The Bell Jar (38 page)

The
poets were Alistair Reid, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, George Steiner, and
William Burford, whose pictures were accompanied by biographical notes and
comments on poets and poetry.

               
After 230-odd pages of
advertising, the bulk of the August 1953 college issue was introduced by Sylvia
as Guest Managing Editor with
“Mile’s
last word on college, ‘53.” Under
a vapid picture of the guest editors holding hands in star formation, dressed
alike in tartan skirts with matching Eton caps and openmouthed smiles, she
wrote:

               
We’re stargazers this season,
bewitched by an atmosphere of evening blue. Foremost in the fashion
constellation we spot
Mlle’s
own tartan, the astronomic versatility of
sweaters, and men, men, men--we’ve even taken the shirts off their backs!
Focusing our telescope on college news around the globe, we debate and
deliberate. Issues illuminated: academic freedom, the sorority controversy, our
much labeled (and libeled) generation. From our favorite fields, stars of the
first magnitude shed a bright influence on our plans for jobs and futures.
Although horoscopes for our ultimate orbits aren’t yet in, we Guest Eds. are
counting on a favorable forecast with this sendoff from
Mile,
the star
of the campus.

               
No doubt she was far more
pleased with page
358--”Mlle.
finally published ‘Mad Girl’s
Lovesong’--my favorite villanelle”:

A VILLANELLE

By Sylvia Plath

Smith College, ‘54

I
shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I
lift my lids and all is born again.

(I
think I made you up inside my head. )

The
stars go waltzing out in blue and red,

And
arbitrary blackness gallops in:

I
shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I
dreamed that you bewitched me into bed

And
sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.

(I
think I made you up inside my head. )

God
topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:

Exit
seraphim and Satan’s men:

I
shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I
fancied you’d return the way you said,

But
I grow old and I forget your name.

(I
think I made you up inside my head. )

I
should have loved a thunderbird instead;

At
least when spring comes they roar back again.

I
shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

(I
think I made you up inside my head. )

               
That summer, too,
Harper’s
Magazine
paid $100 for three poems which Sylvia identified as “first
professional earnings.” Later, assessing these bubbling achievements, she
wrote, “All in all, I felt upborne on a wave of creative, social and financial
success--The six month crash, however, was to come--”

               
These were the events which took
place in her ‘life in the summer and autumn of 1953--at the time of the
electrocution of the Rosenbergs, at the time when Senator Joseph McCarthy was
forcing his power, at the beginning of the Eisenhower presidency--these were
the events which Sylvia Plath reconstructed in
The Bell jar.
Years later
she described the book she wanted to write:

the pressures of the fashion magazine world which
seems increasingly superficial and artificial, the return home to the dead
summer world of a suburb of Boston. Here the cracks in her [the heroine, Esther
Greenwood’s] nature which had been held together as it were by the surrounding
pressures of New York widen and gape alarmingly. More and more her warped view
of the world around--her own vacuous domestic life, and that of her
neighbors--seems the one right way of looking at things.

For
Sylvia then came electroshock therapy and finally her well-publicized
disappearance, subsequent discovery and consequent hospitalization for
psychotherapy and more shock treatment. She wrote:
“A
time of darkness,
despair, disillusion--so black only as the inferno of the human mind can
be--symbolic death, and numb shock--then the painful agony of slow rebirth and
psychic regeneration.”

               
Subsequently Sylvia returned to
Smith College and reconquered “old broncos that threw me for a loop last year.”
At the

beginning
of the next summer she wrote that “a semester of reconstruction ends with an
infinitely more solid if less flashingly spectacular flourish than last
year’s.” By the end of the next academic year, she had sold more poems, earned
additional prizes, and written her long paper for English honors on the double
personality in Dostoyevski’s novels. In June 1955 she graduated from Smith
College
summa cum laude
with the prospect of an English Fulbright year
in Newnham College at Cambridge University. There Sylvia met the British poet
Ted Hughes, whom she married in London on June 16, 1956: Bloomsday. Sylvia’s
Fulbright was renewed and, after a vacation in Spain, Ted and Sylvia lived in
Cambridge for another year. Then, in the spring of 1957, they moved to the
United States, where Sylvia was assessed by her colleagues as “one of the two
or three finest instructors ever to appear in the English department at Smith
College.”

               
It is probable that Sylvia already
had a version of
The Bell Jar
in her trunks when she returned to the
States, but she was concentrating on poetry and on teaching. In June 1958, she
applied for a Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship to complete her book of
poems. The Saxton Fellowship had been established “to honor an outstanding
editor of Harper & Brothers”; the trust, at the discretion of the trustees,
gave outright grants of money to writers for living expenses. Agreement of all
three trustees was necessary to make the grant, and one of them, who called the
sample poems “beyond reproach,” noted that “in looking over Mrs. Hughes’
history, I see that she has had valuable awards dropped into her lap during
most of her adult life. Perhaps it would not do her any real harm to continue
her work for a while as a teacher in a fine college. My impulse is rejection,
though I think the quality of her work entitles her to serious consideration.”
In October 1958 the application was rejected with a special letter from the
secretary to the trustees, who wanted Mrs. Hughes to know that “your
application aroused more than ordinary interest. The talent--which is
marked--was not a matter for dispute but rather the nature of the project.”

               
Meanwhile the Hugheses had moved
to a small apartment on Beacon Hill, “living on a shoestring for a year in
Boston writing to see what we could do.” Sylvia had made the difficult decision
to give up teaching, and to discard an academic plan for which she had been
groomed since childhood, in exchange for a less certain existence but one which
she hoped would give her more time to write. However, as the year progressed,
and her book of poems was repeatedly submitted and rejected under everchanging
tides, she wrote:

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing,
which remark I guess shows I still don’t have a pure motive (O
it’s-such-fun-I-just-can’t-stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about
writing....I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.

               
In December 1959, Ted and Sylvia
returned to England to live. In April 1960 their first child, Frieda, was born.
At last Sylvia’s book of poetry,
The Colossus,
was accepted for fall
publication by William Heinemann Limited. Subsequently Sylvia suffered a
miscarriage, then an appendectomy, and then became pregnant again. On May 1,
1961, she again applied for a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship; this time in order
to finish a novel which she described as one-sixth completed--about fifty
pages. On the application Sylvia had asked for money to cover “babysitter or
nanny at about $5 a day, 6 days a week for a year, $1,560. Rent of study at
about $10 a week: $520 for a year. Total: $2,080....(At present I am living in
a two room flat with my husband and year old baby and having to work part time
to meet living expenses. )” To a friend she wrote that she was “over one third
through a novel about a college girl building up for and going through a
nervous breakdown.” She wrote:

         
I have
been wanting to do this for ten years but had a terrible block about Writing A
Novel. Then suddenly in beginning negotiations with a New York publisher for an
American edition of my poems, the dykes broke and I stayed awake all night
seized by fearsome excitement, saw how it should be done, started the next day
& go every morning to my borrowed study as to an office & belt out more
of it.