There were societies for nearly every imaginable activity, even tiddlywinks. She wanted to write for the university newspaper and join the Labour Club so she could become better informed about politics; she was curious about the far left, too. “I shall also investigate the Socialists, and may, just for fun, go to a meeting or two of the Communist Party (!)”58 She wished she could join all the extracurricular clubs that interested her, but in the end she settled on the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club, or ADC. She auditioned with parts from As You Like It and Camino Real, and boasted to her mother that she beat out more than one hundred others for one of nine female spots in the troupe. That October, she played the “mad poetess” Phoebe Clinket in Alexander Pope’s Three Hours after Marriage, an “absurd farce,” but she did not get a major part in the next play, Bartholomew Fair. She was inspired by the avant-garde films she saw with her new ADC friends, films that brought Poe and Kafka to mind. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was, she told Aurelia, “the sort of movie I enjoy most: it shocks one into new awarenesses of the world by breaking up the conventional patterns and re-molding them into something fresh and strange.”59 Sylvia’s Downing College beau Christopher Levenson recalled that films were serious business at Cambridge “in the era of Truffaut and Godard, Buñuel and De Sica…subject to endless discussion and interpretation, on par with traditional theatre.”60
In many ways, Cambridge conformed to Sylvia’s expectations. She walked among the grand, imposing colleges and spent afternoons in Grantchester taking tea beneath the shady blossoms of an apple tree just as Rupert Brooke and Virginia Woolf had. She sat by the fire reading The Tempest aloud with ADC men and hosted sherry parties in her Whitstead garret. But in other ways, Cambridge was utterly foreign. Unlike at Smith, men outnumbered women ten to one; she was a second-class citizen. Women were not even allowed in the hallowed halls of the Cambridge debating society, the Union, unless escorted by a man. Sylvia also had to navigate the British class system, and she needed to assimilate quickly lest she be labeled a naive, unsophisticated Yank—which was how Jane remembered her during that first term. Jane was embarrassed when Sylvia asked a Cambridge bobby where they could find somewhere “picturesque” to eat. She remembered her English friends ridiculing Sylvia’s Samsonite luggage (which Sylvia had gotten on sale), and her use of the term “enjoy.” “In her room at Whitstead, for example, she had a favorite piece of furniture, a coffee table….She apparently would often remark on how much she ‘enjoyed that table,’ thereby unconsciously regaling her English visitors, for I heard that anecdote more than once.”61 One of Sylvia’s Whitstead contemporaries, Philippa Forder Goold, thought Sylvia was “the epitome of what we non-Americans imagined an American coed to be,” and admitted to “disliking her fairly intensely.”62 Plath’s adoption of a mid-Atlantic accent by 1958 suggests that she felt such pressures and tried to conform. (Jane said that when she listened to Sylvia’s later poetry recordings, she did “not recognize her voice.” At Whitstead, Sylvia had spoken with a strong American accent.)63 Ted Hughes’s friend Michael Boddy, who met Sylvia at a Cambridge mixer in 1955, remembered that she was “very obviously an American College Girl, nodding her head, doing a hair-flipping laugh, and saying ‘Wunnerful! Wunnerful!’ ”64
Plath’s academic program—a second BA in English, for which she was allowed to skip the first year’s examinations—also presented new challenges. Cambridge was much less structured than Smith, with no annual midterms or final exams. Each week that fall, she would attend two one-hour “supervisions”—Tragedy and Practical Composition & Criticism—an hour of French language tutoring, and twelve hours of lectures. Her only required assignments were essays for her two weekly supervisions. But such freedom was illusory. Plath’s entire degree would be based on her performance on her final Tripos exams in June of her second year. She had chosen the topics for Part II of the degree herself: Composition and Criticism, Ancient and Modern Tragedy, French, the English Moralists, and the History of Literary Criticism. At Cambridge, no one would take attendance or formally grade her tutorial papers. It was up to Sylvia alone to make sure she was reading and learning enough to succeed on her final exams.
Sylvia—like her father—relished the challenge of mastering new fields. Still, she felt like a “novice compared to the specialized students here.”65 After less than a month in her Tragedy supervision, she wrote Aurelia that she felt “enormous handicaps reading…in a vacuum where I have had no background.”66 Normally Sylvia was the A student who intimidated others. But at Cambridge she accepted being behind in a way she never would have at Smith, and saw an opportunity for self-improvement—spreading “pathways and bridges over the whistling voids of my ignorance.”67 She challenged herself to read more until she was an expert in sixteenth-, seventeenth-, or eighteenth-century literature.68 Her anonymity in Cambridge seems to have liberated her, at least for a time, from the competitiveness that marked her academic career, though she felt “claustrophobic at the piles and piles of books rising up around me that I ‘must read.’ ”69 She was proud of herself for tackling her weakest literary subjects. As she wrote to Mrs. Prouty, who often prodded her to lower her academic expectations, “The constant struggle in mature life, I think, is to accept the necessity of tragedy and conflict, and not to try to escape to some falsely simple solution which does not include these more somber complexities….One doesn’t get prizes for this increasing awareness, which sometimes comes with an intensity indistinguishable from pain.”70 Prouty replied that she had known Sylvia would be “disappointed & disillusioned—but you are standing up to it and taking it.”71 Plath had lately received only rejections from magazines, and was bitterly disappointed that she had not won the Borestone Mountain Poetry Award, an annual contest nearly as prestigious as the Yale Younger Poets prize. She vowed to write for two hours a day so that she could send out more material for publication and “get rid of this sense of a financial deadend.”72 (She was $50 in debt to Dr. Beuscher.)
Prouty understood the homesickness, alienation, and sense of inferiority Sylvia might experience alone in England. While Sylvia’s family and friends assumed that she was living an enchanted life in Cambridge, Prouty worried that her Grand Tour would end in sorrow and ruin, as it had for Isabel Archer. She was skeptical of Sylvia’s cheerful letters—such as her claim that “the cold air (which blows directly from the russian [sic] steppes) makes me feel simply grand: clean, fresh and strong.”73 Prouty guessed the truth: the damp cold made her sick. Sylvia appreciated her candor. “I feel I can talk to you like a second mother, perhaps even more frankly!”74 Even Mary Ellen Chase warned, “My one anxiety is that you are whirling about too rapidly….rein in your Bay Horse and Hound a bit lest you burst into radiant particles!”75 (Chase’s image brings the end of “Ariel” to mind.)
Plath attended morning lectures by Basil Willey and Dorothea Krook on the moralists; Muriel Bradbrook and Enid Welsford on tragedy; Theodore Redpath on the history of tragedy; F. R. Leavis on criticism; and Joan Bennet on the metaphysical poets.76 Her Tragedy and Practical Criticism supervisions with Kay Burton met in the afternoons on Tuesday and Thursday, respectively. She hoped to attend David Daiches’s lectures the following term on the modern English novel. Plath told her mother the writers Daiches taught were “Really ‘modern,’ I think, instead of the usual concept of ‘modern’ here: e.g. ‘modern poets’ are considered to be Wordsworth, Arnold, and Coleridge!”77 Daiches was the critic who helped resurrect Virginia Woolf’s reputation. But Sylvia seemed most excited about attending the “pithy deadpan” F. R. Leavis’s lectures on literary criticism.78 After applying for special permission, Plath audited Leavis’s weekly classes at Downing College.79 (Christopher Levenson recalled that Leavis disliked Americans, and once “mocked an American visitor by climbing into the study through the open window rather than by the door, commenting that that was the custom in Cambridge.”)80 Leavis—who had, along with I. A. Richards and William Empson, introduced the
concept of New Criticism—was one of the most influential literary critics of the twentieth century, and shaped Cambridge’s English department in ways that still resonate today. Leavis was disturbed by the rise of the dime-store novel and other “low” culture, such as (in his opinion) women’s magazines. As a scholarship student, Plath could transcend her middle-class upbringing by mastering high culture—by attending Smith and Cambridge, winning literary prizes and scholarships, reading the right books, and publishing in highbrow publications like The Atlantic. But Plath was also steeped in what Leavis, in the sexist context of the day, would have considered low culture: she had spent much of her high school and college years breaking into the women’s magazine market. This division between high and low was something Plath always straddled; while she would prefer to publish in Harper’s, she did not turn down Ladies’ Home Journal.
Apart from her lectures and the ADC rehearsals, there was another activity that required several hours each week: dating. An attractive, clever, confident American woman did not suffer from lack of male attention at Cambridge in 1955. Many contemporaries remembered that Sylvia cut a dramatic figure on the quads with her perfectly coiffed hair, infectious laughter, and fashionable clothes; Christopher Levenson recalled her as “fresh and outspoken.”81 In her letters home, she often reassured Aurelia and Mrs. Prouty that she was not a “career girl,” but lamented the fact that the right man had not yet appeared: “I sometimes despair of ever finding anyone who is so strong in soul and so utterly honest and careful of me,” she wrote the night before she met Ted Hughes.82 She longed to find a “strong” man who could “match” her own strength, who would not be intimidated by her talent and her accomplishments, someone who would create art alongside her. If she could not find such a husband at Cambridge, with its ten men for each woman, she thought, she would not find him anywhere.
Meanwhile, Sassoon had abandoned his career in furnace sales for philosophy at the Sorbonne. He visited Sylvia at Cambridge on December 4, and they decided to meet again in Paris over her Christmas vacation. Sylvia spoke of Sassoon constantly to Jane Baltzell. He was her main “preoccupation.” “She was obsessed with Sassoon—and she called him Sassoon. She lived for his letters, she relished them very obviously. She would read them at the breakfast table, laughing out loud. She romanticized him tremendously. She saw him as a Rimbaud.”83 Yet Sylvia dated several Cambridge men during 1955 and early 1956: Winthrop Means, Isaac (Iko) Meshoulam, John Lythgoe, Brian Corkery, Richard Mansfield, Martin Deckett, Ken Frater, Tony Smith, David Buck, Mallory Wober, and Christopher Levenson, who felt Sylvia was drawn to him because he had done “relief work after the 1953 Dutch floods” and traveled in “war-ravaged Germany”—experiences that made him seem “more cosmopolitan,” in her eyes, than his contemporaries.84 (He was also the editor of delta, a Cambridge literary magazine.) Christopher thought Sylvia “physically very attractive in an exotic, very un-English way.” He came to find her “too glossily sophisticated, too worldly-wise,” but also, when she let down her guard, too effusive with her gee-whiz American mannerisms.85 Sylvia hadn’t yet mastered the art of English understatement.
Early in the term, she wrote to Ellie that she had had dates with three young men in a single day; she was soon juggling so many dates for tea and sherry parties that she longed to hide in her room.86 One young man caught and kept her attention—Mallory Wober, who was studying natural science at King’s College. She had met him at a Labour Club dance on October 10, and he quickly became Sassoon’s rival. (He was, in fact, distantly related to Sassoon.)87 When Sassoon visited her in early December, he and Sylvia had a “long sad talk” about how “you can’t go home again.”88 Compared to Mallory, Sylvia wrote Ellie, Sassoon had “shrunk, like gregor samsa [sic], to an insect.”89
Mallory had lived for nine years in India, where his father was in business, before moving back to London. He was Jewish—“amazing family background: Moorish Jews, Russian Jews, Syrian Jews, etc.”—cultured, and charming.90 In the afternoons he invited Sylvia to his room for tea or sherry. (“Seeing young men make tea is still a source of silent mirth to me!” she wrote home.)91 She lounged before his fire while he played Beethoven and Scarlatti on his small Hammond organ. In the evenings they attended concerts and dined at the Taj Mahal, where he spoke Hindustani with the waitstaff and introduced her to mangoes and Indian cuisine. She introduced him, in turn, to Dylan Thomas, whom she read aloud, “practising some experimental ideas of mine in getting people to like poetry by hearing it without analytic fanfare.”92 He took her to a candlelit Evensong service at King’s College Chapel, where she was overwhelmed by the grandeur. She described this “mystical” night over and over in letters to her friends and family, calling it one of the most profound experiences of her life.
Sylvia found Mallory immensely civilized, and exoticized his Jewishness, which, she said, gave him “a subtle strange other-world aura.”93 She spoke of him as she later would Ted Hughes: “a young Hercules,” a giant of the earth from the time of the “Old Testament prophets…strong and peaceful as the Rock of Gibraltar.”94 To Ellie she wrote, “he is dmitri karamazov [sic] and I made him all myself. god, elly [sic], he is the kind one could create a superman with.” Sylvia was falling in love with him and opened up to Mallory about her breakdown and suicide attempt, telling him about “going into hospitals and meeting mad doctors and being treated in incomprehensible ways.”95 She was dismayed by his age: at nineteen, he was four years her junior. To friends she wrote that he was much more mature than men her own age—“compared to gordon, to ira, to mr. kazin’s harvard-pressboy [sic] he is a MAN,”—but she saw his age as an impediment to a relationship: “to think I’m making him ready for some girl who is teething innocently in her cradle!”96 She told Sassoon about Mallory to rouse his jealousy: “a rugged jewish hercules [sic], hewn fresh from the himalayas [sic].”97
By December, Sylvia had earned an invitation from Mallory’s mother to stay with the family in London over the Christmas break. She told Aurelia, “it is an Event to have a ‘christian’ [sic] girl accepted, I gather. Ironically enough, I am not really a christian [sic] in the true sense of the word, but more of an ethical culturist: labels don’t matter, but I am close to the Jewish beliefs in many ways.”98 (In “Daddy,” Plath writes, “I think I may well be a Jew.”) However, she had to turn down Mallory’s holiday invitation because she had already accepted one from John Lythgoe, a “shy Botany student” who came from an aristocratic family. Sylvia did not say much about John in her letters home, but she enjoyed telling correspondents about her tea date with his grandmother, Lady Tansley, in Grantchester.
Sometimes Sylvia’s dates crossed paths, and farce ensued. In mid-November, she canceled a trip to Ely with John in favor of a tea date with Mallory. John did not get her message, and showed up at her room while she was entertaining Mallory. Sylvia made the best of an awkward situation:
well, nothing remained but to have them both for tea….believe it or not they both stayed from 4 till 10 at night, talking about everything from “is there a purpose to the universe” to the Belgian Congo—no mention of supper! john [sic] left only after I invited him to tea today, and mallory [sic] took me to a lovely late steak dinner at the Taj. My first “salon,” and most stimulating.99
Mallory said that Sylvia was always “fighting off” men who wanted to date her. (Indeed, she told Dick Wertz, perhaps exaggerating, that she had received several marriage proposals at Cambridge.)100 He remembered Sylvia’s bright clothes, make-up, “big skirts,” and “flamboyant” nature. Heads turned when she walked into a room. This “genius-person comes to subdued England and is four times more vivid than the culture.” One afternoon, when he was in Sylvia’s room at Whitstead, there was a knock on the door. Sylvia said, “Go away.” The door opened and a hand dropped a bouquet of flowers on the floor. Mallory made motions to leave, but Sylvia said, “You don’t have to. He’s gone.”101
Syl
via managed to spend a day with Mallory’s family over the December break at his London home at 71 Wentworth Road. In a later letter to him, she described the afternoon’s scenes in “snapshots”: “dream-walk through mist, underground,—to lights, carols, hot roasted chestnuts, conversational Bobby, surrealist mushrooms in Trafalgar Square—all this is Christmas—wrapped in my heart—and will be with me in Paris to sustain me till the New Year which will really begin when I am with you again.”102 She would write Mallory love letters from Paris even as she shared her hotel room with Sassoon.
In December, she had a double tea date with Mallory and a young man named Nathaniel LaMar, who had attended Harvard and known Warren at Exeter. Nat, as Sylvia called him, had published a story in The Atlantic (“Creole Love Story”) that impressed her, and she begged a mutual friend for an introduction. She told Aurelia that he was “a lovely, light-skinned negro, and I look most forward to talking to him about writing, etc.”103 Sylvia mentioned numerous tea and coffee “dates” and satisfying conversation with Nat—“American talk.” She found him a “strong contrast to the Englishmen, who have a kind of brittle, formal rigidity and…a calculated sophisticate pose.”104 By January she called him her “dearest friend in Cambridge…a blessing; the true friend, warm, dear, and emotionally very much like me.”105 Like Perry Norton, Nat became a “psychic brother,” and she told Aurelia she would join him in Paris for Christmas.106 She later wrote, more suggestively, “I have a greater faith that if I work and write now, I will have a rich, inner life which will make me worth fine, intelligent men, like Sassoon, and Nat.”107
Sylvia’s labeling of Nat as a “light-skinned negro” reveals the prejudices of her era. But such easy camaraderie between a black man and a white woman would have been impossible in segregated 1950s America. Jane recalled that Cambridge was much more diverse than American campuses on account of the presence of so many Commonwealth students, and that Nat was regarded as a “wunderkind.”108 Still, Cambridge was not free of racism or anti-Semitism. Both Mallory and Nat were “others” whose religion and race kept them outside the mainstream of English life. Ted Hughes was a Yorkshireman, a provincial who did not belong to the highborn set that still filled Oxbridge in those days. Plath, also an outsider, seemed drawn to those on the fringes. As she wrote to Jon Rosenthal that term, she felt no “rapport” with “the delicately boned frosty-eyes, terribly proper English. My best friends here are Jewish or negro.”109
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