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: “Do not take me too literally about not spanking you anymore. . . .” (Eventually, Sylvia would tell a friend that one time at Rahar’s Sassoon had become angry at her and slapped her.) If she was searching for an affair more complex than the one she had had with Gordon, she had certainly found it with Sassoon.
March was as bustling—and draining—as any recent month. For school, Sylvia studied German, read Shakespeare, and wrote about five poems a week in Fisher’s directed-study course. For Mademoiselle, she reported on Smith’s symposium “The Mid-Century Novel,” which Chase chaired, and which featured such speakers as Kazin and Saul Bellow. Although Sylvia had supper with Gordon on the 6th—a pleasant evening—she was so exhausted by mid-month that she checked into the infirmary for two days. As of March 23, she felt well enough to date Peter Davison, the young Harcourt, Brace editor. In Northampton for his quarterly trip to bookshops, Davison took her to lunch at Rahar’s; then she drove with him to drop in on stores in Holyoke. Sylvia found out that Peter, a Harvard graduate and a Fulbright fellow, was the son of the British poet Edward Davison, who taught at Hunter College and who spoke on the women’s club lecture circuit. Also, Peter could be charming—the sort of young man she would like to go out with more in the future.
At home on spring break for the first two weeks in April, Sylvia saw Philip McCurdy, visited her friend Sue Weller in Cambridge, and worked on typing her poetry manuscript Circus in Three Rings, which she was assembling for Alfred Young Fisher. Refreshed, Sylvia returned to Northampton at mid-month, then two days later left for Mount Holyoke, where she was to compete in the Irene Glascock Poetry Contest, a student literary competition whose past winners included Muriel Rukeyser, James Agee, and Robert Lowell. On arriving at Holyoke, Plath checked into the dormitory room that had been reserved for her. Later, in the dormitory, she met Lynne Lawner, a brilliant and classically beautiful young woman in her sophomore year at Welles-ley College, who was also a contestant. Soon, the two went over to an informal reception and joined the other four Glascock contestants, all of whom were interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor and Mademoiselle and photographed with contest judge Marianne Moore, whom Plath had never met.
Following supper, everyone moved on to the main event. In an oak-paneled room, the contestants seated themselves at a long table. Behind them rose a wall of bookshelves filled with poetry volumes. Before them sat the judges—John Ciardi and Wallace Fowlie were the other two—and an audience of about two hundred, mostly Mount Holyoke students. Beginning the ceremony with a brief opening speech, Moore advised the poets to “write what you are impelled to write,” to be resilient to “rebuffs and unfavorable comments,” and “to do something else for a living—something that doesn’t grate on your nerves too much—[so that] you can do your writing in evenings and on weekends.” The house lights dimmed, a hush fell over the crowd, and each poet read. From her portfolio, Plath chose “Winter Words,” “Epitaph,” “Lament,” “Verbal Calisthenics,” “April Aubade,” “Love Is a Parallax,” “Danse macabre,” and “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea.” When Plath finished, the audience applauded enthusiastically.
At a party after the reading, Plath met Ciardi and Fowlie, both of whom she adored. Saturday morning, breakfast in bed was served to each contest participant. Then the six student poets recorded poems for the campus radio station, listened to a forum on translation presented by the judges, and attended a luncheon in their honor. At Smith on Monday, Plath glowed when she saw The Christian Science Monitor. In it, her “April Aubade” appeared alongside the article “Judges Hear Glascock Poetry Contestants” and several photographs—small shots of the contestants and a large one of Moore sitting on a sofa chatting with Plath. Three days later, Sylvia received from a contest spokesman a letter that contained some of the judges’ comments. “[Moore] commends your spirit, patience, craftsmanship, and strong individuality,” the spokesman wrote. “Her main adverse criticism is of a too adjectival manner at times bordering on formula.” Confusing signals—but Plath accepted them. She had become inured to hearing mixed news. In mid-April, for example, The Atlantic Monthly’s Edward Weeks accepted a poem—sort of. Though he regarded the second stanza of Plath’s “Circus in Three Rings” as “a perfect beauty,” he believed “neither the first nor the third are up to it.” Therefore, he suggested Plath take the second stanza, build a poem around it, call it (because of its controlling metaphor) “Lion Tamer,” and resubmit it to him. To tempt her, Weeks enclosed a check for twenty-five dollars and hinted at including the poem in the magazine’s August “Young Poets” section.
Surely Weeks did not mean to, but he disturbed Plath greatly with his letter. Indeed, Sylvia told her mother that the letter, which she considered paternalistic, made her feel ill and disillusioned. She resented Weeks s attempt to alter her work in any way. But he did present her with the chance to appear in The Atlantic Monthly, so, after discussing her problem with Fisher, Plath decided to submit to Weeks the original “Circus in Three Rings,” a newly composed “Lion Tamer,” and five other poems. In her cover letter, Plath told Weeks that she preferred “Circus in Three Rings,” that his magazine was among the very few in which she wanted to publish, and that she had been chosen, which she had just learned, one of the winners of the Glascock competition. (She had tied with William Key Whitman; the two split the one-hundred-dollar prize.) All bases covered, Plath mailed Weeks her package.
As she waited for a response, she received more distinctions. In late April, she won the Alpha Phi Kappa Psi Award, the Alpha Award in Creative Writing, and a one-hundred-dollar Christopher Prize. In the middle of all this success, though, Sylvia faced near disaster: her mother suffered yet another gastric hemorrhage. With Aurelia’s future prognosis unclear—major stomach surgery seemed unavoidable—Sylvia demanded that she take the coming summer off, rent out 26 Elmwood Road, and convalesce on the Cape.
Sylvia herself now felt the term’s wear and tear. To relieve some of the pressure, she withdrew from a course—German—which she did not need to graduate. (That she was dropping one of her father’s favorite subjects did not appear to occur to her.) Life was a neverending struggle between emotional demands and physical energy, she wrote to Gordon, who had himself become an emotional demand on Sylvia. This tension had developed not because of any rift between the two of them but because Sylvia and Sassoon had fallen in love. Soon after they spent a Saturday night together at Elinor Friedman’s house in Longmeadow, at which time Sylvia had prepared him a lamb chop supper, Sassoon wrote, “[Y]ou will torture tonight! It will do no good, I shall only wake tired and angry and incompetent to deal with the world . . . but you will torture . . . because I love you.” To put off Gordon so that she could see Sassoon, Sylvia still maintained that she was too busy for Gordon to visit her. As a result, one April weekend, Gordon went on a skiing trip to Canon Mountain with two girls from Pembroke College. On a particular run, he bolted head-first into a woodpile and broke the metacarpal in his hand, an injury serious enough to require minor surgery at a naval hospital. Before long, jus
t as Sylvia had interpreted her fractured fibula as her “break” with Dick, Gordon identified his cracked metacarpal as his “break” with Sylvia.
Though she was trying to end her affair with Gordon, Sylvia mailed him, towards the end of April, a letter in which she enclosed her “Sonnet for a Green-eyed Sailor,” a wild, hypnotic love poem she had written for him. Sylvia might have preferred Sassoon, but she obviously could not let go of her feelings for Gordon. After all, she had loved— and no doubt did love—Gordon too. Many years later, towards the end of her life, evidence of her love for him would resurface. Then, if not now, she saw the loss of that love as tragic.
Seemingly, with each passing day of her last month at Smith, Plath received greater acclaim. On May 4, she appeared at a literary festival in Kingston, New York. She judged a creative-writing contest and read her poems to an audience of seven hundred students from across the state. On the 12th, she won an honorable mention, one of twelve, in Vogues Prix de Paris. A follow-up letter suggested that she apply for a job at Conde Nast. At Last Assembly, on May 18, she was awarded the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize, the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize for her poem “Second Winter,” the Marjorie Hope Nicholson Prize for best senior thesis (she shared it with another student), and the Academy of American Poets Prize, voted to her by the English department on the basis of an anonymous manuscript of ten poems. The next day, Mademoiselle bought “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea” as a companion to an article on the Glascock which the magazine planned to run in August. Two days later, The Atlantic Monthly s Weeks accepted not “Lion Tamer” but “Circus in Three Rings,” also to come out in August. And, finally, the Spring 1955 Smith Review contained her poem “Danse macabre” and her story “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit.” But the best news of all arrived on the 20th. On that date, Plath read a letter from the State Department’s International Educational Exchange Service: she had been granted a Fulbright Scholarship to study literature at Cambridge University. She especially wanted a Fulbright because that grant, unlike others, covered almost all tuition, travel, and living expenses. Overjoyed, Sylvia telephoned her mother, who was in Newton-Wellesley Hospital being given intravenous feedings to reconstitute her system for the subtotal gas-trectomy which doctors had decided she needed.
During the next few days, Sylvia lived in a state of wonderment. When she wrote to Lynne Lawner, with whom she had become pen pals after Glascock, she described herself as “walking on air” due to her Cambridge acceptance—sure to fail her finals because of this “feather-headedness.” She would sail for London in September on the Queen Elizabeth, she continued, a dream come true.
In May, as Gordon faded from the picture, Sassoon had become the focus of Sylvia’s affection. She had visited him one weekend at Yale, and he had written her nine long letters. He ended one with his now standard “Darling, I love you,” before he lapsed into a splattering of French punctuated with the word “LOVE” printed in letters three inches high. In another, he stated: “[M]y love lies in waiting still and stealthy . . . as a tiger, that can be taught to be gentle, I think.” In yet another, he confirmed plans to celebrate the end of Plath’s finals by meeting her in New York. Following that trip, during which she took in Desperate Hours, several films, Central Park, and the Museum of Modern Art and lunched with Cyrilly Abels, Plath described the event to Lawner as “magnificent.” Her Manhattan fling with Sassoon behind her, graduation awaited.
For someone who had led such an active undergraduate career, Plath did not appear prominently in her senior yearbook. Listed as “not pictured” under the photograph of The Smith Reviews staff, she showed up only in the group shot of Lawrence House members, except, of course, for her senior portrait, which depicted a smiling collegiate Plath—a true Smithie—in pageboy hairdo, white blouse, and cashmere sweater. However, at the end of the year she received several awards that distinguished her. By Last Chapel on June 3, Plath had been given the Clara French Prize (for being the outstanding student of English) and selected both as a member of Phi Beta Kappa and as a summa cum laude graduate, one of only four in her class.
Graduation ceremonies took place on Monday, June 6, a beautiful, crisp New England late-spring day. On the stage sat the honorary-degree recipients, among them Marianne Moore. In the huge audience sat Aurelia Plath, who had checked out of the hospital and arranged for a friend to drive her to Northampton. (Along the way, Aurelia lay on a mattress in the back of her friend’s station wagon.) The centerpiece of the ceremony, which occurred on the college’s quadrangle, was the commencement address given by former Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson, whose son, coincidentally, was engaged to be married to Nancy Anderson, another Smith ‘55 graduate. Standing at the podium before Smith’s six hundred seniors, these women who had just completed one of the most rigorous undergraduate programs in America, Stevenson, himself divorced, informed the graduates that their “highest vocation” in life, as Plath would recall his wording, was to achieve a “creative marriage.” At the end of his speech, the audience applauded: Stevenson had not said anything at all alien to the crowd that day. After all, women were expected to marry, have children, run a home, volunteer in the community. If a woman wanted a career, she pursued it in addition to her domestic life. As Polly Longsworth, Smith ‘55, remembers: “I think we were in a condition of mind where we could hear Stevenson’s message—we’d been brought up on it—but not believe it. Smith had told us differently for four years. It was only later, when his words began to prove true, that most of us got mad.” On that day in June, Sylvia Plath was surely not mad as she took her place in the alphabetical roll call of names and proudly accepted her Smith diploma.
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One person who did not attend Sylvia’s graduation was Gordon. “I have taken all you had to give—and you gave more than anyone,” he wrote to her in early June. “We diverge now, you set on a bramble path in the middle of a lemon forest, and I drifting on a balancing craft over a liquorish, clouded sea. Though I am cast up now out of the round belly of the whalewhite night upon the headland of the bloodrock shore, I will taste still the sea on my tongue and feel the tempest wind swim through my hair.” After she read Gordon’s letter, Sylvia did something odd: she tried to make up with him. In late June, they played tennis and went to Cranes Beach twice. As she rekindled this affair— it did not become sexual—Sassoon grew impatient. In June alone, he wrote her ten letters. “I and the sky are both pretending and hiding a very terrible fire. . . . [I]t burns tremendous deep and the brand is a beam and gleams with a rage beyond redness—in a bomblike between sorrow and gladness—a tenor like before screaming scaring sound to slight in a frozen blare—burns. . . . I long for my Sylvia.” After graduating from Yale and moving off campus, Sassoon even described his apartment as belonging to “Sylvias Lover.” By the end of the month, though, he knew things were terribly wrong. “It’s an awfully long time since I asked a girl to write me,” he said in one letter, before he told her to send him a card “to let me know if you are quite well.”
In June, Sylvia distracted herself from Sassoon by keeping busy. She visited her mother, still in the hospital, who had been operated on during the week of the 13th. She submitted poems to Harper’s, Harpers Bazaar, The Ladies’ Home Journal, and The Nation, which accepted “Temper of Time.” And, on the 11th, she served as maid of honor at the wedding of Ruth Freeman and Arthur Geissler at Saint John’s Episcopal Church in Winthrop. Also, during that month, she ate supper, separately, with Wilbury Crockett and Patsy O’Neil and wrote to the Academy of American Poets to thank them for her prize. But her biggest diversion was the prospect of a new boyfriend. In June, Peter Davison quit his job at Harcourt, Brace in New York to accept the position of assistant to the editor at Harvard University Press in Cambridge. “I hope to see a bit of him,” Plath wrote to Lawner about Davison, now a candidate for an affair.
At the end of June, on the same day Sassoon wrote his letter asking to hear from her, Sylvia dropped him a note. “At l
ast a whiff of perfume in my mailbox . . . in my whitewalled damnably odourless home,” Sassoon wrote back. “I love you, Sylvia. A madness I am strong enough to live with—even alone.” To compensate further for her neglect, Sylvia telephoned Sassoon early one Sunday morning. In a long letter which he wrote just after they hung up, Sassoon said: “I want. . . very much to see you again soon, my darling . . . [but] I must stop my mouth and stopped it is until my pretty Sylvia smiles and the lights change and .. . my God, I fear it will be a very dangerous moment.” Then, Sylvia invited Sassoon to Wellesley for the July Fourth weekend. “Darling, darling, thank you for inviting me,” Sassoon answered. “I was afraid that . . . you wouldn’t. . . because you were doubtless calculating . . . how many beach hounds [Sylvia had been sunning at the lake] severely wounded by the lack of bronze, how. . . Dids’t count swounds, wretched woman?! . . . [Anyway,] two days with my love is worth the world the wretched ways of which are payment for it.”
Following her weekend with Sassoon, Sylvia drove her mother, just released from the hospital, to the Cape so that the family could celebrate Grammy and Grampy’s fiftieth wedding anniversary on the 10th. Afterwards, Sylvia returned to Wellesley alone, while Aurelia remained to convalesce. Later in the month, Sylvia traveled to New Haven. Sassoon had hoped her visit would be pleasurable, but midway through the weekend, they got into a heated argument—at one point, Sylvia accused him of faithlessness—which apparently Sylvia, not Sassoon, started. Sassoon could not figure out why Sylvia wanted to fight. In retrospect, one reason suggests itself. Like Eddie, Dick, and Gordon before him, Sassoon had fallen in love with Sylvia. As they discussed their future life together, Sylvia became uneasy. How could she give herself to Sassoon? In fact, she found him lacking in such basic areas as looks and temperament. When she had located character flaws in her previous boyfriends, she always first abruptly pulled away, then instigated a slow dissolution of the relationship. (Gordon was currently in the slow-fade stage.) In short, during the spring term, as Sassoon had become more in love and less aggressive with her, he had turned into a weak figure in her eyes. Now his shortcomings seemed even worse. It was only a matter of time before Sylvia lost interest—and dropped him.
Rough Magic Page 20