Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Ann soon procured Sylvia’s first date, a twenty-two-year-old Amherst senior named Bill Gallup, whom she met for dinner in early October. The blind date went surprisingly well. Bill was tall, “cleancut,” and from West Newton—a familiar type. She was amused by his “observations” of her: “I live ‘hard,’ am dramatic in my manner, talk sometimes like a school girl reporting a theme, and have a southern accent!”77 Yet her buoyant mood soon descended. “Today has been utterly hell-hot, sunny, and I had 4 hours of classes this morning & one this afternoon. My desk is loaded with books, all the classrooms are on the third floor, and I am physically & mentally exhausted,” she wrote Aurelia. She felt “overwhelmed” by her classwork and was not sleeping well.78 She wished she had signed on only for an eighteen-hour load instead of the more challenging twenty-four. “I find myself rather hard pressed,” she wrote. She feared she would fail history with Mrs. Koffka, a six-hundred-person lecture class with a crushing reading list. English with Mr. Madeira was “strictly critical,” which meant that she did not have the chance to write creatively.79 She wanted to get outside and enjoy the brilliant foliage, but most days her classes did not end until four p.m. “I don’t dare think of marks,” she wrote her mother.80 Sylvia felt that all her professors were excellent but worried she would let them down. The only class she seemed to enjoy was French, where she could focus on literature rather than grammar. “Maybe I’ll get rested and balanced in a month. Just now Thanksgiving seems awfully far away.”81

  The new tone of these letters worried Aurelia, who advised her daughter to get to bed earlier and spend less time writing home. Sylvia decided she would face her dilemma with pragmatism and self-resolve: she would stay up no later than ten fifteen during the week and wake no earlier than seven. “I see a little order in the chaos already,” she reassured Aurelia, and herself, in early October. “Wait for a few weeks till I build up study habits and sleep habits, and I’ll have more time to breathe….Rome was not built in a day, & if I accept confusion as a normal consequence of being uprooted from home environment, I should be able to cope with my problems better.”82 She soon came down with a bad cold and had to miss several classes. She tried to cancel a date with Bill, but he insisted on visiting her at Haven House. She realized that her “first enthusiasm” had “cooled completely.” Later, when some of her friends wandered into her room, she “burst into tears,” she told Aurelia. “Dear me, how pathetic can we get.” The friends made her a pot of hot tea and served her meals in bed. Afterward, she felt “much less homesick.”83

  She tried to be “philosophical” about her frequent illnesses and treat them like a “challenge.” Instead of crawling home to Aurelia, it was time, she declared, “to learn to be master of myself.” She would spend weekends at Smith while most of her classmates fled, “dressed to kill,” to Dartmouth and Yale. She would sit in the sun on her dorm’s third-floor piazza: “Out of misery comes joy, clear and sweet.”84 Yet her mood plummeted again. She was running herself ragged trying to keep up with her “endless” classwork.85 “Your letters, just now, are a sustaining life force,” she told her mother.86 She considered going home, but checked herself into the infirmary instead.

  Sylvia was slipping into her first major depression. That October, she wrote in her journal about feeling “pathetic,” “ugly,” “flabby,” “without identity: faceless,” “mad,” “a knot of nerves, without identity,” “lost.” She described the library’s serene beauty to her mother, but in her journal she called it “a nightmare. There is no sun.” While she read history assignments, she felt “pulled thin, taut against horizons too distant for me to reach.” “Will I never rest in sunlight again—slow, languid & golden with peace?”87 She felt that she would never attract a man who was her intellectual equal, and she feared herself the subject of gossip from the other students who might think her “queer” for her intense studying.88 She was not being paranoid; peers indeed remembered that she never relaxed in the common areas after dinner but went straight up to her room to work. Her habits made her seem aloof, even arrogant to some. But those who knew her best, like Ann and Enid—and later, Marcia Brown, Janet Salter, Sue Weller, Ellie Friedman, and Claiborne Phillips—found her to be warm, sympathetic, and an astonishingly good listener, full of humor and vitality.89 Whether they liked or disliked Sylvia, her Smith contemporaries agreed on one thing: she drove herself too hard.

  Sylvia’s crisis was existential as well as emotional: her dread of time passing infiltrates her journal entries. “I can hear it even through the pillow I muffle it with—the tyrannical drip drip drip drip of seconds along the night….I could smash the measured clicking sound that haunts me—draining away life, and dreams, and idle reveries. Hard, sharp, ticks. I hate them.”90 Echoing Eliot’s Prufrock, she wrote that she would never fulfill her goals “because there isn’t time, because there isn’t time at all, but instead the quick desperate fear, the ticking clock, and the snow which comes too suddenly upon the summer.”91 She wrote a sonnet, “To Time,” which ended with a memorable final couplet: “Time is a great machine of iron bars / That drains eternally the milk of stars.”92

  In letters to Aurelia, this emotional crisis was coded in talk of heavy workloads, lost sleep, and weekends alone in the library. These letters marked the beginning of a literary pattern that would characterize Plath’s writing life: all that was threatening and malignant was exorcised in her journal, while Aurelia received sunny, optimistic letters. It may not be the case that Aurelia demanded only good news from her daughter; more likely, mother and daughter were coconspirators in a scenario where one always tried to spare the other from worry. The novelist Janet Burroway, who knew Sylvia in London in 1960, said, “Sylvia did not invent this tone; it is the mode of the letter home.” Janet referenced her own voluminous letters to her mother from 1960 to 1971: “They are plucky. They omit. They prevaricate. They lie.”93 Sylvia’s Smith friend Ellie Friedman Klein agreed that the sunny tone in Sylvia’s letters home was standard fifties fare. Nor was her word count excessive, she said, as phone calls were simply too expensive for scholarship students.94 But Plath had even more reason than others to give her mother only, as she later wrote, “the gay side.”95 Sylvia, along with the rest of the family, assumed that Aurelia’s ulcers were caused by stress. She likely feared that telling Aurelia what she did not want to hear could adversely affect her health. She had lost her father; she was not about to lose her mother.

  Still, the gulf between the voices of Plath’s letters and journals was becoming extreme. Her very first journal entry from Smith, for example, contained no grand adjectives about her new dorm, classes, or friends. Instead, it was an eviscerating mockery of the idea of “community,” triggered by a fire drill. “So this is what we have to learn to be part of a community: to respond blindly, unconsciously to electric sirens shrilling in the middle of night. I hate it. But someday I have to learn—someday—” She saw the fire drill, with its military overtones, as a metaphor for blind conformity. Its screech was “inhuman,” terrifying—“My nerves pained me keenly.”96 The idea of “community” terrified the iconoclast in her.

  Later she would fantasize in her journal about being a man, gaining experience in bars, brothels, and battlefields, like Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. She was frustrated by female subordination and knew she would never attain power by abasing herself:

  I don’t believe that the meek will inherit the earth: The meek get ignored and trampled. They decompose in the bloody soil of war, of business, of art, and they rot into the warm ground under the spring rains. It is the bold, the loud-mouthed, the cruel, the vital, the revolutionaries, the mighty in arms and will, who march over the soft patient flesh that lies beneath their cleated boots.97

  Her desire to conform was in constant tension with her desire to break away, to pursue artistic selfhood in experimental and risky ways. She would allude to the dilemma in her 1954 poem “Metamorphoses of the Moon,” which
pitted the comforts of illusion against reality:

  The choice between the mica mystery

  of moonlight or the pockmarked face we see

  through the scrupulous telescope

  is always to be made: innocence

  is a fairy-tale; intelligence

  hangs itself on its own rope.

  Either way we choose, the angry witch

  will punish us for saying which is which;

  in fatal equilibrium

  we poise on perilous poles that freeze us in

  a cross of contradiction, racked between

  the fact of doubt, the faith of dream.98

  Later, in an academic paper, she wrote about the conflict between the burgher and the artist in Thomas Mann’s novels. As she wrote in her journal that November, “I, too, was stunted, narrowed, warped, by my environment, my outcroppings of heredity. I, too, will find a set of beliefs, of standards to live by, yet the very satisfaction of finding them will be marred by the fact that I have reached the ultimate in shallow, two-dimensional living—a set of values.”99 Sylvia would long for freedom and escape—from Aurelia, the strictures of American middle-class womanhood, and even American men, who “worship woman as a sex machine with rounded breasts and a convenient opening in the vagina, as a painted doll who shouldn’t have a thought in her pretty head other than cooking a steak dinner.”100 She began fantasizing about spending her junior year in Europe. The allure of the Left Bank literary lifestyle was strong, and it offered a liberating alternative to academic achievement, which she was beginning to find “false” and “provincial.”101

  Sylvia hated the pressure to secure weekend dates, but she played along. On a blind date that October she went to an Amherst fraternity party at Alpha Delta (“God, these Greek names are foolish”) and saw through the forced gaiety to the ennui. “There seemed nothing very real about the occasion,” she told Aurelia. “The boys are all rather good-looking, the girls all rather lovely or pretty or cute, as the case may be….the whole system of weekends seem more intent on saying ‘I went to Yale,’ or ‘Dartmouth.’ That’s enough. You’ve gone somewhere. Why add: ‘I had a hell of a time. I hated my date.’ ” She was beginning to doubt that she would ever meet “a congenial boy.”102 Indeed, a Smith friend recalled that there was a widespread culture of “humiliation of women” at the elite men’s colleges where Smithies socialized: on “pig nights,” men would get a visiting unattractive woman drunk and make a fool of her. Sylvia would have been deeply upset by such stories.103

  Indian summer came to Northampton in late October. Sylvia lounged in the sun, biked through the countryside, and practiced her backhand. Sun and exercise eased her anxiety. “You should see the view from my 3rd floor sunporch,” she wrote her mother. “The hills are rising over the gold trees and blue and red tile roofs in a smoky blue-purple haze. Paradise [Pond] is reflecting russets & bronzes. Wellesley never had such hills!”104 She longed to paint it all, but she had to study. Her high spirits plummeted, however, when she received a B– on her first English paper. “Now if I do my best and get B– in my ‘best’ subject, what chance do I have in my tough courses?” She mocked herself as a “brilliant authoress.” The prospect of her upcoming history test left her “frozen,” so Aurelia sent her outlines to help her study.105 “Time ticks by relentlessly,” she wrote her mother.106 She envied the “perfect Smith girls.”107

  On October 27, 1950, Sylvia turned eighteen. She celebrated with friends over pizza at Joe’s, a college hangout in town. She was an adult now, living on her own, and forging an independent life. But the milestone unnerved her. “I have little time to stop running. I have to keep on like the White Queen, to stay in the same place.”108 She felt as if she had truly left her childhood behind—“the smooth strawberry-and-cream Mother-Goose-world, Alice-in-Wonderland fable…to be broken on the wheel” of the “dull responsibility of life.”109

  That evening, Sylvia’s house mother, Mrs. Shakespeare, joined the girls for a small party. (Aurelia had sent a cake.) Mrs. Shakespeare was upset to hear that Sylvia had decided to cancel a date with a Dartmouth boy in order to study; Sylvia repeated their conversation to Aurelia: “ ‘But my dear, you musn’t let studying blot out your social life—it’s so important to keep in circulation.’ I agreed with a smile, making a mental reservation (sleep, after 2 weeks of solid speed & tension, also is important.).”110 A few days later, Miss Mensel, the woman in charge of representing scholarship students to Smith’s board of trustees, met with Sylvia and “stressed the point about getting out on weekends so as not to go stale.”111 Ending up an old maid was not worth graduating summa cum laude, she implied.

  Sylvia ignored her. She had so little time to socialize that she agreed to a “church date” with a Dartmouth freshman on a Sunday morning. Compared to Pat O’Neil, who started studying in the morning, skipped dinner, and finished up at ten p.m., she felt positively lazy. “It’s rather a shock to realize that here everyone studies, and often there are people more intelligent than I am.”112 She was sure her old rival Louise Giesey would receive the top academic award in her class while she barely stayed afloat with B’s and C’s. “I just can’t stand the idea of being mediocre,” she wrote to Aurelia in a burst of candor. “I am driving myself rather hard,” she admitted, and wondered if she was “good enough to deserve all this.”113 Louise indeed felt tension with Sylvia at Smith, despite their friendship. “She was disciplined about how she spent her time, and also about how much of her she would show the world….She didn’t throw her intellect around. She didn’t try to intimidate. She was always very friendly. But within narrow confines.”114

  Sylvia had recently learned that her scholarship benefactress was a famous author: Olive Higgins Prouty. Mrs. Prouty, as Sylvia always addressed her, was best known for her novel Stella Dallas (1923), a melodrama that was made into a film in 1937, starring Barbara Stanwyck and nominated for two Academy Awards; a popular radio series based on the novel ran from 1937 to 1955. Prouty’s semiautobiographical 1941 novel, Now, Voyager, was ahead of its time in its portrayal of a woman with an overbearing mother on the brink of madness who is cured by a sympathetic psychiatrist. This novel, too, was made into a successful film, starring Bette Davis. The plot of Now, Voyager influenced The Bell Jar, and Mrs. Prouty inspired the character of Philomena Guinea. Prouty would influence the course of Plath’s life in much more important ways, however—none of which Plath could have foreseen in 1950. The revelation of her benefactress filled her with excitement and anxiety. “If only I can meet all the opportunities,” she wrote. “Just now I feel rather overwhelmed.”115 She warned Aurelia that she would look “hollow-eyed” when she came home for Thanksgiving, despite the sleeping pills Aurelia had sent her.116

  But then she received a major boost—her poem “Ode to a Bitten Plum” appeared in the November issue of Seventeen. Eddie Cohen wrote to say that while he liked it, he felt it was “overdone” and too prose-like.117 B’s in English had shaken her confidence, and she was in no mood to hear Eddie’s criticism. She was also growing tired of his romantic declarations—yes, he was sexually involved with other women in Chicago, but what if he was meant to be with her? What if she was the near-perfect “Golden Woman” of his dreams, his “Love Idol,” his “La Dorada”?118 He simply had to see her. But Sylvia was not interested in serving as Eddie’s muse. He was one of the few people to whom she could speak honestly, and she continued to gently rebuff his plans to visit her.

  In the wake of her poem’s national publication, she began to feel more secure about her abilities in English. At one point that November, her professor asked her not to speak up so much. “It’s so annoying to sit back & watch people fumble over a point you see clearly,” she complained to Aurelia.119 Her art class, however, was a joy. She was studying Piero della Francesca, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, de Chirico, Matisse, Picasso, Henry Moore, color, texture, perspecti
ve. Three hours of woodcut printing launched a soaring, Whitmanian mood. “Oh, mumsy, I’m so happy here I could cry! I love every girl & every blade of grass.”120 She sensed “hope, opportunity, capacity” everywhere.121

  Sylvia canceled a date on a Friday night in early November in order to see A Streetcar Named Desire, which she called “dynamic,” with its “poetic bestiality.”122 She was steeling herself for another dateless weekend when Louise came through with a blind date from Amherst, Corby Johnson. “I threw on my clothes—all the time ranting to dear Ann on how never to commit suicide because something unexpected always happens.” Her date with Corby left her feeling “terrific—what a man can do.”123

  The next week she had yet another blind date, this time with Guy Wilbor, an Amherst freshman from Chicago, set up by Ann. Guy recalled that Sylvia was “far more interesting than the average date.” She was “perceptive,” “intellectual,” “very aware and interested in what was going on around her.” Though slightly “austere” in her bearing, she warmed up once they began talking. When she spoke, he recalled, she was a “commanding presence”; she was not “girly.” Their conversation centered on writing. She wanted to hear about his English class at Amherst, taught by a young professor who encouraged his students to write creatively about personal experiences. Sylvia was intrigued, and pressed him for more details about the type of “word analysis” the professor encouraged. She told Guy she wanted to become a fiction writer, though modestly omitted the fact that she had already published in Seventeen. When he mentioned some of his investments, she wanted to know more about the workings of the stock market. It was not the sort of serious conversation he had expected on a first date, but he was flattered by her curiosity.124 Sylvia, for her part, felt that the night was a social triumph. Not only was her date tall and handsome, but she saw numerous friends from Wellesley at the Amherst dance. They waved and smiled as she basked in her “warm glow.”125 Now no one could say that she did not circulate.