Red Comet

by Heather Clark

  Aurelia knew something was very wrong, and “dreaded” telling her daughter that she had not been admitted into Frank O’Connor’s creative writing class at Harvard Summer School. She downplayed the news, “casually” mentioning that the class was full and that Sylvia would have to wait until the following summer to register. Aurelia looked into the rear-view mirror and saw the color drain from Sylvia’s face. The “look of shock and utter despair that passed over it alarmed me,” she later wrote. “Sylvia was too demanding of herself.”2

  Plath had submitted “Sunday at the Mintons,” her most successful story, to O’Connor, but it had not earned her a seat at his table. (O’Connor later said that Plath’s writing had been too advanced for his introductory-level class.)3 Now she was filled with doubt and self-reproach. She admonished herself for basing Henry on Dick Norton in such an obvious way, as if O’Connor’s rejection were punishment for a moral lapse. It had been a cruel thing to do, she told her mother. Years later, Aurelia speculated that Sylvia experienced similar “emotional recoil” after the publication of The Bell Jar, which also painted a humiliating portrait of Dick.4

  Sylvia had assumed she would spend her summer writing stories for O’Connor that she could sell. Now she considered taking a Harvard summer course in elementary psychology, but she worried that the course’s tuition would leave her with little money for her senior year. In her journal she wrote that she heard “the little man in my head mocking: is this worth it, worth it, worth it, this course for $250, while your mother does all the work at home.” It may have been Mildred Norton’s voice she heard. Sylvia did not want to give Dick’s mother the satisfaction of proving her correct, and she worried that Smith might reduce her scholarship if she did not earn anything all summer. After much internal debate, Sylvia decided to spend her summer writing creatively at home, learning shorthand from Aurelia and doing preliminary research on her James Joyce thesis. She would tell Smith she had “worked for the month of June, and took free shorthand for the rest of the summer. Logically, this is a much more politic thing to do.”5

  Sylvia had suffered a mild depression the previous summer after she had returned to Wellesley from the Belmont, and she was nervous about the bell jar descending again. Routine and discipline were the keys, she felt, to stability. “I will have to be cheerful and constructive, and schedule my day much harder than if at Harvard. I will learn about shopping and cooking, and try to make mother’s vacation happy and good.”6 But she also admitted fear of paralysis. Her July journal is full of self-reproach; she called herself “an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled Baby.”7 She wrote this entry on the back of her July letter to Columbia asking for more information about their graduate program. Plath drew a large slash through the letter, as if remonstrating herself for her high ambitions.8

  Sylvia told Marcia, who was already working in Cambridge and enrolled at Harvard Summer School, that she would not be living with her after all. What she needed—or so everyone thought—was rest. But almost immediately, she knew she had made the wrong decision. “You are an inconsistent and very frightened hypocrite: you wanted time to think, to find out about yourself, your ability to write, and now that you have it: practically 3 months of godawful time, you are paralyzed, shocked, thrown into a nausea, a stasis.”9 At the same time, her calendar from early July 1953 shows that she was able to function socially. Gordon Lameyer said he saw Sylvia every day before he left for naval training camp in Rhode Island in mid-July. He had no idea she was suffering from depression and insomnia.10 She picnicked along the Charles River with Marcia, visited New Hampshire with the Lameyers, and played tennis. But after Gordon left, the cracks that had appeared during her first few days at home widened. Her normally healthy appetite disappeared, and sleep became elusive. She wrote in her journal on July 6 that she felt “sick in the head,” and was disturbed by her fantasies of “razors and self-wounds & going out and ending it all.” On July 14 she wrote of her visions of herself “in a straight jacket, and a drain on the family,” “murdering your mother in actuality.” “Thesis panic” set in, and with it, the most paralyzing anxiety of all: “Fear of failing to live up to the fast & furious prize-winning pace of these last years—and any kind of creative life.”11

  Sylvia had other reasons to worry. In late July, Aurelia wrote to Marcia about the “state-of-emergency tension” in the house when Sylvia had arrived home in late June. Grammy was seriously ill and had almost died, she wrote, but had recovered. Aurelia’s “old ulcer” also flared up again, and she was given doctor’s orders to rest. Otherwise she would have to undergo a “serious and costly” surgery. Aurelia told Marcia that Sylvia had decided not to go to Harvard Summer School “for her,” though she mentioned that Sylvia had been upset by some “big disappointments” that summer. She implored Marcia not to talk too much about her own exciting experiences at Harvard lest she make Sylvia jealous.12

  Sylvia revealed nothing of these crises in her breezy letters to Gordon that July, which were full of Joycean puns, wisecracks, and questions about naval life. (“And do tell me if there are any Captain Queegs about your station, will ya, huh?”)13 She was more forthright in her letters to Dick, who told her he was disturbed by the “intense unrest” of her July letters.14 He wondered if “accomplishing great things” while living “quietly at home” was the best way for her to spend her summer.15

  Learning shorthand quickly became Sylvia’s justification for staying at home. A woman at the Smith vocational office had told her she should learn it—“a practical skill” that would give her greater “bargaining power” after she graduated.16 She and Aurelia began the lessons for an hour each morning, but learning this abstruse language was an exercise in futility that exacerbated Sylvia’s sense of failure. She was unable to master the small squibbles “that blurred into senselessness,” as she later wrote in The Bell Jar. There, shorthand symbolized the soft bigotry of low expectations for women in the 1950s. “There wasn’t one job I felt like doing where you used shorthand,” Esther says. “If I never learned shorthand I would never have to use it.”17 Aurelia later castigated herself for attempting the lessons, which she says lasted only four days.18 But she would bristle at Plath’s suggestion, in The Bell Jar, that she had insisted on them. This, she said, was “the biggest lie.”19

  Sylvia turned to her senior thesis. She had a brilliant academic reputation to maintain; naturally, she had chosen James Joyce’s Ulysses. She approached her task with a determination to prove that she was capable of entering the citadel of male modernism. Her Joyce notebook from Smith shows she was well equipped to do so: she had taken extensive, sophisticated notes on Ulysses in Elizabeth Drew’s Twentieth Century British Literature class, where she received an excellent and thorough introduction to the novel’s major themes, symbols, and motifs.20 Her classmate Nora Johnson remembered that Sylvia “could stripsearch Ulysses and make all the mythological connections without batting an eye.”21 Yet reading and writing about this notoriously difficult novel was probably the worst recuperative task Plath could have set herself. Instead of bolstering her confidence in her own abilities, explicating Joyce made her feel incapable. In The Bell Jar, Esther writes of her frustration upon reading Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:

  Lifting the pages of the book, I let them fan slowly by my eyes. Words, dimly familiar but twisted all awry, like faces in a funhouse mirror, fled past, leaving no impression on the glassy surface of my brain.

  I squinted at the page.

  The letters grew barbs and rams’ horns. I watched them separate, each from the other, and jiggle up and down in a silly way. Then they associated themselves in fantastic, untranslatable shapes, like Arabic or Chinese.

  I decided to junk my thesis.22

  Plath condensed and exaggerated in her fiction what was a longer, less dramatic, struggle in her real life. Many commentators have assumed that she was no longer able to read or write coherently that July because that i
s what Esther implies in The Bell Jar. (“I can’t sleep. I can’t read,” Esther tells her family doctor.)23 Yet Sylvia was writing lucid, humorous letters to Gordon and Dick throughout July about Joyce, the very topic that stifles Esther’s reading and writing. Gordon and Dick had both read Ulysses, and Sylvia approached them as if they were literary authorities on the subject. She asked Gordon whether he thought anything new could be said: “from your more advanced point of view, do you think the idea of a thesis on Joyce is really plausible. I thought so before I began outside reading—now I wonder.”24 Gordon ignored Sylvia’s questions about Joyce in his reply, telling her about his new life in the Navy instead. Later, after Plath had attempted suicide, he realized he should have placated her fears about Joyce. In September he finally wrote her a long letter admitting that he, too, found Joyce difficult.

  Dick, still ensconced on his own Magic Mountain, was only too happy to parry about Joyce. He immediately reread Ulysses, and found himself humbled again by Joyce’s wit and semantic powers. He encouraged Sylvia to forge ahead with her thesis plans: “i [sic] am totally weak, worshipping, wondering and wideyed [sic] at the genius of James Joyce….Are you really going to study that novel next year for your thesis? Because i [sic] think it is superbly suited to research and suited to you too.” He even compared Plath’s writing favorably to Joyce’s. When she continued to express her doubts, he suggested that perhaps she might limit her thesis to Portrait or Dubliners. “But then again there comes the suspicion that there must be an unexplored area in Ulysses, be it ever so small. go [sic] and read over your favorite parts of the book and hunt in the keys hopefully to turn up an explanation that they have not given. but [sic] above all, comment [sic] thy soul to the One which made Heaven and Earth.”25

  Plath’s inability to understand James Joyce that summer was not the reason for her depression, but rather a symptom of it; she was the top English student at Smith and perfectly capable of analyzing Ulysses. Her Joyce troubles seem to have been wound up with her larger worries about integrating her literary ambition with a traditional feminine role. Explicating the most difficult novel of the twentieth century was a man’s game in 1953. And if Joyce was partly responsible for Plath’s breakdown, he was equally responsible for her resurrection. Eight years after nearly dying during the summer of 1953, she would transform her personal tragedy into turbulent, page-turning drama in The Bell Jar—her subversive take on Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Plath’s own Künstlerroman is darkly ironic, for it is Esther’s attempt to write a thesis on Joyce’s work that helps trigger her breakdown, while the novel itself was Plath’s way of announcing that she had assimilated Joyce’s forms in groundbreaking ways—even as Joyce’s words throw her fictional protagonist into mental chaos.

  In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce famously wrote, “When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight.”26 Joyce’s words held a particular truth for American women in the Eisenhower era. When Plath read Portrait in Elizabeth Drew’s Twentieth Century British Literature class in the spring of 1953, she enthusiastically underlined, in red pencil, quotes and themes about Stephen Dedalus’s rejection of authority and artistic dedication, including his famous non serviam: “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church.”27 Yet in The Bell Jar, Stephen’s triumphant rejection becomes Esther’s failed protest. His rebellion from oppressive cultural monoliths results in a new life; hers in a suicide attempt. There is no lighting out for the territory for women, Plath seems to say, no way to forge anew the conscience of the race using those famous Joycean weapons of “silence, exile and cunning.”28

  Like Stephen Dedalus, Esther, too, is a traitor to those forces that have shaped her; like the Rosenbergs, she is punished for rejecting American values. Yet Plath suggests that Esther’s sick society—warmongering, anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, classist, and homophobic—has driven her to the brink of insanity. If her mind was maladjusted, so was the world in which she lived. Esther enacts her own non serviam when she throws her wardrobe off the roof of the Amazon Hotel, freeing herself from literal and metaphorical corsets. When Buddy quotes his mother (the character based on Mildred Norton) saying, “What a man is is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from,” Esther counters: “I wanted change and excitement and to shoot off in all directions myself, like the colored arrows from a Fourth of July rocket.”29 (In “Ariel,” Plath would write, “And I / Am the arrow.”) This passage is Plath’s sly take on Joyce’s famous quotation, in Portrait, about the oppressive religious and cultural “nets” flung at the soul to “hold it back from flight.” Plath, too, wanted to fly.

  That July, after O’Connor’s rejection and her stalled attempt at Ulysses, she worried that these failures would dictate her entire future, and that she might never write again. Aurelia noticed that her daughter’s “joie de vivre” was gone.30 Even neighbors noticed the change. Peter Aldrich, who lived across the street from the Plaths, had the sense of her “being distracted.” “She was not the kind of smiling girl I was used to.”31 Pat O’Neil went swimming with Sylvia at Lake Waban after she returned from New York and was shocked by her friend’s appearance. Sylvia’s face was broken out, she was far too thin, and her eyes were “positively dogged.” She seemed filled with “utter exhaustion.” Pat had to convince her to go out to the raft, only a few feet offshore. “She was just too tired to swim….mentally staggering from the avalanche that had hit her.” When they made it out, Sylvia sat on the undulating raft, looking down at her legs in the water, and opened up about her feelings of inadequacy. “Do you know the truth, Pat?” she said. “I have sat in my room with my paper, and my mind is a big blank.” She whispered the last two words. “I’m blank,” she whispered again. “People think I have this great writing power and that the images just pour out, and the fact is my mind is blank.” Sylvia’s voice became small and pained. “How can I go back?” She said she couldn’t sleep. “I keep seeing that moon go up; I keep seeing that moon go down.”

  Pat thought she understood. Sylvia had gone to New York “with a complete hunger to find out about life, just rushing to it, like a windstorm. It had hit her with the pace and the commercialism that she really was not prepared for….at one moment she turned to me and she said, ‘If Mr. Crockett only knew the ways of compromising yourself.’ (Crockett had always emphasized the high ideals of the artist.) And when she said that, I thought on how many levels she’d probably been crushed….by the commercial aspect of the writing, and by the sales and high pressure….the chromium-plated relationships….It was just a level of life that was being carried on to the clink of money, to the pressure of time and to the power of what people could get out of you.”32 Marcia had a similar sense when she saw Sylvia that July. Sylvia told her that her time in New York “had shaken her to her very foundations about hypocrisy and surface-glamour and people who were exploitative.” She said she was “tremendously tired” and “had this profound problem of not being able to write.”33

  Aurelia encouraged Sylvia to relax, as she had been working at a furious pace all year. “At home, she would sunbathe, always with a book in hand, but never reading it. After days of this, she finally began to talk to me, pouring out an endless stream of self-deprecation, self-accusation. She had no goal, she said. As she couldn’t read with comprehension anymore, much less write creatively, what was she going to do with her life? She had injured her friends, ‘let down’ her sponsors—she went on and on.”34 Sylvia’s despondent journal entry from July 14 dovetails with Aurelia’s account: “please, think—snap out of this. Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind. You must not seek escape like this. You must think.”35 This entry, followed by twelve blank pages, was Plath’s last known journal entry unt
il 1955.36

  Aurelia later recalled that the only book Sylvia had “really read during the weeks before her suicide attempt was Freud’s Abnormal Psychology.”37 This book was not by Freud, but rather a collection of essays, Modern Abnormal Psychology. Plath made marginal markings on 235 of the book’s 880 pages. E. W. Lazell’s essay, “Schizophrenia,” is more marked up than any other in the collection, especially a section in which Plath likened her summer in New York City to the symptoms of schizophrenia. H. M. Graumann’s “Disorders in Perception and Imagery” is also heavily marked.38

  On July 14, Aurelia noticed red razor gashes on her daughter’s legs. “Upon my horrified questioning, she replied, ‘I just wanted to see if I had the guts!’ Then she grasped my hand—hers was burning hot to the touch—and cried passionately, ‘Oh, Mother, the world is so rotten! I want to die! Let’s die together!”39 July 14 was right after Gordon left for naval training camp.40 This was the date of her disturbing journal entry in which she wrote about killing her mother and herself. Aurelia suspected that her daughter was in free fall and immediately called the family doctor, Francesca Racioppi, a young mother of three whom Sylvia trusted. Dr. Racioppi saw Plath on July 15, and referred her to a young local psychiatrist, Dr. J. Peter Thornton.

  The next day, July 16, Sylvia began volunteering for four hours each morning at Newton-Wellesley Hospital.41 The idea was likely Aurelia’s. (In The Bell Jar, Esther performs voluntary hospital work after her shock treatments. “My mother said the cure for thinking too much about yourself was helping somebody who was worse off than you.”)42 Sylvia called herself a “nurses’ aide” in a July 23 letter to Gordon: “the environment is very new and intriguing, while, of course being very sobering at times.” She told him she had fed dying patients. “I never realized or paused to think about the side of the world where the people are reaching the other end of the line: senility, even death.” Sylvia was repulsed by sickness, and attending to those near death—including her old art teacher, Miss Hazelton—upset her deeply. Small details from her letter suggest the contours of nightmare: “The little woman who cries all the time and takes only liquids dies and is wheeled away rapidly. Mongoloid babies are born along with the other ones. There are whispered consultations in the halls, cautions to say nothing specific to the mothers.”43 Plath was in no condition to be ministering to chronically ill patients in a position that she understood was a cure—or rather a punishment—for self-pity.