It was during this time that the rhetoric of “soft” and “hard” transformed American political discourse, and even American society: to be “soft” on communism—as Joseph McCarthy accused Truman—was as good as committing treason. The progressive liberalism of the New Deal and left-wing intellectualism were casualties of this rhetoric. By McCarthy’s heyday in the 1950s, 78 percent of Americans polled in a national survey supported reporting friends and neighbors with suspected communist sympathies to the FBI. Liberalism, along with the entire Democratic Party, was vilified by Republicans and many Republican-backed newspapers. Dwight D. Eisenhower sailed to victory in the 1952 presidential race, ending twenty years of Democratic control. Dissent and difference were to be repressed at all costs. By 1956, Robert Lindner, the prominent psychiatrist and author of Rebel Without a Cause: The Story of a Criminal Psychopath—the book on which the James Dean film was based—could declare that communism was “a haven for neurosis and a refuge for neurotics.”1
For politicians and the media, taking a hard line against communism meant trumpeting nuclear armament as the only strong course for America. Though John Hersey’s Hiroshima had exposed the horrors of the bomb as early as 1946, “horror had its hypnotic appeal.”2 Ethical questions about the bomb were generally dismissed in the early 1950s, in favor of a narrative of optimism that portrayed nuclear superiority as a virtual guarantee of global manifest destiny. The bomb even had sex appeal: “atomic” became a cute colloquialism that teenagers—including Sylvia—used to describe their crushes. The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce even crowned a Miss Atomic Blast.3
In this environment, pacifism was linked to other suspect “isms”: atheism, liberalism, and Marxism. In 1951, an antinuclear, pacifist group called the Stockholm Appeal, co-organized by W. E. B. Du Bois, was denounced by the Los Angeles Times. The paper urged its readers to report pacifist petitioners—who, it claimed, were “straight from Moscow”—to the FBI.4 Du Bois and four of his co-organizers were later indicted by the United States government “for failure to register as agents of a ‘foreign principal.’ ”5 They were acquitted, but the trial underscores just how risky it was to practice pacifism during the Cold War, when “peace” itself became a suspect ideology. Quakers were harassed, as were prominent peace activists such as A. J. Muste, who advocated for civil disobedience in the style of Gandhi. Against this backdrop, Plath’s burgeoning pacifism—influenced by Unitarian Church principles, her own parents’ pacifism, and friends like Perry Norton (who eventually became a Quaker)—appears less quaint.
In 1946, Sylvia grew more aware of the West’s past and future horrors. In March she produced a social studies report titled “The United States and the World,” in which she assembled newspaper clippings about the buildup to the Cold War (“Russia Tightens Grip on Balkans”) and the fledgling attempts of the new United Nations to avoid “atomic diplomacy.” She included a political cartoon, with satirical undertones, of Uncle Sam lecturing representatives from other nations as Cuba leaves with a diploma and titled one section “Can the UNO Prevent Another World War?”6 Her report suggests a left-leaning attitude toward the expanding international crisis: she declared that the United States and Great Britain should do everything they could to placate Russia, and argued that the United States should cede its wartime acquisitions in the Pacific if it expected Russia to back away from Turkey, Iran, and eastern Europe. She seemed to understand that the end of one war had ushered in the start of another, and that the threat of nuclear annihilation was real. This was the beginning of her education in Cold War politics, a subject to which she would return throughout her life and work.
In February 1946, Sylvia wrote a thirty-eight-page school report about World War I, called, ironically, “A War to End All Wars,” revealing a mind disturbed by war’s violence. Her accompanying illustration of a wounded man with a bloody, bandaged head stands as a sobering counterpoint to her original ditty that instructed soldiers to “pack up” their troubles in their kit bag and “smile, smile, smile.” In another drawing, a neatly dressed schoolgirl reads a book about the war, a tear rolling down her cheek as she imagines a scene of carnage that includes cannons, smoke, barbed wire, and dead bodies. The landscape of war stands in obscene contrast to her homey room; the schoolgirl will never be the same.7
Plath deplored war on a moral level, yet, like her hero W. B. Yeats, the artist in her was fascinated by apocalypse. In April 1947, she began writing to a new pen pal in Grebenhain, Germany, Hans-Joachim Neupert.8 She was eager to correspond with a German; she told him, proudly, that her own father had been a professor from Germany, and that her grandmother was an Austrian who served hearty European meals.9 But she was interested in the relationship for more dramatic reasons. Her World War I report had given her a more accurate understanding of what Europe’s beleaguered citizens had suffered, and she was ready to hear from the front lines. Part of what drew her to Hans was his firsthand knowledge of mass destruction. “Is it true that many bodies are still buried under the crumbled rubble of the large buildings?” she asked him in October 1949. “We saw some colored slides of the ruins in large German towns.”10 When Hans pointed out that Americans could not understand what the war had been like in Europe, she agreed. “How right you are when you say one can not fully understand the seriousness of life when one lives in good conditions!” she wrote him in 1948. “Take the last war, for instance. To me, it was as unreal as a fairytale….I would like to plunge into the vital world, if I could.”11 As if offering consolation for the ruin of his nation, she tried to convince Hans that Americans were not “frivolous” and “spoiled,” and she emphasized that she herself was “far from rich.” She expounded on her pacifist views: “We want so much to have peace—we students….Do you not feel as I do—that war is futile in the end?”12
Sylvia later pasted a photo of Hans in her scrapbook, and wrote, “the youth all over the world has the same ideals and emotions—a universal bond. Yet as we grow up, we are unfortunately nationalized and carefully taught to hate those who challenge our complacent mode of living.”13 This seemingly innocuous statement was in fact quite radical; the idea that young Americans were “unfortunately nationalized” would have sounded almost treasonous in the context of late-1940s political paranoia.
She repeated her antiwar stance to Hans in several letters throughout 1948–50. In August 1950, she called dropping the bomb on Hiroshima a “sin” and quoted an antiwar poem by Thomas Hardy. She felt that American children did not take war seriously because they had “never seen the effects”—a “dangerous” predicament.14
Of course there are dances and parties on weekends, but this war-scare bothers me so much that I can never completely forget myself in artificial gaiety. Always in the background there is the fear that I will never be able to live in peace….Surely democracy and freedom would mean little in a world of rubble and radioactive rays….I think of us as of the Roman Empire and feel that this is the fall, perhaps, of our new and bright civilization.15
The Korean War, which began in 1950, made her “ill.” “There is nothing brave or heroic about this war. What are we fighting for?” she asked Hans. “For nothing. Against communism. That word, communism, is blinding. No one knows exactly what it means, and yet they hate everything associated with it. One thing I am convinced of: you can’t kill an idea.”16 She felt the anti-communist war hawks were “fools.”17
These ideas could have earned Plath a place on an FBI blacklist. Sylvia and her family had been targeted during the previous world wars on account of their German heritage, and the experience had left its mark on her psyche. She had little sympathy for intolerance of “others,” even communists. Yet her leftist tolerance did not include those with disabilities. At times, her obsession with health and vitality—perhaps rooted in the childhood trauma of her father’s early death—could lead her perilously close to eugenic thinking. “It is entirely against reason to kill the best and the heal
thiest—why not the aged cripples, if we must kill…?” she asked Hans in 1949.18 Yet elsewhere she showed liberal sympathies antithetical to such disturbing comments. In a tenth-grade paper about witchcraft in America, for example, she seized on the connection between the colonial witch-hunts and present-day Jim Crow. “There may come a time,” she warned, “when our descendants laugh at our cruel, thoughtless prosecution of different racial groups. Yes, we may wonder how intelligent people could murder ‘witches,’ but how similar are the race riots and skirmishes of today!”19
Hans, a German who lived an ocean away, was an early, safe sounding board for the subversive political ideas Plath would later express in her creative work. In the March 1950 Christian Science Monitor, she coauthored an article with Perry titled “Youth’s Plea for World Peace,” in which they publicly rejected the apocalyptic logic of the arms race between America and the Soviet Union. Youth programs that fostered international cooperation and exchange would be far more valuable, they argued, than a bomb that could annihilate humanity. Though they took pains to support the United States’ mission to spread democracy and capitalism, writing that American society was “ideal,” many of their points could have been read, given the paranoia of the time, as subversive. “Is it any wonder, then, that some of us young people feel rebellious when we watch the futile armaments race beginning again?” they wrote. They called nationalism a “dilemma” and advocated instead an embrace of “the basic brotherhood of all human beings.” Their final thoughts rejected the patriotic, pro-bomb rhetoric of the time: “For those of us who deplore the systematic slaughter legalized by war, the hydrogen bomb alone is not the answer.”20 Perry remembered that he and Sylvia “felt very passionately about the need for avoiding international conflict right after the Second World War.” The two of them were acutely aware, he said, not only of the war’s “horrors,” “but particularly of the Holocaust.” Their pacifism colored their politics. “She and I were on a liberal track,” Perry said. “She would have been a liberal Democrat.”21
But even as Sylvia decried the use of the bomb in a mainstream newspaper and in her letters to Hans, she was taking stock of its metaphoric potential. Her 1948 poem “Youth’s Appeal for Peace” shows her already rendering the apocalypse in her poetry: the four horsemen come “Thundering, thundering over the hill…./ And out of the cloud-blank from whence they came / The whine of shrill bombs and a burst of flame.” Though the poem is an appeal for peace, Plath reveled in the violent, trochaic rhythms of the hoofbeats’ portending doom:
Desert breezes sighing, sobbing;
Drums of thunder thudding, throbbing;
Lightning cymbals clash and then—
The tortured screams of a million men.22
This was an early rendition of the “strong” voice Ted Hughes would later encourage Plath to cultivate in her poetry. She would spend years writing elaborate, well-wrought, New Critical poetry before she broke out of “the glass caul” of formalism and embraced a bolder voice.23 In “Ariel” she would pare down the four horsemen of the apocalypse to one horse and one woman, flying into the burning sun on a journey of rebirth and renewal.
In 1948, Sylvia and her mother were reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s benevolent philosophy together, but Sylvia’s marginalia—considerably more skeptical than Aurelia’s—suggests that she was ready for something bolder. Where Aurelia frequently annotated Emerson’s prose with phrases like “good!” “lovely!” and “universal quality of beauty!” Sylvia wrote comments like “Why?” “Does it?” “Meaning what?” “Perhaps,” and “Please explain.” When Emerson extolled humility and moderation, Plath wrote, “Is this the best way?” in the margin.24 She could not contain her dry cynicism when she read Emerson’s dictum, “But one day all men will be lovers; and every calamity will be dissolved in the universal sunshine.” “Always the optomist [sic],” she wrote pithily.25
Though Sylvia would come to associate what she saw as Emerson’s naive optimism with her mother, it was Aurelia who presented her with a much more provocative philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, which she gave Sylvia for Christmas in 1949. During the postwar years, Nietzsche was associated with Nazism and atheism, and would have been considered a potentially dangerous moral guide for a young middle-class woman.26 Yet his ideas regarding autonomy and his dramatic, headstrong prose inspired Plath. Her copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra is heavily annotated. She called it “our bible of individualism at present” in a 1954 college paper.27 Her Yale boyfriend Mel Woody, who eventually became a philosophy professor, remembered discussing Nietzsche with her while she was at Smith. “She responded to it. She loved Nietzsche’s aphorisms.”28 In 1955, Plath called Nietzsche her “favorite philosopher (the wit and poetry and shock of his epigrams makes my soul ‘sneeze’ itself awake, to use a Nietzschean verb!)”29 She was later drawn to the work of D. H. Lawrence—and Ted Hughes—for similar reasons. But her interest in Nietzsche and the aesthetics of violence would always remain in tension with her commitment to pacifist ideals.
* * *
OF ALL SYLVIA’S ADOLESCENT TEACHERS, it was her high school English teacher, Wilbury Crockett, who had the most profound influence on her liberal and intellectual education. In his college-level honors seminar, which lasted for three years of high school, Sylvia and her fellow “Crocketteers” read between forty and fifty works of literature each year by major American authors, as well as modern British and Irish authors such as Hardy, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, Yeats, Lawrence, Auden, and Dylan Thomas. The class was small—about fifteen students. As Sylvia’s friend Phil McCurdy remembered, “The Crocketteers really were a different class of people in the high school. Was it precious? Was it literary? Gilded? Yes. On the other hand, we were a bunch of kids who loved school, who loved Crockett, who came to love literature and poetry….When you spoke he listened. When he commented, it was to the point and personal. The work was very hard, but he balanced that by saying we’re not going to do any silly testing….We talked about books literature and writing like the kids talk about records today….He made you feel at times that you had produced gold.”30
Crockett also taught Greek drama and philosophy, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Blake, and a few European writers such as Mann, Flaubert, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy—though Phil could not remember reading a single woman writer over the three years. Three of Sylvia’s friends from her class all mentioned that they had read War and Peace with Crockett; looking back, they were astonished that he thought them capable of the task.31 They also remembered presenting four five-thousand-word papers over the course of the year, far beyond the typical high school workload. Phil felt everyone wanted to be there. “The forty-two minutes went by like forty-two seconds. You looked forward to it.”32
Crockett supplemented class readings with theater trips to Boston, where his students saw The Glass Menagerie, A Doll’s House, and Death of a Salesman. “In other classrooms we learned to memorize,” recalled Perry Norton. “In his classroom we learned to think.”33 Sylvia’s friend Frank Irish similarly recalled that the emphasis was on “understanding and appreciating literature” rather than test taking, and that there was “a lot of class discussion.”34 Louise Giesey White, who took Crockett’s class with Sylvia, remembered that he was “dignified” and would address his students by their last names: Miss Plath, Miss Giesey. She recalled, too, one memorable essay topic: “Poetry is frozen music.”35 Pat O’Neil Pratson, who sat next to Sylvia in class, remembered another, which Crockett wrote on the board on the very first day of class: “What is the good life?” She and Sylvia “realized suddenly that this was going to be the opening of ourselves.”36
Crockett was not only a respected teacher, but a compassionate listener, always ready to hear about “the depths of our adolescent angst.”37 He took his students seriously. One year when the class president died suddenly of pneumonia, none of the hastily arranged school assemblies comforted—but Crockett did
. That day, Crockett came into class, paused, and read “To an Athlete Dying Young” by A. E. Housman. When he finished, he simply got up and left. For Crockett’s grieving students, poetry had adequately expressed what the formal rituals of mourning could not.38
In early September 1947 Sylvia wrote excitedly to Aurelia, who was in the hospital recovering from stomach surgery, about her new honors class, English 21. “I could sit and listen to Mr. Crockett all day….My English Class has so stimulated me that I’m chock-full of ideas for new poems. I can’t wait to get time to write them down. I can’t let Shakespeare get too far ahead of me, you know.”39 That afternoon, she went straight to the bookstore in Wellesley Square and bought a copy of Robert Frost’s poems. (Frost was a favorite of Crockett’s.) A month later, she decided it was time to show Crockett her own poetry. “Trembling inwardly,” she presented him with several poems, four of which he read aloud in class. In her diary she wrote, “He liked ‘Alone and Alone’ and ‘I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt’ above the rest, and encouraged me greatly by remarking that I had a lyric gift beyond the ordinary. I was overjoyed, and although I am doubtfully doubtful about poetry’s affect [sic] on the little strategy of ‘popularity’ that I have been slowly building up, I am confident of admiration from Mr. C!”40
Admiration from “Mr. C” would become one of the driving forces behind Plath’s creative life during high school. Aurelia said Sylvia had been offered a scholarship to Dana Hall, a prestigious private girls’ boarding school, but that she chose to stay in Wellesley so that she could continue her studies with Crockett.41 He was her first true literary mentor; he nurtured her ambition and urged her to take her literary goals seriously. He was, Pat remembered, “truly a spiritual father for her.”42 Crockett encouraged his students to write creatively and to read their work to the class. Louise remembered, “Several times he’d have Sylvia read her poetry aloud. We were all just astonished. I remember one poem, ‘Five Smooth Stones,’ and it was beautiful.”43 Plath’s desire to become a great writer solidified in Crockett’s class.
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