American Isis (23 page)

Sibyl is, of course, the name of a prophetess, and Leroy is the cognomen of a king. Together the names signify the way these two poets mythologized themselves. With no evident trace of irony, Hughes remarks in his notes to
The Collected Poems
that his wife “mentioned flashes of prescience—always about something unimportant.” Did he not see the predictive value of “Dialogue”? Critic Jacqueline Rose notes that Plath “situates quite explicitly” in Leroy's lines the “male invocation of poetry” associated with violence entering their room like an earthquake, turning Sibyl “ashen.” Like Hughes, Plath both venerated and dreaded the eruptive nature of his poetic gift and her own rage, which could erupt in response to it. In “Dialogue” Sybil ends their colloquy with spirits by smashing the glass.

About a week before the couple left Northampton for the fall semester at Smith, Ted wrote Olwyn the first of many scornful descriptions of an America wrapped in cellophane, “crapularised” into processed food that reflected a more general lack of texture in a “boundless” suburban uniformity, in which everyone was friendly in a facetious sort of way, but no one knew anyone's else's family history. He thought better of Northampton, which he had visited earlier in the summer when they were looking for lodgings. With its main street full of shops “huddled together,” it was “fairly English.” This letter and others demonstrate that Sylvia's hope that Hughes would open up to America—which would in turn expand his poetic sensibility—was sadly mistaken. He associated affluence with inauthenticity.

In September 1957, Sylvia and Ted settled into an apartment in Northampton within walking distance of the Smith campus. On the surface (which is what Sylvia presented to her mother on 23 September), Ted was a considerate husband, making breakfast and doing the dishes. Sylvia had three classes and a total of sixty-five students, each of whom she would also be seeing in individual conferences. This work, plus department and general faculty meetings, would fill out her schedule.

Sylvia still found time to mull over in her journal ideas for several stories, including one about a woman who is shocked to discover that her poet-husband has not been writing about her, but about a “Dream Woman Muse.” Another story, set in
Wuthering Heights
country, is cryptically linked to Ted as a poet associated with decay and “aloneness.” This is perhaps Plath's first recognition of his estrangement from an American scene that had separated him from the ghosts and spirits of his native land. Hughes's letters reflect a sensibility ill at ease in surroundings that had no resonance or texture for him. Smith girls had a sort of machined beauty—“Chromium dianas,” he called them. “I sit for hours like the statue of a man writing,” he wrote to Lucas Myers in early October. “Two years will be our stretch in America,” he wrote, as though describing a prison sentence. Not even a visit to the Poetry Center cheered him, judging by his dismissive remarks about the dowagers and maidens who accosted him about his work.

By 1 October, Sylvia's anxiety level seemed to peak. She had trouble sleeping, doubted her teaching abilities, deplored her lack of experience, obsessed over the perplexed expressions of her students—but most of all decried the demon in herself that demanded excellence when, in fact, she was “middling good.” Correcting papers exhausted her. She was ashamed to admit that she was afraid of not measuring up to Smith standards. She counseled herself to face reality, adopt a stoic face, and do her job as best she could. But of course, she could not leave it at that, admitting, “Not being perfect hurts.” Ted, more resigned to his teaching and unproductive writing regimen, admitted to Olwyn that life was pleasant, and he was in good humor, whereas Sylvia was “creaking under her burdens.” Sylvia complained to Warren on 5 November of a “rough class of spoiled bitches.” Her funk, she admitted, arose out of wanting to create her own metaphors, not discuss the ones in Henry James and D. H. Lawrence. Reading them was one thing; teaching them seemed to diminish her own creativity.

These words to Warren may have provoked Sylvia to take herself in hand. In her journal, she dismissed her complaints as those of a spoiled little girl. She deserved a good slap. She vowed not to weigh Ted down with her woes and to learn to live with her anxieties. Gradually, she pointed out to herself, she had learned to cope with her students, get enough sleep, write letters to friends, and finally do some baking. These small victories were confidence builders.

Sylvia's initial disappointments as a teacher, and her eventual acclimation to the classroom, seem confirmed in the reminiscences of her students. As a Smith freshman, Barbara Russell Kornfield “struggled mightily as we read William James, no doubt why my first paper was a D
+
. She was a tough teacher for a 17 year old.” Of course, Kornfield did not know about her own teacher's struggles to improve, or about what the sudden appearance of Hughes, a stranger to the class, meant to Plath. “I do remember quite clearly,” Kornfield adds, “we had no compunctions about asking her who he was. In an ethereal voice, she replied: ‘That is a man from heaven sent.'”

Part of Plath's problem during her first months at Smith stemmed from her decision to adopt the Socratic method of her Cambridge tutorials. She had reveled in the hard give-and-take of her sessions with Dorothea Krook, which were quite unlike anything she had experienced at Smith—or her own students were prepared to endure. Anne Mohegan Smith remembers one of her Smith classmates, Merrill Schwartz, explained that in her freshman English literature section Plath began the year

singling out students as foils in class, challenging/ridiculing their comments and more than once reducing them to tears. I heard this from Merrill who was one of the students singled out in this way; she came to the Wilder House dining room with swollen red eyelids, and told our table about it. She was a lively girl with a heavy, nasal Brooklyn accent and a high-pitched cackle of a laugh, but however irrepressible she might seem, she could be wounded, and was. After that day, I heard about this behavior once again from another student in Plath's class who lived in a different college house from mine.

Before beginning her year at Smith, Sylvia had written letters worrying about how she would establish her authority in the classroom, especially since she was only a little more than six years older than her students. Her resort to Cambridge pedagogy was a way to exert power in precisely the place where she felt most vulnerable. But “then, suddenly, about halfway through the semester, the behavior stopped,” Smith noted. “Florence Dalrymple told me years later that Plath … was told (probably by our class dean) to stop it at once—students perceived it as abuse.”

Whatever start-up problems Plath may have had at Smith seem to have been resolved quickly. By the end of November, she reported to Warren, she had been asked to teach for a second year, but she had already decided against it, since teaching had put a stop to her writing. She and Ted were planning to move out of Northampton by the end of the summer and settle in Boston, where Sylvia hope to find some kind of part-time employment that would not sap her writing energy. They would rent a flat on the “slummy side” of Beacon Hill, as far from an academic environment as they could get.

Whatever Ted's qualms about America, he had lost none of his charm. His latest conquest was Olive Higgins Prouty, who had, if Sylvia is to be believed, become “obsessed with Ted.” It was a common enough experience. Ted only had to say hello to you, recalled Ravelle Silberman (a freshman when she met Hughes), and he was already flirting with you. He enjoyed watching women compete for him, recalled writer Marvin Cohen, who met Hughes many years later and became a friend of Olwyn.

On 7 December, Sylvia wrote to Aurelia with considerably more confidence about her teaching, saying she was making the best of a bad job. Several faculty members had relayed comments from students who had called her a “brilliant teacher.” But that accolade did not mean Sylvia inspired much affection—certainly not like one of her mentors, Alfred Fisher, whom Smith undergraduates adored, and who appears in CB Follett's poem about Sylvia as “our druid king.”

By the end of the fall semester, Sylvia had exhausted herself, and by the time she reached Wellesley for her Christmas break, she had developed a fever and then came down with pneumonia, which was successfully treated with antibiotics. Over the holidays, Sylvia nursed her ambition, dreaming “too much” of fame, she admitted in her journal. Thoughts of “Falcon Yard” as a “rich, humorous satire” flitted randomly among ideas for stories, the fate of the book she had submitted to the Yale Younger Poets series, and plans to apply for a fellowship that would fund their return to Europe. A certain estrangement had set in: “You can't go home again,” she wrote, noting that her beloved memories of her seaside childhood in Winthrop had “shrunk.”

Plath also experienced pressure from Smith faculty, who urged her to stay a second year. Alfred Fisher said her failure to do so would be deemed “irresponsible.” She resisted overtures from her former thesis advisor, George Gibian, too, commenting in her journal that her colleagues meant well but really had no idea of what was good for her. Winters were often hard for her, and she contracted a cough in early January. Her aches and pains seemed of a piece with her dread of preparing for class, attending department meetings, and dealing with her writing almost like an onlooker whose troubles Alfred Fisher dismissed with, “It's all in your mind.”
Citizen Kane—
especially the famous scene with the glass globe that contains Kane's grieving memory of the snow scene, which signals the end of his childhood, and the parade of Kanes in the mirror shots—appealed to Sylvia as emblematic of her own haunted retrospection. To her surprise, sometimes classes went well, but teaching still exhausted her. Knowing this was her last term had freed her to take more pleasure in her students, whom she now regarded “as really
good
girls,” she told Aurelia on 13 January.

But Sylvia thought mostly of June and her return to full-time writing. It seemed so long since she had achieved anything notable, and now she learned she had not won the Yale Younger Poets prize, and she would not have her first book published—not yet. And how infuriating, she wrote in her journal, to see that she had not been included in an anthology of six “new poets of england and america.” Only two of them, May Swenson and Adrienne Rich, seemed any good, and they were not “better or more-published than me,” Plath observed. She needed a tougher, freer voice, she told herself, anticipating work still years beyond her reach. She regretted her diaries, “spattered with undone imperatives, directives.”

At the end of January 1958, Ted commuted eight miles to teach literature and creative writing at the Amherst campus of the University of Massachusetts, a position he obtained through one of Plath's contacts at Smith. He was teaching two classes three times a week. Milton, Goethe, Keats, Wordsworth, Yeats, Thoreau, and Molière were on his syllabus for a great works course. He also taught freshman composition. This job helped to pay for what Sylvia's salary did not cover and contributed to the savings they would rely on when they returned to their writers' lives.

Sylvia had moments, she confided to her journal, when visions of cozy academic life beckoned. They could easily earn eight thousand a year teaching, making a living off of classes on Joyce and James. She could become a teacher/writer like Elizabeth Drew, one of her mentors, queening about as a beloved campus icon. But she remained true to Ted's antiacademic attitudes and to her own ambition to overtake poets like the “facile Isabella Gardner & even the lesbian and fanciful & jeweled Elizabeth Bishop in America.” Teaching did not allow her to live her own self, as she put it in her journal. She needed to sweat out her novel next summer. With “Falcon Yard” behind her, perhaps by the fourth year of their marriage it would be time to begin conceiving children. An academic career would have meant years of graduate school to earn a PhD and a very junior position at Smith. Yet the faculty thought, as George Gibian put it, that to teach at Smith was the “very highest thing an intellectual woman could do, and to give THAT up was very odd.”

Never at her best in bleak, blustery cold seasons, Sylvia groused about even good friends, like the Roches. Paul, an Englishman, was teaching at Smith, and his wife, Clarissa, befriended Sylvia, although their greatest period of intimacy would come later in Britain. Paul, Sylvia noted, had lost his Adonis-boy looks and was no poet—for all his connections to William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. Ted held a similar critical view, describing his fellow countryman as “tall, thin a rapt shelleyan look, bright blue eyes that he holds wide open and slightly glazed, but withal utterly seedy … an old lady charmer, with his beautiful hushing voice, and wonderful English manners.” Clarissa seemed “naive and likeable” to Ted, but in Sylvia's journal she appeared as a sullen blonde figure in a “silken pout” over a cup of coffee.

Sylvia and Ted also socialized with the poet W. S. Merwin and his British wife, Dido, then living in Boston. Bill Merwin embodied a cliché: the man's man. Poet Grace Schulman remembered that Bill and Ted formed a sort of men's club. Their utterly self-sufficient maleness seemed to impress her, inspiring a wonder at the masculine gravitational pull that Sylvia herself felt so strongly. At this early stage, though, the Merwins mainly represented to Sylvia the admirable urbanity of a couple on their own, in a high-rise apartment with windows so wide they reminded her of a ship deck.

Campus life bothered Sylvia because it subjected her to men like the poet Anthony Hecht, a notorious misogynist who plied her with patronizing pleasantries about her earnest, energetic manner. She was a grader for critic Newton Arvin's lecture course, a job she enjoyed, which nevertheless made her feel like a drudge, dealing with assignments and students in a sort of mopping up operation. She would return home and give everything a thorough cleaning—and then bake a lemon meringue pie, taking immense satisfaction in her own realm. In a better mood, she described a party and her enjoyment of “blond witchy dear Clarissa” and a cherubic Paul, looking “Rossetti-like” with his blue eyes and blond curls. Department gossip amused her, especially tales of Alfred Fisher, who had married three of his students, and other tales about which faculty members had “the Power.” Sylvia preened when told how good her freshmen classes were. She exulted in a “dangerous enjoyment from shocking” her students, she wrote to Olwyn on 9 February, describing a memorable class that had stimulated “laughter & even tears, the occasion of the latter being a snowy Saturday spent evoking the bloody & cruel history of the Irish whiteboys, potato famines, mass hangings, etc.” Such interludes broke up the otherwise discontented winter that had Sylvia holding on with visions of June, dreaming of trading her Smith “girl-studded” past for the anonymity of Boston.