Nom de Plume

by Carmela Ciuraru

  She found sexual satisfaction in picking her nose

  Chapter 10

  Sylvia Plath & VICTORIA LUCAS

  She was a good girl who loved her mother. That, at least, was the benign impression Sylvia Plath gave the outside world—a smiling façade of conformity; feminine, pure of heart; accommodating, polite, bright-eyed, and pretty. She admired her mother, Aurelia, and was desperate for her approval. There were no secrets between them. Aurelia was nurturing and boundlessly devoted; Sylvia was her dutiful, adoring daughter. Such was the seamless porcelain exterior of their relationship, and both players were invested in protecting it. Meanwhile, writing in her journals, Plath recorded the brutal truth. “I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world,” she wrote on December 12, 1958, following a session with her therapist. “But I was too nice for murder. I tried to murder myself: to keep from being an embarrassment to the ones I loved and from living myself in a mindless hell.” She resigned herself to the ineluctable role she’d been cast in: “I could pass her on the street and not say a word, she depresses me so. But she is my mother.” Sylvia was adept at dealing with Aurelia. Before speaking to her, it was as if Sylvia had trained herself to neatly tuck in her fury and put it to bed, permitting it to stir again only in her mother’s absence.

  Plath’s biography is familiar to just about every English literature major, reader of contemporary poetry, and suicidal teenager. She was toxic because she was so seductive, and seductive because she was so toxic. Her fame is immeasurable. Even many nonliterary types know that Sylvia Plath was the mercurial poet who gassed herself in an oven.

  She was born at 2:10 p.m. on October 27, 1932, in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, was a biology professor at Boston University, a well-regarded etymologist, and twenty-one years older than his wife. “At the end of my first year of marriage,” Aurelia later wrote, “I realized that if I wanted a peaceful home—and I did—I would simply have to become more submissive, although it was not my nature to be so.”

  By the time she was three years old, Sylvia proved quite brilliant. Once, while her mother was baking in the kitchen, she played alone on the living room floor. She was unusually quiet. Otto went to check on her, and, as Aurelia recalled, both parents were stunned to see what their daughter had done. Using a set of mosaic tiles she’d received as a gift, she reproduced “unmistakably the simplified outline of the Taj Mahal, the picture of which was woven into a mat in our bathroom.”

  When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died of an embolism brought on by complications of diabetes. We know how well she came to terms with that loss; those who don’t should read her notorious poem “Daddy,” which says it all.

  She had a younger brother, Warren, born in 1935, with whom she felt competitive for her parents’ affection, especially her mother’s. Sylvia was always driven to be the best, and often was. The siblings’ relationship did not become markedly closer until she attended Smith College (on a scholarship) and Warren was at Phillips Exeter Academy and then Harvard. Years later, their mother described the family with her typical fondness for nostalgia (steeped in denial). This false portrait presented a family close and uncomplicated in its affections: “We three loved walking by the sea, in the woods, huddling close by the fire and talking, talking, talking—or sharing a companionable silence,” she said.

  Plath always knew that she stood apart from others. Because she was viewed as “dangerously brainy,” she felt it was in her interest to mask her sharp intellect and turbulent emotions. Not only did she embody the role of a perfect, straight-A student, but she was determined to become popular. She also pursued the approval of adults, both at school and at home. Other students might merely work hard, but she burned with determination. Before her first short story appeared in Seventeen (in the August 1950 issue), Plath had submitted forty-five pieces to the magazine. At eighteen, she berated herself in her journal: “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don’t know and I’m afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.”

  One of her early poems, written when she was in tenth grade, was called “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt.” A teacher who read it expressed amazement that “one so young could have experienced anything so devastating.” In this instance, the source of suffering was her unwitting grandmother, who had accidentally smudged one of Plath’s pastel drawings. The final stanza read,

  (How frail the human heart must be—

  a mirrored pool of thought. So deep

  and tremulous an instrument

  of glass that it can either sing,

  or weep.)

  Such intensity of feeling would never leave her, despite her efforts to conceal and tame it. Aurelia added to this unbearable pressure by making Sylvia feel responsible for the well-being of both mother and daughter. Yet Aurelia might also be credited for Sylvia’s supreme sense of confidence, her innate belief that she was “special” and destined for greatness. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt,” Plath once wrote, but when it did creep in, she pounded it like a Whac-A-Mole until her achieving self could surface once again. Then all was right with the world. And she was at least able to find consolation in what she once described as the “minute joys” in life: she admitted in her journals that she loved the “illicit sensuous delight” she felt when picking her nose. “God what a sexual satisfaction!” she wrote.

  Early on, Plath was a baffling mix: highly empathetic but also self-obsessed. She absorbed everything and everyone around her. By the age of seventeen, she was investigating the bounds of the self and how to manage her troubled psyche. “Sometimes I try to put myself in another’s place, and I am frightened when I find I am succeeding,” she wrote in her diary in 1949. “How awful to be anyone but I. I have a terrible egotism. I love my flesh, my face, my limbs with an overwhelming devotion. . . . I want, I think, to be omniscient. . . . I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.’ Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be? . . . But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful, but to what extent? I am I.”

  The struggle between selves would torment her for her entire life—in poems such as “An Appearance,” “Tulips,” and “In Plaster,” among others—and it served as a frequent subject of her journals. At Smith, she wrote a long paper on the theme of double personality in Dostoevsky’s novels. Even when she was relatively happy, or at least emotionally stable, her inner turmoil never abated. It must have been exhausting. Often her fixation on duality and falseness reached a crisis pitch. “Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it,” she wrote in a lacerating note to herself in a 1953 diary, referring to a recent photograph. “It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again.” That year, she attempted to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills.

  Despite her recurring depressions, treatments with electroshock therapy, and flirtations with suicide, she was not entirely obsessed with death. As much as she was preoccupied with it, she was also seeking to end her ego self, with its oppressive, needy demands that were impossible to fulfill. Perhaps it wasn’t her whole life she wanted to stop, but a “shameful” part of herself. Over and over she expressed frustration at not measuring up to other poets and for feeling stalled in her work. “I, sitting here as if brainless wanting both a baby and a career,” she wrote in her journal in 1959. “What inner decision, what inner murder or prison-break must I commit if I want to speak from my true deep voice in writing . . . and not feel this jam up of feeling behind a glass-dam fancy-façade of numb dumb wordage.”

  What she seems to have craved most, in fact, was a chance at rebirth, at resurrection. Even though she was s
ometimes able to produce (or recover) what she deemed an “authentic” self, the success did not prove sustainable. Plath’s obsession with split selves—the pretty, superficial good girl who does everything easily and well, versus the raging, violent demon lurking within—left her perpetually confused: Which one was real? Which one should be shed? Which one should she kill off? In the end, the demon won.

  In 1961 Plath won the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship, a writing grant of $8,000. She had by then graduated summa cum laude from Smith, published poems and stories, and won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University. There she met the dashing British poet Ted Hughes, whom she married on June 16, 1956. (That date is Bloomsday.) After winning the Saxton, she was especially excited because she had applied previously, for poetry, but had been rejected. This time, she’d gone for it with a different project in mind. Although she had in fact completed her first novel, The Bell Jar, and even signed a contract for the manuscript with the British publisher Heinemann, this award would give her time to make revisions before the book’s publication and provide monthly living expenses as well. Money was extremely tight. That fall, Plath wrote one of her usual cheery letters home to her mother, assuring her that all was well. (Many of Plath’s missives to Aurelia opened with the effusive “Dearest-Mother-whom-I-love-better-than-anybody.”)

  She mentioned that the New Yorker had just accepted her poem “Blackberrying” and shared the news about the Saxton. “Well, I applied for a grant for prose this time and got the amount I asked for,” she wrote. “They pay in quarterly installments as parts of a project are completed, so I should get my first lot in a week or two!” She continued: “Life in town has been more and more fun.” The letter began and ended with her standard loving greeting (“Dear Mother”) and sign-off (“x x x Sivvy”).

  Less than two weeks later, she sent Aurelia another chatty letter, referring again to the grant but neglecting to explain what, exactly, her writing project was about. “I finished a batch of stuff this last year, tied it up in four parcels and have it ready to report on bit by bit as required,” she reported vaguely. “Thus I don’t need to write a word if I don’t feel like it. Of course, the grant is supposed to help you do writing and is not for writing you’ve done, but I will do what I can and feel like doing, while my conscience is perfectly free in knowing my assignments are done.”

  What “Sivvy” failed to mention was that the “batch of stuff” was an autobiographical novel that would have killed her mother, or at least broken her heart. The narrator’s voice, as in Plath’s poetry, was icy and lucid. It was about the “crackup” of a well-behaved young woman named Esther Greenwood, described in the flap copy of the 1971 Harper & Row hardcover edition as “brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful—but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time.” The story was also, to put it mildly, an exploration of Esther’s strained relationship with her mother, and how her repressed anguish leads to madness. There was only one way this devastating novel could be published by a “good girl” such as Plath, and that was to hide behind a pseudonym. She chose “Victoria Lucas”: “Victoria” was a favorite cousin of Ted Hughes; “Lucas” was the name of Hughes’s good friend Lucas Myers. Heinemann published The Bell Jar in London on January 14, 1963. Twenty-eight days later she killed herself.

  Plath lived long enough to read the reviews of her novel, and they didn’t please her. The reception in Britain was tepid and condescending. “There are criticisms of America that the neurotic can make as well as anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them brilliantly,” Laurence Lerner wrote in the Listener. A critic in the Times Literary Supplement wrote that “if [Lucas] can learn to shape as well as she imagines, she may write an extremely good book.” Worse, Plath had hoped for publication in the United States, too, but that didn’t seem forthcoming. Just after Christmas, she’d received a jarring letter of rejection from Alfred A. Knopf in New York, which had published her poetry book The Colossus the year before. A second rejection came from Harper & Row (“The experience remains a private one,” the editor wrote of the narrative, which seemed more a “case history” than a novel.) In the letter from Knopf, the editor expressed her regret: “We didn’t feel that you had managed to use your materials successfully in a novelistic way. . . . Up to the point of her breakdown the attitude of your young girl had seemed a perfectly normal combination of brashness and disgust with the world, but I was not at all prepared as a reader to accept the extent of her illness.” The same could be said of Plath. No one—not even those closest to her, who were well acquainted with her despair—could fully comprehend its sheer velocity, its manic and unstoppable force.

  The 1989 Plath biography Bitter Fame, by the poet and critic Anne Stevenson, opens with an apt epigraph from Dostoevsky’s The Devils:

  There was a tremendous power in the burning look of her dark eyes; she came “conquering and to conquer.” She seemed proud and occasionally even arrogant; I don’t know if she ever succeeded in being kind, but I do know that she badly wanted to and that she went through agonies to force herself to be a little kind. There were, of course, many fine impulses and a most commendable initiative in her nature; but everything in her seemed to be perpetually seeking its equilibrium and not finding it; everything was in chaos, in a state of agitation and restlessness. Perhaps the demands she made upon herself were too severe and she was unable to find in herself the necessary strength to satisfy them.

  Plath, volatile to say the least, was once described by the poet W. S. Merwin as “a cat suspended over water.” Like many others who knew her, he found her a “determined, insistent, obsessive person who snapped if things did not go her way, and flew into sudden rages.”

  The manuscript of The Bell Jar is another interesting manifestation of Plath’s fragmented selves. Here she had produced the most shocking work of her young life, filled with harrowing insights into her own psyche—yet she typed these words on dainty pink Smith College memo paper. “Got a queer and most overpowering urge today to write, or typewrite, my whole novel on the pink, stiff, lovely-textured Smith memorandum pads of 100 sheets each,” Plath wrote in her journal on March 3, 1958, while she was back at Smith, working as an instructor in the English department. She proudly noted that she’d helped herself to plenty of school stationery: “Bought a rose bulb for the bedroom light today & have already robbed enough notebooks from the supply closet for one & 1/2 drafts of a 350 page novel.”

  Well before the novel came out, the phrase “bell jar” had popped up in Plath’s writings. At Smith, she described feeling overwhelmed by her own mind, by the demands made on her, socially and otherwise—and admitted that she found things especially hard without a prescribed routine to follow. She could never give herself a break:

  Working, living, dancing, dreaming, talking, kissing—singing, laughing, learning. The responsibility, the awful responsibility . . . is rather overwhelming when there is nothing, no one, to insert an exact routine into the large unfenced acres of time—which is so easy to let drift by in soporific idling and luxurious relaxing. It is like lifting a bell jar off a securely clockworklike functioning community, and seeing all the little busy people stop, gasp, blow up, and float in the inrush (or rather outrush) of the rarefied scheduled atmosphere—poor little frightened people, flailing impotent arms in the aimless air. . . . What to do? Where to turn?

  Elsewhere, she wrote that “it’s quite amazing how I’ve gone around for most of my life as in the rarefied atmosphere under a bell jar.” And a 1959 journal entry recorded feelings of frustration and gloom: “The day is an accusation. Pure and clear and ready to be the day of creation, snow white on all the roof tops and the sun on it and the sky a high clear blue bell jar.”

  The few years leading up to the publication of The Bell Jar had brimmed with creativity. That period provided an argosy of material, but it may have ultimately contributed to her death. In the spring of 1959, she was writing the searing po
ems of The Colossus. Those took a toll, and the book’s themes would inform her novel as well. She also had an appendectomy, and in 1960 she gave birth to a daughter, Frieda. After suffering a miscarriage, she became pregnant again, and in January 1962 gave birth to her son, Nicholas. (He would have his own lifelong battle with depression; he died in 2009 by hanging himself.) By the fall, her marriage had fallen apart: Hughes left her for another woman. This time, recovery was not possible.

  The following January, as an overwhelmed, exhausted, and isolated young mother, Plath numbly witnessed her novel’s debut. She was living in a dreary London flat (where W. B. Yeats had once lived) at 23 Fitzroy Road in St. Pancras. There was no telephone and electricity was intermittent. That winter in England, following a “bone cold” autumn, was bleak, snowy, and icy, one of the worst on record. Plath and her children had the flu, and she was terribly anxious about money.

  At night, she could not fall asleep without medication. She was waking at four o’clock each morning to crank out the poems of Ariel. (Several drafts had already been handwritten on the reverse of the “lovely-textured” pink Smith College stationery on which she had typed her Bell Jar manuscript.) On February 11, 1963, as her children lay sleeping, she sealed off the door to their bedroom with wet towels and opened their window wide. She left them milk and bread. Then she put her head inside that infamous gas oven and ended it all.

  As she’d immersed herself in the early stages of her novel, Plath had been understandably secretive with her mother about writing The Bell Jar, but she had openly shared her fiction-writing ambition with a friend: “I have been wanting to do this for ten years but had a terrible block about Writing a Novel. Then suddenly . . . the dykes broke and I stayed awake all night seized by fearsome excitement, saw how it should be done, started the next day & go every morning to my borrowed study as to an office & belt out more of it.” This was a real breakthrough, considering Plath constantly berated herself for not having accomplished enough. “Prose writing has become a phobia to me: my mind shuts & I clench,” she wrote in her diary in 1957. “I can’t, or won’t, come clear with a plot.” Her self-flagellation is present throughout her journals. “Why can’t I throw myself into writing?” she wrote. “Because I am afraid of failure before I begin.”