Though she wrote love letters to Gordon and dated Edwin, Sylvia also occasionally saw another man, a Harvard professor whose wife, assuming that Sylvia and her husband were having an affair—they were not—referred to her as “the blonde bitch.” When Gordon returned from Virginia, he and Sylvia spent the August 14 weekend together and, for the first time in their months-long courtship, made love. In the following days, as the anniversary of last summer’s suicide attempt approached, Sylvia started to worry that because of their single sexual encounter she had become pregnant. Gordon, of course, was more than happy to propose marriage, but both he and Sylvia felt relieved when she finally got her period. Never again would Sylvia and Gordon be so close to marriage as they were in late August and early September of 1954, or so intimate.
4
For the first three weeks in September, Sylvia relaxed in Wellesley. She dated Gordon, read some, and considered what she would do after she graduated from Smith in May. She felt pulled in two directions: she hoped to have a family (with Gordon or someone else) but she also wanted to establish a career in writing or academics. Either way, she knew for certain that she would go to graduate school. Remembering her conversation with Mr. Crockett, she decided to apply to Oxford and Cambridge Universities, which she hoped to finance with a Fulbright Scholarship. (To play it safe, she would also apply to American universities and for additional scholarships.) So, when Plath returned to Smith to begin her senior year, which she did by settling into her (and Nancy’s) new room at Lawrence and by starting her classes—Esther Cloudman Dunn’s Shakespeare, Anita Luria Ascher’s Intermediate German, and senior thesis unit—she also drafted her statement of intent for a Fulbright. But the excitement of the term’s early days tired her out and, coming down with a respiratory infection, she—again—checked into the infirmary, where Gordon stopped by to see her on the 30th. Once released, she worked on her senior thesis, which would discuss, she and Gibian had concluded, Dostoevsky’s use of the double in the novella The Double and The Brothers Karamazov. The opening chapter, they further agreed, would be due by October 22.
As she drafted her thesis chapter, studied, and worked odd jobs to make money, The Smith Alumnae Quarterly asked Plath to write an article about Alfred Kazin, that year’s English-department Neilson Professor. Once he had met Sylvia and discovered that she was talented and had already chalked up an impressive list of publications, Kazin invited her to sit in on his creative-writing section. Following the first class, in which Plath stood out among the other ten students as she oflFered opinions on the stories up for discussion, Kazin suggested that she join the group permanently. The author of On Native Grounds and A Walker in the City, Kazin had a reputation too impressive for Sylvia to resist studying with him, so she added his course. “The teacher can help the student in two ways, Mr. Kazin points out: first, to have confidence in her own individuality; and, second, to learn that all literature is discipline,” Plath wrote in her article (which she finished by the end of October and The Smith Alumnae Quarterly published in its fall issue). Plath took Kazin’s advice to heart and wrote a short story—her first in nearly two years. “[Kazin] told me it’s my holy duty to write every day, spill out all, learn to give it form,” Sylvia wrote to Gordon at this time. “He is extremely critical and encouraging, and the fortuitous accident of interviewing him is something 111 praise fortune for all my life long. I adore him!”
Otto Plath, 1924
(Rare Book Room, Smith College)
Sylvia, age two (T. B. Conlin)
RIGHT: Sylvia and Warren (Lilly Library, Indiana University)
BELOW: Sylvia and Warren, August 1940, in Winthrop (Lilly Library, Indiana University)
BELOW: The Plaths—Warren, Aurelia, Sylvia (Lilly Library, Indiana Universitu)
ABOVE: Sylvia, February 1947, at the Powleys’ country home in East Colrain, Mass. (Betsy Powley Wallingford)
RIGHT: Betsy Powley, 1947 (Betsy Powley Wallingford)
Sylvia, a leggy teenager, in Wellesley (Lilly Library, Indiana University)
Wilbury Crockett, Sylvia s teacher, in the late 1940s (Gamaliel Bradford High School)
Sylvia and Marcia Brown on a skiing vacation, February 1951, in New Hampshire (Rare Book Room, Smith College)
Sylvia and Joan Cantor at the beach, August 1952 (Rare Book Room, Smith College)
Sylvia, 1952. Aurelia later sent a print of this photograph to Sylvias children, and wrote on the back: “To Frieda and Nick/Fall of 1952/Sylvia—your mummy, who loved you with all her heart.” (Rare Book Room, Smith College)
RIGHT: Sylvia in her dormitory, Haven House, at Smith (Barbara Sugarman Cohen)
Lynne Lawner (© Pino Abbrescia)
Plath reading in the Glascock Poetry Contest at Mount Holyoke College (Mount Holyoke College Library/Archives)
BELOW: Sylvia Plath interviewing Elizabeth Bowen for Mademoiselle, summer of 1953 (Lilly Library, Smith College)
ABOVE: Edward Cohen in the early 1950s (Edward Cohen)
Sylvia with Richard Norton at the Yale prom (Lilly Library, Indiana University)
RIGHT: Peter Davison, 1955, rehearsing for The Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.
Philip McCurdy, December 1953, in his room at Harvard. Sylvia was standing behind the photographer, waiting to be taken out to dinner. (Philip McCurdy)
BELOW: Sylvia and Gordon Lameyer (Gordon Lameyer)
OPPOSITE: Sylvia in her bridesmaids dress, with Ruth Freeman, just before Ruth’s marriage to Arthur Geissler (Ruth Freeman Geissler)
Sylvia in Paris, 1956 (Gordon Lameyer)
BELOW: Ruth Bamhouse with her first two children, February 1953, shortly before she began treating Sylvia (Ruth Bamhouse)
Newnham, Sylvias Cambridge College
RIGHT: The Beacon—Ted’s family home in Heptonstall, Yorkshire
Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes in Paris just after their honeymoon in Benidorm, Spain, in 1956 (Rare Book Room, Smith College)
ABOVE: A street in Heptonstall
The moors behind The Beacon, where Ted and Sylvia went walking
Court Green, North Tawton, Devon
BELOW: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, 1956 (Rare Book Room, Smith College)
Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath in Concord, Mass., December 1959 (Rare Book Room, Smith College)
The hedgerow-lined lane near Court Green down which Plath rode when she was taking horseback-riding lessons in 1962; the experience would be reflected in her Ariel poems.
ABOVE: Sylvia Plaths grave in Heptonstall in late 1988. When a third tombstone was removed from Plath s grave because, as had happened with the previous two stones, vandals chiseled off the name “Hughes” from “Sylvia Plath Hughes,” a local resident erected a handmade cross that bore only “Sylvia Plath.”
23 Fitzroy Road in London, formerly Yeats’s house. Sylvia hoped that living there would make her work blessed. (Elaine Henderson Duble)
Aurelia Plath with Sylvia s letters, at the time of the publication of Letters Home (© Arthur Grace/Sygma)
By mid-semester, Sylvia had once again pushed herself to the limit. Besides keeping up with her classwork, now fifteen hours’ worth, she busily applied to graduate schools, submitted her work to magazines, and served in extracurricular organizations like Alpha Phi Kappa Psi. Indeed, she felt so pressed for time, she wrote to Gordon, who was now living temporarily in Wellesley while the navy repaired the Perry, that she would not be able to see him—not even on weekends. In one letter, Sylvia begged Gordon to have patience with her and to accept her weaknesses and limitations. When, in late October, he asked to visit her anyway, she told him that she would not have any free time for around eight months.
In a way, Plath really did have a full schedule. Professor Joyce Homer interviewed her for Oxford on October 28, Mary Ellen Chase for Cambridge on November 9. To create the proper image, Sylvia had dyed her platinum-blond hair walnut-brown. In November, the interviews behind her, she relished the publication of her poem “Go Get the Goodly Squab” in Har
pers, an occasion significant enough—her third poem in the magazine in a year—to warrant a Wellesley Townsman article. In mid-November, Cyrilly Abels wrote Plath to tell her that her poem “Parallax” had won honorable mention in Mademoiselle’s Dylan Thomas Poetry Contest. And, over Thanksgiving break, she had so much to do—work on her thesis, read Shakespeare—that Sylvia could be with Gordon, still living in Wellesley, only at Thanksgiving dinner. Soon after this, Gordon lost his patience. “Although I know you are not thinking of leaving me for another man (unless for the time being it is Fyodor [Dostoevsky]), your attitudes toward me have changed and mine toward you,” he wrote on December 2. “Last summer the reality of a fissure in our relationship seemed like an impossible bad dream; we wondered what there could be which we could disagree about and which we could not settle peacefully in words.” But now the “impossible” seemed to have happened. He was hurt by her refusal to see him, Gordon let her know, and he disliked “some of [her] disconcerting remarks.” Why had their relationship deteriorated?
In a word, Sassoon. During November, as she put off Gordon, Sylvia had become preoccupied with Richard Sassoon. By December, she hoped to have an all-out love affair with him. On the weekend of the 10th, they went to New York together. If they had not been physically intimate before now, they were during this trip. On the 18th, Sassoon wrote to Sylvia—his characteristic ornate English-mixed-with-French prose pulsed on the page, even when its sentences’ syntax sometimes rendered its meaning incomprehensible—to chide her for bossing him. “Worst, what no woman has dared, you tell me what to do! Yet fetch and carry for the future like an American rattle-snake stung female hound in the hunt and the spring, when lame laddies are in love the way the cloud is in the sky by the grace of God, the ocean and the sun and cannot tell if [it] floats.” Later in the letter, Sassoon joked that he was “scolding” her, because “one must always be inventing new ways of scolding when one is conceiving new ways of loving.” His parting passage would have rivaled any written by Sylvia’s previous boyfriends. “Darling, darling, my darling, my very darling,” he gushed, “I think you will never die or be old, because I love you too much and there is a force and a fire and a fury of life in my love.”
Plath may have been falling in love with Sassoon, but she still worked to further her career. In December, she entered Vogue’s Prix de Paris competition, finished the rough draft of her thesis, and published her poem “Circus in Three Rings” and her short story “In the Mountains” in The Smith Review, on whose editorial board she again served. Also, beginning in December and continuing into January, she lined up individuals to write letters of recommendation for her various scholarship (Fulbright, Radcliffe, and Woodrow Wilson) and graduate-school applications. Had she ever been able to read these private documents, she would have been deeply heartened. “If any graduating senior deserves an opportunity to study abroad,” Mary Ellen Chase stated, “[Sylvia] most surely does.” Elizabeth Drew offered similar acclaim: “I have known Miss Sylvia Plath intimately as a student for the past three years, and I have never had a more brilliant and a more charming student to teach. . . . I can truthfully say that I cannot think of any American student that I would choose above Miss Plath to represent America in my country [Drew was British].” Newton Arvin said he believed that “[Sylvia] will prove to be a really original teacher and writer,” while Kazin called her “someone to be watched, to be encouraged—and to be remembered.” And Gibian, who thought Plath was “the outstanding student in my experience at Smith College,” felt that “we shall hear further of her as a scholar, short story writer, and poet.”
The challenge facing these recommenders—and Plath—was not complicated. They had to convince graduate-school and scholarship committees to support the candidacy of a student who had a record of serious mental instability. Logically, Ruth Barnhouse, Plath’s psychiatrist, could best address this issue. Regarding Plath’s breakdown, treatment, and present academic pursuits, Barnhouse wrote:
In my opinion, 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 channelled 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. She is extremely quick and sensitive in her relationships with others, and this, combined with her natural intelligent curiosity, leads her to seek experience almost for its own sake. In my opinion she is perfectly capable of handling the difficult situations into which these attitudes sometimes lead her. . . . She has confidence in her abilities without seeming over-confident. Her chief fear is that having had an emotional upheaval sufficiently severe to provoke her hospitalization will be held against her as evidence of basic instability. While in many cases this might be a valid conclusion, in the case of Miss Plath, I feel that anyone refusing her for a position on those grounds would be depriving not only Miss Plath, but also depriving themselves.
Oddly, the only negative comments made about Plath in these letters of recommendation came from Lawrence House, whose housemother filed in the Vocational Office an evaluation as disparaging as Plath’s teachers’ were laudatory. “Sylvia Plath is a girl of unquestionable character,” Estella Kelsey wrote. “Her appearance is quite striking. She has a pleasant voice and pleasing, correct deportment. [But she] is self-centered and very selfish. Her talent for writing has made her difficult for the girls to live with.”
5
After she spent Christmas in Wellesley, Sylvia returned to Smith in early January. As soon as she got back, she developed her worst sinus infection yet. During a near week-long infirmary stay, she wrote five poems and entertained a handful of guests. One, sent to her by Alfred Kazin, was a young Harcourt, Brace assistant editor named Peter Davison who told her to keep him in mind if she ever finished a novel. Released from the infirmary, Plath submitted her new poems (along with two others) to The New Yorker, dropped off to a typist the draft of her thesis, The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels (in accepting it Gibian had called it a “masterpiece”), and focused on her classes. For the semester, her last, she enrolled in Dunn’s Shakespeare, Helene SommerfekTs Intermediate German, Kazin’s Twentieth Century American Novel, Alfred Young Fisher’s one-hour independent-study course Theory and Practice of Poetics, plus Honors hours. Not long afterwards, Vogue announced that she had reached the finals of the Prix de Paris, which meant that she had next to write a ten-page treatise on Americana. Despite her recent illness and her more remote nervous breakdown, Plath seemed to be as highly motivated—and as busy—as ever.
On January 22, Plath interviewed at Harvard with a screening committee for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. In the meeting, it became apparent that the four-man-and-one-woman panel frowned on Plath’s application, not because of her resume but because of her gender. Following the interview, having told her mother she planned to see a recently married Smith friend in New York, Sylvia went to Logan Airport and flew to New York, to meet not a Smith friend but Sassoon. (Curiously, Sylvia now seemed to have enough money for periodic air trips, even though her budget remained tight.) Over the next three days, she tried to forget the Wilson interview, which she felt she had little chance of passing, and absorbed herself in New York’s cultural and social life. Besides seeing the Japanese film Gate of Hell and the Russian Jewish play The Dybbuk, Sylvia and Sassoon ate at several French restaurants—Le Gourmet, Cafe Saint-Denis, and Le Veau D’Or. Back at Smith, Plath received the bad news she expected. On January 27, she opened a letter from Francis M. Rogers, who informed her that her “name [had] been withdrawn from the list of nominees who [were] still being considered for National Woodrow Wilson Fellowships.” Rogers also suggested that Plath “consider applying to a graduate school that is not most likely to be overcrowded with applicants in your field.” In disbelief, Sylvia underlined this sectio
n of the letter. More forthcoming on her calendar, she wrote next to this date “refusal from WWilson” and “SHOCK!” Sylvia now feared that she would also be turned down for a Fulbright and that her application for a Radcliffe would be blocked by Rogers, a dean at that college.
Life looked much better for Sylvia in February. At mid-month, she was accepted in the honors bachelor’s program (the equivalent of an American master’s) at both Cambridge and Oxford Universities. Overjoyed, she wrote her mother about the acceptances, saying that she thought British men were wonderful. No doubt, she was thinking of Sassoon, with whom her relationship had become more complicated. On the 8th, they had slipped away to New York for another quick trip, and it was at this time that their involvement took on darker colorings. Returning to New Haven, Sassoon wrote Sylvia—his “very dearest": “Do not think I am scolding you, my love, for I have recently decided that you are a quite grown up child and that I may not henceforth chide you in the manner to which I am used, nor even probably spank you. Such it is that if you ever anger me greatly I shall have but two alternatives, one of which is to beat you, which is a very different thing from spanking.” At the end of the letter, Sassoon added an afterthought:
Rough Magic Page 19