During the weeks that followed the night in question, Plath did not withdraw—on the contrary, she led a dizzying social life. To Nancy’s astonishment, Sylvia saw Edwin again that summer and invited him to Smith that fall. She and Edwin spent several hours drinking and discussing Machiavelli at Rahar’s, in Northampton, on October 31. Nine days later, Sylvia spent the afternoon at his apartment in Cambridge: “Lovely fire, beer, talk and very dear time—reading and pipe smoke,” she wrote in her calendar.167 There would be more dates with Edwin in April and May of 1955; that year, she even sent him some of her poetry. In 1975, Edwin wrote to Frances McCullough, the editor of Plath’s abridged journals, about his impressions of Plath. He noted that they spoke of poetry and probability, and that she told him about her grief for Otto. She had been frank with him about her suicide attempt, as well, but he did not see any “deeper tensions” within. He said Plath seemed more balanced than many young women he had known at the time.168
Sylvia dated other men that summer of whom Nancy did not approve. Chief among them was Dr. Ira Scott, a married instructor at Harvard who provided afternoons, as Plath joyfully recorded, of “sailing in Marblehead, beach and sun in Duxbury, garden grandeur at Castle Hill, champagne and steak at charming inns.”169 Sylvia’s behavior alarmed Nancy. “She was not depressed or alienated; in fact, she was racing from experience to experience with a recklessness that asserted her invincibility.”170 On one Saturday, August 21, Sylvia breakfasted with Gordon, saw Harvard’s famous glass flowers with Ira, then attended a cocktail party on Beacon Hill with her “enigmatic, handsome” neighbor Lou Healy and some medical school students. They stayed up until dawn drinking and discussing “Satanic Sadism.”171 Plath was on furlough, trying to experience as much as she could before the window closed again.
In early August, Sylvia told Gordon that she had hemorrhaged after being “manually attacked” by Edwin—though she assured him they had gone no further.172 She downplayed the event, framing it as a misunderstanding for which she was partly to blame. She had thought her friendship with Edwin was strictly “platonic,” she wrote Gordon on August 5, “but I lost my eve-like naïvté [sic] with a traumatic shock last week, when I realized that I might have only comradely intentions, while my ‘comrade’ might have totally different expectations of our meetings.”173 Gordon accepted her version of events at the time.174 She promised him she would no longer hold tête-à-têtes with young men.
Sylvia told Gordon she had an upcoming appointment with Dr. Heels for a pelvic exam. “Even if I regret the unsavory way I discovered about my manyarteried [sic] insides, I’m glad to get the deluge over with so that I will be healthily prepared for a natural and completely understood sexual life.”175 Two days later, she wrote him that Heels had pronounced her “intact, healthy, and generously normal.” But the ordeal had exhausted her: she returned to Wellesley for the weekend, went to bed at five p.m. and slept for fifteen hours. She hoped Gordon would understand her need to use the time to “rehabilitate,” “repair my wardrobe and my serenity.”176 He reassured her that he loved her.177
She spent the short break reading and writing in her backyard and luxuriating in “the minor-keyed daily delights” of a suburban summer. “I cherish the lunging roar of the powermower as peter aldrich [sic] mows our lawn, the blasé drone of the cicada, the junior greek [sic] chorus of children playing hide-and-seek in the foliage, sunlight incandescent on blue and pink cornflowers.” Even the sound of her mother’s voice beckoned. She was getting along with Aurelia after a period of “belated” adolescent rebellion, which she compared to the American colonies’ desire for independence from mother England. With her “revolution” over, she felt “loving, benevolent, without fearing for my ever-strengthening newfound independence and self-reliance.”178
Sylvia worked hard at her German. Gordon, whose father was from Germany, helped her study, but she received a B on her exam. She began to regret taking the course, which turned her into a “beast of burden, with blinders.” It pained her to see “shaw, ibsen, o’neill [sic], and the rest, languishing unread on my bookshelves.”179 However, she chose to spend most of her free hours drinking and dining with friends and dates—sharing hot toddies with Nancy or sherry-soaked fruit compote with her German class. She reveled in “the ‘Joy of Cooking’ social life centered around charming intimate dinners.”180 Few would have guessed that the platinum blonde whipping up consommé in champagne glasses had tried to kill herself a year before.
In mid-August Sylvia spent the weekend in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, with Gordon and his family. They canoed on Thorndike Pond and climbed Mount Monadnock. She was as close to the Lameyers now as she had been to the Nortons, and they considered her part of the family. But three days after she returned to Cambridge, she again saw Ira. “Bourbon & waters—Louis Armstrong—Jon Dos Passos & steak & candlelight” she wrote of her date on August 19. The next night, she went out with Gordon, who may have suspected she was seeing another man: “long tense bull session,” she wrote in her calendar, “problems.” A week later, she ran into Gordon unexpectedly when she was out with Ira. She wrote in her calendar that a “scene” ensued.181
The anniversary of her suicide attempt was on her mind: in her calendar she drew a border, in red pencil, around August 24–28. On the 22nd, she took a sedative—phenobarbital—after what she enigmatically called a “crisis of suspended animation.” Gordon, with his “mending talk,” had helped.182 But it was Ira she turned to that week. Sylvia saw him almost every day from August 23rd to the 26th; they enjoyed long walks, daiquiris, and steak dinners. She spent the anniversary day itself—August 24—sailing in Marblehead with him. She relished the salt spray on her skin, the “warm, choppy” water, the “roaring” ride back to Cambridge in his convertible, and the “exquisite” pink Brooks Brothers shirt he gave her that morning.183
Aurelia called Nancy on the 24th and became extremely anxious when Nancy told her Sylvia was out. Could Nancy guarantee that Sylvia was not at that very moment trying to kill herself? Nancy finally located Sylvia, who promptly called home and reassured her panicked mother. Plath made sure to see Dr. Beuscher on August 27. The two had a “long good talk” about “domination, paternalism, sadism.”184 Something—whether it was a memory of Otto, Edwin, Sassoon, or the “cruel” Peruvian—triggered these connections, which would later find their way into the black heart of Plath’s most famous poem, “Daddy.”
Nancy saw Sylvia’s behavior that summer as dangerously promiscuous, but Sylvia had finally found the courage to flout the repressive sexual double standard she described with such anger in her high school and early college journals. Dr. Beuscher had sent her off from McLean with the diaphragm prescription. Sylvia’s affairs with Edwin and Ira—one married, both professors rather than college boys—suggest that she was determined to use it. The fact that these men were not serious prospects was, as Esther hints in The Bell Jar, part of their attraction. Sex that summer was something Plath wanted on her own terms, with men to whom she was not committed. Men treated sex casually until they were ready to marry. Now that pregnancy was no longer an issue, why shouldn’t she?
* * *
—
On the last day of August, Hurricane Carol struck New England. Safe from the storm’s coastal ferocity in Wellesley, Sylvia reveled in the strafing winds and churning skies. The power went out, and she wrote a poem, “Insolent Storm Strikes at the Skull,” by candlelight. After clearing up the wreckage the next day, she headed back to her apartment in Cambridge, where she would stay until mid-September, then to the Cantors’ home in Chatham for a weekend with Gordon. There, the two swam in the “iced champagne surf,” picnicked on the outer sand bar, and danced at the Chatham Bars Inn.185 Over the next two weeks, she saw Gordon nearly every day, and they began sleeping together. Feeling renewed, she wrote several poems before returning to Smith on September 20. She spent more time on the Cape visiting the Cochrans, the Cantors, Aurelia in
Eastham, and Warren at the Pines resort.
Sylvia and Gordon had spent the last weekend of August alone in Wellesley, and she became worried in September that she was pregnant. Gordon was ready to marry her, and did not regard the pregnancy as a crisis. Sylvia did. She saw Dr. Beuscher three times during the second week of September; one session lasted for three hours. The scare clarified her priorities after weeks of idealizing married life. She was not yet ready to become a wife and mother, and she saw with vivid precision what such a turn would mean: no Smith degree, no Fulbright, no bohemian sojourn in Europe. A life with Gordon suddenly seemed the antithesis of all she wanted, and she was overwhelmed with relief when she realized she was not pregnant. As she wrote to Enid Epstein, she had “put off all thought of marrying him to a very indefinite future…he is amazingly young yet (or I am amazingly old) and I am Machiavellian enough to want to grow to the fullest.”186 She had walked a fine line that summer between sophistication and dissolution, and she had nearly imperiled her future. But she was lucky, and her luck made her confident that she could continue to assimilate such experiences into her writing. She told Gordon, “I can like jazz, blatant syrupy love lyrics, dirty jokes, bartenders, taxi drivers without any sense of superiority or patronizing pride, quite honestly, and simply talk that language…but in the final analysis I guess I want, like Eliot, to refine the dialect of the tribe.”187 Plath’s decision not to marry Gordon Lameyer had consequences she could not yet envision. In six years, she would be T. S. Eliot’s dinner guest.
14
O Icarus
Smith College and Wellesley, September 1954–August 1955
Sylvia began her senior year at Smith in “a siege of activity.”1 On top of the usual academic pressures, she was applying for a Fulbright Fellowship to England, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, and admission to Oxford, Cambridge, Radcliffe, Yale, and Columbia.2 Her goal, she told Mel Woody, was a graduate degree at Radcliffe or Harvard “eventually,” but only after she had traveled “around the world.” She wanted to see England, Italy (“where I am a daughter—body-and-soul”), France, and Africa; to escape, for a time, “the land of the chromium plated bathroom, the ivory soap opera and the league of women voters!”3
She rushed between appointments with professors, nurses, and college officials as she gathered the necessary documents for her applications: “12 letters of recommendation, 3 health exams, 12 statements of purpose, etc.”4 She took her Cambridge University entrance exams at Mary Ellen Chase’s home. Chase, George Gibian, Newton Arvin, Elizabeth Drew, and Alfred Kazin would write Plath glowing recommendation letters. All said she was the best student they had ever taught, and emphasized her graciousness, maturity, humor, and good manners.5 (Chase noted, “She has not the slightest trace of conceit or arrogance.”)6 Kazin spoke for all of Plath’s mentors when he wrote that she was “not merely the most gifted student in the class but perhaps the most interesting student writer I have seen in years….I have even heard it said that she is the most gifted student Smith has seen for many years.”7 No one mentioned Plath’s suicide attempt or stay at McLean.
Sylvia told Aurelia that because these professors were “all very big names in their field internationally, I should have an advantage there that might compensate for my mental hospital record.”8 She had heard that Oxford and Cambridge “aren’t hospitable to lady-suicides,” and so she asked Dr. Beuscher for a recommendation, hoping that she would attest to “the completeness of my cure.”9 Dr. Beuscher did just that: “at the time of hospitalization Miss Plath was suffering from a state of mental turmoil which is highly unlikely ever to recur. Some of the qualities most obvious in her illness were the very ones which, properly channeled and maturely balanced, contribute to her undoubted superiority as a person. She has a great sense of responsibility, not only to others who may depend on her, but also to herself, and to her integrity.”10 Sylvia’s only negative recommendation came from her house mother, Mrs. Kelsey, who felt that though her “character,” “appearance,” “voice,” and “deportment” were all “pleasing,” her devotion to writing made her “selfish” and “difficult.”11
Sylvia decorated her Lawrence House room in “Harvard” crimsons and “Yale” blues, hung sketches from Ilo and snapshots of Gordon. She felt more at ease there now that a cliquey contingent of seniors had graduated. Sylvia was still a breakfast waitress six days a week, and noted, optimistically, that the commitment would force her to go to bed early each night; she knew that fewer than eight hours a night could start her on a precipitous downslide.
She had a relatively light class load due to her six-credit thesis tutorial. Shakespeare with Miss Dunn was “magnificent,” as was her Short Story Writing course with Alfred Kazin. But she found her intermediate German conversational course “terribly difficult.”12 Like science, German was psychologically fraught territory, for it was bound up with Otto’s legacy. Despite her Harvard summer course, Sylvia felt unable to “stammer” out a single sentence.13
Her Dostoevsky thesis made up for her struggles in German. Her adviser George Gibian encouraged her to pursue the thesis topic she had chosen: “several pairs of the ‘double’ personality in dostoevsky [sic],” as she explained to Gordon.14 She limited her social activities, including weekends with him, and devoted all her free time to her thesis. “I must read like fury,” she wrote.15
Her monkish devotion to scholarship required a new look. With her platinum summer and its men behind her, she dyed her hair back to its natural brown in September. “I feel that this year, with my applying for scholarships, I would much rather look demure and discreet,” she told Gordon:
in a sense, I’m rather sure that my brown-haired personality will win out this year…gone is the frivolous giddy gilded creature who careened around corners at the wheel of a yellow convertible and stayed up till six in the morning because the conversation and bourbonandwater [sic] were too good to terminate…but it is good for me, and this is really the most honest part of myself, I think.16
Plath, excited to finally find herself in command of a challenging literary topic, was now energized rather than crushed by her workload. She revisited The Picture of Dorian Gray, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Freud, Jung, Poe, and Frazer; she hoped to read Otto Rank in German—“all fascinating stuff about the ego as symbolized in reflections (mirror and water), shadows, twins…dividing off and becoming an enemy, or omen of death…or a warning conscience.”17 For once, she did not downplay her analytical ability: “perhaps it’s all abominably bad, but I secretly don’t think so,” she told Aurelia.18 This was the most serious scholarly work she had ever done. She hoped to write “an adolescent story about doubles” after she had finished her thesis—“every incident in my life begins to smack of the mirror image.”19
She found an outlet for her creative work in Kazin’s fall semester fiction class. When Kazin arrived at Smith in the fall of 1954 as a visiting professor, Plath was eager to meet him. She couldn’t believe her luck when the Smith Alumnae Quarterly asked her to interview him. Mr. Kazin, she wrote, “does not like to consider himself as any one particular type of writer,” and when pressed about his teaching style, “he would only say that the important thing is ‘not to have theories.’ ”20 He emphasized discipline over raw talent, though talent was important, too. To Plath, he embodied the world of the heroic intelligentsia. Kazin was a public intellectual involved in the major theoretical and political debates of his age. He, along with Hannah Arendt, Karl Shapiro, Saul Bellow, and Lionel Trilling, contributed regularly to the magazine Commentary, which was founded after the war to address “public opinion of problems of Jewish concern.”21 Esther Greenwood’s horror of the Rosenberg execution suggests Plath’s sympathy for the radical literary and political New York Jewish circles to which she was connected, tangentially, through Kazin.
During her interview, Plath found Kazin “brusque” at first. When she revealed that she had worked her way through college and h
ad literary aspirations, he warmed to her. He had thought she was “just another pampered smith [sic] baby,” and invited her to audit his creative writing class—the only class he taught that year—where she made a strong first impression. She was “appalled at the weak, mealy-mouthed apathy of the girls, who either were just too scared or just too stupid to have opinions.”22 Plath was soon referring to Kazin as “the great god Alfred,” and began writing fiction for the first time in nearly two years.23 She called him “the light that incandesces my year,”24 and loved the way he flouted dry academic convention: “he told me it’s my holy duty to write every day, spill out all, learn to give it form, and is going to let me go off on my own every week, only asking that I turn in lots and lots and not to bother with the regular class assignment.”25
In Kazin’s class, Sylvia got to know Ellie Friedman, a young Jewish woman from Longmeadow, Massachusetts, in the Class of ’56. Ellie felt Kazin took Plath seriously—here was “the Big Man teaching writing and here’s a student who he knows immediately is better than he’ll ever be. That’s the feeling I had when I was there.” Ellie, who called herself “snobbish” about her taste in friends, said she “fell in love” with Sylvia over dinner one night at Martha Wilson House, where she lived. “She was never a mad, obsessed poet when I knew her. She was happy, and she was funny.” The two became close that year as they whiled away afternoons in each other’s rooms. Sylvia would read Ellie her poetry and flaunt her rejection letters, saying, “ ‘Look at my rejections, it means I’m a writer!’ ” Ellie added, “She was always interested, always welcoming.”26 They spoke often of their love for Russian literature and Yeats, their dreams of becoming a writer and an actress. Ellie thought Sylvia romanticized her Jewishness, partly in reaction to her own “arid” WASP identity. “I think that the idea of these people who went through great trial and who wandered a great deal and yet had a central core on which they could rely was a big source of fascination. Jews seemed to have a relationship to self that I think she always felt was missing.” She had the feeling that Plath wanted to “dissipate” her “whiteness.”27
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