Red Comet

by Heather Clark

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  Sylvia flew from Boston to New York on March 28 with an overstuffed suitcase and Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Ilo met her at LaGuardia Airport, and his aunt’s “roué escort” drove them back to the Pills’ “dark, dingy 3rd floor walkup” in an Estonian section of Harlem.51 The family prepared a “ceremonial dinner” for Sylvia, who then posed for formal portraits with Ilo’s mother and aunt. Ilo, now an architect’s draftsman, had always regarded Sylvia as more than a friend, and her visit likely sent mixed messages. Aurelia and others had advised her not to stay with him, but she dismissed their misgivings, insisting, “I could manage myself equally well in Ilo’s apartment as at Smith.”

  Everything went according to her “calculations,” she told Gordon, until Ilo “startled” her early on Monday morning as she lay in bed. He announced that he was staying home from work to spend time with her. “I told him coldly, in a flash of inspiration, that I was engaged to be married in a few months, and so was to be considered as a friend, and absolutely nothing more…which information succeeded in making him behave with utmost solicitude and tact for the rest of my stay.” (She may have been less startled than she let on to Gordon.) After Ilo left, she walked from 123rd Street all the way to Midtown, where she met Cyrilly Abels for lunch at the Ivy Room of the Drake Hotel. They spoke mainly of Dylan Thomas, and Abels confirmed that Thomas had been “drinking to excess on an empty stomach” in the days before he died. Against her better judgment, Sylvia met Ilo at the Met that afternoon. He came bearing a half-dozen red roses, “a combined apology and farewell present.” Together they toured exhibits on Sargent, Whistler, Cassatt, and medieval art. The paintings did not appeal to her as much as the abstract expressionists. She realized that her tastes were “arrantly modern!”52

  That night, she adorned her hair with one of Ilo’s roses and met up with Atherton “Bish” Burlingham, a Cornell graduate who was now attending Union Theological Seminary. Bish was the boyfriend of a Lawrence House friend, Mary Derr, who described him then as a blond Cary Grant. Janet was close to Mary, and remembered Mary’s fury when she learned that Sylvia had arranged to meet Bish.53 Sylvia, indifferent to the heartbreak she had caused, accompanied Bish to lectures by Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr at the seminary, dined with him at breakfast and lunch, and played the piano at a practice room while he sang opera—“gay fun.” She had strong feelings for him, but the relationship did not outlast her spring vacation. He remained just “a potential.”54 Janet thought the entire escapade “ridiculous.” “He was a theological student! She was going to be a minister’s wife? Not Sylvia. This was not in her wildest dreams.”55

  Sylvia left Ilo’s apartment midweek to stay with Janet downtown in Greenwich Village. Janet thought she was arriving by train at Grand Central, but she did not appear as scheduled. When Sylvia did not get off the next train, Janet called Aurelia, who became filled with anxiety. Plath had only been out of McLean for three months, after all. Around six p.m., Sylvia finally called Janet, cheerful and oblivious of the worry she had caused. She had stopped off uptown to see Bish and said she’d be “right down,” but it was another two hours before she showed up to Janet’s apartment. “She finally waltzed in, didn’t say, ‘I’m sorry I inconvenienced you.’ Didn’t say anything. We sat down and ate dinner, my father in the grumpiest silence I’d ever seen him in. Sylvia settled into a supposedly social conversation until it was time to go to bed.” Janet called Aurelia to tell her Sylvia had materialized, but Sylvia would not get on the phone to speak to her mother. She asked Janet to tell Aurelia that she had come back earlier, but Janet refused. “The next day she told me she had to go see some people who she had met when she was at Mademoiselle. Fine. Go ahead. I didn’t know whether I believed her or not. I was still so unnerved.” Janet said she and her family felt used. “She just wanted a bed. She really wasn’t visiting me.”56

  Abels surprised Plath by inviting her to dinner at her Fifth Avenue apartment before she left the city. Plath got along well with Abels’s husband’s nephew, a “young Jewish news reporter” for Voice of America. After dinner, she joined him for drinks at the Albert Hotel, which she called a “Greenwich dive.”57 Janet recalled that Sylvia came home that night at one a.m., again angering her parents, who normally slept in the living room. Sylvia spent Friday with Janet and Dee Neuberg, another Smith friend, lunching at the Time & Life Building and watching the end-of-season skaters at Rockefeller Center. Sylvia had lost her wallet at the Albert bar, and Janet’s father lent her $25 to get home. “I’ll never see that again,” he told Janet after Sylvia left. He didn’t, though someone later returned Plath’s wallet to her at Smith with all the money in it. (She was overjoyed to be “solvent for the rest of the year!”)58

  The trip marked the true end of Sylvia and Janet’s friendship. Janet was upset that Sylvia had stolen Mary Derr’s boyfriend and had largely ignored her, while Janet’s parents now considered Sylvia “persona non grata.” The trip would have social ramifications for Plath, too. Mary was “very vocal” about telling people back at Lawrence House what Sylvia had done to her, and house seniors retaliated by calling her “Silver Plate” in private, a reference to her phoniness.59 Jane Truslow thought that some of Plath’s behavior was brazen and selfish; Jane even called her “cheap.” “People who knew her in the house were always glad to hear something bad about her.”60 Even Claiborne, too, was troubled by what she felt was Sylvia’s hedonistic nature that spring. “She seemed to feel somewhat defensive and to anticipate my disapproval by referring to her psychiatrist and being emancipated from old hang-ups about sex.”61 But shaming had little effect on Plath. Sylvia told a Smith friend after her breakdown that she now felt “less compelled to conform,” adding, “I used to have to play bridge but now I don’t.”62 Later, at Cambridge, she would “bird-dog” Ted Hughes. She wanted what she wanted.

  On the train back to Boston, Sylvia stopped off for an overnight visit in New Canaan, Connecticut, with Sarah-Elizabeth Rodger Moore. Mrs. Moore, the mother of Warren’s roommate Clem, was one of Plath’s “ideals,” and the two women discussed her writing career as they toured the mansion. Sylvia marveled at her study, “separate, all windows looking out into trees and lakes, walled with books and files, with the typewriter the central talisman on this writer’s altar,” as she told Gordon. Warren and Clem, also on vacation, joined them for dinner. Sylvia left the next morning rested and hopeful that she too might someday write her own fiction in “a modern dream house in the plushest part of the New Canaan woods.”63

  The next day, April 3, she met Mel Woody for lunch in New Haven. She had written to Mel before she left for New York City to arrange a date with him on her way home. She sent a poem with her letter:

  sun aslant along blue blotter…flesh sunwarm

  clean air greenlucid and spattered with

  sundrops…tender sproutings of spring

  ……………­……………­…

  somehow I will and must

  see you64

  After a romantic interlude at Yale, Mel agreed to accompany Sylvia back to Wellesley on the train. She still had five days of vacation left before she had to return to Smith. “Sylvia said, ‘You’ve got to come home with me to protect me from my mother.’ ” He understood that Elmwood Road had become stifling for her and that she needed a buffer. He gave her a poetry book by Hart Crane and D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died. He spent the night sleeping in Warren’s room, and read the entire Lawrence book to her out loud the next morning before he departed to visit another erstwhile girlfriend in Newton. Sylvia had told Mel about what she termed “The Resurrection”—her rebirth after near death—and he thought Lawrence’s book would be fitting. “She was hungry for life all along. She had a terrible time putting it all together because there was so much she wanted to embrace.”65

  Smith seemed sleepy after the buzz of New York, but Sylvia tried to take
advantage of the college’s many cultural opportunities. She was particularly impressed by a lecture on Ibsen by Hans Kohn, a visiting professor from Columbia. “I’ll never be the same again. It was absolutely explosive—vital—soul-shattering!” she wrote Phil McCurdy. After the lecture, she rushed to the bookstore, bought Ibsen’s collected plays, and “read them immediately.” “Phil, I’m worried—what I’ve got is worse than epilepsy or syphilis! I went to that damn store and came back having bought TWELVE (12!) books!” Among them were plays by Shaw and O’Neill, poetry by Whitman and Delmore Schwartz, Fry’s Venus Observed and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. “My bookcases are overflowing—shelves of novels, poetry, plays, with lots of philosophy, sociology & psych. I am a bibliomaniac (with a slight touch of nympho thrown in!).”66

  Plath’s sexual hunger was wound up with her “resurrection,” and her new embrace of life—though she was still a virgin. She was finally operating at full capacity, deeply fulfilled, challenged, and stimulated by new ideas and authors. “Doomsday” had appeared in Harper’s, and she encouraged Phil to pick up a copy: “ah vanitas, vantitatum,” she wrote him. “I’m only human: & did so want to share my happiness.” When Phil wrote to her of the loss of Harvard’s Adams House master, she replied philosophically, “if we could be clairvoyant and see the date of our own doom, the bloodclot in the vein of our existence—how differently we might proportion our time…and yet, perhaps all one can do is go on and on ‘making the best of a bad job…’ and loving life the more for its individual ephemeral quality.”67 Plath had come a long way since August.

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  ALL OF HER READING was preparation, she felt, for great work—and great love. In April, Sylvia met Richard Sassoon, the Yale roommate of Mel Woody and Nancy Hunter’s “psychic brother” Dick Wertz. Sylvia first saw Sassoon—as she usually called him—while visiting Mel at Yale. Mel remembered that he, Sylvia, Dick Wertz, and Sassoon all went out together on that occasion. Later, Sassoon arranged a date with Sylvia despite the fact that she was seeing Mel. Sassoon and Sylvia spent the afternoon together in the Northampton countryside, where they “raced each other over the green fields” and “meandered along by the river.”68 After dinner, they drove out to Mount Tom and climbed an 830-foot-high firetower in the dark. Sylvia was nervous as her legs shook beneath her, but she was eager for the small adventure: “a victim of vertigo, I shuddered in ecstasies of terror all the while pretending to be brave,” she wrote Phil.69 After, they drank in a pub in Amherst and spoke to each other in French. Sassoon complimented Plath on her accent, and she felt like the “belle of the bar.”70

  Sylvia first mentioned Sassoon to Aurelia in an April letter. His father, she noted, was a cousin of Siegfried Sassoon, the famed World War I poet. The Sassoons, of Persian Jewish descent, had married into the Rothschilds to become one of the most powerful and wealthy Jewish lineages in Europe. Sassoon, born in Paris to British parents, had attended Lawrenceville in New Jersey, but Mel found him Continental in manners and British in attitude. He was “neurasthenic” and extremely “class-conscious.” “He complained that in America you don’t know how to deal with people because you can’t tell what class they are.”71 Plath likely knew about Sassoon’s heritage, for she told Claiborne he had “money.”72 Later, she referred to him in her journal as a “Persian Jew.”73 To others she described him as “a thin, slender Parisian fellow who is a British subject, and a delight to talk to…a very intuitive weird sinuous little guy whose eyes are black and shadowed so he looks as if he were an absinthe addict.”74 (At five feet eight inches, Sassoon was an inch shorter than Sylvia.) She would cast Sassoon, who was a French major and an aspiring writer, as Rimbaud and Baudelaire—much as he would cast himself. Mel thought he was “brilliant,” though Sassoon always tried to hide his vast intelligence. “He was lounging around all the time, then he’d sit down and type at sixty words a minute and write an A paper and I’d say, ‘How’d you do that?’ And he said, ‘I’ve been writing it all week.’ Kind of like Mozart with symphonies, he had it all finished.” Mel claimed that Sassoon’s French was so good the Yale French department invented courses for him.75

  By late April, Sassoon was writing frequently to Plath, partly in French, happy to play the world-weary sophisticate: “I am a cultural mongul [sic]—decadent & lazy.”76 His missives were full of exclamations and non sequiturs that sounded straight out of Baudelaire: “I am master and actor. Will you play?” “I am God. I damn you for my pleasure!”77 “I am as chained to you as you are to your dreams.” “There is no oblivion!!!” “I had to run to the all night café…in order to be a little alone.”78 He called Sylvia his “enchantress” and “sorceress” and told her that she was “the artist,” he the critic.79 Dick had invited Sylvia to Yale with neatly copied train schedules. Sassoon took a more dramatic approach: “Saturday? Sunday! Shall I come? Shall I come—when the Sun you so love and I so loath (it—he is my rival; I prefer my appetite!) Shall I come when the sun still strives to murder myth?”80 Plath played along: “ANNIHILATE SUN. COME SATURDAY. WIRE WHEN. TOMORROW & TOMORROW.”81 (She signed off “Eva,” invoking her poem “To Eva Descending the Stair.”) Together they drank French wine on hilltops and quoted French poetry: “great rapport—charming little chap—diversion,” Plath wrote her mother.82 But Sassoon proved to be much more than that. He later said that their relationship was “very adolescently hysterical, egotistical. We did not attend to each other so much as to our effects on each other.” Yet he admitted it was also “magical,” “tremendously significant for both of us and extremely rich,” and rightly noted that “Sylvia had a strong mixture of puritanism and passion.”83

  Sylvia sent Aurelia two new sonnets that April—“Doom of Exiles” and “The Dead.” These were the first proper poems she had written in nearly a year. The third stanza of “Doom of Exiles” struck a tragic tone:

  Backward we traveled to reclaim the day

  Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;

  All we find are altars in decay

  And profane words scrawled black across the sun.84

  The two poems were full of sleep and death, but Sylvia reassured Aurelia that she was still seeing the Smith doctor regularly, and that she was “continually happy in a steady fashion, not ricocheting from depths to heights, although I do hit heights now and then.”85 She toed the same line with Eddie Cohen, who admitted that he was a little jealous of her fireside chats with Auden and I. A. Richards. Eddie was by now married and working full-time for a Mexican import-export company—a “dull and dusty” job he loathed. He had become a “pitchman” in order to support his family and had realized—hopefully not too late—that he would “rather be a starving, happy anything than a successful drudge.” He was not sure how he had lost hold of his bohemian principles, and his youth:

  I regard my evolution towards a typical middle class citizen as somewhat alarming. I am rapidly developing into a good bridge player; I am a dedicated Cub-master; I have built-in book shelves instead of brick-and-boards; I belong to the Book-of-the-Month Club; I am looking for a house in the suburbs; and I am starting to hate myself. What the hell ever happened to all night wanderings in the honky-tonk areas, weekends lost in sex and drink, radicals, and camping trips?…The problem is whether it is possible to properly integrate the raw passions and desires and interests of the “free” soul with the necessary demands of raising a family. It is a problem which is, I venture, as old as copulation…86

  This was exactly the sort of bourgeois sea change Sylvia feared. She smugly suggested that one could always find time to write if one tried hard enough. Eddie thought her naive. “And you, my charming little optimist? How much free-lancing will you be doing when there are three kids around the house wanting, respectively, to be diapered, fed and have the funnies read to them? After they’re asleep, you say?…You can’t plan your life out on paper and expect it to behave that way. I suspect that this tendency of yours contributed
to your trouble. You didn’t know what to do when something happened that wasn’t in the blueprint.”87

  Sassoon reassured Plath that it was possible to outwit conventional expectations. In a late-April letter, he invoked the symbol of the comet moving through the universe and back again. He advised Plath to “flie [sic] with it! Move with it! Rise with it! Burn with it! Charge with it!”88 It was as if Sassoon had invoked “Ariel” and “Stings” nearly a decade before their composition. Here was someone who would not just tolerate Plath’s literary ambitions—he expected her to achieve them. When “Doomsday” appeared in Harper’s that April, Sassoon gushed with enthusiasm: “It is Art! What an effort it must have been. Yes—work! And I did not know you were capable of t’s and k’s! Or had so strong a fist. You will crack poor nature yet!”89 Sassoon understood that Plath was struggling to be the “brave” artist they both wanted her to be even as she fulfilled her academic duties to family, teachers, and benefactors. He knew she was the burgher and the artist both, yet he effortlessly reconciled the contradiction for her: “truths or lies, you or the actress—not much matter, one lives some lies, they are quite as much a part.”90

  Sylvia had never met anyone who so thoroughly inhabited a literary pose and who expected her to inhabit one in turn. He was the only man she had yet met who possessed a “soul” she considered “holy.” Sassoon allowed her to transcend the model of 1950s femininity she found so claustrophobic. To him, she wrote in a style that was experimental, erotic, and languorous—part D. H. Lawrence, part Gertrude Stein.