Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  On the surface, “I Lied for Love”—at fifty-one typed pages, the longest story Plath had ever written—was a conventional morality tale: A farmer’s daughter falls for a wealthy boy, bears his baby out of wedlock, and eventually marries her father’s trusty farmhand (based on Ilo Pill). The farm girl, who hopes to shed her provincial life by marrying above her station, is predictably punished for her pride and materialism. Plath tried to balance the salacious with the righteous, but the story was too formulaic; besides, Plath was never one for conservative paternalism. In her journal, she admonished herself for writing such a “monstrosity” for “filthy lucre,” though she came away from the exercise with a new appreciation for the “good tight plot” of the “Confessions.”148 The story was rejected. Why was it, Sylvia asked Warren, that her serious fiction sold, whereas her attempts at pulp languished in the slush pile? Plath did not yet realize that she was better at ambiguity. The sexist contours of “I Lied for Love” give a sense of the constrictive worldview Plath knew she had to uphold in her “popular” women’s stories. It was this worldview she would attempt to demolish, eight years later, in The Bell Jar.

  Perhaps inspired by Auden’s lecture on April 10, Plath followed “I Lied for Love” with several poems: “Dialogue en Route” on April 12, “Parallax” and “Verbal Calisthenics” on April 16 (both dedicated to Enid Epstein), and “Admonition” on April 17. She worked on her Mademoiselle guest editor assignments, though she worried that twenty of the most brilliant Smith girls were her competition. She was thrilled to learn that Warren had won a national scholarship to Harvard, and decided to try for a scholarship herself at Harvard Summer School. She would apply to the Elementary Psychology course and Frank O’Connor’s creative writing course—her backup plan should she not get the Mademoiselle guest editorship. She saw Gordon by chance after an Auden lecture in April, and the two ended up drinking ginger ale and talking “heatedly about James Joyce” and “obscure poets” in Northampton. She still referred to him as the “great God Gordon,” “the best looking boy I have ever met,” but she was not impressed with his career plans: he intended to become an insurance salesman after a stint in the Navy.149

  The high point of Plath’s 1953 spring semester was Elizabeth Drew’s Modern Poetry seminar, which gave her the time and space to wrestle with Yeats, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, John Crowe Ransom, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, and Auden. She had never felt so engaged. Drew continually circled back to Yeats and Eliot, and Plath’s notes suggest that she was inspired by Yeats’s symbols—the mask, the tower, the gyre, blood and the moon—which she starred and underlined. Eliot’s ideas about the interrelationship between time present and time future, symbolized by the “still point of the turning world” in Four Quartets, also excited her greatly. Plath’s love and deep knowledge of Yeats, in particular, would help solidify her relationship with Ted Hughes, who shared Yeats’s iconoclasm, occult interests, poetic vision, and sense of vocation. Drew’s seminar inspired Plath to abandon her plan of studying philosophy or psychology. She knew now that she would “stick to writing.”150

  In April, Sylvia learned that she had been elected to Phi Beta Kappa along with twelve other Smith girls, and that she would be the editor of the Smith Review for her senior year—“the one job on campus that I really coveted with all my heart.”151 She got her courage up to invite Auden to dinner at Lawrence House on April 22. Sylvia, Janet Salter, Jane Truslow, and five other house English majors surrounded him at the circular wooden table in the dining hall. “There wasn’t a single word about poetry,” Janet remembered. “Auden just wanted to talk about current events. Basically it was a very banal conversation….After dinner we went into the living room and Auden stayed a while and we sat around and talked about ordinary sorts of things. But not once did the subject of poetry come up.”152 Jane remembered that Sylvia, in her gushy manner, tried to get Auden to talk about Wallace Stevens, but Auden just questioned the young women about “blind-dating at Smith.”153 Sylvia did not seem disappointed, simply in awe. She saw Auden again a week later, on April 27, when he attended her evening Modern Poetry seminar. Over beer, he read and discussed one of his poems for two hours in Elizabeth Drew’s living room, and expounded on Caliban and Ariel, “art and life, the mirror and the sea. God, god, the stature of the man,” Plath wrote in her journal.154 She called the evening “the privilege of my lifetime” and vowed to show him her poems.155 When she finally did, Enid Epstein accompanied her to his office for moral support. Enid was sure Sylvia “would be discovered,” but Auden simply told Sylvia that “she should watch out for her verbs, and that her poetry was very nice. Sylvia, dutifully, went back to her thesaurus to work on her verbs.” Enid was “furious” with Auden, but Sylvia seemed to take his “criticism in stride.”156 Sylvia’s Smith friend Sue Weller had a different memory. She recalled that Auden told Sylvia her work was gushy, superficial, and full of “froth.” Sylvia was deeply hurt, and his words became “engraved” upon her memory.157 This response did not surprise Sue, who said that Sylvia still complained about a bad grade she had received in her freshman English class during her senior year. Sylvia and Enid heard Dylan Thomas read at Amherst on May 20—presumably a less fraught poetic encounter.

  On April 24, 1953, Sylvia learned that Harper’s had accepted “Doomsday,” “To Eva Descending the Stair,” and “Go Get the Goodly Squab” for $100. They would appear in the May, September, and November 1954 issues, respectively. It was her first “Professional Acceptance,” as she called it, and she boasted to Warren that Harper’s was on par with The Atlantic. “Can’t you just hear the critics saying ‘Oh, yes, she’s been published in Harper’s’ ”—though she assured Aurelia she had not gotten “smug.” The success made her all the more determined to scale those “unclimbed Annapurnas,” The New Yorker and The Atlantic. She telegrammed Aurelia and offered the Harper’s acceptance as a birthday present, dedicating her “triumph” to her mother, her “favorite person in the world.”158

  Three days later, Plath learned that Mademoiselle had awarded her second prize in its latest round of guest editor assignments. The news helped dispel her stress over the fifty pages of class papers due by May 20, and gave her hope that she could afford to live in Cambridge while she attended Harvard Summer School. But she blew nearly all her Harper’s earnings on a black silk shantung dress and jacket, a navy and white pinstripe suit dress, white linen shoes, and a brown linen dress. She called the clothes “sleek and suave and stylish.” Her first “professional” publication had inspired her to purchase a wardrobe befitting a professional author: “no more dirndls or baby puffs for me.”159

  As the weather warmed, Sylvia longed to leave the confines of Northampton. In early May, she joined Ray Wunderlich, her old Cape Cod beau, now at Columbia medical school, and another couple (“both very liberal jews”) for a weekend in New York. Ray treated Sylvia to her first oysters at a French restaurant, followed by The Crucible. They finished the evening at Delmonico’s, where they stayed until four in the morning discussing “Communism, racial prejudice and religion.” The following day she saw her first opera, Carmen, and afterward, Elia Kazan’s Broadway production of Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, which she called “the most stimulating, thought-provoking, artistic play I’ve ever seen in my life!”160 She spent the evening at a Columbia dance with Ray, followed by sherry and Swan Lake in his room overlooking the Hudson. They danced and swooned until sunrise. She had not experienced such heady joy since Maureen Buckley’s debutante party. Sylvia visited Janet Salter that spring at her family’s apartment in Greenwich Village, where they made a pilgrimage to Edna St. Vincent Millay’s house.161

  Sylvia told Dick about her date with Ray because she wanted to be honest about the other men in her life now. But Dick had just come through surgery and was in no mood to hear about her gilded New York weekend. Mildred Norton wrote to update Sylvia on Dick’s post-op condition. “He doesn’t complain but his days
look very grim….Somewhere, some time, if there’s justice in this life, he should have the happiest and most rewarding experiences that can come to anyone.”162 Sylvia sensed an admonishment. Shortly afterward, she heard through Perry’s friend Bob Modlin that Mildred no longer wanted Sylvia to marry her “precious courageous boy.” Apparently, Sylvia wrote in fury, Mildred now considered her a “Selfish Person” because she had abandoned Dick for the summer. Sylvia had also heard that Mildred thought she should contribute to her family’s finances instead of going to Harvard Summer School. “As you may imagine,” she told Aurelia, “I feel very chilly toward Mrs. Norton, and really don’t care if I ever see her again for all the such-like rationalizations she has made about me now that she sees I’m not serious about her Baby.”163

  But Mildred’s accusations struck a nerve. Blazing a trail as a woman artist was exhausting, alienating work, and Mrs. Norton had hit on Plath’s secret source of shame—she feared that her artistic ambition was selfish. After she heard the scuttlebutt, Sylvia applied for a scholarship to Harvard Summer School and wrote to Warren that she hoped Aurelia would not have to contribute any money for his degree: “She is really down to rock bottom, and I gather from her letters that she is having ulcer trouble.” She urged her brother to support himself through college and to cook for himself when he was home. Sylvia was now waging a furious campaign to ease her mother’s burdens in the face of Mildred’s criticisms.

  You know, as I do, and it is a frightening thing, that mother would actually Kill [sic] herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us. She is an abnormally altruistic person, and I have realized lately that we have to fight against her selflessness as we would fight against a deadly disease. My ambition is to earn enough so that she won’t have to work summers in the future…her frailty worries me.

  She can’t take big problems or excitements without staying awake all night, and so our main responsibility is to give her the illusion (only now it hardly seems like an illusion) that we’re happy and successful and independent. After extracting her life blood and care for 20 years, we should start bringing in big dividends of joy for her.164

  Financial self-sufficiency was easier promised than practiced, however. On the same day she lectured Warren, Sylvia wrote her mother, “PLEASE PUT A GOODLY SUM OF MONEY IN MY CHECKING ACCOUNT AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, AS I AM DOWN TO ONE DOLLAR…one hundred dollars would not be amiss.”165 She was also relieved that Aurelia was redecorating: “now I can bring boys home without keeping the lights down very dim and hoping they won’t see the spots and tears in the wallpaper.”166

  In letter after letter that May, Sylvia honed her wrath on Mildred Norton: “I just hope that with all her resentful talk about my selfishness in not slaving to be near her son while she runs around Europe won’t spoil my tentative and embryonic friendship with Myron.” If she were in Dick’s place, she went on, Mrs. Norton “would smile sweetly, shake her head, and say that a doctor couldn’t risk the liability of a tubercular wife. And she’d also emphasize the fact that he’d never even gone steady with me, but liked me as a ‘cousin.’ Well, a cousin is all I’ll ever be to That [sic] family. I really am most disgusted with them.”167

  Thus were the seeds of The Bell Jar sown. Sylvia would bear a grudge against Dick and Mildred Norton for the next decade; in the novel, the personal would indeed become political. Why was a woman “selfish” if she wished to spend her summer at Mademoiselle and Harvard rather than tending to a sick boyfriend? Plath saw the double standard clearly. She had earned $1,000 from her writing during the previous year, and wrote Aurelia, “I hardly need to stoop to waitressing or fileclerking.”168 She encouraged her mother to try to make money through her own writing for women’s magazines and the “True Confessions” market. “I forbid you to work this summer!…Between the three of us we’ll show the Norton’s [sic] that we are all paragons of forgiving selflessness.”169

  In early May, Plath finally learned she had won one of the twenty coveted guest editorships at Mademoiselle. To Warren she described her joy: “I feel like a collegiate Cinderella whose Fairy Godmother suddenly hopped out of the mailbox and said: ‘What is your first woosh?’ and I, Cinderella, said: ‘New York,’ and she winked, waved her pikestaff, and said: ‘Woosh granted.’ ” The stint lasted from June 1 to June 26 and paid $150 minus room and board. After her New York weekend with Ray, she was “excited to death” at the prospect of “4 gala weeks” at the women-only Barbizon Hotel—her first stay in a hotel.170

  Privately, she was already annoyed by the demands being made on her. In the middle of her exam period, Mademoiselle assigned her a two-page spread requiring research on, and interviews with, five young male teacher-poets—Alastair Reid, George Steiner, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, and William Burford. Sylvia had a hard time finding their books, and Mademoiselle offered no help. (She was not able to interview Wilbur.) The assignment, which she finished on May 23, would have been stimulating if it hadn’t required a wild goose chase during her exams. Dick proved a surprising ally—he sensed she was being exploited and encouraged her to ask Mademoiselle point blank when and how much she would be paid for the work. (He also agreed with her that his mother had no right to call her selfish.) She told the magazine she wanted to interview J. D. Salinger, Shirley Jackson, E. B. White, or Irwin Shaw. None of these requests was granted. She was assigned to interview Elizabeth Bowen at May Sarton’s house in Cambridge on May 26, only a week before her Milton exam. She began reading Bowen novels at a furious pace, and complained about the timing to Warren and Dick; she also had two long stories due that week for the Press Board.

  The news, in late May, that she had won two Smith poetry prizes (the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize and the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize, for which she earned $120), should have pleased her. But she was tired and “harassed”; she wrote in her journal about feeling “very banal, very confused,” and twice mentioned the idea of suicide.171 Janet suspected a reason for Sylvia’s darkening mood. On the last day of class that May, Robert Gorham Davis had given them some unwelcome advice as they departed: “He said he hoped none of us was going to be a writer because women writers are frequently very unhappy. This was a creative writing class where we had thought he took us seriously, and then to make that kind of statement was really devastating. I don’t know how many other people experienced writers’ block after that, but I certainly decided I was never going to be a fiction writer because I didn’t want to be depressed….Sylvia and I went back to our dormitory from that last statement and we were absolutely furious. And somewhat dazed.”172

  Janet speculated that these discouraging, sexist comments may have been a root cause of the writing block that exacerbated Sylvia’s suicidal depression that August. They certainly suggest a cause for her unhappiness in May, before she went to New York. Indeed, Davis’s words cut to the core of the conflict Plath faced in her young life: to heed her calling and become a great writer in a society that discouraged women from fulfilling their artistic ambitions. Plath’s sense of vocation was uncommonly strong, yet such a comment from her male writing mentor reinforced the message that literary greatness was for men only; women need not apply.

  Dick became worried, and offered the kind of perceptive advice that normally came from Eddie Cohen:

  You give every indication of being frightfully busy….Time, you say, is in danger of pressing you back, flooding on and on and drowning you quite completely. Never a moment’s rest, and always the imminence of Things to Do. Poor girl, I think you are crowded by success. For God’s sake take it easy in NYC, come in by 1:00, stay moderately sober, EAT FOOD FREQUENTLY, or mark my words you’ll be sick as a dog during or after. Have a good time, sivvy, of course, but take it easy.173

  Sylvia would ignore Dick’s words. She was going to New York to build a new life that did not include him. She would shed the Nortons and their conservative worldview at dances, bars, fashion shows, and cocktail par
ties. But such disjunction soon left Plath grasping for solidity in a city where virtue seemed but “the illusion of a Greek necessity.”174

  10

  My Mind Will Split Open

  Manhattan, June 1953

  One of the most memorable scenes in The Bell Jar occurs midway through the novel, on the night before Esther Greenwood leaves New York. “Quiet as a burglar,” she ascends the stairs to the roof of the Amazon Hotel just before dawn, carrying the silken sheaths and satin slips she has worn all month long in the heat. Slowly, she walks to the edge of the parapet. “Piece by piece, I fed my wardrobe to the night wind, and flutteringly, like a loved one’s ashes, the gray scraps were ferried off, to settle here, there, exactly where I would never know, in the dark heart of New York.”1

  Esther’s gesture was a small but aesthetically powerful protest against the phoniness of everything she had experienced that month: the worldly, uncaring men; the endless copy about lipstick and perfume; the hired dates at the magazine’s ball; the poisoned luncheon at the advertising agency. There is an echo, in her reference to Joseph Conrad, of a failed pilgrimage.

  During her month in Manhattan, Sylvia learned that everyone was selling something, and everything had a price. New York’s fashion industry was the antithesis of Smith’s austere intellectualism. Here, Professor Patch’s fireside seminars and Elizabeth Drew’s evening poetry discussions seemed quaint. She had imagined meeting Dylan Thomas, editing manuscripts, and attending poetry readings in Greenwich Village. Yet most of her days were filled with efforts to sell a magazine that was effectively one large advertisement. During her four weeks at Mademoiselle, Sylvia came to feel repulsed by the fashion industry, consumer culture, and New York City itself. Marcia Brown said Sylvia told her that “she’d met a whole lot of people she felt were phonies—really phonies—phony through and through, and that were opportunistic, exploitative, thoroughly nasty human beings with no intact integrity. The business of confusing night with day and right from wrong and good from bad had really shaken her.”2 The story of Plath’s disillusion would shape the first half of The Bell Jar: in a 1962 progress report for the novel to the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Trust, Plath wrote that Esther Greenwood was “beginning to crack under the pressures of the fashion magazine world which seems increasingly superficial and artificial. She is unable to connect with her destiny, or even to imagine it.”3