Eventually Sylvia opened up to Ellie about her traumatic experiences at Valley Head and McLean, telling her “many times” about the horrifying details of her shock treatment. “She told me about her sessions…She told me what would happen, it was like being murdered, the electroshock therapy. It was the most horrific thing in the world for her. That’s when she said to me, ‘If this should ever happen to me again, I will kill myself.’ ” Ellie said Sylvia was “referring to the madhouse” and shock treatment, but also to “her madness, her loss of self, her inability to do anything. Because that’s what you are. You sit there and you can’t do anything.” Sylvia told Ellie, “When you’re crazy, that’s all you ever are.” She did not portray McLean as “a good place,” but spoke positively about Dr. Beuscher: “She felt that she understood….she gave her herself back.”28 But mostly Sylvia spoke about what the psychiatrists did to her: how the nurses had strapped down her hands and placed electrodes on her temples before turning on the electric current.29
Ellie’s brother’s disappearance from Dartmouth in 1954 meant that she understood great pain. “We had something of pain to share….We held it to be like pleasure: it is our own, it is not for everybody. ‘I don’t want anybody’s pity. And I’m not going to talk about it in tears, either.’ ” She and Sylvia shared moments of black humor, joking about a student who hanged herself near Paradise Pond. They told each other they knew what was on “ ‘the far side of Paradise’: the Northampton State Asylum for the Insane.”30
Sylvia, Ellie noted, divulged these details from a place of health. Yet these conversations also suggest the lingering trauma of Plath’s mismanaged shock treatment at Valley Head, and perhaps other shock treatments at McLean. Sylvia’s depression had abated, but the repercussions of her disastrous “cure” haunted her. Still, her improved mental health was not simply a façade. Her painful memories of Valley Head and her anxieties about a relapse did not cripple her as her depression had in 1953. In the past, writing a lengthy thesis, mastering German, and impressing a famous writer would have left Sylvia exhausted and full of self-doubt. Now she was able to function at a high level without a struggle. She had never been so enmeshed in a scholarly paper before: “the best thing is that the topic itself intrigues me, and that no matter how I work on it, I shall never tire of it.”31
Meanwhile regular exercise helped her stay balanced. At Smith, Sylvia’s frequent colds and sinus infections, Marcia said, would just “flatten” her. She “was really seriously ill for a substantial period of time….She would withdraw, simply go to bed and stay there feeling dreadful.”32 When she was not laid low, however, Sylvia always seemed to be on the go. Many Smith friends recalled her love of the outdoors and her attention to colors and patterns in nature—a stone wall, or bark on a tree. Pat remembered her saying, “Let’s get out in a bike and ride. Let’s go skating. Let’s do something.”33 Professor George Gibian recalled that Sylvia looked “always as if she had just come back from skiing in Vermont or swimming in Bermuda—healthy.”34
In September Sylvia again joined the Lawrence House crew team, which practiced three times a week. She had rowed during her sophomore year and “luxuriated in the exercise.”35 She told Gordon, “it does me no end of good to be out on the water in a shell…the feeling of pulling hard and skimming along in a unanimous sweat of stroking is really potent!” Her health seemed to improve after she began taking iron for anemia; she suddenly felt “strong and ironic.”36 She thought she would “explode” with new poems and stories in the spring, and sent a humorous greeting card to Gordon, whose preprinted message made light of her breakdown: “To bundles of nerves / And strange complexes / To all of those / With wrong reflexes / Whom drugs won’t help / Or antibiotics / Let us celebrate / Being neurotics.”37 She felt she could have written the verse herself.
* * *
A SUMMER OF REST and restricted diet on Cape Cod had not healed Aurelia’s duodenal ulcer; by late September, she was back in the hospital. After her release she was put on bed rest and instructed to take a leave from Boston University. Sylvia had grown used to Aurelia’s medical crises and did not dwell on them (“does ‘bed rest’ mean you’ll be at home in bed & not teach the rest of the year, or what? let me know if I can be of any use whatever. One thing, I’m desperate for cotton clothes—all I have up here is woolens”).38 But Olive Prouty was alarmed. “I know that many ulcers are the result of anxiety—or mental stress,” she wrote to Aurelia. Prouty guessed that the “terrible experience” Aurelia had endured the previous year had caused the trouble and thought a change of scenery might help.39 She invited Aurelia to stay with her at the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. She was glad, she added, that Sylvia’s hair “was again its natural color…she herself seemed so natural and unstrained.”40
Mrs. Prouty took the surprising step of confiding in Sylvia about her worries regarding Aurelia, whom she thought might benefit from a talk with a psychiatrist. Prouty felt Aurelia needed to hear, from a professional, that she was “no longer necessary to her children.”41 She wrote perceptively to Sylvia, “I feel sorry that Dr. Beuscher couldn’t have included her in her treatment of your illness. It seems to me that psychiatrists should treat their patient’s nearest relative…as well as the patient himself—for often he, or she, is the cause of the patient’s maladjustment and illness.—& his treatment is beneficial to all concerned.”42 The idea of family therapy seems to have appealed to Sylvia. When Warren visited her that fall, she suggested, lightly, to Aurelia that he begin therapy with “some respected doctor or social advisor” who “could point out more specific and constructive ways to develop in warren [sic] an articulate, active and participating delight in life…a sense of ‘fun,’ which I think has been a family weakness.” Sylvia felt that she had worked hard to grow over the summer in Cambridge, and she wanted Warren to experience a less restricted life, as she had. “I know that underneath the blazing jaunts in yellow convertibles to exquisite restaurants I am really regrettably unoriginal, conventional and puritanical, basically, but I needed to practice a certain healthy bohemianism for a while…I needed to associate with people who were very different from myself.”43
Henry James had replaced James Joyce, for the moment, as Sylvia’s and Gordon’s literary touchstone: “Sometimes I see you as a Jamesian heroine like Isabel Archer being exposed to life,” Gordon wrote. Sylvia liked the comparison, despite its ambiguous prophecy, and signed off a letter as “Isabel.” But she started to pull away, telling Gordon that they faced a “hard future” together should they marry. He dismissed her doubts. “I love you, I love all of you, and your thorns are the best part of you.”44
Gordon spent three days with Sylvia in October to celebrate her twenty-second birthday, but the visit did not go well. She was upset with him for interrupting her work. He gave her a brown cashmere cardigan sweater, while his mother sent her an apron—a gift that probably sent a “chilly whisper” up her spine. She was more excited by Ira Scott’s baby-blue Brooks Brothers shirt to match the pink one he had given her over the summer, and some coral jewelry from Sassoon. Edwin Akutowicz visited her on November 2 and took her out to dinner in Northampton. “He is very peculiar and archaic, but amusing,” she told Aurelia.45 Though Sylvia and Nancy Hunter were now roommates, their friendship had not survived the events of the previous summer, when Sylvia had felt the cold glare of Nancy’s disapproval. Now Sylvia was annoyed that Nancy had literary ambitions and fancied herself a campus “Poetess.” “The stardust has long gone out of my eyes,” she wrote to Mel. “We speak, that is all.”46
Sassoon, back from Europe, continued to write Sylvia Wertherian love letters full of Sturm und Drang throughout the semester. “God! My darling, darling did you hear the thunder last night, beating and banging at the beauty of a mottled sky…it was only my love raging at the distance between me and my love.”47 Sassoon knew about Gordon but felt less threatened as the weeks passed. “My darling—my rival begins to bo
re me—at least I am not jealous anymore and I am sure you would not enjoy going through Italy with him because he only agrees with what a hundred people have said and it is all wrong.”48 Sassoon’s devastating portrayal of Gordon as a bourgeois fop struck a nerve with Sylvia. His letters pulsed with a Romantic sublimity that made Gordon’s Joycean puns seem dry and irrelevant. Sassoon unintentionally summed up her predicament: “when you have lived the beauty of Mallarmé you do not wish to read Sandburg.”49 Her “Frenchboy” enjoyed portraying himself as base, depressed, cruel—much like the compelling characters she was reading in Dostoevsky, whom she now declared “the greatest philosophical influence on my life…along with nietzsche, huxley, fromm [sic] and a few others.”50 As Dostoevsky replaced Joyce, Sassoon replaced Gordon.
Sassoon played with tropes of violence in his letters, a French literary posture meant to conjure de Sade: “And I know I teach girls to be women and I teach them how to taunt me and then you are far and cannot be punished….you are the only one I have wished to please and to punish.”51 He told her in December that in New York “it will be rather fun to play daddy to a naughty girl if you are naughty.”52 But he also wrote of his love and wrote intelligently about her poems. When she sent him “Verbal Calisthenics,” “Admonition,” and “Ice Age” that fall, he replied, “I am so terribly proud of you, darling….The Americans are saying that poetry should sound natural, and I never heard anything more absurd in my life. Poetry is a great discipline, a torturous discipline, a perversion.”53 He probably knew about Plath’s suicide attempt, but he assumed that his soul was the more troubled. “At times I am a very depressed man—I have tried to hide it—but you must know this of me.”54
With her other boyfriends, Sylvia had to deny the iconoclast within. Sassoon, alternatively, required her to disavow anything that smacked of middle-class morals. “I think original sin is vulgar, and self-denial disgusting, and the conception of a personal deity cowardly,” he wrote to her that fall, effectively demolishing the bedrock of Aurelia’s moral philosophy.55 But Sassoon could not shield himself from the strong emotion he felt for Plath. He was, despite himself, falling deeply in love with her and felt he was on the brink of madness.56 He told her that he would no longer write to her unless she made a greater effort to see him.
When Sylvia told Gordon about Sassoon out of “frankness,” he asked that she stop seeing him. Sylvia balked: “I do not plan to refuse reunions with my old friends…ira and sassoon [sic] among them,” she wrote to him in late November. She broached ending the relationship: “obviously, darling, I would never think of calling anything ‘quits.’ even [sic] if you decide to marry someone else in a few years from now, I hope we shall always be good friends.”57 Although she spent Thanksgiving with Gordon, the next day Ira picked her up in Cambridge. Together they drove to Concord, where they drank champagne at the historic Colonial Inn. The following day she had a “grand talk” with Dr. Beuscher—“need for being & experiencing—who knows what’s ‘good’ in the long run anyhow? Trial & error…maturity—necessity of paradox—need for wait for ‘ebb-tide’—look up ‘Psychology & Promethean Will’—for sustenance.”58 By Sunday she was back with Sassoon for a steak dinner followed by “cognac on Mount Tom.”59 Gordon began to understand. A few days after declaring his love for her and looking forward to “a future of knowing you for what we call ‘ever,’ ” he spoke plainly: “your attitudes toward me have changed and mine toward you.”60
Sylvia had again left one man for another whose literary and intellectual interests dovetailed more closely with her own: Dick was a scientist with a passing interest in poetry; Gordon an English major and a Joyce fanatic; Sassoon a Dostoevskian darkling. She moved through these men and others as she moved more confidently toward her own literary destiny, increasingly determined not to settle for a conventional marriage. Yet Sylvia, still her mother’s daughter, found extracting herself from her unofficial engagements to Dick and Gordon difficult. She had boxed herself into a corner with Gordon, just as she had with Dick. Studying for a graduate degree abroad seemed an increasingly attractive option.
* * *
SEVERAL LITERARY ACCEPTANCES BOOSTED Plath’s confidence in November. “Go Get the Goodly Squab” and “To Eva Descending the Stair” appeared in the September and November issues of Harper’s, while her story “In the Mountains” and poem “Circus in Three Rings” were published in that fall’s Smith Review. Cyrilly Abels wrote Plath that her “Triad of Love Lyrics” had won honorable mention in Mademoiselle’s Dylan Thomas poetry contest. Abels also bought “Parallax” for $30, money Plath badly needed (she was elated she could finally buy a girdle, brush, comb, and slippers). By this time, winning literary contests was almost passé. She was more excited by her A– in German, which she had brought up from a B through weekly tutoring sessions. She began translating Rainer Maria Rilke poems, using the same rhythm and rhyme scheme—“very difficult for me, but terribly stimulating,” she told Gordon.61 She was thrilled, too, by an airplane ride she took that November. She had asked Aurelia to give her permission to fly, as Smith required, but Aurelia was too nervous to allow it. Sylvia took matters into her own hands. As she explained to Gordon, “Icarian lust” came upon her, and she sweet-talked one of the pilots at the small local airport into taking her on a flight: “and we are up, tilting over hamp, me screaming about how this is the fourth dimension and god isn’t it a fantastic day.”62 Sylvia neglected to mention the flight to Aurelia, but assured her she was “most happy”—“busy and occupied, of course, but oh! With such a healthy, philosophical outlook!”63 Mrs. Prouty was not convinced, and asked Sylvia candidly whether she was “really as happy as you seem. I was so so doubtful—unsure—and lonely—at your age—temperamentally. Is your joyousness real or assumed? I wonder sometimes.”64
By early December, Plath had nearly finished her thesis—two months early. “I am so proud of myself!” she wrote her mother. Now she had time to enjoy her Christmas vacation and revise stories she had written for Kazin, who had enjoyed “Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit.” Sylvia wrote Aurelia, “every time one sits down to the blank page, there is that fresh horror, which must be overcome by practice and practice.”65 She was looking forward to her upcoming tutorials with Alfred Fisher, a Shakespearean scholar who had offered to take her on as a private poetry student. (Plath came up with a “classy” title for the tutorial: “The Theory and Practice of Poetics.”)66 Janet Salter Rosenberg recalled that Fisher was a “handsome, nice, absolutely good teacher” but “had a reputation” for getting involved with students.67 Sylvia described him as “very British, with keen blue eyes, white hair and mustache, and most tweedy clothes.” Fisher wanted Plath to help him research the Elizabethan poet and playwright John Ford, and asked her to turn in a “batch” of poems each week. To Aurelia, Sylvia compared the practice to “prospecting for gold: you know the raw nuggets are there, but you have to sift through a hell of a lot of sludge to get at them!”68
In early December, Plath rendezvoused with Sassoon in New York City. They saw The Bad Seed and dined on escargots, oysters, shrimp, and wine at Le Veau d’Or.69 Sassoon bantered in French with the waiters, and a couple next to them whispered that the two young lovers could not be a day over eighteen.70 While they downed more oysters at Steuben’s on Sunday, someone stole Sylvia’s suitcase from Sassoon’s car, parked just off Fifth Avenue. Nearly her entire wardrobe was gone, plus many of her favorite poetry books and her Chanel No. 5. “I’m trying to keep this secret from mother,” she wrote her friend Jon Rosenthal, “because when one is supporting oneself, one does not replenish wardrobe, one wears dungarees for a year. so [sic] I will wear dungarees for a year. and [sic] pretend I have become an ascetic. you [sic] know just cawn’t beah cashmeah sweatehs, so vulgah.”71 A visit to the police station did little good, but Sylvia was fascinated by the details of the cases she overheard. Sassoon mailed her a check before he knew whether his insurance policy would cover th
e loss, and she replaced her wardrobe. She even got a poem out of the incident: “Item Stolen: One Suitcase.”
Sylvia turned in a first draft of her thesis on December 17; the next day, she celebrated with Warren and Gordon at Robinhood’s Ten Acres, a cocktail lounge west of Boston. She was now on her Christmas vacation, and would soon join Jon Rosenthal on a skiing trip to Stowe. Jon, an Amherst graduate who was now in the Army, had bunked with Sylvia’s old boyfriend Bob Riedeman at Fort Dix. Someone had pointed Sylvia out to Jon at an Amherst fraternity party in April 1954, when she was George Gebauer’s date, and told him that she had tried to kill herself. Jon was struck by Sylvia’s beauty and dynamism, and could hardly believe she had been suicidal. On leave that November, he called on a friend at Lawrence House; when she was not home, on a whim, he asked for Sylvia, who was surprised to find him in the living room. The two immediately began bantering about her poem “To Eva Descending the Stair.”72 They dated briefly in November before he was reassigned to El Paso, but he returned to see her in December. He remembered her as radiant, bursting with ideas and energy. When he offered to take her either skiing in Vermont or to New York City, she wrote him that New York was “intellectualized and sedentary and most daiquiri-saturated,” and decided she needed “a more elemental communion with nature on snow slopes.”73 He picked her up in Wellesley on Monday, December 20, bound for Stowe. Aurelia fretted over the practical details of their trip. Sylvia had told Jon that Aurelia was a “nervous mother, whom I see as little as possible….in case she dies unexpectedly, she wants to be able to send me a telegram. (seriously [sic] though, I do love her, and am not contemplating matricide).”74
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