Sylvia Plath: A Biography (7 page)

Norton’s letters before the big prom date were both distant and literary. He sent Sylvia some excerpts from Sherwood Anderson’s novel
Poor
White
, mentioning that he had been to the Yale library to see exhibits from the manuscript collections of Gertrude Stein, Alfred Stieglitz, and Sinclair Lewis. He called Sylvia “artist” and signed himself “scientist” but his letters were calculated to impress her with his versatility. The prom itself was a fairy-tale date, with Sylvia carrying a black purse and wearing a white formal and crinoline, silver sandals, and a fur (all but the dress borrowed from housemates). She wrote to Cohen that she felt like Cinderella. After they stayed out till 3:30 the night of the dance, walking all around campus to the hill behind the Chemistry Building, Norton finally kissed her. Then they composed a joint letter to “Dear Aunt Aurelia.” Dated March 10, the letter — which was mostly from Dick — described the dance, their getting in late, and a telegram from Brenda Marshall, another family friend from Wellesley, wishing them much happiness on their big weekend.

If Sylvia felt hemmed in by the “family” nature of this romance, she didn’t express any reservations. Dick remained the most exciting, smartest, best-looking boy she knew. But her pride took a blow the very next weekend when Norton turned up at Smith as the prom date of Jane Anderson, another Wellesley girl a year older than Sylvia. Jane had invited him earlier, but his error — in Sylvia’s view — was that he didn’t let her know he was coming to Smith, for whatever reason. He left a letter at Haven telling Sylvia that he was on campus. Sylvia was enraged.

Luckily for Norton, spring break came and he drove to Florida to spend time with his grandparents there before driving them back to Massachusetts. His letters to Sylvia from Florida opened “Dear Beauty and Kindness” and talked about trying to find a place to have “a houseparty weekend” in later spring. Furious as Sylvia had been about his date with Jane, she evidently had not conveyed her anger to Dick. The tone of his relatively noncommittal letters did not change; they were filled with messages to Aunt Aurelia and assumptions that, of course, Sylvia would be glad to see him, whenever he appeared.

Sylvia’s own spring break was unexpectedly eventful. Late in March, just after Cohen had written her that he had broken his second engagement, he appeared in Northampton. He had borrowed his parents’ car on the pretense of visiting some relatives in Detroit, which he did briefly, but then he continued nonstop to Massachusetts. In bad emotional shape, he felt that he needed to see Sylvia; she had become his alter ego as he had become hers. Unshaven and tired, he had been driving for over thirty hours. Their meeting at Haven House was nothing like either of them had expected.

Sylvia had been waiting for a ride home, so she drove with Cohen instead — a largely silent trip as the two loquacious correspondents, who wrote easily about everything from existentialism to sexuality, felt that they were each in the presence of a stranger. Perhaps both were frightened. Once at 26 Elmwood Road, Sylvia curtly introduced Ed to her mother, from outside the house, and then dismissed him. Aurelia was horrified at Sylvia’s lack of manners: the man from Chicago was clearly in need of hospitality, not to mention food and sleep. Ed himself was furious at Sylvia’s disdainful treatment. He turned around and kept driving, only to have a head-on collision in Ohio, but he was not badly hurt.

Spring break was limbo for Sylvia. She was angry about Norton’s treatment of her and angry that Cohen had simply appeared at Smith without advance notice. Spontaneity was not, and could never be, one of Sylvia’s traits. She needed time to prepare herself for any experience. She could already see that what most college women expected from men was not what she wanted. Most women echoed what Mrs. Norton had told Sylvia, “Girls look for infinite security; boys look for a mate. Both look for different things.” Security was not a priority to Sylvia. In her journal, she commented, “I am at odds. I dislike being a girl, because as such I must come to realize that I cannot be a man. In other words, I must pour my energies through the direction and force of my mate. My only free act is choosing or refusing that mate.” She spent her week at home taking stock, barraged by letters form Norton and Ed, the first organizing her life for her, the second analyzing her “incredibly rude” behavior. At the end of the week, she wrote in her journal,

would marriage sap my creative energy and annihilate my desire for written and pictorial expression ... or would I if I married achieve a fuller expression in art as well as in the creation of children? Am I strong enough to do both well? ... That is the crux of the matter, and I hope to steel myself for the test ... as frightened as I am.

With relief, she went back to Smith and Marcia.

But as soon as she was back at Smith, Dick came for a weekend. They succeeded in missing nearly every meal as they walked and talked together. Sylvia was sick by the time Dick left and was sure the “sweet wonderman,” as she called him to her mother, would not want to see her again. But he reappeared April 28 to help her decorate for the Haven dance that night, even though she had invited Bob Humphrey, a friend from Wellesley, to the dance itself. After decorating, Sylvia had one of her sinus colds and was too sick to go anywhere.

As the term ended, Sylvia worried about examinations. She wrote Aurelia, “as I look ahead I see only an accelerated work-pattern until the day I drop into the grave.”
Seventeen
published her “Den of Lions” as the third-place winner in a fiction contest, with a prize of $100. In April Sylvia and Marcia Brown applied for summer babysitting jobs on the Cape, so they could be together and, more directly, so Sylvia could be near Norton, whose summer job waiting tables was in Brewster. Sylvia planned to ask for Mondays off because that was Dick’s day off.

She went to Yale May 10 to 12, “the best weekend yet,” for a dance, a production of Thornton Wilder’s
The
Skin
of
Our
Teeth
, and a beach picnic at Sachem’s with beer, hot dogs, and volleyball. Then she and Dick read Hemingway aloud on the beach for hours. Although Sylvia enjoyed her dates with Dick Norton, his “older cousin” attitude confused her, and she wrote to her mother about it.

As the year ended, Sylvia finished her exams and then packed to drive home with Norton on June 3. He and Perry were about to leave for a bike trip to Maine, but he asked her to come to Class Day and his Yale graduation with his family. She spent the night at the Nortons’ because they were leaving early. (Mildred Norton was up at 5 a.m., packing a picnic lunch for the day and cleaning house; then she made a hot breakfast.) One wonders whether Sylvia remembered her own stint as househelper when Mildred had the flu, or “Cousin Dick’s” first letter to her in 1943, when they both were home with colds. Then fourteen, Norton wrote that he had found Otto Plath’s book on bees and was reading it to help pass the time. Yale graduation with “Aunt Mildred” and “Uncle Bill” was the high point of a long family friendship.

As Sylvia and Mrs. Norton went to bed that night in New Haven after the graduation and a visit to an amusement park, Dick called to say he was leaving the next day for Arizona with friends. Then he would go to Brewster, and after his summer job he was taking a Western trip to see other friends. His peremptory announcements may have been in retaliation for Sylvia’s taking his father’s side in a family argument earlier in the day, but, whatever the reason, Sylvia resented his making these curt announcements of plans to be away from her. She had taken her summer job to be near him.

His plans also renewed her frequent worries about money. Dick had gone to Florida during spring break, he and Perry had just taken a trip to Maine, and now he was going to Arizona. In contrast, she stayed in Wellesley and mowed the grass. She had already complained to her mother about having to work all summer; she was tired. At Smith, she had gone five months without a menstrual period, and she had written hardly anything all year. In a letter home, she said,

I wish I didn’t have to work all summer, just so I can work the rest of the year. The Theory of the Leisure Class is fine only so long as you’re a member of the aristocracy. When you aren’t a member of the nobility, you might as well revolt and institute a classless state. (Your reply, I suppose, will be to count my blessings.)

Back in Wellesley, with Dick gone and Marcia in New Jersey, Sylvia was faced with the ever-widening difference between what she wanted for herself and what everyone else — including her family and boyfriends — seemed to think was appropriate for her. It was a time of depressing recognition.

5 - Conquering Smith

1951-52

“Eating the Fingers of Wisdom”

Sylvia’s letters home from the Mayo household during the summer of 1951 were one long cry for help. She had no idea what to do with three children, for whom she was expected to cook, clean, make beds, entertain, and get up at night. The radical expansion of what “babysitting” had meant in Wellesley almost capsized her. Joey, the baby girl, was two; Penny, four; Freddie, seven. Dr. Mayo and his wife entertained a great deal. They needed Sylvia, in addition to their part-time cook, to handle family activities.

Just outside Sylvia’s window was a beautiful beach. She quickly learned to get the children to the beach as often as possible. After two weeks of this, Marcia Brown came to do similar work for a nearby family, and things improved immensely. Both girls, however, were bothered by their heavy responsibilities.

Part of Sylvia’s initial upset was in reaction to an even cooler tone in Dick Norton’s letters. In his June 21 note, which opened “Dear Sister-Cousin,” he described a “big sisterish” waitress who was helping him improve his dancing. He asked Sylvia to come to Brewster in early July, but she decided not to go — she was pale and exhausted. Evidently, because she did not come, Norton’s friendship with the waitress grew more intimate. A few weeks later, he came to see Sylvia and confessed; her resulting anger ruined their day, and much of the coming year. In his July 18 letter, Norton signed himself “Truly and faithfully” and pointed out that
his
indiscretions occurred only because
she
had failed him by not coming to Brewster.

Sylvia was appalled, not only because of Norton’s acts but also because of his attempts to justify those acts. She had thought she was his girlfriend. She had taken a miserable summer job in order to be near him, and the extent of their summer was going to be a few days together. She felt only “a deep hurt” at his treatment. She had idealized their relationship, but her pain was no less real for her naive trust in those idealizations.

What she saw as Norton’s betrayal colored his every word and action. She was so angry about the double standard behavior — that he could simply confess his intimacy and expect to be forgiven — that she had sleepless nights. Sylvia expressed her anger only in her journal (“Being born a woman is my awful tragedy,” she raged) and sometimes on the Mayo piano, if no one else was in the house. She had already invested years of thought, talk, and guilt in the subject of sexuality. Especially at Smith, she had listened well to other women: “Once a woman has intercourse she isn’t satisfied,” “You need time and security for full pleasure,” and the dire “You’ll be finished at Smith.” She was remaining a virgin so that she could continue school, but more importantly because she wanted to be virginal for a husband. Now the very man she thought would be her husband had just made love with someone he cared very little about. In another year, Sylvia was to write in her journal, with predictable self-disgust, that she was still a virgin but that her love-making was “Everything but: what a pretty compromise between technical virginity and practical satisfaction.”

During the 1950s, before birth control pills and in the days of illegal and dangerous abortions, American women knew all too well the destructive potential of sex. There was much frustration and anger about it — and so it was for Sylvia. But despite her disappointment with Norton, she persisted in the relationship. Dick had become her choice for a mate, regardless of the way he treated her. He seemed to be everything her family and friends admired — ambitious, talented, handsome, well educated, and from a good family. He was also studying to be a doctor. With characteristic stubbornness, Sylvia tried to live with the situation. The four days in September that the Plath and Norton families shared at Brewster, however, were agony, and Sylvia found herself spending more time with Perry than with Dick. Dick too was airing hurt feelings. Their anger finally culminated in what Norton called a “truth talk.” Sitting back to back in the center of an open field, Sylvia and Dick asked tough questions and gave candid answers. They decided to continue their relationship, although Dick seemed to think that they were engaged, while Sylvia promised herself that, if she chose, she would date other men as well.

A few weeks later, Dick entered medical school at Harvard and Sylvia returned to Smith, ready to do even better than she had freshman year. At chapel on September 28, she was named one of twenty-four outstanding sophomores. Classes during her second year were more to her liking. She took English, creative writing, government, religion, art, and physical education. Except for B’s in the latter, all her grades were A or A-.

Along with creative writing, Mr. Crary’s Religion 14 was her favorite. Partly historical overview, partly philosophy, the course required a term paper about a belief system. Sylvia’s was about Unitarianism. The most interesting assignments, however, were the precourse and postcourse “personal history” essays. In the precourse paper, Sylvia discussed what she called her unorthodox religious background — her mother’s having left the Catholic faith, her own lack of interest in religion until she joined a “vital” Unitarian congregation the previous year. Then she had become convinced that “religion
was
life.” She described her ideas as “anti-Christian,” even pagan. She believed that people were born without purpose, that there was no “kind Father” and no such thing as an inborn conscience. Each person therefore was responsible for his or her destiny. People were not perfectible, and there was no afterlife.

Sylvia’s postcourse essay was much the same, although she admitted that she was more sympathetic to Christianity than she had been before taking the course. She still defined herself as an “agnostic humanist”‘ who agreed with Nietzsche’s criticism of the “weak and passive” elements of religion. “Heaven, hell, original sin, and redemption, as commonly thought of, do not have any part in my philosophy,” Plath wrote. For Sylvia, religion remained a curiosity, something of interest intellectually, but not a matter of faith. Her friend Ellie Friedman attested to Sylvia’s interest in Judaism, and described Sylvia’s effervescent questions — “300 at a time” — when she was interested in a topic.

What interested Sylvia more during this sophomore year was Ortega y Gasset’s
The
Revolt
of
the
Masses
. When he said that out of struggle and hardship came a strong, vital nature, she wrote in the margin, “My
own
philosophy.” She also underlined many places that said, in effect, that the mass crushes beneath it everything that is different — ”excellent, individual, qualified and select.” Part of Sylvia’s hesitation about adopting a religious belief beyond her Unitarianism was that she saw such belief as a leveling process. She liked being what she saw as different.

She used these ideas in essays about both Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky. Both men believed in a creative dialectic by which a person makes his or her own purpose on earth, “striving always for a dynamic becoming.” For Mann, conflicts between his father’s materialism and his mother’s artistic nature led to what he called “the artist’s bad conscience.” Plath felt that Mann’s story “Tonio Kroger” reflected this philosophy. Although adolescent depression had led Mann to plan suicide when he was twenty, his later work shows his secure sense of self. He continued, however, to acknowledge what he called “the magnetic attraction” of death.

Margaret Mead’s
Male
and
Female
was another important book for Plath during this sophomore year. Much of chapters 12 through 18, Mead’s analysis of gender differences in America, is underlined; and Sylvia used that information as her Bible. Mead championed the need for an integrated person, “high and low, animal and spiritual, body and spirit.” She insisted that people recognize that sex drives have a place in human personality: “We are creatures who are made not only to be individuals, but to continue the human race.” She lamented the American lack of “skin sensuousness” and what she saw as a tendency to idealize the Puritan code of restraint. Mead described the plight of the well-educated American housewife, infernally busy but “not working,” questioning what she has done with her life. Heavily underlined, Plath’s copy of
Male
and
Female
contains ideas that Plath would enthusiastically embrace: “the misfits are the gifted.” “In educating women like men, have we done something disastrous to both men and women alike?” “Women will see the world in different ways than men.”

In long journal entries during the fall of 1951, Sylvia drew on Mead’s book as she tried to sort through her situation with Dick. She understood that she would always argue with him unless
she
changed:

I can whittle my square edges to fit in a round hole. God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way.... The most saddening thing is to admit that I am not in love. I can only love (if that means self-denial — or does it mean self fulfillment? Or both?) by giving up my love of self and ambitions — why, why, why, can’t I combine ambition for myself and another?

Characteristically, everything positive about her realizations seemed negative to Plath, and she continued to blame herself for the dilemma: “I am vain and proud. I will not submit to having my life fingered by my husband.... I must have a legitimate field of my own, apart from his, which he must respect.”

For all the expert faculty at Smith College, Sylvia knew few women professors she could admire completely as role models. Many of her teachers were women who had given their lives to teaching and scholarship, most of them unmarried and, even if married, childless. Sylvia was looking for professors with families, women with what she regarded as rich, happy lives, full of accomplishment and pride in themselves. Even the successful Smith novelist Mary Ellen Chase was so modest, so deferential to the “great” writers about whom she taught, that she was embarrassed if students wrote essays on her fiction. Mentally and emotionally, Sylvia was trying out the roles of writer, wife, mother, professor.

Luckily, she had a chance to work out her ideas and emotions in Evelyn Page’s creative writing course. Page was inspiring and shrewd, warm and practical (she limited her students to one story about suicide in each course); she understood adolescence, and she respected her students. For her course, Sylvia wrote three stories that later appeared in
Mademoiselle
and
Seventeen
, and other stories and poems as good. Before class met, Sylvia and Enid Epstein read and critiqued each other’s writing. Always enthusiastic about her friends’ work, Sylvia praised whatever Enid wrote — and then worried about her own writing. Enid in turn encouraged Sylvia, but Sylvia needed several cups of coffee and much praise before she was ready to submit her work.

Sylvia’s creative writing and essays during her sophomore year were polished and sophisticated. When she took courses where she could work independently, her intellectual strengths became obvious. She was adept at selecting and correlating details and shaping material. Every professor who knew her work was impressed with her skill, her vivacity, and her hunger for learning. Robert Gorham Davis, a well-known American literature scholar who was then chair of the English Department, said about Sylvia’s presence in class, particularly her smile:

It was not just a smile for the photographer. It was certainly not the ambitious, ingratiating, falsely-open smile of someone eager to please and be accepted.... It was a radiant smile (I thought) of happiness at what was being offered, being shared.... I was conscious of Sylvia from the beginning, before I knew the quality of her work, because she was always attentive, always looking up at me as I spoke, always smiling. I can still see her very clearly.

Sylvia was once again submitting work to national magazines.
Seventeen
bought the story “The Perfect Set-Up” for $25 and “Initiation” for $200 (the prize in its annual fiction contest).
Seventeen
also bought five poems, “To a Dissembling Spring,” “The Suitcases Are Packed Again,” “Carnival Nocturne,” “Twelfth Night,” and “Cinderella.” “Crossing the Equinox” appeared in the
Annual
Anthology
of
College
Poetry
.
The
Christian
Science
Monitor
took “As a Baby-Sitter Sees It,” her essay about the Swampscott summer, which ran in two issues and included her drawings of the Mayo children; the
Monitor
also printed the poems “White Phlox” and “Riverside Reveries.” “Sunday at the Mintons’” took the $500 first prize in the 1952
Mademoiselle
Fiction Contest.

Sylvia was also successful on campus. She belonged to several councils, boards, and committees (including PUSH, the sophomore honorary) and was asked to be on the board of
Smith
Review
, the campus literary magazine. Her biggest honor was being chosen for Alpha Phi Kappa Psi, the arts honorary, at a time when most inductees were juniors. She was also named assistant correspondent on Press Board, writing news releases about Smith for area papers. Compelled by her conscience to share her time in ways other than for pay, she also volunteered to teach a children’s art class at the nearby People’s Institute, a service she continued during her junior year as well.