American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  Home for just two days between the end of her examinations at Smith and her departure for New York City, Sylvia frenetically packed and planned for her month at Mademoiselle, all the while urging her mother to do something for herself—maybe write articles, which Sylvia would love to edit, about her teaching for women’s magazines. Out the door, Sylvia was carrying with her words of overwhelming gratitude for all her mother’s sacrifices, which had resulted in so many opportunities for her children.

  Betsy Talbot Blackwell, editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle, interviewed all guest editors on their first day. As her title denoted, she had final say over all copy and departments. She also sized up the guest editors and decided on their suitability for the magazine’s various departments. The guest editors were then divided into small groups to lunch with the Mademoiselle staff. Sylvia soon learned that editing meant not merely writing and revising, but also functioning as errand clerk and typist, as a memo sent to her cohort explained. She put an exclamation mark in the left-hand margin next to the following statement: “Magazine deadlines are as final as exam dates, and are to be observed religiously—no extracurricular activities will be scheduled until deadline crises are past!” This may have been her first inkling of the pressures that would undo her, reminding her of the nerve-wracking build-up to exams. Crises? Sylvia had already had enough of those, and now, before the first day on the job, she was on notice to expect more. Like everyone else, she was required to “pitch in” on assignments in any department that needed help. Although the memo promised “lighter moments,” it also declared this was no “glamor job.” After such sobering words, the memo ended with a section on extracurricular activities, mentioning visits to designers, fashion shows, meetings with famous people, theater parties, dinners and dancing, and special screenings. Half-skeptical, half-hopeful, Sylvia wrote at the bottom of the memo: “Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it!”

  “Citystruck Sivvy,” as she dubbed herself in a letter to Aurelia, spent her month on the sixth floor at 575 Madison Avenue working late. In the evening, from her room (1511) at the Barbizon Hotel she could marvel at the sight of Manhattan lighting up, with glimpses of the Third Avenue El and the East River. Laurie Levy, another summer guest editor, recalled an outing with Sylvia: “We billowed about the steaming summer-festival streets trying to keep cool in below-calf cotton skirts.” They passed one another in the Mademoiselle hallways, “our teeth white against the magenta lipstick of 1953.” Sylvia was given all sorts of copy to read and rewrite, including submissions from Elizabeth Bowen, Rumer Godden, Noël Coward, and Dylan Thomas. She rather relished writing a rejection slip to a staffer at The New Yorker, but she also worried that she would not get into Frank O’Connor’s much-prized summer writing class at Harvard.

  Sylvia admitted to her mother that the end of semester rush and quick removal to New York had been both heady and daunting, and that she had trouble dealing with high-pressure situations. At Mademoiselle a handwriting expert had delivered this analysis of Sylvia:

  STRENGTHS: Enjoyment of working experience intense; sense of form, beauty and style, useful in fields of fashion and interior design. Eager for accomplishment.

  WEAKNESSES: Overcome superficiality, stilted behavior, rigidity of outlook.

  Plath appreciated how much important work Mademoiselle managing editor Cyrilly Abels assigned to her. Sylvia signed herself “Syrilly” in one letter to Aurelia. Abels was, in the words of a Mademoiselle primer for guest editors, “boss of the deadline.” She approved all copy. Owing to her wide-ranging contacts with writers, publishers, and agents, she was also the magazine’s ambassador to the literary world.

  Elation and exhaustion were compounded when Sylvia and several other guest editors came down with ptomaine poisoning. Even so, she was meeting well-known authors such as Vance Bourjaily, dating boys from all over who were working at the UN, and spending time in Greenwich Village. Then the cheerful letters dwindled. It would take years for the full story to come out.

  During this busy month, the horrifying execution of the Rosenbergs, convicted of participating in a Soviet spy conspiracy to steal the secret of the atomic bomb, intruded with such force that Sylvia felt nauseated. The pacifist of “Bitter Strawberries,” who had been shocked by the head picker who wanted Russia bombed off the map, reappeared in a journal entry on 19 June describing a stylish, beautiful “catlike” girl waking up from a nap on the conference room divan, yawning and saying with “beautiful bored nastiness: ‘I’m so glad they are going to die.’” Everyone else went about business as usual, planning the weekend without a thought for the preciousness of human life. It seemed ironic to Sylvia that the prevailing mood deemed it right to execute the Rosenbergs for purloining the secret of her country’s zealously guarded mechanics of inhuman invention. Too bad the electrocution could not be televised that evening, she remarked, since it would be so much more realistic than the crime shows. She imagined the country taking these deaths as nonchalantly as had that blasé beauty in her office.

  More than twenty years later, in The Public Burning Robert Coover would publish a scathing portrayal of the Rosenberg execution that included the kind of spectacle Plath imagined. Like Plath, Coover believed the execution had tainted and degraded his nation. Both writers were concerned with the individual’s connection to history and—like Rebecca West in the prologue to her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—deplored the fact that people could be so idiotic as not to see how their fates were entangled with the lives of millions of others. No matter how much it meant to be working at Mademoiselle, Sylvia never lost sight of the world elsewhere, to which she was irrevocably connected by her consciousness of what it means to be fully human. The events of June 1953 became the basis of The Bell Jar, in which Plath transmogrified her traumatic month into a fable, a Catcher in the Rye–style story that captures all the glitter and gore of New York City, the abode of the brilliant and the phony, the predatory and the pretentious.

  When Sylvia returned home in late June, Aurelia found her daughter unusually somber. That intense period in New York hit others hard, as well. Laurie Levy wrote, “We dispersed in different directions to have our letdowns alone.” Aurelia dreaded breaking the bad news: Sylvia had not been chosen for Frank O’Conner’s Harvard writing class. Like many ambitious people, Sylvia did not care how many awards she won, only that the acceptances kept coming. (O’Connor would later say that he thought Sylvia too advanced for his class). But Aurelia, expecting her child to be disappointed, was aghast to see that the news drove Sylvia to despair.

  Even if it was the proximate cause of her depression, it is unlikely that one month in New York, however trying, had produced this humorless and even dull Sylvia. For well over a year, Eddie Cohen had been warning her that something was seriously amiss. During that year she wrote as though the power of positive thinking would pull her through. But working at a high-energy Madison Avenue magazine wore down her will to succeed, already severely weakened by doubts she could take her talent to the next level. To put it another way, Sylvia’s stint in Manhattan accelerated the crackup Eddie had tried to head off.

  Aurelia described Sylvia’s “great change” in Letters Home as a fundamental break in the daughter who had always expressed such joie de vivre. Sylvia’s journals suggest that her effort to maintain a brave front had collapsed. It was no longer enough to unburden herself by falling into Marcia’s arms and crying out her fears and anxieties. Writing to Eddie would not relieve enough of the pressure. A summer writing course with a renowned writer was not available to help her overcome dejection.

  Sylvia saw one way out of her predicament: Attend Harvard Summer School and take a psychology course, which she considered both a practical and creative way of developing her talent. Also, she would meet new people and have access to the library and other activities in Cambridge, which would give her life structure. She dreaded staying home alone with the awful burden of constructing her own schedule. She admitted in her journal that she
was frightened and called herself a “big baby.” Self-doubt sapped her creativity.

  But the course would cost $250, not then a negligible sum for an undergraduate who calculated she had just enough to get by during her final year at Smith and had counted on making her mother’s summer easier by selling stories generated in O’Hara’s class. On balance, then, better to stay home, face her fears, learn shorthand from Aurelia as a practical skill (a woman at Smith’s vocational office had suggested as much), start reading Joyce for her senior thesis, and try to “forget my damn ego-centered self.”

  In her journal entry for 6 July, Sylvia addressed herself as though she were a fairy-tale princess who had to be brought back to earth after the ball. Not to write at home would be a failure of nerve proving her unworthiness. She even held Dick up as a model. After all, he had been able to read and write while in the sanitarium. But how could she write when she equated living at home with returning to the womb, and when she had begun to think of suicide. She put it in these extreme terms: “Stop thinking of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all.” By 14 July, Sylvia was sleeping no more than two hours a night and having homicidal thoughts about Aurelia. Confessing that she could no longer imagine an existence outside of her “limited self,” she cried for God—or a god, some force outside herself that would lift her spirits.

  Sylvia, as Eddie suspected, could not see that part of becoming an adult meant knowing when to ask for help. Sylvia told herself that her “negativism” was a kind of sickness, but like a Christian Scientist she thought she should heal herself, even though she was not able to place her faith in God. Thinking she could somehow control her emotions, she viewed her dilemma as an ethical or moral one, a matter of behaving according to a certain standard she thought appropriate for her age and competence. In spite of her interest in that Harvard psychology course, she did not see how compulsively repetitive her behavior had become, that her problem was her own psychology. She had escaped the crisis at the Belmont by finding refuge with the Cantors, and then had school to look forward to. This time she felt she could confront her demons at home with even less resilience in the aftermath of what she deemed O’Hara’s rejection of her.

  Aurelia’s description in Letters Home of Sylvia’s affect suggests all the signs of clinical depression. Not even sunbathing seemed therapeutic. She would sit, book in hand, but could not read. Sylvia Plath could not read! All her talk was of how she had let people down. Even worse, she could not write. Aurelia noticed gashes on her daughter’s legs, and Sylvia responded, “I just wanted to see if I had the guts!” Horrified, Aurelia felt the hot touch of Sylvia’s hand and heard her scorching cry that the world “is so rotten! I want to die! Let’s die together!” Instead, Sylvia agreed to see a doctor and then a psychiatrist, although neither seemed to help much, other than prescribing sleeping pills and then submitting her to brutal electric shock treatments administered without sedatives or muscle relaxants.

  On 24 August, a day when Sylvia seemed to be doing better, Aurelia went out with a friend, and then returned home to find a note saying her daughter had gone out for a long walk. Sylvia went missing for three days, until Warren heard what sounded like a moan coming from the basement. There he found Sylvia in a crawl space, half-conscious after throwing up some of the sleeping pills she had swallowed to end her life. She had a gash on her face that would leave a scar, but otherwise she seemed to recover rather quickly from her physical ordeal. In September, she began to recuperate under the supervision of Dr. Ruth Beuscher at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Sylvia later described her therapist to Gordon Lameyer as “one of my best friends, only 9 years older than I, looking like Myrna Loy, tall, Bohemian, coruscatingly brilliant, and most marvelous.”

  Sylvia’s disappearance and discovery were widely reported, and she became news in a way she never intended but which had a remarkable impact on her vocation as a writer. Eventually, she would realize that dying had become part of her true subject matter. The notion of living with thoughts of death would suffuse some of her best, most sincere material. She had meant to die and had felt more strongly about dying than about any other decision she would ever make. Suicide, a kind of ultimate commitment, repudiated deceit and her false facades. Whatever happened next would have to be measured against the authenticity of that act.

  There was no easy way back from death, which has a sureness and finality to it that appealed to Plath. Recovery was a far less decisive process, fitful and fraught with confusion and doubts about her capacity to revive her creativity. Certainly she was in no shape to return to Smith. Literary critic Robert Gorham Davis, one of Sylvia’s favorite professors, wrote Aurelia offering his help, mentioning that his daughter knew Sylvia well. He and his wife, whom Sylvia also admired, were taken aback because Plath had seemed so gay during her last semester at Smith: “Though we have both had some experience with upsets of this sort in other people, we did not notice in the Spring any signs of stress of this kind, though this may have been imperceptive of us.” Indeed, Davis had once confided to his colleague, George Gibian, that unlike other neurotic creative writing students, Sylvia seemed entirely whole and healthy. He did add, though, that Sylvia had demanded “far too much of herself.”

  Professor Elizabeth Drew, another Plath favorite, wrote directly to Sylvia.

  I know exactly how you felt, because once in my life I had a similar depression, though for a different reason, & it seemed the logical & the only way out. But now that is all over & you must remember all the time how good life is & how much joy & adventure there will be in it for you. As to your work, you are by far the best student in English in the College & you don’t have to strain to be. You could do it standing on your head or in your sleep! I suspect you were pushing yourself much too hard in the spring … You just burnt yourself out for a spell. Now you’ve got to let life flow in all over you again & it will, never fear.

  Such letters testified to the powerful impact Sylvia Plath had at Smith, signaling how dearly she was missed and what a warm welcome she would receive on her return.

  Gordon Lameyer’s letter was perhaps just as important to Sylvia: “I admire you, Sylvia, I admire you more than any girl I know. More than anything I don’t want you to feel differently about me now. I want to be your dearest and closest friend as you have been ever since June to me. Believe me, please believe me, I can understand anything. Your happiness is everything to me, so please get well as soon as you can.” Lameyer would write her long letters while at sea during his service in the navy.

  These letters do not seem to have had an immediate impact on Sylvia, judging by Aurelia’s letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, who wanted to be informed about Sylvia’s care and also to contribute to it financially. Prouty had suffered a nervous breakdown twenty years earlier and had recovered completely under expert care that made her “better equipped to meet life.” She wanted no less for Sylvia. Aurelia wrote Prouty that the psychiatrists told her Sylvia had not confided to her mother just how insecure she felt. That Sylvia also craved the guidance of a father figure came as no surprise to Aurelia. To Sylvia, suicide seem preferable to years of incarceration in a mental institution, the kind of facility she associated with Olivia de Havilland’s harrowing performance in The Snake Pit (1948). Prouty visited Plath in early October and wrote on the 14th to Dr. Beuscher, expressing concern that Sylvia was not mixing well with others and seemed disheartened because she was not coordinated enough to do the kind of handwork (sewing, in this case) that treatment programs often prescribed for patients. Sylvia tried weaving, and though her doctor thought it was well done, Sylvia disparaged her efforts.

  In November, Sylvia received shock treatments—this time administered with more preparation and with Dr. Beuscher by her side—and insulin therapy, the latter the subject of “Tongues of Stone.” In the narrative, a young girl watches her body grow fatter with insulin treatments, and in her dreary state she cannot read words that look to her like “dead black hieroglyphics.�
� She has lost her tan and shies away from the sun, wishing she could shrink to the size of a fly’s body. Day after day she reports that the insulin shots have made no change. She believes she is drying up and in the final stage of withdrawal from a preposterous life. She had been “pretending to be clever and gay, and all the while these poisons were gathering in her body, ready to break out behind the bright false bubbles of her eyes at any moment crying: Idiot! Imposter!” Like Sylvia, the young girl dreads another sixty years with a brain folding up like a “gray, paralyzed bat in the dark cavern of her living skull.” In the story, the girl interprets her rescue as defeat, since she has been resuscitated into a zombie, sallow-skinned and bruised and “jolted back into the hell of her dead body.” “Tongues of Stone” ends abruptly in a transition that seems forced, even if it is true to Sylvia’s case: Suddenly, in her sleep the girl sees light breaking through her blindness, and every fiber of her mind and body flares with the “everlasting rising sun.”

  Sylvia treated her period at McLean as resulting in full recovery. Jane Anderson, a fellow patient and a Smith student who went on to become a therapist, doubted that Plath had worked hard on her therapy. She did not make “much of a commitment to it in terms of trying to understand what was going on in herself and she was angry about that.” When Anderson commented on Plath’s rather passive response to treatment, Sylvia seemed to become “less friendly and less willing to talk about things in depth.” Aurelia would later write to Ted Hughes’s wife Carol, “Anyone who did not know Sylvia before she had her first [electric shock] treatment (and that includes Dr B) never knew the whole Sylvia.”