Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Her friendship with Ann Davidow was deepening too. The two of them had intended to spend a few hours at the library one afternoon in late November, but when they saw the sun setting through the windows, they dashed down to Paradise Pond. There, they watched the sun sink slowly into the “glassy water & the lavender-blue twilit hill in the distance” while they talked “frankly about everything.”126 Sylvia did not have many friends who knew her well enough to break through the artificial gaiety that exhausted her, or who understood her deep connection to nature. “I could lean on her….Together the two of us could face anything,” she wrote in her journal.127

  Sylvia took the bus to Wellesley at Thanksgiving. Home meant “love and security,” though the house now felt small and shabby with its stained seat cushions and faded wallpaper. Aurelia had cleaned out Sylvia’s old room, which left her feeling untethered. She spent time with Warren, now on scholarship at Exeter, and his roommate Clement Moore, whose novelist mother, Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger Moore, was an inspiration to Sylvia. She saw The Red Shoes with Bob Riedeman (who hoped to rekindle their romance) and attended a local party with a “horribly popular” date. But she felt “numb, gray” on Sunday as she headed back to Smith with a group of Wellesley friends.128 She had hoped to sit next to the handsomest boy in the car, Bob Humphrey, but was outmaneuvered by a Smith classmate. She fumed silently all the way to Northampton and felt lonelier than ever when she arrived at Haven House.

  Back at Smith, already homesick, she fell into what she herself called a “depression.” “My loneliness perhaps springs from the fact that the busy routine I associate with life here is momentarily lifted & I am left spinning in a vacuum. I’m glad the rain is coming down hard. It’s the way I feel inside. I love you so,” she wrote Aurelia.129 Routine, she said, “keeps me from thinking too much about myself.”130 She felt better when she left her room and sat down to write alongside another student in the living room: “what one human presence can mean!”131 But to her journal she reflected more deeply:

  So here I am, in my room. I can’t deceive myself out of the bare stark realization that no matter how enthusiastic you are, no matter how sure that character is fate, nothing is real, past or future, when you are alone in your room with the clock ticking loudly into the false cheerful brilliance of the electric light. And if you have no past or future which, after all, is all that the present is made of, why then you may as well dispose of the empty shell of present and commit suicide.

  Yet Sylvia had become adept at talking herself out of despair: “there is always the turning, the upgrade, the new slant. And so I wait.”132

  Although she had found other young women who shared her “pacifist ideals” about communist China—“none of this ‘Bomb them off the map’ Business!!” she wrote to Aurelia—in her journal she confided her terror of nuclear annihilation.133 She noted how the December snow resembled “frozen ashes” and wondered how the landscape would look “if the planes came, and the bombs.”134 She imagined living “in that white world,” an eternal winter, foraging and gathering from plants alongside small animals that had been spared death. All would fade into oblivion, even concepts like freedom and democracy, though she almost relished the prospect of America—“our tender, steak-juicy, butter-creamy million-dollar-stupendous land”—dying like the Roman Empire. “We all are on the brink, and it takes a lot of nerve, a lot of energy, to teeter on the edge, looking over, looking down into the windy blackness.”135 Her mood reflected the anxiety of the age.

  In early December she received her first set of grades: Botany, A; French, A–; History, A–; English, B; and Art, B–. She could not understand why her lowest grades were in her two “best” subjects, but she was relieved she was on track to make honors. Now she worried about finding a date for the Haven House dance. Ann did not have a date either, and the two of them conspired to find some willing Amherst boys “by hook or crook.”136 She was still running on a sleep deficit. Her vow to get to bed by ten thirty had given way to midnight, while on Saturdays she stayed out until two thirty in the morning. She reassured Aurelia that she would start taking sleeping pills again to reestablish healthy sleep patterns. She also spoke frankly to her mother about her lack of periods since she had begun attending Smith—probably due to stress and irregular sleep. She was worried and wanted to see their family doctor when she returned home for Christmas.

  Sylvia had learned some troubling news about Ann, who confided to her that she was depressed and had been contemplating suicide. Ann had gone so far as to gather a stash of razor blades and sleeping pills. Sylvia immediately wrote to Aurelia asking for advice about whether she should write to Ann’s parents to tell them that their daughter was “tired.” Sylvia blamed Ann’s mother for making light of her troubles. “If you were her mother, she would be alright.”137 Perhaps echoing Aurelia, Sylvia told Ann that she just needed “rest.”

  In early December, Sylvia went on a date with an Amherst student, a twenty-five-year-old Second World War veteran. As the two walked together in the cold night, Sylvia could not help herself from asking “what its [sic] like to kill someone or be killed”—just as she had asked Hans-Joachim Neupert about bodies in the rubble of bombed-out German towns. “I said I’d like him to tell me all about the things that ever had hurt him or bothered him so I’d be able to understand him better.” The vet mistook Sylvia’s interest for intimacy, and he suddenly pinned her to the ground. Certain she was about to be raped, she fought him off, “all of which made a scene.” Sylvia remained cool-headed and managed to defuse the situation by asking about his ex-lovers. When they parted, she felt as if she ought to apologize even though she knew her instinct was perverse. Still, she blamed herself for agreeing to go on a night walk alone with him. She did not know what to make of the experience; her mind was “in rather a fog,” as she told Aurelia. She later decided that she would see the man again even though he had nearly raped her. Something about this battle-scarred ex-Marine intrigued her. And yet, she found the uniforms on the Amherst campus “sickening.”138 Plath was simultaneously revolted and fascinated by war.

  Guy Wilbor accompanied Sylvia to the Haven House dance in late December after dinner and a sleigh ride. He recalled that she was more “pensive” and “reflective” this time.139 Something seemed to be bothering her. She wrote that she had reached “the saturation point when it comes to studying,” and could do no more.140 She could not wait to see Aurelia again, and counted down the days until Christmas vacation. But once she was home, she fell into a “black mood” and felt “close to going utterly and completely mad.”141 She told Ann she had realized, perhaps for the first time, that she could no longer rely on Aurelia to comfort her:

  It was such a relief to go back and feel the responsibility slide off my shoulders on to my family’s. I realize now, though, that mother can’t be the refuge that she was before, and that hit me hard….My mother’s purpose in life is to see me & my brother “happy and fulfilled.” And I can’t cry on her shoulder any more when things go wrong. I’ve got to pretend to her that I am all right & doing what I’ve always wanted…and she’ll feel her slaving at work has been worthwhile.142

  Sylvia advised Ann to “gradually build up a philosophy of life, or your purpose in it, or something, and be reasonably jolly.”

  Earlier that fall, Sylvia had written a thank-you note to her scholarship benefactress, Olive Higgins Prouty, about her love of Smith and her writing ambitions. To her astonishment, Mrs. Prouty wrote back inviting her to tea over the Christmas break. Plath was extremely anxious about the meeting; to prepare, she read all of Prouty’s novels, and for the tea, she dressed with great care, rechecking the seams of her stockings and clutching her white gloves nervously. On the bus ride to Brookline, a wealthy Boston suburb, she began to panic. “What if they took away my scholarship and gave it to some senior who was writing a best-selling novel? Worst of all, what if Olive Higgins Prouty was disappointed in me?
”

  When the bus driver called out her stop, she walked up the elegant, curved driveway to Mrs. Prouty’s white mansion. A maid ushered her into the living room, where she waited stiffly by the fire. She was admiring the blue walls, French windows, and gold curtains when she heard a warm voice call, “Why, you must be Sylvia!” Over tea and cucumber sandwiches, Plath relaxed. Mrs. Prouty asked her if she had ever written about her family, but she demurred that they were just “ordinary.” “For you, perhaps,” Prouty said, “but not for me, not for others. Think of the material you have there!” Writing about her own family had never occurred to Plath. “I had always wanted to write about something very grand and complicated, very important and world-shaking. Home seemed so close, so familiar that I took it for granted.”143 Prouty advised her to forge stories out of the problems and conflicts that had arisen in her own life. She took this advice to heart.

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  Sylvia returned to Smith after the Christmas break with a bad sinus infection. Worse, she learned that Ann would not be returning to campus; she had transferred to an art school in Chicago. When she heard the news she felt “sick,” for Ann had been her “one real friend.” She had assumed that the two would room together. “You don’t know how it is without Ann,” she told Aurelia. “I loved her so!” There was no other friend with whom, Sylvia said, she could “completely be myself…or write in that journal of mine without having to justify myself.”144 Ann liked to study, and Sylvia had looked forward to quiet hours reading and writing alongside her in their shared room. Now she had no one to buffer her from the gossipy headwinds. She wondered how she would make any new friends given her strenuous schedule and inability to play bridge. Now, more than ever, she needed to “ ‘Conform in the little things’: I really have to as I don’t in other big things.” She asked Aurelia to learn bridge with her that summer.145 She wrote Ann a despondent letter in mid-January. “I almost wish I’d never met you—so I wouldn’t feel so empty. What made me sparky & giddy was the friction of us two banging together & giving off electricity.”146 She told Ann that there were “acres of misgiving and self-doubt in me.”147

  After Ann left, Sylvia stopped writing in her journal. Her mind had become “like a wastebasket full of waste paper; bits of hair, and rotting apple cores.” She felt “bereft” but chastised herself for self-pity.148 Sylvia was compassionate toward others but bore herself little mercy. She often mistook her depression for weak-willed complaint. How could she feel so terrible when thousands of girls would give anything to switch places with her? Didn’t she realize how lucky she was? What did she possibly have to complain about? Her self-contempt fed her depression in an unrelenting circle of anguish that continued to baffle her. “I have much to live for,” she wrote in her journal that winter, “yet unaccountably I am sick and sad.”149

  Aurelian bromides of hope forged out of ruin frequently followed her dark journal passages. Hopkins House, which she saw every day from her window, was “smeared” and “soiled,” yet she loved it nonetheless. “Such is the resiliency of man that he can become fascinated by ugliness which surrounds him everywhere and wish to transform it by his art into something clinging and haunting in it’s [sic] lovely desolation.”150 She was not yet ready to relinquish her mother’s Emersonian vision. Uplifting surprises kept her from foundering—an A– on her latest English assignment, and another publication, “Den of Lions,” in Seventeen.

  The story was based on her summer fling with Emile (Sylvia did not even bother to change his name). In the story, Marcia decides to break things off with Emile because of his playboy ways, even though she feels herself falling in love with him. “Den of Lions” is pure teen romance, but parts of the story rehearse Plath’s more mature themes. The language of love is masked in the language of sacrifice, war, and violence, just as in her later poems “Purdah” and “Pursuit”: “He had her cornered. No matter what she said, it would be meat for the sacrifice. The priest stood, knife raised over her chest. A flash of silver, a downward plunge.”151 (Ilo Pill would send her an illustration for the story when he read it.) “Den of Lions” had won third prize ($100) in the Seventeen fiction contest. When Sylvia learned the news, she “lay in bed giving little screams of joy.”152 She was not able to fall asleep until two a.m. The award boosted her confidence, and her mental health improved. “Clem’s mother better watch out,” she wrote Aurelia. “I’ll be Sarah-Elizabeth Rogering [sic] her out of business in no time.”153 She called it “the best story I’ve ever written.”154

  She and Guy began dating again (they saw All About Eve in mid-January), and she was “once more eating like a pig.”155 She soon decided that Ann’s departure may have been for the best, for it forced her to seek out “other freshman [sic] more deeply.”156 One of those students was Marcia Brown, who lived on the first floor of Haven House. “She is so alive, and we were shouting out our opinions about life while striding along into the bitter wind and antiseptic sunlight,” Sylvia wrote Aurelia that January.157 She would use similar language to describe her first conversation with Ted Hughes five years later. While some of Sylvia’s Smith contemporaries remembered her as egotistical, aloof, and superior, Marcia, who became Sylvia’s lifelong friend, had the opposite reaction. She recalled that when Sylvia listened to you, she made you feel like “the world’s most interesting person.” Whether she was speaking with a “salesman or a major in microbiology,” Sylvia showed “an intent enthusiasm and a friendly, lovely smile that made them feel simply wonderful and unique.”158 Jane Truslow Davison, who got to know Sylvia in 1954, remembered that Sylvia was indeed “at her best” with Marcia, who made no “demands” and “knew instinctively how to handle” Sylvia.159 Marcia herself recalled long, philosophical conversations with Sylvia “about what kinds of people we wanted to be and what we thought were our essential selves that couldn’t be compromised and ways in which we expected to change and grow.”160 Sylvia gushed so much about the simplest things—Chinese food, French wine, even spicy pizza—that Marcia sometimes found her hard to take seriously. But she felt Sylvia’s sentimental enthusiasm was “genuine” and “charming.” Not everyone would.161

  In late January, Sylvia returned home for six days of rest. Aurelia catered to her, cooking lavish meals, baking her favorite desserts, buying her perfume and silk stockings, and keeping the house quiet so that her daughter could sleep late. Sylvia made an effort to socialize and went dancing at the King Philip with Bob Humphrey. The visit home was an attempt to soothe her fraying nerves. She feared she would need to make a “Herculean” effort to keep up her relentless academic pace for another four months.162

  When she returned to Smith she was surprised to find a three-page letter from Dick Norton waiting for her. Dick was now a senior at Yale (where Perry was a freshman) and bound for Harvard Medical School. She had spent time with both brothers over her Christmas break, when Dick began to see her in a new light. Sylvia was a college girl now, no longer just his kid brother’s friend. He politely inquired whether she would like to spend a weekend with him at Yale in February. He proposed several suitable diversions—a swim meet, a chapel service, a walk in the country, a campus tour. Though Sylvia insisted to her mother that his invitation was simply a gesture of sympathy from a generous older “cousin,” she wrote Ann that she was “overawed” by the invitation. “Ann, he is just the sort of boy I’d love to get to know better—a med student, good-looking, intelligent!”163 Indeed, Dick was Sylvia’s ideal: blond, blue-eyed, athletic, intelligent, ambitious, and a family friend. “He was gorgeous. He was just a catch,” Louise Giesey White recalled. Louise and her Wellesley friends were surprised when Dick showed an interest in Sylvia, who they assumed was not in his league. They began to regard her with a new respect.164 Marcia felt differently. “He looked like a caricature of an all-American boy.” She was revolted by Dick’s “mom and apple pie with vanilla ice cream” persona. “When Sylvia was at her most enthusiastic,
adoring and worshipping of this person—which she really was—I just had to put my hand over my mouth to keep from saying, ‘I don’t see how you can stand him for five minutes.’ ”165 But dating Dick Norton was risky. The match would have thrilled both families, who had known each other for nearly two decades. Yet if the relationship faltered, so might the close ties between the Nortons and the Plaths. Dick was a careful young man, and he must have decided Sylvia was worth the risk. He could not have known the pain and humiliation his romance with Plath would eventually cause him—or her.

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  Sylvia studied ferociously for her first exams at Smith. On weekends she stayed in the library from nine to six with only an hour break for lunch. She complained about her sore eyes after reading history for ten-hour stretches, and once again began relying on sleeping pills each night.166 She joked that she would either hang herself or join Alcoholics Anonymous if she had to continue the pace. “I have a horrible feeling of tension and pressure,” she wrote to Aurelia. She couldn’t keep all the “Johns and Henries” of English history straight, “while dates and trends leak like water from a sieve.” She often made jokes about committing suicide in the face of her massive workload—gallows humor that surely unsettled Aurelia. “Now really, I am not writing from the hospital or the morgue,” she wrote in early March.167 And later that same month, “I’ll write after I pass through this week. Either that, or you will receive a little ink bottle full of ashes. Please scatter them on the waters of the ocean I loved so well in my infancy.”168