Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  In early June, Sylvia attended the senior prom with Bob. They doubled up with Perry Norton and Pat O’Neil, but the pairing did not work well, since Perry had wanted to go as Sylvia’s date. She tried to ignore her friend’s sulking; she was going to Smith on scholarship, and she had a handsome boyfriend she adored. (Bob had finally given her a romantic gift before the prom—seventeen “deep red baby roses,” which she saved and dried.)80 Though she had missed twenty school days due to illness, she again received straight A’s in all her subjects.81 She was first in her class of 160 graduating seniors, but, curiously, she did not receive the award for “Best Girl Student” in the 1950 Wellesleyan yearbook.82 Barbara Botsford did. (Perry Norton won “Best Boy Student.”) Louise Giesey won “Girl Most Likely to Succeed,” as well as the senior “cup” for the most outstanding student, chosen by the faculty. “It was obvious that Sylvia and I were the two main contenders for that,” Louise recalled. “I got it. And I was very upset the minute I got it. I left and went to the ladies’ room because I was embarrassed, and because I was worried about Sylvia.” Plath, distraught, had beaten her to the ladies’ room. “We saw each other crying but we didn’t have enough sense to say anything to each other. It would have meant a lot to her to have gotten it. It meant a lot to me.”83 Several friends inscribed notes in Sylvia’s yearbook, while her own photo caption listed the qualities she felt defined her: “Warm smile…Energetic worker…Clever with chalk and paints…Those fully packed sandwiches…Basketball and tennis player…Future writer…Those rejection slips from Seventeen.”84

  The Class of 1950 graduation ceremony, for which Sylvia wrote the sentimental “Senior Song,” took place on June 7. Now a graduate herself, she was “passé” and “would very soon be old,” as she wrote in her scrapbook. Underneath her graduation program she pasted three photographs of herself in her backyard looking tired and anxious. Her usual broad smile was missing, her celebratory, optimistic outlook muted. Half her life was already over. Emily Dickinson’s “Presentiment,” which Sylvia had included in her poetry anthology for Crockett, captured something of her mood that June:

  Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn

  Indicative that suns go down;

  The notice to the startled grass

  That darkness is about to pass.85

  Her urge to flee Wellesley suddenly competed with a new, uncomfortable desire to stay. But Plath was resolved. She would not become like her paralyzed characters in “Heat” and “East Wind,” for, as she would later write, she was a “voyager, no Penelope.”86

  7

  The White Queen

  Wellesley and Smith College, 1950–1951

  In July 1950, Plath began her new diary with quotes from three Irish writers—Louis MacNeice, W. B. Yeats, and James Joyce. All were politically engaged modernists who combined a broad, sweeping view of history with intimate portraits of their society. She quoted MacNeice’s “Aubade,” about seizing the day before the approach of war; Yeats’s “We only begin to live when we conceive life as tragedy”; and Joyce’s “Hold to the now, the here, through which all future plunges to the past.” She began to feel burdened by time’s passing, worried that she was letting too many moments slip by without seizing their artistic potential. The world was opening up to her just as she had wished, and yet she felt herself caught in flux: “With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting….I am the present, but I know I, too, will pass. The high moment, the burning flash, come and are gone, continuous quicksand. And I don’t want to die.”1

  Her writing became a way to engage with the ineffable present, to pin it wriggling on a wall—like Eliot’s Prufrock—before it faded into the ephemeral. “Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me,” she wrote in early August 1950.2 It was a theme she would return to throughout her 1950s diary. “How can I tell Bob,” she wrote that summer before Smith, “that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotion, my feeling, by turning it into print?” He could not know, and was convinced that they could be happy together as husband and wife. But she would end the relationship that fall. Despite the glorification of married life that infiltrated every women’s magazine Sylvia read, she would not settle. “Something in me wants more. I can’t rest,” she wrote in her journal. “Perhaps someday I’ll crawl back home, beaten, defeated. But not as long as I can make stories out of my heartbreak, beauty out of sorrow.”3

  Throughout high school, Sylvia had spent her summer days in the relaxed, privileged manner of her affluent friends. But now, while her peers from honors English toured Europe with Mr. Crockett, she faced ten weeks of full-time work to defray college expenses. Rather than return to Camp Helen Storrow as a counselor, she found a position as a farmhand at Lookout Farm in Natick, five miles from her home. The job required long hours picking and cleaning vegetables—a curious choice for a cerebral young woman who had graduated at the top of her high school class. But Lookout Farm was a respite from excessive consciousness. “Now I know how people can live without books, without college,” she wrote in her journal. “When one is so tired at the end of a day one must sleep, and at the next dawn there are more strawberry runners to set, and so one goes on living, near the earth.”4 Out in the radish fields, she did not have to impress, outthink, or outperform anyone.

  Lookout Farm provided Sylvia with experience for her writing and put her in closer touch with a less privileged class of people with whom, she claimed, she felt a kinship. “It is my First Job, and I’m firmly convinced I couldn’t have done better,” she wrote to her new friend Eddie Cohen in early August. “A ten mile bike ride plus an eight hour day picking beans, loading radish crates and weeding corn six days a week is hardly relaxation, but the people I work with—Negroes, Displaced Persons, and boys and girls my own age—are worth the low pay.” Sylvia wore her laborer’s status like a badge of honor, happy to find a morally unassailable way of flouting Wellesley’s conventions.5 “I’m up at six, in bed by nine, and very grimy in-between. But I just smile when my white collar acquaintances look at me with unbelieving dismay as I tell them about soaking my hands in bleach to get them clean.”6

  If her correspondence with Hans Neupert provided her with an alternative way of understanding her sheltered American existence, Lookout Farm exposed her to hardship and difference in her own backyard.7 Sylvia had grown up in “anti-Semitic, Waspy” Wellesley, as her friend Phil McCurdy put it, where Jews and Italians were considered racially distinct.8 Sylvia was curious about those on the fringes of the American dream; she too felt herself an “outsider,” with her immigrant family background. At Smith she would not be rubbing shoulders with men like Robert, “the negroe who ran away with his wife’s pay and came home from Boston the next morning at five with a taxi bill of $8 and very very inebrieated [sic].”9 Or Ilo Pill, the Estonian refugee and aspiring artist who lived and worked at the farm while saving money for a new life in New York City.

  Sylvia was attracted to Ilo, who was fifteen years older: she described him as “bronzed,” “intelligent,” “blonde,” with a “muscular body.” She noted in her journal that he spoke with a “thick German accent” (this alone would have been grounds for interest) and that he flirted with her. “Out in the strawberry field we were talking about German writers,” she wrote Eddie, “and he suddenly burst out You like Frank Sinatra, ja? He is so sendimendal, so romandic, so moonlight night.”10 He was a man unlike any she had ever met—an eastern European artist and drifter who worked odd jobs in pursuit of loftier ambitions.

  In August, Ilo invited Sylvia up to his living quarters above the barn to view one of his drawings. She was almost eighteen, with plenty of necking experience, and she probably understood what was about to happen: as she ascended the staircase her “ch
eeks burned.” But when Ilo kissed her roughly in his room, she became flustered. “And suddenly his mouth was on mine, hard, vehement, his tongue darting between my lips, his arms like iron around me.” She tried to break free, and Ilo, surprised by her protest, quickly stopped. When he saw that Sylvia was crying, he brought her some water as she composed herself. Although she resisted, the encounter had excited her—no one had ever kissed her “that way before.” The kiss left her, she wrote in her journal, “warm and bruised,” “flooded with longing, electric, shivering.”11 The “bruising kiss” would become one of Plath’s leitmotifs. A year later, she would write about Ilo for her English class at Smith. Dylan Thomas meets D. H. Lawrence in “The Estonian” (eventually retitled “The Latvian”), about a young woman’s erotic awakening: “Warm and strong his mouth moved over hers and all the young green shoots of wonder that had been growing in her since she had first seen him all of them broke free from the small cramped darkness and shot skyward into a giddy articulate blue.”12 When Plath’s professor accused her of overwriting in her first draft, she removed all the references to her heroine’s sexual satisfaction in the second draft. Her grade, predictably, rose from a B+ to an A–.

  Lookout Farm also provided the material for Plath’s first nationally published poem, “Bitter Strawberries,” a piece about Cold War anxiety that appeared in The Christian Science Monitor on August 11, 1950. “All morning in the strawberry field / They talked about the Russians,” Plath began. The women pickers try to give voice to the “vague terror” they feel in the face of a nuclear stand-off. Some want to “Bomb them off the map,” while others plead for nonviolence. The strawberries turn “thick and sour”—a physical manifestation of the pestilence of war. Plath’s poem suggests the powerlessness of women, whose fates are dictated by a patriarchal system they have little power to overturn. She had already explored this theme in her high school stories and would return to it in The Bell Jar, where she exposed the rank and rot underneath what otherwise appeared sweet and seductive. Bitter strawberries would morph into concealing cosmetics, constricting gowns, and poisonous luncheons—all metaphors for the false, conformist selves that women in the Eisenhower era were encouraged to inhabit. It is tempting to give short shrift to “Bitter Strawberries,” with its Frostian overtones and awkward rhythms, yet the poem was an important, early foray into the political concerns that animated Plath’s later work.

  Sylvia dated a roguish Wellesley boy named Emile after her summer at Lookout Farm, but this time she played by traditional rules. “We go on dates, we play around, and if we’re nice girls, we demure at a certain point. And so it goes.”13 Emile’s smoking, drinking, and carousing only seemed to increase her desire for him. She began to think that “the unreasoning, bestial purity was best”—better, at least, than the teasing and flirting that only led to “soggy desire, always unfulfilled….I can only lean enviously against the boundary and hate, hate, hate the boys who can dispel sexual hunger freely.”14 In her diary she wondered if she would ever find a man worthy of her intellect and literary ambitions, someone who would not “swallow up my desires to express myself in a smug, sensuous haze.”15

  “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” in the August 1950 issue of Seventeen, followed the publication of “Bitter Strawberries.” Curiously, Plath did not celebrate these milestones in her journal. In late summer she wrote that she was at a “low ebb…dreaming sordid, incoherent little dreams,” “uneasy with fear and discontent,” with “widening cracks” in her self-assurance.16 She now thought her Seventeen story “trite,” “syrupy,” and “hideously obvious.”17 What would it take to publish in a sophisticated magazine like The New Yorker? The small headshot beneath the story and its sentimental caption made her wince (“Jazz makes her melt inside. Debussy and Chopin suit her dreamer moods”). She began to feel impure, and wrote about the daily cleansing rituals that “could not rinse the sticky, untidy film away.”18 She would always remain conflicted about her audience: as much as she sought recognition and payment from women’s magazines, she knew that literary reputations were not made in the pages of Ladies’ Home Journal.

  In early August, Sylvia had found an uplifting surprise in her mailbox—her first fan letter. Eddie Cohen, a twenty-one-year-old English major from Chicago, had read “And Summer Will Not Come Again” in his sister’s Seventeen and wrote to express his admiration. His tone was genuine, if patronizing. He felt the story was subtler than the usual Seventeen “drivel” and “offered insight into people which was a little above average.”19 Sylvia noted his condescension in her reply: “Why is it that my particular brand of drivel rates such subtle flattery? Have you a long standing bet with Ernest Hemingway on the gullibility of would-be female writers?” He had asked her to send him a story, but she refused until he sent her his writing. “Now you know that my nature is far from sweet and trusting,” she wrote.20

  So began a long correspondence between two literary aspirants that Plath would later try to publish as “Dialogue of the Damned.” On paper, the two had remarkably similar personalities, even similar writing styles. They were both intellectuals, passionate about literature, and increasingly skeptical of the comfortable certainties with which they had been raised. Eddie, who was from an affluent Chicago suburb, had put more distance between himself and his origins than Sylvia. “I’ve had my share of convertibles and sport coats, dances and socials,” he told her. “I don’t really care much for it now, although I can still make myself look at home in that kind of life.”21

  He was now a junior at Roosevelt College in Chicago, a liberal hotbed that was, he said, “about as far from the traditional college as one can get.” He boasted that all freshmen were required to take Philosophy 101, “very anti-God and Church,” a requirement that had prompted a state senate investigation. He described political science classes that verged on “free-for-all fist battles” where students were encouraged to “cross-examine” their teachers.22 Sylvia was fascinated.

  To Eddie, Sylvia described her “character” as “ice cream and pickles,” a line he found particularly memorable. She told him she was slender, tall, and tan. When women asked her what brand of suntan oil she used, she replied, “None, lady, but forty-eight hours in the blazing sun per week does wonders.” She described her German-Austrian background, her father’s bumblebee book and his “countless scientific articles.” Her brother took after her father, but she was more “subjective,” like her mother. She admitted that she had a “mercurial disposition” and recounted her struggles to fit in during high school. “My biggest trouble is that fellows look at me and think that no serious thought has ever troubled my little head. They seldom realize the chaos that seethes behind my exterior.” While all the other girls were attending dances, she was reading Huxley’s Brave New World—and so on. Sylvia was slightly disingenuous when describing herself as a brainy loner, but she certainly was, as she wrote, “vulnerable.”23

  Eddie, for his part, described himself as a “semi-bohemian” in jeans and a T-shirt with “unruly” hair and a cigarette “constantly” dangling from his lips. He was a “cynical idealist” who hung out “at little jazz joints…or maybe just wandering the streets at four or five in the morning.” He seemed a cross between James Dean and the T. S. Eliot of “Preludes.” He told Sylvia he would soon be “thumbing or bumming” his way to Mexico City. The two were striking poses for themselves as much as for each other. “Don’t try too hard to figure me out,” he wrote. “You’re liable to go neurotic too.” With his dangling cigarette and his talk of “spiritual independence,” Eddie Cohen was Plath’s first beatnik.24 “I wasn’t aware that anyone quite like you existed,” she wrote to him that August.25

  Eddie was raised in the conservative Jewish tradition, but, like Sylvia, he viewed religious doctrine with Nietzschean distrust. “Those who believe in God are mental cowards,” he wrote to her that fall. Yet he admitted that he had “clung to” the “customs, ceremonies and tradit
ions” of Judaism even after he had “rejected the idea of God.”26 He was still very close to his rabbi, who had encouraged him to assert his independence and leave home. Plath told him she was a Unitarian “by choice” but added, “I don’t like the idea of salvation being spooned out to those too spineless to think for themselves.” She supposed she could be “labeled an atheist,” though she had great belief in man’s potential and “respect for life.” She quickly deflated her rhetoric: “Sounds flowery, doesn’t it.”27

  Sylvia told Eddie he was a “magnetic correspondent,” and, indeed, decades later, his words still resonate with humorous, brash intelligence.28 His letters were full of sex and death, war and madness. Though Sylvia challenged him on his “modern” morals—he believed in premarital sex and was unapologetic about his girlfriend’s abortion—she could not discount his Experience. During the past year, he told her, he and his friends had been through “six illicit love affairs, two marriages, one divorce, one near-murder, one complete mental smash-up, five people winding up with psychiatrists, one sadistic-masochistic love affair, one triangle involving a male, female, and a bi-sexual.”29 His tales of sexual adventures, late-night jazz sessions in Chicago’s “black belt,” lunchtime conversations with Richard Wright, and his own psychoanalysis gave Plath a vicarious thrill. As did his travels: in Mexico, he wrote Sylvia about the availability of prostitutes, unexpurgated Henry Miller novels, and the “rhythm and harmony” of the open road.30 When she wrote to him complaining that a date had called her “dramatic,” Eddie responded that she was only “living intensely,” as he did. “That is what seperates [sic] the artist from the rest of the world.”31 (Ted Hughes would later tell her much the same.)