McCarthyism wasn’t simply political theater for Plath. In the late spring of 1953, her writing teacher Robert Gorham Davis was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee for his communist affiliation in the 1930s. Another English professor, Newton Arvin, would also be investigated. Janet Salter Rosenberg, who took Davis’s writing class with Plath in 1952–53, remembered that Davis spoke frankly of the hearings to his students and even admitted that he had been pressured to name names. “He was clearly shaken by the experience.” Although Janet thought Smith “80% Republican” at the time, she remembered that there was enormous sympathy for these professors who had flirted with communism as young idealists during the Depression, when capitalism seemed broken. They had all cut ties with the Communist Party once they learned of Stalin’s abuses. Indeed, Janet remembered that Maureen Buckley was ostracized on the Smith campus after her sister sent a mass letter to alumnae urging them not to donate to the college because it was full of “Reds.” The plan backfired—Smith received huge donations that year.123 Plath would express her anti-McCarthyism in her short story “Initiation,” later that summer.
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Spring heralded a creative burst. Sylvia began teaching an introductory art class to children at the People’s Institute of Northampton, and writing more poems. In early April she wrote “Go Get the Goodly Squab,” with its exhortations to “Reap the round blue pigeon from the roof ridge, / But let the fast-feathered eagle fly.” Yeats and Hopkins left their marks on the poem, which is full of alliteration and strong rhythms. Harper’s accepted it in 1953, and it was the only pre-1953 poem Plath saw fit to include in her 1955 manuscript Circus in Three Rings. The “august” Elizabeth Drew gave her an A on an English exam, and Sylvia sent a batch of poems to Eddie that left him “gasping.”124 “A toast, lady, from this humble soul, to what I seriously think may be one of the great creative geniuses of our generation.”125 He was not wrong.
Her short stories that year focused again on the damaged and the disenfranchised. In “Marie,” a short character sketch about a French Canadian cook at a women’s college, Plath conveyed the working-class immigrant’s loneliness and frustration with realistic poignancy. February’s “Brief Encounter,” with its Hemingway cadences, concerned a lonely, disabled Korean War veteran on his way home. He meets a kind college student on the train who reaffirms his faith in life, love, and family. She is changed, too—made more aware of the complacency that distracts her from the horrors of war. In June’s “The New Day,” a young art student overcomes her fear of mental illness after spending the day in Rockport with her art teacher’s mentally disabled son. Sylvia’s writing teacher, Evelyn Page, was impressed both by Plath’s work and by her “nearly professional” work ethic. “She was serious about her achievement as a writer, knew that she lacked experience and bent herself to gain it….though she by no means gave up her right to govern her own effects and materials….[she] maintained a sound intellectual and emotional distance in revising her work.” Few undergraduate writers, Page noted, possessed this quality.126
In each of these stories, Plath challenged herself to write empathetically about outsiders, and they showcased the secular humanism she was exploring in her classes. In a May 1952 paper for her religion class, “Religion as I See It,” Plath laid out her “basic tenets”: man was “born without purpose in a neutral universe,” without inherent morals, and was responsible for his own destiny. There was no afterlife. “His mind may live on, as it were, in books, his flesh may continue in his children. That is all.” God was not to blame for man’s evils or triumphs. Plath claimed that she could “never find my faith through the avenue of manmade institutions,” and called herself an “agnostic humanist.” She happily admitted she was a pantheist at heart: “For my security, I resort not to the church, but to the earth. The impersonal world of sun, rocks, sea and sky gives me a strange courage.” For her, the vital world was earthly and present: “the universe is non-moral, non-purposive….There is no God to care.”127 She wrote that she had joined the Unitarian Church—which preached a human Jesus and the Bible as literature—on account of its tolerance, inclusion, and emphasis on reason. In her December 1951 paper “Unitarianism: Yesterday and Today,” she noted that Unitarians looked to the moment Adam ate the forbidden fruit not as original sin, but as unbounded possibility—“ ‘his greatest virtue—the way to the fullest realization of all his potentialities as a human being.’ ” She scorned the repetitive incantations of the Catholic Church her mother had been born into and agreed with Nietzsche’s “healthy anti-Christian sentiments” in Thus Spake Zarathustra.128
Plath would not belong to any institution that trafficked in absolutes. When she studied Paradise Lost in the spring of 1953, she would find “Eve and Satan most absorbing”—much more so than God and his angels. She saw Eve as bold and brave rather than a narcissistic temptress. “I would have eaten the apple at once!” she declared in her exam, in which she admitted that “Satan is a favorite of mine in P.L.” She added, in a “P.S.,” “Among my favorite ‘quotable’ lines in all P.L. are his ‘The mind is its own place and in itself / Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.’ ”129
She felt that her most important creative accomplishment of 1952 was her short story “Sunday at the Mintons,” which she wrote over her spring vacation and entered in the Mademoiselle college fiction contest. (School breaks gave Plath precious time to write; her ability to send out poetry and fiction at the rate she did, given her heavy academic obligations, is astonishing.) The story explores the unfulfilled lives of a brother and sister, Elizabeth and Henry, living together in retirement. Before moving in with Henry, Elizabeth had lived an independent life as a librarian. The two now inhabit stuffy Victorian quarters where Elizabeth waits on Henry like a wife, longing to escape her newly circumscribed life. Her existence—the kind Plath most feared—is embodied by Henry’s question “Have you finished tidying up the study?” Henry, oblivious to Elizabeth’s frustration, continues to plod away with his maps and compasses, “charts and calculations”—what passes for his inner life. Elizabeth is a daydreamer while Henry is “Scrupulously exact.”130 When the two take a Sunday stroll by the seaside, Elizabeth fantasizes that Henry has been engulfed by a wave and cast out to sea. Plath constructs the scene so the reader thinks Henry has actually drowned, but at the end she reveals Elizabeth has only been dreaming. She is still trapped in a sexless life of subservience.
Sylvia told her mother that Elizabeth and Henry were based on herself and Dick, and, indeed, the connections are obvious. While she was writing the story, Sylvia jotted down each character’s attributes on a piece of paper as she contrasted her emotional and subjective self against Dick’s rational, scientific self: Henry was “dogmatic,” “indefatigable,” and “obstinate,” while Elizabeth was “capricious,” “volatile,” “light.”131 In the story, Elizabeth imagines the inner workings of her mind to be “a dark, warm room, with colored lights swinging and wavering, like so many lanterns reflecting on the water.” Henry’s mind, by contrast, “would be flat and level, laid out with measured instruments in the broad even sunlight. There would be geometric concrete walks and square, substantial buildings with clocks on them, everywhere perfectly in time, perfectly synchronized. The air would be thick with their accurate ticking.”132 She would again characterize Dick as stiff and logical in her poem “Love Is a Parallax”: “So we could rave on, darling, you and I, / until the stars tick out a lullaby / about each cosmic pro and con.” In “Sunday at the Mintons,” Plath hid in plain sight the truth she dared not admit: the thought of a future with Dick was suffocating.
Yet as Constantine receded, she drew closer to her “sure thing,” and invited Dick to spend his weeklong spring break at Smith. He accepted, calling it “the happiest, most productive vacation that ever occurred.”133 They studied together in the library, biked to Mount Tom, and ate cheeseburgers at the local din
er. She attended Smith’s sophomore prom with him on April 26, and they continued to spend weekends together, luxuriating in the newly warm weather. “Dick & I ran barefoot on lawns, went wading in the liquid waters of Paradise, climbed trees, and generally enjoyed ourselves on our own.”134
In mid-May the two of them, along with three other couples, drove into the Berkshire hills for a hike and a cookout. As usual, fresh air and vigorous physical activity agreed with Sylvia. “Really, though,” she told Aurelia, “I am leading a gloriously country-clubby life.”135 Her relationship with Dick seemed less fraught when they were walking in the sun, drinking beer, and cooking over open fires. In May he wrote her an erotic, Joycean letter celebrating the lure of her body.136 The new tone probably reflected their increasing sexual intimacy—“everything-but,” as she put it to Eddie.137 No longer did Dick hold back out of cousinly chivalry: “every time I see him it gets harder and harder….we can’t tear ourselves apart, the attraction is so strong,” she told Ann. During a late-March trip to Harvard Medical School, they had spent the day in bed: “we stayed there in each others [sic] arms as it got darker and darker….Time blurred, melted warmly. We had been there seven hours when we finally realized that I had to go home—plunged rudely out in the cold world again.”138 Sylvia did not know how much longer she would be able to hold back with Dick, though she knew that giving in would make it harder to extricate herself from the relationship. Still, she railed against the “customs and conventions” that kept her from fulfilling her sexual needs. “Life around here is so hypocritical,” she told Ann.139
On May 28 she finished her final exams, and Aurelia came to collect her; they loaded the car with suitcases and cartons overflowing with books. Sylvia ended the year triumphantly with A’s in her two English courses and Introduction to Politics; an A– in religion; a B in art; and a B– in phys ed. Her lower grades did not upset her as long as she excelled in English.
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Sylvia spent her first weekend of summer vacation on Cape Cod with the Nortons, then headed back to Wellesley for a last idle week before returning to the Cape to work at the Belmont Inn in West Harwich. She read Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives and wrote “The New Day” while sunning in her backyard. At night there was dinner with the Nortons and “bull sessions” with Aurelia and Dick. Eddie visited her in early June—this time, announced. The two walked the paths at Wellesley College and Lake Waban and drove around in his coral convertible discussing life and love. Sylvia made it clear to him that a physical relationship was out of the question.
On June 9, she headed south to the Belmont, a grand nineteenth-century resort that faced the West Harwich beach. After her experience with the Mayos, she had decided against babysitting. At the Belmont, she would live in the women’s dormitory, work three daily two-hour shifts, and spend her nights at beach parties. Because she was inexperienced, she was relegated to “Side Hall,” where the hotel’s managers ate. She would make less money and have the unenviable task of waiting on her employers in a “proletarian” black waitress uniform all day.140 She worried that amid the “loud, brassy Irish Catholics” and “wise, drinking flirts,” her “conservative, quiet, gracious” demeanor would prevent her from getting much male attention.141
She quickly forgot her troubles when she received a telegram, forwarded by Aurelia, on her very first day of work. “Sunday at the Mintons” had won the $500 first prize in the Mademoiselle college fiction contest. She was ecstatic. “I screamed and actually threw my arms around the head-waitress who no doubt thinks I am rather insane!” She told Aurelia that “psychologically, the moment couldn’t have been better,” as she was feeling tired and depressed by her demotion to Side Hall.142 Few things made Plath as happy as publication and prize money. She kept telling herself that Mademoiselle had made a mistake, or that Aurelia had made it all up to comfort her. But it was true—in August she would walk into a drugstore, buy a copy of the magazine, and see her name under her story’s title. “Really, when I think of how I started it over spring vacation, polished it at school, and sat up till midnight in the Haven House kitchen typing it amidst noise and chatter, I can’t get over how the story soared to where it did,” she told Aurelia.143
Plath saw “Sunday at the Mintons” as an artistic turning point. She was proud that she had transformed Elizabeth from a thinly veiled version of herself into someone else. “I am beginning to use imagination to transform the actual incident. I was scared that would never happen—but I think it’s an indication that my perspective is broadening.”144 Despite her sense of pride and fulfillment, she immediately began to doubt herself. She was worried about Dick’s reaction. Would he realize that Henry had been based on him, or that the story contained “the germ of reality”?145 Would Smith lower her scholarship when they realized she had won $500? She hoped the prize would help her win a scholarship to the Bread Loaf English seminar in Vermont the next summer, though it was “really a dream, because boys usually win those things, & my style needs to mature a lot yet.” She could not shake the doubt that the prize had gone to “the wrong person by mistake.”146 Sylvia’s doubts reflect the sexist mores of the time. Women were not supposed to become writers—men were.
She apologized to Aurelia for haranguing her with such concerns: “God, I’m glad I can talk about it with you—probably you’re the only outlet that I’ll have that won’t get tired of my talking about writing.”147 No matter how tense Sylvia’s relationship with Aurelia became, she knew her mother would always listen. Like Sylvia’s journal, Aurelia too was an “outlet.” She needed her correspondence with Aurelia to reflect her resiliency back to herself, just as she needed her journal to privately pour out her despondencies. Plath felt, at core, that she was a resourceful, capable, and vital person with faith in humanity. She would not have understood her “true” self to be the one that wanted to flee the world, give up, and commit suicide. She was not a “quitter” or a “coward”—she saw through commitments she would rather have abandoned, like the Mayo job. The ambitious, determined, optimistic self of her letters to Aurelia was not necessarily a construct, not solely a mask. Plath struggled always toward the light rather than the darkness.
Sylvia held court on the beach during her first few days at the Belmont, before most of the other waitresses arrived. One afternoon, Perry showed up unexpectedly (he was working at the nearby Latham Inn with Dick) and was “shocked at the ‘competition’ ”—Sylvia was surrounded by five bronzed young men.148 But she was soon brought low by the daily drudgery of waiting tables. She made an effort to get to know the new waitresses—in her calendar she recorded a long “gab session” with them on June 11—yet she still felt out of place. They all seemed so pretty and extroverted. If not for her fiction prize, she “would be pretty low.”149 Within a few days, she was “vacillating in great confusion.”150 The conditions were ripe for another depression: she had not been sleeping well; she was homesick and living with strangers; she was fatigued from hours on her feet; she had no dates; she was a terrible waitress. “I am exhausted, scared, incompetent, unenergetic and generally low in spirits,” she told her mother.151
Aurelia came to visit, and found Sylvia in a “dangerous state of feeling sorry for myself,” “tired, tense and on the verge of tears.” Sylvia begged Aurelia to visit her again on her next day off (“Please, please”). The other waitresses seemed like old hands, but she could barely manage to time her food courses properly. She began to think about quitting as she had just won $500. Wouldn’t her time be better spent resting and writing more stories for publication? But she would not “be a coward and escape by crawling back home.”152 She needed, as always, to prove to herself that she was “capable.”
A week later, she was “a little more optimistic.”153 She saw Dick in the evenings but made an effort to date other men, including a Columbia medical student named Ray Wunderlich. She began to think of herself as
a writer rather than a waitress, just as she had done at the Mayos when she reached a crisis point. “The characters around here are unbelievable, and I already have ideas churning around in my head.”154 She was devising a story called “Side Hall Girl” with an ending that would be “very positive and constructive.” “Ambitious?” she asked Aurelia. “You bet.”155 She thought that she would “stick it out” until August 10.156
After a few late nights on the beach with Ray, Sylvia developed another sinus infection. The illness could not have come at a better time, as she had been thinking about leaving the Belmont almost as soon as she had arrived. She decided to have “one real fling” before she left, with Phil Brawner, a Wellesley Princetonian who was on the Cape for the weekend.157 She “got all swish” in an aqua cotton dress and enjoyed a “delectable evening” at the Mill Hill Club, where they danced and drank all night. She promised to play tennis with Phil the next day, but when he came to collect her, she had a fever. She asked for a ride back to Wellesley. Phil thought the whole episode hilarious, while Sylvia was pleased with her appearance—“I looked very flushed and healthy, having both a tan and a temperature of over 100.”158
Back home in Wellesley, Sylvia stayed in bed for a week, taking penicillin. When the Belmont called to ask whether they should hire someone else, Aurelia told them yes. Amid the get-well cards that soon arrived from friends was a letter from Knopf’s editor in chief, Harold Strauss. Mademoiselle’s managing editor, Cyrilly Abels—for whom Sylvia would work in the summer of 1953—had been so impressed by “Sunday at the Mintons” that she forwarded the story to Strauss. Sylvia was thrilled by his words: “This struck me as an extraordinarily deft and mature story, far better than the average prize-winning short story.” While he advised her not to rush into anything, he hoped Knopf would someday publish a novel by her and asked her to write him directly. “Shall I put it that I should like to watch a very gifted nature take its course?”159 Apart from her Smith acceptance letter, this was probably the single most important piece of correspondence Plath had ever received; she promised Strauss that she would keep him informed about her writing. To round off her good fortune, Phil Brawner, who was working for Boston’s Shawmut Bank as an intern, reappeared asking for dates. Together they went to double bills at the Kenmore Theater and drank Scotch and soda at the swank Copley Plaza Hotel bar. Sylvia told Marcia he was a member of the “Wellesley aristocracy.”160
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