Words revolve in flame and keep the coliseum heart afire, reflecting orange sunken suns in the secret petals of ruined arches…so sylvia burns yellow dahlias on her dark altar of the sun as the sun wanes to impotence and the world falls in winter….do you realize that the name sassoon is the most beautiful name in the world. it [sic] has lots of seas of grass en masse and persian moon alone in rococo lagoon of woodwind tune where passes the ebony monsoon….91
Sassoon did not care whether Sylvia was a virgin, attended church, or did good works. As she told Phil, “my frenchboy is not the outdoor type…he prefers cloistered velvet rooms, pale with roses, light wine, a volume of baudelaire or vigny or rimbaud [sic] and a nuit d’amour.”92 His nonconformist, intellectual personality and his Continental, laissez-faire attitude appealed to the part of her that sought to experiment with darker, more taboo modes of experience. In January 1956—just a month before she met Ted Hughes—she would write to Aurelia,
Naturally I am sorry that none of the “nice” boys who’ve wanted to marry me have been right….I shudder to think how many men would accept only a small part of me as the whole, and be quite content. Naturally, all of us want the most complete, richest, best parts of us brought out, and in turn will do this for another. Actually, as you probably know, Richard Sassoon is the only boy I have ever loved so far; he is so much more brilliant, intuitive and alive than anyone I’ve ever known. Yet he pays for this with spells of black depression and shaky health which mean living in daily uncertainty, and would be hard over any long time. But he is the most honest, holy person I know….ironically enough, he “looks” not at all like the kind of man I could be fond of; but he is, and that’s that.93
Sassoon was not interested in marriage or children—at least not yet. He excited and frustrated her; she called him “the child of the devil and dionysus [sic].”
Jane Truslow found Sassoon “foreign, dark, broody” and silent when he came to visit Sylvia.94 Connie Taylor, who was dating Sassoon’s friend Alec Holm at Yale, remembered that during train rides to New Haven with Sylvia they would discuss the burdens of loving ambitious, literary men. Sassoon had “vast aspirations…to be great,” Connie said, but Sylvia had published more—much more—than he had.
We used to sit on the train and talk about facing these young men who were, I suppose, afraid of us….the puzzlement of how one dealt with wanting to be somebody important, of going whole hog in one’s profession, the emotional problem of being a woman in this situation. She was very conscious of this. And being faced with a young man who had ambitions and who was not as successful maybe made it worse.
Like Sylvia, Connie was ambitious; she would go on to become an influential historian. She was not surprised that Sylvia had “cracked-up” the previous year; doing so “seemed more normal than abnormal. That she had a disease is obvious. But that the tensions she was living under were unreasonable is also very very obvious.”
At Yale, they congregated at the Elizabethan Club, where men drank sherry, smoked clay pipes, and made witty conversation; the atmosphere was that of an Oxford Common Room. Connie felt this milieu inspired Sylvia to study in England, where she could be a part of “a cosmopolitan intellectual life.” As for Sassoon himself, Connie found him “witty, melodramatic” with “no sense of humor about himself.” She recalled him sitting on a low ledge at Calhoun one evening “saying he couldn’t stand life any longer….complaining of melancholy; impossibility of fulfillment.” The ledge, however, was just a few feet off the ground. Connie told Sassoon that if he jumped, he wouldn’t die—but he would probably hurt himself. He climbed down.
She and Sylvia never found a solution, on those long train rides, to the “problem” of driven young men. But “there wasn’t any question” that they would take the train back to New Haven.95
* * *
SYLVIA GUESSED THAT she would probably receive a mix of A’s and B’s that semester; she did not mind as long as she did not get any C’s. She claimed that she no longer experienced a nauseating insecurity after finishing exams; she wrote Aurelia that she “really enjoyed” her Early American Literature exam, and “got quite inspired with my own spontaneous eloquence!”96 The weather was turning and she looked forward to long afternoons on the sun porch rereading War and Peace—her major pastime that spring. Things were beginning to settle into place: she decided to write her thesis on Dostoevsky and room with Nancy—now her “dearest friend”—during her senior year.97 Her poems “Admonition,” “Verbal Calisthenics,” “Never Try to Know More Than You Should,” and “Denouement” appeared in the Smith Review that spring, and she became an unpaid correspondent at the New York Herald Tribune.
That April, Smith awarded Plath a nearly full scholarship of $1,250 from Olive Higgins Prouty’s fund. Sylvia would be responsible for only $300 during her 1954–55 senior year. It was the largest scholarship Smith had ever awarded, for the college did not want their prize student to feel any “financial or other pressure this spring or summer.” The committee hoped Plath would attend summer school rather than waitress, especially in light of her “superb recovery” and “beautiful adjustment.”98 Sylvia immediately telegraphed the good news to Aurelia, presenting it as a birthday present. For Aurelia, this truly was “a boon,” as she had paid full tuition for the spring 1954 semester.99 For Plath, too, the news came at the right time—she had just $1 left in her account that May.
She began to think about applying for a Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford or Cambridge, or graduate school at Radcliffe or Columbia. She even considered joining the Women’s Naval Reserve so she could finance graduate school on the GI bill. Her experience at Mademoiselle had convinced her she did not want “a job in business,” even for “a magazine or for a publishing house.” As she wrote Gordon, who was trying to decide between a career in business or academia, she would probably still experience “a nucleus of conflict” even if she did manage to combine writing and motherhood: “it’s damn hard to keep whipping yourself out of some comfortable bourgeois complacency…but I want to do just that…to keep on learning and thinking and feeling intensely even if it hurts like hell.”100
To Mrs. Prouty, Sylvia wrote of her “joy” over her Harper’s publication, her courses, her scholarship, her election to Phi Beta Kappa, and “the new boy with dark eyes in elegiac purple hollows.” “What a girl you are!” Prouty replied. “Your illness must seem to you now like a bad dream. I’m so glad you waked up. My dearest love.”101 But Prouty was worried by Sylvia’s emphasis on her achievements, and asked Aurelia if she had any “misgivings” about her daughter’s health: “I realize there may be other anxieties. In fact I know that there are.”102
Aurelia did have misgivings. Her daughter seemed changed, her old “sunny optimism” muted:
After Sylvia’s return to college, she made me think of deep-sea plants, the roots firmly grasping a rock, but the plant itself swaying in one direction then another with the varying currents that pass over and around. It was as though she absorbed for a while each new personality she encountered and tried it on, later to discard it. I kept saying to myself, “This is only a stage; it will pass.”
Her memory grasped and held to discords and seemed to have lost recollections of shared childhood and early girlhood joys. Kindnesses and loving acts were now viewed cynically, analyzed for underlying motives. We all strove to be patient, helpful, and understanding through this very difficult period of self-rediscovery on her part.103
Sylvia had become more frank in her letters to friends about her increasingly difficult relationship with Aurelia. She mocked her mother for placing demure photos of her around the house “for propaganda,”104 and told Gordon in late June that she was experiencing “forays with the maternal monolith…conflict.”105 Therapy with Dr. Beuscher had unleashed Sylvia’s anger, and Aurelia bore the brunt. Yet Plath would later characterize her behavior as typical, if delayed, adolescent rebellion.
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Throughout that spring Sylvia and Sassoon spent much of their time picnicking in the countryside around Northampton and drinking bottles of Bordeaux. He admitted that he was falling deeply in love with her: “You will never know how wonderful I feel when you say I make you happy. It is so much better than being a God.”106 Mel was still under the impression that he and Sylvia were dating, and she was amused to receive “passionate metaphysical love letters” from both men in her mailbox.107 When Mel wrote to her that spring urging that they consummate their relationship, she told him she was a virgin, and that if she slept with him “lacerations and pathos” would follow. She would become especially attached to him, she warned.108 He told her of his “deep revulsion for anything that smacks of a strategy of caution,” and Sylvia, now in love with Sassoon, responded with a scathing diatribe:
Really, now, do you accept the fact that your “total commitment to earth” involves more than a brief spasm of irresponsible ecstasy? Do you accept the fact that the demand of fertility is fertility, creation (not of male euphoria) of babies, and the care of such? Can you deny that the end of fertility is reproduction, not just the hedony which you condone as “a ritual act of fertility”…?…I am hardly ready or willing to produce the children which nature would endow me with as the understood reward of my actions.109
She resented his implication that she was a “puritan pragmatist” and told him she never wanted to see him again. Two days later, she informed him that she would be coming to Yale to visit his roommate Sassoon. She would return the Crane and the Lawrence books; he should “feel free” not to be there. But her tone was light as she acknowledged the “intricate” and “interweaving web of circumstance” that tied her friends to his (Mel had dated Marcia and was becoming close to Nancy) and humorously suggested a “family barbecue.”110 Jane Truslow Davison remembered Sylvia delighting in her dates’ “Don Juan-ish quality” and the “high drama” that ensued when Sassoon’s and Gordon’s visits almost overlapped.111
Sassoon finally told Mel, “I’m dating your girlfriend.” Mel responded that he never considered Sylvia his girlfriend, and soon realized the arrogance of his sexual request. Her letter set him straight. She would only sleep with someone she intended to marry, she told him.112 Sylvia continued writing Mel long, cerebral letters about Lawrence, Hemingway, Nietzsche, Fromm, Joyce, and Dostoevsky, and while he did not feel proprietary about her, he felt she was not a good match for Sassoon. “I remember saying to myself, ‘He’s not strong enough to handle Sylvia.’ ”113
In early May, before Sassoon left for a summer in Europe, Sylvia accompanied him to New York City. They saw Chekhov’s The Seagull, starring Montgomery Clift, in Greenwich Village, then headed back to their 44th Street hotel for “the inevitable french [sic] poetry and wine” and a “nuit d’amour.”114 The night seemed to mark a new phase in their relationship. Sassoon wrote to her shortly after, “And if all memory should perish—we have known each other—it is deeper than memory….‘darling’ is a new word and so is ‘love’—I love you, darling.”115 That Sunday, they “spent two hours gourmandizing” at the Steuben Tavern in Times Square, where they feasted on herring in sour cream, onion soup, éclairs, and white wine before heading back to New Haven. Sylvia told Phil the trip was “a much needed bohemian respite to my more academic obligations.”116
Those obligations now included studying ten hours a day for her final exams in late May; her joints became stiff from sitting for such long stretches, and she was “so cerebralized” that she had difficulty falling asleep. She remembered the days at Lookout Farm when she was “struck with an uncomplicated physical exhaustion which swallowed me in a dark and dreamless sea of sleep until I woke refreshed and rejuvenated at dawn.”117 She knew she needed “physical exercise” for “balance,” but she felt she could not afford the time away from studying. Among the books and authors she had to master were, as she listed in her scrapbook, “War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors, The American, Erich Fromm, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, et al.”118 But she was relieved that she was still capable of intense studying: “exams and papers proved I hadn’t lost either my repetitive or my creative intellect as I had feared,” she wrote.119
Sylvia felt she was leaving on a high note: “A semester of reconstruction ends with an infinitely more solid, if less flashingly spectacular flourish than last year’s.”120 She thought she had aced her final Early American Literature exam on Melville, James, and Hawthorne. She was elected president of the college arts society, Alpha Phi Kappa Psi, and awarded a gold and ruby pin from Tiffany’s. She was delighted, if not surprised, to receive the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize for “Doom of Exiles.” All augured well for her senior year. “Look-out,” she wrote in her scrapbook, “for next year most optimistic—great courses, Nan for roommate, exciting thesis topic, and who knows what tall man!” Her ebullience manifested itself in a new blond bob. It was the start of her “Platinum Summer,” which she hoped would be her best yet.
Aurelia was “shocked” when Sylvia returned from Smith in late May with her bright yellow hair, though she admitted “it was becoming.” She felt her daughter “was ‘trying out’ a more daring, adventuresome personality, and one had to stand by and hope that neither she nor anyone else would be deeply hurt.”121
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ON JUNE 1, Sylvia received a formal letter from Scotty Campbell, her erstwhile Harvard dance partner, that she had received a full scholarship to Harvard Summer School.122 She had already lined up a job at the Southward Inn on Cape Cod in case the scholarship did not materialize, and was relieved that she would not have to spend another summer “slinging hash.” Aurelia was having ulcer trouble again, and, to convalesce, she and her parents rented a cottage on the Cape for the summer. (Sylvia would tell Gordon that September that Aurelia was “very sick,” and that she was “worried always” and “scared” about her mother’s health.)123 Sylvia decided to divide June between the Cape and Wellesley, where Nancy came to stay during the first week of the month. Nancy was from Ohio and had never seen the ocean; she was astonished by Nauset’s pristine sand, undulating dunes, and rhythmic surf. Sylvia set the scene in a July letter to Mel: “ten mile strolls along the fantastic solitude of nauset [sic] beach, with powerful surf crashing on hardpacked sand, and a treacherous undertow sucking back into itself with a low chuckle of rocks and pebbles.”124
Sylvia and Nancy called on Mrs. Prouty in Brookline, where they giggled like schoolgirls and devoured so many cucumber sandwiches they felt sick. Nancy was moved when Sylvia woke her up on her twenty-first birthday with breakfast on a tray and a copy of Alice in Wonderland in which she had inscribed, “A classic, read-aloud heirloom to be taken in small, mirthful doses at bedtime.”125 In the evenings, they double-dated with Phil McCurdy and his Adams House tutor, Norman Shapiro, who was pursuing a doctorate in French poetry. On one of these dates, Sylvia asked Norman to recite some Old French poetry for her; he recalled that he “needed no prodding”:
As the stars, in exquisite dispassion,
View my tribute to the May,
I fancy I may fashion
Stars of my own, to condone
The reckless fancy of my play…
Sylvia loved the poem, and relished the phrase “exquisite dispassion.”126 As they dined on Armenian cuisine and watched Turkish belly dancers, Nancy was struck by Sylvia’s easy cosmopolitanism and worldly friends, who seemed to speak “seven languages fluently.”127 At Smith, Sylvia was always holed up in her room studying. Now, released from the pressure of maintaining her grades and her scholarship, she was hungry for new, even taboo, experiences.
Sylvia went to bimonthly appointments with Dr. Beuscher and attended the wedding of Marcia Brown to Mike Plumer, in Hanover, New Hampshire, on June 15.128 Marcia remembered that the night before the ceremony, Sylvia, who was in the wedding party, “drank too much and made a complete ass of herself. She was ridicul
ous, falling all over men. She didn’t know how to handle liquor at all. She was uncoordinated, mentally and physically. Finally, we had to haul her home and put her to bed.” Sylvia was weepy, hungover, and abashed the next morning, but Marcia wasn’t angry. Rather, the episode made her worried that Sylvia might get herself “into sticky situations” with men, especially without a girlfriend by her side.129
Claiborne Phillips married Avrom Handleman, at Smith, on June 7. Sylvia, though invited, did not attend, citing a conflicting date with Gordon; the snub upset Claiborne greatly. Two other close friends, Louise Giesey and Enid Epstein, also wed that June, shortly after their Smith graduation. The pressure was on. Her own wedding, Sylvia told Phil, would be held atop a vast cliff overlooking the ocean, “sort of a pledge of honesty, relating one to the huge natural forces of procreation and life: a kind of pagan ritual, in some respects, clean and unadorned.”130 This Lawrentian fantasy did not come to pass—Plath, too, would marry in a church.
In late June, Sylvia learned that Ruth Freeman’s father had died suddenly. She and Aurelia rushed to the Freemans’ Winthrop home to “sustain, support, solace.” As soon as they arrived, Sylvia embarrassed herself by drinking out of the last glass Mr. Freeman had used before dying. It was just like her, she told Gordon, with her “infallible instinct for doing the tabu thing in all innocent accidence.”131 She kept busy washing dishes and comforting Ruth’s grieving brother, David, yet she secretly thought that Mr. Freeman’s death at seventy was merciful. He was, she told Gordon, a “victim of skin disease which had stopped his one creative outlet—painting—so wasn’t deadness better quick than a slow paralytic stroke, or a slow decaying senility?”
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