The Bell Jar (37 page)

               
Irwin’s voice had meant nothing
to me.

               
This was the first time, since
our first and last meeting, that I had spoken with him and, I was reasonably
sure, it would be the last. Irwin had absolutely no way of getting in touch
with me, except by going to Nurse Kennedy’s flat, and after Joan’s death Nurse
Kennedy had moved somewhere else and left no trace.

               
I was perfectly free.

Joan’s
parents invited me to the funeral.

               
I had been, Mrs. Gilling said,
one of Joan’s best friends.

               
“You don’t have to go, you
know,” Doctor Nolan told me. “You can always write and say I said it would be
better not to.”

               
“I’ll go,” I said, and I did go,
and all during the simple funeral service I wondered what I thought I was
burying.

               
At the altar the coffin loomed
in its snow pallor of flowers--the black shadow of something that wasn’t there.
The faces in the pews around me were waxen with candlelight, and pine boughs,
left over from Christmas, sent up a sepulchral incense in the cold air.

               
Beside me, Jody’s cheeks bloomed
like good apples, and here and there in the little congregation I recognized
other faces of other girls from college and my home town who had known Joan.
DeeDee and Nurse Kennedy bent their kerchiefed heads in a front pew.

               
Then, behind the coffin and the
flowers and the face of the minister and the faces of the mourners, I saw the
rolling lawns of our town cemetery, knee-deep in snow now, with the tombstones
rising out of it like smokeless chimneys.

               
There would be a black,
six-foot-deep gap hacked in the hard ground. That shadow would marry this shadow,
and the peculiar, yellowish soil of our locality seal the wound in the
whiteness, and yet another snowfall erase the traces of newness in Joan’s
grave.

               
I took a deep breath and
listened to the old brag of my heart.

               
I am, I am, I am.

The
doctors were having their weekly board meeting--old business, new business,
admissions, dismissals and interviews. Leafing blindly through a tatty
National
Geographic
in the asylum library, I waited my turn.

               
Patients, with accompanying
nurses, made their rounds of the stocked shelves, conversing, in low tones,
with the asylum librarian, an alumna of the asylum herself. Glancing at
hermyopic, spinsterish, effaced--I wondered how she knew she had graduated at
all, and, unlike, her clients, was whole and well.

               
“Don’t be scared,” Doctor Nolan
had said. “I’ll be there, and the rest of the doctors you know, and some
visitors, and Doctor Vining, the head of all the doctors, will ask you a few
questions, and then you can go.”

               
But in spite of Doctor Nolan’s
reassurances, I was scared to death.

               
I had hoped, at my departure, I
would feel sure and knowledgeable about everything that lay ahead--after all, I
had been “analyzed.” Instead, all I could see were question marks.

               
I kept shooting impatient
glances at the closed boardroom door. My stocking seams were straight, my black
shoes cracked, but polished, and my red wool suit flamboyant as my plans.
Something old, something new....

               
But I wasn’t getting married.
There ought, I thought, to be a ritual for being born twice-patched, retreaded
and approved for the road, I was trying to think of an appropriate one when
Doctor Nolan appeared from nowhere and touched me on the shoulder.

               
“All right, Esther.”

               
I rose and followed her to the
open door.

               
Pausing, for a brief breath, on
the threshold, I saw the silver-haired doctor who had told me about the rivers
and the Pilgrims on my first day, and the pocked, cadaverous face of Miss Huey,
and eyes I thought I had recognized over white masks.

               
The eyes and the faces all
turned themselves toward me, and guiding myself by them, as by a magical
thread, I stepped into the room.

Sylvia Plath:

A Biographical Note

With eight drawings by Sylvia Plath

               
The Bell Jar
was first
published in London in January 1963
by Wil
liam Heinemann Limited,
under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Sylvia Plath had adopted the pen name for
publication of her first novel because she questioned its literary value and
did not believe it was a “serious work”; she was also worried about the pain
publication might cause to the many people close to her whose personalities she
had distorted and lightly disguised in the book.

               
The central themes of Sylvia
Plath’s early life are the basis for
The Bell Jar.
She was born in 1932
in Massachusetts and spent her early childhood years in Winthrop, a seaside
town close to Boston. Her mother’s parents were Austrian; her father, a
distinguished professor of biology at Boston University (and an internationally
known authority on bees), had emigrated to the States from Poland as an
adolescent; she had one brother, two and a half years younger. A radical change
occurred in Sylvia’s life when she was eight: in November 1940, her father died
after a long, difficult illness, and the mother and grandparents moved the
family inland to the town of Wellesley, a conservative

upper-middle-class
suburb of Boston. While the grandmother assumed the care of the household, Mrs.
Plath taught students in the medical-secretarial training program at Boston
University, commuting each day, and the grandfather worked as
maitre d’hotel
at the Brookline Country Club, where he lived during the week. Sylvia and
her brother attended the local public schools. “I went to public schools,” she
wrote later, “genuinely public. Everyone went.” At an early age she began to
write poems and to draw in pen and ink--and to collect prizes with her first
publication of each. By the time she was seventeen, her interest in writing had
become disciplined and controlled. Publication, however, did not come easily;
she had submitted forty-five pieces to the magazine
Seventeen
before her
first short story, “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” was published in the
August 1950 issue. A poem, “Bitter Strawberries,” a sardonic comment on war,
was accepted and published in the same month by the
Christian Science
Monitor.
In her high school yearbook,
The Wellesleyan,
the girl who
later described herself as a “rabid teenage pragmatist” was pictured:

         
Warm
smile...energetic worker...Bumble Boogie piano special...Clever with chalk and
paints...Weekends at Williams....Those fully packed sandwiches... Future
writer...Those rejection slips from
Seventeen.
..Oh, for a license.

               
In September 1950, Sylvia
entered Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, the largest women’s
college in the world. She went on scholarship--one from the Wellesley Smith
Club and one endowed by Olive Higgins Prouty, the novelist and author of
Stella
Dallas)
later a friend and patron. These were the years in which Sylvia
wrote poetry on a precise schedule, circled words in the red-leather thesaurus
which had belonged to her father, maintained a detailed journal, kept a
diligent scrapbook, and studied with concentration. Highly successful as a
student, she was also elected to class and college offices; she became a member
of the editorial board of
The Smith Review)
went for weekends to men’s
colleges, and published stories and poems in
Seventeen.
But at the time
she wrote in a letter: “for the few little outward successes I may seem to
have, there are acres of misgiving and self-doubt.” Of this period a friend
later said: “It was as if Sylvia couldn’t wait for life to come to her.... She
rushed out to greet it, to make things happen.”

               
As she became increasingly
conscious of herself as a woman, the conflict between the life-style of a
poet/intellectual and that of a wife and mother became a central preoccupation,
and she wrote: “...it’s quite amazing how I’ve gone around for most of my life
as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar.” In August 1951 she won
Mademoiselle
magazine’s fiction contest with a short story, “Sunday at the Mintons,” and
in the following year, her junior year in college, Sylvia was awarded two Smith
poetry prizes and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and to Alpha, the Smith College
honorary society for the arts. Then in the summer of 1952 she was chosen to be
a guest editor in
Mademoiselle’s
College Board Contest. In her
scrapbook, she described the beginning of that month in New York in the breathy
style of the magazine:

After being one of the two national winners of
Mademoiselle’s
fiction contest ($500!) last August, I felt that I was coming home again
when I won a guest editorship representing Smith & took a train to NYC for
a salaried month working--hatted & heeled--in
Mlle
’s air conditioned
Madison Ave. offices....Fantastic, fabulous, and all other inadequate
adjectives go to describe the four gala and chaotic weeks I worked as guest
managing Ed...living in luxury at the Barbizon, I edited, met celebrities, was
feted and feasted by a galaxy of UN delegates, simultaneous interpreters &
artists...an almost unbelievable merry-go-round month--this Smith Cinderella
met idols: Vance Bourjaily, Paul Engle, Elizabeth Bowen--wrote article via
correspondence with 5 handsome young male poet teachers.