American Isis (14 page)

Sylvia was aware of her penchant for mythologizing herself as she turned to Dostoevsky, preparing a senior thesis: a study of the double in his novels. In what is perhaps the study's most revealing passage, Plath wonders whether Golyadkin, the protagonist of
The Double,
deals with a real alter ego or simply a projection of his imagination. She cites various critics who fault Dostoevsky for not clarifying his main character's sense of reality. Plath concurs, but obviously the issue itself—what is real—exercised her deepest emotions. What she wrote about her childhood in essays like “Ocean 1212-W” and “America! America!” formed part of her essential myth. Was not the “Plath” of her journals and letters also her double and alter ego?

Marilyn Martin remembers a conversation with Sylvia about Henry James's novel
The Portrait of a Lady
“and how we become what we read sometimes. We move into that world. Sylvia and I talked about this. The difference in reading when you had to write about it rather than step outside and criticize. Identifying with the characters.” Like so many creative artists, Sylvia absorbed art into her bloodstream, and it took considerable effort for her to function outside of that assimilated sensibility and write as a literary critic. In fact, on her first English assignment at Smith, she had been dismayed to receive a B–. It is often said that her worries about doing well at Smith were a product of perfectionism, but such an analysis ignores how strenuous it was for a sensibility like hers to conform to the academic model of learning. Her thesis on Dostoevsky proves that she could learn to write a scholarly paper perfectly well, but her letters also show that doing so put a strain on her. Her switch from Joyce to Dostoevsky also suggests that she found a theme in the Russian author that resonated more deeply in her than anything Joyce wrote.

That Sylvia Plath perceived her mythologizing tendencies did not mean, of course, that she could control them, or that she would not make mistakes, misconstruing the dream for the reality, as Golyadkin does. Going to England on a Fulbright scholarship (if she was fortunate to be offered one) would be another test, she wrote her mother on 13 October. Taking up her scholarship would mean relinquishing the security of her native land, finding new friends, and attempting to succeed in a formidable, intellectually unfamiliar world. As she worked on the first draft of her senior thesis, she worried about having something new to say about an old topic. Isn't this also what England represented: daring to do well in a culture far older than her own and daunting to an upstart American? She did not consider, however, that England, too, would become a Sylvia Plath project, seen through her own special lenses, which could distort as well as discover reality.

The literary world became more palpable for Sylvia Plath when she encountered Alfred Kazin, author of
On Native Grounds
and a prominent American literary critic, teaching a course at Smith. Her description of a curt and aloof figure is apposite. In
New York Jew,
Kazin recalls that she looked like any other Smith student. When she showed him her work, he became suspicious, because it was so polished and professional. Suggesting that she was presenting him with plagiarism, Kazin named the magazines such work appeared in. “I know,” Plath replied. “They've already taken them.”

He warmed up when he realized that Plath was a published author and deadly serious about writing. He liked that she had worked her way through college. He had been disappointed with his apathetic students and at first assumed she was simply another “pampered Smith baby,” Sylvia wrote her mother on 25 October. He invited her to audit his class, which she did, vowing to learn as much as she could from “such a man,” who told her the class needed her contribution. She did not elaborate, but what Kazin offered her was another version of independence. He took the money and the tributes from the academic world in stride, but unlike her other professors, he was not really part of it. The point was to write; there were no excuses for not doing so. “You don't write to support yourself; you work to support your writing,” was his message to Plath, one she quoted to her mother. She soon became a Kazin favorite. Constance Blackwell can still hear him calling her: “Syl-via, Syl-via.” In the letter he wrote in support of her application to graduate school, Kazin noted he was not in the habit of writing on behalf of students—and certainly not with the superlatives he used to describe Plath. “She is someone to be watched, to be encouraged—and to be remembered,” he concluded.

Sylvia was still aiming at publication in
The New Yorker
and
The Atlantic Monthly,
and she enthused over Kazin's interest in her—which included a kind of command performance at his home, reading and discussing her story, “Paula Brown's Snowsuit.” At the same time, she continued her impersonation of a “regular girl”—to quote from
New York Jew,
the “first to clear the dishes after coffee.” Sylvia did not seem to mind building up her hopes because, she told Aurelia on 7 December, she loved living “in suspense.” Kazin had invited her to an informal lunch and was writing a recommendation for her Woodrow Wilson fellowship application. Just how extravagant she could become is clear in her final comment on Kazin, “I worship him.” Yet to Kazin, she appeared “guarded to an extreme. I knew nothing about her and never expected to know anything.” She simply presented an image of perfection, the pet of what he called, in
New York Jew,
“the nervous English department.”

Sylvia spent part of her Christmas break in New York City, with Sassoon playing Prince Charming to her Cinderella, as she described it in a letter to a friend. Gordon Lameyer, still very much in the picture, was in the navy's gunnery school in Virginia. In a typical description of her itinerary, she mentioned breakfasting on oysters in a scene that would not be out of place in a Hollywood romance, and ending her day in film noir fashion, “talking to detectives in the 16th squad police station.”

Sylvia continued to write poetry for a creative writing class, and she submitted a story to the
Ladies Home Journal,
which rejected her work but wanted to see a rewrite—an encouraging sign, since rejections usually included an invitation to submit her next story. More rejections followed from
The Saturday Evening Post
and other magazines, but always having something on the way to a publisher seemed to drive her on. She fretted over what seemed to her the slim chances of studying at Oxford or Cambridge, and kept calculating which graduate school would serve her best, considering that, as she told Aurelia on 29 January, “writing is the first love of my life.”

Sylvia Plath's strongest inclination pointed toward study and perhaps teaching abroad. Her pacifism and sense of international solidarity put her at odds with Cold War America and McCarthyism, which she wanted to counteract, as she put it in a letter to Aurelia on 11 February, by acting on her realization that “new races are going to influence the world … much as America did in her day.” She considered teaching in Tangier. Then on 15 February, Sylvia wrote that Cambridge had accepted her, and that the Smith College English department was behind her in their rejection of “machine-made American grad degrees … P.S. English men are great!” Writing several poems a week, Sylvia was also thinking of submitting a book to the Yale Younger Poets series.

More exciting trips to New York and an encouraging letter from
The Atlantic Monthly
made the spring of 1955 seem a reprise of the fateful 1953 season when the heady round of success and frenetic activity had only served to panic Sylvia. This time, though, she was nearing graduation and pleased with her senior thesis and her advisor, her Russian literature professor, George Gibian. He had been deeply impressed with her, describing Sylvia as the ideal student to Edward Butscher. Even a “lame” suggestion from Gibian turned into a wonderful chapter of the thesis, Gibian remembered. She also babysat for him and enthusiastically wrote to Gordon Lameyer, “I was holding the deliciously warm twins and feeding them bottled milk (after five glasses of sherry I felt an overwhelming impulse to strip and nurse them myself!)”.

Sylvia remained under the steadying influence of Dr. Beuscher, whom she saw periodically, as well the sobering encouragement of Alfred Kazin and the kind attention of Professor Mary Ellen Chase, who made sure Sylvia knew, step-by-step, how her Cambridge application fared and what to expect next. Sylvia formed new friendships, purposely not isolating herself as she had done before her suicide attempt. Sue Weller had become a close friend as copasetic as Marcia Brown. Sylvia invited Sue to accompany her home for spring break.

Sylvia continued to see Gordon Lameyer and briefly considered an engagement to him. She decided against it because she did not want to cut off opportunities or be saddled with a commitment to supporting his career. She thus avoided another awkward involvement of the kind she had backed away from with Dick Norton. Richard Sassoon was another case altogether. He might write passionately, but he came nowhere near the subject of marriage: “I bear the name of love tonight and bear myself alone and alone to boredom's bed and bear my love like a cross—so cross you are not with me—a cross forever until you are with me—that's true, I swear—and swear madly because it is true—o god of the godly keep off the pidgins! Ah to conquer death—not to avoid it—but to have it now and then—in between the now and then—until then, all my love, Richard.” These letters evidently amused Sylvia, who proposed taking Sassoon along on one of her visits to Olive Higgins Prouty.

Sylvia was beginning to meet major contemporary poets like Marianne Moore and John Ciardi. She did a public reading of her work for an intercollegiate poetry contest (she tied for first place) and enjoyed making the audience laugh. Later, the college radio station recorded her reading her work. Moore made a deep impression, appearing as a sort of fairy godmother and expressing a wish to meet Aurelia, Sylvia wrote in a 16 April letter to her mother. A letter from
The Atlantic Monthly
requested revision of a poem that Sylvia thought might ruin the work's spontaneity. She regretfully admitted, “I battle between desperate Machiavellian opportunism and uncompromising artistic ethics.” The former won out.

Plath was thrilled to get a letter from Ciardi calling her a real poet. She was also hoping that May would bring further publication in
Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly,
and
Mademoiselle,
as well as several more prizes from Smith. Reading her letters is rather like making the rounds of perpetual desire. This time there were fewer disappointments. At pains to show how fulfilled Sylvia felt in the late spring of 1955, Aurelia noted her daughter's happy birthday call in
Letters Home:
“Thank you, Mother, for giving me life.” In early May, Sylvia was invited to judge a contest at a writer's festival in the Catskills. She enjoyed the work and the attention—mistakenly thinking, however, that her well-received public performance meant that she would enjoy a teaching career.

The official award of a Fulbright to study at Cambridge was announced in late May at the same time as Edward Weeks, editor of
The Atlantic Monthly,
wrote Sylvia to say that her original version of “Circus in Three Rings” was better than the revision the magazine had requested. He would publish her work in the August issue. After his call for more new work, Plath practically chortled to her mother, “That fortress of Bostonian conservative respectability has been ‘charmed' by your tight-rope-walking daughter!” In the same 21 May letter, Plath listed the eleven awards she had received that year, totaling $470. At graduation, Sylvia listened to Adlai Stevenson give the commencement address, watched Marianne Moore receive an honorary degree, acknowledged Alfred Kazin's wave to her as she accepted her degree, and whispered in her mother's ear, “My cup runneth over!”

The apotheosis of Sylvia Plath seemed perfected in June, when letters from Gordon Lameyer and Richard Sassoon arrived with breathtaking tributes—and, in Sassoon's case, a new, almost pleading eroticism that complemented Lameyer's earnest adoration: “From you … I have found a language, a way of looking at life, a beauty in the terrible paradoxes. You have given me courage to work in the dark, energy to concentrate on my work, vision to clear the shelf of the masters who sit starting down on me with their chilling jeer, confidence to act in the Hamlet play of life. I have taken all you had to give—and you gave more than anyone.” Sassoon wrote his letter on 4 June, a day later, abasing himself even as he exalted her: “O my darling sweet clever Sylvia! You will make the heavens answer someday … if ever I am there … and I shall be.”

A new note of urgency verging on panic enters Sassoon's letters that summer, as he realizes he may be losing her: “I do not believe I shall ever love another woman so deeply, so happily, so sadly, so confidently, so desperately, so fully … something in me has broken … Goodbye my very dearest Sylvia … love—it is a great thing, even when it has failed. And it was the love really that faltered or failed, was it? Because it lives.”

The next day, 19 July, Sylvia mentioned to her mother that in Cambridge she had gone out to dinner and a play with Peter Davison, now another of her lovers. Alfred Kazin had introduced Plath to Davison, then twenty-seven and an editor at Harcourt, Brace. At Smith, Davison met a typical undergraduate, robust and ingenuous, but also driven to write and full of questions about the world of publishing. The conventionally pretty girl in the Smith sweater-and-skirt ensemble formed a “curious, even a disturbing alliance” with her intensity of expression, he pointed out in
Half-Remembered.
Davison asked Plath to show him her first novel whenever she wrote it. Davison seemed especially suitable for the summer before her departure for Cambridge because, she told her mother, his voice sounded “nice and Britishy and tweedy.” He was a Harvard man who wrote poetry and had a Scottish poet for a father, she told Warren.