She found a temporary escape with Marcia, who invited her to an aunt’s farmhouse in Francestown, near Peterborough, New Hampshire, in early February. The girls cooked together, stayed up late chatting in bed, shopped in town, and went on a long winter hike that left Sylvia fatigued but exhilarated. The change of scenery improved her mood but made the return to Smith all the more difficult. She continued to compare her intellectual abilities to that of other girls—particularly Pat O’Neil, who had straight A’s. To her surprise, a fellow student told her that her art professor had showcased Plath’s work as an example of “a promising Freshman.” Sylvia scoffed—“I never believe anything good about myself”—but the compliment pleased her.169 Later that month a senior congratulated her after reading an article about her in the “Teen Triumphs” section of an Illinois newspaper, which someone had posted on the Smith College hall bulletin board. In March a student approached her and gushed, “ ‘I hear you’re writing a novel. I think that’s just wonderful!’ ” Sylvia wrote Aurelia, “Whereupon I felt like telling her I was my twin sister and never wrote a damn thing in my life. I’ve got to get to work if I’m going to live up to my ‘reputation.’ ”170 Such encounters continued throughout the semester, and even began to bother Sylvia. “ ‘Oh, you’re the one who’s writing the book?’ or ‘You’re the one who got all A’s in History?’ It’s too bad—because once one person knows, everybody does. The only quiet woman is a dead one.”171 (These words bring Plath’s late poem “Edge” to mind, with its ironic opening image of a “perfected” dead woman.)
Sylvia was dating several different young men, but none of them satisfied. A date with a University of Massachusetts student left her reeling. He and his friends seemed to “think of girls as a clothes-horse with convenient openings and curved structures for their own naive pleasure….The American male does not think of a woman as a friend and companion (the mature outlook) but childishly as a combination of mother and sweetheart.”172 Yet she herself was snobbish about state-school men. “It is one level of society to get plushily tight on highballs and maraschino cherries and another to get ‘stewed’ on beer and greasy potato chips.”173
In February, as was tradition, Smithies trekked up to Dartmouth for the Winter Carnival. Sylvia had no Dartmouth date; nor did Marcia, whose roommate was away. She invited Sylvia to bunk with her for the weekend. Together they hiked through the countryside and shared their meals. Sylvia summed up Marcia’s appeal to Aurelia: “she’s the only gal around here who takes looong walks.” Buttressed by a deep female friendship, Sylvia relied less on men to boost her mood. “Both of us hate women en masse. But individually they are nice.”174 Around this time Grampy Schober sent Sylvia $25—a surprise windfall at a time when her savings were dwindling.
Sylvia soon learned that her midyear marks were high: all A’s and A–’s except for a B+ in English (“damn”).175 Around this time she told Aurelia that her period had returned after five months, a sign that the stresses of her first semester were beginning to recede.176 Yet she worried about Aurelia’s health; her mother’s ulcer was troubling her again. “I don’t want you to worry about things, mummy. Is it money?”177
She spent the weekend of February 17–18 at Yale with Dick Norton. She stayed off campus at “the Coop” on Prospect Street, a boarding house for dates, but spent most of Saturday with Dick in his room while the rain poured down outside. She read some of his old sociology papers—she was most interested in one about his visit to a mental institution—and even his poetry. His roommates intrigued her, especially a Yugoslavian refugee who had once belonged to (but had since rejected) the Hitler Youth. They visited Perry. The weekend went well, though she was careful not to get Aurelia’s hopes up: “He regards me as an indulgent older cousin would.”178 She was disappointed Dick did not try to kiss her and told Ann she had “needed a few cocktails rather badly” to get her through the weekend.179 But Dick frowned on girls who drank, so she abstained.
Dick was an aspiring doctor, and his scientific acumen—connected, for Sylvia, to masculinity and paternal love—impressed her. She vowed to learn more about chemistry and physics. “I don’t care if I am not ‘mathematically minded,’ ” she wrote her mother in February. “All that I write or paint is, to me, valueless if not evolved from a concrete basis of reasoning, however un-complex it must be.”180 To Aurelia she claimed that she was intrigued by the fact that Dick did not “credit emotional expression as valuable without scientific knowledge,” but in a more candid letter to Ann, she wrote that around Dick, she felt “dumb” and “brainless.”181 She adored him, yet his smugness angered her. “All in all, I was grateful to the handsome old Einstein for taking me out, but God, Ann, I never felt so shallow in my whole life. I hate being patronized. When I came back, I tried and tried to rationalize, but couldn’t say that one thought in my unlogical head was worth-while.” She felt his mastery of “physical & chemical laws” showed up her “slippery shifting basis of liberal arts.”182
The following week, Dick invited her to the Yale junior prom, which was coming up on March 10. She was “thrilled to extinction” by the invitation but kept her hopes in check. “I know he’s just doing it to be nice,” she told Aurelia.183 She was wrong—Dick was laying the groundwork for a relationship. After Sylvia’s visit, he spoke with “Aunt” Aurelia by phone, subtly asking permission to date her daughter.184 He need not have worried. Dick Norton (or Perry—either would do) was exactly the sort of young man Aurelia wanted Sylvia to marry. But the intimacy and mutual approval between the families would eventually prove claustrophobic. Sylvia could never be sure whether she had made the decision to date Dick independent of her mother’s wishes. One can trace the beginning of the end in casual remarks from Dick’s letters, such as his feeling, which he discussed with Aurelia, that Sylvia ought to learn shorthand and develop more “enthusiasm for natural science.”185 Plath would connect both ideas, in The Bell Jar, to Esther’s breakdown.
Sylvia wore a white, half-shouldered evening gown to the prom that accentuated her slim figure and deep brown eyes. “I feel a bit like cinderella [sic]: a borrowed old fur coat…a borrowed crinoline, plus borrowed silver sandals,” she wrote home.186 Dick did not notice her insecurities. She told Ann, “evidently things took a quick turn from the platonic to the…well, you know….As we walked up the hill to my ‘house’ after the dance, we stopped for a minute and let the great windy silence come at us. It was dark, the streets were quiet and bare, and the stars were clear. ‘It’s like being in a church,’ he said. And it was.” They went on a long, cold bike ride the following day; Sylvia was exhausted, though she kept up a cheerful front. “I said to myself: make the most of this kid, you may never see him again.”187 The two wrote a joint letter to Aurelia in which Dick played the awed suitor. “Need I say that Syl was her very prettiest in the new white dazzling dress? Or that she easily outshone the other pretenders?” He planned to take Sylvia to a play that night. “I just hope it will not prove to be too much for a young lady since she has had a full two days already,” Dick wrote.188 Eddie Cohen he was not.
The prom letter launched a correspondence between Dick and Aurelia that would last several years. Dick always addressed her as “Aunt A.” and signed off “Your loving nephew.” “As you know,” he told Sylvia, “my admiration for my Aunt Aurelia defies any logical or legible writing.”189 Sylvia began to worry that she could not compare to her mother in Dick’s eyes. “You better not be so capable and wonderful, because the poor boy doesn’t know that I’m rather an awkward hybrid…like does not always breed like.”190 But that spring she was overjoyed to date a handsome Yale- and Harvard-trained future doctor; she felt “a rich sense of belonging.”191
Now that her relationship with Dick was becoming more serious, Sylvia was in no mood to stumble on the all-too-real apparition of Eddie Cohen, whom she found waiting for her at Haven House just as she was about to leave campus for her spring break on March 21st
. He had, apparently, driven all night from Chicago.
I walked unsuspectingly into the living room and there was this strange, dark-haired guy standing with a pipe gripped tightly between his teeth. “This is the third dimension,” he said, just like in a play or something. So he said he’d come to drive me home. So, fool that I am, I threw all my suitcases in his father’s nash, and we were off. The funny thing is, Ann, that even though he could talk to me about my private life more authentically than any of my friends, I just couldn’t get used to the idea that this physical stranger was the guy I’d written such confidential letters to. I couldn’t get rid of the impression that he was just some taxi driver off the street. So all during the three hour drive home I was very nervous, not quite sure whether or not I would ever reach my destination and petrified as to what my mother would say if she saw me coming up the walk with Eddie, who she never wanted me to meet.
Sylvia told him she was dating someone from Wellesley and did not invite him into her house because she was “so scared” of Aurelia’s reaction. “Turned out she was cross—not at Ed, but at my ‘lack of hospitality.’ I was rather shaken and surprised by the whole unexpected encounter.”192 Later, she too regretted making him drive all the way back to Chicago without offering him so much as a cup of coffee. Sylvia rightly assumed that a real-life meeting would destabilize this otherwise perfect, platonic relationship. She had given too much away to Eddie; no other young man had been privy to her deepest anxieties. Even he had admitted, just a few days before he arrived, that a meeting might result in the “destruction of the illusion.”193 He chided Sylvia for her rudeness, but after a few epistolary recriminations the two continued a mostly amicable correspondence throughout her time at Smith.
* * *
—
After spending her spring break with Marcia in New Jersey and New York City—her first trip out of New England—Sylvia returned to campus to learn that Dick was attending the Smith sophomore prom with Jane Anderson, who was the president of her class. (Sylvia eventually befriended Jane, who inspired the character of Joan Gilling in The Bell Jar, during her stay at McLean.) This development worried her. She also voiced anxiety about keeping up with her schoolwork while finding time to “relax & read what I want & lie in the sun.”194 “I really can’t see too much light ahead….Keep my morale up!” she begged her mother.195 She worried that she was on the brink of another depression: “as I look ahead I see only an accelerated work-pattern until the day I drop into the grave.”196 Sylvia needn’t have worried about Dick’s loyalties. He visited Sylvia at Smith twice that April, and she planned a Yale visit in early May. He now addressed her as “Darling” and “Sweetie-Pie” in increasingly romantic letters, and she began to consider a life with him. When she and Marcia got summer jobs nannying for two wealthy families in Swampscott, Sylvia wrote Aurelia that the work would be “informative” since her employer was a doctor’s wife.197 She was now, as she put it, “beyond the dirndl skirt & frilly blouse stage.”198
As the semester wound down, Sylvia began to relax. The dogwood trees were blossoming, “shading the campus with a sort of green and fragrant liquidity.” She began skipping classes to read outside and felt like she was “living at a landscaped country club.”199 She spent hours tanning on the sun porch across from her room—always a form of solace and meditation—and began to plan her courses for the next year. She would major in honors English, but she could not decide what to take. Minor decisions prompted broader reflections. She asked Aurelia to get her “started secretarially next summer” so that she might apply for a United Nations job. “Shall I plan for a career? (ugh! I hate the word.) Or should I major in Eng. & Art & have a ‘free-lance’ career if I ever catch a man who can put up with the idea of having a wife who likes to be alone and working artistically now & then?” Mrs. Prouty thought she “had something,” which cheered her enormously. She resolved to continue writing, even if it meant getting “battered & discouraged” in her courses next year.200
When “Den of Lions” appeared in the May edition of Seventeen, Dick showed the story to his Yale friends, who were full of compliments. He was proud of his “girl.” Ann Davidow and Ilo Pill also wrote to congratulate Plath. Eddie was more critical: “you overdo it just a bit.”201 Sylvia admitted to Aurelia that Eddie’s criticisms were insightful. In her journal that May, she wrote that rereading the story now made her “sick.” What only a few months ago had seemed “so real and genuine” now “was hideously obvious,” full of “lyrical sentimentality.”202 Next to a section about how her character Marcia refused to “sacrifice” her identity to join Emile’s “brilliant tinsel world,” Sylvia wrote in the margin of her manuscript, “How saccharine can you be?”203 Eddie, as usual, put her deficiencies down to her lack of Experience. “You are good, Syl—mighty good. You have the eyes and ears and soul of a great writer. Sometimes, though, I wonder whether you have the heart of one.” He told her that she would not achieve her full literary potential unless a man hurt her “so hard that you ache for months afterward, down where I don’t think you have ever really hurt.”204 His comment was patronizing, for Sylvia had already experienced a grief beyond anything Eddie had encountered: her father’s death.
Sylvia and Dick continued to see each other on weekends, mostly at Yale. They browsed in bookshops, took bicycle rides, and read Hemingway aloud to each other at Lighthouse Point. They were moving steadily toward a committed relationship. Dick’s letters became more reflective and sentimental: “You are best imagined at a desk or table, neck arched foreward [sic] at an open book, blond hair about cheeks.” He told her if she were with him, he would throw her over his shoulder, “Sabine-fashion,” and would not be responsible for his actions.205 He wanted her to teach him more about “artistic matters”—maybe they could even “create, as a team.”206 Sylvia told Eddie, “I won’t say I’m in love. I don’t believe in the word.”207 But to Aurelia she wrote that Dick was “the most stimulating boy I’ve ever known.” There was nothing she would rather do than spend time with him, yet she felt insecure in his presence. “I can’t see how any modern boy as athletic as Dick could bear a girl as uncoordinated as I am.”208 She was sure he would tire of her eventually.
When Sylvia finished her final exams in early June, she did not fret and ruminate over them as she had before. The weather was mild, and three months of freedom stretched before her. Dick and Perry picked her up from Smith and drove her back to Wellesley. “Perry drove home, while Dick explained the intricacies (sp.?) of carboxyl and hydroxyl groups, to which I listened with not as much avidity as I should have,” she told Marcia.209 Sylvia was already having second thoughts about the relationship.
Back in Wellesley, she shopped downtown for novels by Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Richard Wright, and Pearl Buck, and tanned in her backyard. She penned a Tennysonian mock-up for Marcia:
She clasps the sun oil with hooked hands;
Close to the sun in backyard lands,
Ringed with azure halter, she stands,
The wrinkled rug beneath her crawls;
Her love for sunlight never palls,
Till with sunstroke down she falls…210
While Dick was vacationing in Maine she ambled back to her “old hunting ground,” the town tennis courts. There she played against Phil McCurdy, a Wellesley High senior who was the best player on the school tennis team. She and Phil had been friendly since 1946, when he had stopped inside the Plath house on his way home from school to use the bathroom. Although Phil was younger, they quickly realized that they shared several intellectual and artistic interests (Phil would also eventually become a devoted Crocketteer). They bonded over their similar domestic situations. “We both had a solo parent, female, striving to beat poverty,” he said. Phil lived only three blocks away from Sylvia and said the two of them used to sneak out at night to look at constellations. He remembered painting flowers with her at the Honeywell F
ields, catching fireflies, and dancing together at Mrs. Ferguson’s dance classes. “She was a delight. Whether it was a dragonfly or a line of poetry….She gave it her all, whatever it was.”211 During high school, their relationship had been platonic. But as the two grew older, she called him her “protégé” and “baby doll.” She ridiculed herself for trying to seduce a younger man, but she could not deny the attraction. On the courts she “maternally patted him on the shoulder & told him to come up and see me some time.”212
There was one last academic engagement she needed to attend before the freedoms of summer—Dick’s Yale commencement. The weekend portended troubles. On Saturday night she agreed to help Dick babysit his brother David, but as she and Dick read to the seven-year-old boy, she was seized by a vague distress. “I felt a preview of myself ten years hence breathe down my neck with a chilly whisper,” she wrote in her journal.213 Dick prepared an elaborate supper for her that made her feel embarrassed about her own lackluster culinary skills. On Sunday morning, Mildred Norton was up at five a.m. cleaning the house, packing lunch, and cooking an enormous breakfast. Watching Mrs. Norton, Sylvia felt “lazy,” even though she had woken up at six to help. She told Ann she was impressed by Mildred’s capability. “Mrs. Norton is my favorite—you would love her—very pretty in a mobile way—and terribly capable=keeps a house running and her four men well-fed, ironed, clothed and happy.”214 Sylvia would come to feel differently about Mildred Norton.
At Yale, Sylvia’s mood soured in the June heat. Dick dashed off to various class events and left her to chat with his parents and other guests. “After Class Day,” she wrote Marcia, “it was a two hour tea at the headmasters [sic] house, and I got so damn sick of making small talk with mothers of boys and fiancées and young wives that I thought my sweet girlish smile had frozen to my face.” She and Mildred stayed together at the New Haven YMCA, where she slept badly. Commencement was another round of small talk and frozen smiles. She only “saw Dick in glimpses.” Back in Wellesley that night, he called to tell her he had a few trips planned with friends and would not be around over the next few weeks. Sylvia was indignant. She had assumed the commencement invitation had sealed their relationship, but now Dick seemed to be backing away. “Tra la la,” she wrote to Marcia. “Looks like glimpses is all we get, boy.”215 She was tired of reading his moods and ready for some distance, especially after the claustrophobic weekend with his family. She willed herself not to care. Summer by the sea, with Marcia, would salve all wounds. Or so she hoped.
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