I’ll never forget the final scene at the pyre, a strong and terrible masterpiece of understatement, with the flames licking the wood, smoke rising, the faces of the peasants….I was physically unable to stop looking, even though my mind screamed for release. With the final tension of the film dissolved, I went for a long walk in the cold dark of Central Park, crying and crying, those cold pure tears of Greek tragedy….Human kind cannot bear very much reality. That kind of reality.
Images of martyrdom, torture, and fire would all feature in her late poems. The trip fortified her. “I returned to Smith gladly (which last week I thought was both physically and psychically impossible) and will subsist happily for months on cold water and brown bread.”116
Sylvia was taking three English courses this semester: the Twentieth Century American Novel with Kazin; an English review unit with her sophomore year writing teacher, Evelyn Page; and her poetry tutorial with Alfred Fisher. Under Fisher’s guidance, she began writing poems at a rapid rate: “my typewriter won’t be still.”117 “I am obsessed by writing as the first thing in life, and the poems come more and more,” she wrote to Gordon that February.118 During the first two weeks of the spring semester, she wrote nine new poems;119 by the semester’s end, she would “pound out” nearly fifty new poems—about five new poems a week.120 Her confidence was growing. “I have felt great advances in my poetry,” she told Aurelia, “the main one being a growing victory over word’s [sic] nuances and a superfluity of adjective.”121 Her burgeoning poetry collection began to take shape in her mind.
Sylvia was correct about her weaknesses. As Mrs. Prouty put it in a letter to Aurelia, “I am often puzzled by her underlying meaning. Many of her poems are to me like abstract paintings—bright, vivid, colorful.” But Prouty did not know “what the lovely words and rhythmic sounds are saying.”122 Many poems from Plath’s Smith period are, as Plath later admitted in a 1962 interview, “desperately Audenesque.” (Consider “Yet astronomic fountains / Exit from the heart” in “Parallax.”) Others, such as “Advice for an Artificer,” are full of Sitwellian wordplay and aural effects (“Shall we spell summer with tricks of rhetoric / till thoughts like purpling plums grow grandly rich / and glut the feigning brain”).123 Still others, such as “Love Is a Parallax,” are New Critical exercises in Marvellian poise and conceit. Yet alongside the thesaurus vocabulary are the images for which Plath would become known: bones, mist, ice, sun, blood, stone, skulls, hags, moons, stars, hearts, flames, wind, and flowers. She continued to write about spring (and false springs), unrequited love, time passing, ennui, storms, and death—just as she had in high school. But her language could be brittle. Plath’s poems had not yet achieved the spare grandeur of her mature voice.
The most successful poems from this period—“Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea,” “Go Get the Goodly Squab,” “Epitaph in Three Parts,” “Morning in the Hospital Solarium,” and “Lament”—were about loss. They are the antecedents of “Sheep in Fog,” “Words,” and “Edge.” Their muted cantations forced Plath to tone down the aural fireworks that overwhelm many of her “thesaurus” poems from this period. Yet she achieved success with some of what she called her “giddy” verses as well. “Circus in Three Rings” foreshadows “Aerialist” and “Lady Lazarus” (“a rose of jeopardy flames in my hair / yet I flourish my whip with a fatal flair”) while “The Suitcases Are Packed Again” looks forward to the ebullience of “Ariel” (“with a jerk / We zoom up into lunatic black sky / Where little epileptic comets smirk / And giddy asteroids go whizzing by”).124 Several of her Smith poems feature young female speakers in the midst of a circus, taming lions, walking tightropes, and performing daredevilish tricks—a metaphor, perhaps, for her own attempts to transcend patriarchal obstacles set before an ambitious young woman in the mid-fifties.
In early February, Sylvia made one such attempt when she and her friend Sue Weller interviewed for a one-year position teaching fifth-grade English at the American School in Tangier, Morocco. “I can think of nothing else,” she told Gordon.125 Aurelia was less excited, and told Sylvia she would be better off taking education courses or learning shorthand, despite her previous failed attempt. Furious, Sylvia issued a non serviam:
Now with me, writing is the first delight in life. I want time and money to write, both very necessary. I will not sacrifice my time to learn shorthand….I do not want the rigid hours of a magazine or publishing job. I do not want to type other people’s letters and read their manuscripts. I want to type on my own and write on my own….I realize that my goals in life may seem strange to you….Do consider what I say seriously.
The job would enable her, she wrote Aurelia, to “counteract McCarthy” and serve her “religion, which is that of humanism.”126 But the job did not come through.
Sylvia began dating Peter Davison in late March. Peter had been to Cambridge on a Fulbright and also had literary ambitions; he was the closest she had yet come to finding a male “double.” Even if the romance did not bear fruit, Sylvia knew that Peter, with his publishing connections, could help her professionally. She probably did not tell Sassoon about Peter, or Edwin Akutowicz, whom she saw twice at Smith in April and again in Cambridge during May and June.
Sassoon would have made light of his rivals. He continued writing Sylvia dramatic love letters from Yale, sometimes playing a character out of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. He spoke of spankings, beatings, and adultery, and may have given Plath the idea for her later poem “Pursuit” when he wrote, “I love you and my love lies in waiting still and stealthy and hateful as a tiger.”127 Most of his letters were unabashed declarations of love, but he offered his thoughts on her poetry, too. His critique of her sonnet in an April 20 letter likely made an impact:
I very tinily but unmistakably wince and am not sure why except there is too much maybe strictly structure…it remains a plan and one does not see it or move with the movements (except in the matter of sound and rhythm you are so good at)…and yet it is not PRESENT and worse it is not a present because it has wit’s lack of generosity.
This loyalty to structure over nature—what Plath would later call “the glass caul”—was something Ted Hughes and his friends would mock when they read Plath’s early poems at Cambridge. Yet even as Sassoon criticized her poems, he emphasized his ignorance and offered unconditional support. He ended this same letter, “darling, I am so proud of all you do and say…and you do not stop, but always something better or something new….it makes me proud of you and proud that I fell in love with you.”128 The couple rendezvoused in New York City again in late March. Sylvia told Aurelia she was staying with Smith friends, but in fact she stayed with Sassoon before he returned home to Tryon, North Carolina, and she to Wellesley, for the spring vacation.
On April 1, Plath received a letter from Columbia appointing her as a graduate residence scholar for the 1955–56 academic year. The appointment came with free room and board, plus a $500 scholarship toward tuition. With her $1,000 graduate fellowship from Smith, the year at Columbia would cost her nothing; she would even have spending money left over. Yet Sylvia, still hungry for Experience, was determined to go to England even if she had to spend the summer waitressing, and within a week she had turned down Columbia’s generous offer. She had been accepted to Newnham College, Cambridge, in February and had heard rumors through Mary Ellen Chase that her Fulbright application had made the final round. She was confident about her chances.
In mid-April, Sylvia learned she was one of six finalists for the Glascock Poetry Prize, held at Mount Holyoke College. She gave a reading there and lunched with Marianne Moore, one of the judges; Plath called her “as vital and humorous as someone’s fairy godmother incognito.” She shared a guest room with Lynne Lawner, a contestant from Wellesley College, with whom she would continue to correspond. She had her photograph taken with Moore by The Christian Science Monitor and Mademoiselle, and spoke on the radio. Sylvia enjoye
d the spotlight, especially the poetry reading attended by (she guessed) two hundred people. “I loved doing my poems,” she wrote Aurelia, “because they all sounded pretty polished and the audience was immensely responsive, laughed in some of the witty places, even, which made me feel tremendously happy.” (She was so pleased with her performance that she considered becoming a “humorous public speaker.”)129 Plath eventually tied with a young man from Wesleyan for first place, for which she received $50. In the judges’ notes, she read that Marianne Moore “commends your spirit, patience, craftsmanship and strong individuality. Her main adverse criticism is of a too adjectival manner at times bordering on formula.”130 The other judge, John Ciardi, called her “a real discovery” and “a poet,” and offered to help her publish in little magazines. Sylvia gushed to her mother, “so it’s not a completely indifferent world, after all!”131
Good news followed on April 18 in the form of a twenty-five-dollar check for “Circus in Three Rings” from The Atlantic. Plath was thrilled to have scaled another of her “Annapurnas.” The editors wanted her to revise the first and last stanzas, however, and change the title to “The Lion Tamer” or “The Tamer.”132 She called the suggestion an “aesthetic rape” and, after a long talk with Alfred Fisher decided not to tamper with her poem.133 “I did resent this attempt at butchering to fit their idea of it,” she told Aurelia. “Prose, I wouldn’t mind, but a poem is like a rare little watch: alter the delicate juxtaposition of cogs, and it just may not tick….I battle between desperate Macchiavelian [sic] opportunism and uncompromising artistic ethics.”134 Opportunism won the day. After downing two martinis and sleeping for twelve hours, she revised the poem and sent it back to Edward Weeks, along with five other poems she hoped he would prefer. She would learn, on May 21, that The Atlantic took her original, unrevised “Circus in Three Rings.” “Such bliss! That fortress of Bostonian conservative respectability has been ‘charmed’ by your tight-rope walking daughter!” she wrote Aurelia.135 The Nation would publish “Temper of Time” in its August 6 issue, while Plath earned $15 from Mademoiselle, which published “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea” that August. The poem, with its beach setting and existential quandaries, shows the influence of Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order at Key West.” Plath writes:
We are not what we might be; what we are
Outlaws all extrapolation
Beyond the interval of now and here:
White whales are gone with the white ocean.
Sylvia decided to drop German in late April—she needed to focus on her comprehensive exams surveying the whole of English literature, and her growing poetry collection. She explained her decision to her mother: “I am in my cycle of ebbed energy and know that at these times I must pare my demands to a bare minimum.”136 Sylvia now knew the consequences of trying to “do it all,” and she was wise to reduce her obligations in the face of mounting academic pressure. “It seems my life is a constant readjustment between my psychic demands and my physical supply. I need three long months of sun and sand and tennis and time (to read and write as I choose or do not choose) to recover from the academic trials of this year,” she wrote Gordon.137
May, too, was a month of bounty. Plath won the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, the Marjorie Hope Nicolson Prize for her senior thesis, and the Clara French Prize, awarded to the top senior in English. She was accepted to Radcliffe and won the Academy of American Poets Prize as well as an honorable mention in the Vogue Prix de Paris. The Vogue prize came with $25 and a tentative job offer at a Condé Nast publication—but Plath had already decided against a career in media. Her year’s earnings from writing and prizes came to an astounding $465, “plus much joy!”138 The best news came on May 20, when she learned that she had won a Fulbright Fellowship to Newnham College, Cambridge. Sylvia was ecstatic and immediately called Aurelia at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where she was again being treated for her ulcer. She celebrated with Sassoon in New York, where she “wept buckets” watching Laurence Olivier play Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
Sylvia passed her grueling comprehensive exams—a “hot hell of 12 hours”—to graduate summa cum laude on June 6, Sassoon’s twenty-first birthday.139 That morning, before the ceremony, she was suffering from severe abdominal cramps. Nancy Hunter told Sylvia to ask a Lawrence House beatnik, whom Sylvia disliked, for some rum. But Sylvia and this student had been feuding all year: she had taunted Sylvia about her conventional values, and Sylvia had threatened to report her secret stash of alcohol. Still, she gave Sylvia the rum without hesitation. Sylvia was grateful and wrote her a note that read, “Thank you for teaching me humility.”140
Aurelia, still recovering from her recent stomach surgery, arrived at Sylvia’s commencement on a mattress stretcher.141 Sylvia was one of only four summas in her entire college class, and the accolade cemented her standing as one of the most gifted academic students of her generation. Kazin and his wife blew kisses as she received her degree, and President Wright gave her a firm handshake. Mary Ellen Chase promised to be her “Chase bank” in England should she ever run short of funds. It was “a magnificent send-off,” Sylvia wrote in her scrapbook, for a young woman who once thought she would not graduate.142 Adlai Stevenson, erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate, gave the commencement speech. He famously—and condescendingly—told the class that they should aspire to be superlative mothers and housewives and that their main role was to support their husbands. Afterward, Sylvia picnicked at Quabbin Reservoir with her mother, who was helped along by her grandparents and Mrs. Cantor. (Warren and Mrs. Prouty had not been able to attend.) She wrote her new friend Lynne Lawner that Stevenson was “most witty and magnificent as commencement speaker” but quipped that he was “operating on the hypothesis that every woman’s highest vocation” was marriage.143 She knew now that marriage and children could wait: “writing is the first love of my life.”144 To that end, she assembled her first poetry collection, Circus in Three Rings, which included most of the 1955 poems she had written in Alfred Fisher’s tutorial. She ended the collection with Sassoon’s favorite, “Doomsday.”
* * *
—
Sylvia spent her summer in Wellesley, reading, writing, gardening, and painting old furniture while Aurelia recuperated from stomach surgery. Her doctors had instructed her not to take on any summer teaching. Her weight was still dangerously low, and, after she left the hospital in late June, Sylvia drove her to medical appointments. Mrs. Prouty wrote frequently, and paid at least one of Aurelia’s hospital bills.145
When not tending to Aurelia or attending weddings—Sylvia served as maid of honor at Ruth Freeman’s wedding on June 11 in Winthrop—she applied herself to “the slicks.” She “saturated” herself in old copies of The Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal in the hopes of gauging that “ ‘indefinable something’ which makes a $1000 story.”146 In July and August she wrote a short story, “Platinum Summer,” which she had originally entitled “Peroxide,” based on her experience waitressing at the Belmont, and featuring dueling male leads.147 The rich playboy Ira Kamirloff, who “seldom had anything but dishonorable intentions,” dates the Plath character, Lynn Hunter, after she dyes her hair blond. But it is the “intellectual” medical student and fellow waiter, Eric Wunderlich, whom she truly loves. After some scandalous adventures with Ira, which Eric observes disdainfully, Lynn wins over Eric by dyeing her hair back to its natural brown. The moral is conventional: the girl gets the hero only after she has tamed herself and her “wild” impulses. Plath ends the story:
“Will you ever,” she returned, “want me to act like a kaleidoscope?”
“You already do,” Eric grinned down at her. “That’s what worries me. With that impulsive streak of yours, you’ll always need someone masterful around to keep you from going quite wild.”
“Someone like a lion tamer?”
“Someone,” Eric illustrated by kissi
ng her masterfully on the mouth, “exactly like me.”148
That July she sent off a more staid, brown-haired piece, “Tea with Olive Higgins Prouty,” to Reader’s Digest, and learned that The New Orleans Poetry Journal and Lyric accepted three poems.149 Yet Mademoiselle turned down three of her new stories, which she had entered in the College Fiction Contest.150 She wrote Gordon, “I keep reading about this damn adrienne cecile rich [sic], only two years older than I, who is a yale [sic] younger poet and regularly in all the top mags; and about 23-year old blondes from radcliffe [sic] who are already selling stories plus climbing alps. occasionally [sic], I retch quietly in the wastebasket.”151 The rivalry with Adrienne Rich made Plath more determined to succeed, and she mailed out her poetry collection to the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award that summer. Plath had been inspired by an article she had read in the Writer’s Yearbook, advising her to think of herself as a woman first, and a writer second—otherwise, every rejection would throw her “into depression.” If she identified herself too closely with her craft, the failures would seem like “grievous wounds” to her sense of “personal worth.”152 “I would like to memorize this article forever etching it in my head. It is a directive to live by,” she wrote Aurelia.153
In early August, Peter Davison, now assistant to the director at Harvard University Press, invited Sylvia to Martha’s Vineyard. (He had been dating her since March; he later remembered lying on his apartment floor with her “listening with rapture” to Dylan Thomas reading “Fern Hill.”)154 She and Peter had drinks with the Irish poet Padraic Colum and his wife Mary at the Landfall Restaurant, across from the ferry landing in Woods Hole. It was not the first time Plath had met Colum; she had shared drinks with him when visiting Phil McCurdy, who was teaching at the Children’s School of Science in Woods Hole that summer. Phil remembered, “It was amazing to me how the two lit up the evening wherever they were. I’ve often thought that there was a kind of spiritual radio wave between the poets. He was a remarkable man, but actually very reserved, very reticent. But when Sylvia was with us, he became extremely animated.” He remembered Colum reciting his poem “King Cahill’s Farewell to the Rye Field” in Plath’s honor. “We were sitting there with our mouths open.”155
Red Comet Page 54