American Isis (12 page)

You could not live in Lawrence House and not hear about Sylvia's dramatic suicide attempt. Several freshmen had read her work in
Seventeen.
Marilyn Martin, class of '57, recalls it was as if the walls were whispering, “Sylvia is back. Sylvia is back.”

CB Follett ('Lyn), class of '58, later wrote a poem that captured the Sylvia Plath mystique.

We all knew, didn't know,

knew of her—

never pointed

just a flinch of our head

as she walked

cool and brilliant

along campus paths …

In Follet's poem, Sylvia's scar is one sign of her difference. She was one of them who had tried death and entered the “shock chamber,” then returned, somehow whole again, making them feel fragile. She looked like other college girls in her pageboy June Allyson hair, and yet “she was, in her camouflage, / an exotic we added to our collection.”

Outside of Lawrence House, though, what had happened to Sylvia was the subject of much speculation. Ravelle Silberman, a freshman with literary aspirations that included writing poetry and following Plath's example, thought, like other underclassman, that Sylvia had been pregnant and had gone away to have her baby. Unwanted pregnancy was usually to blame when Smith girls had to interrupt their education. Ravelle, who lived in Gillette House, did not get to know Sylvia well until Plath returned to teach at Smith. To a freshman like Ravelle, Sylvia and her cohort in Lawrence House appeared rather snobbish in their carefully groomed Smith outfits, as Ravelle shunned skirts for jeans. She steered clear of these scholarship girls, even though Ravelle herself was on a scholarship and shared many of their literary aspirations. Her fascination with Plath would later yield insight into Plath's marriage to Hughes, and also into the aura Sylvia began to establish for herself much later in London.

Several Smith alumni remember their freshmen fondness for Sylvia, an outgoing, friendly upperclassman. They were flattered by her attention. As she wrote in a letter to Phil McCurdy, she had picked out a freshman, Kathleen Knight, to date her brother Warren. Kathleen believed Sylvia picked her because Kathleen was tall, light-haired, and pale-skinned like Sylvia. Kathleen said Warren was shy and very sweet. Like Judy Denison, a promising physicist, Kathleen was a scholarship girl who welcomed Sylvia as a sort of alternative role model. “Freshman girls were told they should aim to be ‘good members of the Junior League,'” Kathleen recalled. In other words, women were supposed to forsake careers and engage in volunteer work for charitable and educational purposes. “The scholarship girls looked at each other and said, ‘What?' This is why they were going to college.” Judy summed up the way lots of Smith girls felt: “Somebody was complaining about her boyfriend. He said he couldn't make any commitments because it would upset all his plans. And we said, ‘We can't even make any plans until we have a commitment.'”

Helen Lane, then in her freshman year, remembered that students were instructed not to mention Sylvia's suicide attempt. In fact, it was not hard to treat Sylvia like a normal Smith student. She wore her shoulder-length hair in a popular pageboy style and tossed her head a bit when she laughed. She wore knee socks, Bermuda shorts, Shetland sweaters, and plaid skirts. “Very collegiate looking,” remembered Judy Denison, another freshman. Judy mentioned that Sylvia had a dazzling smile, and Helen mentioned that Sylvia laughed easily. Sylvia counseled Marilyn, who was applying for an internship at
Mademoiselle,
and encouraged her to attend a symposium at which Alfred Kazin and
New Yorker
editor William Maxwell spoke. “Sylvia said there was more to Smith than attending classes. She opened that to me. I don't think I would have gone otherwise,” Marilyn said. Sylvia sat beside Helen, then reading T. S. Eliot, and discussed “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It astonished Helen to discover that Plath was also an accomplished bridge player and played only with the best, as beginners watched her handle the cards. Later, Helen thought of Sylvia planning to take each trick the way she would strategically work out a line of poetry or prose.

On 25 February, Sylvia typed a cheerful eight-page, single-spaced letter to Jane Anderson. They were not especially close friends, but Jane had grown up in Wellesley and had dated Dick Norton. She had taken a special interest in Sylvia's case and had even presented Sylvia with newspaper clippings about the latter's three-day disappearance and Warren's discovery of her underneath the house. Like Sylvia, Jane traced a good deal of her suicidal feeling to her conflicted relationship with her father. She admired Sylvia's accomplishments, but she also believed that through electric shock treatments Plath had taken a shortcut, never really dealing with the underlying causes of her suicide attempt. In
The Bell Jar,
Jane is transmogrified into Joan Gilling, a rather eerie mental institution companion and a sort of upsetting double whom Esther regards with appalled fascination. In the novel, Esther recovers, but Joan commits suicide. But in her newsy report to Jane, Sylvia was sunny, telling Jane how well she had readjusted to college life—a message that seemed written for the benefit of Dr. Beuscher, since Sylvia urged Jane to show the letter to the therapist. Sylvia was pleased to have her old room all to herself, a situation made possible because the girls in Lawrence House made sure no one else took it. During her reading of Dostoevsky, the subject of suicide came up in class, and like Hester feeling the heat of her
A
in the
Scarlet Letter,
Sylvia “felt sure” her scar was “glowing symbolically.” And yet, she discovered that not only could she discuss the subject openly, she felt like a sort of expert on suicide—although no one dared to question her about her own attempt. She had already gone on several dates, and even though she was a year behind and would miss some of her graduating friends, she seemed content and even happy to spend another year at Smith. She loved her course work, especially classes in American and Russian literature.

Sylvia also had a new “alter ego,” Nancy Hunter, a freshman who lived in the room Sylvia had chosen for the fall semester of 1953 but never occupied because of her breakdown. Nancy had spent her first semester surrounded by the ambiance of Sylvia Plath, hearing stories about a student who had already become a legend. The first time Nancy caught sight of Sylvia, however, she was startled and blurted out, “They didn't tell me you were beautiful.” Sylvia and everyone else laughed. Nancy wrote that Sylvia could have been “an airline stewardess or the ingenuous heroine of a B movie. She did not appear tortured or alienated; at times it was difficult for me to believe that she had ever felt a self-destructive impulse.” Hunter believed no photograph she had ever seen of Sylvia did her justice, a remark that Ted Hughes would later second. Judging by Sylvia's 15 April letter to Phil McCurdy, Nancy held her own in discussions about sex, war, and capital punishment. A later letter described Nancy as “tall, slender, with an enchanting heart-shaped face, green Kirghiz eyes, black hair and a more than pigmentary resemblance to a certain Modigliani odalisque.”

An exuberant poet wrote to her mother on 16 April that she had written her first sonnet in a year. “Doom of Exiles” details the descent from a cheerful world of green alleys into the “infernal haunt of demon dangers.” Like a good deal of Plath's early verse, the poem stiffens as she works out an intricate rhyme scheme and stanza structure that is at once impressive but also too self-consciously poetic. This time she was trying to balance a sense of a defeated humanity against its indomitable desire to “crack the nut / In which the riddle of our race is shut.” It is not hard to picture her—thesaurus in hand, as Nancy Hunter reports in her memoir—searching for the precise word in an agonizing, plodding process.

On 19 April, Sylvia announced to her mother that she had met Richard Sassoon, whose father was a cousin of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon. She described Richard as a slender “Parisian fellow,” even though he was a British subject and had family in North Carolina. She delighted in his outré conversation, which he would carry on in youthfully pretentious letters, large parts of which were written in French. Perhaps Sylvia enjoyed the wordplay of his rather decadent manner, so at odds with contemporary culture. She liked his “wicked laugh.” He presented himself as an exile, and that surely appealed to her.

Richard was a Yale student, and Sylvia, familiar with New Haven after her outings with Dick Norton and Myron Klotz, appreciated just how much Sassoon stood out from his contemporaries. Constance Blackwell, Smith class of 1956, sometimes joined Sylvia and Richard on their Yale weekends. Blackwell recalls that Sassoon was “generally regarded as the most clever and worldly wise of all—he was very amazing and witty—it was he who belonged to the Elizabethan Club, where we went once or twice to have tea and smoke clay pipes. Richard was preparing himself to be a great literary figure.” This social club housed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and Shakespeare folios, and promoted literary conversation while Irish maids in black uniforms and white aprons served the quintessential English beverage. In such a setting, Plath may have felt welcome enough to level with Richard Sassoon in a way that was not possible with other males of her generation. In the only “heart-to-heart” talk Blackwell ever had with Plath, Constance remembers Sylvia saying “how difficult it was to speak about our own dreams and ambitions with young men we adored—because they themselves had their own demons of ambition.”

More than a decade later, in the fall of 1968, when Yale went coed, women still found the “maleness of Yale” overwhelming. “Male eating clubs, male-populated streets, even a male-oriented health program. Walking down a Yale street we became acutely aware of the staring. We were conscious of ourselves as objects, common objects to be looked over and appraised,” Janet Lever and Pepper Schwartz write of their experience in
Women at Yale: Liberating a College Campus
(1971). “You were expected to be a mixture of Margaret Mead and Scarlett O'Hara,” Lever told a
Time
interviewer. Well, Sylvia Plath, three-time reader of
Gone with the Wind,
was prepared.

Richard formed part of an unusual male grouping inspired by the charismatic Henri Peyre, described as a “quintessential Frenchman” in his
New York Times
obituary (10 December 1988). Author of more than thirty books, including
French Novelists of Today
and
The Contemporary French Novel,
Peyre told a
Newsweek
interviewer, “The only sport I enjoy is conversing with women. Most of life is a purely nuanced affair, and women help men realize this. Yale is much too masculine a place.” For Peyre's acolytes, literature was a way of life. At Smith, Constance Blackwell suggests, literature was more of an acquisition, almost a commodity. Sassoon and his friends had an appealing vulnerability, she recalls, and were just the right antidote to hard-drinking Yale men. Sassoon & Co. were authentic. When they drank, Constance noted, they drank sherry, which put her, so to speak, halfway to England, where she wanted to study and mature as a writer.

So Richard Sassoon was a kind of literary dream come true for Sylvia Plath. He seemed magical, the kind of lover Plath describes in the refrain to her villanelle, “Mad Girl's Love Song”: “I think I made you up in my head.” On so many evenings out, Sylvia scorned men who did not know how to talk to her. She rued her own efforts to rid herself of any original expressions that might intimidate her dates. Even someone like the literary-minded Gordon Lameyer was a project Sylvia had to shape to suit herself. With Richard, she did not have to summon a compliant demeanor to mask her true emotions. The soigné Sassoon was also a master at planning dates, excursions to the city, and cultural events. He was too small for her physically, Sylvia would often say, and yet she found a man who exuded aestheticism very appealing. The story, as Constance Blackwell heard it, was that Richard's father had initiated his son into the delights of sex by taking him to a prostitute.

Sassoon had a Volkswagen, Constance Blackwell recalls, and was “a bit of a hypochondriac. We used to tease him that he and his Volkswagen got ill at the same time.” Sylvia told Phil McCurdy about a gas station stop on the Merritt Parkway, where she enjoyed the spectacle of herself sleeping in Sassoon's Volkswagen, seated among wine bottles and books on Baudelaire and attracting attention that she greeted with “blithe abandon.” To Aurelia, she almost apologized, describing Sassoon as a “very intuitive weird sinuous little guy whose eyes are black and shadowed so he looks as if he were an absinthe addict … all of which helps me to be carefree and gay.” Sassoon was a decidedly bohemian corrective to her orthodox dates. Nancy Hunter thought Sylvia built Sassoon into a Byronic hero but also an “amusing toy.” Sometimes Sylvia even seemed to find him repulsive, telling her roommate, “When he holds me in his arms, I feel like Mother Earth with a small brown bug crawling on me.” The only way Nancy could explain Sylvia's continuing dates with Sassoon was to conclude, “She could not resist exploring the bizarre or ugly, even when it frightened or sickened her, and I could not help feeling that for a girl with a delicate equilibrium it was a dangerous pastime.”

When a Lawrence House girl called Sassoon a worm, Nancy explained how powerful Sassoon made Sylvia feel. Marilyn Martin got a firsthand glimpse of what Nancy meant. Marilyn was used to seeing Sylvia with Gordon Lameyer, whom Marilyn described as “all American … such a handsome, charming person.” Sylvia and Gordon looked wonderful together, like a poster couple. After a date with a guy from Amherst, Marilyn had returned with him to Lawrence House. They were on the porch, the make-out spot couples would repair to after the girls signed in and waited for the bells signaling they should return to their rooms. Marilyn watched Sylvia approach the porch with a date Marilyn did not recognize. He was small and swarthy. Later she learned it was Richard Sassoon. Couples usually looked for a dark corner. But Sylvia, in full view, virtually attacked her companion, leaning over Sassoon, who was sitting on a railing. “It was kind of embarrassing,” Marilyn said. Sylvia was “very passionate, more passionate than most people on the porch would be.” This was a “level of sexuality that I was not comfortable with … in literature, yes, but right here?”