Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  She had good reason to be optimistic. In the fall she had received all A’s, and was astonished to discover that she had received a higher grade in science (A) than she had in her creative writing course (A-). The news was welcome but troubling. How had she aced the course that had sent her into a vortex of suicidal despair? Eddie had deduced that she was perfectly capable of mastering physics and chemistry, and that she had made the science course the scapegoat for her deteriorating mental state. Her bouts of depression were tolerable if she had a reason for them. The alternative—that her affliction was completely out of her control—was too terrible to contemplate.

  At Ray Brook, Dick became more despondent as he absorbed the reality of his prolonged recovery, which could take another ten months, depending on test results. “I despair of seeing you for months or even years—there being no forecast or planned meeting around which I can place thoughts and descriptions for you.”108 Sylvia felt sorry for him and continued to write, but she focused on her work and her social life: there were papers on medieval literature, Milton, Thomas Carlyle, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, John Crowe Ransom; dates with Myron; coffee with Professor Chase; plays (The Importance of Being Earnest) and dinners with Marcia. She was no longer tormented by indecision over her future with Dick, which she summed up tersely in her journal: “I saw Dick, went to Saranac with him, and broke my leg skiing. I decided again that I could never live with him ever.”109 She felt liberated now that she no longer needed to “measure up to what I thought were his standards.” His sickness repelled her: his mouth now seemed “poisonous” and “unclean.” The sexual attraction that had kept them together for so long was gone, and yet Dick doggedly assumed that she still wanted to realign “the you and me toward the us.”110

  Sylvia made a tentative attempt to end things. She told him that their separation prevented them from having a real relationship—letters were no substitute—and hinted that she could not marry a man who would not be “self-supporting” for several more years. Dick conceded that she was right—he would not be able to go back to Harvard Medical School for at least another year. This truth depressed him most. “You have actually spoiled me, Syl, because when I ask myself if such-and-such a girl is attractive or gives satisfaction of the order and fullness that you do, the answer is invariably NO.”111 He sent her a poem about his “state of mind” that January after he learned that he would remain in the sanatorium for several more months. So much time away from his “girl” “Cuts off hope at the root / Stops jubilant creative living.”112

  In her journal Sylvia admonished herself for envying Dick’s freedom; she knew quite well the sanatorium was no “Garden of Eden.”113 Negativity and self-pity were not options for the Plaths or the Nortons, yet Dick could no longer wear the bright mask of optimism. He knew he should cut Sylvia loose and continued to ask her to be honest with him about her feelings, but she could not bring herself to do so.114 When he invited her to visit him again in February, she concocted an excuse about having to stay at Smith for Rally Day. She sent a polite letter to Mildred Norton explaining why she could not accompany them north, which she quoted verbatim to Aurelia, adding, “I am becoming an expert in the polite expedient white lie.”115 Sylvia was now completely open with Aurelia about her waning feelings for Dick. When she told her mother that Dick’s old Harvard roommate was still serious about her friend Carol Pierson, she joked that she’d be happy if “Dick & I were responsible for a happy marriage…someone else’s!”116

  Dick’s letters seemed to confirm that she had made the right decision. In late January, he wrote to her about his dislike of Virginia Woolf—symbolic proof, to her, that they would never marry. He had read To the Lighthouse and was baffled by Woolf’s “mile-long sentences.” He even typed out an entire paragraph from the novel, pointing out its flaws. He felt Mrs. Ramsay’s “irritation” toward her husband was unfair since she was “basically such a little child.”117 He even noticed the “striking similarities” between the Ramsays and Henry and Elizabeth in “Sunday at the Mintons,” asking Sylvia if she had read To the Lighthouse before she wrote her story. Not realizing that Henry was based on him, he quoted a Woolf sentence he thought had influenced Plath’s portrayal of Henry and Elizabeth: “She set her clean canvas firmly upon the easel, as a barrier, frail, but she hoped sufficiently substantial to ward off Mr. Ramsay and his exactingness.”118 Sylvia’s greatest fears about marriage to Dick were embedded in that sentence; she responded with a polite but firm letter about Woolf’s genius implying that Dick simply did not understand stream-of-consciousness narrative.

  Myron was the new god. “If I could build an ideal and creative life with him, or someone like him, I would feel I had lived a testimony of constructive faith in a hell of a world,” she wrote in her journal.119 He had dropped by to visit her at Smith unexpectedly in late January and asked her to the Yale junior prom in March, the most prestigious college event on the Smith social calendar. She was awhirl with plans and wanted to “look absolutely gorgeous”; she would “live in an ecstasy of anticipation” for the next six weeks. Her broken leg hardly bothered her now. In fact, she had “proved that a broken leg need not handicap a resourceful woman,” she wrote Aurelia. “Oh, mummy, I am so happy. If a hideous snowy winter, with midyears and a broken leg is heaven, what will the green young spring be like?”120

  In early February she attended a lecture by Theodore Greene on “Protestantism in an Age of Uncertainty.” She was about to enter Lawrence House, pondering the relationship between philosophy and religion, when a friend told her there was a man waiting to see her in the living room. Sylvia, “Completely nonplussed,” rushed up the back stairs, changed into a more flattering red sweater and skirt, and came downstairs to find “the most handsome, tall, lean, curly brown-haired boy.” His name was Gordon Lameyer, an Amherst senior majoring in honors English. “What did this god want with me?” Sylvia asked Aurelia. Gordon introduced himself and told Sylvia his mother had suggested he call on her after hearing her speak at Wellesley’s Smith Club.

  They had what Sylvia called “an instinctive ‘rapport’ ”—both were from Wellesley, both Unitarians with German fathers, and both shared a passion for literature and Chatham summers. He asked her out that weekend. When he left, a group of girls crowded around Sylvia, asking, “Who was he!”121 She had not heard from Myron since he asked her to the prom, and the silence had affected her mood. (She would soon receive a five-page letter from him full of “God and the universe.”)122 Now she could hardly believe “the peculiar workings of chance, dropping lovely English-majoring Amherst seniors from the sky at exactly the right psychological moment!”123

  She spent her first date with Gordon, a James Joyce “fanatic,” talking about Joyce in his Amherst room as the fire roared. She had been auditing a Joyce unit that included A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses, and was considering writing her senior thesis on Ulysses, which she called “unbelievably semantically big, great, mind cracking, and even webster’s [sic] is a sterile impotent eunuch as far as conceiving words goes.”124 Their conversation made her all the more determined to write her thesis on the great Irish modernist. She received another letter and postcard from Myron, and decided to ask him to Rally Day. She now had two handsome, brilliant men interested in her (three, if one still counted Dick), and her spirits ascended. Male attention, like publication, saved her from despondency and seemed to confirm her sense of self-worth. Marcia thought Sylvia’s dating habits had to do with her own insecurities as a gifted woman. “She needed to be reinforced in this way. That even though she kept winning prizes and getting poems accepted and getting A’s, she was still perfectly all right as a female.”125

  In the end, Sylvia called February the “Black Month”—Myron canceled his visit at the last minute, and when her cast came off, on February 19, she learned that her leg had not completely healed. The “hairy yellow withered corpse” finally released from
its “coffin” repulsed her: “I felt like hell: took a razor and sheared off the worst of the black stubble and the skin of course is all coming off and raw, my ankle is swollen and blackish green, and my muscles have shriveled away to nothing.”126 The leg seemed to symbolize the rotten pestilence within her that fall. She began to consider the themes of doubleness that would animate her senior thesis and later poems such as “In Plaster.”

  To distract herself from her “helpless misery” she turned to poetry. On February 20 and 21, she wrote three villanelles: “To Eva Descending the Stair,” “Doomsday,” and “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” The villanelle was an elaborate French form she had rarely tried, but practicing it made her “feel a good deal better.” She was so pleased with the results that she sent the poems “blindly” off to The Atlantic and The New Yorker.127 (All three would appear in the Smith Review that spring.) “I am getting more proficient with the singing uncrowded lyric line, instead of the static adjectival smothered thought I am usually guilty of,” she wrote her mother.128 Writing in form was an orderly, restorative exercise. “Life is so difficult and tedious I could cry. But I won’t: I’ll just keep writing villanelles.”129

  “Mad Girl’s Love Song” was, she said, “inspired by one myron lotz [sic].” Her style is typical of the time: “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; / I lift my lids and all is born again. / (I think I made you up inside my head.)” The speaker dreams her lover bewitches her “into bed,” kisses her “quite insane,” but never returns. Plath ends the poem, “I should have loved a thunder-bird instead: / At least when spring comes they roar back again. / I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. / (I think I made you up inside my head.)”130 Yeats’s “The Song of Wandering Aengus” is the thematic—if not stylistic—influence here. Unrequited love was a major theme of Plath’s Smith poems, as was the passage of time. In “Doomsday,” she experiments with hard k consonants in an apocalyptic villanelle: “The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans / Atop the broken universal clock: / The hour is crowded in lunatic thirteens.”131 Much of her diction from this time, though, is still genteel: in “To Eva Descending the Stair,” she wrote, “Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear; / The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running. / Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.”132 The future star poetry critic Helen Vendler (née Hennessy) was so impressed when she read “Mad Girl’s Love Song” in 1954 that she wrote to Aurelia, who was a friend of her mother’s, calling it “the only decent villanelle in the English language besides Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night.’ ” Helen assured Aurelia that Sylvia would “always have a devoted audience” in her. The extraordinary letter was star-crossed; Plath would become the twentieth century’s most famous American woman poet, Vendler its most famous woman poetry critic.133

  Dick began to worry when he started receiving only one letter a week from Sylvia. He wondered if some of her letters had been lost and suggested they start registering their mail with the post office. Sylvia finally told him about Gordon and opened up about her doubts regarding their own future. College was no “way-station for matrimony”—she intended to pursue a career—and her “wound of separation” was “healing.” For him it was not; he wrote to her of his loneliness and bitterness, his anxiety about death, and his own doubts about returning to medicine. The muse had departed: he stopped writing creatively and became depressed.

  Sylvia reported to Aurelia in February that Dick’s letters were now “pathetic.”134 She wanted to be completely honest with him about all her dates, but she knew her honesty would hurt him. In his isolation at the sanatorium, he had come to idealize her. But it wasn’t her fault. She felt that she could not tell him her true feelings when he was in such a fragile state, but she did not want to waste her spring vacation visiting him at Ray Brook. She worried that he would “propose” or “try to extort a promise to him” if she saw him in person. “I know as well as I’ve known for a long time now, deep down, that I could never be happily married to him: physically I want a colossus; hereditarily, I want good sane stock; mentally, I want a man who isn’t jealous of my creativity.”135 She felt “a great gulping breath of relief” when she thought of how she had nearly “ruined” her life by marrying Dick.136 Myron too would have to wait: “graduate school and travel abroad are not going to be stymied by any squalling breastfed brats. I’ve controlled my sex judiciously, and you don’t have to worry about me at all,” she told Aurelia. “The consequences of love affairs would stop me from my independent freedom of creative activity, and I don’t intend to be stopped.”137

  Plath’s ambition to become a great artist guided her through these years of heavy dating. She had set a course, and her literary success boosted her confidence that she need not marry a man who was wrong for her. But untangling herself from the Nortons was difficult. The situation was growing increasingly awkward for Aurelia, too: Dick wrote her frequent letters that began with Thomas Mann and John Locke, and ended with questions about Sylvia’s feelings for him. Aurelia replied politely, saying she did not want to meddle, but that her daughter had told her she was “not at all matrimonially minded.” She tried to spell things out for Dick as plainly as she could: “I have always found Sivvy to be very honest. Should she hedge now, I am sure it would be because she were afraid of hurting you at a time when it might do you physical harm.” She hoped that “no hurt comes to you through us…any of us. In my affections you have a place very close to that of my two who come first.”138 Dick found the suggestion that both mother and daughter were trying not to hurt him condescending. “What is hidden from view generally is more dangerous to everybody than the transient discomfort of its discovery,” he wrote Aurelia.139

  Sylvia now felt only “a great pity” and “a sad sort of maternal fondness” for Dick.140 She finally agreed to accompany Mr. Norton on a three-day visit to Ray Brook at the end of March 1953. She would “get it over with and enjoy the rest of my vacation.”141 She tried to navigate a friendly middle ground, but Dick continued writing her love letters, some of them sexual. He had effectively become her secretary, happy to type out the handwritten manuscripts she sent to him (previously Aurelia’s job). By this time Perry had become engaged to Shirley Baldwin, a Middlebury student, after a whirlwind courtship. Sylvia could no longer fantasize about marrying “the other brother.”

  Dick hoped that Sylvia would spend her summer waitressing in Lake Placid to be close to him, but she had no such intention—she would either work for Mademoiselle or attend Harvard Summer School. She began to feel pressure from the Nortons, who, she told her mother, had “no right to assume any concrete promises of plans for the future had been made. Dick was always carefully noncommittal, and so was I.”142 Sylvia was hedging—they had in fact discussed marriage the previous summer. She even contemplated telling Dick’s parents that he was not a virgin so she would not look so callous in their eyes. Mr. Norton suspected that the relationship was unraveling. He wrote Dick a searching letter in February, telling him that if there was no real love between him and Sylvia, he should not “pretend,” but move on.143 Mildred Norton was less forgiving.

  Meanwhile, Sylvia had found a strapless “silvery” “palish lavendar” dress that she “christened” with Myron—or Mike, as she frequently called him, even though he never went by that name—at the Yale junior prom in early March.144 She got a pageboy cut, and buckled down on papers about Milton and Sitwell. She and Myron spent weekends together, often driving into the Vermont countryside in his Ford (a situation that worried Aurelia) and reading from his abnormal psychology book. The New Yorker had sent her an enthusiastic, handwritten rejection of “Doomsday” encouraging her to try again; the poem had made it to the last round. She knew that she was close to achieving her dream and immediately sent them another villanelle. An acceptance from The New Yorker, she wrote Warren, “would crown my life.”145 She vowed to “study the magazine the way I did Seventeen.” Seventeen, in fact, accepted “
Sonnet to a Dissembling Spring” in March, while “The Suitcases Are Packed Again” appeared in the magazine that month. Now that she was twenty, she hoped to publish fiction on a regular basis in Seventeen. Winning contests had become trite.

  Springtime renewed her creative sensibilities, as did the presence of “the great W. H. Auden,” who was teaching at Smith that semester. Sylvia first saw him on March 18, when he spoke at chapel. The encounter almost made up for a recent rejection from The Atlantic. “He is my conception of the perfect poet: tall, with a big leonine head and a sandy mane of hair, and a lyrically gigantic stride. needless [sic] to say he has a wonderfully textured british [sic] accent, and I adore him with a big Hero Worship.”146 After hearing Auden, she used her check from the Springfield Daily News to buy three “coveted” books: James Joyce’s Dubliners, Sigmund Freud’s Basic Writings, and a New Directions anthology. Sylvia worried that Aurelia would “scold” her for spending all her earnings on clothes and books. Although she hoped to earn $200—half her college expenses—as the Springfield Daily News correspondent during her senior year, she promised her mother that she would try to sell more writing.147 To this end, after her late March visit to Ray Brook, she began writing a potboiler for the “True Confessions” market and finished it on April 7.