Sylvia Plath: A Biography (5 page)

During the summer of 1949, she swam, went to stock car races, went dancing, motorcycled, and took day-long trips to Cape Cod with a dozen different boys. Late that summer she met John Hall, the first date who, in her words, made her feel “confident and joyful,” and they dated steadily before he left for Williams College that fall. With John she played tennis, went for long walks and drives, climbed the local tower —which must have been an ordeal for Sylvia, who was afraid of heights — danced, and visited friends on the Cape, driving their Jeep along the beaches. “Say fun!” is the caption under Sylvia’s photo of the Jeep, written with an ebullience new to the usually serious girl.

Sylvia’s popularity seemed to calm her, and she was able to give up taking the sleeping pills that had become routine. In late September she began dating Bob Riedeman, a sophomore botany major at the University of New Hampshire. Blond and musically talented, Riedeman dated Sylvia seriously for over a year although she continued to write to Hall and visited the Williams campus that fall. Most of Christmas break she spent with Riedeman — seeing movies, going to supper, skating, and dancing. They spent Christmas and New Year’s Eves at the Plaths’, listening to records, especially “Put Another Nickel In.” They found ways to escape to the Riedeman family car for long sessions of intense talking and necking, serious about their love for each other. Sylvia once asked Bob what he was “building” for her life.

Sylvia spent several weekends at the University of New Hampshire, including the February Snow Circus carnival. On the weekend of Bob’s birthday in May, she took the bus to New Hampshire to give him a surprise party, carrying for his present three records (“These Foolish Things,” “I’ll Remember April,” and “That’s a Plenty”) and money for dinner out. Riedeman took Sylvia to the prom, to graduation activities, and to early summer events, but he left for two months at a forest service camp in Wyoming in mid-June 1950. Sylvia gave him Housman’s
A
Shropshire
Lad
as a going-away present.

Her other friendships with boys like Perry Norton and Phil McCurdy continued through high school. She sometimes dated Perry, but he often thought of her as a sister. Whenever they did go out, Perry was nervous around the highly competitive girl. Usually Perry and Sylvia were confidants, taking long walks and talking endlessly about their adolescent problems. She did that, too, with McCurdy, including in their conversations discussions of menstruation and masturbation as well as religion, ambition, art, and nature. Phil was an excellent science student, and with him Sylvia was willing to play the role of pupil.

In all her relationships, Sylvia seemed to be divided. While she was usually affable with Riedeman, there were times when she let him know that she did not appreciate his being better at some things than she was (as when she called him Dick Button at the skating rink). The dominant element of Sylvia’s personality during high school was her need for control. She didn’t like surprises; anything unexpected unnerved her. Sylvia liked life to be predictable. When it wasn’t, she became involved in work, or depressed, or ill. She also showed a less agreeable side to her mother and her family during these later high school years, turning more often to girlfriends like Mary Ventura and Patsy O’Neill. On the surface, however, Sylvia remained the dutiful achiever, needing the attention her accomplishments brought as reassurance that she was the perfect American girl.

What the perfect American girl was one could discover in the pages of the 1950s teen and women’s magazines. According to the media, a woman should be a wife and probably a mother. If there was time, then she might do volunteer work, but she was not expected to be a professional. In a decade when the average marriage age for women had fallen to 20.3, the lowest ever recorded in the U.S., Sylvia did not plan to be an unmarried career woman. To choose not to marry would be to label herself
unfeminine
. Throughout high school, Sylvia examined boys as possible future husbands. Part of her closeness to Perry Norton stemmed from her conviction that the Norton boys would make wonderful husbands.

Typical of the message Plath and other young women received during the late 1940s and early 1950s was a 1949 Listerine advertisement. Featured in
Ladies’
Home
Journal
as well as
Seventeen
and
Mademoiselle
, the ad shows three pretty women wearing graduation caps and gowns. Two of the three are prominently displaying engagement rings. The caption for the ad reads, “One Course They Didn’t Teach Her” and the opening line identifies “her” as “Dora”: “Even though it was Graduation Day Dora felt a little pang of loneliness. What was the diploma compared to those precious sparkling rings that Babs and Beth were wearing?” The message was clear,
The
only
happy
woman
was
the
married
woman
.

A corollary to this emphasis was the culture’s concern over sex and virginity, another issue that worried Plath as she was growing up. Her reputation at Bradford was that of a good girl, one who had not had sex. But she had done her share of necking and petting. The midcentury code of morality was entirely negative — nice girls didn’t have sex. It was a delicate balance, for a girl to appear “normal” — i.e. sensual — and yet remain a virgin. According to the magazines, women were supposed to enjoy sex, but with just one lifetime partner. Doris Day’s naive allure became the ideal, just as Farnham and Lundberg’s
Modern Woman
:
The
Lost
Sex
became the 1950s guide to satisfying relationships. Thoroughly Freudian,
Modern
Woman
stated that women would find sexual satisfaction only through motherhood. It was a commonly held opinion, And during the Fifties the birth rate rose with such speed — the peak of the “Baby Boom” — that the nation’s population grew more than 18% in that decade.

Sylvia had grown up with these attitudes and with the embodiment of them all —
The
Ladies’
Home
Journal
. When she came home from school, she devoured that magazine. Several years later, when she lived in England, she frequently asked Aurelia to send her back copies. As her unpublished short fiction shows clearly, she often wrote stories aimed at that market (Ted Hughes recalls that she wrote for either
The
New
Yorker
or
Ladies’
Home
Journal
, “the two alternating according to her mood”). Somehow, the latter magazine epitomized the American woman’s ideal life, and Sylvia was never certain that she did not want to live that life. Her early conditioning to live exactly as her mother directed and to please her parents in order to win their love was almost impossible to shake.

Her high school fiction reflects the pressure she felt from those cultural ideals. Much of her writing is concerned with women’s lives and the choices women make. Even at fifteen and sixteen Sylvia saw herself as outside the mainstream of society, and she worried about being out there. Whether she felt guilty (why did she want to be different from other women? from her mother?) or rebellious, she hid her feelings except in her writing. Throughout her life, Sylvia’s writing expressed feelings she did not allow herself to admit otherwise.

In “The Dark River,” a 1949 story, the striking older woman protagonist tells the young female listener of having given up the man who loved her so that she could lead her own life. Her final parting from him is defiant, described by Plath as a triumph:

It was good to run. As her feet thudded over the gravel path, the blood pounded in her ears and drowned out the sound of the river, which still echoed in her brain. Something pent up inside her broke, free and wild. Her hair flew out behind her as she ran....

Generally, Plath’s stories from this period depict a girl or woman protagonist desperate for a lover, yet here a broken romance is the climactic event. Young as she was, Sylvia was exploring women’s lives in considerable dimension.

Much of her early fiction concerns the conflict between some “ideal” woman — virginal or married, a good daughter or wife and the slightly suspect “career woman.” The continuing character in Sylvia’s stories is the girl who must choose between roles, sometimes an overachiever and usually alienated from life around her. Other poems and stories reflect her growing suspicion of her family’s values, her mistrust of her mother’s advice. Much of her writing is already complex and ambivalent. The story “East Wind,” for example, presents Miss Minton, a single woman who is lured through city streets by an elfin child, almost to her death. Here the water imagery that Sylvia often used to depict security becomes the place of suicide. Ostensibly, Miss Minton is chasing her hat in the strong wind of the title, but the chase brings her to a river bridge:

She reached out over the railing, and there was the water down below. Way, way down the dark surface of the river leered up at her. If she leaned just a little farther, just a little ... there would be no more apartment, no more ugly brown cloak, no more.... The wind would bear her up. She would be floating on the wind; light as a feather she would be caught and tossed up, up. For one breathless exultant moment she leaned out, her eyes shining. She laughed giddily. She was going to...

But with a shift in the wind, Minton leaves her fantasy and goes home, forgetting the episode and, Plath suggests, losing as well those moments of clarity that the elf had made possible. “Sane” survival has also meant a kind of loss.

In senior year Sylvia continued her writing, submitting to magazines, and being undisturbed at rejections. It was a year of French III, art, biology, English, and American history with Mr. Upham, who wrote on her final report, “You are what makes teaching worthwhile.” It was also a year of leadership in the Unitarian Church’s youth group and membership in the United World Federalists, a club to promote world peace.

The most important event of her senior year was her decision to attend Smith College. She wrote, “I know my whole life will be different because of my choice.” (Her choice was either to live at home and go to Wellesley College, or to use a number of scholarships and go to Northampton.) Attending Smith, however glamorous, meant increased financial worry for both Sylvia and her mother. Scholarships were given for one year only, so each spring was a trial while various awards were announced. For her freshman year, Sylvia had a $450 scholarship from the local Smith Club and an $850 scholarship from the Olive Higgins Prouty fellowship fund at Smith. Mrs. Prouty, the well-known author of
Stella
Dallas
, the novel and radio serial, as well as other novels, became one of Sylvia’s lifelong benefactors and friends. She lived in Brookline, Massachusetts, and befriended Aurelia and Warren as well as Sylvia.

At her high school graduation, Sylvia was recognized for winning the
Boston
Globe
contest (first prize for a news story and honorable mention for a poem) and for winning top prize in
The
Atlantic
Monthly
Scholastic contest for fiction. The uneasiness of her hard-won popularity, however, showed in the school paper’s Class Prophecy on June 6, 1950. There Sylvia appears, intent and serious-minded, “explaining her theory of relativity to Pat O’Neill who is listening, as always, with the patience of Job.”

The triumph of Sylvia’s graduation from Bradford High was, in some ways, foreshadowed by her earlier essay, “Childhood Fears,” a writing assignment for Crockett’s English class. According to the essay, Sylvia had never been afraid of anything but, knowing that she should have some fears to be normal, she chose carpet sweepers (for noise) and opening umbrellas (for motion). Later, she described the way she and her friend Ruthie Freeman talked themselves into being afraid of escalators and subways, of circular stairs and cut-out steps, of people hiding in closets, and of dreams (the girls studied dreams with a book from the Freeman attic). The impertinence of Sylvia’s essay suggests that she had experienced a childhood that was generally peaceful and secure and that, at fifteen, she felt in control of her life. But a careful reader might have noticed that her flippant essay did not mention the various losses and worries she had actually known: her fear of change, worries about money, her father’s death, academic pressure. Whether Sylvia was a fearless high school student, the remainder of her school years would not be carefree.

4 - Beginning Smith College

1950-51

“Blameless as Daylight”

In the summer of 1950, with her characteristic discipline, Sylvia began keeping a serious journal. In it she described scenes from dates and summer jobs and meditated about issues important to her — the Korean War, the “decline” of America, people’s inhumanity to each other, her identity, whether she could become the writer she now dreamed of being.

Her thoughts about what it means to be a writer, to depersonalize feelings so that they can be recorded, take up much of this summer journal. Her obsession with this one subject suggests that she was not comfortable with her ambition. Sometimes she felt that she was being opportunistic because she wrote about the people in her life, boyfriends included: “At home on my desk is the best story I’ve ever written. How can I tell Bob [Riedeman] that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print?”

Had Sylvia made this entry public, perhaps someone would have assured her that her ambitions, her emotions, needed no justification. But whenever she wrote, she expressed a need to be “justified,” to be reassured that this activity was acceptable. From the first her private journals seemed to contradict the picture of confident mastery she was adept at projecting.

Her summer journals include a moving passage about Mary Ventura, her friend who had moved from Wellesley to Natick during their senior year. Always looking for role models, Sylvia admired the more experienced girl, whom she described as “something vital, an artist’s model, life.... Mary is me ... with her I can be honest.” Aside from Phil McCurdy and Mary Ventura, there were few people Sylvia felt she could be herself with. In the course of her life, her deepest friendships were with people with whom she could show a frankness that was often discouraged in “polite” society.

Plath’s journal relates other summer events. She and Warren had full-time jobs at Lookout Farm, a truck farm where fruits and vegetables were raised for the city markets. Every morning they biked as far as Wellesley College where they caught rides with other workers. It was a long day of hard labor, setting out strawberry plants, cutting asparagus, weeding corn. What was satisfying to Sylvia was that she could do the work and that she was accepted by her coworkers. (Almost accepted. There was one day when the boys in the group planned to throw her into the washtub, but Warren stood them off.) Sylvia’s hunger to know people led to her romanticizing the farm workers, as in her poem “Bitter Strawberries” and an essay, “The Rewards of a New England Summer,” both of which were published that fall in
The
Christian
Science
Monitor
.

There was a sexual dimension to the farm experience as well. Ilo, a Latvian immigrant, was working there before going to New York to start a career as an artist. He had been studying art in Munich. Sylvia’s interest in drawing led to friendship, but she was frightened when Ilo French-kissed her and she realized how attracted to him she was. One of her college stories, called “The Estonian” and, in a second version, “The Latvian,” describes that attraction. So too does “Den of Lions,” which she wrote about another summer date, and which was published. The tension between fear of the sexual and fascination with it gave these stories a sensuality, which she also caught in “A Day in June,” a story about adolescent girls. Her journal, however, presented a much more caustic Sylvia, who described dating as “this game of searching for a mate, of testing, trying.” She wrote with wicked humor about “the strong smell of masculinity which creates the ideal medium for me to exist in,” but she also described, perceptively, the real sexual conflicts she endured: “I have too much conscience injected in me to break customs without disastrous effects; I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who dispel sexual hunger freely ... and be whole, while I drag out from date to date in soggy desire, always unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.” She ironically called herself “the American virgin, dressed to seduce.... We go on dates, we play around, and if we’re nice girls, we demur at a certain point.”

The wry candor of Plath’s journals did not show in any of her published writing from these years. In August of 1950, as she was about to enter Smith,
Seventeen
published “And Summer Will Not Come Again.” Based on Sylvia’s tennis court dates of the summer before, the story is about a high school girl who falls for the college boy who coaches her, only to discover that he already has a girlfriend. The story established her reputation as a writer at Smith, but it was less important in itself than as the impetus for her five-year friendship with Ed Cohen, a Chicagoan who wrote to her after he read the story.

A student at Roosevelt University, a small, politically radical liberal arts school, Cohen introduced himself as a former University of Chicago student who wanted to be a psychiatrist but would never have the patience to go to medical school, a “cynical idealist” who was impressed with Sylvia’s writing. Four years older than she, Cohen came through even in his first letter as a comparative “man of the world.” He smoked, he had recently broken off with a live-in fiancée, and he had temporarily dropped out of college so that he could live in a way he considered more full. He was, in fact, about to vacation in Mexico, a statement that was more alluring than he could have known to the little-traveled New England girl.

There were letters from Cohen on August 8 and 19, and one on August 25 from the Hotel Belpra in Mexico City. Once back in Chicago, Cohen wrote — usually in the middle of the night (and for Sylvia, who needed ten hours of sleep a night, his writing habits were as exotic as his vacations) — every week in September. Each letter, single-spaced, ran from four to ten pages. All Cohen’s letters were candid, troubling accounts of his alienation from society; all attempted to involve Sylvia in his life. Cohen and Sylvia were soon corresponding the way she and Phil McCurdy had always talked — openly and with an element of self-dramatization that might, given the right circumstances, topple over into fiction.

Much of Cohen’s correspondence had to do with sex. He recommended that Sylvia read Walter Benton’s
This
Is
My
Beloved
, a book of graphic sexual poetry popular at the time. He frequently advised her about her own sexual behavior (“I not only did not advocate promiscuity, I think I very specifically said the person who indulges in it is likely to be unhappy”).

Cynical humor dotted Cohen’s letters, and Plath frequently borrowed his epigrams: “It is quite true that women grow up faster than men do; however, they never seem to grow up quite as far.” “Life might be simpler if we were born in pairs.” “Those who believe in God are mental cowards; those who devote their lives to his service are physical cowards as well.” “The meek shall inherit the earth — but how long will they stay that way?”

An important element in their correspondence was their shared disgust with the Korean War. Cohen described the “state of terror” he and his friends lived in, because of the draft, and wrote about coming home from Mexico only to hear Truman “telling me that after all this living, I’m going to die in Korea. Why? WHYWHYWHY? I want to know what the hell it’s all about. I’m damned if I intend to stop living for a lot of fancy slogans.” In other letters, he described the way his friends and he felt about the draft and about war. On September 21, he wrote that Sylvia’s antiwar letter — a letter she had recently sent him — which he called “a powerful document,” had helped him to change the views of several friends from prowar to antiwar.

In quality as well as quantity, Cohen’s letters impressed Sylvia. In many ways, the two were kindred spirits, and she recognized this from her first letter. She wrote in a style that was, for her, new and tough. With Hemingway-like abruptness, she wrote, “My father is dead; my mother teaches. I have a kid brother.” About her job at Lookout Farm, “I’m up at 6, in bed by 9, and very grimy in between. But I just smile when my white collar acquaintances look at me with unbelieving dismay as I tell them about soaking my hands in bleach to get them clean.”

Plath showed her own satiric vein in her August 11 letter, calling herself “a red-blooded American girl (Do I hear strains of the national anthem in the background) I’m sarcastic, skeptical and sometimes callous because I’m still afraid of letting myself be hurt. There’s that very vulnerable core in me which every egoist has.” She told Cohen she was not religious, scornful of a salvation that is “spooned out to those too spineless to think for themselves.” She too saw herself as alienated and told Cohen that, for a girl, alienation was worse because boys were always trying to categorize her as brainless, never realizing “the CHAOS that seethes beneath my exterior. As for the Who am I? What am I? angle ... that will preoccupy me till the day I die.”

The subject of greatest interest to both of them was their shared disaffection from society. Writing as the McCarthy hysteria was reaching its peak, Sylvia was furious about the reaction to dissenters: “You’re a Communist nowadays if you sign peace appeals. Ed, people don’t seem to see that this negative Anti-Communist attitude is destroying all the freedom of thought we’ve ever had.... Everything they don’t agree with is Communist.” Like her early poem “Youth’s Appeal for Peace,” with its imagery of apocalypse, and the essay she wrote with Perry Norton, which appeared in
The
Christian
Science
Monitor
in March of 1950, Plath’s view was that pacifism would solve the world’s problems.

There was a core of idealism to Sylvia’s often stubborn character, and her anger usually flared when her ideals were not respected. She believed in truth and honor as more than platitudes, and she was far from being a materialist, no matter how much she yearned for good clothes, records, and books. She also looked for people’s spiritual dimensions, although, since she had been reared on Unitarian optimism, she believed people could determine their own future. Individual will was more important than the quality of a person’s belief in God. “Knowledge” was often the path to spiritual growth, even if that knowledge was not primarily religious. In Sylvia’s household, “character” was the mark of an accomplished person, and anyone could reach his or her goals through self-betterment. Sylvia carried this personal belief into her dealings with other people, and she grew impatient when her friends were less than perfect. Nearly all her friends commented on her tendency to become disillusioned with people, and they observed that she had the same idealistic expectations for herself.

In fact, the most noticeable trait of Sylvia’s personality in 1950, as she entered college, was the relentless demand she made on herself. Anything less than complete success in all areas was failure to her. Now that she had achieved such successes as her academic record, her admission to Smith, even her social life, she might have been ready to believe in her own abilities and talent. But Sylvia was not. She was still apprehensive, and as the move to Smith grew closer, her journal filled with her fears.

Complicating the issue was Sylvia’s rejection of the prevailing mode of femininity. She wrote in one journal entry, “Spare me from cooking three meals a day — spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.” Instead, she wished for freedom, power, the means to achieve whatever she desired: “I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’” And in a later entry: “I love freedom. I deplore constrictions and limitations.... I am I — I am powerful.”

On September 27, 1950, Sylvia took with her to Smith her fears, complete with her self-contradictory image as the responsible intellectual and the daring woman who insisted on living fully. She was intent on realizing potential, including her sexual potential. Yet the admonition she put foremost — with characteristic guilt at her good fortune — was to prove herself worthy of the $1300 in scholarship money.

The self-imposed pressure was intense. Sylvia’s letters from Smith, one written only a few hours after she arrived, show her nervousness about being there. “I’ve so much work to do.” “Just now the schoolwork seems endless.... I don’t see how girls can play bridge in the livingroom all night. For these first months, I’m going to study every chance I get. I’ll be amazed if I get one A.” The steady litany of exhaustion in these letters home suggests either that Plath was defeated before she began, or that she felt bound to convince her family of the incredible work ahead.

Part of Sylvia’s uneasiness stemmed from the fact that — at Smith as in Wellesley — she felt that she was an outsider. Both Smith and Wellesley radiated well-kept serenity, expensive serenity. Wellesley’s exclusive shopping districts and the mammoth stone castle that serves as its Town Hall surrounded Sylvia with the marks and the privileges of wealth. In a somewhat understated manner, the Smith campus gave the same impression. Immaculate lawns and parks surrounded Paradise Pond; the women lived in thirty-five houses that served as dormitories. Sylvia lived in Haven House, one of the frame residences along wide, tree-lined Elm Street. She was given a single room on the third floor. Considering her need for a great deal of sleep, such a room should have been ideal.

At first she was ecstatic at having forty-eight girls as house-mates. As she wrote to Aurelia, “Girls are a new world for me. I should have some fascinating times learning about the creatures. Gosh, to live in a house with 48 kids my own age — what a life!” The next day in another letter home she announced somewhat prematurely, “I’ve gotten along with everyone in the house. It’s good to see more faces familiar to me.... The food here is fabulous. I love everybody. If only I can unobtrusively do well in all my courses and get enough sleep, I should be tops. I’m so happy ... I keep muttering, ‘I’M A SMITH GIRL NOW.’”