Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  By mid-July, she was tired. She had been on a date every day since she had returned from Star Island and needed time to herself. “Today I recuperated—rested from boys.”32 She had her first drink at a party that July. “No, lightening [sic] didn’t blast me on the spot, and I didn’t turn purple! It tastes good, sort of, but it burns like fire inside.”33 Bruce wanted to go steady with her, but she decided she was not ready. It was still John Hodges, her tennis fling, who occupied most of her thoughts. He treated her too casually; sometimes he showered her with attention, while other times he ignored her. His behavior made her “weepy” and “boy-crazy.”34 One day after he saw her at the tennis courts with another boy, he called and asked her out on a canoe date. The two paddled and necked until midnight. But a few days later he walked past her with an “adorable blonde” and uttered “a nonchalant” hello. “If he thinks he can go out with a blonde the day after he said he loves me & get away with it, he’s got another think [thing] coming!” she wrote in her diary.35 By early August she declared him “ostentatiously obnoxious” and was apparently glad to be done with the affair.36 And with good reason: at one point Hodges had compared her habit of dating different boys to that of “a Jew in a junkpile.”37

  The relationship was the basis for the only short story Plath published during high school: “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” which she wrote during the late summer of 1949 and which appeared in Seventeen in August 1950. The story of Celia and Bruce, a handsome, athletic older boy, closely follows Sylvia’s relationship with John. When Celia pedals her bicycle past Bruce and a blond girl, he “called out airily, ‘Hi there.’ He didn’t even look guilty, Celia thought, furious.” After Bruce walks the other girl home, he catches up with Celia:

  She let out a torrent of angry phrases…mean, cutting things she had stored up inside her. “Why, won’t your girl friend play with you any more?…I should have known gentlemen prefer blondes…” But her sarcastic voice trailed off breathlessly as she saw Bruce’s friendly grin vanish. A strange alien look masked his eyes as he waited for her to finish. Too late she stopped the flood of words, frightened at the silence hanging between them. At last he said quietly, “All right, Celia. I won’t bother you any more. I hadn’t figured you were like this. My mistake.”

  He turned and walked away. Celia stood, congealed with horror.38

  Celia then remembers lines from a Sara Teasdale poem, “An End”: “With my own will I turned the summer from me, / And summer will not come to me again.” The narrator likewise suggests that it was Celia’s strong expression of “will” that pushed Bruce away. The story ends with Celia’s despondent cries; Bruce’s desertion is somehow her fault for expressing unfeminine anger. “And Summer Will Not Come Again” shows Plath silencing her “other” voice—the one that could be sarcastic, angry, bitter, and cruel. It is no accident that her least subversive piece of fiction from this period was her first mass-market publication.

  Plath took a dramatically different approach to the relationship’s end, however, in a poem she had written about Hodges on June 10, “To Ariadne (deserted by Theseus).” There, the female speaker lashes out against her lover in fury: “Oh, scream in vain for vengeance now, and beat your hands / In vain against the dull impassive stone.”39 The elegiac poem, written in careful iambic tetrameter with an a-b-c-b rhyme scheme, is far superior to “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” which obediently conforms to the stifling gender codes of the early 1950s. By harnessing the voice of a Classical heroine, Plath was able to write a more authentic, formally impressive work about male betrayal—a strategy she would revisit in some of her strongest future poems.

  Sylvia soon met another boy on the courts, John Hall, who took her mind off Hodges. She spent the last two weeks of August 1949 dating Hall, who left for his freshman year at Williams College in September. He was her physical ideal—tall and handsome with “athletic good cleanness.”40 Sylvia and Betsy used to croon over Hall during school basketball games; he had seemed unattainable then. Now she could barely believe they were dating. Unlike John Hodges, John Hall was clear about his feelings for Sylvia. He said he loved her, but he did not pressure her to have sex. He told her it “was one of the most beautiful things in the world” but was “cheapened by all the people who misused and misunderstood it.”41 She appreciated the space he gave her, and his strong, unambiguous feelings for her increased her self-confidence. “I’m glad I’m me,” she wrote in her diary.42 She had dated twenty-one different boys since the fall of 1948, but none of these relationships had taken root like the one with Hall. She spent every day with him, “playing tennis, climbing Dean’s Tower, walking in the woods and admiring mansions, sitting on hilltops and strolling around Lake Waban at night with all the lights spilling reflections into the water and the trees dripping black velvet shadows over the silver wash of moonlight.”43

  On August 30, the couple drove to Cape Cod and spent the day with friends in West Falmouth. Sylvia memorialized the day in a lyrical passage in her diary:

  We battled the waves and threw ourselves on the roman-striped towels, deliciously exhausted. The sun beat down, hot on our skin. My hair was wet, smelling salty and I was oh, so happy—I can enjoy things alone, but when I have someone with me—my physical complement—someone who understands—I get the feeling of a thrilling current of fog flowing, flowing through me and John and the ocean and sky….a complete circuit of electric, tingling happiness.44

  When Hall showed her his deformed foot as they sunbathed, she gasped in shock, but decided she “liked him more for it” because it made him more vulnerable.45

  The day before John left for Williams, he took a photo of Sylvia lounging in the grass in a halter top and skirt, looking happy and relaxed. She later pasted it in her scrapbook, noting that she looked “radiant”: “he was the first person to ever make me feel quite so confident and joyful.”46 She spent the weekend with him at Williams in late October, the day after her seventeenth birthday, but the relationship was faltering. As his feelings intensified, she withdrew. He wrote her long letters, and she began to fear that he wanted to marry her. She knew she was too young to settle down: “I am afraid of getting married,” she confided to her diary. “Spare me from cooking three meals a day…spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free.”47

  Besides, by late September, she was dating yet another boy she had met at the tennis courts, Bob Riedeman, a former Crocketteer who was now a student at the University of New Hampshire. Bob—as Sylvia enjoyed writing—was six feet tall, blond, blue-eyed, athletic, and handsome. Yet he seemed to have little in common with her intellectually; he was studying forestry at a state college. Normally Sylvia was snobbish about academic pedigrees, but she gave Bob a pass. Nor did his sexist views appear to bother her. He told Sylvia he did not “go for a career woman”; when she “protested,” he demurred that his future wife could have some outside interests, like painting.48 She eventually justified leaving John Hall for this very reason—she felt he “could never enter into” her “love for books and art,” which did not matter to him.49

  Sylvia finally ended her relationship with John Hall the night before Thanksgiving 1949, while he was back in Wellesley. After an awkward dinner, she bade him goodbye at her door. A few minutes later she looked outside and saw him in his car “hunched over the wheel, sobbing hoarsely and brokenly.” It made her “sick inside,” but it had to be done. “I know I managed this whole thing pretty brutally. But one emotion I can’t fake is love. But I’m not the first girl in history who has told her fellow off—I don’t know why I should feel so guilty and sorry.”50

  The benefits of “going steady” were, at any rate, ambiguous. Because young people were marrying earlier than they had during the previous generation—by the end of the 1950s, most women wed at age nineteen—parents encouraged their children to date in high school.51 Aurelia was delighted when Sylvia’s dates came calling, bu
t Sylvia herself was more wary, as her short story “First Date” suggests. Prone to strong feelings, she was nonetheless ambivalent about pledging herself to one person; she often slowed things down when she suspected that her partner might be falling in love.52 That year Plath wrote a poem titled “Adolescence,” in which the speaker declares “I was not born to love one man / And him alone.”53 The poem is not about sex but power: high school boys could date as many girls as they wanted, but girls were marginalized if they “got around.” Sylvia wanted the same freedom.

  As 1949 drew to a close, Sylvia focused on her college applications, school exams, and SATs. She had finally broken into the November Seventeen with a contribution to an article about parenthood, which she hoped would help her college chances.54 She needed to take a psychological test to be admitted to Smith, a prospect that may have troubled Aurelia, who underlined this requirement in a letter from the college. Sylvia was confident that she would be admitted to a top college; the problem was money. As she explained to Hans, for most of her peers, “their only worry is to get good marks so their parents can send them anywhere. With me it is the other way—I have the high marks, but a sad lack of funds.” Yet she was optimistic, “In this land of wonderful, unbelievable opportunities,” that she would win some money that would enable her to live on campus at Wellesley College, or, if she were very lucky, Smith College in Northampton.55 As Betsy remembered, “She didn’t have the father, she didn’t have the money, she didn’t have the clothes. She didn’t have any of that. But she wanted it. And she made sure she was going to work towards that….She felt beholden and did her utmost to achieve what was expected of her to achieve. Not that she wouldn’t have anyway, but that was an added pressure….Her mother had to scrape, and Sylvia knew that.”56

  Aurelia understood her daughter’s desire for independence. With Warren away at Exeter, she had vacated the small upstairs bedroom they had shared—the twin beds had been very close together—so Sylvia could enjoy more privacy during her senior year of high school.57 Although Aurelia knew it would be much easier, financially, for Sylvia to live at home, she wanted her daughter to live on a college campus—an experience she herself had been denied. Smith’s yearly tuition was $850, while room and board cost another $750—nearly half of Aurelia’s annual salary in 1949. She estimated that their home was worth $10,000, on which she owed $1,650. After doing the calculations, she decided she could afford to give her daughter $400 a year if she chose not to live at home.58 There would be no money for Crockett’s bicycle trip through Europe after graduation. As Sylvia told Hans that Christmas, “I would have given anything to sign up—but $800 was too much to pay—I could not afford it….They are going to see the passion play, visit the music festival at Salzburg, cruise down the Rhine, and do all sorts of other wonderful things.”59 Eight hundred dollars was half of Smith’s tuition. She would have to stay in New England, where the “dingy, snowy fields were very bare and lonely,” though she assured Hans that “the barren sadness of the landscape had a strange fascination for me.”60 She tried to describe that sadness in a poem she wrote that winter, “Midnight Snow,” about the snow’s “cold blind silence”: “And losing thus the boundary / Of the finite me, / Diffusing outward, I approach / The edges of infinity.”61

  She threw herself into her work. She received an A from Crockett for a research paper on Tolstoy’s “Philosophy of History,” and delivered an hour-long oral presentation on Thomas Mann’s novels. Yet her favorite author remained the Norwegian Sigrid Undset, known for novels that chronicled the joys and crises of women in love. She called Undset’s historical romance Kristin Lavransdatter “a majestic epic of womanhood…stark, bare and true,” and declared Undset’s The Bridal Wreath and The Mistress of Husaby the most “dynamic” books she had ever read. Having read mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century male writers for the previous three years, she was excited by feminine fiction that tackled “woman as a daughter, as a mistress, and as a wife and mother.” Although she normally maintained an objective scholarly tone in her work for Crockett, her paper on Undset spills over with passionate, uncritical phrases like “I was held spellbound” and “I lost myself in the personality of Kristin.” Crockett noted these slips in the margin: “Be wary of such words…rephrase.”62

  She prepared a meticulous application to Smith. In addition to her superior academics and creative accomplishments, she listed a slew of extracurricular activities: The Bradford, basketball, tennis, viola, orchestra, piano, school decoration committee, school devotional committee, yearbook, Girl Scouts, Unitarian youth group, and the United World Federalists. Her SAT score in verbal was 700, math 567.63 She amassed an impressive array of prizes, among them the top award in the Atlantic Writing Contest (which she won her sophomore and junior years), three Gold Key Awards in Regional Scholastic Art Contests, the Sons of the American Revolution History Prize, membership in the National Honor Society, and three writing awards from The Boston Globe.64 She also compiled a list of authors who had influenced her, including Robert Frost, Amy Lowell, Carl Sandburg, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sinclair Lewis, Jane Austen, Willa Cather, Eugene O’Neill, Emerson, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy.

  Crockett supplied a stellar reference—he wrote that she was the best student he had ever taught—as did her high school principal, who noted that she had achieved a fantastic record even while carrying the extra burden of “many home responsibilities” and odd jobs.65 Her neighbor Mrs. Aldrich, for whom she often babysat, also wrote a recommendation, and she took care to mention, lest Sylvia seem too academic, that she was a member of a sorority and “is popular with both girls and boys.”66 There was not a hint in Plath’s reference letters of any psychological troubles. Her poem “Family Reunion,” which appeared in The Bradford on April 29, 1950, suggests that she had become adept at hiding her moods. The speaker stands at the top of the stairs as aunts, uncles, and cousins enter her house. She imagines herself a diver about to plunge into a whirlpool. “I cast off my identity / And make the fatal plunge.”67 Aurelia later wrote that Sylvia had become a “slavish admirer” of Dorothy Parker during this time, and that the poem was “cruelly satirical in the denigrating Parker manner. She was to develop this in her own style with more lethal impact later on.”68 Plath had been influenced, she thought, by Parker’s 1926 poetry collection Enough Rope.

  As graduation approached, Sylvia reflected on her life in increasingly existential terms. She contemplated the narrowing of possibilities that came with growing older, and again expressed a desire “to be free.” She compared her summer of dating to “shuffling through a deck of cards to see how many new combinations you can come up with” and felt more and more distressed by the superficial Wellesley social scene: “Girls pretending to be happy with boys whom they hated. Boys leaving their dates and flirting with other girls—bottles, bottles everywhere, and the high nervous laughter.” It was enough to make her want to “scream sometimes.”69 To Hans in January 1950 she wrote that the Wellesley parties were “so meaningless…all the noise and music can not cover up the emptiness that lies beneath. Why must people try to fool themselves by thinking that money, clothes and cars are so important? Are they afraid of facing their souls?”70 She vowed not to let the walls of Wellesley and its culture of conventionality close in on her, to never “take such a narrow existance [sic] as a matter of course.” Inspired by Nietzsche, she called herself “The girl who wanted to be God”: “omniscient—and a bit insane.” She worried, too, that she had grown too dependent on Aurelia and would have a hard time achieving “complete self-reliance.” If only she could break away somehow, embrace freedom and leave behind the “constrictions and limitations” of life in Wellesley.71

  She was talking, partly, about sex. Although she valued her virginity, she also longed for the “blind burning irresponsible delight of being crushed against a man’s body.” She already aestheticized sex as Lawrentian conflict: “I want to be ravished…to hear a man groan
hoarsely, for in that moment I am the victor. In that moment only the man becomes the child, while I, yet concious [sic] of the stars, of the twilight, possess the wisdom of Eve, before abandoning myself to the lovely flame that eats at my insides with warm, spilling heat.”72 That fall she often cut her necking sessions with Bob Riedeman short, but doing so was a struggle. “I could kiss him forever, but I’ve got to be conventional, darn it.”73

  During the last few months of her senior year, she spent five “grueling” weeks rehearsing for the senior play, The Admirable Crichton, written by J. M. Barrie and directed by Crockett. She enjoyed playing the “proud & haughty” Lady Agatha, one of the leads: “I loved every moment of the stage (egotist that I am).”74 Her performance received a good review in The Bradford, which she was editing.75 Putting together six issues during her senior year was a stressful venture that left Sylvia and her coeditor Frank Irish “chewing their nails down to the bone.”76 But the “editors’ teas” at the elegant Copley Plaza Hotel, hosted by John Taylor—a Brahmin whose family owned The Boston Globe—compensated for the frantic late nights.77

  In May she learned that she had been accepted to Smith College with a full tuition scholarship of $850 for her freshman year. From the Smith Club of Wellesley she received another $450. That meant she needed only $400 for room and board—the exact contribution Aurelia had calculated she could afford. Plath turned down the full scholarship she had been offered by Wellesley College.78 She was ecstatic:

  After countless nights and days of suspense, indecision and an agonizing weighing of pros and cons, SMITH has at last become a reality. I know my whole life will be different because of my choice…but I can only hope blindly that the advantages of living at Smith will in the end outweigh these I would have had if I’d accepted a town scholarship, lived at home and gone to Wellesley….I just hope I can be adequate to withstand the temptations of college weekends and keep up my marks. I just know I’ll be horribly homesick! But it’s a challenge, knocking me out of a “rut” of living alone in my own little room.79