Back at Smith, Sylvia was surprised to find that the large sunlit room with three windows she had shared with Mary during her junior year was now hers alone. (The Lawrence House residents had shuffled themselves around so that Sylvia could use the room as a single.) She bought a maroon bedspread, gray curtains, blue pillows, and wall prints, and filled two bookcases with books. From her window, she could see the shops on Green Street below, and “the far gray humpback of a dark distant hill.”6 After she unpacked, Mrs. Estella Kelsey, the new Lawrence House “mother,” invited Sylvia and the other girls to tea in her rooms. Plath told Jane Anderson that “everything went off very smoothly.”7
Later, during her first meal in the Lawrence House dining room, Sylvia sat with six women whom Mrs. Kelsey had, unbeknownst to her, hand-picked for their maturity. One of them was Nancy Hunter, who would become Plath’s senior-year roommate and close friend. Sylvia described her to Phil McCurdy as “tall, slender, with an enchanting heart-shaped face, green Kirghiz eyes, black hair and a more than figmentary ressemblance [sic] to a certain Modigliani odalisque.”8 Upon seeing the “girl-genius” she had heard so much about, Nancy blurted out, “They didn’t tell me you were beautiful.”9 The others at the table balked at the “impropriety” of her remark, but Sylvia laughed. She was more relaxed now with her unhurried academic pace, and was content to adopt a “new attitude of easy-going and relaxed averageness, in contrast to my former hectic leaps for the exceptional,” as she told Jane. “I feel in general very calm, philosophical, and indeed, consistently ‘happy’ rather than spasmodically ecstatic.”10
Many of Sylvia’s professors had written anguished letters to Aurelia after her suicide attempt and pledged their support should she return. They were true to their word, and Plath felt only admiration and warmth from the faculty. She had worried that she would be the subject of gossip, but she now experienced not a single curious stare. “No one has questioned me about my experience….All of the difficulties which I was prepared to encounter have melted away like snow in the sun….everybody has treated me just as if nothing had happened, and I feel most at home and casual about the whole episode, which I never thought possible,” she wrote to Jane.11 Enid Epstein Mark recalled that Sylvia was, at this point, more well-liked than she realized. “When her name was recited for being elected to Phi Beta Kappa in her junior year, she was absent. She was then hospitalized in Boston. The applause for her was deafening. Everybody knew and cared what happened to her. She never understood that.”12 Enid felt that Sylvia pushed herself too hard, and that built-up academic pressure had caused her breakdown. She remembered sitting on a bench with Sylvia during their junior year, poring over their report cards, calculating whether or not they would make it into an elite academic honor society. “This was not just icing on the cake for Sylvia. It was an imperative necessity.”13
Janet Salter Rosenberg remembered that before Sylvia’s arrival, Mrs. Kelsey summoned all the students in the house. “We had a meeting in the living room and the house mother told us that Sylvia was coming back, that she was very fragile, that we should all be very careful about what we said to her, we should not pump her for information, we should be as kind and understanding as we could.” But many of the women in Lawrence House did not know what to say. “They were worried about relating to her,” Janet said.14 Sylvia stayed close to Marcia Brown, whose own mother was currently in a New York City mental hospital. Even to friends, though, Sylvia did not confide much: “we just spoke of my experiences thoroughly once, and that was that, none of the daily self-examinations and analyses that I subjected myself to with friends at McLean.”15 Plath did not want to dwell on her illness, and her friends did not probe. When Sylvia returned to campus, Louise Giesey invited her out to dinner to offer support while she readjusted to Smith. But as the two friends chatted on about “nothing,” Louise could not bring herself to mention the episode. Neither could Sylvia. Still, Louise was relieved that her friend “seemed completely at ease with herself.”16 Sylvia described herself to Pat O’Neil at this time as a set of tires that had been “retreaded” for the road. But, Pat said, “she was never sure that this couldn’t happen again.”17
Plath’s schedule was lighter than in previous years: Early American Literature, 1830–1900—Dreiser, Hawthorne, Melville, and Henry James—with Newton Arvin; Russian Literature—Tolstoy and Dostoevsky—with George Gibian; and Nineteenth Century Intellectual European History with Elisabeth Koffka. She was also auditing Robert Gorham Davis’s Modern American Literature and a class on medieval art with Phyllis Lehmann. Before her classes, she chopped vegetables in the Lawrence House kitchen, which she preferred to waitressing. She enjoyed bantering with the kitchen workers, who provided snippets of dialogue she stored away for her stories.
In her Russian Literature class, Plath read The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, and Notes from Underground. “I felt conspicuous at first during the discussions of suicide in these books,” she told Jane, “and felt sure that my scar was glowing symbolically, obvious to all (the way Hester’s scarlet letter burned and shone with a physical heat to proclaim her default…). But now I am really so adjusted to my attempt of last summer that I may even write my Russian paper on the theme of suicide.” She had, she felt, “a personalized understanding of the sensations and physical and mental states one experiences previous to the act.”18 A Smith friend from this period, Connie Taylor, remembered that suicide was, philosophically, “a big general topic. Everyone sat around drinking sherry, listening to Bartok, discussing the void. Kierkegaard [was] very big. Dostoevski big too. It was almost as if everyone was trying to drive himself crazy….all of us were being pushed in so many different directions that the attraction of nothingness was very real.”19
Plath lost some friends and found others. Janet was surprised to find that Sylvia no longer seemed interested in her company. “Of all the people in the house, she and I were closest. She had casual relationships with the other seniors. The relationship with me was much closer, and I can’t say that I wasn’t quite hurt by the way she was acting. But I understood that this was a different person.” No longer did they discuss their ambitions to become great writers; no longer did Sylvia declare she was going to be famous, as she had many times during the previous year, or that someday someone would write her biography. “And so this openness had stopped.”
Janet thought Sylvia was determined to make a new set of friends to correspond with her new self. “She cultivated people in the dormitory who she had not known, which was sort of strange….But to us, she’d been Jekyll and Hyde, and we’d seen only the Jekyll and suddenly she was Mr. Hyde. And she walked all over people, she didn’t fulfill her responsibilities, she would not show up for her job she was supposed to be doing and someone else would have to do it.” Sylvia gained a reputation for “bird-dogging”—stealing other women’s boyfriends. Janet said Sylvia never would have flouted this taboo before her breakdown. “I think she thought that the psychiatrist she had been being treated by had given her permission to do anything she wanted.”20
Sylvia’s closest confidantes now were Marcia Brown, Pat O’Neil, Nancy Hunter, Jane Truslow, and the “unconventional” Claiborne Phillips, who would rush into Sylvia’s room at two in the morning and suddenly talk of “free will and destiny and objective and subjective worlds.”21 With these women, Sylvia discussed “every field from sex to salvation,” often over bottles of Chianti at Joe’s or martinis at Rahar’s bar.22 Sylvia shared a dark bond with Jane Truslow, who had also spent time in an asylum and received shock treatment the year before. Though Jane later came to feel that Sylvia manipulated those at Smith to get special privileges (“if you had the good luck to have a little nervous problem, then you were really treated like a queen”), her February 10, 1954, journal entry suggests Sylvia’s warmth and humor: “We found so many laughable things in common that few others would be able to understand. I didn’t think we talked as sensationalists, but to anyone els
e it would have been so. It was the first time I have talked to anyone who really understood.”23
Sylvia also spoke of her suicide attempt to Claiborne, now her best friend in Lawrence House. “She had some vague memories of a hospital that were very strange and terrible, but like a dream, unreal. Then, at the sanatorium she said she just sat as if dead, numb and unfocused on a lawn where they would wheel her in a chair.” She told Claiborne she “had really been helped” by Dr. Beuscher.24 Later, in a June 1954 letter, Sylvia made a generous gesture Claiborne would never forget: “I want you to know also that if ever things look black and ominous, I am always here, wanting you to come visit or stay any time at all. (If I’d been sure of someone being ‘there’ any time I wanted, I might not have felt so frightfully isolated last summer.)”25
To Nancy Hunter, Sylvia detailed the “frustrations” that had led to her suicide attempt.26 She did not discuss her therapy and shared just a single story with Nancy about her time at McLean: one afternoon she had stormed into her psychiatrist’s office and demanded a lobotomy because she felt so hopeless about her prospects for recovery. “You’re not going to get off that easily,” the psychiatrist joked.27 Sylvia found humor in the anecdote, Nancy recalled.
Sylvia grew closer to Sue Weller (a “great girl”) and the “brilliant music major” Dorri Licht.28 Sue remembered long, pleasant afternoons at Rahar’s nursing a single martini and listening to Sylvia talk about men.29 Sylvia was keen to experience as much of life as she could now, she told Gordon:
Life is so largely eating and sleeping and going places without ever getting there: my “experiences” with the quantity of “action” seem so few and outstanding in comparison….I can count them off: seeing a baby born, breaking rules and going up spontaneously for the first time in a small private airplane, cutting up the lungs of a human cadaver, being the only white girl at an all-Negro party, battling high waves in a storm in trying to climb aboard our little tipping sailboat, squatting in the blazing noon sun setting strawberry runners and wishing for water, racing my favorite golden retriever along the hardpacked shore at Nauset beach….little things, large things, that all are somehow very important in the formative scheme of living. I want to do more, so very much more: to bike and hike through Europe, to travel out West, to meet and know and love people with that intense rapport, transient and elusive though it may be, which I have felt so strongly in so many separate instances: I want to condition myself to hear, and not just listen; to see, and not just look; to communicate, and not just talk; to feel, and not just touch….It is so disastrously easy to settle down into the smooth undemanding rituals of the trite sheepish conformist life….30
She was eager to date again after her nunnish interlude at McLean, and went out with eight different boys, mostly from Amherst, during her first month back at Smith (though she thought the Amherst boys “so young and weak and ‘sheepish’ ”).31 She told her mother she was “ ‘getting back in Circulation’ ” with “the greatest success.”32 Mel Woody humorously recalled that Plath “assaulted” him one February night when he came to visit her in Northampton. “We were walking someplace to have a beer and she pinned me against the wall and started kissing me! I was taken aback because there’d never been any hint of that sort. But of course I enjoyed it. We ended up on a rooftop at Smith. So that got that going.”33 It was all good fun, Sylvia felt, as her “marital future was far from being at stake.”34 Myron Lotz still called, but she now found him “dull”—“so damn sad, depressed, spongy.”35 George Gebauer, an Amherst chemistry major, was her new favorite. All the male attention, she wrote Jane, had convinced her that she was not damaged goods after all: “I feel that my escapade has in no way made a lasting scar on my future associations, but is of advantage in deeping [sic] my understanding of self and others.”36
She saw the Smith physician, Dr. Marion Booth, once a week, but did not feel the same rapport she had with Dr. Beuscher. Their talks were more “philosophical”; she wrote Jane, still at McLean, that “psychiatric help is really superfluous” now that she had “several close friends to confide in, and no problems.”37 Booth was probably not much help; she was a professor of bacteriology and public health. Janet worried that Sylvia was seeing her regularly. “We all thought that was a mistake, but not one of us was willing to say that to her. Dr. Booth was unqualified to tell anything about psychology or psychiatry. She didn’t have the training.”38
Sylvia received good news from Harper’s again: in late January she learned it would publish one of her poems in the spring, though the editors had not yet decided which one. She joked to Aurelia that they probably thought she was dead and that any poems of hers would appear inside a “black border.”39
Dostoevsky was beginning to replace Joyce as Plath’s favorite author. “I’ll never get over the experience of reading ‘The Idiot’ and ‘Brothers Karamazov,’ ” she wrote Gordon that March.40 She wondered if eternity was like Mephistopheles described it in Crime and Punishment—“one little room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner.”41 Her letters were intensely literary, full of quotes from Williams’s Camino Real, Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning.
Sylvia attended I. A. Richards’s lecture, “The Dimensions of Reading Poetry,” in early March.42 Richards, a professor at Cambridge, was one of the most famous critics of his day. President Wright held a reception for him after the lecture, where Sylvia “sat on the floor at his feet” before the fire and listened to him read his poetry aloud.43 Richards had pioneered New Criticism, which, by the 1950s, had become the standard analytical method in English departments. Plath had mastered this technique of vigorous close reading in her Smith literary essays. But New Critical ideas also influenced her poetry. Her college style is marked by intricate formality and literary allusions meant to amplify a poem’s complexity. She enjoyed showing off her formal skills by writing villanelles, sestinas, and other rhyming verse. Her vocabulary, too, in these college poems, bears the mark of her thesaurus—unlike her later work, which used simpler, direct language and the rhythms of natural speech. Plath was aware that some of her work had an artificial, almost stilted quality; she would later write in her journal that she was trapped inside a “glass caul.”44 These were affected, apprentice poems calculated to please professors and editors. They were, in the parlance of the time, superbly “well-made.” But her Smith-era poem “A Sorcerer Bids Farewell to Seem” reveals her longing to free her poetic lines from elaborate artifice and structure:
I’m through with this grand looking-glass hotel
where adjectives play croquet with flamingo nouns;
methinks I shall absent me for a while
from rhetoric of these rococo queens.
It would be some time before Plath was able to “vanish” “alone to that authentic island where / cabbages are cabbages; kings: kings.”
* * *
DICK’S DEPARTURE from Sylvia’s life—he was traveling in Europe, looking for a new girlfriend, she quipped to Jane Anderson—provided an enormous psychological release. Gordon was away at sea, writing long, descriptive letters about Joyce’s Dublin and Odysseus’s Greece. He would not return until June. His missives resembled travelogues more than love letters, and Sylvia told Aurelia she was secretly glad he was away.45 Meanwhile, George Gebauer’s views on women’s rights had begun to anger her, and she no longer considered him a serious prospect. She was beholden to no one now. She was free.
In early March, Cyrilly Abels invited Sylvia to lunch in New York City. Sylvia wanted to “reconquer” the “old broncos that threw me for a loop last year” and planned to stay with Ilo Pill, now a “fatherly” thirty-five years old.46 She unwisely brushed aside the arrangement’s romantic complications and began planning a visit over her spring break. This time, she vowed to know the city on her
own terms, “from the Village to Harlem by walking and looking and more walking.”47
She spent the first weekend of her two-week spring break at Harvard with Warren and his friends—Luigi Einaudi, the grandson of Italy’s president; Clem Moore, the son of writer Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger Moore; and Alec Goldstein. (Clem Moore would later marry Susan Alliston, one of the women Ted Hughes was seeing when Plath died.) Back in Wellesley, Sylvia met Dr. Beuscher for a long cup of coffee in Framingham. Dr. de Marneffe considered such a meeting an unethical blurring of the lines between treatment and friendship. Any meeting over the standard one-hour session, he said, was not good psychiatric practice—and, according to Plath’s calendar, many of her “comradely” sessions with Dr. Beuscher lasted two, sometimes even three hours.48 As Sylvia told Gordon that April, Dr. Beuscher was “now one of my best friends…only 9 years older than I, looking like Myrna Loy, tall, Bohemian, coruscatingly brilliant, and most marvelous.” When Plath ran her plans for a New York trip and Harvard Summer School by Dr. Beuscher, she “approved heartily.”49
Around this time, on March 27, Sylvia attended a cabaret dance at Harvard’s Adams House with Phil McCurdy. There, she danced with Scotty Campbell, the assistant director of the summer school. Sylvia “boldly” told him, as they danced, that she had been “hesitant” to apply for a scholarship this summer as she had been rejected the previous one. Scotty assured her she should apply again as he “whirled” her away from Phil and whispered compliments in her ear. She figured Scotty would forget all about her in the morning, but she soon received a letter from him all but promising a scholarship if she signed “on the dotted line.”50 She was thrilled, and seems not to have resented the manner by which the funds had come about. This, she knew, was how the game was played.
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