Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  By Thursday, June 18, Sylvia had recovered enough from the food poisoning to take a tour of the United Nations, which she felt was the world’s best hope for peace. Most of June had been filled with fashion-related events—a behind-the-scenes tour of Macy’s; John Frederics’s hats; the Trigère fashion show; a “Fabric Talk” with Madeline Darling; a visit to Cosmetic House; and (yes) corset manufacturers. Plath needed a respite from hemlines and hat brims. The UN tour was one of the few daytime excursions that had no connection to beauty products. As Sylvia toured the sleek, modern building, she considered working there, even as a secretary.

  She thought the tour well timed, for that night she had a date with Gregory (Gary) Karmiloff, a Russian-speaking simultaneous interpreter at the UN. Mildred Norton had hosted Gary on an exchange, and had told him to contact Sylvia in New York. (Sylvia sensed a thaw, and called Mildred to thank her.) She expected a dud but was pleasantly surprised by the handsome, suave eastern European sophisticate who took her to an Italian café. Gary was the only date Sylvia talked about to Laurie Totten. She felt Sylvia was attracted to him because of his “unusual avocation” and “worldly experience”—which, Laurie suspected, Sylvia deeply craved in her own life.95

  In The Bell Jar, Plath changed Gary’s name to Constantin and set the date in a restaurant with travel posters for Europe and Africa, candles weeping into old bottles and “sweet Greek wine that tasted of pine bark.”96 There, Esther decides she will become a war correspondent, and she will let Constantin seduce her. She returns to his apartment and waits for the moment to unfold as they listen to balalaika records. But Constantin only holds her hand tenderly and falls asleep. She leaves his apartment at three a.m. feeling hungover and unwanted. Constantin’s appeal—like Gary’s—lay in his old-world charm, with its promise of deliverance from American kitsch. Sylvia did not want Hamburger Heaven and its fluorescent lights and soup of the day. She wanted candlelight and figs and sweet Greek wine, surrounded by the lure of elsewhere.

  In real life, Sylvia and Gary went back to his studio on Christopher Street after dinner, but Gary was not interested in sex—at least not with her. In The Bell Jar, Esther thinks, “This Constantin won’t mind if I’m too tall and don’t know enough languages and haven’t been to Europe, he’ll see through all that stuff to what I really am.”97 But Gary did mind. He later said Plath was “not seductive enough—a bit too provincial.” He was annoyed that “she did not appreciate, as she should have,” some of his Chinese furniture and his vicuña bedspread, which had cost him a week’s salary.98 Sylvia called him “the most brilliant wonderful man in the world” in a letter to Warren, but there was no second date.99

  Sylvia walked back to the Barbizon late that night, and did not get much sleep before reporting back to work at nine a.m. She was tired and despondent over Gary’s rejection. The events of the past night—indeed the past three weeks—left her feeling vulnerable that morning as she sat at the Barbizon’s coffee shop and read about the Rosenberg execution.

  * * *

  “IT WAS A QUEER, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York,” Plath’s novel begins.100 The execution serves as a malingering backdrop for everything Esther experiences.

  Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death after being convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union in March 1951. Whether they truly deserved the death penalty—or even were guilty of the crimes attributed to them—remains a matter of debate.101 Plath thought the couple was executed to make an example, like the women in the Salem witch trials. She was not the only one. Her Wellesley friend Phil McCurdy had driven to Washington to march in a protest proclaiming the couple’s innocence. Sylvia knew Mr. Crockett and many of her Smith professors were also appalled. Members of the international intelligentsia, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Pablo Picasso, and even Albert Einstein, called on the American authorities to pardon the couple. The incident was widely seen abroad as a modern-day Dreyfus affair, though no American Jewish organization offered to support the Rosenbergs. Julius maintained his innocence, stating before his death that the sentence was the culmination of McCarthyist hysteria.102

  Neva Nelson was with Plath on the morning the Rosenbergs were executed. Sylvia was already seated at the counter when Neva sat down next to her and ordered a coffee and a large Danish. She seemed “much distressed about something…in no mood to eat anything.”

  She mentioned the headlines—“Rosenbergs To Be Executed.”—[and] said off-hand to me something to the effect that there wasn’t enough evidence to convict them, and that they were really killing them because they were Jews. Then she turned directly to me and said, “You DO know what Jews are, don’t you?” And I said, in my stock Bible-belt upbringing answer, “Yes, Christ was a Jew.” And she just found that so absurd, and that’s when she became so disgusted with me that she got up to leave, with me following her out the door, just as she said, “Oh, you’re so stupid. Just go away and leave me alone.” But I, the puppy dog I was at that time, followed her towards the subway stairs.103

  Sylvia walked the rest of the way to work with Laurie Totten. Laurie remembered passing a newspaper kiosk and seeing the headlines about the Rosenbergs. She felt that the couple should face the death penalty: “I was fine with it.” Sylvia was not. She was “vehement” that they should not be executed, Laurie recalled, and found the whole affair “hideous.”104 Other guest editors also remembered Sylvia’s agitation. Laurie Glazer Levy recalled, “She said to me, ‘You’re Jewish and you should care.’ She was always asking me about being Jewish. She said she identified with me.”105 Sylvia told Laurie Totten that she felt guilt over the Holocaust on account of her father’s German background.106 (Plath may have heard an echo of her grandmother’s maiden name, Greenwood, in Ethel Rosenberg’s maiden name, Greenglass.)

  Many of the guest editors had never heard of the Rosenbergs. Ann Burnside Love remembered, “The serious Sylvia was agonizing over the execution of the Rosenbergs and McCarthyism; others were delighting to dream over trousseau lingerie at Vanity Fair’s showroom.”107 Margaret Affleck Clark, the group’s only Mormon, had the sense that Plath “contemplated these things more than a lot of girls our age.” She remembered Sylvia asking her about Mormonism during a tour of the Herald Tribune: “She was asking about my religion and what our stance was on the afterlife and what did we think people did in heaven. I told her we go on progressing. We take the intelligence that we have and keep progressing when we get to heaven. She thought that was a wonderful idea and said it would be such a waste to just lose everything that you had in life.”108

  Plath herself probably did not have detailed knowledge of the case beyond what she read in the papers, but she knew the Rosenbergs were Jewish and that they had belonged to communist organizations. Her mind was already attuned to the ways in which outsiders and nonconformists were pushed to the margins of Eisenhower’s America, and she saw the Rosenbergs as innocents paying the ultimate price for their “un-Americanism.” “It is good for them to die,” Plath wrote sarcastically in her journal. “So that we can have the priority of killing people with those atomic secrets which are so very jealously and specially and inhumanly ours.”109 She was appalled by her fellow guest editors’ blasé attitudes, summed up by Hilda in The Bell Jar: “I’m so glad they are going to die.”110 Hilda’s words captured American indifference, Plath suggested in her journal.

  There is no yelling, no horror, no great rebellion. That is the appalling thing. The execution will take place tonight; it is too bad that it could not be televised…so much more realistic and beneficial than the run-of-the mill crime program. Two real people being executed. No matter. The largest emotional reaction over the United States will be a rather large, democratic, infinitely bored and casual and complacent yawn.111

  The Rosenberg execution provided the over
arching theme of The Bell Jar: in 1950s America, dissidence would be punished by electric shock.112

  There were more Mademoiselle commitments during Sylvia’s last week: a tour of Macy’s and the Herald Tribune, Betsy Talbot Blackwell’s farewell party, and George Bernard Shaw’s proto-feminist play Misalliance at the Barrymore Theatre. A disastrous date with a Peruvian UN delegate, José Antonio La Vias, proved to Sylvia again that New York was inhospitable to innocents. She had arranged the date at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, through Gary Karmiloff, who knew José through the UN. In her calendar, Sylvia wrote the Peruvian’s name on June 20, as well as the words “Forest Hills Dance,” “East Side apt.,” “Latins,” and “Lima, Peru.”113 In The Bell Jar, Esther is almost raped by her Peruvian date, Marco, at a country club dance—a harrowing scene that has caused at least one biographer to speculate that the real José did in fact rape or attempt to rape Sylvia at his apartment after the dance.114 But Janet Wagner, who double-dated with Sylvia that night, said the two left Queens before they got into any real trouble. Janet, not Sylvia, was assaulted by her Brazilian date, though José had clearly done something to upset Sylvia. (She wrote Warren that she had spent an evening “fighting” with him, and called him “cruel” in her journal.)115 When Janet’s date wrestled her to the ground, she elbowed him in the mouth and knocked out several teeth. She fled back to Plath, who was in the clubhouse, and told her what had happened. “José had said some awful things to Sylvia,” Janet remembered. “We were laughing, but we had gotten ourselves into a bit of a mess. How were we going to escape these men? How were we going to get out of Queens?”116 Janet said the cavalry appeared in the form of a Mademoiselle chaperone (Leo Lerman’s assistant), who had been sent out to Queens by Blackwell when she heard about the girls’ plans. The two piled into the front seat of his convertible, and together they drove back to Manhattan.

  Sylvia would fit in two more dates before she left New York. On Thursday night, she went out with Ilo Pill; on Friday, her last day in the city, she rode the Staten Island Ferry with Ray Wunderlich, the Columbia medical student who had treated her to champagne and oysters two months before. That day, Ray recalled, Sylvia was “ashamed because she had met indomitable things that she could not conquer, things that were conquering her. She felt that she should be better than that.”117 Sylvia had met unconquerable things in New York—callous men, inscrutable editors, work that bored her. The experience was supposed to have been the pinnacle of her year—her life, even—yet she had been disillusioned at every turn. Plath never met any of the literary luminaries who descended on Mademoiselle’s halls, like Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, and—her biggest regret—Dylan Thomas. Each time he had visited the office, she was out. She was upset that she had not been able to interview him for the “We Hitch Our Wagons” segment—that plum assignment had gone to the guest fiction editor, Candy Bolster. Neva Nelson remembered hearing that Sylvia hung around the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, where Thomas eventually drank himself to death. “Sylvia was ready to move heaven and high water to see him.”118 After the St. Regis dance, Sylvia commandeered Carol to keep vigil with her outside Thomas’s room at the Chelsea Hotel.119 But Thomas never showed up. He should have been accessible. Abels, who published Under Milk Wood in Mademoiselle in 1954, considered him a personal friend, but Plath was probably too intimidated to ask Abels for an introduction. She had failed at this, too. Crockett later recalled that Plath had sent him an uncharacteristically disconcerting letter in late June. One line stayed with him: “You’ll never want to see me again, Mr. Crockett, I’ve let you down.”120

  On Sunday, June 21, Sylvia wrote a dark, bracing letter to Warren. The bright, cheerful “Sivvy” was stressed and fraying. “I just today felt: heavens, I haven’t thought about who I am or where I come from for days. It is abominably hot in NYC…the humidity is staggering, and I am perishing for the clean unsooted greenness of our backyard.” She would not be able to “comprehend” what had happened to her in New York until she came home to “sleep and sleep and play tennis and get tan again….I am worn out now, with the strenuous days at the office and the heat and the evenings out.” She admitted that she had been “horribly depressed” as well as “ecstatic,” and the mood swings left her feeling wrung out. She was “soot-stained, grubby, weary,” and clung to her brother’s anchor:

  I love you a million times more than any of these slick ad-men, these hucksters, these wealthy beasts who get drunk in foreign accents all the time….Smith seems like a simple enchanting bucolic existence compared to the dry, humid, breathless wasteland of the cliffdwellers, where the people are, as D. H. Lawrence wrote of his society “dead brilliant galls on the tree of life.” By contrast, the good few friends I have seems [sic] like clear-icewater after a very strong scalding martini.

  As for her arrival: “I will let you know what train my coffin will come in on.” And her things: “All I have needs washing, bleaching, airing.” This was the language of depression—Sylvia was telling Warren she felt dirty and corrupted, that she needed “bleaching, airing.” Yet her pain was such that she spoke out of code at her letter’s end, admitting the depth of her psychological distress: “oh God, it is unbelievable to think of all this at once…my mind will split open.”121

  On June 26, her last day, the guest editors picked up their final checks and left the Mademoiselle offices early. Neva met Sylvia in the Barbizon hallway after she emerged from the elevator. Sylvia was “in the midst of offering clothes” to Janet, and offered some to Neva as well. Neva did not find anything strange or dramatic about the gesture. “We jokingly told her that we’d take some of hers if she’d take some of ours (we were all so sick of wearing the same few outfits for the entire month).”122 Carol remembered riding the elevator up to the roof with Plath that night and watching her toss clothes into the wind. “Sylvia and I were together and ready to cast off the look we’d been expected to maintain for a month.”123 But Carol said that she and Sylvia had tossed mainly their “girdles and waist-cinchers,” which had caused them “misery.” She noted that neither she nor Sylvia would have dared cast off their expensive outfits: “the money to pay for those clothes would have been hard earned and the dresses and gloves needed for job interviews.”124 (Carol’s memory helps explain why Aurelia always maintained that the event never happened, and that Sylvia came home with her main wardrobe intact.) Sylvia would imbue this scene with somber symbolism in The Bell Jar, but Carol remembered it as a more “giddy” affair. “We were laughing. All this absurd phony fun we were having was over….I didn’t see it as Sylvia throwing off a false self. It was just fun—a ‘good-bye to all that’ sort of thing.”125 Neva recalled, “I heard later from Jan that Sylvia had gone up to the roof and was throwing her clothes to the wind, all a grand, funny gesture to the rest of us….Sylvia was upbeat in doing this and was glad to have the whole ordeal over with.”126 Plath was shedding the corsets—literal and figurative—that had circumscribed her life that month.

  Earlier that day, when Sylvia and Janet were trading clothes, Janet had offered her “anything she liked.” Sylvia made a curious choice—“a green dirndl skirt, and a peasant-style blouse in white eyelet.”127 (Sylvia gave Janet her green-striped bathrobe in exchange.) This girlish outfit was the type Sylvia had told her mother, in letters home, that she had outgrown. Her choice may have had something to do with the previous day’s excursions. In the morning, she watched models strut around in animal-print lingerie at the Warner corset fashion show and luncheon at the Vanity Fair showroom on 200 Madison Avenue. After the show, the guest editors were invited backstage to try on the bras and corsets. Neva remembered how Carol “pranced around” in her panties and a white merry widow corset, and, after some “negotiations,” secured merry widows for all.128 Sylvia then headed to the Pauline Trigère fashion show at the designer’s Seventh Avenue atelier. There, she saw the best that New York offered in haute couture—long, narrow
sheaths of crepe and grosgrain on impossibly tall, lithe models. Sylvia would never be able to afford such gowns, nor did she have the perfectly proportioned body of a fashion model. After the Trigère event, she attended two more fashion shows—Horwitz & Duberman on Seventh Avenue and Charles James at the Sherry-Netherland Hotel. Cocktails accompanied both. All told, Plath saw four fashion shows that day. The next day, she threw her girdles off the roof of the Barbizon Hotel and donned, instead, a Heidi ensemble that evoked alpine innocence. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood would not change out of this outfit for three weeks.

  11

  The Hanging Man

  Wellesley, July–August 1953

  When Aurelia and Grammy Schober met Sylvia at the Route 128 station on Saturday, June 27, they were shocked to find her exhausted, hollow-eyed, and wearing borrowed clothes. Plath’s month in New York had left her reeling and disoriented, and she was too tired to put up a front. “New York: pain, parties, work,” she wrote in her journal. “And Gary and ptomaine—and José the cruel Peruvian and Carol vomiting outside the door all over the floor—and interviews for TV shows, & competition, and beautiful models and Miss Abels….And now this: shock. Utter nihilistic shock.”1