Excited by the news, Sylvia flew to New York on March 28—her first commercial flight. (Even though money was scarce, Aurelia had insisted she fly.) At LaGuardia Airport, Ilo and his mother greeted her warmly, then drove her to their apartment—a gloomy third-floor walk-up at Lexington and 123rd Street, the heart of Harlem. That evening, Ilo treated her to T. S. Eliot’s The Confidential Clerk. The next morning, he revealed that he was not going to work that day; at this point, Sylvia told him that she was engaged to be married and so she and Ilo could only be friends. She remembered all too well the embarrassing episode in the barn loft during her Lookout Farm summer and must have questioned her decision to come see Ilo in the first place. In fact, Ilo may have thought that by accepting his invitation Sylvia was implicitly agreeing to the physical relationship he had wanted years ago. When she made it clear that she wished to keep their association strictly Platonic, which she did by inventing the story about the fiance, Ilo dressed and went to work.
Relieved, Sylvia had lunch with Cyrilly Abels in the Ivy Room at the Drake Hotel. Later, she did go through with her plans to meet Ilo at the Metropolitan Museum, where they saw a show of the American painters Sargent, Whistler, and Cassatt. That night, again treated by Ilo, they took in William Inge’s play Picnic, which starred Sandra Church and Paul Newman. On Tuesday, after visiting the Museum of Modern Art, Sylvia ate supper with a friend of a friend named Atherton Sinclair Burlingham (nicknamed Bish), whom she was supposed to look up in New York and whom she would describe as being a Union Theological Seminary student. The next morning, a serious strain developed in her friendship with Ilo, who continued to manifest an interest that Sylvia did not approve of, and Sylvia announced with some ceremony that she intended to go back to Wellesley. Then she packed and left. But instead of returning home, she stayed in New York and called on friends, especially Bish. On her way to Wellesley by train on Saturday, she stopped off briefly in New Haven to see Melvin Woody, a boy whom she had met through Marcia in New York the summer before.
Back at Smith the next week, Plath tried to write a poem, something she had not done since last May. On April 16, once she had warmed up by revising “The Dead,” an old sonnet, Plath attempted a new poem, “Doom of Exiles,” also a sonnet. Their voice at times richer and more confident, these poems, though they finally fail to do so, strive to achieve a greater level of maturity than her earlier poetry.
Plath’s work also began to appear in print again. The Spring 1954 Smith Review, the journal of which she would have been editor if she had not had a nervous breakdown, published four Plath poems— “Admonitions,” “Never to Know More Than You Should,” “Verbal Calisthenics,” “Denouement.” Also, in May, Harpers ran “Doomsday.”
In the academic and creative areas of her life, Plath was now functioning as efficiently as ever. After Eddie had written in late April to ask if he had not heard from her because she had “run off with a handsome Czarist pretender [to live in] sensual and satisfying sin with him while he runs blow-darts to the Maumaus”—or had she been “popped back in an institution”?—Plath, who still hoped to write a short story based on their extensive correspondence, replied with a new plea for him to give up her letters. Eddie answered:
I suggest, flatly, that my letters have much more value than yours. Not as literature, certainly, but at least in terms of your facing the world, and yourself. Strong language, I admit, and you have never been particularly good at taking it before. It remains to be seen whether you are now capable of picking yourself off the floor and flinging it back in my teeth. When you are capable of doing that instead of pouting in silence for six months, you will have come a long way toward being a whole personality. As of now, or at least six months ago, you were no more capable of giving in anger than giving in love.
In her response, Sylvia ridiculed Eddie, radical bohemian that he used to be, for marrying into a mindless middle-class life. “How much freelancing will you be doing when there are three kids around the house wanting, respectively, to be diapered, fed and have the funnies read to them?” he shot back. “And will your husband, whoever he may be, find contentment in talking to you or making love to you while you are banging on a typewriter? You can’t plan your life out on paper and expect it to behave that way. I suspect that this tendency of yours contributed to your trouble. You didn’t know what to do when something happened that wasn’t in the blueprint.”
In this spring of 1954, one obvious symbol of Sylvia’s past trouble lingered—the brown scar under her right eye, from which she tried to distract attention by bleaching her hair platinum-blond. Or so she would tell her mother and others. In fact, she may have been trying to make herself more glamorous, which the platinum-blond hair definitely did, since during the spring term two boys—roommates, no less—had assumed a notable place in her life. In Calhoun College at Yale, Melvin Woody shared a room with Dick Wertz and Richard Sassoon; the former was a past boyfriend of Nancy’s, the latter a friend of Marcia’s. Mel regaled them with such glowing descriptions of Sylvia that Sassoon had convinced Wertz to go with him to Northampton to see her. As soon as Sylvia and Sassoon met, on the weekend of April 17, they were drawn to each other immediately. Sylvia was especially intrigued by Sassoon, a Paris-born British subject who had sophisticated tastes in music, literature, and wine. Moreover, even though he was nineteen, thin, and on the short side, Sassoon exuded a dark, lustful sexuality which deeply appealed to Sylvia. Also, she did not overlook the fact that Richard’s father’s cousin was the well-known British poet Siegfried Sassoon.
Their first date might have ended in calamity—Sassoon’s car became stuck in mud as they drove through the countryside and a tow truck had to be called to pull it out—but they still saw each other weekly from mid-April until the end of the semester. At this same time, Sylvia dated Sassoon’s roommate, Mel. In fact, their relationship had advanced to the point where intercourse was the next logical step. With Woody, though, Sylvia never went as far as she had with Philip and would in the future with others. A philosophy major, Woody wrote Sylvia in early May a tortured letter in which he complained of feeling an agonizing lack of completion in their relationship. He knew she was afraid of getting pregnant, yet he longed to have sex with her—and not just for the physical release but for the psychological and mental involvement that being intimate with someone can produce. He could not continue like this, he said; it was too emotionally painful for him.
On the face of it, Sylvia’s almost Byzantine romantic involvements, combined with the sexual frustration her dates expressed, implied that she was a tease. But by the moral standards of the day her behavior was understandable. With no reliable birth control available, no legal abortion, and the certain promise of social rejection should their affairs result in pregnancy, Sylvia and other young women and men suffered the constant stress of aroused and unresolved sexual tensions. In Sylvia’s case, because every one of her boyfriends fell in love with her, the tensions were magnified.
Despite her involvement with Mel, Sylvia went with Sassoon to New York for a weekend in early May. Afterwards, she felt excited over the trip—and the chance of a romance with Sassoon. Then again, much in her life seemed to be going well lately. On April 30, Smith awarded her a twelve-hundred-dollar scholarship for the next year—the college’s largest. Also, she finally selected her senior thesis subject—Dostoevsky, not Joyce—which allowed her to choose as her adviser George Gibian, her Russian-literature professor, whom she admired. Best of all, she received a Harvard Summer School scholarship. At the end of the semester, after she was elected president of Alpha Phi Kappa Psi, won a twenty-dollar poetry prize for “Doom of Exiles,” and earned excellent grades (American Fiction, A; Russian Literature, A; European History, A —), Sylvia returned to Wellesley. Only months before, she had been anguishing in a suicidal depression. Now, on top again, she was writing, publishing, and excelling in school just like the golden girl she once was.
3
When Sylvia arrived home at the end
of May with platinum-blond hair, her mother was shocked. Sylvia explained by saying that she was simply trying out a new adventuresome personality. Aurelia decided not to argue with Sylvia about the hair—or anything else, for that matter— for Sylvia’s sake and for her own. Aurelia’s ulcerous stomach, which had flared up in response to Sylvia’s breakdown, had become even worse of late. It had forced her to pass up teaching summer school and instead to rent a cottage on the Cape with her parents. Aurelia had not yet left Wellesley during the first five days in June, when Nancy Hunter—Sylvia’s twin, as she now referred to her—arrived for a stay. Nancy’s visit contained two high points. One afternoon she and Sylvia called on Mrs. Prouty. In a gesture that showed that, even though they were young women, they could still be girlish, Sylvia and Nancy became giddy with silliness and ate first one tray and then, once Prouty ordered it, a second tray of cucumber sandwiches—much to the horror of the butler who served them. The girls said that they had never before eaten cucumber sandwiches, although, of course, Sylvia had—at Mrs. Prouty’s. Prouty, a soft-spoken but forceful woman who dressed in tweed suits, silk blouses, and cashmere sweaters, and who seemed to carve out time from her busy schedule to give Sylvia her undivided attention when she visited, overlooked the girls’ behavior and talked with them on their own terms. The next day, Nancy’s birthday, Sylvia gave Nancy a copy of Alice in Wonderland, inscribed with the phrase “A classic, read-aloud heirloom to be taken in small, mirthful doses at bedtime.” Later, Sylvia drove Nancy to the Cape, where Nancy, a Midwesterner, saw the ocean for the first time in her life.
After Nancy’s visit, Sylvia tried her best to relax in preparation for her upcoming stint in summer school. She played tennis with Philip, dated Perry Norton (whom she had not seen in a year), attended an art festival and a Robert Frost reading, and at mid-month traveled to Hanover to serve as a bridesmaid for Marcia, who was marrying Mike Plummer. She also enjoyed visiting Gordon, who was back from his five-month tour of Europe. On the 10th and the 18th, she drove down to Newport, where the Perry was docked, to have lunch on board ship with her “Ensign Lameyer.” In the middle of this peaceful period, tragedy struck on the 21st, in Winthrop: Ruth and David Freeman’s father, William, died suddenly of a heart attack. Immediately, Aurelia, Sylvia, and Warren went to console the Freemans. While she walked through the town on this trip, Sylvia felt the passage of time more than she ever had before—the events of the last eighteen months almost overwhelmed her—and concluded that her days of youth had finally lost their idyllic luster. Following supper at the Freemans’, Sylvia helped David wash the dishes; she then strolled past her old house, which was now surrounded by, as she wrote to Gordon, the bushes her botanist father had planted. Eventually, because he needed to talk to her, David drove Sylvia home. If anyone could sympathize with David over the loss of his father, Sylvia could. After all, Sylvia had been consoled by David on the afternoon of her own father’s funeral, fourteen years ago.
In late June, as the Plaths and the Schobers vacationed on the Cape, in Eastham, Sylvia saw Dick Norton in nearby Orleans. Talking to him, she realized that she could never date him again. When she left that day, Sylvia actually felt sorry for him. Seeing Dick only furthered her conviction that she loved Gordon—a fact that she did not evade in the many letters she now wrote to him.
Around July 1, Sylvia, Nancy, who had also received a Harvard Summer School scholarship, and two other Lawrence girls rented a one-bedroom flat in the Bay State Apartments on Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge. In an informal arrangement, all four girls contributed a dollar a day for food, which, because they had taken the bedroom and left the other girls to sleep on a dingy hide-a-bed in the dining room, Sylvia and Nancy agreed to prepare, each cooking every other night. Together in Cambridge, only a “T” ride away from Boston, Sylvia and Nancy resolved to live the summer to the fullest. They shopped at Filene’s, ate in cafes, wandered through bookshops, went to concerts on the Esplanade, and whiled away many an afternoon sitting on the bank of the Charles. Early on in Boston, since they shared a bedroom, Nancy noticed the way Sylvia folded, stacked, and arranged her clothes with a sort of studied, military precision. When Nancy questioned her about this, Sylvia gave her a strange answer: “Yes, if anyone ever disarranged my things I’d feel as though I had been raped intellectually.” Neither girl—perhaps they were too young—mentioned the broader emotional issue this behavior suggested: that some people who suflFer catastrophic losses in childhood feel an overpowering compulsion to control all areas of their life later on, even down to the way they fold and stack their clothes.
In summer school, Sylvia signed up for two courses, German and The Nineteenth Century Novel. The latter—taught, ironically, by Frank O’Connor—had a challenging syllabus, which included Austen’s Emma and Pride and Prejudice, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, Dickens’s Bleak House, Trollope’s The Last Chronicle of Barset and Phineas Finn, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Tolstoy’s The Cossacks, Turgenev’s On the Eve, and Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. In July, as she studied German and read novels, Sylvia dated Gordon, either in Massachusetts or in Newport. Sylvia and Gordon might have become an item—the word marriage had actually been brought up—but Sylvia made a pact with Nancy to date other young men that summer. They tested their agreement one day, two weeks into the term, when, leaving the Widener Library, they encountered a tall, balding man who wore glasses. Striking up a conversation, the man—Edwin—told the girls that he was a professor from an Eastern school, doing research at Harvard for the summer, and that he wanted to take them to coflfee. In the coffee shop, Edwin talked about his life and work—like many professors, he tended to speak in monologues— as Sylvia and Nancy wondered which of the two he would ask for a date. Later, at the apartment, they got their answer. Edwin telephoned and, though Sylvia answered, asked to speak to Nancy.
On the night of July 19, when Edwin picked her up in his yellow sedan convertible, Nancy learned that their evening out would actually be a steak dinner cooked by Edwin at his apartment. After supper, Edwin became obvious with his sexual overtures. Nancy was just as obvious with her refusals. At one point, in a scene reminiscent of a bad Hollywood comedy, Edwin was literally chasing Nancy around the sofa. Eventually, in light of her demands to go home, he complied. At the apartment, while they lay in bed in their darkened bedroom, Nancy recalled for Sylvia Edwin’s escapades, which, perhaps because of their boldness, fascinated Sylvia. Over the next few days, as she screened Edwin’s calls, Sylvia became drawn into the conversations he would strike up with her. Ultimately, he asked her out, she went, and this date led to some involvement. On the afternoons of the 26th, 29th, and 30th, it was Edwin who drove Sylvia to appointments with Ruth Barnhouse, her McLean psychiatrist, whom she was seeing privately. Before long, Sylvia had a key to Edwin’s apartment.
Up to that point, Sylvia had not been involved with a seasoned lover. Now, though, she was. One night towards the end of their first week of dating, Sylvia and Edwin consummated their physical relationship. The end result was both terrifying and confusing for Sylvia. During the act, which she would vow she had been opposed to, Sylvia experienced a vaginal tear, which hemorrhaged. When the blood would not stop, Edwin took her to a neighborhood hospital. Sylvia signed in under a pseudonym, for fear that the newspapers might pick up the story— she could not forget last year’s media spectacle over her failed suicide attempt—and was examined and released by a gynecologist. After she spent what remained of the night with Edwin, she skipped her classes the next day to go with him to the; beach—and, she hoped, to recover from her trauma. At five, he dropped her off at her apartment, but no sooner had he left than she collapsed in the bathroom, blood puddling on the tile floor around her. Rushing to her side, Nancy heard Sylvia say, “I think I’m bleeding to death. You have to help me.” “Of course I’ll help you,” Nancy answered. “But I have to know what’s wrong. What’s causing the bleeding?” “He raped me,” Sylvia said.
When the bleeding became worse, Nancy telephoned the doctor who had examined Sylvia the night before. He told Nancy to attempt a particular home-remedy procedure on Sylvia; it did not work. Nancy then called Edwin and demanded that he drive them to the hospital. The treatment the doctor administered there finally stopped the bleeding. Later, a$ Sylvia and Nancy got out of his car to go into their apartment, Edwin said, “I’ll call tomorrow to see how she is.” To which Nancy responded, “Don’t bother. You’ve done enough.”
Within a week, Sylvia was dating Edwin again. Either Sylvia accepted more of the responsibility for the episode than she wanted to admit and therefore did not blame Edwin or she felt drawn to men whose behavior towards her tended to border on abuse. Just as she now continued to date a man who she said had “raped” her, she would soon become deeply involved with someone who would hit and spank her. Ultimately, there would be one man who, in part because of his violent nature, the brunt of which she often felt, captivated Sylvia so completely that only months after their meeting she had married him.
On Sunday, August 1, Sylvia ate supper with Gordon and his mother. When Sylvia and Gordon talked alone before supper, she explained her recent illness to him: Edwin had manually assaulted her—he had not, Sylvia reassured Gordon, gone any further—and had torn the skin of her vagina with his finger. Gordon accepted Sylvia’s explanation without asking what it said about his and Sylvia’s relationship, which had become so serious that Gordon considered them unofficially engaged. (He expected they would many after his discharge from the navy.) While Gordon was away for the next two weeks on a tour of duty off the Virginia coast, Sylvia wrote sexually suggestive letters to him that did little to dispel the idea that she now loved him dearly.
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