Rough Magic

by Paul Alexander

  Sassoon was left reeling. “I tried very hard . . . the last 24 hours we were together to reach you,” he wrote the Monday after she left. “I tortured you in my attempt and I also failed. I wanted more than anything in this world to bring you back to me, and I may someday be cut to think that was why I failed. But perhaps, the reasons lie more profound within us.” Despite their argument, Sassoon still loved her. “I do not believe I shall ever love another woman so heartedly, so deeply, so happily, so sadly, so confidently, so desperately, so fully, as my love for you has been.” He continued his line of thinking, using much more lyrical prose, in his next letter, written on Tuesday. “I promise you now, when you are ready for me, when you are really ready, ready so that if you were again by chance not ready . . . then I shall be waiting for you and ready to meet you—ready . . . for you even if you are not ready.”

  Indeed, Sylvia was not ready. Apparently, she put Sassoon completely out of her mind and immersed herself in writing. As of the Tuesday following New Haven, she had finished a lighthearted article about her first tea with Olive Higgins Prouty which she hoped to sell to Readers Digest. The next morning, she started “Platinum Summer,” a story she aimed to send to the “slick” magazines. That night, Mrs. Lameyer took her to supper and to Henry IV, Part I, staged at Theatre-on-the-Green. (Sylvia was reluctant about going, though she did not show her apprehension to Mrs. Lameyer.) But the high point of the week was a date with Peter Davison on Saturday night. After cocktails at Peter’s and supper at Chez Dreyfus, they went to Henry IV—Sylvia’s second time to see it in a week. She did not complain, for she now regarded Peter as a potential serious boyfriend. His boyish handsomeness matched his easygoing personality. His credentials were good too: born in New York, then raised in Miami and Colorado, he had been educated at Harvard and Cambridge. And she found him sexually appealing. Sylvia more than reciprocated when, in the living room of his apartment after Henry IV, Peter made a pass at her. She was so willing, in fact, that she readily followed Peter into his bedroom.

  Over the next few days, Sylvia worked on “Platinum Summer,” helped her mother, who had returned from the Cape, around the house, and dated Peter. Gordon wrote to ask if he could see her on the weekend of August 6. Since she had already agreed to go with Peter to Martha’s Vineyard, she quickly sent him back a letter, by airmail, which said that a friend of Alfred Kazin—a “Mr. Davison”—was taking her to the Vineyard to be interviewed by an agent, that this was her only opportunity to meet the agent, but that she desperately wanted to see him—Gordon—before she sailed to England. On her weekend with Peter, which they spent at Barn-House, a cooperative located on South Road near Chilmark, Sylvia met Roger Baldwin and Ann Hopkins, attended a champagne party given by a German baron and baroness, and learned even more about Peter—his father was close friends with Robert Frost, she noted—although no agent interviewed her. Nor was one supposed to. From the start, Peter intended the weekend to be strictly social.

  August was a banner month for Plath. The Atlantic Monthly printed “Circus in Three Rings"—Plath’s most satisfying publication to date; The Nation ran “Temper of Timq"; and Mademoiselle included “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea” as a sidebar to its article “Poet on College Time,” the Glascock piece, which mentioned Plath prominently. Because of these accomplishments, Plath heard not only from friends like Gordon and Mrs. Prouty but from Henry Volkening, an agent whose clients had included Thomas Wolfe and Saul Bellow and who possibly wanted to represent Plath. With August’s publications amounting to a kind of milestone, Plath could look back over her fledgling career. So far, she had written at least 220 poems—an enormous quantity for a young woman not yet twenty-three—as well as numerous short stories, newspaper articles, and magazine pieces. And now, as of August 1955, some of that work had found its way into national periodicals. But with acceptance came a never-ending flow of rejection slips. Most of the poems and stories she mailed out that summer were returned. The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly rejected poems; Colliers and Woman’s Day, stories. Yet Plath would simply not give up. Until the very end of her life, each rejection she received fueled in her a stronger desire to publish.

  On August 14, on a date with Peter Davison, Plath talked about her writing, especially her poetry. “I was far less impressed by the poems she was actually writing at that time"—he would call them “sedulous villanelles and acrobatic caprices"—"than by the furious intensity of her preparation,” Davison later wrote. “She had studied contemporary poetry like coastal charts before a voyage, and she enthused about makers I had never heard about—Isabella Gardner, George Barker, Theodore Roethke.”

  Over the last month or so, Sylvia and Peter had dated about a half-dozen times. Davison remembers that on almost every occasion, as they had on their first date, they ended up sleeping together. At some point on their date on the evening of the 19th, Sylvia finally felt comfortable enough with him to tell him about the summer of 1953. No doubt because the second anniversary of her suicide attempt was approaching, memories of the summer weighed heavily on her mind. That night, Sylvia confessed to Peter that she had considered either shooting herself or drowning herself before she finally settled on taking sleeping pills. In the wake of their intimate conversation, Peter believed that Sylvia had revealed to him some private part of herself. So, he was stunned when, on the evening of the 23rd, after supper at 26 Elmwood Road, where Peter met Aurelia for the first time, Sylvia took him on a long walk and told him that she did not want to see him again. She “spoke in such a way as to retract any tenderness that had infused our lovemaking,” Davison would write. “She was on the lookout for a man whose strength and gifts would anchor her instability, and I was at best a leaky life preserver.”

  On August 28, her summer affair with Peter over, Sylvia went to Washington, D.C., to see her friend Sue Weller, who was working for the government. During her stay, Plath visited several traditional tourist attractions—the Washington Monument, the National Gallery, the White House, the Supreme Court, the Capitol, and the Library of Congress. On September 2, she took the train to Baltimore to meet up with Gordon, who drove her back to Wellesley. In the car, they discussed various topics, among them literature and writing, but mostly they reminisced. Yet it became clear that Sylvia was trying to bring some sense of closure to their relationship, which had now essentially ended even though she would have supper with him on September 3 and with him and his mother the day after.

  In early September, Sylvia spent time with Warren (one day they swam in the icy waters off Crane’s Beach); talked with Peter on the telephone twice; saw Olive Higgins Prouty and Mary Ellen Chase, separately; and had supper one evening with the Harvard professor whom she had dated the previous summer. On the 12th, Warren drove her to New York. The next day, she wandered about the city, shopping at Bloomingdale’s and sightseeing at Rockefeller Center. On the 14th, she kissed Warren good-bye and boarded the Queen Elizabeth II, which set sail for England at nine o’clock in the evening. From the deck of the ship, Sylvia told Manhattan farewell—she would actually write that word on her calendar—as she watched the city slowly recede into a gray wash of twilight.

  Abroad

  1

  For the three days she sailed on the Queen Elizabeth II, Sylvia often socssialized with a boy named Carl Shakin. During the day, they sat out on deck; at night they went ballroom dancing, which gave Sylvia the chance to use the Fred Astaire dance lessons—a gift from Aurelia— she had taken just before her departure. Soon their friendship turned into what Sylvia called a shipboard romance. On September 20, the Queen Elizabeth II docked in Cherbourg, France, where Sylvia and Carl went ashore for a pleasant afternoon. Then the ship cruised on to Southampton, England, its port of entry; here the Fulbright students caught a train into London’s Waterloo Station. From there, a bus took them to their temporary residence at Bedford College on Regent’s Park. On their first night in London, Carl took Sylvia to Waiting for Godot. Over the next four days, Sy
lvia saw three more plays and the French film Rififi, and generally explored the city, usually with Carl. She also attended a reception for Fulbright English-literature students. At the reception, she met David Daiches, but because of (to her mind) poor hostessing, she was not introduced to John Lehmann, C. P. Snow, or Stephen Spender. On the 24th, Sylvia moved to a fourth-floor room at a YWCA, which she shared with three other Fulbright girls. After that, she spent less time with Carl and more with an old boyfriend of Sue Weller’s who took her to out-of-the-way spots, like a Dickensian pub called The Doves. Sylvia stayed in London until October 1, the date on which her Cambridge college—Newnham—opened and she took the train north to begin the Michaelmas term.

  In England, the universities were made up of free-standing colleges which were defined not by academic affiliation (Business, Engineering, Arts and Science) but by general mission. A student remained within his home college, unable to move from one to another. With names like King’s, Saint John’s, and Pembroke, several colleges formed Cambridge University. At Cambridge, the academic year was divided into trimesters, separated by two long vacations. Students, who wore black university robes to class, chose their triposes—the examinations they had to pass to graduate at the very end of their years of study—and prepared for them by attending lectures and tutorials on a volunteer basis.

  Early on in Cambridge, Sylvia became acquainted with the school and the town. She strolled through the university’s beautiful courtyards; hiked along the River Cam, which compared in width to Wellesley’s Linden Street; and, on the bicycle she had imported, snaked her way down the town’s tiny cobblestone streets lined with an assortment of cafes, public buildings, and shops. The walk from the university to the town was short (the two entities actually seemed to merge into one another), so Sylvia made the trip often. Each time, she noticed some new sight—a rose garden, a fish-and-chips store, an apothecary, a church.

  In those first days, Sylvia unpacked the clothes and books from her Samsonite luggage, which she had bought just for Cambridge, and arranged her things in her room. She had been assigned to live in Whitstead, a large ten-woman graduate-student residence house located on Barton Road, near Newnham. An attic single, her room had a gas fireplace, a gas ring on the hearth, bookshelves, and a cozy window seat on which she could sit and, when she was not reading or writing, stare over the treetops onto the Whitstead gardens below. Venturing out, Sylvia checked into the campus’s social life and learned that the university sponsored a club for almost everything, from “Esperanto to wine-tasting to Gepettos (puppetry) to tiddleywinks!” She introduced herself to her director of studies, Kathleen Burton, with whom she selected the triposes for which she would read, and went to her first lectures, which started on October 7. This term, Miss Burton would tutor her weekly; Sylvia would also go to lectures on tragedy. To prepare for her optional exams, Sylvia decided to sit in on F. R. Leavis’s lectures on the English moralists, Basil Willey’s on the history of literary criticism, and Joan Bennett’s on the seventeenth-century metaphysical poets.

  Immediately, Sylvia hated the weather in Cambridge. The temperature was colder than Boston’s, the British heating inferior to American. In the morning when she ate breakfast and dressed in her robe to go to lectures, she could actually see her breath.

  From the beginning, Sylvia read numerous books as background for her lectures and tutorials. Yet she also tried to strike up a social life, which did not promise to be too diflBcult since men outnumbered women ten to one at Cambridge. On the 10th, she dropped in on a Labour Party dance and met Malloiy Wober, a nineteen-year-old Londoner who had lived for years in India. Before long, Sylvia and Malloiy were friends, often sharing tea in each other’s “digs.” With his black hair, blush-red cheeks, and tall rugged build, Malloiy was a welcome exception to other British men, whom Sylvia now regarded as washed-out and fragile. One evening, after a concert in King’s College’s dining hall, Malloiy took Sylvia to supper at an Indian restaurant, the Taj Mahal, where he introduced her to mangoes and bindhi quaht, dishes familiar to him from his nine years in Darjeeling.

  To expand her social life further, Plath joined the Amateur Dramatic Club, for which she auditioned by reading the parts of Rosalind in Shakespeare’s As You Like It and Camille in Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real. By October 12, not two weeks into the term, what with dating, attending classes, and studying dramatics, Sylvia had come down with a sinus infection. As had been her custom at Smith, she checked into the campus hospital, whereupon she discovered that instead of Smith’s treatment of penicillin and cocaine spray she was to receive nothing stronger than aspirin. Also, she had to eat tasteless meals, unlike Smith’s delicious food, and deal with rude nurses who, if Sylvia asked for a tissue, offered to tear up a sheet. After a day of this treatment, Sylvia left the campus hospital and went downtown to her National Health Services physician, a Dr. Bevan, who prescribed appropriate medication and promised to X-ray her head within a week if she did not feel better.

  In time, Sylvia recovered from her sinus infection. Returning to her studies, she initiated a friendship with Jane Baltzell, a Whitstead resident with whom she shared tutorials with Miss Burton, and performed, in mid-October, in an Amateur Dramatic Club one-night-only showcase of a Pope play in which she delivered fifteen wordy speeches. Around this time, Sylvia also saw the royal couple—a rare sight for the British, much less an American. In Cambridge to christen the opening of a veterinary laboratory, Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were scheduled to come by Newnham for sherry and a presentation ceremony. After they were delayed by rain on the morning they were supposed to visit, the royal couple finally showed up. As they strolled between two greeting lines formed by the Newnham girls, Sylvia—so thrilled that she fell into Mademoiselle prose when she wrote about the episode later—thought the Duke “enchanting,” the Queen “quietly radiant in a Kelly-green princess-style coat and hat.” Following the brief ceremony, which left her “speechless with excitement,” Sylvia hurried out into the pouring rain to glimpse the royal couple getting into a car that would take them, she learned, to lunch at Trinity College.

  Several days later, still excited by the royal visit, Sylvia celebrated her birthday—her first abroad—by opening presents mailed to her by her family. She also set out on a new friendship with a charming “light-skinned Negro,” Nathaniel LaMar, to whom she had been introduced by boys from Pembroke College. A student of Archibald MacLeish’s at Harvard and an acquaintance of Warren’s at Exeter, LaMar, who had just published his story “Creole Love Song” in The Atlantic Monthly, would eventually become one of Plath’s best friends at Cambridge. By the end of October, when she wrote to Olive Higgins Prouty, who in her last letter had called Sylvia her “most wonderful-of-all scholarship girls,” Sylvia described her life as pleasant and full of activities. Indeed, she had been so pressed for time, she told Prouty, that she had postponed writing stories and poems until December.

  In early November, Sylvia saw I Am a Camera, engaged Nat LaMar in long literary chats in a local coffee house, and auditioned for a large part in Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair, for which she was turned down. Though not writing, she still submitted work to magazines. When she had shown a batch of poems to the editor of Chequer, one of Cambridge’s literary journals, he had accepted “Epitaph in Three Parts” and “ ‘Three Saiyatids Without a Portico’ by Hughes Robus: A Study in Sculptural Dimensions.” Yet as she read, attended lectures, and saw her friends, Sylvia became anxious. She felt Smith had trained her well in Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the moderns, but, she now decided, she was ignorant about many other periods of literature. She knew nothing of the classics or of any literature produced in England in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Because of her poor preparation, she could never attempt a doctorate, something she had considered doing.

  Around November 20, Sylvia had tea with Dick Wertz, Sassoon’s Yale roommate, who was reading in theology at Cambridge. As they talked, Sylvia realized she missed
Sassoon, then studying at the Sor-bonne. To take her mind off Sassoon, Sylvia dated several boys. One was David Buck, a resident at Christ’s who was reading in English and who had landed a major part in Bartholomew Fair. (In the end, Sylvia had been offered a five-line bit part as a prostitute which she accepted because she wanted the experience of performing in a Cambridge production.) Another was John Lythgoe, a kind-hearted biology student. But mostly, she saw Mallory, whom she now considered her “Jewish God.” On the weekend of the 18th, they attended Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie, read aloud Dylan Thomas and Oscar Wilde in his room, and went punting on the Cam. On one other occasion, after Sylvia had mentioned she regretted that she did not have a phonograph in her room, Mallory showed up with a stack of records, a gramophone, and—hard to believe—a Hammond organ that he had rented for a week.

  Starring Raymond Massey’s son Daniel, Bartholomew Fair ran from November 24 to December 3. Throughout rehearsals, Sylvia enjoyed playing a prostitute, although she had made up her mind to quit the Amateur Dramatics Club if she did not get bigger parts in the future. The opening-night audience included several critics (one long, negative notice eventually appeared in the London Times), and Mallory met Sylvia at the stage door after the premiere to congratulate her. By early December, the grind of the term—the academics, the dates, the play—had taken a toll. Sylvia succumbed to another sinus infection and a fever that became so bad she was bedridden, causing her to miss the last three performances of Bartholomew Fair.