Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  At McLean, Barnhouse allowed Sylvia few visitors. Besides Prouty— who came about once a week—and Aurelia—who in the wake of Sylvia’s hospitalization moved into Prouty’s house, where she remained on and off until May, but who was often driven to McLean for her weekly visit with Sylvia by Margaret Cantor—Sylvia received only Wil-bury Crockett. Yet his recollection of his early sessions with her indicates the severity of her sickness. “Sylvia had lost touch with words,” Crockett remembers. (She had obviously suffered a severe reversal since writing Gordon a letter.) “So I brought along a game called Anagram, a word game. And I can see us now: sitting in the hospital visiting quarters, I would spread out the letters on a card table. I sat at one end of the table, Sylvia at the other. And I would take her finger, place it on a letter, and say, ‘Sylvia, this is an A’ And she would say, ‘Yes, an A’ Then I would take her finger and reach for an N. ‘Sylvia, this is A-N. An apple’ Next I would take her finger and reach for a D. ‘A-N-D, this spells and’ “ It took a month or so for her ability to read and write to return. When it did, it did so quickly and completely. However, one byproduct of her recent ordeal did not go away. In the months following Sylvia’s breakdown—following, in particular, her poorly administered shock treatments—Aurelia noticed that her daughter’s personality, which had previously been integrated, seemed to be split. In the past, Sylvia could be “up” or “down” but was usually a blend of the two. Now the extremes became apparent: she was either manic or depressed, with little in between. Aurelia hoped that Sylvia’s treatment at McLean might integrate those personality traits. Otherwise, she envisioned her future mood swings reaching even more drastic polar opposites.

  The method of treatment for Sylvia that Barnhouse employed, and that McLean officials endorsed—daily psychotherapy sessions, regular insulin injections, and unstructured free time during which she could engage in occupational therapy if she chose—did not meet with Olive Prouty’s approval. After she visited with Sylvia for two hours on October 6 and took her for a drive on the 13th, Prouty wrote Barnhouse a terse letter. Sylvia had complained about “the long objectless hours spent in her room,” had admitted that she was “not mixing well with other patients,” had longed for some activity to “make her isolation more bearable.” Despite Prouty’s complaints, Barnhouse did not change Sylvia’s treatment radically, but encouraged Sylvia to type some of Prouty’s manuscripts—Aurelia brought a typewriter from home—that Prouty supplied for that purpose. On the 21st, when she took Sylvia to lunch at the Hartwell Farms, Prouty noted that Sylvia had typed the documents flawlessly and that she now wanted to read a book on contract bridge. To Prouty, the expert typing job had led to the desire to read about bridge: a routine and the performance of menial tasks do improve a patient’s mental outlook. At Silver Hill, where Prouty still wanted Sylvia to go if only as a follow-up to McLean, Sylvia would receive this type of structured treatment, since Terhune believed in providing patients with schedules he expected them to follow. Barnhouse did not agree with Prouty; nor, for that matter, did Lindemann, who now saw Sylvia weekly. As a result, Sylvia remained at McLean—on McLeans terms. In mid-October, while everyone concerned discussed how best to treat Sylvia, Smith, from which Sylvia remained on medical leave, sent her a telegram announcing that she had just been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Otherwise, Sylvia had little contact with Smith, though she did occasionally see a young woman named Jane Anderson, a Smith acquaintance who was also hospitalized at McLean.

  During the first half of November, Prouty and Aurelia continued to visit Sylvia regularly. Early in the month, even if they did not see signs of improvement, McLean doctors did. Around the 7th, after this (supposed) change for the good, her insulin injections were stopped. However, Sylvia had by no means recovered. “She continues getting psychotherapeutic treatment which I believe is the main approach,” Psychiatrist-in-Chief Paul Howard wrote to Prouty at mid-month. “Her cheek"—as yet unhealed—"continues to get better and a surgeon advises me that it is well to let these things alone. . . . Although electroshock therapy is . . . a possibility I do not believe, considering her improvement, that it would be good to think of [it] at this time.” The debate regarding Sylvia’s treatment continued into November. On the 16th, Prouty arrived at McLean to find Sylvia “terribly depressed and discouraged” because she could not “escape idleness"—an obvious downturn, if she had in fact improved earlier in the month. On the 23rd, when she wrote to Director Franklin Wood to pay him a monthly bill of $790—the last bill she would be willing to pay, she said—Prouty told him that, during the eleven weeks Sylvia had been a patient at McLean, Prouty could see “little change in her depression, attitude or . . . ideas.” Prouty went on: “I usually find Sylvia wandering listlessly up and down the corridor and when I leave she says she will do the same, as there is nothing else for her to do.” This aimlessness, according to Prouty, contributed to Sylvias lack of improvement. On the 25th, by way of defending McLean, Wood evaluated Sylvia’s condition. He wrote Prouty:

  There are things about for her to do and people to interest her in them. It is more of value to her to do these things with her own feelings than by schedule. . . . We notice if under pressure or expectation she seems to feel worse, further confirmation that the pressure of a schedule would not be supportive as it is with some people. And in this connection I do not think that visits with relatives or friends should especially be the occasion of an examination of any sort, either as to the progress of her ideas or the number of her accomplishments. . . . This girl has been an accomplisher, and living in the atmosphere of accomplishment, and is excessively self conscious in her depressed state; and usually tries to put her worst foot forward saying that anything she is doing or thinking is “nothing.”

  At the moment, Wood continued, Sylvia had been put on chlorprom-azine, known to reduce tension in patients. If that drug did not work, electroshock therapy was a last resort.

  Though Prouty had said she would stop paying for Sylvia’s treatment, she did not. Instead, she decided to place her in another hospital. Prouty and Aurelia conferred at tea on December 2, and Prouty toured the Boston Psychopathic Hospital alone the next day; she took Aurelia to see the facility on the 5th. Boston Psychopathies director, a Dr. Solomon, set in motion the process to admit Sylvia within a week. Then, upon discovering from McLean that Sylvia had experienced “a distinct turn for the better,” Prouty told Solomon that she would delay moving her until after Christmas. She also wrote McLean that, as of January 1, she would no longer be responsible for Sylvia’s expenses there—and now she meant it. It was at this point that the McLean staff modified both Sylvia’s schedule and the standoffish manner in which they had dealt with Prouty and Aurelia. Barnhouse had a long meeting with Aurelia—the longest conversation the two women had had since Sylvia was admitted—and the staff concluded that Sylvia would have to undergo electroshock therapy again. Finally, McLean offered to treat Sylvia free of charge after January 1. Because of this, Aurelia left Sylvia at McLean for the time being.

  Soon after December 15, Barnhouse began giving Sylvia the shock treatments, which ended before Christmas Eve. Barnhouse recalls:

  I convinced her that she had to have shock treatment because she was persisting in this depression and she had to get out of there. I didn’t want her to become chronic. She was still suicidal. We had worked on the preparation for the shock treatments for months. When she had the treatments—I don’t think she had more than two or three—she recovered so fast that it was obvious that the shock treatment itself had a psychological significance, apart from whatever shock treatment does to people. What Imean is, it was almost as though she had to be punished for something. So she finally got it. I mean, that’s one interpretation.

  Following the shock treatments, Sylvia improved dramatically. During the Christmas holidays, her depression appeared to evaporate. By New Year’s, the old Sylvia seemed to have emerged. On various occasions, doctors described her as “cheerful,” “vivacious,” able to
gain “good insight into her problems.” By January 13, McLean officials, who had begun treating Sylvia without charge, decided that her recovery was so remarkable that she did not need to stay in the hospital. They concluded—amazingly—that she was ready to return to Smith as a special student. When Prouty heard about this, she was angry and astonished. She wrote bitterly to William Terhune, Silver Hill’s director: “The fact is they [McLean officials] are not going to send Sylvia to Silver Hill at all. In spite of the nearly $4,000 I have sent McLean Hospital since September it has failed to lead to the period of ‘reeducation’ at Silver Hill which I desired so much for Sylvia and which I was willing to finance.” Prouty never realized her wish. Later in January, McLean released Sylvia to go home in preparation for her upcoming return to Smith.

  It was not the first time she had been to Wellesley since her breakdown. In late December and January, McLean had allowed Sylvia occasional visits home. One day, she had actually traveled to Harvard with Philip McCurdy. (The night before, she had explained to Philip why she had tried to kill herself—she feared she had lost her talent to write—and told him that she had attempted it before—when she was ten she slit her throat, she said, and showed him a scar which, whether she invented the story or not, he could plainly see.) After the visit to Harvard, they returned to Philip’s Wellesley home for supper, then went dancing at the Totem Pole. Tired but excited to be together, they drove to Sylvia’s house. Sitting in his car in front of 26 Elmwood Road, Sylvia suddenly stopped talking and made romantic advances towards him. Confused at first, Philip gave in. Their necking heightened their passion, and they soon ended up, as Sylvia had referred to the act throughout high school, “having sexual intercourse"—her first time.

  Barnhouse believed that Sylvia should no longer suppress her sexual desires. In therapy, she had encouraged her to consider experimenting with sex when she had the opportunity. Sylvia had wasted no time in doing just that; Philip happened to be party to her experimentation. As it turned out, Sylvia and Philip had been Platonic friends for too long to set out on a romantic relationship. They had a second night of awkward sex in the front seat of his car, but decided not to try it a third. Rather, they would go back to their close friendship.

  Barnhouse may have placed part of the blame for Sylvia’s emotional problems on sexual frustration, yet another possible cause surfaced at this time. In the wake of Sylvia’s release from McLean, Aurelia received word from one of Otto’s sisters that in the Plath family their mother, a sister, and a niece all suffered from depression. Otto’s mother had become so sick that she had been hospitalized. Perhaps Sylvia’s illness did not result from outside factors at all. Perhaps she had simply inherited the disease from her father.

  2

  The start of Plath’s return to Smith was inauspicious. The very automobile trip to Northampton—Warren had volunteered to drive her there before he went back to Harvard for his own spring term—almost ended in disaster. While they were driving down a snow-covered hill next to Paradise Pond, as Sylvia wrote to Gordon, “the car plunged into a skid the likes of which I never hope to see again—speeding downward sideways. . . .” The car could have crashed into a tree or another car—or Paradise Pond itself—but fortunately it merely skidded into an embankment. Shaken by the memory of the near car-crash, which strangely terrified her even though she had just survived the more frightening ordeal of her own suicide attempt, Sylvia spent her first days at Lawrence familiarizing herself with her new room, a big maroon-gray-and-blue-painted single overlooking Green Street. Because of Sylvia’s general physical and mental condition, Smith gave her special considerations for the term. First, the single room—a rarity. Second, Lawrence reduced her house workload to a single duty: delivering the housemother’s breakfast tray each morning. Third, as a special student, she enrolled in only three courses: George Gibian’s Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Elisabeth Koflka’s Nineteenth Century Intellectual History, and Newton Arvin’s American Fiction 1830-1900. Naturally, Smith had not retained her scholarship monies for the year; to help Sylvia study worry-free, Aurelia cashed in an insurance policy to finance the spring semester. Sylvia’s adviser, Kenneth Wright, implored her to relax and enjoy her courses. As for her concern about earning low marks, Wright remembers telling her that “a person of her intelligence need have no such fears.” Finally, her doctors and Smith officials expected Sylvia to see the school’s psychiatrist, a Dr. Booth, once a week.

  With her lightened schedule, Sylvia could concentrate on readjusting to college life. On February 6, 1954, one week into the term, she attended a tea at the home of Elizabeth Drew, who embraced her and welcomed her back to Smith. The night before Valentine’s Day, Sylvia took in a reading given by Esther Forbes at the Hampshire Bookshop. On Valentine’s Day itself, she went to the dance drama Green Mansions; the day after, a lecture by Mary Ellen Chase. In those first two weeks, Sylvia read for her classes as well, finishing Sister Carrie, Crime and Punishment, and a collection of Hawthorne short stories. And to try her hand at boys, she went on a blind date one Saturday night with an attractive but shallow Amherst College student. Amid all these distractions, she did not feel disappointed that she would not be graduating with her class, Smith ‘54. Or so she reported to Gordon in the airmail letters she sent to him now that he had graduated from Newport and begun his service aboard the battleship U.S.S. Perry. The ship’s tour of duty in European waters, a special communications mission, was scheduled to last through May.

  At the start of Sylvia’s new life, she enjoyed a burgeoning friendship with Nancy Hunter, the girl who had taken over Sylvia’s spot in her second-floor double room, just down the hall from the single Sylvia currently occupied, when Sylvia had not returned to Smith in September. As they became acquainted, the young women realized that despite key differences (a transfer student from Wooster College in Ohio, Nancy was a true Midwesterner) they had a lot in common. Intellectuals, both had come from humble backgrounds, studied hard, and tried to fit into the college’s mainstream by not appearing to be “scholarship girls.” Before long, Sylvia and Nancy were spending many hours in each other’s rooms. Surprisingly, Sylvia did not avoid discussing events from the summer and fall. In their rambling conversations, Sylvia recounted her suicide attempt and, more important, the reasons behind the breakdown that caused the attempt. “A brief expedition into the New York world of fashion journalism triggered a spiraling depression from which she could not extricate herself as the summer wore on,’ Hunter would write, recalling Sylvia’s version of the story. “What should have been a stimulating, exciting round of gala festivities produced only a mounting tedium that did not subside even at the chance to meet and interview outstanding figures in the literary world. She found the work artificial and banal. [Soon she believed] that she could do nothing well except study and compile a superior academic record. When she began an earnest, unproductive study of Joyce’s Ulysses for her honor thesis . . ., the last shred of self-confidence withered. ‘I was a nothing,’ she exclaimed. ‘A zero’ ” Even more noteworthy, in their conversations Sylvia felt comfortable enough with Nancy to discuss her father’s death, a topic about which she had been close-mouthed for years. “She talked freely about her father’s death . . . and her reactions to it,” Hunter would write. “ ‘He was an autocrat’ she recalled. ‘I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him‘ And then she added, ‘The strangest part of the suicide attempt was regaining consciousness in the hospital. I don’t believe in God or in an afterlife, and my first reaction when I opened my eyes was “No, it can’t be. There can’t be anything after death.” ’ ”

  In her early days back at Smith, Sylvia received numerous letters inquiring about her health. One arrived from Eddie Cohen. Telling her that “in my own little way, I love you” and that he had learned about her suicide attempt by reading the Associated Press stories in his local papers, he confessed: “When I was writing you that
you should see a psychiatrist"—and he had, of course, as early as Christmas 1952—"I don’t think I conveyed to you the sense of desperation I felt about the matter. Actually, I was thinking much more than I said, and held long ethical debates with myself and a psychiatrist friend about the propriety of writing your mother and suggesting that you be put under convalescent care. I permitted myself to be talked out of it.” Sylvia answered Eddie, who had not been available to her in her time of crisis during the summer because he had married and gone on an extended honeymoon in Mexico where she could not reach him by mail, with a long recapitulation of the last several months of her life that did not differ drastically from the one she told Nancy. On the whole, she composed fewer letters these days, since she devoted almost all of her energy to schoolwork.

  March became so busy—she attended an I. A. Richards lecture, studied hard, and dated several boys—that by the end of the month she needed a break from her routine. Lately, she had begun corresponding with Ilo Pill, the Estonian artist whom she had known at Lookout Farm. Now living in Manhattan with his mother, Ilo suggested Sylvia visit him there during her spring vacation; she could stay with him at his mother’s apartment. Weighing the situation—this would be her first trip to New York since her breakdown—Sylvia decided to go. When her vacation arrived, though, she first spent a weekend at home during which, on the 25th, she traveled into Cambridge to lunch with Warren and meet his Radcliffe girlfriend; saw Barnhouse, who approved the New York trip; and took in the Cabaret Dance at Harvard’s Adams House. There she met “Scotty” Campbell, the assistant director of Harvard Summer School, who encouraged her to apply for a scholarship for the coming summer. Would last summer be held against her? she wanted to know. Absolutely not, Campbell assured her—much to Sylvia’s astonishment.