On December 4, she had recovered enough to have lunch with— of all people—Sassoon, who had flown to England to visit relatives and dropped by Cambridge to see Dick Wertz. After lunch, Sylvia served Dick and Sassoon tea in her room. Before Sassoon left, he and Sylvia agreed to meet in Paris over Christmas vacation. One reason Sylvia decided to resurrect her relationship with Sassoon was that, as she wrote in her journal, she found most British men to be pallid, neurotic homosexuals—a development she blamed on segregated schooling. She was also disgusted by British boys’ poor dental hygiene; they all seemed to let their teeth rot until they had to be pulled. Mallory did not resemble such British boys, but Sylvia looked forward to seeing Sassoon nonetheless.
On December 9, the Michaelmas term ended and Mallory left for London. Alone in Cambridge, Sylvia, when she was not catching up on her letter writing, filled out her Fulbright renewal papers. As she did, she also began to reflect on her personal shortcomings. The hardest thing in her life, she wrote to her mother, was accepting that she could never be perfect. She so lacked perfection she was sure that her Fulbright would not be extended (only about 10 percent were). Obviously, it was time for a vacation.
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Though Mallory had asked Sylvia to come to his home in London during Christmas break, Sylvia had previously accepted an invitation from John Lythgoe. On December 20, after a three-day visit with John during which she also set aside a few hours one afternoon to stop by Mallory’s and meet his parents, Sylvia went to the London airport, where she expected to board a prepaid charter flight to Paris. In the airport waiting room, she spotted Jane Baltzell. The two had gradually become good friends, even though Sylvia was afraid Jane could be her doppelgänger. Both German-American, Ivy League-educated Whit-stead residents who were reading English in Newnham, they were possibly too similar, Sylvia had warned Jane. Nevertheless, today they seemed happy to see each other.
Hours passed—no plane. Bad weather had grounded all aircraft in Paris. Eventually, because no airplane was forthcoming, the travel company bused the passengers to the ferry docks. After another two or three hours, everyone was boarded onto a boat to cross the Channel. Halfway through the trip, a winter storm passed over. As a numbing drizzle fell, choppy waters tossed the boat to and fro so badly that many passengers began vomiting in the enamel basins provided on deck for that purpose. Huddling under Jane’s Burberry raincoat, the two young women sipped brandy to settle their stomachs. By the time the boat landed on the French coast and Jane and Sylvia had made the train ride into Paris, it was eleven o’clock—too late for Jane to find a hotel room. So, Sylvia offered to share the room Nat LaMar had arranged for her.
At the hotel, Jane, exhausted by the nightmarish trip, collapsed into bed, but Sylvia, delighted over being in Paris and by the prospect of seeing Sassoon, decided not to go to sleep just yet. Without mentioning Sassoon, she told Jane she wanted to explore the city—and left. She walked to Sassoon’s flat to find him waiting for her there. They had an hour together before Sylvia returned to the hotel, only to discover that her room door was locked. No matter how hard she knocked, Jane would not answer. Exasperated, Sylvia explained her predicament to the concierge, who could not open the door with a passkey, as it turned out, because Jane had left the key in the keyhole and turned in the locked position. Finally, the hotel manager let Sylvia sleep in a room with two girls from Switzerland, all three in the same bed.
When Sylvia knocked on the door the next morning, Jane answered. “How could you?” Sylvia blurted out furiously. At which point Jane, who assumed Sylvia had stayed out all night, realized her mistake: she was so worn out, she said, that she must have slept through Sylvia’s knocking. “Rarely have I felt more hopelessly embarrassed,” Baltzell later wrote. “My fault was the more grievous, of course, in that she had been doing me a kindness. At the same time, I found the peculiar intensity of her anger inappropriate. I had not, after all, locked her out on purpose; but she was angry just as though I had. She somehow conveyed as much, alluding to her doppelgänger theory.” To save the friendship, not to mention their nerves, they struck a truce. All would be forgiven if Jane would be more careful with the key in the future. Yet, astonishingly, when Jane left for Italy a few days later, she again locked the key in the room. The episodes with the key would be the beginning of the end of Sylvia and Jane’s friendship.
Over the next week and a half, Sylvia saw as much as she could of Paris, a city she grew to love even more than London. In her short time there, Sassoon introduced her to many of the city’s sights, among them the Champs-Elysées, theSeine Chapel on the Ile de la Cité, the Rue de la Paix, the Place Pigalle prostitutes, and the Louvre, where Sylvia marveled at Brueghel, Winged Victory, and the Mona Lisa. With Sassoon, she mingled with children at the Garden of the Tuileries, saw an Impressionist exhibit at the Orangerie, strolled along the Seine, and went to two French films and two plays. On Christmas morning, her first away from home, Sassoon took Sylvia to Notre Dame Cathedral. Sitting on a pew in the soothing morning light, Sylvia, as she would later write, thought of her mother and her brother and all the other people she loved.
On the 31st, Sylvia packed her suitcases, checked out of the hotel, and, with Sassoon by her side, boarded the midnight express for Nice. Along the way, they celebrated New Year’s, enjoying a delicious breakfast as they watched the scarlet sun rise over the Mediterranean. In Nice, located on Angels’ Bay, Sylvia spent her first day relishing their magnificent view of the snowcapped Alps, groves of orange and olive trees, and the green palms. During their week in the south, Sylvia and Sassoon wandered the streets of Nice; motorbiked around nearby inlets to Monte Carlo (in one casino Sylvia lost three dollars at a roulette table and left in a rush) and on into Ventimiglia, Italy; and, the two of them exhausted, rested in their hotel room by reading The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.
One day Sylvia and Sassoon motorbiked to Vence, a small, uncommercial town that was home to a Matisse chapel Sylvia wanted to see. But when they found the chapel in Vence, it was closed. A sign on the front gate said the building was open only two days a week. For some time, Sylvia sat nearby and sketched the small church; eventually, she returned to the front gate. Standing there, she started to cry, because she could imagine the sunlight falling in streaks through the blue, yellow, and green stained-glass windows—a sight she was not going to be able to see. Then, while she cried, the mother superior suddenly appeared, as if from nowhere, and, saying, “Ne pleurez plus, entrez,” unlocked the gate to allow Sylvia in. Slowly Sylvia entered and “in the heart of sun and the colors of sky, sea, and sun, in the pure white heart of the chapel” lowered herself to her knees.
On January 8, 1956, Sylvia and Sassoon returned to Paris by train. In the fall, Sylvia had dated several young men. Just before Christmas, though, she decided that she really only wanted to be with one— Sassoon. Consequently, Sylvia was devastated when, as she finished packing to leave Paris, Sassoon told her that he intended to go out with other women once she was gone. In fact, he and a Swiss girl had become so involved lately that they had actually discussed marriage. Distraught, Sylvia flew to London on the 9th in a blur of anger and confusion. Back at Whitstead the next day, she could hardly get excited over the gift from Gordon she found waiting for her there—an autographed copy of Richard Wilbur’s Misanthrope. She tried to put the ugliness of her final hours with Sassoon behind her. She rewrote her Fulbright renewal application, composed an article about her trip to France, and drew pen-and-ink sketches of Cambridge. The activities did not help. Writing to her mother in mid-January, she complained with bitterness about not being happy at Cambridge.
When the second term started, on January 17, Plath decided to buckle down, stop socializing, and pour all of her energies into academics and creative writing. To experience the spiritual calm that she believed the act of writing produced, she would write at least two hours a day. And though she realized that writing did not necessarily lead to publishing, she resolved herself to sell some
thing to The New Yorker, since she appreciated the magazine’s beautiful, crafted style. She spent the last week of January working on “The Matisse Chapel,” a twenty-five-page story inspired by her Vence trip. In early February, she submitted it to The New Yorker, which turned it down two weeks later with a standard rejection slip.
As she battled what was turning into a full-fledged depression, a result of her falling-out with Sassoon, Sylvia also tried to decide how she was going to live her life in the future. Because she saw herself as becoming no more than a minor writer, because she had so much love to share with another person, and because she did not really want a career, Plath, not yet twenty-four, concluded that she was meant to marry a man, have children, keep a home, and write in her spare time. After all, the next-oldest generation’s women writers—Jean Stafford, Hortense Calisher, Phyllis McGinley—conducted their lives in this way. There was just one problem: Sylvia had no one to marry. Mallory was too young and naive, she decided; John was actually just a Platonic friend; and Sassoon, even if he had not rejected her, suffered from periodic depression and poor health. To find an appropriate candidate for marriage, she would just have to keep on searching.
Through most of February, Sylvia had neither the energy nor the desire to date; instead, she gradually sank deeper into her depression. At the beginning of the month, she heard news from America that saddened her even more. Grammy, who in late January had become sick with—her doctors believed—gastritis, had now been diagnosed as having stomach cancer. Deeply shaken, Sylvia wrote her grandmother a heartfelt letter in which she told her how much she loved her. Then, later in February, Plath’s poems, which appeared in that month’s Chequer, received bad reviews. She was so disappointed that she discussed the reviews with Christopher Levenson, the editor of Delta, Chequers competition. Much as Sylvia delighted in such lectures as Daiches’s on Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, her schedule started to wear on her. As the month progressed and the relentless cold English weather became more inclement, Sylvia slipped into an all-consuming depression which caused her to relive memories of her breakdown. She now believed she had become suicidally depressed that summer because of the hysterical stresses that tore her apart—a conflict between wanting and fearing to take action, between longing for and being able to achieve perfection. By the 24th, Sylvia had developed insomnia. Desperate over the frigid weather—she fed her heater shilling after shilling but still had to wear several sweaters, wool pants, and knee socks just to keep warm—she came down with a cold and a sinus infection.
This was not her only bout with illness in February. Recently, she had visited the university’s infirmary for a complete physical examination, after which, at the suggestion of the medical staff, she set up an appointment with the school psychiatrist. In their session, which did not take place until the morning of the 25th, Sylvia revealed to the psychiatrist her greatest resentment about Cambridge: she had no older friends in whom she could confide. At the university, she had found extraordinary dons and mature men (she used this language as she wrote her mother that afternoon), but so far she had not become friends with any of them. “Wanted to burst out in tears and say Father, Father, comfort me,” she confessed in her journal about her session with the psychiatrist, echoing a passage she had written days before when she had said, “And I cry so to be held by a man; some man, who is a father.”
Sylvia did not discuss her father with the psychiatrist. Nor did she tell her^ doctor something else. Lately, she had become so obsessed with Sassoon—lost to her, he was probably having his way with some prostitute, she imagined—that she regularly visited a statue of a boy and a dolphin, which stood in one of Newnham’s gardens, because to her it had somehow come to represent Sassoon.
On the night of February 25, Sylvia ate supper with Nat. Afterwards, she did not linger too long, since she had a party to go to. A new magazine—The St. Botolph’s Review—had started up to rival the two established Cambridge literary journals, and the editors were giving a party to celebrate their first issue. Sylvia had read the magazine earlier in the afternoon—and admired it tremendously. So she had decided to drop in on the party, if only to take her mind off her problems.
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Sylvia had bought The St. Botolph’s Review from Bertram Wyatt-Brown, a friend (and frequent date) of Jane Baltzell. Taking one copy from his stack of seventy-five, Sylvia had gone back to her room and studied its contents page, which promised stories by Than Minton, E. Lucas Myers, and George Weissbort, and poems by Myers, Daniel Weissbort, Daniel Huws, Ted Hughes, and David Ross, the magazine’s editor. The names were familiar to Sylvia, although she knew none of the contributors personally. Huws had been the author of an attack on her Chequer poems, and Myers, Huws, and Hughes had published poetry in Chequer and Delta. Since it was a small volume, only about thirty pages, Sylvia read it quickly. Finished, she remarked with awe the poetry’s powerful veracity. Of the poets, Sylvia most admired Myers and Hughes; in particular, she liked Myers’s “Fools Encountered’ and, because they were so violent, all three of Hughes’s, “Fallgrief s Girl-Friends “ and two untitled pieces. More excited by the poems than by any she had read in Delta or Chequer, Sylvia rushed out and found Bert, still selling his magazines. When she asked him how she could meet these poets, Bert told her that they would be at a party for the magazine that night at the Women’s Union.
By chance, on her way back to Whitstead, Sylvia bumped into a friend, Hamish Stewart, who recently had asked her for a date. As soon as she suggested that he take her to the St. Botolph’s party, he agreed. In her room, Sylvia passed the time before her supper with Nat by writing in her journal, making the observation at one point that Hamish—clearly on her mind—often filled his idle hours with drinking, a vice she considered deplorable. Then again, lately she herself had been drinking wine and sherry alone in her room at night. She liked the feeling it produced—sex-charged, joyful. Left to her own devices, she could easily become an alcholic, she admitted to her journal. Since coming to England, she had been drinking a lot; in France, she and Sassoon had consumed a steady flow of wine. If liquor could heighten the good times, she thought, it could also blunt the bad. And so she drank in her room, often to forget about her depression—and, now, Sassoon.
Eventually, Sylvia dressed in a cute “American” outfit, which she accessorized with silver earrings, a red hairband, and a pair of red shoes. After supper with Nat, she returned to Whitstead, where Hamish picked her up in a cab. At Miller’s Bar, a stop they made on their way to the party, Sylvia stood at the counter and quickly downed several whiskeys. Soon the whole world floated around her. When they left after an hour, Hamish had to help Sylvia walk.
By the time they reached the Women’s Union, a foreboding building on campus just off Falcon Yard, Sylvia was very drunk. Still, as they entered the huge second-floor room in which the party was located, she took the scene in. To the back of the nearly dark, smoke-laden room, a jazz combo improvised; in front of the band, couples mingled—some dancing, some talking, all drinking. Tonight, most of the boys wore jeans and turtlenecks, the girls stylish black dresses. Their attire, like the party itself, projected a studied “hip” feel. Sylvia ran into Bert, but they could barely carry on a conversation. The music was too loud; they were both drunk. Bert could—and did—point out the St. Botolph’s crowd. About the room stood Huws, Ross, Weissbort, Myers, and Minton. Saying good-bye to Bert and abandoning Hamish as well, Sylvia, drink in hand, confronted Huws to argue about the bad review he had given her Chequer poems. Afterwards, she approached Luke Myers, also drunk, yet not so badly that he could not dance with Sylvia. Over the band’s blaring music, she shouted how much she liked his poems—and quoted all of “Fools Encountered.” The song ended; Luke returned to his girlfriend.
Then, as Sylvia would later write, “the worst thing happened.” Standing there in the hall, she saw him—"that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one . . . huge enough for me.” Though he had been “hunching” over other women, Sylvia had
wanted to know who he was the instant she spotted him. Now, while she studied him, he fixed his stare on her and headed across the room. When he came nearer to her, Sylvia could see more clearly his tall frame, his broad shoulders, his youthful, sensual face. He stopped, close enough for the two of them to touch. Her body rigid with fear and expectation, Sylvia looked at him, knowing in her heart who loomed before her—Ted Hughes.
Now, Sylvia began quoting to Hughes one of his poems from the magazine, an untitled piece the first line of which was “I Did It, I.” After she finished, Hughes said, “You like?”—and offered her a brandy. Guiding her into a side room, Hughes shut the door and poured Sylvia the drink. While she sipped the brandy, they talked about Sylvia’s Chequer poems, Hughes’s poems, his London job, and his “obligations” in the other room—a girlfriend. Dreamily, Sylvia looked at his face, noticing his demure lips, his wide forehead, his soulful eyes. Then, as if to acknowledge the palpable sexual charge that had formed between them, Hughes leaned down and kissed Sylvia on the mouth. Pulling away, he tore the red hairband from her head and yanked off her silver earrings. “Ah, I shall keep these,” he said.
Sylvia felt pleasantly dazed. As soon as Hughes made a move to kiss her on the neck, Sylvia, ready to show that she could hold her own in such matters, reached up and bit his cheek so hard her teeth broke skin, causing him to flinch. Somehow it did not seem possible to continue, so they stepped apart. Certainly Sylvia had found her match, though Hughes had found his too. Moments later, as Hughes left the room, Sylvia could see blood trickling down his cheek.
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