American Isis (6 page)

In her 1 December thank you letter to Prouty, a rattled Sylvia wrote about watching the faces of six hundred freshmen on the steps of Scott Gym, and feeling that she was
“
drowning in a sea of personalities, each one as eager to be a whole individual as I was.” What makes Sylvia such a significant figure—a cynosure, in fact—is her refusal to simply play the alienated artist or disaffected individual, even though she believed her true calling as an artist was elsewhere. Beginning with her first year at Smith, she was trying, in earnest, to live through her contradictions.

When a twenty-five-year-old soldier, a Korean War veteran who had spent two years in a hospital convalescing from a lung wound, attacked her during a late night walk on campus, Sylvia was shocked by how little she knew about the world. He desisted when she cried out, but she was amazed at how offended
he
was, since he presumed their night out would culminate in a rape—although neither he nor Sylvia would have used the word then. A chagrined Sylvia realized how naïve she had been and actually comforted the aggrieved man, who put his head in her lap. She understood something was wrong with this picture. Shouldn't he be apologizing to her? Yet the times were such that neither of them could see past what were then conventional cultural markers of their encounter. It perplexed Sylvia that she should have made such an elementary blunder, and she vowed never again to put herself in such a vulnerable position. Back at Haven House, a shaken Sylvia talked over the episode with friends and discovered they had had similar experiences.

On 8 December, Eddie Cohen set her straight:

Although you have an unusual understanding of the world in terms of ideas and groups of people, you as yet do not understand the individual in conflict with himself or society, or the impact of emotion upon an individual to the extent that it overcomes his rational aspects. This results from two things: never having had the experience of facing a demanding personal situation on your own; and never having had a really compelling, overwhelming love affair. In these shortcomings, time will bring you through—your attitude is almost exactly my own two years ago, and I have since learned those things which only experience can bring. Logic isn't everything.

No one talked to Sylvia Plath this way. She fell silent, as Eddie noted in two follow-up letters.

Because she was depressed, Sylvia did not write. She admitted as much to her mother, saying she had given up carving a block of wood that now represented her own blankness. To counteract her “black despair,” she had attended a life class and felt her spirits lift as she made sketches of a posing Smith girl. But Sylvia still wondered how she would make it to Christmas. She also told Aurelia that Ann Davidow was dropping out of Smith because she did not feel smart enough to do the work. Ann, in fact, was suicidal, Sylvia said. In
Letters Home,
Aurelia would add a note suggesting her daughter was exaggerating and that Ann's mood was, in fact, a projection of Sylvia's own.

On 24 December 1950, Sylvia wrote to her pen pal Hans, describing Smith in very positive terms, though she admitted she felt “a little lost.” She still believed the world was likely to come to a grim end: America was like the Roman Empire, “new and bright,” and yet falling apart.
On the Beach,
Nevil Shute's novel about the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, would not be published for another seven years, and yet Sylvia was already imagining not only the extinction of her hopes, but of the world's. She made it through the Christmas season but returned to Smith in a glum mood. She missed Ann Davidow. Sylvia wrote to Ann, addressing her as “Davy,” to say she was lost without her confidant. Sylvia was not unhappy for long, though. She made friends with Marcia Brown, a cheerful companion who loved debating ideas on long walks. Sylvia went home with Marcia to New Hampshire in early February for a brief visit.

Eddie Cohen suddenly appeared at Smith in early April, exhausted from his cross-country drive from Chicago and ill-prepared for Sylvia's frigid reception. He drove her home in near silence. Their awkward meeting shook his confidence. He wondered if perhaps he had misled her and was not the good-looking guy in the photograph he had sent her. At any rate, he took the blame for their misadventure and told her he was going to therapy. He suspected that somewhere in him a piece was missing, and he was
“
rather anxious to find what and where it is.”

Eddie had been replaced by Dick Norton, a med student at Yale, tall and handsome, and the older brother of Perry Norton, whom Sylvia had dated in high school. The older neighbor boy noticed she had grown up, and he invited her for a weekend at his school—always a special kind of invitation, requiring arrangements for travel by train and a place to stay, insuring all was in order for a Smith girl intent on preserving her chastity. Dick was a master of the routine, and at first he impressed Sylvia. He was friendly but not too familiar, writing correct letters that inquired about her studies, discussed their families, and expressed interest in what she was writing. He also described events on his campus, including the visit of Reinhold Neibuhr, a theologian then popular owing to his talent for addressing a broad range of readers concerned about America's place in history. Like Plath, Niebuhr feared the country was going the way of the Roman Empire.

If Dick was promising, he also needed work, Sylvia confided to Ann. He acted like an “indulgent older cousin,” memorizing poetry and reciting it to her, even though he had discounted “emotional expression” unless it had a scientific basis “or something,” Sylvia trailed off. Whereas go-for-broke Eddie saw a glorious future for Sylvia as a writer, the practical Dick observed, “You won't be badly off, Syl, if she [Aurelia] can teach you shorthand and if I can impart some enthusiasm for natural science. One or both may come in time.” Sylvia had to set aside such small-minded advice in hopes that there was more to Dick. Right then, it was Dick—or more of those dreadful blind dates.

Their first weekend was a great success. Dick made headway, it seems, because he was gentlemanly and sure of himself, traits Sylvia admired. Unlike her blind dates, he was not cowed by her intelligence; indeed, he found it lacking in some respects. The very idea that
she
might have shortcomings sent Sylvia to the moon over Dick, as she revealed in a 5 March letter to Ann: “I never felt so shallow in my life.” And he knew how to show a girl a good time, attending an exciting swim meet, biking, and dining at a Chinese restaurant. Reporting to her mother about the weekend with Dick, Sylvia summed it up this way: “He knows everything.”

In her journal, Sylvia gave Dick a portentous fanfare. She might as well have written a Harlequin romance, for the scene is set at night, with the wind whipping up a froth of expectation, as she strides forward on “silver feet,” holding hands with her beloved under the starkly shining street lights, “Two of us, strong and together.” Overhead she observes a cathedral of constellations, and Dick says it is like “being in church.” They kiss, again and again. Sylvia salivated over that “glorious specimen of Dick-hood,” who addressed one letter to her, “Dear Incomparable One” and signed another “Your willing slave.”

To her mother, Sylvia spoke in conventional terms of catching a man. In her journal she chided herself, “so proud and disdainful of custom,” for thinking of marriage as a viable option, one that required her to subordinate herself to a husband and to channel her creativity through his career. Even so, Sylvia hoped her man would tolerate her freelancing writer's life. The idea of a career—the very word—bothered her. She had not entirely abandoned the idea of earning an advanced degree, but like Susan Sontag, born just a year after Plath, she regarded the routines of academic institutions and the paraphernalia of the scholar's life with ambivalence. How could a creative person function in so much harness? Marriage itself, Sylvia confided to her journal, might drain her of creativity, although she conceded that having children might do just the opposite, making her a more fulfilled artist.

Marcia Brown, so logical and sensible according to Sylvia, offered solace and companionship, and Sylvia was heartened in May when they both secured summer babysitting jobs in Swampscott, Massachusetts. By this time, after a month or so of rhapsodizing about Dick, Sylvia was beginning to have her doubts. What was behind his jocular tone? She suspected, for all his casual confidence, that he was uneasy about something. On 14 May, she told her mother that she had ripped off part of his irritating “jovial mask.”

Sylvia took the typical Smith safety route, finding summer employment babysitting the Mayo family's children, aged six, four, and two. She called them three “adorable” kids, but they seemed far less lovable after a long day of helping with breakfast, making beds, doing the laundry, ironing, and bathing the baby at night. In her journal she lamented the tragedy of womanhood. She wanted to be out in the world, hitting the road and consorting with soldiers and sailors, hanging out at bars—doing the scene like Jack Kerouac. But her mere presence would be taken as an invitation to have sex.

Sylvia felt awkward in the kitchen, since she knew little about cooking. She now realized how her capable mother had spoiled her by not ever requiring her to learn the rudiments of meal making. It was a lot of work, and she was having murderous thoughts about her “darlings.” By July, she was fed up with the peripatetic schedule that had her going “in spurts” from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. She was well treated and did take some pleasure in caring for her charges, but inevitably she suffered in the role of supernumerary, which brilliant women before her—Marie Curie and the Brontë sisters, among others—had endured in their demeaning apprenticeship years. She had to grit her teeth, as they did, and deal every day with unruly children. In her journal and letters she actually sounds rather like Anne Brontë's Agnes Grey. What is most unbearable about such situations is that no one notices the beautiful genius in their midst. No one complimented Sylvia on how well she looked. She admitted to Ann Davidow that she felt diminished. The recognition of others was always important to Sylvia, who did not care for the role of solitary genius. She longed to hear from Eddie, but he had fallen silent after she failed to answer his last two letters. To Aurelia, she confessed to feeling “cut off from humankind.” She could do no work of her own, since her main task was always to superintend the children. She had lost her tan and looked hollow-eyed. So no trysts with Dick, she decided, although she eventually did see him when he could get away from waiting tables at the Latham Inn. Marcia had taken a job similar to Sylvia's with the Blodgett family and saw Sylvia frequently. Even so, in her journal Sylvia reprimanded herself for allowing fear and insecurity to dominate her.

Sylvia's forlorn letters after a month of babysitting reflect how much her grandiose sense of herself had been affronted by her employment. Her 7 July letter to Aurelia suggests how keenly she felt the discrepancy between the fan letters forwarded to her from
Seventeen
and her own uncertainty about herself. Reading fan mail provoked an ironic comment in the third person: “Sylvia Plath sure has something—but who is she anyhow?” She quoted a line from William Ernest Henley's famous poem, “Invictus”: “My head is bloody, but unbowed,” to which she added her own line, “May children's bones bedeck my shroud.” Those children would be the death of her, she implied in her gruesome poetic joke, which was such a counterpoint to Henley's own concluding lines: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” Sylvia had a few inconsequential dates that summer, and in late August she enjoyed a few days with Dick. But mostly she was learning, as she wrote to Aurelia on 4 August, the “limitations of the woman's sphere.”

As so often, though, what Sylvia said on one page would be contradicted on another. Her shifting moods made it impossible for her to settle down. Thus a journal passage written after her return to Smith for a second year pays tribute to blind dates and the thirty-odd boys who had made her more conversant and confident. She was making her entrances downstairs in Haven House with a “practiced casualness,” no longer worrying whether her slip was showing or her hair uncurling. Now Sylvia could see herself as an attractive creation. It was show time at Smith College. What had bothered her so much about her babysitting stint in Swampscott was, as she put it in her journal, living in the “shadow of the lives of others.” The very expression of this sentiment in the passive voice suggests how much Sylvia missed the spotlight.

Resuming correspondence with Eddie Cohen was one sure sign that Sylvia had recovered from her summer in shadow. She had also come to realize how awful she had been to Eddie after his long ride to see her. She told him about Dick's tentative courtship, which Eddie diagnosed as her suitor's uncertainty about himself and Sylvia. Eddie did not need to read her journal to sum up her problem: the huge discrepancy between the way she was living and her ambitious plans, a discrepancy that marriage would complicate. But he did not know that Sylvia was also keeping score, estimating that a woman had only about eight years before the wrinkles began to show and she was no longer physically attractive.

Then Sylvia had one of those Jane Eyre/Thornfield Hall episodes. Everyone in Haven House was invited to Maureen Buckley's coming-out party at her family's mansion in Sharon, Connecticut. Maureen was the sister of William F. Buckley Jr., then a senior at Yale and later the founder of the
National Review
and one of the guiding lights of American conservatism. Bill had brought along his Yale class to meet all the Smith girls. Sylvia, sought after by several dance partners, gloried, perhaps for the first time, in her womanhood, feeling like a princess escorted by the scions of wealthy families, including Plato Skouras, son of Spyros Skouras, head of 20th Century Fox. One of her courtiers actually addressed her as “Milady.” Another said she looked like the Botticelli Madonna hanging over the Buckleys' fireplace. That night, as she drifted off to sleep and into “exquisite dreams” in what might as well have been Thornfield Hall, she could hear the wind “wuthering outside the stone walls.”