Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Plath called Abels “the most brilliant clever woman I have ever known.”45 Abels was a Radcliffe alumna with impressive literary contacts who had singled out “Sunday at the Mintons” for publication. (“Imaginative, well written, certainly superior; hold.”)46 But she was a businesswoman at heart—the “boss of the deadline,” as one Mademoiselle memo put it.47 Abels was “not comforting,” like Olive Prouty and Val Gendron, but, as Laurie Totten Woolschlager remembered, “blunt” and “irritable.”48 Plath described her as “capable, and heaven knows what else,” in her journal.49 Abels dressed conservatively, in neutral colors, and wore her gray hair pulled up. Mary Cantwell, who worked for Abels at the time, remembered that she kept a box of Kleenex on her desk because she made so many young women cry.50

  While most of the guest editors worked in a large communal space outside the staff offices (“the bullpen”), Plath worked in Abels’s office at a card table. Abels may have thought she was doing Plath a favor by keeping her out of the bullpen and giving her real responsibility, though other guest editors noticed that by the second week of June, Plath seemed overwhelmed by her heavy workload. Such close proximity to her boss, along with the “dirty work” of “ ‘managing’ ” all copy and deadlines, frayed her nerves.51 Sylvia confided to Laurie Totten that Abels was “rather hard” on her. “She did overwork her,” Laurie recalled. She guessed that Abels “thought she was contributing to her education,” but in fact Abels was breaking down Plath’s confidence, day by day, with her tough manner.52 Sylvia was used to hearing only praise from her teachers and professors. Now, her first real boss—a legendary editor who seemed to know every important writer in New York—was criticizing her work. Guest editor Margaret Affleck Clark also recalled that at lunch one day, Sylvia was “upset about things, seemed to think that staff didn’t treat us like intelligent people but too much like children.”53

  Guest editor Anne Shawber said that Plath was always in Abels’s office “checking copy or rewriting something” while the other guest editors were out having fun. She felt sorry for her. “I don’t know why they didn’t make her fiction editor….I had felt all along that Sylvia was in the wrong job, and that Mademoiselle had contributed to her breakdown.”54 Carol LeVarn McCabe, the inspiration for Doreen in The Bell Jar, also noted that Plath worked more “intensely” with Abels than the other guest editors did with their senior editors.

  Laurie Totten was “depressed” when she returned home from New York because she realized she was not “ruthless” enough to make it in the magazine business.55 She speculated that Sylvia experienced similar disillusion. In 1954, Abels wrote Plath a glowing review for her Fulbright Fellowship, calling her “one of the best young women I have had as a Guest Editor in the eleven years I have been at Mademoiselle. She is talented, completely responsible and a very hard and efficient worker.”56 But years later, Abels dismissed Plath. “I never found anyone so unspontaneous so consistently, especially in one so young….She was simply all façade, too polite, too well brought up and well disciplined.”57 Sylvia, an intimidated subordinate, could hardly have behaved otherwise.

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  Sylvia spent her first free day in New York roaming the austere, curved galleries of the Museum of Modern Art, pondering the kind of works she had once defended to her mother and Mr. Crockett. She would have just missed an exhibit on German Expressionism and new works by Francis Bacon and Marcel Duchamp. But she probably saw the large exhibit on postwar European photography. There were familiar names like Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau, and less well-known figures such as the Austrian Ernst Haas. Many of the photos were disturbing: famine in India by Werner Bischof; miners in Wales by Robert Frank; returning prisoners of war in Vienna by Haas; war-torn Korea and Cockney London by Bert Hardy. There were abstract and surrealist photos by Italians and Swedes with bold geometric patterns, and haunting compositions by Anker-Spang Larsen and Vilem Kriz—broken, dismembered dolls lying in open fields or caught on barbed wire.58 The exhibition, which was a testament to those who had risked everything to bear witness through art, was a world away from Madison Avenue.

  Plath, whose poems would feature images of starvation, war, and deformity, did not mention this dark exhibit to her mother, but had cheerfully described the art fair she visited at Washington Square Park with Laurie Totten that night.59 She and Laurie ventured into Central Park on Sunday, where they relaxed on benches and wandered through the zoo. To Aurelia, Sylvia marveled at the many different languages she heard that day. But Laurie remembered that the zoo upset Sylvia, who was “appalled by the conditions, the small cages, and the smell.”60 Sylvia later told Warren that beggars on the subway had reminded her of the zoo’s caged animals.61

  By the second Monday, after a week extolling the “astronomic versatility of sweaters,” Plath yearned to return to the citadel of high literature. That was where she belonged, as Elizabeth Bowen reminded her in a warm letter congratulating her on “a brilliant start” to her writing career.62 Plath had interviewed Bowen, but her copy was cut to a mere paragraph and placed next to a glamorous photo of the two women. An instructional memo suggested that it was the photo that mattered, not the words. (“Be sure to keep remembering that your picture is being taken. Interesting as the conversation is, keep one eye on the photographer so that he can direct you without too much interruption.”)63 Bowen asked Plath to send her more writing, a generous gesture that thrilled and terrified her.

  As Sylvia buried herself in fashion copy, Frank O’Connor’s creative writing class at Harvard Summer School, which started in July, took on greater significance. She submitted “Sunday at the Mintons” but worried that she would be competing against “professional writers and grown-ups” and prepared herself for the worst: “I’m dubious about getting in, as all people in the U.S. will no doubt try to.”64 Sylvia signed her letter home “your citystruck, sivvy,” but her initial enthusiasm for New York had waned. “Life happens so hard and fast I sometimes wonder who is me. I must get to bed.”65 She wanted to be on the Cape, she told Dick, and she wanted to write her own stories.66 “I just pray I get into the O’Connor course because I want to write this summer,” she wrote Aurelia. “Let me know what you think about my chances, also my determination to have time to really work at writing daily, which I have never done.”67

  Plath wanted to write about New York, yet she could not afford to experience most of it. If only she could meet men who could take her places she “couldn’t go alone at night,” who would treat her to oysters and champagne.68 She hoped to find willing candidates at Mademoiselle’s guest editor dance, held at the posh St. Regis Hotel on 55th Street and Fifth Avenue on June 10. “Rosy ceiling, painted like sunset sky, pink tablecloths, everything washed with a rose glow and outside the floorlength windows: all the lights of the New York skyscrapers,” she wrote Aurelia.69 Two bands played simultaneously, one sinking as the other rose. There were cocktails on the rooftop deck at sunset, where a photographer captured her with her date and another couple, “daiquiri in hand, big beaming smile of joy on face.”70 The photo showed a young woman in her prime, the toast of New York, living the high life. It would appear in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle, where readers all over America would see Sylvia Plath looking gorgeous with a handsome beau at her side. (“Mad Girl’s Love Song” would also appear in the August issue.) Sylvia fantasized about her name in the caption and wished she could get “the big copy of it, cause it’s a great picture of me.”71 It was enough to make her the envy of even the wealthiest Smith girls.

  Yet when Plath finally saw the glamorous photo in Mademoiselle that August, she would be appalled by its phoniness. The photo resurfaced in The Bell Jar: when one of Esther’s fellow patients at the mental hospital sees it and makes the connection, Esther says, “No, it’s not me….It’s somebody else.”72 The photo should have been proof that Sylvia had arrived. Instead, it reminded her that she had become a prop in h
er own show, her desires stage-managed to sell magazines. Even the admiring young men around her that night were showpieces, clean-cut Ivy Leaguers hired by Mademoiselle as escorts. Three weeks after the photo appeared in Mademoiselle, Plath tried to kill herself.

  But that June, she was still chasing her dreams down Madison Avenue. Three Columbia men vied for her attention at the St. Regis—actors, lyricists, and composers trying to make it in New York. One (the “goodlooking one”) asked her out to Jones Beach the following weekend, but canceled because of bad weather. (It rained nearly every weekend that month.) She welcomed the respite after two weeks of nonstop work and socializing. Sketch pad in hand, she walked up and down the steamy avenues of Manhattan, drawing scenes she hoped would inspire her writing. “I will make the most of being off on my own and not sulk in my Barbizon trou,” she wrote to Aurelia.73 She had little choice, since her second Mademoiselle check had not yet arrived, and her money had nearly run out. Aurelia sent enough to cover her hotel bill, but she needed to save the rest for her nightly fifty-five-cent hamburger. She could not even afford the bus fare to attend Warren’s Exeter graduation. “Money goes like water here,” she told her mother.74

  Her strict budget made her vulnerable to pickup artists like Art Ford, a disc jockey Plath met while stuck in traffic on the way to the ballet. All the guest editors were packed into three taxis, idling in a row. Ford, in a black cowboy hat, tried the first, but Neva Nelson told him to try the car behind them. Sylvia was in that car, along with Carol LeVarn and Laurie Totten. “Too many pretty girls for one taxi,” he said as he paid their fare.75 Carol and Sylvia followed him into a nearby bar, but Laurie stayed in the cab, surprised by Sylvia’s “fast” behavior. Yet Laurie admitted that she and Sylvia had drifted apart during the last two weeks of June, and that perhaps she did not know her as well as she thought.76 Sylvia never mentioned her evening with Art Ford to Laurie afterward. They were all posturing to some extent, all trying to seem sophisticated—except Carol, who gave the impression that she had seen it all before and was not “dewy-eyed.”77 Carol and Sylvia downed a cocktail with Ford, and he invited them to a party in Greenwich Village after he finished his radio show at three a.m. His minor celebrity impressed Plath: he had been written up in Mademoiselle “as one of the bright young men in New York,” she told Aurelia.78

  Sylvia and Carol soon made their way to the New York City Ballet at City Center, where they saw Christensen’s Con Amore, Balanchine’s Scottish Symphony and Symphonic Metamorphosis, and Robbins’s Fanfare. (Sylvia loved all four pieces and described them in detail to Myron.) During intermission, Sylvia ran into Mel Woody, the Yale student who was Marcia Brown’s “psychic brother.” After the show, the two of them ducked into P. J. Clarke’s, an Irish pub, to discuss their “respective philosophies of life.”79 Mel remembered that they were both on a high after the ballet, which was one of the richest aesthetic experiences of his life. “This was the moment at which I said, ‘No matter how many years go by, we’re going to be just like this.’ That was our conviction. We didn’t really know each other, but it was very important to me. When I finally decided to give up on my first marriage, I headed to New York, I went to P.J. Clarke’s, and I sat at that same table.” He remembered Plath’s incandescence. “Sylvia, when she was up, was glowing.”80 Around two a.m. Sylvia said goodbye to Mel and headed down to Greenwich Village. There, she and Carol met Art Ford at a club and stayed out until dawn. She walked all the way back to Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street.

  Almost a decade later, Plath wrote about her month in New York with jaded, cynical eyes. In The Bell Jar, Art Ford would become Lenny Shepherd, a famous disc jockey with “a big, wide, white toothpaste-ad smile.”81 After ditching Lenny’s short, unappealing friend Frankie, Esther joins Doreen and Lenny back at Lenny’s apartment, where he brags about his “twenty grand’s worth of recording equipment.” Esther coolly observes Doreen and Lenny’s rough foreplay and slips out as they are fighting (“Leggo, you bitch!”). The evening leaves her rattled, and she begins to wonder if all relationships in New York are brutal. “The tropical, stale heat the sidewalks had been sucking up all day hit me in the face like a last insult. I didn’t know where in the world I was.”82 When Esther reaches her hotel, she takes a bath to wash away the “liquor” and “sticky kisses.” Doreen eventually lands on her doorstep, half conscious and vomiting, but Esther closes the door and vows to “have nothing at all to do with her.” The scene was based on a real event: Laurie Totten remembered finding Carol “dead drunk in her own vomit” outside her door early one morning, and summoned Plath to help.83 In The Bell Jar, Esther vows to go with the “innocent” Betsy from now on, whom she “resembled at heart”—not the wise-cracking, curfew-breaking Doreen. That morning, she thinks, “I still expected to see Doreen’s body lying there in the pool of vomit like an ugly, concrete testimony to my own dirty nature.”84

  Years later, Carol sobbed as she read The Bell Jar for the first time. She was then working for a newspaper in Rhode Island, and had asked to review her old friend’s novel. She recognized herself as Doreen—a Sweet Briar society girl who is lazy about deadlines and sexually adventurous—but claimed it was a distorted portrait, a “thorough betrayal.” “I was stunned….This was somebody I was close to, and the whole time she had been making fun of me….The pain lasted a long time….It was not the Sylvia that I knew.”85 Many others who saw themselves in The Bell Jar felt similarly betrayed. Yet Carol’s testimony underscores the fact that The Bell Jar is not a factually accurate chronicle of Plath’s Mademoiselle summer. It is fiction. Plath molded the raw material of that summer to make a political point about coming of age as an ambitious woman in Eisenhower’s brutally conformist America.

  Carol dated Art Ford for the rest of June. Plath may have picked up some of the details for the Lenny Shepherd scene from a story she heard later, from Laurie Glazer. Laurie had performing ambitions, and asked Carol to arrange an interview with Art. Laurie remembered that when Art answered the door he was wearing only a towel. She thought of him as “very sleazy and greasy…a funny little man.”86 He asked her to sit on the couch with him and began pressing his knee into hers. “A star is born,” she remembered him saying. “All you need to do is put yourself in my hands.” He handed her a beat-up microphone and told her to start singing as he headed to the bathroom to shave. Laurie knew she had made a mistake and rushed back to the Barbizon, where she recounted the story to several others in Sylvia’s room over a bottle of warm white wine. Everyone laughed, and Sylvia said, “Should I, after tea and cakes and ices, have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?” (Laurie did not recognize the quotation from Eliot’s “Prufrock.”) Sylvia advised Laurie to “stick to writing” rather than singing, and the conversation turned to more intellectual topics. Sylvia and Laurie began discussing Shakespeare’s Tempest. In her diary, Laurie wrote, “S. thinks Ariel male-animal power, fiery depths. I said air, heaven, female.”87 Plath would experience a sea change herself when she began to reconsider Ariel in the 1960s. By that time, she understood the spirit as Laurie had described: “air, heaven, female.” She titled her second collection of poetry Ariel, the name Laurie Glazer eventually chose for her daughter. Laurie wondered, when Ariel appeared, if Sylvia had remembered their conversation.88

  During her third week at Mademoiselle, Sylvia attended a Yankees game and toured two magazine offices, Living for Young Homemakers and Charm, and attended the infamous luncheon at the Batten, Barton, Durstine and Osborn advertising agency that became the inspiration for the famous food-poisoning scene in The Bell Jar. On Tuesday, June 16—Bloomsday—Plath and her fellow guest editors were given a tour of the agency and treated to crabmeat and avocado salad, two of Plath’s favorite foods. Sylvia began vomiting on the way home in the taxi she shared with Janet Wagner and barely made it to the hotel bathroom before another round of sickness. Soon, nearly all the guest editors were crowded into bathrooms, collapsed in misery all nigh
t long. In the morning, the hotel doctor administered intravenous treatment. Some of the women felt well enough to wander downstairs for a bite to eat, but Sylvia stayed in bed all day. She wrote to Warren that she had “wanted to die very badly for a day, in the midst of faintings and hypodermics and miserable agony.”89 The next morning, the agency sent gift baskets containing fruit and a collection of Hemingway stories. “We all joked about the poisoning of guests being distinctly bad advertising for the world’s second largest advertising agency,” said Laurie Glazer.90

  The luncheon provided Plath with a perfect metaphor for the gluttonous consumerism she felt was poisoning the nation. There were echoes of Crockett’s disdain for American materialism in her depiction of the event in The Bell Jar:

  I had a vision of the celestially white kitchens of Ladies’ Day stretching into infinity. I saw avocado pear after avocado pear being stuffed with crabmeat and mayonnaise and photographed under brilliant lights. I saw the delicate, pink-mottled claw meat poking seductively through its blanket of mayonnaise and the bland yellow pear cup with its rim of alligator-green cradling the whole mess.

  Poison.91

  Plath saw the rot festering beneath the “celestially white” façades the ad men sold—ads that had a particularly corrosive effect on women. Part of her aim in The Bell Jar was to expose the dark side of the fashion and beauty industries. Throughout the novel, Esther looks into mirrors and sees a distorted reflection of herself; everything she experiences at Ladies’ Day magazine makes her question her own sense of self, and self-worth. New York made a mockery of Plath’s “philosophy of life”—her optimistic belief in hard work, merit, compassion, and humanistic inquiry. Earlier that fall, Plath had wondered, “How to justify myself, my bold, brave humanitarian faith?”92 The question was now more urgent. Yet the only things that seemed to matter in this brave new world were sex and money. At every turn, it seemed, she was encouraged to become an object for men to behold, when what she really wanted to be was the subject of her own life. “My world falls apart, crumbles, ‘The center does not hold,’ ” Plath wrote in her journal, quoting Yeats.93 She tried to mute her sense of “naked fear” and hollowness in a letter to Warren in late June: “Seriously, I am more than overjoyed to have been here a month, it is just that I realize how young and inexperienced I am in the ways of the world.”94