Sylvia Plath: A Biography (8 page)

Volunteering helped to relieve the guilt that still dotted her letters home (Is she really “good enough” to be a Smith girl?) but campus recognition helped her to realize that her talents were exceptional. She was happier than she had been during her freshman year, in great part because she was rooming with Marcia Brown. Sylvia became a “celebrator,” enjoying friends, listening, laughing. She left time for bull sessions with other Smith women, usually in the carved wooden booths at Rahar’s (a local hang-out) and about what she called “monumental topics of interest: Sex and how can there be a god? Sex and why is there segregation? Sex and have you read D. H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Tortoise Shout’?” Marcia and Sylvia were close, unquestioning friends. They were not inseparable but they kept the same hours and liked many of the same things. They took walks together whenever they could. Because of the Cape Cod summer, Marcia had come to love the sea and its beaches almost as much as Sylvia did.

She also continued her correspondence with Ed Cohen, a literary and philosophical connection that she needed. His anger at their meeting the previous spring had worn away, and the two bantered about many things, including Sylvia’s ideas about marriage, family, and career. Cohen — whom Sylvia described as “lovely, immoral, radical” — understood the Ivy League marriage patterns:

You might as well face it — we “radicals” believe that a wife should share her husband’s life and experiences, but for most of the world a woman has a definite social role in marriage which will not permit the existance
[sic]
which I am inclined to feel you want before you start on the home and kiddies and dinner-everynight stuff. If I may get bitter for a moment, the nice clean boys of your acquaintance (you know, the ones who want the mother of their kids to be a virgin, etc.) would probably faint dead away at the thought of their wife living in the jungles of Mexico or on the left bank of Paris. Which means only this — that the type of individual who believes in what I somewhat contemptuously refer to as conventional morality also leads the type of life which is apt to be somewhat conventional. Literarywise, such a situation is likely to be rather sterile.... You can have your career, or you can raise a family. I should be extremely surprised, however, if you can do both within the framework of the social structure in which you now live.

With Marcia and Ed as confiding friends, Sylvia was more stable emotionally during her second year at Smith than she had been during her first, though she experienced some depression. Cohen returned that fall to visit with Sylvia in Boston — sight-seeing, going to hear jazz, and spending time at the Plath home. He brought a Chicago friend along with him, so he and Sylvia were seldom alone. The chemistry that was so powerful on paper lessened in person, but Ed talked seriously to Sylvia about what he saw as her destructive relationship with “Allen” (her name for Dick in her letters to Cohen). He predicted that if they did marry, there would be unhappiness, if not violence.

Dick’s attentiveness from Cambridge, however, was consistent. His regular letters were full of medical school worries, and detailed replicas of drawings from his anatomy textbook. He planned weekends for them at Harvard (for some of which Sylvia fell ill) and they dated on vacations. She spent much of her Christmas break with Dick and his family, though she also saw what she called “a daze of men.” Once the pressure of his studies lessened, Norton began taking advantage of the literary resources of Cambridge: he heard Wallace Stevens read, as well as Merrill Moore, a physician who wrote sonnets. Trying to understand — and impress — Sylvia, he brought out notes from a literature course at Yale. For her birthday, Dick gave her T. S. Eliot’s
Four
Quartets
. Toward the end of the year, his letters, many of which had been decidedly impersonal, grew more sensual and more openly displayed his affection.

From Sylvia’s journal, it is clear that she and Dick had become as physically intimate as they could be. Much of her correspondence with Ed Cohen discussed this involvement; she was both bothered and intrigued by the sexual play. She was also concerned over their many disagreements. When Sylvia visited Harvard for the first time, in October, she was hit with a number of upsetting experiences. She went with Dick on his tour of duty at Boston’s Lying-In Hospital and spent the entire night watching dissections of cadavers, inspecting fetuses in jars arranged chronologically to show development, listening to a lecture on sickle-cell anemia, making visits to seriously ill patients, and, as a climax, seeing a live birth, complete with the mother’s episiotomy. With her usual poise, Sylvia acted as if she were fascinated by everything. Her comments to friends at Smith revealed the truth, that she found having to match Norton’s enthusiasm tiring, particularly about these experiences.

Many of the things Dick planned for them to do he chose because he knew more about them than Sylvia did. Sylvia, however, was sensitive to anything she considered an attempt to overshadow her or her interests. Her unhappiness over the medical school weekend in October lasted into Thanksgiving, when they had another “truth talk” and decided to conduct their relationship, in Sylvia’s words, “more realistically.” Their holiday dialogue did not, however, persuade Sylvia that her dating other people was wrong. Dick evidently agreed; when he was too ill to take her to the house dance at Smith, he sent a friend from the Harvard Business School to escort her. He had less control over other men that she was seeing — dates from Williams, Yale, and Princeton.

At a formal ball in Connecticut to which about thirty Smith girls were invited, Sylvia met a suave, articulate Russian-American student from Princeton. They danced a great deal, then went driving until 5:00 a.m. Sylvia didn’t have to play dumb with this man; she needed all the intelligent conversation she could summon. After the next day’s brunch, she and Marcia were driven back to Smith in a Cadillac. Sylvia felt even more like a princess when the cosmopolitan Princetonian asked her to a weekend in November.

But she refused. She had been ill and was behind in work and tests. She did see him several times that year, however. He appealed to her as a man of the world — wealthy, well-educated, “golden” in many ways. She described him to her mother as “a potential.” He is “the only boy I have met ... (after Dick) that I could really become greatly interested in. As far as my future life is concerned, doesn’t it bear a whirl?”

Both her letters home and her fiction make clear how much thinking Sylvia was doing about possible husbands. Her prize-winning story “Sunday at the Mintons’” (the name not far re-moved from Dick’s family name of
Norton
) explored some of the problems in Sylvia and Dick’s relationship. Elizabeth Minton, the retired librarian housekeeper, was Sylvia; her controlling, scientifically-minded brother was Dick. She said as much in a letter to Aurelia, “Henry started out by being him [Dick] and Elizabeth me (and they grew old and related in the process).” In all respects Sylvia was sorting through, working through, the emotional dilemma: how to keep from being eclipsed by the older, stronger male whose mind was so different from hers. (Although Sylvia worried that Dick would recognize himself in the story, he thought it was modeled after Virginia Woolf s
To
the
Lighthouse
.)

Plath’s worksheets for the story show that the pivotal differences between Henry and Elizabeth were her primary concern. The worksheets give an interesting glimpse into her working method. She made lists of adjectives, nouns, and a few verbs to describe her main characters. For Henry she chose
perseverance
,
firmness
,
stability
,
solid
,
sturdy
,
staunch
,
indefatigable
and the more negative
plodding
,
obstinate
,
dogmatic
,
peremptory
,
inexorable
,
indomitable
,
relentless
,
calculating
, and
designing
; for Elizabeth,
vacillate
,
fluctuate
,
irresolute
,
tremulous
,
capricious
(twice),
frothy
,
volatile
,
frail
,
pliant
,
erratic
,
fitful
,
fanciful
,
whimsical
,
spontaneous
,
impromptu
, and the somewhat more critical
eccentric
,
freakish
,
wanton
, and
giddy
. But what occurred in the story was a moderation of those qualities, as the tale went “soaring” past her plan, in her words, with Henry’s character becoming less sinister and Elizabeth’s becoming both stronger — even defiant at times — and more likeable.

The difference between the two characters is treated succinctly in careful dialogue:

“Last spring ...”

“The week of April sixth,” Henry prompted.

“Yes, of course. You know, I never thought,” she said, “of what direction I was going in on the map ... up, down or across.”

Henry looked at his sister with something like dismay.

“You never have!” he breathed incredulously. “You mean you never figure whether you’re going north or south or east or west?”

“No,” flashed Elizabeth, “I never do. I never saw the point.”

She thought of his study, then, the walls hung with the great maps, carefully diagramed, meticulously annotated.... She imagined herself wandering, small and diminutive, up the finely drawn contour lines and down again, wading through the shallow blue ovals of lakes....

Henry was looking at her still with something akin to shock. She noted that his eyes were very cold and very blue.... Elizabeth could see him now, standing brightly in the morning on the flat surface of a map, watching expectantly for the sun to come up from the east. (He would know exactly where east was.) ... Feet planted firmly he stood with pencil and paper making calculations, checking to see that the world revolved on schedule.

It took Plath many years to see that her kind of intellect — the penetrating and seemingly unsystematic insight of the poet — was as valuable as the more scientific ability of Otto Plath and Dick Norton. Ages of stereotype about the fallacies of “woman’s intuition” set against man’s “logic” didn’t help her. In a late essay, she complained that the American educational system during the Fifties did a poor job of recognizing and nurturing individual talent. There was no place in the American culture, she wrote, for the artist.

As sophomore year ended, once again Sylvia was spending her summer on Cape Cod, this time at a $40-a-month waitressing job at the Belmont Hotel on West Harwichport. Once again she was near Dick Norton. But since neither of them had a car, the distance as measured in bike miles was forbidding. This time she was without Marcia. When she began working at the Belmont on June 10, she was the only female waiting on table.

Because she was a novice, Sylvia was assigned to the Side Hall dining room, which served staff instead of guests. This disappointing assignment meant no tips. Sylvia wrote Aurelia that she was “exhausted, scared, incompetent, unenergetic and generally low in spirits.” As was her usual pattern, in a few weeks she was running a fever, miserable with another sinus infection. On a moment’s impulse, one afternoon in early July, she decided to go home to Wellesley to recuperate.

Once home, she called and quit the job at the Belmont, partly because the satisfaction of having won the $500 fiction prize from
Mademoiselle
for “Sunday at the Mintons’” lulled her into thinking she did not need to work. Within days, however, as she came into what was now customary conflict with her mother over what was “useful” work for a vacationing college student, Sylvia regretted her choice. She then found an ad for a mother’s helper and teenage companion with the Cantor family in Chatham. Sylvia began working there on July 21 and stayed for six weeks. For the first time, she enjoyed being a part of another household. She admired the Cantors, liked their children, and was interested in their belief in Christian Science. They liked Sylvia enormously too, and on her last day Mary Cantor presented her with a wonderful mock check, made out “To the gal with the winning smile, 1,000,000 thanks for the 1,000 things so lovingly and cheerfully done” and signed “Your devoted ‘Family.’”

As the summer ended, Sylvia chose to return to Wellesley instead of going with the Nortons to Brewster for a week. She needed time to prepare for what she knew would be a grueling year, and she was avoiding Dick. Her relationship with him continued to be a source of frustration; she had dated a number of men in Chatham, and she was thinking more seriously of herself as a writer, not just a girlfriend. The summer had brought two important events in Sylvia’s professional life:
Mademoiselle
published “Sunday at the Mintons’” in August and, about the same time, Sylvia met Val Gendron, a professional fiction writer. She spent several evenings at Val’s, talking shop and being encouraged to take herself seriously. These two events, so close together, were watershed experiences for Sylvia. As she wrote to Aurelia,