Sylvia had more trouble making close female friends in England, a fact that worried her mother. She treated Aurelia’s concerns lightly, but, after four years at Smith, she missed having girlfriends in whom she could confide. Sylvia thought that English women, whom she described as “hysterical and breathless,” ignored and looked down on Americans.110 To Ellie she wrote, “the women here are ghastly: two types: the fair-skinned twittering bird who adores beagling and darjeeling tea and the large, intellectual cowish type with monastically bobbed hair, impossible elephantine ankles and a horrified moo when within 10 feet of a man.”111 Jane felt similarly. “The English women at Newnham (both faculty and students)…all seemed humorless and deliberately—aggressively, even—unattractive, physically as well as otherwise. I found them incomprehensible, and didn’t make a single friend among them.”112 Jane said that Whitstead’s distance from Newnham’s main buildings meant that Whitstead’s foreign residents were isolated geographically from the English women undergraduates: “they just had no interest in us.”113 She and Sylvia would befriend only Canadian, South African, and Scottish women at Newnham.
Jean Gooder, who shared a Tragedy supervision with Sylvia, remembered thinking, “There’s this beautifully dressed blond sitting in the corner, dumb. She never uttered a word, and I paid her no attention.” Later, Jean—with the benefit of her perspective as director of studies at Newnham—realized what a difficult situation the college had put Sylvia in. “I would never have put a first-term student onto the Tragedy paper like that. It was a crazy way to begin. You want to give them some sense of what Cambridge English is about, what it means. It was very bad management.” But in 1955, Jean was wary of Sylvia. Her conversational style, as many Cambridge contemporaries recalled, was “gushy,” “easily satirizable.”114 She seemed to many a walking cliché of the clean-cut American girl. But she could also be nasty, making “awful, sour comments” about people and exhibiting “appalling rudeness” in shared supervisions.115 Jean said, “One of the things that put me off Sylvia was her notion of being extremely well turned out, beautifully made up, aggressively so.” Jean had spent time at the Sorbonne in Paris before she went up to Cambridge. “My idea of chic was Left Bank, black.” Sylvia, on the other hand, wore “clothes of a hard cut, very clear primary colors….She was very American. It was very effective. She compelled attention.”116 Sylvia’s Newnham contemporary Felicity Meshoulam said Sylvia developed a reputation for “cheap flirtatiousness” that fall. And yet, Felicity thought, Sylvia also seemed to like Cambridge’s “Puritan atmosphere.”117
Isabel Murray Henderson shared Sylvia’s wariness of the English undergraduates, who could be “flippant and unserious.” But this was an act—the most clever students often appeared, out of pride, to be the most “indolent.” (Iko Meshoulam remembered that this was especially true of Ted Hughes and his friends.)118 This facet of Oxbridge culture, which still exists today, was completely foreign to Sylvia, Isabel remembered. “She rightly saw this deficiency as a real social disadvantage….The very clever could be stand-offish at meals and minor encounters. This was not being competitive but more like conceit.” Americans did not know what to make of the English students’ more casual demeanor, while the English women could be similarly nonplussed by the Americans. For example, Isabel remembered, Americans at Newnham knew how to type, whereas the British students “were advised never to learn to type or we would end up being secretaries.”119
Sylvia and Jane’s dim view of English women may have been colored by their experience in Kay Burton’s Tragedy supervision with A. S. Byatt, the future writer of Possession and other novels. Byatt was known as Antonia (Toni) Drabble then, the elder sister of the novelist Margaret Drabble; she had a terribly clever reputation, and would take a first-class degree in English in 1957.120 Jane remembers that she and Sylvia found Byatt rather “annoying in her mannerisms”—lounging on the floor, for example, rather than sitting properly in a chair. It was clear to them that Byatt was Kay Burton’s favorite—probably, they thought, because she was English and they were American. The Yorkshire-born Byatt admitted, years later, that it was essentially so: she remembered Plath wearing “bobby socks and totally artificial bright red lips and totally artificial bright blonde hair…a made-up creature with no central reality to her at all, always uttering advice like a woman’s magazine column. She wrote beautiful words, but there wasn’t anybody inside there.” Byatt claimed Plath “didn’t show any signs” that she would become a major poet at Cambridge. “She just seemed silly.”121
Jane was, in Sylvia’s words, “as close to a ‘best’ friend as I have.”122 But she admitted that she felt a sense of “rivalry” around Jane, and Jane’s burgeoning friendship with Isabel also upset Sylvia. Jane did not know Sylvia had thought of her as “a potential best friend” and felt “rather sad in retrospect.”123 The two quarreled, and by the end of her second term Sylvia would not have a single close girlfriend at Cambridge. She longed to see old Smith friends like Ellie Friedman and Sue Weller, with whom she could “be wholly woman,” and counted down the weeks until their visits to Cambridge.124 Ellie, who had also spent time in England, felt that class dynamics were partly to blame for Sylvia’s isolation. British women at Cambridge, she said, “closed you off, they never asked you in. They’re generally from a higher class—a moneyed class—and they’re not going to ask you to come for the weekend. You’re left with the men.”125
Writing, like love, was a constant source of elation and anxiety. During the nine-day staging of Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (November 24 to December 3), in which Plath had only a small role as the whore Punk Alice, she experienced a period of writer’s block. While she boasted to several correspondents that the play had been reviewed in The Times and that the costumes had been made in Stratford-upon-Avon, she was disappointed with her marginal role—“five short speeches and a cat-fight in Act 4, Scene 5.”126 (Jonathan Miller, who played Troubleall, remembered Plath as “this rather big, blonde girl standing with one hand on her hip in what she thought was a traditionally ‘whorish’ posture,” while Jane remembered that Sylvia pronounced “the word ‘whore’ with peculiar gusto.”)127 Sylvia was also upset about the toll the play had taken on her writing. After the play, she quit the ADC; the commitment was simply too demanding, and she was not prepared, as she put it, to give “blood.” “I am no Sara Bernhardt,” she admitted to Mrs. Prouty in mid-December.128
To Aurelia she was more frank: “ ‘muteness is sickness’ for me, as richard wilbur [sic] says, and I felt a growing horror at my inarticulateness; each day of not-writing made me feel more scared.”129 Although Plath cared a great deal about publishing her work, she insisted to others that she was “dependent on the process of writing, not on the acceptance.” She wrote Aurelia, “When I say I must write, I don’t mean I must publish. There is a great difference. The important thing is the aesthetic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and as necessary for me…as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.” Writing was purgation and fulfillment, even if “the actual story never lives up to the dream.”130
Later, Plath’s first-term Cambridge experiences found their way into her more mature poems. “Whiteness I Remember” was partly based on a wild ride she took on December 10 on a horse named Sam. Dick Wertz suggested the outing and Sylvia agreed, though she had never ridden a horse. She was in “ecstasy” until Sam began to gallop through a busy intersection and down the wrong side of the street. As cars pulled over and women on the sidewalk began to scream, her feet fell out of her stirrups. She knew she should have been terrified—Dick, pursuing her in horror, thought she was going to die—but she felt invigorated: “I find myself hugging Sam’s neck passionately….such power: like the old gods of chance: I feel like one human, avenging thunderbolt.”131 The images would reappear in “Ariel.”
* * *
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Sy
lvia found more experiences to write about in France that Christmas. Her December 20 arrival in Paris was “nightmarish”: her flight was canceled due to bad weather, and she had to take the ferry instead. Then Jane, with whom she shared a Left Bank hotel room, accidentally locked her out.132 (Sylvia ended up sharing a room with two Swiss girls from Cambridge.) The next morning, Sylvia greeted Jane coldly; in a postcard to Mallory, Sylvia called her “thoughtless.”133 The incident did not bode well for their burgeoning friendship, although Sylvia, Jane, and Sassoon enjoyed a companionable meal together in Paris after the lockout. Jane liked Sassoon, whom she thought “small and wiry,” and recalled that the couple behaved “appropriately” at the restaurant; after hearing Sylvia’s rhapsodic affections, she had half expected them to fall over each other.134 Jane left for Italy, and Sylvia eventually moved to another hotel on the Left Bank with Sassoon, between the Boul’Mich and the Boulevard St. Germain. She was delighted with her blue velvet room and its view of the Seine.
Sylvia stayed with Sassoon in Paris for ten days. Nat LaMar, who had offered to be her Parisian “escort,” joined her for the first few days. Sylvia told Ellie that during this time she “had a brief affair with him.” But she had come for Sassoon; when Nat left, she reunited with her great love.135 Together the couple walked for hours along the Seine browsing through the bookstalls and lingering in cafés. They saw plays and ballets—Plath’s favorite was Georges Simenon’s “surrealistic ‘La Chambre’, cyclic, detective, drama with vampire woman…god, what a dance; seduces him and murders him; convulsions great.”136 She could hardly contain her joy at seeing so many Parisian landmarks, both high and low: “saw hundreds of whores, thanks to dear Richard, who obligingly quoted price ranges,” she wrote Ellie.137 She saw the Mona Lisa and Winged Victory at the Louvre, and sought out her “favorites”: “the ‘Virgin of the Rocks’ and several thin, torturous El Grecos, a marvelous anonymous Pieta d’Avignon, Breughel, and my beloved Flemish school.”138 She marveled over the Cézannes, Van Goghs, and Gauguins at an Impressionist exhibit at the Orangerie, and wrote Aurelia about the Parisian faces, so “beautiful” compared to those in London, where everyone struck her as “un-chic, dowdy and formal.”139 To Mallory she wrote that Paris was “like the combination of heaven and hell in one colossal surrealistic dream.”140 Outside the cafés there were oysters and snails on ice, and artists—always artists. At one café she saw the manager give a toothless beggar soup and bread. The man had once been a clown in the circus and had gone mad, the manager explained. To Sylvia, the gesture epitomized the Parisian spirit.
On Christmas Day she and Sassoon spent the morning in bed, lingering over croissants, coffee, and oranges. Sylvia proclaimed the Christmas service at Notre Dame an “an aesthetic feast”—she marveled over the “blazing jeweled colors of the windows” and the “mammoth organ,” which “sounded really like the voice of god.” They wandered along the Île de la Cité and the Palais de Justice, and through the Tuileries, where they watched an “utterly enchanting” puppet show.141 When Sylvia checked her mail at the American Express office, she found twenty-five letters and cards—including $25 from Mrs. Prouty—waiting for her. News from home tended to make her homesick, though she was determined to stay in England for another year. Ruth, her oldest friend, was pregnant, and Dick was engaged to Joanne Colburn, whom Sylvia considered too “quiet and delicate” for him.142 (They would wed in June 1956.) This news made her anxious about her own future. Nearly all of her close friends had married, and some were beginning to start families. Aurelia, meanwhile, wrote her about “the relief of engaged girls.”143 Yet she would not apologize for her unconventional path. “I believe one has to live alone creatively before being ready to live with anyone else.”144 She told Aurelia, “as blake [sic] says: ‘the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.’ ”145
She could not have found a better guide than Sassoon, a decadent aesthete who understood her appreciation for “the daily texture of life with a keen awareness and joy in small, colorful things: from the sight of a flicker on the grass to the sound of rain on a tin roof.”146 The two traveled by train to the French Riviera on New Year’s Eve. Plath had brought her Smith-Corona typewriter so she could record her impressions. Sassoon slept on her breast while, with a painter’s eye, she wrote about the “Van Gogh stars” and “Cubist” landscape. With each mile they put behind them, she was distancing herself from her real life and entering into a dream life with Sassoon. She wrote in her journal:
lifting my head sleepily once, suddenly the moon shining incredibly on water. Marseille. The Mediterranean. Sleep again, and at last the pink vin rosé light of dawn along the back of the hills in a strange country….and the red sun rising like the eye of God.147
She was, she told Mallory, “practically screaming with joy at the feast of color.”148 Plath would write about this dawn in “Southern Sunrise”:
A quartz-clear dawn
Inch by bright inch
Gilds all our Avenue,
And out of the blue drench
Of Angels’ Bay
Rises the round red watermelon sun.
Like her description of her ride on Sam, the language here prefigures the “red // Eye, the cauldron of morning” of the sunrise in “Ariel,” as does the theme of transcendence through movement. She was already becoming a poet of apotheosis.
In Nice, Plath and Sassoon stayed in a small, iron-balconied room with a view, and spent their days traveling on a Lambretta through Beaulieu, Villefranche, Menton, Cap Ferrat, and Monte Carlo (where they played roulette). In the evenings, she drank wine, ate pastries and fruit, and read The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in bed. This was her life as she had dreamed it. “Sassoon and I shared all this, all life, crying, kicking each other, madly in love, growing, and all that. God, what a life,” she wrote to Ellie.149 But her relentless enthusiasm alarmed Mrs. Prouty. “She seems to see everything through pink-lavender glasses. Everything—even the tawdry and so often (to me) ugly Riviera—is beautiful to her,” Prouty wrote Aurelia. “Isn’t Sylvia a little starry-eyed about it all? I’d like to hear her tell about something that disappointed her.”150
For Sylvia, the pinnacle of the trip was her visit to the small hillside village of Vence, the burial place of D. H. Lawrence and the site of the Chapelle du Rosaire, designed by Henri Matisse in 1951. Sylvia had seen photographs of the chapel in art books over the years, and had always dreamed of seeing it in person. When she and Sassoon arrived, however, she learned that the chapel was closed. Distraught, she walked away down the hill. Meanwhile, the mother superior saw Sassoon, still standing by the chapel, and beckoned him inside. He looked around for Sylvia, but did not see her. After his brief tour, he found her at the bottom of the hill, sitting on a rock and crying. She was furious that he had gone in without her and demanded that he take her back inside.
In the chapel, finally, she basked in the white and blue light shining through Matisse’s stained-glass windows. “I just knelt in the heart of sun & the colors of sky, sea, & sun, in the pure white heart of the chapel,” she told Aurelia.151 It was the closest thing to grace she had ever experienced; “epiphany…weeping—vision of Love,” she wrote in her calendar.152 But she could not forgive Sassoon’s selfishness, as she saw it, and the two had a heated row on the sunny hillside.
Both Plath and Sassoon made this argument the dramatic centerpiece of short stories they later wrote about the Rosary Chapel. Sassoon’s 1962 story “In the Year of Love and unto Death, the Fourth—an Elegy on the Muse,” was, he claimed, “pretty biographical.”153 It concerns a young man who reminisces about an old girlfriend. At once remorseful and nostalgic, the narrator remembers the early days of their relationship: “an unbelievable protraction of the instant of first sight love—with all its magical lightening of perfected creation, of Eden regained, and all the profound agonies of doubt.”154
Sassoon’s description of the Plath char
acter’s wonder as they drive to the Rosary Chapel has the ring of authenticity: “I got a crick in my neck from turning to all she told me to look at. Her excitement in one instance nearly caused an accident. This made us laugh heartily. Her laughter had a wonderfully sonorous note; it was elemental.” She was, he wrote, “as various as the sea, and I as the sun.”155 But they quarreled at the chapel:
“Let’s go now.”
“I won’t go! I won’t go until I’ve been inside. I’ll stand here and starve until they open to me.”
“Oh, the hell…”
“Hell! Why do you say that? Why do you say hell?” Her eyes flashed and she brought clenched fists abruptly to her chest in a motion of terrifying violence; she seemed possibly about to cry. “Why do you say hell? Because it’s I that will go there, not you! I!”
“I forbid you to say such an absurdity! I forbid it. Do you hear!”
“No, no! I hear nothing! Your voice and words mean nothing, in this thing! Because there, there is the place of sacredness. And there you avoided me. For that you had to be alone.”
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