Aurelia told Dr. Beuscher that Dr. Tillotson, who had sessions with Sylvia from August 10–22, thought Sylvia’s “problem was a sexual one and questioned her extensively about that part of her life….He had numerous interviews with her and told her this was the nature of the problem.” (This line of questioning came from a psychiatrist who was dismissed from his previous position for sexual misconduct.) Aurelia did not believe Tillotson’s diagnosis, and felt her daughter’s problems had more to do with academic pressures at Smith. Aurelia was so aggrieved by Tillotson’s “sexual” line of questioning that she “insisted” upon attending Sylvia’s August 21 appointment with him. Aurelia felt that her understanding of Sylvia’s crisis was “vindicated” during this session.81 In the wake of these emotional intrusions, Sylvia’s depression worsened.
The following day, Saturday, August 22, Sylvia joined two friends on a double date with Dick Linden,82 who later told Gordon, his fellow Navy sailor on the USS Perry, that he, Sylvia, and another couple—likely Marcia Brown and Mike Plumer—had been at the beach that day, and that Sylvia had “been probing them about the best way to commit suicide.”83 That night the two couples went dancing at the Meadows restaurant in Framingham.
Plath later wrote about this day in The Bell Jar, where Esther and Cal (based on Mel Woody) discuss Ibsen’s play Ghosts—about a young man suffering from syphilis who asks his mother to kill him before he descends into madness—and the best ways to commit suicide. Esther tries to drown herself in the sea, but her body will not capitulate. Mel Woody thought the scene was based on the earlier summer day he spent at Nahant Beach in 1951 with Sylvia and Marcia during the summer they worked as nannies. On that day Sylvia had complained about her writing block; he had read her Rilke’s sonnet, and she had swum dangerously far out. The episode in The Bell Jar actually seems a composite of both the 1951 and 1953 beach days. Sylvia later told Eddie she had tried to drown herself shortly before she attempted suicide in 1953, but that “The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.”84
She made a more determined attempt to end her life two days later, on Monday, August 24. Aurelia described Sylvia that day as “extremely upset and confused,” and she herself as “also distraught.”85 Seeking relief from emotional turmoil, Aurelia accompanied a friend into Boston that afternoon to see a documentary about Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, A Queen Is Crowned, at the Exeter Street Theatre. She wrote that Sylvia had encouraged her to go and that she had “looked particularly well,” with a sparkle in her eyes and a new “buoyancy.” Aurelia worried that the cheerfulness was “contrived” but decided to go anyway.86 Warren was at work, but Sylvia’s grandparents were home. Aurelia assumed that her daughter would be safe in their company.
She was wrong. After Aurelia left the house, Grammy and Grampy retreated to the backyard. Alone, Sylvia broke into her mother’s safe and removed the bottle of fifty sleeping pills Dr. Tillotson had prescribed for her. She wrote a note in longhand saying, “Have gone for a long walk. Will be home tomorrow,” which she propped against a bowl of flowers on the dining room table. She then made her way to the crawl space in the basement, whose entrance was hidden behind a pile of firewood. After hoisting herself inside, she carefully replaced the logs, one by one. She later told Eddie, “I swallowed quantities and blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion.”87 Plath swallowed about forty pills before she lost consciousness.
At the theater, Aurelia, with a mother’s intuition, began to break into a cold, terrified sweat. She sensed something was wrong at home. “I wanted to get out of my seat and rush from the theater. I forced myself to remain quiet until the close, then begged my friend to drive me home at once.” Aurelia probably saw the 2:10 showing, and would have returned to the house around four p.m. She waited until five thirty before she called the police and reported Sylvia missing. The Wellesley police records from that day described Plath as wearing a “blue denim skirt, blouse and jersey.” “This girl depressed,” the officer noted in his handwritten notes.88
Austrian stoicism offered no protection from this “nightmare of nightmares.” The house erupted into chaos—Grampy cried while Grammy admonished Aurelia for leaving Sylvia alone, saying they had no idea she was “so ill.”89 Aurelia and Warren ventured into Boston in the heavy rain on the night of the twenty-fourth, along with Colonel Rex Gary, a family friend and former Army intelligence staffer. They hoped to find Sylvia at “one of her favorite haunts,” the Boston Common or the Public Garden.90 They returned home soaked and panicked. When Aurelia checked her safe at six forty-five the next morning, August 25, she saw that the sleeping pills were gone. “It doesn’t look good,” the Wellesley chief of police told the Boston Herald—a quote Plath later used in The Bell Jar.91 Aurelia called the Wellesley police at 6:46 a.m. The log reads: “she finds a bottle containing sleeping pills missing and feels sure her daughter must of taken them with her.”92 The family also found a note in Sylvia’s desk outlining what she felt were her inadequacies. Pat remembered its contents. “There was just a sheet of these things: ‘I’m guilty of letting down Mr. X at Smith College….I’m guilty of letting down the people who sponsored me for this editorship; I am guilty of letting down the best that’s within me; I am guilty of compromising my writing.’ ”93
That day more than one hundred friends, neighbors, and a local Explorer Scout troop combed the woods and trails behind Elmwood Road, as well as the area around Lake Waban, the Dover Road, and the Sudbury River aqueduct. (A newspaper photo of a small search party, which appeared in the Boston Traveler on August 26, was among Plath’s papers in England when she died.) Colonel Gary helped organize the search along with the Wellesley, Boston, and Cambridge police; Warren diligently recorded the searched areas on a map at home.94 Bloodhounds were deployed, but because of the heavy rain they were unable to pick up the scent. Chief McBey searched all the garages and buildings within a one-block radius of Plath’s home. After Plath was found, McBey claimed that he “thought” he had searched Plath’s cellar on Monday night, and speculated that she may have entered the cellar after they searched it.95 Neighbors gathered at the Unitarian church to pray and support Aurelia.96 Louise Giesey White and Betsy Powley Wallingford remembered that Pat O’Neil virtually “moved in” to Elmwood Road so that she could help the family.97 Max Gaebler also came to the house on that first day to help. When he arrived, the Unitarian minister William Rice was there; he took Max aside and told him he “feared the worst.” After the minister left, Max sat with the family looking through photographs in an album, “recalling incidents from the past the way one does when someone dies, trying to reinforce whatever shreds of realistic hope we could identify.”98 Aurelia was increasingly shattered. Pat recalled, “it was as if she were dying, truly.” Mrs. Cantor came to comfort Aurelia, saying over and over, “We shall find Sylvia. We shall find her. She is alive.” Aurelia clung to her and prayed with her.99
The “Beautiful Smith Girl Missing at Wellesley” was front-page, tabloid news in the Boston papers and beyond. An astonishing 253 newspaper articles published about Plath’s disappearance that August appeared as far afield as Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, and Florida.100 Stories about Plath’s disappearance also aired on the television news.101 Most of these articles emphasized her beauty first and her brilliance second. Aurelia reported that her daughter had been wearing a summer skirt and sleeveless top the day she went missing, but The Boston Globe reported on August 26 that the “attractive girl” was “clad only in a strapless halter and abbreviated shorts.”102 Enid Epstein’s mother cut one of these articles out of a New York newspaper and sent it to the American Express office in Paris, where her daughter was traveling with Judith Raymo. (Judith had known Sylvia at Smith, though not as well as Enid.) When Enid opened the envelope and read the news, she burst into tears. To them, Sylvia was the golden girl, completely in command of her
destiny and the last person on earth who would try to end her life.103 Plath would later be amused to find herself a media sensation; she kept at least four of these newspaper clippings, which she brought to England and which would inspire the image of the “peanut-crunching crowd” thrilled by suicide in “Lady Lazarus.”
The media frenzy traumatized Aurelia, a deeply private woman who had tried to banish tragedy from the family lexicon. Now her competence as a mother was suspect. Over and over, she told the papers that her daughter had suffered from “nervous exhaustion” on account of her inability to do creative work. “There was no question of a boy in the case,” she emphasized.104 (Reporters corroborated Aurelia’s explanation by pointing out Sylvia’s outstanding academic reputation at Smith.)
During her days at Elmwood Road, Pat found a family disoriented from grief. As the hours ticked by with no leads, Grammy and Grampy Schober seemed fixated on their next meal, in a state of denial and in a world “unto themselves.” Their numbed state troubled Pat. Aurelia, too, seemed to be withdrawing.
On August 26, the family was at the table trying miserably to eat lunch. Pat was ironing, making herself useful. Suddenly they heard a beagle howling right outside the house. Warren pounded the table and said, “Dammit, I’m going to get rid of that dog. I just can’t stand it.” He stood up to go outside and chase the dog, when, Pat said, “it struck him and all of us at the same instant that the dog was trying to tell us something. We all zoomed into the basement.”105 Warren found Sylvia in the crawl space. She had taken too many pills and vomited them up. “Call the ambulance!” he shouted up to them.
According to the Wellesley police report, the station received a call at 12:40 reporting that Plath had been found and requesting an ambulance. Soon paramedics, along with Chief McBey, had Plath on a stretcher and on her way to Newton-Wellesley Hospital, where she had volunteered just a few weeks before.106 Sylvia had cut her skin under her right eye when she woke and banged her face; it had become infected in the August heat. (A friend of Aurelia’s, Richard Larschan, said Aurelia told him there had been maggots—another detail that Plath used in “Lady Lazarus.”)107 Sylvia told Ellie Friedman, a few months later, that the cut was not accidental. “She talked about waking up and finding herself still alive and trying to do anything she could to kill herself….She just kept smashing her head against the stone. She only succeeded in knocking herself out.”108
Doctors treated the infection aggressively and stabilized Sylvia, whose first words on awakening, Aurelia said, were, “Oh no!”109 Sylvia later told Eddie about waking up in the hospital, the “nightmare of flashing lights, strange voices, large needles, an overpowering conviction that I was blind in one eye, and a hatred toward the people who would not let me die, but insisted rather in dragging me back into the hell of sordid and meaningless existence.”110 Aurelia told her daughter she was loved, and how happy the family was to have her back. Sylvia answered, “It was my last act of love.”111
Sylvia recovered from her infection but became more emotionally withdrawn over the eight days she spent at Newton-Wellesley. Gordon Lameyer recalled that one of the first things Sylvia asked Aurelia when she awoke was whether they still owned the house. For the next few days she made “frantic inquiries” about the cost of her medical care. “Sylvia is retreating inwardly,” Aurelia wrote to Mrs. Prouty on August 29. “Her speech and comprehension has slowed down—I am thoroughly frightened.”112 The threat of ending up in a state hospital after her family’s money had run out had helped drive Sylvia to suicide in the first place. Now that threat was playing out in real time as she lay in her hospital bed, worrying that she would be locked away in a padded cell forever.
Prouty suspected as much. Aurelia had admitted to her at dinner in July that Sylvia had been “depressed” “all summer” “due to her inability to write, concentrate, and accomplish mental work in connection with her senior thesis.”113 Prouty had written to Plath on August 22 from her summer enclave in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, hoping that she was “feeling better.” Now she telegrammed Aurelia on August 26: “HAVE JUST LEARNED SYLVIA HAS BEEN FOUND AND IS RECOVERING AT HOSPITAL I WANT TO HELP AM WRITING.”114 Her offer of help was a godsend. Aurelia wrote to her on August 29 with “all details” Prouty had asked for. Sylvia had been treated by Drs. Thornton and Tillotson, but Aurelia had been frustrated by what she considered their lack of insight: “honestly, no one of these men seemed to realize that, while like everyone else, Sylvia’s life held many yet unsolved problems, the anxiety about college was uppermost. Nor did they know—or believe—that she confided wholly in me about her longing for marriage, children, home, security—as well as her burning desire to develop herself to the utmost intellectually.” She told Mrs. Prouty that the daughter of a friend “had had a breakdown necessitating four years of commitment” that left her parents “completely poverty stricken.” Sylvia had sought to end her life “for one reason—to spare us long anguish and expense.”115
Dr. Tillotson had left for his vacation the previous week and had not referred Plath to anyone in his absence. He did not attempt to communicate with Aurelia after Sylvia went missing, or, indeed, after she was found. As Aurelia told Prouty three days after Sylvia was found, “we have no psychiatric help at present.”116 She resorted to contacting her Unitarian minister, Reverend William Rice, who knew one of the most prominent psychiatrists in Boston, Dr. Erich Lindemann, a Wellesley resident who had collaborated with Rice in various community service efforts.117 Rice arranged for Dr. Lindemann to see Plath in three days’ time, on the following Tuesday, September 1. Dr. Tillotson, who had seemed so “fatherly,” abandoned his patient during the worst crisis of her life and left her distraught family to jury-rig psychiatric care.
Aurelia wanted her daughter to rest and recuperate in Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, at a friend’s summer home under the care of a private nurse. She wrote Smith’s president, Benjamin Wright, that she had become disillusioned with psychiatrists. Wright responded that she was right to be “very wary of that profession,” and that he had observed “a number of examples of mistreatment.”118 Aurelia told Prouty that she feared the “detrimental effect” the “locked doors and other patients” of a mental hospital would have on her “sensitive Sylvia.” Dr. Racioppi, who saw “no trace of psychosis” in Sylvia, had approved the Provincetown plan, but Aurelia would await Dr. Lindemann’s verdict. “I believe Sylvia needs most quiet, sunshine, exercise in increasing measure, and the reassurance of love.”119
There was another reason Aurelia wanted to avoid a mental hospital: cost. She had listened to the doctors before, and the outcome had been disastrous. Her minister, Aurelia told Mrs. Prouty, “was not impressed” with the Provincetown plan. “He just said, ‘Wait and see what Lindemann says.’ I have never met Lindemann and do not know anything about his fees.” She had an “emergency fund” of $600, which she hoped would cover the expenses at Newton-Wellesley Hospital. “That is just how far I dare let myself think. It has been the pride all my life to stand on my own feet and manage for my family with my own earnings, but this now is larger and more complex than I can handle or even understand.” Her gross income, she told Prouty, was $3,900 a year. “This is a nervous breakdown—the one illness I several times jokingly said that we could not afford to have.”120 She told Prouty she would humbly and gratefully accept any help she could give. Prouty quickly reassured her that she would cover the Newton-Wellesley bill and would try to arrange further psychiatric care at her expense. “No illness is so hard for the family of the patient, so difficult to deal with wisely, and no suffering is so deep for the one afflicted,” Prouty wrote Aurelia. “I speak from experience.”121
Prouty thought the Provincetown plan was “excellent—at least as a first step,” but she encouraged Aurelia to consult a “wise doctor who has had experience with a nervous breakdown such as hers.” Prouty sympathized with Aurelia’s desire to keep her “sensitive child” out of a me
ntal hospital, but she herself had benefited from the care of a psychiatrist in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where she “went to get away from home and too much solicitation and care from those dearest to me. Like Sylvia I felt I had become a burden and wanted to get away to relieve them.” Prouty asked her own psychiatrist, Dr. Donald McPherson, to consult with Dr. Lindemann, though she immediately advised that Plath stay at Silver Hill Hospital in Connecticut, “a delightful country-club-appearing place, beautifully furnished with no suggestion of a sanitarium inside or out….The ‘guests’ are of a carefully selected group.”122 Prouty hinted that she could pull strings so Plath’s stay might be free; if not, she hinted that she would pay for her care. When Aurelia told Sylvia about Mrs. Prouty’s offer, Sylvia replied, “That is hard to realize,” but she no longer asked about the cost of her medical care.123 Aurelia felt that the news gave her daughter some relief.
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Sylvia’s professors were horrified when they learned that their star student had tried to kill herself. They blamed themselves for missing the signs of her depression. Plath had sent Elizabeth Drew a long letter by special delivery that summer about her plan to change her thesis topic, and Drew now deeply regretted the short reply she had sent. “Had I known…that you were in a mood of despair about your creative work too, of course I should have written at much greater length, & told you how little cause you had to worry & that that is all part of the business of being creative & finely strung,” Drew wrote Plath on August 28, two days after she was found. “You are by far the best student in English in the College, & you don’t have to strain to be. You could do it standing on your head or in your sleep! I suspect that you were pushing yourself much too hard in the spring….You just burnt yourself out for a spell.”124 Evelyn Page wrote similarly to Plath on August 29, reassuring her that she would overcome this black period and apologizing for not having spoken to her “at greater length about the strains and tensions of writing.”125 Both women told Sylvia about their own battles with depression. Robert Gorham Davis wrote to Aurelia on August 27, telling her to assure her daughter that “plenty of people have been through such crises, and come out of them strengthened.”126 All hoped that Sylvia would return to Smith and graduate.
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