She continued to write to Dick’s parents about the goings-on at Smith, such as William Buckley’s recent talk on God and Man at Yale. Buckley took swipes at Yale’s liberal curriculum, which he felt was too secular. Sylvia enjoyed writing Dick a long “vindictive review” blasting Buckley’s argument; she wrote up a piece about the talk for the Press Board.73 Lately she considered making journalism her career. The Press Board “loved” her “tryout” news articles, and she was soon invited to join their ranks.74 As a Press Board member, she would write for the Springfield Daily News, The Springfield Union, and the Daily Hampshire Gazette. She had other reasons to be upbeat: in late October she received unexpected invitations from other young men she had met at the Buckley party, as well as a “beautiful framed pen-and-ink sketch” from Ilo.75 She had never received so much male attention. Eddie wrote, too, saying he might visit her at Christmas. (This time, she told Aurelia, she would be welcoming.) She celebrated her nineteenth birthday with Dick and Marcia, who each gave her books by T. S. Eliot. Together they read e. e. cummings out loud over bottles of Chianti—“utmost of rapport!” she wrote in her scrapbook.76 Yet she was beginning to feel overwhelmed. At the end of a letter to Aurelia, she signed off “your hectic Sivvy” and drew a headstone with the epitaph “Life was a hell of a lot of fun while it lasted.”77
She felt worse in December, despite a successful date with Eric Wilson, a Yale student she had met at the Buckley party, discussing “poetry and art…God and moral standards.”78 Eric told her he was falling in love with her, but she considered him a “dead-end.” Still, she was fascinated by his experience with a prostitute. Hungry for material, she had asked for as many details as possible—“what sort of a personality the woman had, also a little about the procedure in houses of ‘ill fame.’ ”79 (Years later, these details appeared in The Bell Jar.) To Aurelia, she confided with unusual candor, “For some reason, life seems very depressing at present….am rather worn. Ah me. No sonnets till Xmas vacation.”80 Her sleep troubles plus her period had “led to a great depression”; she was enduring a series of “little hells.”81
Her ill humor was partly a result of learning that Dick was not a virgin—a shocking piece of news he had revealed over Thanksgiving. Sylvia was infuriated by what she saw as his hypocrisy. For almost a year she had thought he was a virgin, only to learn that he was sexually experienced. Worse, he had teased her for being “worldly” about sex; “the shock made me sick,” she wrote to Ann Davidow. She knew her anger was absurd, and admitted that she wouldn’t “give a damn about any other boys being a virgin, but somehow I wanted him to be.”82
Sylvia admitted that she was not angry with Dick so much as the double standard. “I am envious of males. I resent their ability to have both sex (morally or immorally) and a career. I hate public opinion for encouraging boys to prove their virility & condemning women for doing so.” (Indeed, William Sterling remembered Sylvia’s horror over a gang rape, involving members of Wellesley High’s football team and a female student, that had been “hushed up.”)83 Sylvia told Ann, “I would gladly go to bed with many of the boys I have dated…the only thing is I’m a coward and afraid of having a baby, becoming too emotionally involved, or getting found out.” She did not want to become “trapped” in a marriage to Dick, but rather to study abroad and write. Dick was too “logical, practical, planned, and scientific.” She, on the other hand, was “terribly emotional, artistically inclined, romantic and impractical.” Their families thought they balanced each other perfectly, but she was not so sure. “I find myself irresistibly drawn to artistic guys,” she admitted. She had asked Dick how she was supposed to fulfill her “burning emotions & lusts” until she was ready for marriage. He had no good answer, and seemed “puzzled” by the question itself.84
Eddie had seen the denouement coming and was amused by Sylvia’s revelation. “Someday, my pet, I hope you will evolve to a stage where you will let yourself fall in love rather than very calmly measuring up your men with a slide-rule and philosopher’s handbook.” She had written about the episode in detail, telling him that she wanted to have sex with the first handsome man that would seduce her. Eddie warned her not to “screw up your life just because you learned that there ain’t no Santa Claus.”85 He predicted that the next man she fell for would not be a doctor or a lawyer, but an artist or a teacher. Yet she stubbornly continued to see Dick. She needed to keep her options open; she was not Maureen Buckley, after all.
Then a surprise letter from Constantine arrived, with another open invitation to Princeton. It seemed like a sign. She spent the early part of her Christmas break with Marcia in New Jersey, and met Constantine in New York City. They dined at his Upper East Side apartment with his parents and grandmother. Afterward, he took her to a Russian bar on 14th Street called the Two Guitars, where they danced, drank Moscow mules, and listened to a “gypsy orchestra.”86 In her scrapbook, she wrote that she felt “most wicked and worldly in black velvet suit with winsome Constantine.” The evening provided a vivid contrast to her anatomy clinics with Dick. But Constantine never visited her at Smith. Later, he blamed the distractions of school, and then the Army.87 The men she desired most seemed unattainable.
Sylvia came down with yet another sinus infection after her jaunt to New York, which necessitated cocaine packs and penicillin shots. Marcia’s Christmas gift of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos helped stave off the “misery.”88 Without word from Constantine, she turned again to Dick. Over her Christmas vacation, they danced at the Wellesley cotillion, visited the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and attended an evening of Charles Dickens readings. But Dick’s close relationship with Aurelia continued to bother Sylvia. He had taken Aurelia on a “medical expedition” in January, to a “neuro-anatomy clinic” at Brigham and Women’s Hospital—a similar “date” to one he had shared with Sylvia.89 He wrote to Aurelia shortly afterward with ideas for future expeditions together (the Boston Medical Library, perhaps?) in a tone Plath later mocked in The Bell Jar: “It was last year at this time when I was plotting the many advantages that would accrue from studying near Wellesley—and the happy prediction that I could see you from time to time has come true, oh thank heaven.”90
By the time Sylvia returned to Smith in late January 1952, she was “praying” to make it to spring vacation “without cracking up mentally and physically.”91 Her room was a mess, Marcia was sick, and she felt “grubby” and “dateless as hell.”92 She forced herself to spend an hour playing sports in the gym every day to “un-tense.”93 Smith seemed “a damn, heartless, demanding machine.”94 A rejection from Seventeen brought her low, though she felt very “professional” after telephoning a news story to a Springfield paper.95
She opened up to Eddie about her increasing bouts of depression and anxiety. She worried that she might be schizophrenic; she most definitely had penis envy and an inferiority complex. Eddie admitted that he may have used Freudian terms “indiscriminately” in some of his past letters to her, but advised her, “Forget this stuff. My own judgment would be that whatever the nature of your difficulty is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with either schizophrenia, inferiority, or the lack of a male sex organ. If you must concern yourself about your personality, do it in terms of concrete facts, and stop agitating yourself about your sub-conscious, about which by definition you can discover nothing.” She worried about her looks, her lack of money, and men. Eddie offered that these were hardly reasons “to hate yourself.” He reminded her of her beauty, her astonishing intellect, and her literary achievements. He would probably fall in love with her himself if the “physical barrier between us were removed.” When she despaired about her writing, he told her to compare Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises to Across the River and into the Trees. Even Hemingway had his bad days. His most helpful reassurance came on the subject of sex. He admired her for admitting desire for sex and reminded her that this desire was entirely natural—not pathological or shameful. “The fact that yo
u have no satisfactory outlet for this stems from the fact that society is maladjusted to the welfare of the individual, and not because there is anything wrong with you….you can hardly expect, at nineteen, to reject a Bostonian background in mores and arrive immediately at an objective compromise.” There were few men in Sylvia’s life who held such progressive views. He advised her, again, to end things with Dick; it was clear to him that she was simply using him for security. “I love you, even if you think nobody else does, and I’ve always got a broad shoulder to cry on, so stop worrying.”96
Aurelia sensed that a visit might lift her daughter’s spirits and came to Smith in January. Sylvia took her to an exhibit at the Smith Museum, where she finally convinced her mother that “modern art is art!”97 She tried to influence Aurelia’s thinking in subtler ways. In early February, Sylvia heard an inspiring sermon at church on love and marriage. She agreed with the pastor’s advice to delay marriage until one found the right partner—“2 real people sharing common & important projects in a genuine way,” as she told Aurelia. The pastor told his female audience not to settle down just “to prove you too can catch a man,” and that waiting until the age of thirty gave one more time to work at a career and enrich oneself.98 This was unconventional advice, but just what Plath needed to hear—especially as friends began announcing their engagements. Sylvia could not bring herself to tell her mother that she did not want to marry Dick. But she could, perhaps, explain her position philosophically, with a pastor’s endorsement.
Sylvia returned to Wellesley for a short break in early February. She and Dick toured a maternity ward at the Boston Lying-in Hospital, where they saw lifeless fetuses in formaldehyde jars and a live birth. “I had the queerest urge to laugh and cry when I saw the little squinted blue face grimacing out of the woman’s vagina,” she wrote to Ann. Plath would imbue this visit with a sense of horror in The Bell Jar and later claim that it made her deeply fearful of childbirth. But to Ann she described her exhilaration at being a part of something so vital and primitive: “my sense of the dramatic was aroused, and I went skipping down the corridors of the maternity ward like a thoroughly irresponsible Florence Nightingale.”99
Dick visited Sylvia at Smith in mid-February, but this time, she was distant. He wrote her soon afterward, saying that he was “very worried,” wondering what the “problem” was “that wouldn’t be verbalized.”100 He sent her a poem titled “Recollections,” in which he celebrated “Your deeply expressive self / Your brown eye with my kaleidoscopic thoughts reflected there / Our open and honest approach to all things—so heartily a union.”101 Sylvia was not so sure, yet she invited Dick back to Smith in late February. The two spent six hours hiking through snowy fields to the Connecticut River, then decamped to the library to read together. It was a “very nice weekend,” she told Aurelia.102 The phrase captured the essence of her time with Dick. Everything they did together was pleasant and edifying. But he was not the kind of man with whom one could dance to a gypsy orchestra.
Dick became the major dilemma of Sylvia’s sophomore year. The forces pushing her toward him were not only societal but familial. How could she squander the chance to be the wife of a Harvard-educated doctor? How could she face her “aunt” Mildred and “uncle” Bill? And how could she disappoint her mother, who saw in Dick the key to her daughter’s financial security? As Sylvia put it to Marcia that March, her only options were to “break up our families or settle down”—neither of which appealed to her.103 She felt trapped and enunciated her fears eloquently in her journal. The same concerns she had been weighing for several months had, with Dick’s summer marriage proposal, become urgent. Her sexual attraction to him was strong, but as early as September of her sophomore year, she had organized her points against marriage with a cool-headed, philosophical rationalism. She wrote, “I am disturbed rather terribly by this sure thing. I am obsessed that it is this, or nothing, and that if I don’t take this, it will be nothing, but if I do take this, I will be squeezed into a pretty stiff pattern, the rigor of which I do not like.” She was determined not to become a small-town-doctor’s wife: “God, I hope I’m never going to massacre myself that way.”104
She may have underestimated Dick. In his letters, he looked forward to the time when they could spend their hours reading plays, poems, and listening to music.105 He told her of his enthusiasm for Faulkner, Hemingway, Chaucer, Emerson, Melville, and Goethe, and often sent her clippings about art exhibits and literary readings. On a date that March, they “talked & talked & read Hemingway aloud for seven solid hours—without even eating.”106 He wrote her poignant, stream-of-consciousness love letters, “experiments in expression,” which she inspired.107 He danced with her in the streets of Northampton after a Smith formal in April and told her he wanted to read Wallace Stevens aloud with her.108 “You have made my miserable tiny existence utterly throbbing and joyful,” he wrote.109
But none of this could erase the spectral future she saw with Dick—a social life lived through civic groups and charitable societies. He would, she knew, want her to play a “town-minded, extroverted” role.110 It was a terrible prospect for someone who dreaded the word “community.”111 She would not give up her art for a man who—she finally admitted—she did not love. “The fact remains that writing is a way of life for me.” She hoped she would meet someone “better,” a fellow artist who understood her need to create. “It is only balance that I ask for. Not the continual subordination of one persons [sic] desires and interests to the continual advancement of another’s! That would be too grossly unfair.”112 When she finally met Ted Hughes four years later, she felt she had conjured him up. The wrongness of Dick confirmed the rightness of Ted, whom Sylvia would marry less than four months after their first meeting.
Sylvia and Dick continued visiting each other throughout the spring. Although she had received another “excitingly dangerous” invitation to the Princeton prom from Constantine, she declined on account of the trip’s expense and her heavy workload. She worried that she might get run down and sick again. “It almost killed me to say no, but I figured a 2-day fling wasn’t worth a 2-week bedrest!” She was increasingly frank with her mother about her attraction to other men, and wondered if she was “an incurable polygamist.”113
That spring, Sylvia learned that room and board at Smith was increasing by $150, an unwelcome piece of news that compounded her other worries. She would need to spend another summer working full-time as a nanny or waitress. She asked a friend about living and waitressing at the Pines resort, but the pay was poor and the working conditions dismal. “Of all crazy things—money is worst,” she told Aurelia.114
“I love this place so, and there is so much to do creatively, without having to be a ‘club woman,’ ” Sylvia wrote home in late April. “Fie upon offices!”115 Still, she was delighted to learn that she had been nominated for the electoral board and for house president, and elected secretary of the honor board. She was also elected to Alpha Phi Kappa Psi, the “Phi Beta Kappa of the Arts,” as well as the sophomore push committee, which was made up of the most “outstanding” leaders in each class.116 She even joined the prom committee. Plath had assumed that she was not well liked, and was surprised by these honors. She had underestimated her popularity at Smith just as she had in high school. She was now a minor celebrity on campus, known as a straight-A student and nationally published writer. Her fame had even spread to Amherst: Guy Wilbor recalled that by her sophomore year she was “getting a reputation as somebody to be reckoned with” in the collegiate literary world.117 Her poem “Crossing the Equinox” was included in the 1952 Annual Anthology of College Poetry, a compilation of the country’s best undergraduate verse, while her short story “The Perfect Setup” won honorable mention in the 1952 Seventeen short-story contest and appeared in the magazine in October 1952. Her poem “Twelfth Night” also appeared in Seventeen in December 1952. That April two young women from the Smith Review expressed admiration f
or her recent sonnet “Eva,” and asked her to consider joining the editorial board.118 Many of her peers were awed by her achievements, yet she still worried that others viewed her as queer and reclusive.
She loved the novels she read in Elizabeth Drew’s English class: Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, Conrad’s Lord Jim, and Lawrence’s Women in Love, which she finished in two days. She was also reading Dylan Thomas. Thomas and Lawrence inspired her creatively: she began writing “Sunday at the Mintons” on March 25, the same day she began Women in Love. The day after she finished the novel she wrote another story, “My Studio Romance,” about a student who falls for her art professor—as Sylvia was falling for hers—on the back pages of her Dylan Thomas essay.119 She learned that W. H. Auden was coming to Smith the following year and began devising a plan to meet him.
Her anti-McCarthy stance hardened that semester. In March, she heard the Dutch mathematician and communist Dirk Jan Struik speak in the Neilson Library on “Academic Freedom and the Trend to Conformity.” She called him “Really a fascinating Marxist” in a letter home and wrote about the lecture for the Press Board.120 She saw Robert Frost and Senator McCarthy on back-to-back evenings in April. She, along with most of the audience, booed McCarthy. In May she heard Ogden Nash and Patrick Murphy Malin, the head of the Civil Rights Commission.121 She told Aurelia, “As an antithesis to Senator McCarthy’s ‘guilt by association and hearsay’ lecture, he [Malin] was an example of integrity and outstanding promise.”122
Red Comet Page 29
