Man wants to “alleviate suffering,” in the words of Fromm, but if he is to achieve the fullest measure of his individual potential, according to Nietzsche, he must not only accept suffering (Nietzsche abhors effeminate Christian humility) but seek it! And we agree heartily here: tempting as it is to avoid pain, the strong individual must perceive that “pain is also a joy, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun…”
For us, this eloquent paradox expresses the full, honest, courageous acceptance of freedom and all its implications: an affirmation of the value of evil as well as good, discord as well as harmony, hardship as well as comfort, and pain as well as pleasure…rising to higher statures and perspectives through conflict and suffering. (Zarathustra, 363)69
Plath’s emphasis on pain and struggle here were significant; these ideas would propel her later dialogue with Ted Hughes.
That same year, in a paper written for her Russian class on Dostoevsky in March 1954, Plath again introduced Nietzsche, beginning the paper with an epigraph from Zarathustra70 and indulging her youthful interest in what Ted Hughes would later call “positive violence.”71 Plath’s experiments with Nietzschean ideas in her journal and early poetry reveal that she recognized him as an enabling literary and philosophical model: her poems “Doomsday,” “Insolent Storm Strikes at the Skull,” “Temper of Time,” and “Song for a Revolutionary Love” all exhibit the influence of Nietzsche, as well as Yeats. Plath’s uncollected 1955 poem, “Notes on Zarathustra’s Prologue,” shows that at Smith she had already begun to incorporate Nietzsche’s philosophy into her art:
Look to the lightning for tongues of pain
Steep are the stairs to the Superman
Go flay the frail sheep in the flock
And strip the shroud from coward’s back
Till the womb of chaos sprouts with fire
And hatches Nietzsche’s dancing star.72
Nietzsche’s melding of puritanism and Romanticism offered an appealingly subversive philosophy to Plath. Her girlhood Emersonian, Unitarian-approved version of individualism must have seemed tepid when set beside Nietzsche’s Will to Power. After all, Plath frequently called herself “The girl who wanted to be God.”73 In her journals, she wrote that she was “strong and assertive” and longed to give voice to the “masculine” elements within herself.74 “I am jealous of men,” she wrote in 1951. “I envy the man his physical freedom to lead a double life—his career, and his sexual and family life.”75 These admissions did not accord with the image of the demure, self-effacing model of fifties femininity.
Although Nietzsche has been criticized as a misogynist, he nevertheless offered Plath an ideological foundation that validated her desire for intellectual and artistic autonomy and opened up possibilities of liberation from the tyranny of gender. In Eisenhower’s America, Plath was not expected to pursue her own career; subordination was the only option available to her if she wished to marry, which she did. Yet Nietzsche thought that subordination was a surrender to the enervating Judeo-Christian doctrine of humility and submission. Plath, too, vowed not to surrender. In the same journal entry in which she wrote, “I do not love anybody except myself,” she swore to live a life determined by her own standards and goals. She would hatch her escape
in the exercise of a phase of life inviolate and separate from that of my future mate…I am not only jealous; I am vain and proud. I will not submit to having my life fingered by my husband, enclosed in the larger circle of his activity, and nourished vicariously by tales of his actual exploits. I must have a legitimate field of my own, apart from his, which he must respect.76
Plath had diagnosed her situation with remarkable clarity well before second-wave feminism. Yet on account of her Emersonian upbringing and the sexist era in which she was trapped, she was conflicted about her goals, and often worried that she was selfish. In September 1951 she wrote in her journal, “I long to excel—to specialize in one field, one section of a field, no matter how minute, as long as I can be an authority there. Pride, ambition—what mean, selfish words!”77 The words were not so much selfish as unfeminine. But Nietzsche’s dramatic rhetoric of self-realization and his rejection of subservience supported Plath in the age before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. As he wrote, “The creation of freedom for oneself and a sacred ‘No’ even to duty—for that, my brothers, the lion is needed. To assume the right to new values—that is the most terrifying assumption for a reverent spirit that would bear much.”78
* * *
DURING THE FALL of 1952 Sylvia continued to write long letters to Dick, but he had no idea how badly she was suffering. “Irony it is to see Dick raised, lifted to the pinnacles of irresponsibility to anything but care of his body—to feel his mind soaring, reaching,” she wrote in her journal that November, “and mine caged, crying, impotent, self-reviling, an imposter.”79 Dick, in his illness, was free to pursue his literary interests in quiet solitude, without stigma. She, in her “health,” was overwhelmed with work and near the breaking point. She smothered her resentment by sending Dick cheerful letters and packages of books she wished she could read. While she spent ten hours a week studying science, Dick wrote her detailed critiques of F. O. Matthiessen’s The Achievement of T. S. Eliot.
Dick thought his literary studies brought them closer together—“I now feel more able to meet and talk with you than ever before”—but Sylvia resented the annexation of her territory, which he had heretofore been quick to dismiss.80 She never forgot that he had once compared a poem to a speck of dust—a quote she memorialized in The Bell Jar. She may have preferred the old letters about blood tests and pathology clinics to this onslaught of amateur literary criticism. Sylvia had felt conflicted about turning down a marriage proposal from a Harvard-trained doctor. But now Dick wanted to be a writer. He sent her half-baked stories and poems, and a four-page paper on her own work, titled “Individualism and Sylvia Plath: An Analysis and Synthesis.” He asked if he could “edit and publish” her letters as “a boon for the literary world.”81 She pretended to be flattered, but she sensed a threat. Did he expect to achieve her goals while she cooked him steak dinners? For her, Dick’s about-face was as offensive as it was disorienting. He had no sense of the rift he sowed with each manuscript he sent her way.
The worst depressive crisis of Sylvia’s life to date was punctuated, sometimes daily, by Dick’s relaxed letters, which offered, as she would later write in “Tulips,” a tantalizing vision of “a land far away as health.” His descriptions of the calm pace of the sanatorium, which he compared to a mental hospital without locks, may have made her think more seriously about psychiatric treatment; she broached the subject for the first time with Aurelia in November.
Sylvia felt her depression recede over Thanksgiving, when she was finally able to rest in Wellesley. (She thanked Aurelia for letting her “loaf so scandalously.”)82 Cheered by a handwritten rejection from The New Yorker and praise from Professor Patch, she felt that she had the stamina to endure three more weeks until Christmas vacation. But it was Myron Lotz, Perry’s Yale roommate, who roused her most. She met him at the Nortons’ house one evening over Thanksgiving break, and was instantly captivated. She told Warren she had never “been so immediately attracted to anyone” as when Myron stood up from the Nortons’ couch and shook her hand.83 He was tall and handsome, with an intriguing background.84 His parents were Austro-Hungarian immigrants; his father, she told Warren, worked in a steel mill, and Myron had grown up in a rough neighborhood “with negroes, immigrants, and all kinds of people.”85 But he had defied all expectations: he was first in his class at Yale and planned to graduate in three years. He would then go on to Yale medical school. “Both of us have been so damn lucky in life.” She compared his odd jobs on road crews to her own “good hard labor” at Lookout Farm.86 “Did you ever hear of such a phenomenal character?” she asked Warren.87
Sylvia had fallen for b
oth Dick and Perry, and now she was in love with Perry’s college roommate. All three relationships had begun in the Nortons’ living room. In the absence of a father, the Norton boys offered fraternal protection. But this desire for security competed with a penchant for eastern European refugees like Ilo Pill and Attila Kassay, who connected her, vaguely, to Otto’s old-world origins. Myron was both a Norton by proxy and an eastern European. She arranged for him to accompany her to the Lawrence House dance the weekend of December 13. “Keep your fingers crossed that my beautiful intellectual charm will captivate the brilliant lug,” she wrote to Warren.88 When Sylvia told Dick she was dating Myron, he absorbed the news with gentlemanly equanimity, telling her that men who were “kind” to her made him grateful rather than jealous.89 They both knew better.
She spent her first date with Myron driving around the countryside, then back to campus, where they took a long walk to the mental hospital and listened “to the people screaming.” “It was a most terrifying holy experience,” Sylvia told her mother, “with the sun setting red and cold over the black hills, and the inhuman echoing howls coming from the barred windows. (I want so badly to learn about why and how people cross the borderline between sanity & insanity!)”90
The next day, when Myron asked Sylvia to show him something she had written, she “calmly walked into the store and picked up a copy of Seventeen.” It was a moment she had dreamed about, and he was duly impressed. They took a long walk into the countryside, where they spotted an airplane landing at a small airport. When they hiked over to get a closer look, the pilot offered to take Sylvia up in the air. She agreed.
I didn’t believe we would go up, but then, suddenly, the ground dropped away, and the trees and hills fell away, and I was in a small glass-windowed box with a handsome mysterious pilot, winging over Northampton, Holyoke, Amherst, watching the small square, rectangular colored fields, the toy houses, and the great winding gleaming length of the Connecticut river. “I am going to do a wing-over,” he said, and suddenly the river was over my head, and the mountains went reeling up into the sky, and the clouds floated below. We tilted rightside up again. Never have I felt such ecstasy! I yelled above the roar of the motor that it was better than God, religion, than anything, and he laughed & said he knew.91
The pilot let Sylvia take the joystick, and she made the plane “climb and tilt” before they landed. She never forgot the “ecstasy” of that flight; its images of transcendence infused her poems years later.
After Myron left Smith, Sylvia came down to earth. On December 15, she checked herself into the infirmary on account of insomnia, and finally saw the college psychiatrist, Dr. Marion Booth—ostensibly about her science course. She soon traveled home for her Christmas vacation, which comprised a whirlwind of visits—Mrs. Prouty, the Cantors, Phil McCurdy, John Hodges, and, of course, the Nortons. On Boxing Day, Sylvia traveled by train to Saranac Lake with Dick. The visit was fraught with tension.92 Because of Dick’s illness, they could not kiss, which made it easier for her to hide her unease. She still felt too guilty to end the relationship as she had planned, and the two simply avoided any discussion about the future. Dick wrote to her, after the visit, that he told a friend, “I-was-fond-of-Sylvia-but-don’t-know-how-she-feels.”93
Plath based her short story “In the Mountains,” published in the Smith Review Fall 1954 issue, on that visit. In the story, Isobel, who no longer feels passion for Austin, realizes she must end their relationship before she leaves the sanatorium. The story ends with echoes of Hemingway as Austin prepares to propose to her: “Stricken, she did not move….There was no wind at all and it was hushed and still.”94
Plath revised this story in 1955 as “The Christmas Heart,” and gave it a more sentimental ending. Sheila (formerly Isobel) realizes that Michael (formerly Austin) has matured and grown tender during his time at the sanatorium. No longer is he “remote and self-sufficient”; and just as she has found the confidence to embrace her own identity in Michael’s absence—shortcomings and all—so too has he embraced his weaknesses. Sheila is so moved by his transformation that she falls in love with him again at the story’s end. Plath’s revised, happy ending was calculated to appeal to the women’s magazine market; she instructed Aurelia to submit the story to McCall’s, Woman’s Home Companion, Good Housekeeping, Woman’s Day, and Everywoman’s in 1956. All presumably turned it down, as the story was never published. It is possible that Dick’s increasing tenderness, similar to Michael’s, thwarted Sylvia’s plans to extricate herself:
“I needed you,” he confessed quite low. “I needed you very badly.”
“Is that so very terrible to you, Michael?”
“No, not any more.” He hesitated, then said quietly. “It is unfortunate that I can’t kiss you. I need to love you now. I always will.”
He put his face into the hollow between her neck and shoulder, blinding himself with her hair, and she could feel the sudden wet scalding of his tears.95
On December 27, Sylvia and Dick set out for nearby Mount Pisgah. It was not Sylvia’s first time on skis, but she was still a beginner. “Obviously I was learning how to ski,” she wrote to Myron in January. “Gaily I plummeted down straight (I hadn’t learned to steer yet.) There was a sudden brief eternity of actually leaving the ground, cartwheeling (to the tune of ‘You Belong to Me’ blaring from the lodge loudspeaker) and plowing face first into a drift. I got up, grinned, and started to walk away. No good.”96 Plath, who had broken her fibula, would later attach great aesthetic and psychological significance to a similar scene in The Bell Jar, which she embellished with Nietzschean symbolism and likened to a Freudian death wish. Her own behavior may have been reckless, but the run down a small beginner’s hill served by a rope tow could not have been—in practical terms—a suicide attempt. She made light of the fall in a telegram meant to soothe her anxious mother:
BREAK BREAK BREAK ON THE COLD WHITE SLOPES OH KNEE ARRIVING FRAMINGHAM TUESDAY NIGHT 7:41. BRINGING FABULOUS FRACTURED FIBULA NO PAIN JUST TRICKY TO MANIPULATE WHILE CHARLESTONING. ANYTHING TO PROLONG VACATION….MUCH LOVE. YOUR FRACTIOUS FUGACIOUS FRANGIBLE
SIVVY97
Later, Dick described her departure from Saranac Lake with prescient poignancy: “You smiled weakly out over crutches, through steam, across snow, beyond trees, over frozen lakes, and disappeared.”98
* * *
AURELIA WANTED SYLVIA to recuperate in Wellesley, but she refused, saying she would only be “languishing in sadness at home.”99 She returned to Smith in early January. At first, she worried that being “shut-in” in her room would make her feel imprisoned, and that Myron would lose interest in a “lame girl.” She cried when Aurelia dropped her off, though she later apologized for making “such a fuss by being a baby.”100 She willed herself to abandon self-pity. “All in all,” she wrote Aurelia, “my leg has made me realize what a fool I was to think I had insurmountable troubles….now that I see how foolish I was in succumbing to what I thought were mental obstacles, I am determined to be as cheerful and constructive about my mental difficulties as I am going to be about my physical one.”
Indeed, a physical ailment provided her with a concrete challenge that she could overcome, unlike her “mental difficulties.” She knew she could impress others with her grit and courage. “Naturally I will be a bit depressed and blue at times, and tired and uncomfortable, but there is that human principle which always finds that no matter how much is taken away, something is left to build again with.”101 Plath always clung to this principle—the symbolic transformation from winter to spring—in her life and her art. Even in her poem “Edge,” so often interpreted as a suicide note, Plath moves from a dead body to a garden.
That January in her journal she “chalked up” her previous November depression to her new living situation, her science course, and Dick’s tuberculosis. Now that those things were behind her, and Myron was ahead, she could once again be the “c
heerful, gay, friendly person that I really am inside.”102 She believed in her healthier self. She even valued the “small delights” of being stuck in her room with a broken leg: “a clear winter sunset through the natural iron grillwork of black trees, a street lamp shining through ice-encased branches, blue sky glittering, and sun on ice-encrusted snow. Loveliness, loveliness.”103 She was carried onward by a burst of positive energy she had not experienced in several months, writing papers on Piers Plowman and the Holy Grail, “exercising like mad,” reading The New Yorker, and studying for her exams. She hoped to win a coveted summer internship as a guest editor at Mademoiselle magazine in Manhattan, and worked hard on the trial assignments the magazine required as part of the application.104 She was getting along better with her roommate, Mary. She came to feel that her broken leg had, ironically, widened her social circle: the women in her house were much more solicitous of her, and she had made several new friends. Above all, she looked forward to spring. “To come, and the bicycle be brought out, and the again strong legs to pedal joyous and swiftly into the green, unfolding future!”105
Eddie Cohen was skeptical. “I intend to nag you on the subject of a psychiatrist until you are at the point of tossing something other than bouquets in my direction…if need be, I shall fly out there and seize you by your pretty hair and drag you, cave-man style, into the office of the nearest available witch-doctor.” He joked perceptively that Sylvia had broken her leg on purpose. “Incidentally, you are going to be a mighty maimed sort of person if you make a habit of substituting broken legs and other forms of violence for the colds which have been your psychological catharsis in the past.”106
In late January Sylvia learned that she had finally gained permission to audit her science requirement for the rest of the year. With science out of the way, she could take a course on Milton, the second half of Robert Gorham Davis’s creative writing class (Techniques of Fiction and Criticism), and Elizabeth Drew’s Modern Poetry unit. She also audited another class with Drew that spring, Twentieth Century British Literature: Joyce, Yeats, Eliot. She opted for a second semester in medieval literature with Patch, who gave her his undivided attention at a Lawrence House dinner that month. He told her “all smith [sic] girls he knew were beautiful, compared to the other women’s colleges he’d taught in.”107 His breezy sexism barely registered. On the day she finished with science, she bought an edition of Auden’s poems and James Frazer’s The Golden Bough. She was eager to earn all A’s and show the college administration she deserved her scholarship.
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