American Isis (10 page)

On 27 April, Sylvia noted in her journal that
Harper's
acceptance of “Doomsday” and two other poems marked her “first real professional acceptance,” and that “things have been happening like a chain of fire crackers.” At the home of Elizabeth Drew, one of Sylvia's teachers and one of the country's distinguished literary critics, Sylvia watched W. H. Auden sip beer and smoke Lucky Strikes while discussing
The Tempest,
commenting that Ariel embodied the creative imagination. Measured against her dreams of male greatness, even Gordon began to pale when she learned he was considering a career as an insurance salesman, and Ray seemed weak, physically and emotionally. He had not even made a pass at her. She wanted, she confessed, the impossible: a “demigod of a man,” a “romantic nonexistent hero.”

Writing to Warren on 12 May, Sylvia rejoiced at his acceptance to Harvard University, hoping that his scholarship would relieve Aurelia of a financial burden. In fact, Sylvia hoped that both of them would be self-financed for the next year, because she well knew how hard Aurelia had worked to give her children the best of everything: “Mother would actually Kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us.” Sylvia was sincere, but she was also appalled at the extent of Aurelia's altruism—although Sylvia did not say so to Warren, or yet realize as much herself. Aurelia's self-sacrifice took an enormous toll on her daughter, who wanted to feel less obligated, but who also found the need to perform for her mother excruciatingly painful, a sore point that got worse as the summer of 1953 wore on. But just the opposite was the case in the spring, when all the world seemed to be opening up to Sylvia. It was time to start paying Aurelia dividends for all that she had invested in her children, Sylvia exhorted Warren.

 

CHAPTER 3

QUEEN OF THE DEAD

(1953–55)

June 1953:
Plath experiences an intense period in New York City at
Mademoiselle
and finds it exhilarating, then exhausting—her first foray into the high fashion urban megalopolis of fame she later dissected in
The Bell Jar.
Returning home in late June, she becomes depressed, then receives electroconvulsive therapy;
24 August:
She attempts and nearly succeeds at suicide. She returns to Smith, apparently recovered;
1955:
Sylvia graduates
summa cum laude
and leaves for England as a Fulbright scholar at Newnham College, Cambridge.

By early May the news got even better: Sylvia was awarded the
Mademoiselle
guest editorship. She had been selected by the magazine's college board, headed by Marybeth Little. In “Your Job as Guest Editor,” the magazine explained that this was an opportunity to learn more about its readership. The position also provided awardees with valuable training and counseling and a “behind-the-scenes” look at the publishing world. The competition for this prestigious internship took into account not only the student's writing abilities, but also her participation in extracurricular activities. These Sylvia listed as membership in the Studio Art Club, working on decorations for the freshman prom and charity ball, and on the editorial boards of the
Smith Review
and the
Campus Cat
(a humor magazine), serving as secretary of the Honor Board (one of the campus organizations dealing with honors students), and her experience as correspondent for the
Springfield Daily News
through the Smith College news office.

All guest editors would work a five-day week from 1 June to 26 June. A
Mademoiselle
editor wrote with suggestions about clothing: dark lightweight dresses, made of nylon, shantung, or other silks and cottons, and a bathing suit for weekends. “We plan to do one ‘do dress' party, so you should bring along a gown, and don't forget hats—we're afraid they're necessary for all the public appearances you will make,” wrote Marybeth Little on 5 May.

Sylvia was already preparing for one of her editor assignments: interviewing and being photographed with a famous author. She had sent the magazine her preliminary choices: Shirley Jackson, E. B. White, Irwin Shaw, and J. D. Salinger. Of course, she would have read them all in
The New Yorker,
the publication she most wanted to appear in herself.
Catcher in the Rye
would later serve as a model for
The Bell Jar,
but how different its author was from Sylvia Plath, who sought fame even as Salinger was developing a mystique as an elusive writer erasing himself from public view. In the end, even before leaving for New York, Sylvia had secured the requisite interview with British novelist Elizabeth Bowen.

Home for just two days between the end of her examinations at Smith and her departure for New York City, Sylvia frenetically packed and planned for her month at
Mademoiselle,
all the while urging her mother to do something for herself—maybe write articles, which Sylvia would love to edit, about her teaching for women's magazines. Out the door, Sylvia was carrying with her words of overwhelming gratitude for all her mother's sacrifices, which had resulted in so many opportunities for her children.

Betsy Talbot Blackwell, editor-in-chief of
Mademoiselle,
interviewed all guest editors on their first day. As her title denoted, she had final say over all copy and departments. She also sized up the guest editors and decided on their suitability for the magazine's various departments. The guest editors were then divided into small groups to lunch with the
Mademoiselle
staff. Sylvia soon learned that editing meant not merely writing and revising, but also functioning as errand clerk and typist, as a memo sent to her cohort explained. She put an exclamation mark in the left-hand margin next to the following statement:
“Magazine deadlines are as final as exam dates, and are to be observed religiously—no extracurricular activities will be scheduled until deadline crises are past!”
This may have been her first inkling of the pressures that would undo her, reminding her of the nerve-wracking build-up to exams. Crises? Sylvia had already had enough of those, and now, before the first day on the job, she was on notice to expect more. Like everyone else, she was required to “pitch in” on assignments in any department that needed help. Although the memo promised “lighter moments,” it also declared this was no “glamor job.” After such sobering words, the memo ended with a section on extracurricular activities, mentioning visits to designers, fashion shows, meetings with famous people, theater parties, dinners and dancing, and special screenings. Half-skeptical, half-hopeful, Sylvia wrote at the bottom of the memo: “Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn't it!”

“Citystruck Sivvy,” as she dubbed herself in a letter to Aurelia, spent her month on the sixth floor at 575 Madison Avenue working late. In the evening, from her room (1511) at the Barbizon Hotel she could marvel at the sight of Manhattan lighting up, with glimpses of the Third Avenue El and the East River. Laurie Levy, another summer guest editor, recalled an outing with Sylvia: “We billowed about the steaming summer-festival streets trying to keep cool in below-calf cotton skirts.” They passed one another in the
Mademoiselle
hallways, “our teeth white against the magenta lipstick of 1953.” Sylvia was given all sorts of copy to read and rewrite, including submissions from Elizabeth Bowen, Rumer Godden, Noël Coward, and Dylan Thomas. She rather relished writing a rejection slip to a staffer at
The New Yorker,
but she also worried that she would not get into Frank O'Connor's much-prized summer writing class at Harvard.

Sylvia admitted to her mother that the end of semester rush and quick removal to New York had been both heady and daunting, and that she had trouble dealing with high-pressure situations. At
Mademoiselle
a handwriting expert had delivered this analysis of Sylvia:

STRENGTHS: Enjoyment of working experience intense; sense of form, beauty and style, useful in fields of fashion and interior design. Eager for accomplishment.

WEAKNESSES: Overcome superficiality, stilted behavior, rigidity of outlook.

Plath appreciated how much important work
Mademoiselle
managing editor Cyrilly Abels assigned to her. Sylvia signed herself “Syrilly” in one letter to Aurelia. Abels was, in the words of a
Mademoiselle
primer for guest editors, “boss of the deadline.” She approved all copy. Owing to her wide-ranging contacts with writers, publishers, and agents, she was also the magazine's ambassador to the literary world.

Elation and exhaustion were compounded when Sylvia and several other guest editors came down with ptomaine poisoning. Even so, she was meeting well-known authors such as Vance Bourjaily, dating boys from all over who were working at the UN, and spending time in Greenwich Village. Then the cheerful letters dwindled. It would take years for the full story to come out.

During this busy month, the horrifying execution of the Rosenbergs, convicted of participating in a Soviet spy conspiracy to steal the secret of the atomic bomb, intruded with such force that Sylvia felt nauseated. The pacifist of “Bitter Strawberries,” who had been shocked by the head picker who wanted Russia bombed off the map, reappeared in a journal entry on 19 June describing a stylish, beautiful “catlike” girl waking up from a nap on the conference room divan, yawning and saying with “beautiful bored nastiness: ‘I'm so glad they are going to die.'” Everyone else went about business as usual, planning the weekend without a thought for the preciousness of human life. It seemed ironic to Sylvia that the prevailing mood deemed it right to execute the Rosenbergs for purloining the secret of her country's zealously guarded mechanics of inhuman invention. Too bad the electrocution could not be televised that evening, she remarked, since it would be so much more realistic than the crime shows. She imagined the country taking these deaths as nonchalantly as had that blasé beauty in her office.

More than twenty years later, in
The Public Burning
Robert Coover would publish a scathing portrayal of the Rosenberg execution that included the kind of spectacle Plath imagined. Like Plath, Coover believed the execution had tainted and degraded his nation. Both writers were concerned with the individual's connection to history and—like Rebecca West in the prologue to her masterpiece,
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—
deplored the fact that people could be so idiotic as not to see how their fates were entangled with the lives of millions of others. No matter how much it meant to be working at
Mademoiselle,
Sylvia never lost sight of the world elsewhere, to which she was irrevocably connected by her consciousness of what it means to be fully human. The events of June 1953 became the basis of
The Bell Jar,
in which Plath transmogrified her traumatic month into a fable, a
Catcher in the Rye–
style story that captures all the glitter and gore of New York City, the abode of the brilliant and the phony, the predatory and the pretentious.

When Sylvia returned home in late June, Aurelia found her daughter unusually somber. That intense period in New York hit others hard, as well. Laurie Levy wrote, “We dispersed in different directions to have our letdowns alone.” Aurelia dreaded breaking the bad news: Sylvia had not been chosen for Frank O'Conner's Harvard writing class. Like many ambitious people, Sylvia did not care how many awards she won, only that the acceptances kept coming. (O'Connor would later say that he thought Sylvia too advanced for his class). But Aurelia, expecting her child to be disappointed, was aghast to see that the news drove Sylvia to despair.

Even if it was the proximate cause of her depression, it is unlikely that one month in New York, however trying, had produced this humorless and even dull Sylvia. For well over a year, Eddie Cohen had been warning her that something was seriously amiss. During that year she wrote as though the power of positive thinking would pull her through. But working at a high-energy Madison Avenue magazine wore down her will to succeed, already severely weakened by doubts she could take her talent to the next level. To put it another way, Sylvia's stint in Manhattan accelerated the crackup Eddie had tried to head off.

Aurelia described Sylvia's “great change” in
Letters Home
as a fundamental break in the daughter who had always expressed such joie de vivre. Sylvia's journals suggest that her effort to maintain a brave front had collapsed. It was no longer enough to unburden herself by falling into Marcia's arms and crying out her fears and anxieties. Writing to Eddie would not relieve enough of the pressure. A summer writing course with a renowned writer was not available to help her overcome dejection.

Sylvia saw one way out of her predicament: Attend Harvard Summer School and take a psychology course, which she considered both a practical and creative way of developing her talent. Also, she would meet new people and have access to the library and other activities in Cambridge, which would give her life structure. She dreaded staying home alone with the awful burden of constructing her own schedule. She admitted in her journal that she was frightened and called herself a “big baby.” Self-doubt sapped her creativity.

But the course would cost $250, not then a negligible sum for an undergraduate who calculated she had just enough to get by during her final year at Smith and had counted on making her mother's summer easier by selling stories generated in O'Hara's class. On balance, then, better to stay home, face her fears, learn shorthand from Aurelia as a practical skill (a woman at Smith's vocational office had suggested as much), start reading Joyce for her senior thesis, and try to “forget my damn ego-centered self.”

In her journal entry for 6 July, Sylvia addressed herself as though she were a fairy-tale princess who had to be brought back to earth after the ball. Not to write at home would be a failure of nerve proving her unworthiness. She even held Dick up as a model. After all, he had been able to read and write while in the sanitarium. But how could she write when she equated living at home with returning to the womb, and when she had begun to think of suicide. She put it in these extreme terms: “Stop thinking of razors & self-wounds & going out and ending it all.” By 14 July, Sylvia was sleeping no more than two hours a night and having homicidal thoughts about Aurelia. Confessing that she could no longer imagine an existence outside of her “limited self,” she cried for God—or a god, some force outside herself that would lift her spirits.