Sylvia and Peter took the ferry to Vineyard Haven and arrived “up-island” at Chilmark after dark. The couple stayed at a rustic compound on South Road near Lucy Vincent Beach that had been set up by several families after the First World War. The visitors—a count and countess from Bonn, writers, psychoanalysts, lawyers, and academics—impressed Sylvia, and she washed dishes alongside the president of Rutgers University. They sailed and swam in Menemsha, dined on lobster and champagne, and careened down the dunes at the nude beach near Gay Head. Peter soon put Sylvia in touch with Henry Volkening of the venerable Russell and Volkening literary agency. Volkening wrote to her asking her to stop by for a drink “and a leisurely talk” before she sailed for England.156 Plath left no record of the meeting, but she met with Constance Smith at the Harold Ober agency before she left America. Smith made a bad impression, and Plath became wary of agents.
Meanwhile, Sassoon had taken the improbable step of accepting a sales job with a heating company after graduation. He spent his days inspecting furnaces and selling “cleanouts”; his hands, he said, were “irrevocably stained with soot and my chest is branded with the name of a firm….Dearest, forgive me for being tired and a little depressed and bothered, but I have never journeyed so far into banalite [sic].”157 Sylvia tried to reassure Sassoon that he was building character, but he dismissed her easy bromides: “and you have the damned idiotic audacity to say this is the sort of thing that matures one! My dear, how very foolish. How very foolish indeed.” Yet he relished the irony of playing the American salesman, which he called “the very foundation of American life and economy.” He was, he said, a “smashing success” at the job and declared it all “a great cosmic joke.”158 Sylvia was unsettled by his plebeian adventure.
She had gently suggested that Sassoon try to find another line of work, but he was a good salesman—he was promoted within just a few weeks—and decided to stay with the firm until he came up with a better plan. (He would eventually decide to take classes at the Sorbonne that fall.) Much like Frank Wheeler in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Sassoon discovered that he was not immune to life’s bourgeois pleasures; he enjoyed drinks after work and the easy backslapping camaraderie of his colleagues. But Plath was not about to marry a furnace salesman. She was not about to marry anyone—not while her shining Cantabrigian future awaited. As she had advised Warren that July, “your security and love of life don’t depend on the presence of another, but only on yourself, your chosen work, and your developing identity. then [sic] you can safely choose to enrich your life by marrying another person, and not, as ee cummings says, until.”159
Nevertheless, Sylvia invited Sassoon to Wellesley for the Fourth of July weekend. The invitation suggests the seriousness with which she now regarded the young man she had once called a “diversion.” They spent time at the beach, relaxed on her porch, took walks in the moonlight—“two days of comfort and sun,” as Sassoon put it. His letters became more pressing and ardent—he spoke continuously of his love for her, his loneliness without her, his fear that he was wasting his life while she sailed off to Europe. “Took the afternoon off today. I went to the beach and it made me very sad, I am too old to play alone in the sand. I will not go until I can take you with me.”160
Sylvia had the house to herself again as Aurelia spent most of July and August on the Cape. She hoped to see Dr. Beuscher “a few times” before she set sail, but Beuscher was busy with her new baby boy. Sylvia called, but Dr. Beuscher did not call back. The silence was discomfiting, especially as Sylvia was not getting along with Aurelia. She wrote to Sassoon of the “hatred and frustration” in her home, and hinted that he was partly to blame; Aurelia resented the slightly foreign, dissolute young man who had stolen her daughter away from Gordon. (“I thought I had succeeded at being the picture of charming young innocence,” Sassoon wrote to Sylvia.)161 This was the second time Sylvia had broken off an informal engagement to the son of Wellesley friends, and Aurelia was at a loss to explain her daughter’s capriciousness. Plath would later write in her journal, “She necked and petted and flew to New York to visit Estonian artists and Persian Jew wealthy boys and her pants were wet with the sticky white filth of desire. Put her in a cell, that’s all you could do. She’s not my daughter. Not my nice girl. Where did that girl go?”162 Sassoon encouraged Plath to set aside her grievances. “Just say she is a hell of a bitch and then determine to get along with her for the last month….Just accept all the enormous evils and get on with the business of family life.”163 He later recalled, “Sylvia was both very rebellious toward her mother and very attached.”164
Sylvia spent another weekend with Sassoon in mid-July, but it did not go well; he spent the whole time trying to “reach” her, and suspected the end was at hand. “I will no longer strain against the limits of both our healths of mind and body. I take with me the memory of all the joy it is possible for me to have had with a woman.”165 He told her he would not always be a furnace salesman—that he might become a publisher or professor, or travel overland to Baghdad. He hinted that someday he would be a wealthy “future gentleman.” Whatever happened between them, he would wait for her until she was “ready.”166
In August, it appears, Sylvia ended the relationship. Sassoon was crushed. “I only hope you know what you do, and what you are about to do….It is possible that you strangle as decent, as honest and as faithful a heart as will ever have beat so proudly and profoundly for you alone.”167 He accepted her decision, yet he continued to build up her confidence: “Sylvia, you are a great big, healthy, powerful woman! Remember it.”168 Sylvia had also ended things with Peter Davison. Peter had begun to feel himself just “a symbol” to Sylvia, someone who could give her “literary respectability.” Sex between them was “very melodramatic” and “athletic”; she played “big parts in bed,” he said, with “big talk,” which stood in the way of real intimacy. But their relationship seemed to deepen when she opened up to him in August, after sex, about the reasons behind her suicide attempt and her terror of electroshock therapy. It was a breakthrough. He would never forget these two hours “of spontaneous tenderness” when she described her depression as an “organic, existing, live thing.”169 She told him that after her father died, her mother had to work to support the family and that she felt “driven to succeed, that with each year the pace of achievement quickened.” After she returned from New York, she said, she did not sleep for a month. “The only way she could get any respite from the wakefulness was to die.” She had tried unsuccessfully to drown herself and had considered guns and hanging, but couldn’t bring herself to try them. She called Mrs. Prouty “my patron” with “a real sense of gratitude.” She spoke of her shock treatment at McLean as an “expurgation,” and described how she gradually came back to life. She was deeply grateful to those who had helped her.170
Peter was so “overwhelmed” by these revelations that he took to his bed for two days. He had fallen in love with Sylvia and was “shocked and hurt” when she broke up with him later that month during a walk after dinner at Elmwood Road. He sensed that he had been used as “a trophy brought home for mom,” and remembered that she delivered the blow with “the air of an executioner.”171 He felt she had “dismissed” him precisely because of her honesty: “it was somehow coldly unforgivable” that she had told him her suicide story.172
Gordon suddenly seemed the more solid prospect, still her “sure thing.” She wrote to him in early August: “I Must See You Before I Sail. I simply can’t leave this country without seeing you. I am damn ritualistic, I know, but you are woven so into the tissue of my life.”173 This was an unexpected swerve. Sassoon had spoken of his depression and hinted at his alcoholism—afflictions that had initially increased his Baudelairean appeal but now seemed more alarming. Gordon had no such demons, as far as Sylvia knew. She wrote him that she was going “off without a chart or friend to stabilize transition.”174 She invited Gordon to London: “you kind of symbolize
the home continent.”175
* * *
—
In late August, Hurricane Connie dumped a deluge of rain on the Boston area for two days. Sylvia had always loved a good storm and told Gordon she “couldn’t resist driving to cambridge [sic]” in the heavy rains to see the destruction: “the harvard stadium stood like a greek arena on the mediterranean [sic]….somehow I was most exhilarated by all this….there is an ancient grandeur to it which I love, in contrast to the killing manmade devastation of war, which only sickens me.”176 Aurelia had given her private dancing lessons at the Fred Astaire Dance Studio in Boston as an early birthday present, and Sylvia spent the end of August learning the tango with another blond god, Richard Hanzel (“tall, lean, with a white-blond crew cut and the most fantastic teutonic bone structure”). They spent their Coke breaks discussing Plato. Sylvia had been hesitant to learn to dance, but she soon looked forward to the lessons. “I’ve just Got to Express all this life I have inside me somehow in rhythm and patterns, freedom in discipline.”177
She spent the last weekend of August visiting Sue Weller in Washington, D.C. She toured the Mall, the National Gallery (“I love the Flemish school”), and the Lincoln Memorial, which impressed her “emotionally & intellectually, most of all. Such a colossus, in such clean, enormous, simply carved white stone. I felt shivers of reverence, looking up into that craggy, godlike face.”178 The memorial may have been an unlikely inspiration for her later poem “The Colossus.”
She returned to Wellesley and prepared, emotionally, for her departure. She tried to make peace with her mother and quell the rising tide of fear. To Gordon, she wrote philosophically about the future:
I grow old, I grow old. already [sic] my pre-departure homesickness has set in and I am growing ineffably nostalgic. two [sic] years, so crucial, and will I know what to do with them? the horror, to be jamesian, is to find there are plenty of beasts in the jungle but somehow to have missed all the potshots at them. I am always afraid of letting “life” slip by unobtrusively and waking up some “fine morning” to wail windgrieved around my tombstone.179
She wondered, “will I grow, like my favorite Isabel Archer, through struggle and sorrow?” In a sonnet, “Ennui,” she wrote about her fear:
The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play to God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither please nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.180
Mrs. Prouty offered practical advice Sylvia probably did not want to hear: “I hope you don’t expect too much from it. I hope you are ready to be disappointed—and perhaps lonely….You may feel pretty forlorn.”181 Prouty told her to find a trusted adviser, someone with whom she could discuss “any sort of problem that may arise.” Yet Sylvia was confident that she was embarking on the right course. Though she felt “rootless and floating,” she knew England was “the best and only thing for me.”182 As she told Warren, “staying in new england or even new york [sic] would suffocate me completely at this point. my [sic] wings need to be tried. o icarus [sic].”183 To Gordon, her peregrinating counterpart, she wrote, “you must speed this female ulysses [sic] on her way with a kind of creative blessing. I’ll need it. I certainly will.”184
Part II
15
Channel Crossing
Cambridge University, September 1955–February 1956
Plath boarded the Queen Elizabeth II on September 14, 1955, en route to Cherbourg, France. From there she would travel to England. At Cambridge, she would be cut off from the voices and embraces of those who cared most for her as she navigated a new social scene and a challenging, unfamiliar academic system that was entirely male dominated. But the blank slate of a new country was precisely what Plath needed in 1955. Home was the place she had tried to die, where everyone knew of her problems, and where her brilliance would always be shadowed by her attempted suicide. She felt that a new life abroad, away from Aurelia’s hovering, would allow her to shed her old self. “I am fighting, fighting, and I am making a self, in great pain, often, as for a birth,” she wrote Aurelia. “I am being refined in the fires of pain and love.”1
Although American power was rising as England’s waned in the mid-1950s, the British regarded Americans as unsophisticated colonials with little talent for nuance or irony. Britons were still coming to terms with their nation’s diminished influence, and America’s prosperity was a source of resentment. As one of Ted Hughes’s American friends, Luke Myers, wrote, “Americans were rich; the products of Europe’s long traditions and ruined wealth had to watch crowds of untutored but confident Yanks eat in the best restaurants and tramp through their museums making ludicrous observations.”2 Yet, even after the devastations of war, London still possessed the kind of cultural cachet to which New York or Boston could then only aspire. T. S. Eliot, the most famous American poet of his day, chose to live in London, where he ran the poetry division at the prestigious literary publisher Faber and Faber. Sylvia understood that she would seem like a vulgar Roman in the eyes of cultured Greeks.
The five-day crossing was not glamorous—the cabins were tiny, the floors too hot for bare feet, and the bathrooms hidden away at ends of long halls. Salt-water baths were by appointment, even if that meant midnight ablutions. Sylvia mentioned none of these hardships to correspondents. In a breathless postcard to Ellie Friedman, she wrote about “a tragic shipboard romance with a young Jewish nuclear physicist” named Carl Shakin.3 Carl, an engineering student at New York University, was on his way to take up a Fulbright at the University of Manchester. (The boat was full of Fulbrighters.) He had been married for two months, but that didn’t deter him from exploring France with Sylvia when the ship arrived in Cherbourg. A fellow passenger on the ship was shocked that Sylvia and Carl “didn’t try to hide the fact that they were, indeed, sleeping together.”4 Carousing about with a married Jewish man was exactly the kind of scandalous “European” behavior that suited Sylvia’s newly liberated self. She did not, however, mention this transatlantic tryst to Aurelia, just a “genial” new friend named Carl with whom she enjoyed “tea and long bull sessions on deck.”5
In Cherbourg, Sylvia wrote, the ancient churches and flower markets were a welcome change from the “eightlane [sic] highways and mass markets” of America. Here the “streets are made for bicycles and young lovers, with flowers on the handlebars and around the traffic lights!”6 To Ellie, she added with dramatic flourish, “there the men know how to look at one.”7
After a rough crossing from France, Sylvia finally arrived by train in London. The experience was heady: she “walked miles through green queen’s parks” and discovered, she told Ellie, “sin & shashlik in Soho.”8 She toured the National Gallery and the British Museum, wandered among the bookstalls on Charing Cross Road, and became a “devotee of café expresso with foaming white cream.”9 She saw four plays in a week, including Waiting for Godot, and marveled at Piccadilly Circus and Trafalgar Square at night with their “lighted fountains and flowerbeds and regiments of pigeons.” She told Aurelia she already felt “stirrings of loyalty” whenever she heard “God Save the Queen,” and pronounced herself most “capable” handling the new bills and coins.10 After saying goodbye to Carl, she ran into an ex-boyfriend of Sue Weller’s and alighted with him to the Doves, a “fascinating Dickensian pub…in a court overlooking the dark, low-tide Thames, where in the moonlight, pale swans floated in sluggish streams that laced the mudflats.”11 London was living up to her literary expectations.
She stayed first at Bedford College in Regent’s Park, then moved to the YWCA across from the British Museum, where she experienced “a keen aesthetic satisfaction” staring at the museum’s Ionic columns through the bathroom window. The sense of possibility was overwhelming. “I ha
ve lived years in the space of hours,” she wrote in her first letter home. The Fulbright Committee sponsored lectures on politics and economics, where she heard members of Parliament and prominent editors. She also attended several “impressive receptions,” including a party hosted by the American ambassador at the U.S. embassy. “Never have I seen such a palace!” she gushed home in language that recalled Maureen Buckley’s debutante party. “Such elegance.” At the English Speaking Union, she met the countess of Tunis and had “a most intriguing talk”—and several glasses of wine—with a member of the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards. The Fulbright reception for English literature students at Bedford College, however, was disappointing. There, she felt, “atrocious” hostessing prevented her from meeting famous guests such as Stephen Spender, John Lehmann (the influential editor of The London Magazine), and C. P. Snow. She hadn’t realized she was in such esteemed company; the gray-suited men had simply looked “like respectable professors.”12 At least she managed to meet the critic David Daiches, whose lectures she would attend at Cambridge. Her New York stint in the world of women’s fashion magazines had literally sickened her, but in London she was energized by the presence of prominent literary critics and writers.
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