an hour I walked or ran, as the spirit moved, straight out to sea on the sand flats….For 30 minutes after a vigorous 2 hour hike, I lay and basked on the sand, then the hike back to the cabin, with a brief stop at the Brewster cemetery to browse about the old tombstones. Dick biked up just as I was finishing my salad in the sun on the front steps.”200 The sea, long walks, a good meal, love: these were the things that restored Plath. They rarely came together as they did during the Chatham summer, when she finally found fulfillment in her work and her art. She wrote to Aurelia that August, “chance is strange—one feels afterward that it must have been destiny.”201
9
The Ninth Kingdom
Smith College, September 1952–May 1953
When Sylvia returned to Wellesley in September 1952, she began dining almost nightly with the Nortons, as if she were already their
daughter-in-law. Yet she was being pulled in more promising directions. In mid-September she received several letters that confirmed her growing confidence in her writing. An editor at Dodd, Mead and Co. publishers asked about the possibility of a future novel and encouraged her to apply for their Intercollegiate Literary Fellowship. One of Smith’s most esteemed English professors, Mary Ellen Chase, congratulated her on her Mademoiselle success and invited Sylvia to her home for coffee. She wanted to discuss “Sunday at the Mintons” and Plath’s “other writing.”1 Mrs. Prouty wrote, too, praising the story’s technique, especially “the similes and metaphors that remain clearly etched upon my consciousness.”2 She asked Sylvia to keep her posted on her “future successes—or failures. Both.” Prouty intuited that Plath needed permission to fail. Val Gendron had offered similar advice: Don’t apologize, and don’t let rejection equal defeat. Both knew that a woman writer’s success depended as much on thick skin as raw talent.
Permission to fail was exactly what Plath needed as she began her junior year at Smith. She had spent two years building friendships and honing her social skills at Haven House. Now, with money short, she was forced to withdraw from Maureen Buckley’s circle. She would be living at Lawrence House, a cooperative dorm where she waitressed at lunchtime, in uniform, to save $250 off her room and board. Sylvia tried to convince herself and her correspondents that Lawrence House was just fine—that waitressing was “not at all unpleasant,” and her new roommate, Mary Bonneville, warm and homespun.3 But on her arrival at Lawrence House, she felt “like a displaced person as yet—a bit bewildered and uninitiated.”4 She was aghast at the bright aquas and yellows Mary had chosen for the room. (Sylvia talked her into “yellow spreads and dark green furnishings, white curtains, and a harmonizing modern art picture.”)5 She told Aurelia that Mary was “a very sweet girl, in her own way” but there was no chance of a friendship. “That was a downer for her,” Janet Salter Rosenberg remembered. “Mary was a science major, and she and Sylvia had very little in common.”6 Moving to a new house, Sylvia wrote Warren, “was like being a freshman all over again, only worse, because I remembered nostalgically the homey comfort of Haven House, and rooming with Marcia.”7 Still, there was some relief in living among other scholarship students; Sylvia spoke of the “delightful atmosphere of economy, and everyone understands the words, ‘I can’t, I’m broke.’ ”8
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