Sylvia Plath: A Biography (9 page)

I took the car alone for a blissful two hours at the beach with a bag of cherries and peaches and the Magazine. I felt the happiest I ever have in my life. I read both stories and already feel that I have outgrown mine, as I saw a great many errors, artistically.... I read it ... chortled happily to myself, ran out on to the sand flats and dog-trotted for a mile far out alone in the sun through the warm tidal water ... talking to myself about how wonderful it was to be alive and brown and full of vitality and potentialities, and knowing all sorts of wonderful people. I never have felt so utterly blissful and free.

The summer of 1952, Sylvia Plath became a writer.

6 - Junior Year

1952-53

“The Doomsday of the World”

Sylvia returned to a troubling situation in her junior year. Smith had raised tuition by $150, and she had not won another Elks’ Club scholarship. She therefore had no choice but to move to Lawrence, one of the scholarship houses, where students did work in exchange for part of the cost of room and board. She knew very few women at Lawrence. Marcia Brown had moved off campus to live with her mother, and Sylvia also missed her other Haven friends. A few days after classes started she wrote to Warren, with whom she was more honest than she was with her mother: “God, those first few days were awful.... I got scareder and scareder thinking of how I didn’t know anybody hardly in the house and hadn’t even seen my room ... — it was like being a freshman all over again, only worse.”

Sylvia turned for help to Mary, her science-major roommate, but they had almost nothing in common. She had a substantial workload in the house. Part of her duty at Lawrence was cleaning and food preparation, peeling large quantities of potatoes and turnips, chopping onions, etc. She also had waitress duty for lunch, and phone and reception duty. Sylvia grew friendly with Jane Truslow, who had younger brothers at Exeter, where Warren was. Jane, however, dropped out of school during fall term and Sylvia was lonely once again. She also disliked the “fluttering idiot” who was the new housemother at Lawrence.

There were other losses. Many women had not returned after sophomore year: quite a few had married, others were working. Of the remaining class members, more than eighty were spending junior year abroad. Sylvia was envious of them and continued to long for foreign travel. Perhaps more important was an atmosphere of trouble: several women had either attempted suicide or had mysteriously left campus. Sylvia’s junior year was marked with episodes of friends’ having abortions (seeing “Dr. No”) or making hasty marriages (the married women were subsequently asked to move out of campus housing while they completed the term; in at least one case, all scholarship aid was revoked).

Fall courses were also disappointing. Sylvia could no longer delay taking the required science course — she had put it off from sophomore year — and she hated every minute of it. Worries about that class hounded her, and she finally concocted a scheme whereby she was allowed to audit the second semester of the course because she had gotten an A for the first term. (She went to class but surreptitiously wrote poems while she was there.)

Even her English classes worried her. She took a Milton course and got only a B in it. The medieval literature unit, taught by the austere and imposing Howard Patch, was a nightmare. Huge quantities of memorization and exceptionally demanding requirements made the class a full-time load. In addition to the quantity of work, Patch’s teaching strategy was to humble his students; of the ten English majors in the seminar, only Sylvia received an A. By the beginning of her junior year, Sylvia had declared that she would “honor” in English, a program which required that she write a thesis and pass comprehensive examinations in both English and American literature. She had no idea what to write a thesis about, and the reading list for the examinations was long and difficult.

It was a fall of lonely hours at Lawrence House; difficult classes; and a busy schedule writing for Press Board, attending the Electoral Board’s “smoky midnight meetings,” and the
Smith Review
; being secretary of Honors Board; and teaching the children’s art class. In the midst of all this came a phone call from Dick, with the news that he had tuberculosis and would be spending at least a year in a sanatorium in Saranac, New York, and that Sylvia should have a chest X-ray as soon as possible. Plath felt guilty about Dick’s illness in the face of her increasing withdrawal from him so, beginning in mid-October, much of her remaining energy went into a lengthy and cheering correspondence with the ailing Norton. Because Dick had never been ill, and had little sympathy for illness — as she had seen during her own bouts with sinus infections — he was emotionally adrift during this time. He often wrote to Sylvia several times a day. She had become his beloved, his anchor. Considering that he was not usually demonstrative in his writing, Dick’s love letters were not only surprising, they were in some ways manipulative; now Sylvia had the commitment she had always pushed him for.

Another change in their relationship also occurred. Because Dick had so much leisure, he began to read seriously. He wrote critical essays about what he read, including one on the work of “Miss Plath” and another on William Carlos Williams (from whom he had received a letter in answer to his own admiring one). Some of Norton’s reading complemented hers: they both liked Salinger’s
Catcher
in
the
Rye
and Lawrence’s
Women
in
Love
. But Dick also enjoyed contradicting Sylvia, as when he wrote a scathing parody of one of her favorite authors, Virginia Woolf.

Norton had always accepted the world of science as his province. Now he was moving into Sylvia’s domain of literature and writing. He was writing his own poems, too, and Sylvia was hard put to say anything good about them. She wrote enviously in her journal about Norton’s “lying up there, rested, fed, taken care of, free to explore books and thoughts at any whim.”

Her envy broke out in the midst of her November 3, 1952, journal entry, typical of what she was writing and feeling that fall:

God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now, with the groggy sleepless blood dragging through my veins.... I fell into bed again this morning, begging for sleep, withdrawing into the dark, warm, fetid escape from action, from responsibility.... I thought of the myriad of physical duties I had to perform.... The list mounted obstacle after fiendish obstacle; they jarred, they leered, they fell apart in chaos, and the revulsion, the desire to end the pointless round of objects, of things, of actions, rose higher....

Depressive as this was, her real anger was directed not so much toward Smith and her work there as toward Dick at Saranac, “lifted to the pinnacle of irresponsibility to anything but care of his body.”

Sylvia’s self-doubts grew stronger than ever. All she saw was her own “naked fear,” her own inadequacy:

I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow. I feel behind my eyes a numb, paralyzed cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness. I never thought. I never wrote, I never suffered. I want to kill myself, to escape from responsibility, to draw back abjectly into the womb. I do not know who I am, where I am going....

Several letters home echo this entry. On November 19, she signed herself “Your hollow girl” and cried to Aurelia,

Oh, Mother, I hate to bother you with this, but I could cry. Life is so black, anyway, with my two best friends, Dick and Marcia, so far removed I hardly see them. And this course: I actually am worried over my mental state! ... God, what a mess my life is. And I know I am driving myself to distraction. Everything is empty, meaningless. This is not education. It is hell.

There was more. Relentlessly critical of herself, Sylvia wrote about her failures. This time, however, writing about them did not help her.

Her mother’s characteristic response was to cheer her up. Mrs. Plath believed that Sylvia was a girl with many talents. She could always do well at whatever she tried, but she was subject to these fears and anxieties. Mrs. Plath’s correspondence gives no indication that she tried to understand the root of Sylvia’s fears. Her letters remained cheerful, encouraging, and somewhat uncomprehending.

Sylvia finally spent a night off campus with Marcia, who knew how to listen to her. Enid Epstein, too, was a loyal friend, and she and Sylvia took long walks. They saw each other at meetings of the
Smith
Review
and Press Board, and Enid remembers sitting with Sylvia in Seelye Hall as they both counted the A’s on their grade slips. Both women knew they would be junior Phi Beta Kappas, but the honor seemed crucial to Sylvia. Her deep-rooted insecurity would not disappear; it was the product of years of frantic searching for ways to excel. By this time, Sylvia believed that love was a consequence of her achievements and without those achievements she would not be loved. Without “success,” Sylvia thought she would be unloved.

During her difficult junior year, the changes and challenges at Smith were less important than Sylvia’s enervating emotional turbulence. Talented women as different as Jane Addams, Margaret Sanger, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton had each known this crippling indecisiveness as they tried to choose what kind of life they wanted. Plath’s depression was partly of that nature. She knew she wasn’t ready to be a great writer, yet that was her dream. Neither could she imagine living a life as curtailed and dependent as that of a physician’s wife, or that of her own mother. Sylvia’s ambition warred with her responsiveness to her culture. As a woman in the 1950s, she should marry and become a mother. How could she — unloved and guilty as she saw herself — dare think of a life other than that?

Everywhere she looked, Sylvia was disappointed. She was upset by Eisenhower’s election as President and wrote angrily to Aurelia about the loss for Stevenson (“the Abe Lincoln of our age”) and about her mother’s stupidity in voting for Eisenhower: “I hope you’re happy with McCarthy and Appropriations, Jenner and Rules and Civil Rights, Taft and Foreign Policy, and our noble war hero and his absurd plan to fly to Korea like a white dove with a laurel leaf in his mouth.... I felt that it was the funeral day of all my hopes and ideas.”

More customarily, however, whatever happened anywhere in the world Sylvia saw as being entirely
her
fault. In the bleakest days of fall term, she made a terse, admonitory list. One column was headed “Escape” and the other, “Wisdom.” Under Escape came the items “Mary? [Mary was her roommate.] Science? Job? Girls in house? Patch? Responsibility?” and under Wisdom, three phrases, all sensible but hardly helpful in a crisis: “More time,” “More rest,” “Less physical danger.” The item that might have been helpful to Sylvia would have been
reevaluation
of both her life goals and of her daily schedule. Such reevaluation, however, would have taken the help of a trained therapist, able to talk with this talented girl who had for so long confused what she accomplished with who she was.

By the fall of 1952, Sylvia had been working hard almost nonstop since the summer of 1949, and her body showed the strain: breaks of three to five months in her menstrual cycle were common. Her seemingly inexplicable angers spoiled friendships, although the hallmark of her personality was cheery calm. Shortly before Christmas, Sylvia wrote her mother that she had gone to the infirmary after an appointment with the college psychiatrist because of her terrible insomnia. And friends from Lawrence House remember that when Sylvia phoned her mother — from the only pay phone in the house, located just outside the housemother’s suite and therefore public — arguments between them were clearly audible.

The symptoms of Sylvia’s growing anxiety during the fall of 1952 were evident. Ed Cohen, 1000 miles away in Chicago, responded immediately to a letter she wrote in December, urging her to get counseling regardless of cost. Cohen wrote that he was concerned over her state of mind, “the agitation, the dissatisfaction, the unrest, the annoyance, the lack of co-ordination, the nervous tensions that mark the time that a person approaches the ultimate breaking point. Syl, honey, I think you’ve moved much too close over these past few months.” Ed knew her well by this time; he also knew that much of her concern for her family was concern for money. Despite this, his advice was “Shoot the cost!”

One must wonder why, if Ed Cohen could assess Sylvia’s health so accurately, no one else saw what was happening to her. Marcia Brown would have seen the changes, but living off campus meant that she saw Sylvia rarely. Dick might have noticed but he was hundreds of miles away and totally absorbed in his own health problems. Each of her teachers knew Sylvia only during this term. Even her mother, to whom she was writing about suicide, seemed to disregard the literal meanings of her daughter’s words. Perhaps Aurelia simply could not believe them; perhaps she did not know what to do about them. And it must also be recognized that Sylvia was usually an expert at assuming a confident manner.

The December holiday only added to her depression. Instead of catching up on studies (exams at Smith fell in late January), Sylvia was expected to spend the days before Christmas with Dick, who was home for the holiday, and then on December 26 she returned with him by train to Saranac for a week’s stay. Arrangements had been made for her to stay with the Lynns, a young physician who had himself had TB as a medical student, and his vivacious family. Although she did not admit it, Sylvia was disturbed by the Saranac plan. It assumed that she and Dick were inseparable and that she had nothing to do but spend her vacation with him. It also located her in the midst of a traditional family with, as she saw it, Dr. Lynn representing Dick, cured and returned to a dominant role in society, and his wife the helpmeet Sylvia was expected to become.

By this time, Sylvia knew that she did not love Norton, but there are indications that they talked seriously about getting married soon after they arrived at Saranac. The next day — angry with herself for not being honest with him — she went downhill skiing, with Dick, who did not himself ski, as her teacher. Her re-creation of the scene in
The
Bell
Jar
seems accurate. After a fleeting sense of freedom, she crashed. Her leg was severely broken.