Jane Baltzell Kopp, a fellow American student, cringed sometimes in Sylvia’s company, because the latter was so brashly American and apparently unaware of the jokes that Cambridge students made about her. Actually, Sylvia was not as oblivious as Kopp supposed. She knew quite well that she put people off with her “emotional, irresponsible gushing,” as she wrote in her journal, but often she could not help it. In her perfectly decorated room, she would enthuse about how she enjoyed a certain piece of furniture, and her English acquaintances mused over the oddity of using a verb like enjoy in connection with the decor. Out on the streets, Sylvia sometimes seemed like any other gauche American tourist. She was girlish, Kopp recalled, pedaling her bike with the frenzy of a small child. One of Plath’s professors remembered that she wore “charming, girlish clothes, the kind of clothes that made you look at the girl, not the garments, hair down to the shoulders still, but ever so neatly brushed and combed, and held back in place by a broad bandeau on the crown.” Kopp called Sylvia’s style “‘Ivy League College Girl’: jumpers, turtlenecks, skirts, and pullovers, loafers.”
As Kopp admits, she had a rather fraught friendship with Plath, who regarded the similarly educated Kopp as her double—no doubt a conceit heavily influenced not only by a reading of Dostoevsky, but also by Edgar Allen Poe’s story, “William Wilson,” in which the eponymous hero’s double turns up at the most inconvenient times. Kopp did not quite fit that role, and she rejected this characterization of her when Edward Butscher interviewed her. But something odd was going on between these two women, since Kopp kept doing things that set Plath off. Some instances seemed inadvertent—like Kopp leaving a key in the lock on the inside of a shared Paris hotel room door, preventing Sylvia from entering and sleeping off a late-night jaunt. But others—like writing in Plath’s books—seem, consciously or not, provocations of the fastidious Sylvia. The refrain of Kopp’s reminiscence is that Sylvia took herself too seriously, an attitude that always seemed, for some reason, to surprise Kopp. In her journal Sylvia wrote admiringly of Kopp’s humor, good looks, and magnetic personality. She saw the two of them in frankly competitive terms: “It is a mutual grabbing for queenship; both of us must be unique.” The solution, said Sylvia—sounding like Elizabeth fending off Mary, Queen of Scots—was to keep separate and not “overlap in too many places.”
Belonging to a theater club made all the difference in Sylvia’s adjustment to Cambridge, since she developed an immediate rapport with cast and crewmembers and joined them for socializing. “I have simply been treated like a queen!” Sylvia wrote on 29 October, two days after her twenty-third birthday. She seemed delighted to have been cast as a mad poetess in an eighteenth-century farce, telling Mallory Wober it was the producer’s “stroke of intuition.” On the same day, in a letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, Sylvia presented a somewhat sober persona to her patron, reporting that her fingers turned blue in her ill-heated room, and that she was attending fifteen hours of lectures a week, as well as sessions with a tutor each morning. She was less prone to want immediate success, and more inclined to perfect herself and her work gradually.
By early November, Plath seemed content that a small Cambridge literary magazine had accepted two of her poems. She was beginning to regard her drama club activities as a drain and decided she would drop out if she did not win any major roles. The next term, she confided to Wober, she would forsake the “riproaring life & become a sedate femme du salon.” She was also working out a schedule that permitted her to write two hours a day, no matter what. Waiting for the perfect time, she told Wober, meant you became “paralysed from lack of practice.” Although she enjoyed her studies, she concluded that an academic career was not for her. It seemed too confining and pedantic and static—in other words, not a real world. She described the small number of women dons as spinster freaks, unappealing models for a young woman who wanted the world and a mate, too.
Sylvia seemed exhausted by the newness of her environs, where she was without any of her old friends. The frigid Cambridge climate took its toll, too—not to mention the starchy, soggy, sludgy food, so different from the appetizing meals at Smith. Homesick, she stocked her room with fruit. Sinus attacks signaled stress. In her journal she declared that the English winter might do her in.
Sylvia admitted to her mother that she missed Sassoon, now at the Sorbonne. He seemed more mature than the Cambridge men she met, although David Buck, whom she had just dated, had some of the aesthetic and worldly qualities she treasured in Richard. Her first letter to Sassoon on 22 November reads like a parody of his style, a baroque and curiously abstract poetic set piece describing artificial fires reflected in goblets of sherry. For all its “culture,” Cambridge was also stuffy and insular. “In the beginning was the word and the word was Sassoon,” she said. To Mallory Wober, she wrote an opaque letter on 23 November, referring to her penchant for adopting various personae and closing with the admonition, “Watch out for schizophrenic women.” She was playing a whore in Bartholomew Fair and wrote a note to Wober on the 24th thanking him for coming to her performance. It made her feel like a prima donna, or at least a “glorified & sublime tart.”
Now experiencing full-blown nostalgia for home, Sylvia thanked her mother profusely for a Christmas box packed with large hazelnut cookies. Cooking and homemaking, she wrote to Mrs. Prouty, mattered a “great deal.” Plath was not a “career girl,” a term that denoted a woman alone, deliberately forsaking married life. She was jettisoning her former prize student, award-winning, collegiate self, she told her benefactor. Away from home at Christmas for the first time in her life, she felt like a female Ulysses, “wandering between the scylla of big ben and the charybdis of the eiffel tower.” She engaged in an orgy of letter writing—thirty messages in all—to the wonderful people she knew. Some received cards and short notes with drawings. This burst of correspondence made her feel thankful and gratified.
To Elinor Friedman Klein and others, Plath made Cambridge into a setting for her misadventures. She enjoyed creating a sensation and then describing the consequences to friends—as she did with a horseback riding exploit that had left her black and blue. Her mount, Sam, had forsaken the sedate pleasures of a country ride and plunged her into a busy Cambridge intersection. Plath reveled in the chaos that ensued: “I find myself hugging Sam’s neck passionately. old women & children run screaming for doorways as we heave up onto sidewalk. such power: like the old gods of chance: I felt like one human, avenging thunderbolt,” she wrote to Elinor Friedman Klein on 14 December. Sam eventually wearied of his romp and came to a full stop. Twice before, she had careened her way toward destruction: toppling down a ski slope and breaking her leg, then floundering in a spinning car as Warren skidded into an icy Northampton on the day of Sylvia’s return to Smith after her suicide attempt. She would soon set off for a Christmas holiday in France and seemed fixated on the hazards of departures and arrivals.
Sylvia enjoyed Paris and Nice, writing detailed letters to Mallory Wober about her travels—although she did not mention spending much of her time in the company of Richard Sassoon. In her journal, she described traveling together with him in a train compartment, with the “good weight of Sassoon, sleeping fitfully, on my breast.” Her mention of the train rocking on the rails intensifies the maternal image. This moment seems a reprieve from the striving, frantic nature of her ambition, which manifested as early as the sixth grade, when she mapped her imagination with an image of Marseille—now visible from her train window—set against the moon shining on the Mediterranean. Her journal explodes with colors—red for the earth, orange for the villas roofs, yellow and peach and aqua for the walls, and green palms juxtaposed with a “screaming blue sea.” She had returned to childhood, to her sea-girl reveries.
At the end of this seemingly idyllic holiday, Richard confessed that he had been seeing someone else, a Swiss girl who wanted to marry him. He wanted to be free to continue seeing her and perhaps others. His abrupt announcement struck hard at Plath’s am
our propre. She wrote a twenty-five-page story about her French sojourn, which The New Yorker rejected in late February, and which Sylvia herself came to regard as “absurd and sentimental.” But she did not quite give up on Sassoon, confessing to Aurelia that he was the only man she had ever “really loved.” She often dressed in black now, she noted in her journal, which contained passages addressing her lost love as though he were dead. Richard had brought out “the highest” in her, she confessed to John, one of her Cambridge pursuers. Plenty of “nice boys” had wanted to marry her, but she was holding out for a man equal to all of her. Sassoon had come closest to her ideal, and yet she worried about his health and his depressive nature. He did not look like the kind of man that should attract her, but he did anyway, she admitted to her mother. In another mood, she supposed that she loved Richard for what she wanted to make of him, and not for himself. Richard’s desertion led to a culminating wail in her journal: She wanted a husband, lover, father, and son “all at once.” She hoped that Richard would again have need of her. She sent a note to Mallory Wober on 8 February begging off a date because she was in a ferocious mood and, like Garbo, wanted to be left alone.
Marriage seemed to preoccupy Plath’s thoughts, and she kept writing to her mother that she was not a “career girl.” She missed the depth of connection that family life fostered. Apparently still thinking of Sassoon, in her journal she wrote about her desire to fight for the man she wanted. She envisioned a life abroad on the Continent, near the “moving currents of people.” Not even her grandmother’s terminal cancer could draw Sylvia back to America, which she now regarded as a dead end. She was hoping for a renewal of her Fulbright, so that she would not have to sell matches in Moscow or make a fast buck on the Place Pigalle.
Expectations about the future and a summer on the Continent were just enough to keep Sylvia going during an otherwise dreary period in her social and creative life. She had sold a superficial piece about Cambridge to The Christian Science Monitor and continued sending her work to The New Yorker, but her poetry struck her as “glib.” She admitted to her mother on 25 February that she had seen a psychiatrist, whose welcoming manner made it comfortable for her to discuss her past and feel some continuity with the stateside life she had left behind. She realized that in Newnham, her home college, she had no equivalent of the older women who had guided her at Smith. She called the female dons “bluestocking grotesques.” Even worse, each college within Cambridge was a closed society, making it virtually impossible for Sylvia to find a mature mentor outside of Newnham, where women professors knew only a “second-hand” sort of life.
Aching for a way to break out of her midwinter slump, Sylvia wrote her mother on 25 February that she was about to attend a party to celebrate a new literary review representing a departure from the staid college publications, which seemed amateurish to her. The new journal, put together by a group of American and British students, had a bracing, astringent, and “taut” style that she admired. At the end of her 3 March letter, Sylvia mentioned meeting an ex-Cambridge poet at a wild party sponsored by St. Botolph’s Review. She had written a poem about him and noted he was the first British man she could be “strong enough to be equal with.” She doubted she would ever see him again. “Such is life,” she concluded, as though believing this time she would not be able to make her imagination and reality coincide.
Sylvia arrived at the party already drunk but in good enough shape to remember and recite the work of Ted Hughes, the St. Botolph’s poet she most admired. According to her journal, she entered the room with “brave ease.” Jane Baltzell Kopp, Sylvia’s doppelgänger, watched Sylvia arrive and thought she looked “young and uncertain, which was not characteristic.” Jane was at the party because she had read Hughes’s “savage poems, powerful and contemporary in content,” so different from the “mannered, bloodless, facile style of the other undergraduates.” As Hughes himself wrote to his sister, Olwyn, he rejected the “meanness and deadness of almost all modern English verse.” Jane wanted to get a good look at Ted Hughes but decided not to accost the brooding, apparently misanthropic man leaning against a wall. “He was large and alarmingly powerful, both physically and in psychological presence.” His dark expression had a malign impact on the party, Kopp suggests. Writing to a friend, Hughes showed no sign of having been unhappy. He had a hand in organizing the party at the Women’s Union, picking a well-appointed room with church-like stained windows, some of which had been smashed in the revelry.
Kopp adds a detail that helps explain why Plath focused on Hughes. His work, Kopp reckons, “came very near to carrying off the audacity of the almost-Renaissance rhetoric in which they were written.” When Plath arrived at Cambridge, she almost immediately realized that although Smith had prepared her well in Chaucer and Shakespeare, she did not have a good grasp of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature she was now expected to master. And here was Hughes, so young and yet, in certain important respects, already an adept.
Plath’s mood is best gauged by analyzing her journal references to the “satanic Luke”: Lucas Myers, nearly as tall as Ted and, to Sylvia, the only one at the party who rivaled Hughes as a writer. She danced first with Myers, who later remembered her red shoes and her “flash” (“rare among Cambridge girls of the period,” comments Elaine Feinstein, Hughes’s biographer). The day after the party, Plath wrote it up in her journal, glowing with excitement. Jazzed up by the music, she sighted her prey and described what she saw with a surprising turn of phrase: “Then the worst happened…” She meant the “big, dark” and “hunky” boy she had been asking about. He had spotted her. They were shouting to one another above the noise, and the first words Hughes heard from her were from his own poetry. “You like?” Hughes asked as he backed her into another room and sloshed some brandy into her glass. Then he kissed her—“bang smash on the mouth,” ripping her hair band and earrings while barking, “I shall keep.” The curt wording Plath records in her journal sharpens the sense of Hughes’s ability to cut through the party palaver, the politenesses of Cambridge he was known to flout. When he kissed her on the neck, she retaliated with a long, hard bite on his cheek that drew a line of blood. Hughes might as well have stepped right out of a Brontë novel. She could not stop obsessing about him. She had already been told he was the biggest seducer in Cambridge. Thoughts of Hughes were almost enough to drive away her longing for Richard Sassoon.
Two days later, Plath had completed “Pursuit,” the poem dedicated to Ted Hughes that sets out in one astonishing burst of insight all Plath needed to know about the love of her life. The image in the first line of a stalking panther immediately segues to a startling conclusion: “One day I’ll have my death of him.” If she dreads this denouement, she also seems to welcome it like a gift—or rather, she seems to relish her death as something that she will take from him. The line acknowledges a bond, a mutuality, between predator and victim. In Plath’s own mythology, death by whatever means—even suicide—could be poetic, a kind of aesthetic completion and thus a desirable, if grisly, denouement, as perfectly consummated as in a Poe story. As she confided to her journal, she picked up the poetic identities of characters who died and believed in them “completely for a while. What they say is True.” Already, Hughes, whose poems would so often feature wild animals, appears to be a figure out of Blake’s tyger poem, with fire running through his hot network of veins.
The poem empathizes with the ravenous panther, whose fierce joy in the consummation of appetite becomes aestheticized in lines that revel in the “sweet … singeing fury of his fur.” The panther as lover is a common trope among literary lovers such as H. G. Wells (Jaguar) and Rebecca West (Panther), the latter just coming into her own when she met her older lover. The Wells-West letters also consider ravishment a mutual hunt. In “Pursuit,” the panther “keeps my speed,” the beloved says, as she hurls her heart to “halt his pace.” The poem ends on a note of fear, after the beloved realizes that the panther demands “a total s
acrifice.” As he treads the stairs toward her bolted door, the overwhelming mood is one of horror and arousal, the theme of her journal reports that “the worst happened.” The poem’s concluding lines, however, echo another journal entry: “I listen always for footsteps coming up the stairs and hate them if they are not for me.” To quote Edward Butscher, the panther can be read as an “aspect of herself,” and as an example of Plath’s “masochism,” according to Anne Stevenson and Elaine Feinstein. But the panther is “emphatically male, and women are his victims,” Ronald Hayman rejoins. To put it another way: No other man had it in him to excite such a vehement, all-encompassing response, and Plath seems to have intuited the triumph and tragedy of mating with such a man. That Hughes was not physically violent, according to Anne Stevenson, is beside the point. He had a violent imagination, and Plath divined that it was her misfortune to meet such a man even as she dreamed of him as her salvation. As critic Margarot Uroff points out, “It would be several years before Hughes himself would write of an animal as ravenous as her panther.”
After several days of mooning about Ted Hughes—a fantastical figure Plath really believed would not materialize again—she resumed brooding about the real Richard Sassoon, the man who got away. She had earlier written a poem with him in mind that seems as prophetic as “Pursuit.” In “Circus in Three Rings,” included in her Collected Poems, Sassoon emerges as a mocking Mephistopheles, vanishing with “devilish ease” in smoke that sears the speaker’s eyes. In her journal, Plath wrote to him: “Break your image and wrench it from me.” The “demon of doom” in her poem and the Sassoon of her journal seemed to have a magical impact, a Prospero-like power to appear and disappear both in her imagination and in her life. She wanted him, once and for all, to say he was “unavailable” to her—or that he was willing to save her from death. Insistent on his talismanic force, she urged him, “kill your image.” Otherwise, she remained “frozen in the land of the bronze dead.”
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