Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Lawrence House was more diverse than the other houses: Sylvia noted in letters home that some of her peers there were Jewish and African American. She had begun a tentative friendship with her housemate Janet Salter, a Jewish New Yorker and a shy, aspiring writer whom Sylvia had approached in the library the previous year when she learned she would be living in Lawrence House. “Within a half hour she had practically told me her entire life story. And she told me about her father dying when she was ten or eleven and how she was planning to be a writer and how she was already writing, and it was amazing to me. She elicited my life story in the process.” Janet, who had been writing since childhood and eventually became the editor of the Smith Review (and, later, a professional editor), was excited to become friends with another writer. Both were taking Robert Gorham Davis’s creative writing class. “More than the rest of us, she really was a writer,” Janet remembered. “We were wimpy writers, and she was actually writing and selling things.” They grew close during Sylvia’s junior year, bonding over the books and authors they loved. “If I liked an author’s work, I’d go to the library and read everything, and Sylvia had that same tendency. In that regard we were peas in a pod.”9 They rarely spoke of sex and dating; Sylvia kept this part of her life private. Plath felt less pressure at Lawrence House to “circulate,” as everyone needed to maintain top grades to keep their scholarships. Sylvia’s Smith friend Nancy Hunter Steiner described the Lawrence House women as many would eventually describe Sylvia herself—full of “savage industriousness.”10

  Plath was on an honors track, taking a fall semester of physical science (World of Atoms), art (which she eventually dropped), medieval literature, and creative writing (Style and Form); she was also part of the college Press Board and the struggling Smith Review. Both of her English professors intimidated her. Robert Gorham Davis had published in The New Yorker and reviewed Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Professor Patch, a medievalist, was, Sylvia wrote home, “the most imposing literary lion I have ever seen—a great 6'5" gray haired man who seems to live in the ruddy vitality of the middle ages.” Patch fostered a love for Chaucer that would endear Plath to the Cambridge literary men she later met, especially Ted Hughes. He conducted his small seminar in his home library, with his bulldog, Jeeves, sitting placidly at his feet. Around him, Sylvia felt “pitifully stupid, inadequate and scared” but “determined to succeed in the enormous intellectual honesty, ambition & discipline that honoring [sic] requires.”11 She had begun to think seriously about attending graduate school at Oxford or Cambridge after a lengthy discussion, over sherry, with Mr. Crockett. Money was “the one great problem,” but she would find a way. “I think I will do graduate work in Philosophy. I am going to do it,” she vowed in her journal.12 During a dinner at the Nortons’ that September, when she felt trapped by the prospect of marriage, she quelled her rising panic with thoughts of a different future. “I was going away to England out of the warm secure circle to prove something. There would be the going away and the coming back, and whatever would greet me on returning, I would take stoically.”13

  In October, she plunged herself into the Press Board—to which she dedicated two hours a day, six days a week writing stories for local Springfield newspapers—and the Smith Review, which was in financial crisis and barely afloat.14 The albatross around her neck was her science requirement. She had hoped to fulfill it over the summer and had been unable to muster the energy. Now she faced ten hours a week of formulae, atoms, and molecules. Despite her earlier vow to learn more about science, she found it difficult and dull. This was Otto’s world, and Dick’s; their mastery of the subject underscored her own—as she saw it—pathetic attempts at proficiency. The stress of fulfilling the requirement would help trigger the most severe depressive episode she had yet experienced.

  That October, “The Perfect Setup” appeared in Seventeen. It was another story about an outsider’s harsh treatment by society—a theme that was coming to define Plath’s more serious fiction. The story was about anti-Semitism and her summer with the Mayos. She worried about their reaction. “I am just beginning to realize the ‘position & stands’ a ‘writer’ must take—and the responsibility,” she wrote Aurelia. When she received a letter from the Blodgetts, the Mayos’ neighbors, saying that they had read her story, she suddenly “had visions of law courts & suits for slander.”15 To her relief, the Blodgetts had read “Sunday at the Mintons,” not “The Perfect Setup.” (The Bell Jar, however, would end up at the center of a courtroom battle.)

  She achieved another literary success in October—“Initiation” took third place in the annual Seventeen fiction contest and would be published in January 1953. The “unexpected good news” made her feel she was “maybe not destined to deteriorate after all.”16 She had not even remembered entering the story. Publishing her fiction was beginning to seem easier than keeping up with her schoolwork. Even fan mail was becoming routine: another young woman had written wanting to “correspond with an ‘author,’ ” but Sylvia brushed her off, telling Aurelia, “[I] simply don’t have time to get chummy with all my readers.”17

  When Sylvia learned about the prize, she thanked Aurelia in effusive, sentimental prose: “You are the most wonderful mummy that a girl ever had, and I only hope I can continue to lay more laurels at your feet. Warren and I both love you and admire you more than anybody in the world for all you have done for us all our lives. For it is you who has given us the heredity and the incentive to be mentally ambitious.”18 Later, in February 1953, Sylvia again spoke of her desire to make her mother proud and “repay” her for all she had done.19 These passages embody the nebulous “difficulty” Sylvia mentioned to friends when she spoke about her relationship with Aurelia. Sylvia loved her mother, and felt gratitude toward her, but she also resented the pressure—real or imagined—to “lay laurels” at her feet.

  Dick had driven Sylvia to Smith and helped her move into her new room. When he left, she pinned photos of him on her bulletin board. But she was still upset about Dick’s sexual affairs and confided in Perry, who thought his brother’s “deviances” were a rebellion against his parents’ “moral standards.”20 Perry wondered if Dick was capable of love and suggested to Sylvia that she might be unhappy with someone who needed “the right gal, the right job, the right friends.” Eddie Cohen had said much the same. Perry had proprietary feelings toward Sylvia, and was probably jealous of his brother. In another letter that week, he cited their “mutual love”: “My grateful legions shall always provide you a sanctuary of absolute devotion in whatever crusade of yours you may ever give them the honor to protect and revere….There is no truth but that we need each other.”21 Letters like this made Sylvia declare to her journal, “I am in love with two brothers, embarrassingly so,” and that she would “of course marry the other brother.”22 She returned to this leitmotif many times in her journal that fall.

  * * *

  MIDWAY THROUGH OCTOBER, Dick’s world shattered when he learned that a routine chest X-ray had revealed tuberculosis. In his letters to Sylvia, he became uncharacteristically metaphysical. “What is good? What is worth doing? Why are we here?” He would have to spend several months receiving treatment at the New York State Hospital for Incipient Pulmonary Tuberculosis (commonly known as the Ray Brook sanatorium), near Saranac Lake, New York. “Why is this happening to me (to us)?” he wrote her forlornly in October. “Is there some happiness-credit-meter in the sugar-icing-heavens above?…Again and again I think ‘This person cannot be me, not this character at the center of all the fuss and nonsense!’ But it is.”23 He and Sylvia visited each other in the days before he left for the Adirondacks. He expected that they would carry on their relationship from a distance. “Auf Wiedersehen, my blond skier,” he wrote in his last letter from home. “I’ll see you in the mountains.”24

  But Sylvia was heading south. She had agreed to attend the Princeton prom with Ro
dger Decker, a friend of Phil Brawner’s. In anticipation, she went shopping in Northampton and bought her first pair of high heels—“a lovely black-suede that had done wonders for my sense of chic.”25 She had reason to distract herself, since she was nervous that she too had tuberculosis. Luckily her chest X-ray, taken on her twentieth birthday, was clear. She celebrated with Marcia over sherry. It all “served to bring me out of the bog of lonesomeness & despair I had been wallowing in, and shot me through with new joy and love,” she wrote her mother.26 Aurelia dropped off a heart-shaped cake, which Sylvia shared with ten other girls at an impromptu house party, while Ilo Pill sent her another pen-and-ink sketch. She was thrilled that he remembered her birthday and considered visiting him in Greenwich Village. Three years after Lookout Farm, the attraction remained.

  The Princeton prom was a bust. Her date, she said, was “quite intellectually stupid,” and the trip had been a waste of time and money. “He served his purpose, but I never intend to see him again—I cannot abide dumb rich boys.”27 She found Princeton beautiful but full of wealthy, dull Republicans—“they are all bloodless like mushrooms inside, I am sure,” she told Warren.28 “I hope Warren goes to Harvard,” she quipped to Aurelia, though she was delighted to have worn her new high heels, something she felt she could not do with Dick because of her height.29

  At the sanatorium, Dick was pleasantly surprised by his large, en-suite room and the friendly doctors and patients. He quickly befriended another young medical school student, and he embarked on an ambitious reading course that included Hemingway, Yeats, Boswell, Dante, Aristotle, Faulkner, Salinger, Tolstoy, and others. “As for visitors, this really comes to be a salon,” he wrote Sylvia in late October.30 Plath had once fantasized about recovering from tuberculosis at a sanatorium so that she could spend uninterrupted months reading and writing. Now Dick, formerly scornful of the unquantifiable, was doing just that. He wrote sketches of the other patients, took music lessons, painted watercolors, corresponded with William Carlos Williams’s wife, and filled a creative writing notebook with story drafts. “Don’t you envy me??” he wrote Sylvia.31 When he asked her if she thought he could make his living as a writer, she answered, “It’s a hellish craft. Beautiful and bitchy.”32 He began to show greater interest in her stories’ technique and autobiographical antecedents, and even sent an adventure story to Boys’ Life magazine. He worked hard to use the uninterrupted time for personal growth, and apologized for his former rigidity. “Sylvia, I think I am trying to learn to laugh.”33 He pondered taking up smoking “to get over that smugness of purity,” or joining the Navy to “mature among hardships.”34 Above all, he told her that he loved her and wanted children “as badly as I want to breathe.”35 Dick sensed that his sickness and isolation might repel Sylvia, who fetishized masculine strength. He was doing all he could to keep her in his orbit.

  * * *

  THAT NOVEMBER, Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson in the presidential election. Plath felt “it was the funeral day of all my hopes and ideals.”36 To Aurelia, who had voted for Eisenhower, she wrote, “Well, I only hope you’re happy with McCarthy…it wasn’t Eisenhower I was against, but all the other little horrors in the Trojan Horse he rode in on. I don’t envy him his crusade nor his companions, and I feel that our gullible American public may be only too sadly disillusioned. But then, variety of corruption is the spice of life. And so are red witch hunts.”37 Stevenson, she thought, was the “Abe Lincoln of our age.”38 Eisenhower’s victory seemed to Plath a symbolic personal defeat, and it marked the beginning of a depression that nearly took her life.

  The new world order reflected the corruption and chaos she felt in her soul. She was writing two papers a week and taking phenobarbital to sleep.39 The competition in her classes was “cut-throat,” and she was relentlessly hard on herself: “I will seek to progress, to whip myself on, to more and more—to learning. Always.”40 Plath would soon see another poem in Seventeen—“Twelfth Night” in December—but publication did not lift her spirits as it usually did. Enid Epstein assured Sylvia “over endless cups of tea” that her academic and creative work was brilliant. “And it always was.” But Sylvia seemed “honestly unsure of everything she did.”41 In her journal on November 3, Sylvia tried to understand the reasons for her rapidly worsening state. She was baffled by her inability to control her “attitude,” given all her success. “I am weak, tired, in revolt from the strong constructive humanitarian faith which presupposes a healthy, active intellect and will.”42 In a now famous passage, she analyzed the textures of her depression with Dostoevskian precision:

  God, if ever I have come close to wanting to commit suicide, it is now….My world falls apart, crumbles, ‘The center does not hold.’…I go plodding on, afraid that the blank hell in back of my eyes will break through, spewing forth like a dark pestilence; afraid that the disease which eats away the pith of my body with merciless impersonality will break forth in obvious sores and warts, screaming, “Traitor, sinner, imposter.”…I can see ahead only into dark, sordid alleys, where the dregs, the sludge, the filth of my life lies, unglorified, unchanged—transfigured by nothing: no nobility, not even the illusion of a dream.43

  She wondered what had finally made Virginia Woolf and Sara Teasdale—both literary role models—commit suicide. Was their brilliance linked to their neurosis? Would she “go either mad or become neurotic” if she could not express herself creatively in marriage? She despaired of finding help—the cost and the stigma prevented her from seeing a psychiatrist.

  I’ll kill myself. I am beyond help. No one here has time to probe, to aid me in understanding myself…so many others are worse off than I. How can I selfishly demand help, solace, guidance? No, it is my own mess, and even if now I have lost my sense of perspective, thereby my creative sense of humor, I will not let myself get sick, go mad, or retreat like a child into blubbering on someone else’s shoulder. Masks are the order of the day—and the least I can do is cultivate the illusion that I am gay, serene, not hollow and afraid. Someday, god knows when, I will stop this absurd, self-pitying, idle, futile despair.44

  Although she began to feel unburdened when she allowed herself to be “unproud and cry” to Marcia in mid-November, she soon spiraled downward again.45 She received the terrible news that a close friend of Warren’s, 17-year-old George Pollock, hanged himself in his Exeter dormitory on November 18. Warren had found him in the dormitory shower and cut him down. Warren remained stoic in the face of this horror, but Aurelia suggested that the event disturbed Sylvia greatly.46

  To Aurelia, in a letter dated November 19, Sylvia blamed her precarious mental state on her science class, which, she said, “annihilates my will and love of life.” She felt like vomiting when she thought about each new week’s work. “If only I wanted to understand it, but I don’t!” Her letter was a cry for help. Aurelia was the only one she could confide in about her “tense emotional and mental state” and her physical symptoms. Again, she blamed her acute depression on her science course:

  I have practically considered committing suicide to get out of it…it’s like having my nose rubbed in my own slime….I have become really frantic: small choices and events seem insurmountable obstacles, the core of life has fallen apart…I feel actually ill when I open the book….I feel I have got to escape this, or go mad.

  She wondered “desperately” if she should see the college psychiatrist and tell her how the course was “obsessing all my life, paralyzing my action.” She hoped that she could persuade the school authorities to let her drop the second semester, but feared they would never let her. “Life seems a mockery….I can’t go on like this,” she railed. She wished for a sinus infection, which would at least provide “escapism.” “When one feels like leaving college and killing oneself over one course which actually nauseates one, it is a rather serious thing.” Sylvia had never written such frank, emotional, and terrifying letters to her mother. The science course,
she wrote, had become “a devouring, malicious monster.” She signed off, “Love, your hollow girl.”47

  She confided her troubles to Eddie. He realized she was in the midst of a full-blown depressive crisis, but there was little he could do from Chicago. In the past, when she had written to him of “nervous tension” and other difficulties, he had been keen to “practice minor therapy” on her. This was altogether different. “Syl, honey,” he wrote, “if my words and judgment mean anything at all to you, let me implore you to get yourself into some sort of psycho-therapy as soon as possible.” He gave her leads for affordable clinics and told her not to let her guard down if she began feeling better. “Don’t be deceived. Such a situation will merely serve to delay the ultimate reckoning, and at the same time increase its potential danger.” He surmised she was finally coming face-to-face with her true feelings about Dick, which caused her guilt and anxiety. Just at the point when she had gained the courage to end things, Dick had come down with tuberculosis and entered the sanatorium. She was trapped: she could not very well break his heart as he recovered from a potentially fatal illness.