Sylvia Plath: A Biography (13 page)

Her writing during senior year indicated a full recovery from her breakdown. Some of the best of her fiction included “The Smoky Blue Piano,” a story about her Cambridge apartment; “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit,” an oblique treatment of a child’s loss of her father; and the deftly written “In the Mountains,” a story about the Norton-Plath relationship, which she described as “Hemingway-like.” She deserved her A in Alfred Kazin’s creative writing course. He had also taught her that “great works of literature come out of passion.”

The fifty-five poems she wrote for Professor Fisher would have profited from that lesson. Her use of controlled stanza forms such as sexain, rondeau, and villanelle undermined the effects she might have achieved, although these poems later won many prizes. Her senior-year collection was titled “Circus in Three Rings” and her current pseudonym was “Marcia Moore.” The collection was dedicated to “My Favorite Maestro, Alfred Young Fisher.” It included poems which had already appeared in
Harper’s
(three poems),
The
Atlantic
Monthly
,
The
Nation
, and
Mademoiselle
(three poems). For an undergraduate, Plath was being published in amazing places. The only other young woman poet in the country who was achieving more notice in 1955 was Adrienne Rich, already a winner of the Yale Younger Poets contest. Sylvia’s envy of Rich is clear in a letter to Gordon: “I keep reading about this damn adrienne cecile rich, only two years older than I, who is a yale younger poet and regularly in all the top mags.... Occasionally, I retch quietly in the wastebasket.”

Competitive and always aware of markets and marketability, Plath was not content to write for herself. She had become “the” area poet, giving readings on other campuses and winning (in a tie) the Mt. Holyoke Glascock Prize, a marvelous two-day event with competitive readings before an audience. Sylvia had good conversations with judges Marianne Moore and John Ciardi, with whom she drank bourbon. She also came to know the other college poets who were competing. A month later, she was asked to staff a New York state writing festival for high school students, at which Mickey Spillane was also an instructor.

As graduation neared, Sylvia won several major awards at Smith — for her honors thesis, her poetry, and for being the outstanding English student. She was one of only four students to graduate
summa
cum
laude
at the June 6, 1955, commencement. She had also been paid over $200 by magazines for stories and poems. Her most important award during her senior year, however, was her Fulbright fellowship to Newnham College at Cambridge University in England. The fellowship paid all her expenses including travel and a generous book allowance.

Winning the Fulbright solved several personal problems for Sylvia. She had a glamorous opportunity before her — at least one year of study in England, possibly two. She did not have to marry anyone (“but English men are wonderful,” she wrote to Aurelia). And she could graduate from Smith and spend the summer at home without the feelings of failure or guilt that usually plagued her when she was “doing nothing.”

Although Sylvia wrote that she was totally cured, she was still insecure, still trapped in her family’s value system, which, even if she learned to question it, she could not reject entirely. After all, it had been her dream just two years earlier, as she had written in her application for the
Mademoiselle
guest editorship, that she would someday have “a tall brilliant husband,” and that together “We will work hard, have vital, intelligent friends, go to plays, concerts, and exhibits, and subscribe to the
Atlantic
, the
New
Yorker
, the
Saturday
Review
of
Literature
,
Time
, the
Sunday Times
, and the
Monitor
— and I will be able to buy all the poetry books and tweed suits I want!”

Cambridge may have sounded exciting, but she was still single, and nearly twenty-three. By itself, the fellowship was not the fulfillment of Sylvia’s earlier dreams.

8 - England

1955 - 56

“In the Sun’s Conflagrations”

If only I get accepted at Cambridge! My whole life would explode in a rainbow. Imagine the wealth of material the experience of Europe would give me for stories and poems — the local color, the people, the fresh backgrounds. I really think that if I keep working, I shall be a good minor writer some day....

This letter from Sylvia to her mother, written during the spring before she went to England, captured two of her dominant personality traits: her tendency to place great weight on something scheduled to happen in the future (and then to be disappointed when it failed to meet her expectations) and a corresponding harshness in her assessment of her own abilities. Why would Sylvia be content to become “a good
minor
writer”? She had immense talent, an excellent education, the encouragement of many professional writers who had either taught her or befriended her or both, and an impressive number of publications, prizes, and awards. Within an outer shell of polished self-confidence lived the timid child-woman who listened all too well when inner voices reminded her that she was “just” a middle-class girl with unrealistic dreams.

Nevertheless, when she sailed for England in mid-September of 1955, she was exuberant. She planned to become at least a professional writer, if not a Ph.D. in literature as well. Her horizons seemed limitless. She was always cheered by having “new worlds” ahead.

She heaved a sigh of relief when the cab pulled up beside her at the small Cambridge train station. Her luggage had grown heavier as she lived and traveled in London for ten days, and she had no idea where Newnham College or Whitstead dormitory at 4 Barton Road was. Much to her dismay, Sylvia found that Whitstead sat at the back of the Newnham playing grounds, far from the classroom buildings, and that Newnham itself was not central to Cambridge. She had had her bike shipped over and would often ride ten miles a day from Whitstead to classes to friends’ rooms and back. Wearing her short black undergraduate gown, Sylvia pedaled robustly through her schedule, until her colds and sinus trouble began. Then her daily treks loomed insurmountable.

But she loved Cambridge. She raved about its formal gardens, King’s Chapel, and the Bridge of Sighs. Surrounded by the archaic walled colleges and lovely stone buildings, Sylvia felt tranquil and happy when she arrived. An academic world was her world; people here would understand and approve her aims, and would nourish her in attaining them. She bought furnishings for her third floor single room — a black pottery tea set, a large earthenware fruit plate, sofa pillows, and some prints — and she got to know Irene Morris, her tutor, and her housemother and housemates (largely Commonwealth women, but among them several other Americans). She wrote home frequently, letters that provided both a bridge and a safety net for her.

By early October Sylvia had settled in. Whitstead was a rambling frame house, large enough for a dozen students, surrounded by a wide tree-dotted yard. It was somewhat dilapidated, but Sylvia described her room glowingly:

The roof slants in an atticish way, and I have a gas fireplace which demands a shilling each time I want to warm up the room (wonderful for drying my washed hair by, which I did last night) and a gas ring on the hearth where I can warm up water for tea or coffee.... I love the window-sofa — just big enough for two to sit on, or for one (me) to curl up in and read with a fine view of treetops.

The woman who had earlier questioned her tutor about whether or not to bring Bermuda shorts to Cambridge seemed secure and happy there.

Some of Sylvia’s happiness that fall in Cambridge must also have stemmed from her relief at having made it through the summer at home. Partly because of her mother’s health, life at 26 Elmwood Road had been tense. During the spring, Mrs. Plath had been forced to have a subtotal gastrectomy to avoid further problems with her ulcer. (Aurelia had not missed Sylvia’s graduation, however, although to get there she had to be taken from the hospital to Northampton, lying on a mattress in a friend’s station wagon.) Much of the summer Aurelia spent convalescing on the Cape with the Schobers, leaving Sylvia — at her request — alone in Wellesley, where she was getting ready for England. Sylvia saw Sassoon occasionally — usually in New York but for one weekend at her home — and she dated Peter Davison, a young poet and editor at Harcourt Brace whom she had met through Alfred Kazin. And before she left for England, she spent several days with Lameyer.

By the summer of 1955, Sylvia’s relationship with her mother was fragile. In a letter written after he had spent the weekend in Wellesley, Sassoon urged Sylvia to be kind to Aurelia, pointing out that Sylvia would not be home for two years. Peter Davison’s account of the relationship was critical of Sylvia, who he said privately criticized her mother but in person deferred to her. After Davison and Sylvia became lovers late in the summer, she took him home to meet her family. Davison thought that Sylvia’s treatment of her mother epitomized what he considered her worst trait, “her impersonal appetite for experience.” (Describing their romance, Sylvia said that her “intensity” had bothered Davison, and he does write, in a memoir, “Her quest for knowledge was voracious. I felt as if I were being cross-examined, drained, eaten.”) It seems that much of the tension between Sylvia and her mother was visible to her dates, and may have occurred in part because of them. Aurelia could never accept Sylvia’s sexual involvements.

The poems Plath wrote during 1955 reflect the tensions in her life. “Aerialist” is about a tight-rope walker, an acrobat doing an amazing balancing act. Horrible things happen to the woman: trucks crush her, weights fall on her, bowling balls threaten to smash her. Staying alive is her feat. As in “Circus in Three Rings,” in which the woman is a lion tamer, in this poem the men in the protagonist’s life are either evil or unreliable. Some of Plath’s poems are about an absent lover — “Cinderella”, “On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover”, “Denouement”, and “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea.” Still other of her 1955 poems convey a fear of death and loss. “Temper of Time” speaks of the character Kilroy from
Camino
Real
, walking the earth while “all the gold apples/ Go bad to the core” and skeletons surround him.

Sylvia’s poems suggest a number of unresolved problems. She may have been ecstatically looking forward to living in England for two years (she would spend her vacations traveling throughout Europe), but she was no clearer about where she fit into the world than she had been before her breakdown. Whenever she was dissatisfied with a situation, she tried to leave it, to find some more exciting new world. Sylvia’s search for the new, then, including her stay in England, was less healthy than it might have appeared.

According to both her journal and many of her 1955 poems, the only genuine alleviation of Sylvia’s “doomsday” gloom came from the pleasure she took in her developing sexuality. She spent much of her time en route to England, crossing on the S. S.
United
States
, flirting with men and then making love. She did more of the same during her ten days in London. Lovemaking blotted out her anxieties about going to Cambridge — once again in that all-too-familiar role of the pressured scholarship student — and about leaving home for such a long time.

Her aims in England were twofold: Sylvia was going to get the best possible education, by reading widely and not overspecializing; and she was going to find a husband. She wrote her mother late in 1955 that she would not return to the United States until she had married. Hearing that Dick Norton was engaged only confirmed her decision. Before she had left for England, she had broken up with Peter Davison and had been chilled by Sassoon’s casual responses to her now that he had graduated and planned to live in France. Her romantic relationship with Lameyer was over, although they were going to travel together in Europe during the 1956 spring break. (Like many women at that time, Sylvia’s pattern was to keep as friends men she had been romantically involved with. This practice reflected her understanding of the patriarchal world she was moving in. As British writer Hilary Bailey Moorcock, who had been a classmate of Plath’s at Newnham, observed: “There would be no point in cultivating the society of women for practical reasons. Obviously, no woman would marry you. Equally, no woman, with only a few exceptions, could advance you in the world. Women had no power to help you in any important way; nor could they defend you from male power.”)

Men at Cambridge outnumbered women ten to one in 1955, and Sylvia was a dramatic, attractive American. She was bound to be noticed. She was slightly older than most of the Newnham students — they being undergraduates, she, at twenty-three, the equivalent of a graduate student. She impressed other students as being even older and also seemed to be a worldly and highly competitive person. (In Cambridge, one of the arts was to appear noncompetitive, although everyone was fiercely so.)

Plath’s bright lipstick, her height, her usually solemn expression, her aura of defiance, and her unshakable poise made her someone to talk about. She sometimes wrote articles for
Varsity
, the weekly Cambridge paper, and she modeled for a two-page feature on fashions. Christopher Levenson, the Cambridge poet who edited
Delta
, an influential magazine, recalled the awe that Plath tended to inspire:

She was almost a golden girl, gifted and poised, energetic, serious and intent.... My main impression remains one of the combination of intensity and sophistication. For me at least she came across as a strong, confident, experienced young woman: I remember her on one occasion describing driving through, or very close to, a tornado. I remember the vividness and intensity of her gestures and eyes, the way certain words, like the word “strong” itself, were elongated to our English ears, almost physically savoured in the telling. I think she must have been aware of the sense of power, and of a larger, less controllable world, that she projected.

Sylvia was capable of holding her own with her Whitstead housemates. She dressed as she pleased, particularly for breakfast. She also had the habit of cutting her fried eggs into careful shapes as she ate them. One morning Margaret Robarts, a South African student, asked Sylvia impatiently, “
Must
you cut up your eggs like that?” Sylvia quickly answered: “Yes, I’m afraid I really must. What do you do with your eggs? Swallow them whole?” Jane Baltzell, a Marshall scholar from the United States who also lived in Whitstead, found that being friends with Plath was sometimes difficult. Jane borrowed some books from Sylvia and made penciled notes in them, intending to erase the marks before she returned them. She forgot to erase the notes, however, and when Sylvia saw her annotations, she was furious. A similar episode occurred once when the women were traveling together and Jane inadvertently locked Sylvia out of the room they were sharing. Once Sylvia was angry, becoming friends again was a slow and testing process.

But to casual acquaintances, Sylvia seemed to be the heart of good fellowship. She was an animated story teller, a vibrant talker. She insisted on learning to eat in the British manner, knife in right hand and fork in left. No one at Whitstead cared whether or not Sylvia ate in this fashion, but she kept her housemates posted on her progress in this and in most of her activities. Everyone heard about her experiences with the theater group, her bike rides, and her dates. (On a date with a friend from America, Plath rode a runaway horse named Sam through the Cambridge streets, barely escaping injury. The ride became one of the recurring images in her late poems, always a symbol of her daring.) Sylvia was intense, nervous, and skittish at times, crossing her legs and swinging the one crossed over, threading her fingers together endlessly. For the women who lived near her in Whitstead, the fact that she often typed before 6:00 a.m. was a cross to bear.

Sylvia’s classes at Newnham fascinated her. Kathleen Burton, her director of studies and supervisor, helped her plan the two years of work. There would be no examinations until June of the second year, but prior to that time she would write weekly papers for each supervision (one hour a week with Burton and another with Dorothea Krook, a young and attractive woman who resembled Ruth Beuscher and became Sylvia’s favorite teacher at Cambridge). She attended eleven hours of lecture a week, all in the mornings and given by David Daiches, Basil Willey, and F. R. Leavis. She read independently in three areas, which she chose from the six offered: tragedy of all periods; literary criticism and British literature; and the English moralists (Aristotle to D. H. Lawrence), the last chosen because it included philosophy. It was an ambitious program, perhaps frighteningly so. The areas that Sylvia had studied at Smith — the modern novel and poetry — were not among those offered at Cambridge.

Sylvia enjoyed her time with Dr. Krook, a bright woman who taught Henry James and the moralists — chiefly Plato. Sylvia admired the fact that Krook was a success academically and yet was also personable and feminine. She was not pretentious. Wendy Campbell, a friend of both Krook’s and Sylvia’s, wrote about the latter’s supervision sessions that even though Sylvia was extremely bright, she “did not feel the need to define herself in intellectual combat.... There was nothing of the preacher, the enthusiast or the persuader about Sylvia. Her point of reference was always firmly fixed within herself. She seemed to use her mind as a set of antennae with which she assessed her own experience and felt it over. She wanted ‘to know’ for her own subjective purposes.”