For Plath, the journey back to Winthrop evoked a deep nostalgia and a fleeting sense of loss:
Sweltering heat, blowing hot air in sweat stenched subways, a bus jolting through narrow streets, crowded houses, increasingly familiar—and then, suddenly, the blue blast of ocean between bleak buildings—a walk down a street woven with the rich, plumcake associations of ten years of creative and imaginative childhood….lawns that were continents, rocks that were fortresses, alleys that were secret passages to magic worlds: all seemed now strangely shrunken and denuded of myriad mystic meanings—like talismans become impotent…
She took a walk by her old house and saw “the golden rain trees and shrubs that my botanist father planted now flourishing giants, though the house and yard had shrunken as if unsanforized through years of rain.”132
Six months later, she would write a story based on that afternoon, “The Day Mr. Prescott Died” (heavily influenced by James Joyce’s “The Sisters”), in which the narrator also drinks out of the dead man’s glass.133 Like Plath, the unnamed narrator assumes Mr. Prescott’s death was a blessing to his family—that, as an old curmudgeon, he “had it coming” and “nobody’s sorry.”134 The narrator resents spending the day with the Prescotts cooking and cleaning and comforting, and her mother admonishes her for her “nasty” words. The narrator silently mocks her mother, who comforts Mrs. Prescott with platitudes. Yet when the narrator is alone with Mr. Prescott’s son, Ben, she realizes the enormity of his loss. “I thought of Mama, and suddenly all the sad part I hadn’t been able to find during the day came up in my throat. ‘We’ll go on better than before,’ I said. And then I quoted Mama like I never thought I would: ‘It’s all the best of us can do.’ And I went to take the hot pea soup off the stove.” The narrator learns the value of social convention in the face of loss. Plath, who had also lost a father whom illness had made irascible (“disease twisted an otherwise good nature,” she told her mother), understood that relief could coexist with grief.135 “I wonder, are you really sorry,” the narrator asks Ben. He replies, “Not really sorry, now, but I could have been nicer.” She tells him that he carries a piece of his father with him; the story seems an oblique reflection on Sylvia’s own mourning for Otto.
In June, Gordon finally came home on leave from the Navy. Sassoon was in Europe, allowing Sylvia ample time to become “reacquainted” with her old boyfriend. Gordon, six foot four and dashing in uniform, was a stark contrast to the “slender, dark, enigmatic, poetic” Sassoon.136 The men Sylvia loved came to personify the writers they most admired: Gordon preferred the Joycean Yes to the Baudelairean cri de coeur. Joyce, more than any other author, became Gordon’s and Sylvia’s touchstone. Over the coming weeks, they tried to outdo each other with their witty Finneganian puns. Sylvia wrote to Gordon in July: “Vraught by the sveldtering noonday headt, Absinned hears the dingle of a sturm nearby und yearns for a drang of vatever iss in it, HomoChinEyezed or uddervise. Liddle doss she know that this sturm is 100% mescalin flowing from a leak in a hidden moundand still.”137
As Sylvia began spending more time with Gordon, whose destroyer was docked in Newport, Rhode Island, her old feelings came rushing back with a new intensity. He inspired her to write again, to “invent new ways of expressing the richness of life.” She told him she was “at war psychically” over how best to invent this language: “one earthy part in me preferring bodily sunworship and physical prowess and power, the other cerebral part preferring the sedentary construction of aesthetic artifices to order in form the artless chaos of content in the flux of time.”138 She invited Gordon to stay with her family in Eastham, on the Cape, telling him that he no longer had the title of “ ‘visitor’—which implies all sorts of formalities.” She fantasized about the two of them someday spending their summers in a quiet beach cottage, writing, surrounded only by “pines, sand and sea.” (She would, in fact, enjoy such a honeymoon in Eastham with Ted Hughes.) She told Gordon she would be his “cook-secretary” and begged, “do let me be your typist!”139 Sassoon receded across the Atlantic.
But Sylvia had unfinished business. In late June, after a long walk down Nauset Beach, she decided to visit Dick in Orleans. To Gordon, she compared the experience to her journey back to Winthrop the previous week:
dick [sic], too, seemed to have shrunk, telescoped up, like alice-in-w, both physically and psychically…I had lived so hard and much and deep that never again could I go back to the same small country of his personality which once, years ago, I had seen as vast and flittering with promise…[…] sue [sic] and I swam with him and saw the infirmary he’ll run, and he loaned me his bike for the rest of the week…and I left, feeling a mingled relief and pity—at his everpresent, inverted snobbery, puritanically directed against smoking, drinking, women with short hair and lipstick—all excesses of comfort and artistry and imagination.
There must have been much she wanted to say to Dick, but she would save that conversation for her fiction.
Seeing Dick only intensified Sylvia’s feelings for Gordon. She declared that they would have a different kind of relationship: “teaching and sharing on a mutual plane—not in a rigid teacher-student character—but rather as if we both were perpetually students—both learning, discovering and creating life…and maybe even art…[…] we will be hobo and hoyden, duke and duchess…[…] oh, I love you more than the alphabet and Roget’s thesaurus combined.”140 It was the sort of pledge she would later make to Ted Hughes. But Gordon avoided talk of love and a future together; instead, he filled his letters with detailed descriptions of naval life. His words threw little heat: “I wonder how it is possible for me to like you better but I constantly do.”141
Sylvia, hedging her bets, resurrected her correspondence with Mel, to whom she wrote a platonic but passionate five-page letter in early July. She was at home for her last weekend before summer school started, becoming “unbelievably domestic” as she cooked steaks, folded laundry, and sunbathed in her Wellesley backyard. Mel was her “psychic brother,” she said, and they were connected by an “ectoplasmic umbilical cord.” She hoped he would visit her soon, “whenever you felt there was no one to commune with; which is naturally an arrogant attitude for me to have for it implies that I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect (which, by the way, I am).” She spoke to him of her suicide attempt:
oh, mel [sic] (which devilishly enough means honey in latin [sic]) there is so much to talk to you about…[…] because the cataclysmic downward gyre I plummeted to symbolic death in last summer, when the center did not hold because there was none, or rather (as you wrote), too many, has given me an understanding of the black and sustained hells a mind can go through…and the enormous insulated loneliness when you feel that no human hand or love could reach or move you.
She told Mel that she was moving to Cambridge and starting “a potentially vital and intellectually valuable summer.”142 By then Mel had started dating Yoko Ono, whom he met at a Sarah Lawrence mixer. (“She was clearly the most beautiful girl, but she was Japanese so no one was dancing with her.”) Mel described himself at the time as “a young man on the make” and ended things with Yoko before they got too serious. She was shy, and told him she had attempted suicide at fifteen. He did not want to hurt her. In a last bid for his affection, Yoko invited him to visit her at Cambridge University, where she planned to spend the summer. He declined, but later reflected, “I might have introduced Sylvia and Yoko.”143
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ON JULY 6, 1954, Sylvia moved to #4 1572 Massachusetts Avenue, a one-bedroom apartment in a collegiate redbrick building a block from Harvard Square. She had three roommates: Nancy Hunter, Joan Smith, and Kay Quinn. Joan and Kay were friends from Lawrence House who had secured summer jobs in Boston and who obligingly slept on a pull-out sofa in the dining room when Sylvia and Nancy insisted that they needed the private bedroom to study. In exchange, Sylvia and Nancy promised to cook. Plath had registered for Elem
entary German with William Oldenbrook and the Nineteenth Century Novel with Frank O’Connor, from whom she was still eager to learn. She spent her first week exploring Cambridge with Nancy, and meeting various young men for coffee and beer. But she missed Gordon “like hell.” In a letter that July she wrote to him of the “eversoaring intense love I have for you,” and looked forward to the “naked wonder of living with you every day.” Sylvia held little back with Gordon, and fantasized about what their married life might look like, “pretending that this is really our apartment, and that I am shopping for you, saving up daily vignettes to share with you, buying books with the intention of reading them aloud together before bed.” She could hardly contain her emotion: “darling, I shall simply explode like a feminine H-bomb if you don’t let me right now tell you very hard again and again that I love you love you love you love you love you!!”144
“We had a gluttonous appetite for the attractions of the city and little money to indulge it,” Nancy wrote of that summer; the two “pledged” to accept any dates they were offered.145 Sylvia finally had the chance to spend a leisurely summer without the crushing weight of maintaining a straight-A average; Nancy remembered that the dates ran through their summer “in a motley procession.” Sylvia treated the men as “dalliances” and told Nancy she would marry Gordon.146 Dating different, overlapping men was not unusual during the 1950s, yet Nancy found Sylvia’s behavior unnerving. She remembered that Plath was attracted to older men, especially professors.
One in particular caught Sylvia’s attention: Edwin Akutowicz, a thirty-one-year-old mathematician who had received his PhD from Harvard in 1947. Sylvia first mentioned Edwin in her calendar on July 7—her very first day of summer school.147 Nancy said the two met him on the steps of Harvard’s Widener Library, which is also where the meeting between Esther and Irwin (the character based on Edwin) occurs in The Bell Jar. Nancy claimed she disliked Edwin immediately—she described him as bald and “myopic-looking” with thick glasses.148 But he was also tall with blue eyes, and he introduced himself as a biology professor at an eastern college. (Akutowicz actually worked at this time for MIT in their Division of Defense laboratories.) Plath’s 1961 notes on The Bell Jar, where she likens Edwin to a “Dream-father,” strongly suggest that what she may have seen that day was a young version of Otto.149 Few of Sylvia’s friends remembered her ever mentioning Otto—except Nancy. She said Sylvia spoke of him as a father whom she “adored.” Sylvia told her he was a true intellectual, as she was, but that her mother was “vacuous.” She also told Nancy, cryptically, that “she felt responsible for his death when he died.”150
Nancy, Sylvia, and Edwin went out for a beer at the Oxford Grille in Harvard Square, where, Nancy wrote, Edwin “wooed” them with his “awesome understanding of subjects we hardly knew existed” and “elaborate theories.”151 “He had not spoken more than ten sentences when both Syl and I knew that he was probably the most brilliant man we had ever met,” Nancy wrote. Sylvia was “dumbstruck” by him.
The two women returned to their apartment giddy and a little drunk, wondering which one of them Edwin would call. The phone rang later that afternoon—for Nancy. She agreed to come to Edwin’s apartment on Sunday night, a little over a mile from their place. Nancy wrote that Edwin got her drunk and chased her around his couch. Deeply shaken, she demanded that he take her home, which he did. She wrote that she “collapsed inside the door of our apartment, sobbing my fear and rage” to Sylvia. Nancy refused Edwin’s calls, and he finally asked Sylvia out instead. Sylvia met him for an “evening of talk” on July 13, and began seeing him regularly: she wrote that she “studied” at his apartment on July 14, 19, and 22.152
Nancy’s accusations against Edwin are serious ones, yet she may have misremembered these events’ chronology. According to Sylvia’s calendar, she and Nancy met Edwin on July 7. Nancy said that Sylvia began seeing him after her own disastrous date; Sylvia’s first date with him was July 13. This means that Nancy’s first date must have occurred between July 7 and July 13. Yet Sylvia wrote to Gordon on July 19 that Nancy had come home at midnight from a steak dinner prepared by Edwin, adding, “he’ll make some strange woman a wonderful cook!”153 The letter also suggests that Nancy continued seeing Edwin after their first date. In 1971, Nancy referred to Edwin as her then boyfriend, and claimed, bitterly, that Sylvia had only shown interest in him “so she could supersede me in that relationship.”154
On Friday, July 23, Plath finally realized her dream of meeting the poet Richard Wilbur, whom she had written about for Mademoiselle. Wilbur’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Ward, lived in Wellesley and was friendly with Aurelia and Mrs. Lameyer. In her calendar, Sylvia recorded the meeting with an excited star: “Evening with Gordon at Mrs. Ward’s. Met Dick Wilbur at last!” In 1972, Wilbur would publish a poem about the meeting, “Cottage Street, 1953”:
I am a stupid life-guard who has found,
Swept to his shallows by the tide, a girl
Who, far from shore, has been immensely drowned,
And stares through water now with eyes of pearl.
How deep is her refusal; and how slight
The genteel chat whereby we recommend
Life, of a summer afternoon, despite
The brewing dusk which hints that it may end.155
Wilbur—who misdated Plath’s visit by a year and called her poems, in his last stanza, “unjust”—presents Plath as weak and scared, yet she may simply have been quiet and nervous before her idol. Nancy remembered that in 1954, Wilbur was “the one man in the world whom Syl most admired…she talked of him often. She read every word he wrote and showed me every article about him and every photograph of him that appeared anywhere in print.”156 The poem would bother Elizabeth Bishop when she read it. “A very neat poem by Wilbur about Sylvia Plath makes me angry,” she wrote to Robert Lowell in 1973. “I think it is very bad—really unfeeling.” What should have been “deep & sad” simply seemed “smug.” Lowell responded, “The Wilbur poem annoyed me too.”157
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Sylvia spent the weekend of July 24 on the Cape with Gordon, then returned to Cambridge for a date with Edwin on Monday. She met him at eight fifteen that night but left no more details in her calendar about the traumatic events that would inspire a famous scene in The Bell Jar. In the novel, Esther, who is living in Cambridge with her asylum friend Joan, meets Irwin, a math professor, on the steps of Widener Library. Esther decides to lose her virginity to him because he is older, experienced with women, and intelligent. “Then, to be on the safe side, I wanted somebody I didn’t know and wouldn’t go on knowing—a kind of impersonal, priestlike official, as in the tales of tribal rites.”158 Esther hemorrhages after sex with Irwin and nearly bleeds to death before she is saved at the hospital.
Nancy provided more details in her memoir, which was published almost twenty years after the event. One morning, she said, she woke up to find that Plath was not in her bed. Soon, Edwin called, explaining that Sylvia had hemorrhaged at his apartment the night before and that they had seen a doctor. “But she’s fine now,” he said, and hung up.159 According to Nancy, when Sylvia returned to the apartment in the late afternoon, she began to bleed again. Nancy asked what had happened, and Sylvia told her that Edwin had “masturbated” her.160 Nancy barely had time to react; before long she was on the phone with Dr. Heels, a local gynecologist, who told her how to stanch the bleeding. Nancy, untrained “in the techniques of the midwife,” as she put it, sat with Sylvia from seven to ten p.m. and thought she had stopped the bleeding. But when Sylvia stood up, Nancy saw a large pool of blood on the plastic tablecloth they had spread on top of the bed. As Sylvia swayed and careened into a wall, Nancy panicked.161 She called Edwin, who picked them up within five minutes and drove them to Mount Auburn Hospital. There, Dr. Heels finally stopped the bleeding.
Sylvia’s cryptic calendar jottings provide furtive clues abo
ut what transpired. She drew an arrow from July 26 into July 27, where she wrote “Dr. Heels.” Her dates suggest that she saw him, as she told Nancy, in the early-morning hours of the 27th. The next day, July 28, she wrote “Mt. Auburn Hospital,” “recuperation,” and “cleaned apartment” in her calendar. She called Dr. Beuscher at nine a.m. on July 29, then met her for an appointment on July 30. (Sylvia told Nancy that Edwin drove her to all her appointments with Dr. Beuscher.) The meeting was probably an emergency one, as Sylvia normally saw her psychiatrist every two weeks. On August 4 and 5, she wrote “Call Dr. Heels.” On August 6: “Dr. Heels check-up.”162 Ted Hughes later testified in his Bell Jar trial deposition that “the hemorrhage business” in the novel had really happened to Sylvia.163 Sylvia herself said in her journal that she lost her virginity to Edwin and that the sex was consensual and passionate: “Never felt guilty for bedding with one, losing virginity and going to the Emergency Ward….I had feelings and found out what I wanted and found the one only I wanted and knew it not with my head but with the heat of rightness, salt-sharp.”164 In The Bell Jar, Esther also describes her sexual experience with Irwin as a deliberate choice.
Sylvia had obviously changed her mind about losing her virginity to the man she would marry. She had almost died during the previous summer; this summer, post-resurrection, was about embracing life. She may have tried to save face with Nancy, whom she regarded as an innocent, by telling her she had been “masturbated.” After all, this was 1954, and Sylvia was unofficially engaged to Gordon—she wrote about their looming marriage in an August 7 letter to him—and she was likely nervous about gossip. She had not counted on such a public aftermath of so private an event. Sylvia’s two appointments with Dr. Beuscher on July 29 and 30 suggest that she experienced emotional pain after her night with Edwin. Still, in her scrapbook, Plath described her time with him in affectionate terms: “A cool study, beer and intrigue provided by assistant physics professor Edwin Akutowicz at MIT, and a casserole of life, love and learning.”165 Nancy herself said the hemorrhaging did not cause Sylvia any “emotional trauma,” and seemed more traumatized by the ordeal than Sylvia did. “I kept seeing her blood on the regular white tiles of the bathroom and hearing her anguished voice as she pleaded with me to keep her from dying,” she wrote.166
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