American Isis (13 page)

Constance Blackwell thought Richard was a little afraid of Sylvia. To Constance's boyfriend, Alex Holm, a shocked Sassoon reported that Sylvia had said to him, “I wish I could take your penis back to Smith with me.” Unlike the Catholic and Jewish girls Constance knew, the Protestant Sylvia seemed to have no guilt about sex. Yet to watch her cross the campus she looked like a typical Smith girl. With her flowing hair and robust health, you expected her to have a tennis racket in her hand. Blackwell's vision evokes Katharine Hepburn in her prime. “I think Richard knew he wasn't up to Sylvia. Charming as he was, he didn't have that private strong character. When I saw Sylvia with Ted, there was a man big enough for her,” Blackwell concluded.

Sylvia admitted to Phil McCurdy she did not fully follow the French her “little expatriate frenchman” spoke to her, although she certainly understood “je t'adore.” That Richard was a little wearing, though, is apparent in Sylvia's confession to Phil that she sometimes wanted “good healthy vulgar american sun, sweat, and song … entendu?” This was, after all, a Smith undergraduate who enjoyed bragging about climbing an 830-foot-high fire tower with three others to gape at the “circling crown of lights far far below,” an all-at-once brave, scary, ecstatic experience. The arch and elusive Sassoon could be quite a trial at times. Here he is trying to placate Plath: “Please do not say you do not know me. That has depressed me a little.… And do you think I know myself well enough to tell you?… I have said
much
about the world—surely not without some self-revelation. And I have made you smile, I have made you laugh—perhaps I have even made you cry—was this not me! and me alone?”

Eddie Cohen seems to have been the only one of Sylvia's correspondents who did not take her recovery at face value. On 28 April, he wrote a detailed response to two of her letters describing her breakdown. Something was missing for him. Why did she descend into such a deep depression at the very moment when “life should have been at a peak”? He realized that he was probing experiences that were still raw, but he seriously doubted that Sylvia could go on for long without understanding why she had chosen that manner of suicide and why her initial therapy had been so ineffective. He was asking her, in short, to examine her reactions: “Attempting to cherish that old life when things were so relatively uncomplicated will do you little good, and when reality intrudes, as it eventually must, you will merely bounce back to where you so recently returned hence.”

Back at it on 6 May, Eddie would not let go—this time pointing out how Sylvia tried to incorporate her male suitors into stories of her own making. Eddie proved to be intractable material when he showed up unannounced. Since Sylvia had not scripted the occasion, what “could have been an exhilarating experience turned into a stiff debacle,” Eddie complained. The super-organized Sylvia had been overwhelmed by her experience at
Mademoiselle,
Eddie pointed out, because so much of her routine mandated that she respond to the demands of others: “You like to plot all the possibilities in your future as if it were a short story. When I first heard of your problems last summer, I could not but wonder what went wrong that you had not counted on.”

Two days earlier, Sylvia wrote her mother, “Just a note in the midst of a rigorously planned schedule…” She seemed to revel in a ten-hours-per-day reading project that would take her through the end of May, writing Phil on 13 May after a “full day of rigid discipline” finishing
War and Peace
and
Anna Karenina.
She was looking forward to the summer—a little too exuberantly, as it turned out. Pace Eddie.

Sylvia went home with bleached blonde hair. A shocked Aurelia adjusted, admitting in
Letters Home
that the change was flattering. Sylvia told Gordon Lameyer that she thought her new hair color drew attention away from her facial scar. After a round of visits to New York and a short stay in Wellesley, Plath joined Nancy Hunter for a summer in Cambridge, studying German at Harvard summer school and attending many cultural events. They visited Olive Higgins Prouty on the way. The giddy and irrepressible girls ate two helpings of cucumber sandwiches in a most “unladylike display of gluttony,” Hunter wrote.

Hunter has provided a striking portrayal of Sylvia's summer in a memoir that was first written in the 1970s to correct certain misapprehensions about Plath. For all her high-powered ambitions and her literary interests, Sylvia was in many ways a conventional Smith girl. She was no rebel and indeed disapproved of a Lawrence House contingent of nonconformists who spurned Smith proprieties. She took her world as it was, Hunter notes, not imagining that it would change much—or that she had any obligation to challenge its conventions. One of Sylvia's projects that summer, in fact, was to work on her cooking, an undertaking that impressed Nancy. Sylvia's tastes were sophisticated, and though they had a food budget, she tended to ignore the staples, expecting Hunter to take care of those, while Plath worked on her creations. Although Hunter complained that her roommate's penchant for specialty items was putting a strain on their limited resources, Sylvia brushed off this concern as Nancy's problem.

Plath did not seem at all sensitive about discussing her previous summer's breakdown. Indeed, she provided Nancy with a startling comment on Otto Plath (not surprising to readers of “Daddy”), calling him an “autocrat” and saying, “I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him.”

The roommates agreed to accept all dates that included dinner, although a wary Nancy had second thoughts about a professor, identified as “Irwin,” they met outside Widener Library, where Esther Greenwood meets her Irwin in
The Bell Jar.
According to Steiner, Irwin later called and asked Nancy for a date. She was surprised to learn on the way to dinner that he would be preparing it. She had not been alone with a man in such circumstances and only agreed to accompany him when he told her he would keep the door open and that his landlady was nearby. In the course of the evening, though, he made a pass and ended up chasing Nancy around his apartment. She escaped and told an intrigued Sylvia about her misadventure. When Irwin phoned, Sylvia took his calls and eventually agreed, to Nancy's amazement, to date him. The message was clear: Plath felt she could handle such a man, a “wolf” in the parlance of the 1950s. Indeed, she wrote to Gordon Lameyer about Nancy's tendency to overreact. Nancy was like “sun-silver on a dark, moody lake, and her calm is a result of tensions which break open at home in shrill, neurotic screaming
.”
Learning to deal with Nancy had been good for Sylvia, she told Gordon, since she had been able to work on her own equanimity to compensate for Nancy's “eternal crises.”

But Sylvia returned from her date in distress, bleeding copiously. She admitted Irwin had raped her. A terrified Sylvia—in morbid fear of hospitals and of the kind of attention she had received after her suicide attempt—made Nancy call a doctor Irwin had previously summoned to treat Sylvia, and on the phone Nancy took his instructions as to how to treat the hemorrhage. When the bleeding proved intractable, Nancy finally persuaded Sylvia they had to go to the hospital. Nancy then called Irwin, insisting that he drive them to the hospital to meet the doctor there and pay for Sylvia's treatment. While there, Nancy heard the doctor say that Sylvia would have no more trouble. And then he added that what she had experienced was not surprising. He had treated other girls in the same situation. To Nancy's astonishment, Sylvia continued to see Irwin.

How to account for this seeming masochism? As the doctor's parting comment suggests, the conception of sexual abuse in the 1950s was quite different from contemporary attitudes toward such behavior. To the Irwins of Sylvia's day, women were fair game, and the women themselves were blameworthy. How Sylvia saw her culpability is not clear, especially since Hunter apparently was not privy to her roommate's motivations.

Sylvia may not have been able to explain her behavior to herself. She seemed to be undergoing a transformation that had gone underground, so to speak, provoking an irritated Eddie to complain on 10 August that her letters were “too sparing.” She was dodging him, teasing and tantalizing, Eddie concluded. Nancy noted, “Sylvia seemed to regard man as an object that could be manipulated at will.” Nancy and Sylvia remained friends but were never again so close. Nancy believed that Sylvia “absorbed the essence of people like doses of a unique psychedelic drug designed to expand her consciousness. Sometimes she seemed to forget that they had emotions and wills of their own.”

Kay Quinn, one of the Smith girls who had shared the Cambridge apartment with Sylvia and Nancy, later told Helen Lane that Sylvia sometimes acted “strange,” prompting Kay to suspect that she had not overcome the behavior that resulted in her suicide attempt. Kay also mentioned an incident in which Sylvia, bleeding heavily from her vagina, asked Kay to hold her. Whether this incident is related to Irwin's rape is not clear. But Plath's reckless involvement with Irwin—even after she had been warned by Nancy—seems a precursor of her later desire to take on the daunting Ted Hughes.

The accounts of Irwin in Nancy Hunter Steiner's memoir and in
The Bell Jar
are so similar that Plath scholar Peter K. Steinberg—after noting that Irwin is referred to as Edwin in Paul Alexander's biography—decided to track down the real man. In the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland, Steinberg discovered a letter, dated 11 January 1975, from the poet Donald Hall speculating that his friend, Edwin Akutowicz, was Irwin. Akutowicz had just written Hall a letter expressing surprise that the Sylvia Plath he had dated had become famous. Hall called Edwin “totally unworldly. He went around making love with women, at an extraordinary rate, without any affect at all, as far as anybody could tell.” This description certainly fits the oblivious Irwin in the novel and the memoir, as does the fact that, like Irwin, Edwin (with a 1948 Harvard PhD) was a mathematics professor. On 10 March 1975, McCullough wrote to Akutowicz, explaining she had edited Plath's letters and was curious to learn his impression of Sylvia, who when he knew her was just beginning to reengage with the world after her suicide attempt.

On 25 March, Akutowicz replied, observing that he could hear Sylvia's “gently malicious laughter” at his superficial impressions of her. He did not detect any “deeper tensions” in her. In fact, at first glance one might suppose she was “beautiful and dumb.” But she was hardly that, he added. In fact, he remembered not only conversations about poetry (Edmund Spenser in particular) but about probability, a subject that of course interested a mathematician. He remembered her hearty laugh and her unembarrassed description of crawling under the porch to take her own life. She was less neurotic than most young women he knew. What made her unusual, in his estimation, was her rather somber memories of her father, her intense dedication to poetry, and the way she “caught on to the idea of suicide as a reality.”

At the end of summer, Sylvia returned to her family home in Wellesley. Sylvia wrote relentlessly upbeat letters to Aurelia, who had taken the summer off to join her parents on Cape Cod and to recuperate from a recurrence of bleeding ulcers. To others, Sylvia made passing references to her “very attractive, but nervous mother, whom I see as little as possible.” Sylvia mentioned enjoyable weekends cooking for Gordon Lameyer. They had also seen Dr. Beuscher, on whom Sylvia still relied.

By the time Sylvia returned for her final year at Smith, she had decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to study at either Oxford or Cambridge. She was lining up her references: Elizabeth Drew, Mary Ellen Chase, and Newton Arvin, all distinguished Smith faculty, favorites of hers, and writers with national reputations. She thought a letter from Dr. Beuscher would be the best way to handle the story of her breakdown and institutionalization, which had resulted, in Sylvia's view, in a complete cure. She was also applying to graduate school, with Harvard, Yale, and Columbia heading her list. She had reverted to her naturally brown hair to highlight a demure, studious look.

In the fall of 1954, Sylvia made friends at Smith with Elinor Klein, who was expecting to meet a “shy spectacled, unattractive kid in the corner clutching her Dostoevski for dear life.” But this was a willowy beauty with “great soft dark eyes,” a “wide laughing mouth,” and a “tumble of light hair.” Sylvia immediately dispelled any “worshipful attitudes” by showing Elinor her rejection slips, which Sylvia seemed proud of because they were proof of her hard work. They talked nonstop on the first of many glorious afternoons. Klein fondly remembered her friend's humor, which bubbled up effortlessly, even during their “most serious conversations.”

Jody Simon, Smith '55, knew Sylvia slightly. They shared a philosophy class, where Simon noticed that Plath's comments were particularly insightful and interesting. “She always seemed to me to be trembling slightly” and fidgeting with her hair, Jody remembers. “I recall it as an inner intensity externalized.” Simon's overall impression, though, was of a calm and confident person. “I appeared shy and reticent, described as ‘quiet' in our '55 yearbook, and I felt Sylvia extended herself toward me in a kind, interested and thoughtful way.” In a German course, Darryl Hafter watched a very quiet, unassuming Sylvia gradually master the language, in class presenting a Rilke poem in a powerful English translation of her own devising.

Sylvia attributed her good spirits that fall to her bohemian summer, suggesting to her mother that she had needed a break from her practical self—the one who stuck to a schedule, budgeted her time and money, and expressed her conventional, unoriginal, and puritanical side. Dr. Beuscher had evidently encouraged acting out, to rid Sylvia of the “good girl” mind-set that had made her resentful of her mother, the embodiment of prim and proper decorum. To Nancy Hunter, however, Sylvia had gone too far in the opposite direction, forsaking not merely the traditional behavior of a Smith undergraduate, but showing a disquieting lack of sense. Sylvia rationalized her “blazing jaunts” as learning the “hard way” to be independent.