American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  Sylvia’s initial disappointments as a teacher, and her eventual acclimation to the classroom, seem confirmed in the reminiscences of her students. As a Smith freshman, Barbara Russell Kornfield “struggled mightily as we read William James, no doubt why my first paper was a D+. She was a tough teacher for a 17 year old.” Of course, Kornfield did not know about her own teacher’s struggles to improve, or about what the sudden appearance of Hughes, a stranger to the class, meant to Plath. “I do remember quite clearly,” Kornfield adds, “we had no compunctions about asking her who he was. In an ethereal voice, she replied: ‘That is a man from heaven sent.’”

  Part of Plath’s problem during her first months at Smith stemmed from her decision to adopt the Socratic method of her Cambridge tutorials. She had reveled in the hard give-and-take of her sessions with Dorothea Krook, which were quite unlike anything she had experienced at Smith—or her own students were prepared to endure. Anne Mohegan Smith remembers one of her Smith classmates, Merrill Schwartz, explained that in her freshman English literature section Plath began the year

  singling out students as foils in class, challenging/ridiculing their comments and more than once reducing them to tears. I heard this from Merrill who was one of the students singled out in this way; she came to the Wilder House dining room with swollen red eyelids, and told our table about it. She was a lively girl with a heavy, nasal Brooklyn accent and a high-pitched cackle of a laugh, but however irrepressible she might seem, she could be wounded, and was. After that day, I heard about this behavior once again from another student in Plath’s class who lived in a different college house from mine.

  Before beginning her year at Smith, Sylvia had written letters worrying about how she would establish her authority in the classroom, especially since she was only a little more than six years older than her students. Her resort to Cambridge pedagogy was a way to exert power in precisely the place where she felt most vulnerable. But “then, suddenly, about halfway through the semester, the behavior stopped,” Smith noted. “Florence Dalrymple told me years later that Plath … was told (probably by our class dean) to stop it at once—students perceived it as abuse.”

  Whatever start-up problems Plath may have had at Smith seem to have been resolved quickly. By the end of November, she reported to Warren, she had been asked to teach for a second year, but she had already decided against it, since teaching had put a stop to her writing. She and Ted were planning to move out of Northampton by the end of the summer and settle in Boston, where Sylvia hope to find some kind of part-time employment that would not sap her writing energy. They would rent a flat on the “slummy side” of Beacon Hill, as far from an academic environment as they could get.

  Whatever Ted’s qualms about America, he had lost none of his charm. His latest conquest was Olive Higgins Prouty, who had, if Sylvia is to be believed, become “obsessed with Ted.” It was a common enough experience. Ted only had to say hello to you, recalled Ravelle Silberman (a freshman when she met Hughes), and he was already flirting with you. He enjoyed watching women compete for him, recalled writer Marvin Cohen, who met Hughes many years later and became a friend of Olwyn.

  On 7 December, Sylvia wrote to Aurelia with considerably more confidence about her teaching, saying she was making the best of a bad job. Several faculty members had relayed comments from students who had called her a “brilliant teacher.” But that accolade did not mean Sylvia inspired much affection—certainly not like one of her mentors, Alfred Fisher, whom Smith undergraduates adored, and who appears in CB Follett’s poem about Sylvia as “our druid king.”

  By the end of the fall semester, Sylvia had exhausted herself, and by the time she reached Wellesley for her Christmas break, she had developed a fever and then came down with pneumonia, which was successfully treated with antibiotics. Over the holidays, Sylvia nursed her ambition, dreaming “too much” of fame, she admitted in her journal. Thoughts of “Falcon Yard” as a “rich, humorous satire” flitted randomly among ideas for stories, the fate of the book she had submitted to the Yale Younger Poets series, and plans to apply for a fellowship that would fund their return to Europe. A certain estrangement had set in: “You can’t go home again,” she wrote, noting that her beloved memories of her seaside childhood in Winthrop had “shrunk.”

  Plath also experienced pressure from Smith faculty, who urged her to stay a second year. Alfred Fisher said her failure to do so would be deemed “irresponsible.” She resisted overtures from her former thesis advisor, George Gibian, too, commenting in her journal that her colleagues meant well but really had no idea of what was good for her. Winters were often hard for her, and she contracted a cough in early January. Her aches and pains seemed of a piece with her dread of preparing for class, attending department meetings, and dealing with her writing almost like an onlooker whose troubles Alfred Fisher dismissed with, “It’s all in your mind.” Citizen Kane—especially the famous scene with the glass globe that contains Kane’s grieving memory of the snow scene, which signals the end of his childhood, and the parade of Kanes in the mirror shots—appealed to Sylvia as emblematic of her own haunted retrospection. To her surprise, sometimes classes went well, but teaching still exhausted her. Knowing this was her last term had freed her to take more pleasure in her students, whom she now regarded “as really good girls,” she told Aurelia on 13 January.

  But Sylvia thought mostly of June and her return to full-time writing. It seemed so long since she had achieved anything notable, and now she learned she had not won the Yale Younger Poets prize, and she would not have her first book published—not yet. And how infuriating, she wrote in her journal, to see that she had not been included in an anthology of six “new poets of england and america.” Only two of them, May Swenson and Adrienne Rich, seemed any good, and they were not “better or more-published than me,” Plath observed. She needed a tougher, freer voice, she told herself, anticipating work still years beyond her reach. She regretted her diaries, “spattered with undone imperatives, directives.”

  At the end of January 1958, Ted commuted eight miles to teach literature and creative writing at the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, a position he obtained through one of Plath’s contacts at Smith. He was teaching two classes three times a week. Milton, Goethe, Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, Thoreau, and Molière were on his syllabus for a great works course. He also taught freshman composition. This job helped to pay for what Sylvia’s salary did not cover and contributed to the savings they would rely on when they returned to their writers’ lives.

  Sylvia had moments, she confided to her journal, when visions of cozy academic life beckoned. They could easily earn eight thousand a year teaching, making a living off of classes on Joyce and James. She could become a teacher/writer like Elizabeth Drew, one of her mentors, queening about as a beloved campus icon. But she remained true to Ted’s antiacademic attitudes and to her own ambition to overtake poets like the “facile Isabella Gardner & even the lesbian and fanciful & jeweled Elizabeth Bishop in America.” Teaching did not allow her to live her own self, as she put it in her journal. She needed to sweat out her novel next summer. With “Falcon Yard” behind her, perhaps by the fourth year of their marriage it would be time to begin conceiving children. An academic career would have meant years of graduate school to earn a PhD and a very junior position at Smith. Yet the faculty thought, as George Gibian put it, that to teach at Smith was the “very highest thing an intellectual woman could do, and to give THAT up was very odd.”

  Never at her best in bleak, blustery cold seasons, Sylvia groused about even good friends, like the Roches. Paul, an Englishman, was teaching at Smith, and his wife, Clarissa, befriended Sylvia, although their greatest period of intimacy would come later in Britain. Paul, Sylvia noted, had lost his Adonis-boy looks and was no poet—for all his connections to William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Ted held a similar critical view, describing his fellow countryman as “tall, thin a rapt shelleyan look, bright blue eyes that he
holds wide open and slightly glazed, but withal utterly seedy … an old lady charmer, with his beautiful hushing voice, and wonderful English manners.” Clarissa seemed “naive and likeable” to Ted, but in Sylvia’s journal she appeared as a sullen blonde figure in a “silken pout” over a cup of coffee.

  Sylvia and Ted also socialized with the poet W. S. Merwin and his British wife, Dido, then living in Boston. Bill Merwin embodied a cliché: the man’s man. Poet Grace Schulman remembered that Bill and Ted formed a sort of men’s club. Their utterly self-sufficient maleness seemed to impress her, inspiring a wonder at the masculine gravitational pull that Sylvia herself felt so strongly. At this early stage, though, the Merwins mainly represented to Sylvia the admirable urbanity of a couple on their own, in a high-rise apartment with windows so wide they reminded her of a ship deck.

  Campus life bothered Sylvia because it subjected her to men like the poet Anthony Hecht, a notorious misogynist who plied her with patronizing pleasantries about her earnest, energetic manner. She was a grader for critic Newton Arvin’s lecture course, a job she enjoyed, which nevertheless made her feel like a drudge, dealing with assignments and students in a sort of mopping up operation. She would return home and give everything a thorough cleaning—and then bake a lemon meringue pie, taking immense satisfaction in her own realm. In a better mood, she described a party and her enjoyment of “blond witchy dear Clarissa” and a cherubic Paul, looking “Rossetti-like” with his blue eyes and blond curls. Department gossip amused her, especially tales of Alfred Fisher, who had married three of his students, and other tales about which faculty members had “the Power.” Sylvia preened when told how good her freshmen classes were. She exulted in a “dangerous enjoyment from shocking” her students, she wrote to Olwyn on 9 February, describing a memorable class that had stimulated “laughter & even tears, the occasion of the latter being a snowy Saturday spent evoking the bloody & cruel history of the Irish whiteboys, potato famines, mass hangings, etc.” Such interludes broke up the otherwise discontented winter that had Sylvia holding on with visions of June, dreaming of trading her Smith “girl-studded” past for the anonymity of Boston.

  It was Ted’s turn in mid-March to be brought down with stomach upsets and fevers, as though he were putting himself in Sylvia’s place. They argued about his clothes and about Sylvia’s need to sew on buttons that went missing from his jackets. Reading the autobiography of a male friend, she objected to his notion that a man could eternally love a woman, even after he left her. She mused, “loving, leaving—a lovely consonance. I don’t see it: and my man doesn’t.” Or so she thought.

  Plath sought inspiration in the work of Paul Klee, Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, and De Chirico, and on 22 March, at the beginning of spring break, she reported to Aurelia that the poem-drought had ended. Work was beginning to shoot out like a geyser. She was also writing Dole Pineapple jingles for a contest. After all, they could use a car. Even just a few cash prizes would help. Commerce and art intermingled easily in the poems she enclosed for her mother’s perusal. In “Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer,” her whimsical work on Klee, she evokes a “little Odyssey” of battles in bathtubs such as children can create with extraordinary intensity. The child’s ability to fashion a fully functioning world separate from what Plath calls “meat-and-potato thoughts” in “Departure of the Ghost (After Paul Klee)” suggests how sorely she wanted to escape from the all-too-material world of her Smith routines.

  By 28 March, Plath had produced eight new poems—her best ever, she thought, vowing not to waste “poem-time” on people she did not like. In a self-described arrogant mood, she pictured herself as the “Poetess of America” and Ted as the “Poet of England.” Ted, likewise, was touting himself to Olwyn, writing in late March about selling a poem to the “high-heeled” Mademoiselle, and extolling Sylvia’s recent productivity, the result of twelve-hour writing jags.

  But a return to teaching brought out Sylvia’s complaints. Ted’s nose picking and scratching were getting on her nerves, even as she realized her petulance hardly made her an appealing companion. Right on schedule, she developed a cold and began her own irritating round of twitching and sneezing, only to be heartened by Ted’s comforting closeness and willingness to cook for her when she felt ill. Thank God she had a man who understood the demon in her. At Easter she filled Ted’s slippers with a chocolate rabbit and eggs, and he ate them all.

  At a poetry reading arranged for Ted at Harvard by his friend Jack Sweeney, Sylvia was surrounded by the people who populated her journal: Mrs. Cantor, Gordon Lameyer, Marcia Brown, Phil McCurdy, Peter Davison, Aurelia, Olive Higgins Prouty—a veritable rollout of an audience she had made for herself and Ted. The group now also included Adrienne Rich, one of Plath’s chief rivals, cut down to size as “little, round & stumpy,” but also endowed with “vibrant short black hair” and “great sparking black eyes.” Sylvia had to admit that Rich seemed perfectly genuine, if opinionated. In the end, Sylvia felt distant from the company, as though the whole affair, like the novel she still could not command, was out of her control. She had the end-of-term blues, a syndrome familiar to seasoned academics, but a dreary period for a poet dead tired of reading scholarly studies of the writers she loved. It always seemed to surprise her when a class went well, since her mind was elsewhere, on what she would write when no longer shackled to the academic bench. She scoured her apartment in a fit of spring cleaning. During this period of furious tidying up, she noted in her journal a quarrel with Ted, who objected to her throwing out parts of his ratty old wardrobe. Later, she went out looking for him and spotted him on the street, staring at her with one of his killer looks.

  By the spring of 1958, Ted, like Sylvia, found the whole academic enterprise enervating and apparently sometimes took his disaffection out on her. Eileen Ouelette remembered the time the couple attended one of the Lawrence House Wednesday night dinners. Sylvia sat at the head table with Ted, who belittled her throughout the evening, much to Eileen’s dismay. Then in her senior year, Eileen disliked this thin, tall Englishman. But Sylvia seemed very happy and very much in love, ignoring his disparaging commentary. Indeed, Sylvia wrote about him in her journal as the kind of man women looked for in romantic novels and when they scanned the pages of the Ladies Home Journal. When he was out, and they separated for as little as an hour, Sylvia wrote that she missed his heat and smell.

  Like Hughes, Plath rejected any allegiance ancillary to her art. “The Disquieting Muses,” conceived as she was forsaking her teaching career, is an answer to the cautious mother who appears in Sylvia’s 11 May 1958 journal entry. A reserved Aurelia seemed not to rejoice when her daughter told her on Mother’s Day about the poems accepted for publication. Aurelia worried about the insolvency of poetry, but Sylvia remained stubbornly loyal to the muses that fostered her genius. She addressed her mother directly in the poem’s last lines, which renew Sylvia’s dedication to her troubling muses: “no frown of mine / Will betray the company I keep.” She seemed to take almost a perverse satisfaction when The New Yorker rejected the poem. In her journal, she comforted herself with the thought of Henry James, writing often without much of an audience, and with the wish to tell him about his posthumous reputation, a reward for all the suffering he had endured. She had no intention, however, of waiting to be discovered. “I am made, crudely, for success. Does failure whet my blade?”

  Sylvia described her last day of teaching (22 May) in a letter to Warren, reporting rounds of applause, ranging from tepid to thunderous in direct proportion to her own reactions to each class. Daniel Aaron, who observed her teaching earlier in the semester, described her as “rather schoolmarmy, prim and neat,” but overall, an effective instructor. To Warren, she confessed her disillusionment with her colleagues, a weak, vain, jealous, and petty lot. She called Smith an “airtight” community of gossipy, pot-bellied tenured males, sparing the women any specific epithets. She had adopted Ted’s scorn for go-ahead Americans with their ten-year
plans—even though she was surely one of them and would find the next months of freedom a trial precisely because she had no long-term, institutionally based program or regular job. She rather prided herself on having no charge accounts, TV, car, or other items purchased on the installment plan. Ted did not need immediate signs of success, she told Warren. But Sylvia always did, despite what she told her brother. For all their scorn of American appetites, Sylvia and Ted seemed very American indeed in their assurance that they would become wealthy and famous.

  By late May, the ghost of Sylvia Plath, withdrawing from her all-too-terrestrial time at Smith, saw herself and Ted as practiced, smiling liars—he the vain and navel-gazing male, penis proud. He was going out alone, telling her not to come along. She was sure he was ashamed of something. Another day, as told in her journal, she spotted him near Paradise Pond on the Smith campus, smiling broadly in the company of a grinning undergraduate, whose appearance assaulted Sylvia in “several sharp flashes, like blows.” This was a man seeking adulation, and the girl served it up like soup, then bolted when she saw Sylvia bearing down on her. Ted wasn’t even sure of her name. Was it Sheila? Just like him, thought Sylvia, who remembered their first long night together when he called her Shirley.

  No biographer has identified “Sheila,” except to say that she was a student Ted had taught on the University of Massachusetts Amherst campus. What, then, was she doing at Smith? No biographer has been able to establish that Hughes was unfaithful to Plath during this period of her marriage, although A. Alvarez, who often talked about women with Hughes, has no doubt that Hughes was constitutionally incapable of fidelity. At any rate, Sylvia now believed she understood why Ted had been arriving home late. She rejected his explanations and got angrier when he snored and snorted in his sleep—another complacent male—while she remained awake. In her journal tirade, she admitted that she had divined this side of him when they first met, but had capitulated to the vulgar heat of their coupling. Why had she tidied up this messy man, now sulking in her disapproval?