Sylvia Plath: A Biography (6 page)

But there were hints that Sylvia was not quite right for Haven. Comments about her constant studying hurt her feelings, and there was a time after Thanksgiving when she was afraid to go downstairs and mix with her housemates. She went out on blind dates, but few of the men she went out with called her again. She did not play bridge. Her clothes were not casual enough. Her attitudes were too conventional for her to be a rebel, and too rebellious for her to be part of the mainstream. Her discomfort occurred despite the fact that Haven was less homogeneous than some of the Smith houses, which were conservative and discriminatory. The women in Haven at that time were independent, even idiosyncratic; and most of them were willing to judge their fellow women on merits other than the number of cashmere sweaters they owned.

Hoping to be bright “unobtrusively,” she worried herself into the customary sinus ailments before she had been at school a month, and in mid-October she was in the infirmary. Buried under tests and papers, a week before her eighteenth birthday, she wrote, “I get a little frightened when I think of life slipping through my fingers like water — so fast that I have little time to stop running. I have to keep on like the White Queen to stay in the same place.” “All I’m trying to do is keep my head above water.... If only I’m good enough to deserve all this!”

A parallel fear seemed to be her anonymity on the campus of several thousand talented women: “God, who am I? ... Girls, girls everywhere, reading books. Intent faces, flesh pink, white, yellow. And I sit here without identity.... If I rest, if I think inward, I go mad. There is so much, and I am torn in different directions, pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach.” Plath’s utter, and unreasonable, hopelessness could not be alleviated by kind words; she shut herself off from cheering up. She was reassured only by A’s on assignments and by boys calling her for dates.

During the Smith years and afterward, what Sylvia wrote in letters to her mother was often quite different from what she wrote in her journal. To Aurelia, she seldom complained, or if she did, it was for effect, with what seemed to be self-mocking humor. In her journals, however, Sylvia was often bitter. Nothing she did pleased her; no accomplishment was enough. She and Aurelia had different expectations. Sylvia wanted everything. Aurelia was satisfied if her daughter made good grades. She reminded Sylvia that thankfulness should be her basic attitude. Sylvia, burned-out and depressed, found it hard to consider herself lucky.

Sylvia’s academic life at Smith was similar to that in high school. She had courses in European history, botany, painting, English, French literature, and physical education. She managed a low-B average in the last; in each of the other courses she carried an A or an A- average, except for English where Mr. Madiera, her instructor, persisted in giving her B’s. He did give her the highest mark on a research paper on Thomas Mann and a long critical analysis of Edith Sitwell’s poetry so she ended the year with a B+ average. This uncomfortable situation in English kept Sylvia from declaring the major she had planned, and she thought seriously about majoring in art.

The aim of the Smith curriculum, a source of pride for its 200 faculty members, was truly liberal learning. Smith women took a five-course load both freshman and sophomore years, choosing from courses in the sciences, history or government, philosophy or religion or language, and art, music or creative writing. During their last two years, they specialized, doing intensive work in courses or opting for an honors program in which they took seminars (“units”) and wrote theses. Sylvia’s favorite course during her first year was Mrs. Koffka’s European history. Koffka was an imposing woman with gray hair, piercing eyes, great enthusiasm, and a somewhat difficult accent. Sylvia later ranked Koffka’s influence on her with that of Wilbury Crockett. She enjoyed Koffka’s integrative approach to history, and she wrote a paper on Darwin, Marx, and Wagner for the class.

Both botany and painting were laboratory classes, worth six credits instead of the usual three. Sylvia spent twenty-four hours a week in class, including Saturday sessions, and devoted many evenings to finishing art projects. Because she had so little time during the day to study, she spent other evenings in the Neilson Library’s comfortable reading room. Furnished with couches and chairs, elegant paintings and tapestries, this room became an important hide-away for her. When she studied there, instead of in her room, her housemates could not call her a grind.

School was Sylvia’s first priority (letters home include strategies for getting better grades, such as inviting Mr. Madiera and his wife for dinner), but she worried almost as much about her social life. Ann Davidow, a Chicagoan, became Sylvia’s best friend and arranged several blind dates for her. Ann and Sylvia were each fascinated by religion, and spent long hours talking about it. They planned to room together their sophomore year, and Sylvia felt lost when Ann did not return to Smith in January. Ann had felt inadequate to the workload, and had become increasingly depressed during fall term. Minor frustrations such as her inability to type loomed large. Sylvia was supportive, even to the point of typing one of Ann’s longer English papers for her. Ann’s foundering self-confidence was a drain on Sylvia’s as well. If her closest friend couldn’t cope, how well could she?

Separated from Ann, Sylvia spent time with Sydney Webber, a history major who also took English courses, and Enid Epstein, an art major who had also published in
Seventeen
. Epstein’s work and Sylvia’s had been placed on the College Hall bulletin board when school had opened, which was where Enid and Sylvia met. The next few years, they worked together on Press Board, the college’s public relations division; for time spent writing press releases, women received salaries. Enid eventually became president of the Board and was, therefore, Sylvia’s boss. Sylvia, always outwardly affable, usually chose to be close friends only with people who shared her academic strengths and ambitions.

She broke that pattern, though, when her search for a sophomore-year roommate led her to exuberant Marcia Brown, a sociology major. Marcia had many friends and often went out with the other women in Haven; by contrast, Sylvia studied unless she had a date who would pay the costs of going somewhere. Marcia provided Sylvia with a bridge to other housemates. Sylvia also had fun with Marcia. They talked nonstop, giggled, accepted each other’s personalities and loved them. One of Marcia’s gifts was to bring out Sylvia’s strengths, and Marcia said in turn that she never talked so well as with Sylvia. Even as a listener, her Wellesley friend was intense and compelling.

Sylvia’s most exciting experiences during her first years at Smith — traveling and working on the Cape during the summer, visiting New York — occurred with Marcia and, often, because of Marcia. The short, brown-haired girl was Sylvia’s opposite in many ways besides appearance: she was direct and forthright, independent, and unconcerned about what people would say, or about what she should be doing.

During her years at Smith, Sylvia and Ed Cohen continued their correspondence, which was valuable to Sylvia both emotionally and sexually. For example, one of Cohen’s 1950 letters describes different kinds of orgasms. For a virgin freshman girl, such explicit information was hard to come by. Sylvia also considered Cohen her “double,” her soul mate. He was a rebel; he was a would-be writer. Politics continued to be a refrain in their correspondence. Plath meditated on political themes in her journal, too. Much of this interest occurred when she was upset about her own life, as if she could legitimately show anger about international subjects when it was difficult for her to express anger about her more personal concerns — or too upsetting for her family. The political and personal came together most notably when Wilbury Crockett was called before the Wellesley town board to explain his political beliefs. (He was a pacifist.) Plath was deeply offended.

In her journals and in letters to Cohen, Sylvia showed a nihilism that few other people saw.

Life is loneliness, despite all the opiates, despite the false grinning faces we all wear. And when at last you find someone to whom you feel you can pour out your soul, you stop in shock at the words you utter — they are so rusty, so ugly, so meaningless and feeble from being kept in the small cramped dark inside you so long. Yes, there is joy, fulfillment and companionship — but the loneliness of the soul in its appalling self-consciousness is horrible and overpowering.

Part of her anger came from her sense of being limited, of having to choose between marriage and a career. She wanted both. She did not want to be a “meek” Christian wife. She wondered what Lillian Hellman, Willa Cather, and Virginia Woolf were like as women. Like them, Sylvia knew even at eighteen that her writing meant a great deal to her. She believed that the only immortality would exist through her writing (“I think I will be snuffed out. Black is sleep; black is a fainting spell; and black is death”). She asked repeatedly, “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid.”

Most college freshmen show some confusion about the future, but few express such deep and unremitting anger. Plath’s rage and her resulting depression were more likely the product of her childhood years of loss and perceived abandonment, emotions always hidden — so that her anger did not upset her mother — or disguised — so that she could remain safely within the pleasant family circle. Like a small child, Sylvia usually expected great happiness in the future. She was repeatedly disappointed. Nothing could have met her exuberant expectations.

Part of Sylvia’s anxiety stemmed from financial worries. An accounting she gave of her expenses during the 1950-51 year shows how carefully she watched even small amounts of money: $270 covered food and room, art supplies, books; $15 for the year’s entertainment, and $50 for clothes. She wrote to Warren in a humorous poem that she had “nuffin’” to wear and her closet was “grungy.” She did not even walk along Green Street, where the clothing shops were. Aurelia’s health was poor, and with Warren now at Exeter both children could have used more money for clothes, entertainment, and travel. Sylvia worried often about her mother. She took a job with Press Board, making $20 a month for spending several hours each day writing press releases for Smith. She also sold stockings in her dormitory. In some ways, a new source of pressure was added once Sylvia learned that her Smith scholarship was funded by Olive Higgins Prouty. At the suggestion of Mary Mensel, Smith’s scholarship counselor, Sylvia wrote to Mrs. Prouty and thanked her. Thus began a relationship that was to be important to Sylvia throughout her life. Mrs. Prouty invited Sylvia to tea, and from then on, Sylvia felt great pressure to maintain the reputation she had with her patron. Typical of her complex relationships with supportive older women — including her mother — Sylvia alternated between gratitude for Mrs. Prouty’s help and anger at what she saw as her benefactor’s influence on her life.

Throughout freshman year Sylvia’s social situation remained unsettled. She was planning to break off with Bob Riedeman, now a junior at University of New Hampshire, although she invited him to Smith for a fall weekend and saw him over Thanksgiving. Part of her challenge at Smith, as she saw it, was to make a good “catch.” Smith was the hub of a wheel that radiated out to many men’s colleges within reasonable commuting distance. Fall mixers with men’s colleges were a regular part of the Smith calendar. But Sylvia saw herself as a giantess, five feet nine inches tall and weighing 137 pounds, and a scholarship student as well. She convinced herself she was doomed to be a wallflower, as described so well in her story “Initiation,” and so she was willing to date anyone who asked her out. One of her blind dates, a twenty-five-year-old disabled veteran, took her on a long walk and suggested they have sex. Sylvia wrote about the date to her mother, wondering naively whether she should see the man again. But in her journal, she described the experience — his moving her hand along his penis, her disgusted yet curious reaction. Her description of the “soft, writhing flesh” foreshadows the scene in
The
Bell
Jar
in which Buddy Willard proudly shows her his penis; as does her anger at the double standard: in the journal she exclaims, “I hate you. Damn you. Just because you’re a boy. Just because you’re never worried about having babies!”

Evidently Sylvia did not see him again. But she wanted a boyfriend as much as she wanted good grades, and she often put the two together, “I know I am capable of getting good marks; I know I am capable of attracting males.” These were parallel ambitions for many women in the Fifties, and Sylvia equated having acceptable dates with stability. As she complained in November of 1950, “I need someone real, who will be right for me now, here, and soon. Until then I’m lost. I think I am mad at times.”

Because this was the situation as she saw it, she grew desperate to have a boyfriend who would impress her Haven friends. When Dick Norton, the oldest son of the family friends and Perry’s older brother, wrote her on January 20, 1951, inviting her to Yale, Sylvia was beside herself with excitement. She even spent $1.75 to have her hair done. Dick had stopped in at the Plaths’ during Christmas week, when he was out running, and the invitation grew from the conversation he and Sylvia had had then. Blond, tall, handsome, with an engaging, wide-eyed expression, Dick was a senior science student who had been accepted to Harvard Medical School.

Despite his greater age, Norton seemed unsure of his role with Sylvia. “Dear Cousin,” his letter began. He asked to be remembered to “Aunt Aurelia,” and in a postscript told Sylvia that she could share his letters with her mother.

Sylvia had never been to Yale. Going as Dick’s date and getting to spend some time with her good friend Perry, who was a freshman there, pleased her. Uncharacteristically, she did not mention the weekend to her mother until afterwards, although her mother probably knew about it. Then Sylvia pretended Dick was just being nice and showing her around. Her enthusiasm for him was boundless; she thought he knew everything. She promised herself that she would study science on her own so that she could understand him. She didn’t tell Aurelia that he had asked her to the Yale prom, but she did tell her that they had missed the last train to Northampton by “one fatal minute” so that she was late getting back to Smith and was confined to campus for a week.