American Isis (11 page)

Sylvia, as Eddie suspected, could not see that part of becoming an adult meant knowing when to ask for help. Sylvia told herself that her “negativism” was a kind of sickness, but like a Christian Scientist she thought she should heal herself, even though she was not able to place her faith in God. Thinking she could somehow control her emotions, she viewed her dilemma as an ethical or moral one, a matter of behaving according to a certain standard she thought appropriate for her age and competence. In spite of her interest in that Harvard psychology course, she did not see how compulsively repetitive her behavior had become, that her problem was her own psychology. She had escaped the crisis at the Belmont by finding refuge with the Cantors, and then had school to look forward to. This time she felt she could confront her demons at home with even less resilience in the aftermath of what she deemed O'Hara's rejection of her.

Aurelia's description in
Letters Home
of Sylvia's affect suggests all the signs of clinical depression. Not even sunbathing seemed therapeutic. She would sit, book in hand, but could not read.
Sylvia Plath could not read!
All her talk was of how she had let people down. Even worse, she could not write. Aurelia noticed gashes on her daughter's legs, and Sylvia responded, “I just wanted to see if I had the guts!” Horrified, Aurelia felt the hot touch of Sylvia's hand and heard her scorching cry that the world “is so rotten! I want to die! Let's die together!” Instead, Sylvia agreed to see a doctor and then a psychiatrist, although neither seemed to help much, other than prescribing sleeping pills and then submitting her to brutal electric shock treatments administered without sedatives or muscle relaxants.

On 24 August, a day when Sylvia seemed to be doing better, Aurelia went out with a friend, and then returned home to find a note saying her daughter had gone out for a long walk. Sylvia went missing for three days, until Warren heard what sounded like a moan coming from the basement. There he found Sylvia in a crawl space, half-conscious after throwing up some of the sleeping pills she had swallowed to end her life. She had a gash on her face that would leave a scar, but otherwise she seemed to recover rather quickly from her physical ordeal. In September, she began to recuperate under the supervision of Dr. Ruth Beuscher at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Sylvia later described her therapist to Gordon Lameyer as “one of my best friends, only 9 years older than I, looking like Myrna Loy, tall, Bohemian, coruscatingly brilliant, and most marvelous.”

Sylvia's disappearance and discovery were widely reported, and she became news in a way she never intended but which had a remarkable impact on her vocation as a writer. Eventually, she would realize that dying had become part of her true subject matter. The notion of living with thoughts of death would suffuse some of her best, most sincere material. She had meant to die and had felt more strongly about dying than about any other decision she would ever make. Suicide, a kind of ultimate commitment, repudiated deceit and her false facades. Whatever happened next would have to be measured against the authenticity of that act.

There was no easy way back from death, which has a sureness and finality to it that appealed to Plath. Recovery was a far less decisive process, fitful and fraught with confusion and doubts about her capacity to revive her creativity. Certainly she was in no shape to return to Smith. Literary critic Robert Gorham Davis, one of Sylvia's favorite professors, wrote Aurelia offering his help, mentioning that his daughter knew Sylvia well. He and his wife, whom Sylvia also admired, were taken aback because Plath had seemed so gay during her last semester at Smith: “Though we have both had some experience with upsets of this sort in other people, we did not notice in the Spring any signs of stress of this kind, though this may have been imperceptive of us.” Indeed, Davis had once confided to his colleague, George Gibian, that unlike other neurotic creative writing students, Sylvia seemed entirely whole and healthy. He did add, though, that Sylvia had demanded “far too much of herself.”

Professor Elizabeth Drew, another Plath favorite, wrote directly to Sylvia.

I know exactly how you felt, because once in my life I had a similar depression, though for a different reason, & it
seemed
the logical & the only way out. But now that is all over & you must remember all the time how good life is & how much joy & adventure there will be in it for you. As to your work, you are by far the best student in English in the College & you don't have to
strain
to be. You could do it standing on your head or in your sleep! I suspect you were pushing yourself much too hard in the spring … You just burnt yourself out for a spell. Now you've got to let life flow in all over you again & it
will,
never fear.

Such letters testified to the powerful impact Sylvia Plath had at Smith, signaling how dearly she was missed and what a warm welcome she would receive on her return.

Gordon Lameyer's letter was perhaps just as important to Sylvia: “I admire you, Sylvia, I
admire
you more than any girl I know. More than anything I don't want you to feel differently about me now. I want to be your dearest and closest friend as you have been ever since June to me. Believe me, please believe me, I can
understand
anything. Your happiness is everything to me, so please get well as soon as you can.” Lameyer would write her long letters while at sea during his service in the navy.

These letters do not seem to have had an immediate impact on Sylvia, judging by Aurelia's letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, who wanted to be informed about Sylvia's care and also to contribute to it financially. Prouty had suffered a nervous breakdown twenty years earlier and had recovered completely under expert care that made her “better equipped to meet life.” She wanted no less for Sylvia. Aurelia wrote Prouty that the psychiatrists told her Sylvia had not confided to her mother just how insecure she felt. That Sylvia also craved the guidance of a father figure came as no surprise to Aurelia. To Sylvia, suicide seem preferable to years of incarceration in a mental institution, the kind of facility she associated with Olivia de Havilland's harrowing performance in
The Snake Pit
(1948). Prouty visited Plath in early October and wrote on the 14th to Dr. Beuscher, expressing concern that Sylvia was not mixing well with others and seemed disheartened because she was not coordinated enough to do the kind of handwork (sewing, in this case) that treatment programs often prescribed for patients. Sylvia tried weaving, and though her doctor thought it was well done, Sylvia disparaged her efforts.

In November, Sylvia received shock treatments—this time administered with more preparation and with Dr. Beuscher by her side—and insulin therapy, the latter the subject of “Tongues of Stone.” In the narrative, a young girl watches her body grow fatter with insulin treatments, and in her dreary state she cannot read words that look to her like “dead black hieroglyphics.” She has lost her tan and shies away from the sun, wishing she could shrink to the size of a fly's body. Day after day she reports that the insulin shots have made no change. She believes she is drying up and in the final stage of withdrawal from a preposterous life. She had been “pretending to be clever and gay, and all the while these poisons were gathering in her body, ready to break out behind the bright false bubbles of her eyes at any moment crying: Idiot! Imposter!” Like Sylvia, the young girl dreads another sixty years with a brain folding up like a “gray, paralyzed bat in the dark cavern of her living skull.” In the story, the girl interprets her rescue as defeat, since she has been resuscitated into a zombie, sallow-skinned and bruised and “jolted back into the hell of her dead body.” “Tongues of Stone” ends abruptly in a transition that seems forced, even if it is true to Sylvia's case: Suddenly, in her sleep the girl sees light breaking through her blindness, and every fiber of her mind and body flares with the “everlasting rising sun.”

Sylvia treated her period at McLean as resulting in full recovery. Jane Anderson, a fellow patient and a Smith student who went on to become a therapist, doubted that Plath had worked hard on her therapy. She did not make “much of a commitment to it in terms of trying to understand what was going on in herself and she was angry about that.” When Anderson commented on Plath's rather passive response to treatment, Sylvia seemed to become “less friendly and less willing to talk about things in depth.” Aurelia would later write to Ted Hughes's wife Carol, “Anyone who did not know Sylvia
before
she had her first [electric shock] treatment (and that includes Dr B)
never knew the whole Sylvia.”

By early December, Sylvia seemed to have emerged from her depression. Wilbury Crockett, her high school teacher, visited and reported to Aurelia that Sylvia seemed happy playing bridge with fellow patients and behaving sociably. Until her suicide attempt, he had never seen her depressed, and now she had recovered her sparkle. Sylvia told her mother she wanted to return to Smith for the spring semester, beginning in January 1954. At the end of December, she wrote a long letter to Eddie and then decided not to send it, entrusting what she wrote instead to her mother as a record of the summer of 1953. Aurelia duly included a part of the missive in
Letters Home.

Essentially, Sylvia presented herself as a fraud who had wasted her junior year at Smith taking the wrong subjects and committing herself to a thesis on James Joyce, even though she had only a superficial grasp of his work. Depleted after her New York City ordeal, she had been dismayed that her friends seemed content with their accomplishments. Sleeplessness, futile appointments with psychiatrists, and writer's block all contributed to her suicide attempt. Her body had resisted her best efforts to drown herself, then she took too many sleeping pills and botched her bid for oblivion. Like the girl in “Tongues of Stone,” she had been angry about her rescue. Then Mrs. Prouty intervened, and to Sylvia's surprise she had gotten better—just like the character in
The Snake Pit,
who had the benefit of a wise and compassionate therapist. Sylvia also mentioned Gordon Lameyer's letters. He continued to write and promised to return to her even though she had not sent him a word in four months.

In
Letters Home,
Aurelia identified Eddie only as “E” and omitted this crucial invitation: “I do miss you to talk to … please do write me frankly and fully what's been with you the last months or so … Aw, please, scold me, placate me, tell me your loves and losses, but do talk to me, huh? as ever, syl.” If Sylvia did not send the letter she handed to her mother, some version of it did reach Eddie, who replied on 29 January that he had not been forceful enough in insisting that she get psychiatric help. He had even debated the issue with a psychiatrist friend, who told Eddie he had no standing in the case and could not intervene. After all, he was making assumptions on the basis of a few letters. To Sylvia's query about whether he had seen news reports of her attempted suicide, Eddie admitted he had, but thought it best to wait for her to communicate with him. Then he told her what she probably wanted to hear most of all: She sounded like the old Sylvia, the one whose “easy flow of words” and “electric communication” had attracted him. When that Sylvia had disappeared from her letters, he had become alarmed. But now she had put herself together again, he insisted.

What mattered to Sylvia, Eddie understood, was her writing—above all, her style. When she had lost the ability to imagine, she was as good as dead, a point she explored in “The Wishing Box,” published in
Granta
(1956). Agnes is envious of her husband's extravagant, literary, Technicolor dreams, which become a staple of his life. She dreams only vague nightmares—nothing like her wonderful childhood dreams of the “wishing box” and of Superman, who flew her over Alabama. She goes to the movies and watches television, but her imagination has shut down. She is in a panic and cannot sleep at night. Her mind, no longer able to form images, is condemned to a “perfect vacancy.” She comes from a long-lived family and dreads the prospect of “wakeful, visionless days and nights.” She takes the fifty sleeping pills prescribed for her all at once and commits suicide, an act that is presented as a kind of victory in the last lines of the story, which describe her “secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal man, she were, at last, waltzing with the dark, red-caped prince of her early dreams.” Such a story suggests that the act of suicide itself is neither shameful nor solely the response of a disordered mind. On the contrary, suicide, in certain circumstances, has an attractive inevitability to it when the human capacity to create a world has disintegrated. It is not such a stretch from this story to one of Plath's last poems, “Edge,” in which the perfected woman reposes in a “smile of accomplishment.”

Sylvia presented the first months of her return to Smith in idyllic terms, writing to Enid Epstein on 18 January describing a snow-laden sylvan scene. She also wrote about walking in the shadows of trees on the path into Northampton, playing bridge and other games with friends, hanging out in the coffee shop with Marcia Brown discussing Dostoevsky, and seeing good movies. To Sally Rogers, who considered applying to Smith, Sylvia wrote a letter extolling the college's intimate atmosphere. As a scholarship student, Sylvia did not feel out of place, since even the girls from wealthy families dressed casually. There were so many different kinds of residences, large and small, that Sally was sure to find her niche. The small classes and supportive faculty, who often visited the residences, suited Sylvia, who did not like the idea of large lecture halls. Sally could be as social as she liked, or remain studious and benefit from faculty members who took an interest in students, inviting them into their homes. Of course, there were times when Sylvia had been “blue,” but it all depended on “you,” she told Sally, to make what you would of yourself—not an easy task, Sylvia admitted, when “you're still growing up, the way we are.”