* * *
IN EARLY 1945, Sylvia began to complain of fatigue. There were more instances of highs and lows in her diary than in the previous year. (“I have an iron-tong feeling of excitement coming on! As though ice cold iron tongs are thrust in me to make me tense, and, when everything’s over, taken out fast!”)103 She was overscheduled (piano, viola) but fiercely disciplined. As she wrote in early January, “I came home to my homework…with a right good will.”104 After Betsy “dragged” her to see Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, a patriotic war film, she “rushed home on the 5:20 bus, remorseful on how I wasted the afternoon but I got all my piano, viola and homework done and got to bed early for once.”105 Her home and school were always chilly, and she came down with several colds that winter. She longed for spring and wrote a poem called “Dreams” in which the poet fantasizes about “blossoming boughs”: “Softly will the petals go, / Drifting earthward as now—the snow.”106 But there was little rest for the weary: her mother brought home Sunday school tests for her to do while she convalesced in bed.107
That January, she saw her first play in Boston—Shakespeare’s The Tempest—and sat next to a handsome sailor on the train ride home. She marked the occasion as a rite of passage:
Today is the biggest day of my life. I had a dreamless sleep and woke as fresh as dew on spring buttercups. All day I was in another world, far better than this. I took the bus to Boston with mother and Warrie to see Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at the Colonial Theatre. It was too perfect for words. I am keeping the program for a souvenir. We took the train to Wellesley and there were only separate seats. I sat next to a young sensitive boy from the navy. He had blond wavy hair and blue eyes. In all my life I have never loved anyone as I did him. Our talk was of travel, life, of Shakespeare.108
She drew scenes from the play in this diary entry and wrote, in capital letters, “THE TEMPEST MY IDEAL.” Her hyperbole sounds like trivial schoolgirl sentiment, but she is nonetheless describing a creative epiphany. This was one of the “biggest days” of her life as an artist. The Tempest was a major influence on Plath’s poetry, providing her with metaphors and imagery she would associate with her own lost father in “The Colossus” and “Full Fathom Five”; it also supplied the title for her final book of poetry, Ariel. The play unlocked something within her, and her experience colored her encounter with the handsome Navy sailor. Sexual longing and creative exuberance already existed in Lawrentian tandem.
Boys, in fact, were an increasing distraction, as were sports. Unlike other entries about music lessons and oral reports, which are filled with anxiety and self-doubt—“I almost fainted when I saw that I got all As and S’s (in effort) on my report card”—Sylvia’s descriptions of basketball, gymnastics, sledding, and biking are always spirited and confident.109 That spring, she wrote frequently about gardening, which, like exercise, prompted meditation rather than anxiety:
I got up before anybody else and went out in the dewy, early morning and transplanted violets and lilies-of-the-valley into my garden….[After lunch] I went outside and examined every bud of the forsythia and apple tree, begging them to open. I worked on my Spring Booklet and illustrated many of my poems….I watered my plants and now my garden looks lovely as it is full of sprouting green leaves and sweet smelling, fresh, overturned earth.110
As spring progressed, she enjoyed walking in the woods picking “loads and loads” of violets and identifying trilliums, bellwort, fringed milkwort, violets, anemones, ladyslippers, and marsh marigolds.111 It was warm enough in mid-April for her to sunbathe with Betsy in the afternoon before going on after-school “missions” to find flowers to press, an activity that soon became an “obsession” for the two girls.112 The theme of triumphant rebirth after wintering already exerted a powerful influence on her young imagination, and Sylvia finally achieved her goal of publishing three spring poems in the Phillipian in April and June: “The Spring Parade” (“Bud and leaf have now uncurled, / Daffodils their gold unfurled”), “Rain,” and “March,” the least sentimental of the three.113 With its violent imagery of predators and wind, “March” brings to mind later Plath poems such as “Pursuit” and “The Snowman on the Moor,” and suggests an early affinity for the types of wild, natural scenes that later captivated her poet-husband Ted Hughes:
The wind-wolves are prowling about today,
They’re chasing the cloud lambs that carelessly stray
While majestic skies loom vast and gray
The powerful Mastero [sic] of March holds sway.
………………………………….
And as over earth the planets swing
I hear at last the Song of Spring!114
Spring arrived, but the war lagged on. It had become a part of daily life, both in school and at home. In gym class, Sylvia performed so many drilling marches that she felt she could march in her sleep. When Uncle Frank and his wife Louise came for a February visit, they talked for hours after dinner about Frank’s experiences in the Army as Sylvia listened, “enthralled.”115 A soldier spoke in a school assembly a week later about his sixty-four missions while Sylvia again listened intently. For someone longing for “experience,” stories about war and Army life provided a vicarious thrill. Despite her earlier enthusiasm for Dewey, she grieved Roosevelt’s death, on April 12, writing “ROOSEVELT DIES” in her diary next to a picture of herself crying and praying with eyes closed. She drew a casket surrounded by flowers and an American flag. The European war’s end finally came on May 8. At school, she listened to President Truman proclaim VE Day. She wrote in her diary, “We had an assembly program that was very fitting and then went back to our regular classes for, as Truman said this morning, ‘To show the appreciation of our victory in Europe we must do work, work, work and more work and still remember that there is a war to be won in the East.’ ”
Despite the gee-whiz tone of her 1940s diaries, there were occasional glimpses of a more subversive spirit. In April, she wrote about a happy afternoon swinging from her apple tree: “Soon I may grow wings (not angels).”116 In May, she cut her finger with a knife while fiddling with a roll of tape, and wrote that it “bled until it filled a bandage, hankie and sink.”117 She drew a close-up of her bleeding finger next to another of herself with a knife. She finished off the tableau with a dark circle she captioned “my blood.” The drawings recall the poem “Cut,” with its fascinated description of a nearly severed thumb. In June, she read the “thrilling” novel She by H. Rider Haggard, whose queen Ayesha, an African femme fatale, may have been an early model for Lady Lazarus—at the novel’s end, Ayesha declares, “I die not. I will come again.”
As spring turned to summer, Sylvia read Treasure Island and Anne of Green Gables up in her apple tree. She was relieved that the school year was nearing its end. The Phillipian had invited her to join its staff the next year, a triumph that earned her a hug from Miss Raguse, who said, “Be sure to tell your mother.”118 She won the Wellesley Award for the highest academic achievement in the seventh grade and a unique award for “excellence in English Expression.” The next day in class Miss Raguse presented her with two more “commendation cards.” One was for scholarly excellence; the other for “unusual creative work,” an award that pleased Sylvia greatly.119 She also received an award for her efforts selling war stamps. Miss Raguse, one in a long line of supportive English teachers, had given Sylvia reason to take her writing seriously; her teacher’s congratulations, she said, “really meant more than anyone else’s.”120 She ended the school year on a high note with seven A’s on her report card, marred only by a B in music. She was “swamped with requests for autographs.”121 Sylvia was learning that achievement brought admiration, not just from her teacher and mother, but from her peers as well.
In early July, the Powleys drove Sylvia and Betsy to Camp Helen Storrow, a Girl Scout camp in the coastal town of Plymouth, Massachusetts. The girls were both housed i
n the same cabin in the “Ridge” unit for two “joyous weeks.”122 Sylvia filled her letters home with the usual details about starchy menus and third helpings. In her diary, however, there is not a single mention of food. One night, she and other girls performed in blackface in a minstrel show—such was the casual racism of the era.123
She advanced in swimming, built an outdoor kitchen, and wrote of the landscape in her diary. She described how she watched the “tawny-red ball of sun sink slowly out of sight in the west” and wrote repeatedly of the ocean, how “The pure white sand gleamed through its crystal, pale, blue-green depths.”124 The highlight of the summer was a five-mile hike to Fisherman’s Cove, where there was a long sandbar, sand dunes, and sea cliffs inhabited by kingfishers. Privately she wrote that the hike exhausted her, but she showed more bravado in a letter to her grandparents: “I had to laugh at some of the girls because I was the only one who dared to go in first for the waves were strong and cold until you ducked.”125 As in “Ocean 1212-W,” she cast herself as the sea’s elect.
Back in Wellesley, she played the piano, drew Rhine maidens and German castles, and held hands with Betsy as they jumped off the raft at Morses Pond. Her book collection became so large that Aurelia had to clear out a bigger bookcase for her.
In late July, the family journeyed by train and bus to Welchville, Maine, near Lewiston, where they stayed with Aurelia’s friends the Loungways until August 8. The Loungways’ property, named Innisfree, consisted of a “big house” and a smaller cabin, where Sylvia, Aurelia, and Warren slept. Sylvia was amazed by the clarity of the night sky in Maine; she saw her first shooting star and called the Milky Way “a gossamer scarf flung across the sky.”126 During thunderstorms, the children stayed inside and played Murder in the darkened living room, a game Sylvia found “terribly exciting.”127 She became fast friends with thirteen-year-old Margot Loungway, with whom she took long walks and attended Bible school. Like Sylvia, Margot was creative and cerebral; she eventually earned a doctorate in history at Harvard and founded the Social Thought and Institutions program at Stanford. Sylvia was competitive with Margot, and they sometimes quarreled. Sylvia dealt with her own anger through writing: she simply “went off alone in back of the house and made up a seventeen line poem titled ‘the Wind.’ ”128 But they spent most days in easy camaraderie, fishing, sketching, sunbathing, and writing in their “secret place”—a bed of pine needles in a field surrounded by trees.
Margot, a precocious young writer, was the first of Sylvia’s “doppelgängers”—girls who shared her interests and talent but who often became targets in her fiction and journal. The two would remain close in the coming years. Instead of playing outside in the woods, as Sylvia did with Betsy, they stayed indoors and wrote when they were together. “Somehow, at her home I feel I could write my best stories,” Sylvia wrote in her diary in 1947.129 When Sylvia slept over, they “tortured each other by reading aloud our stories.” During one weekend with Margot in May 1946, Sylvia wrote two new stories: “The Mummy’s Tomb,” which she called a “frightful murder-mystery”; and “On the Penthouse Roof,” “a smuggler’s story.”130 In “The Mummy’s Tomb,” a young woman working on a history project decides to spend the night in the Egyptian section of a museum after she smells decaying flesh in one of the mummy’s coffins. She awakens to find the museum janitor about to torture a young kidnapped girl by scooping out her eyes and pushing spikes into her body. He sees the narrator and lurches toward her: “ ‘Ha!’ he leered. ‘You got away yesterday, but you won’t now. I’ll muffle your screams of anguish and let you die from loss of blood and in terrible pain.’ ”131 The academic heroine, however, knocks him unconscious with her umbrella and frees the kidnapped girl. Though the plot is ridiculous, the story is more vivid and well paced than Plath’s other prose pieces from this period.132
The only other surviving story from 1946 that approaches the success of “The Mummy’s Tomb” is “Victory,” which describes the attempted murder of a young woman, Judith, on a dark country road during a storm: “The girl stood paralyzed with fright as she heard the labored breathing of her pursuer. He loomed tall beside her. The next moment she felt his fingers close about her neck, choking the cry of terror that had risen to her throat.”133 At the story’s end, however, Plath reveals that Judith is an actress who has successfully completed her first movie scene. In both stories, Plath indulges the darker, Gothic side of her imagination with considerable skill. She would return to the theme of torture—of women by crazed men—in several poems during the 1960s.
* * *
SYLVIA’S SUMMER IDYLL ENDED on August 8 when the Plaths left Innisfree and emerged into a dark new age:
At Portland we had a few minutes between trains and so we bought a newspaper. We learned that the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan and that it destroyed 60% of Hiroshima! This bomb, it is said by President Truman, can be used for constructive as well as destructive purposes. For instance, the same power may be used to cultivate and save food so that there will be no worry of the loss of crops or of starvation. Also, Russia has at last declared war on Japan (the latter nation may capitulate within a few months many people hope).134
A few days later she recorded Japan’s surrender in similar newsreel cadences: “The news today is: Japs Offer to Quit!”135 When Truman declared peace on August 14, Plath’s neighborhood erupted in shouts and firecrackers. She had difficulty writing about war in her own voice, but not peace: “The sky put on its rainbow colors as thanks for peace. Pale pink cloud streamers hung across the azure sky. The west was a golden red-yellow glow and hazy white clouds floated here and there, but, best of all, there was a bright blue crescent moon in the heavens.”136
Sylvia spent the rest of the summer making a book of her poems from 1937 to the present, copying them out in her apple tree. She painted her bicycle “geranium red,” a color that would have special resonance in her later work.137 When Betsy returned home from a trip to New York, the two quickly fell into their old patterns of building forts in the woods and playing with their handmade paper dolls, for which Sylvia designed her own stunning dresses. In late August, however, she grimly submitted to the hairdresser’s scissors: her hair was cut, and she sported a shoulder-length bob. Though Betsy had already cut her long hair earlier in the summer, Sylvia was upset. “I miss my braids,” she wrote in her diary.138
Her initiation into this new feminine world was unpleasant. She spent a sleepless night on her hair curlers and noted that the task of washing and setting her hair, performed by her mother, was “gruesome.” After her curlers were removed, she thought she looked like Medusa.139 Braids lent themselves to days spent swinging upside down in trees and biking down hills, but her new hairstyle required maintenance and deportment. Sylvia seemed to sense, as in A Fairy to Stay, that the haircut was “discipline” of a sort. “To My Sylvia,” a poetic homily Aurelia wrote for her daughter on her thirteenth birthday, reinforced the message that the playful whimsy of girlhood must now give way to the responsibilities of womanhood:
Oh, dear, my head’s awhirl!
Today, my darling,
You’re my teen-age girl!
Your life’s been happy?
You wish no change?
Why, my sweetheart,
That isn’t strange.
But now Life opens
So many doors
To friends and knowledge—
All can be yours.
To keep on growing
In mind and soul,
To serve and learn
Must be your goal.140
“To serve and learn” were not necessarily the goals Sylvia had in mind as she began to plot an ambitious literary career. But it was what American culture expected of well-behaved young ladies.
In eighth grade, Sylvia was elected president of her homeroom and secretary of her English class. She
kept herself busy with the Phillipian, Girl Scouts, viola, piano, and dancing lessons, the Art Club, the Recreational Club, orchestra, and the Stamp Club. (In Maine, Margot Loungway had introduced her to stamp collecting, and it had become a minor obsession.) She still dusted the school offices for money; her supervisor was so impressed with her work that she told Sylvia she would someday “make a good wife.”141 When she did something for pleasure, such as reading “a trashy Nancy Drew mystery,” she chastised herself for wasting time. When she slept late on weekends, she immediately wrote to-do lists and began working. But she still found time to play cards with Betsy, debate philosophical issues with Perry, and read several books by Caroline Snedeker. She took long walks with her family during fall afternoons, which she described in luxurious language: “The sun was hanging low in the west and shining through the graceful milkweed parachutes still clinging to the stalk, in a silver glow.”142
The war had been over for almost two months, but meat and butter lines still formed before the grocery shops opened in Wellesley; a local newspaper captured a photograph of Sylvia and her grandmother waiting in one such line. Sylvia sat through endless school assemblies “with a multitude of speakers on war,”143 on one occasion debating the merits of the draft, which she was firmly against.144 She did not mention the horror of the Holocaust in her adolescent diary, but there were oblique references to the misery in Europe. With her friends, she played Refugee, a game that involved dressing in rags and going from door to door to beg for food (“fortunately…no one was home).”145 She wrote of a captivating social studies class about the atomic bomb, and a lecture on Jewishness in her Unitarian Sunday school from a Wellesley College student: “She spoke to us about the Jewish customs, beliefs and ways. It was very interesting. She promised to take us to a Jewish Synagogue in the future. I had a beautiful time listening to her.”146 Miss Wyneberg kept her word and hosted the group at her temple in Boston early the next year. Sylvia recorded the visit in detail; it was likely her first real introduction to Judaism. That fall she published another poem in the Phillipian—“My Garden”—which she called “no good.”147 Her grandfather’s praise—and his gift of a dollar—provided incentive to keep publishing, but the drive to make art came from inside. She published regularly in the Phillipian until she left junior high, thirteen poems in all, as well as four articles and four prose pieces.
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