American Isis

by Carl Rollyson

  Their first weekend was a great success. Dick made headway, it seems, because he was gentlemanly and sure of himself, traits Sylvia admired. Unlike her blind dates, he was not cowed by her intelligence; indeed, he found it lacking in some respects. The very idea that she might have shortcomings sent Sylvia to the moon over Dick, as she revealed in a 5 March letter to Ann: “I never felt so shallow in my life.” And he knew how to show a girl a good time, attending an exciting swim meet, biking, and dining at a Chinese restaurant. Reporting to her mother about the weekend with Dick, Sylvia summed it up this way: “He knows everything.”

  In her journal, Sylvia gave Dick a portentous fanfare. She might as well have written a Harlequin romance, for the scene is set at night, with the wind whipping up a froth of expectation, as she strides forward on “silver feet,” holding hands with her beloved under the starkly shining street lights, “Two of us, strong and together.” Overhead she observes a cathedral of constellations, and Dick says it is like “being in church.” They kiss, again and again. Sylvia salivated over that “glorious specimen of Dick-hood,” who addressed one letter to her, “Dear Incomparable One” and signed another “Your willing slave.”

  To her mother, Sylvia spoke in conventional terms of catching a man. In her journal she chided herself, “so proud and disdainful of custom,” for thinking of marriage as a viable option, one that required her to subordinate herself to a husband and to channel her creativity through his career. Even so, Sylvia hoped her man would tolerate her freelancing writer’s life. The idea of a career—the very word—bothered her. She had not entirely abandoned the idea of earning an advanced degree, but like Susan Sontag, born just a year after Plath, she regarded the routines of academic institutions and the paraphernalia of the scholar’s life with ambivalence. How could a creative person function in so much harness? Marriage itself, Sylvia confided to her journal, might drain her of creativity, although she conceded that having children might do just the opposite, making her a more fulfilled artist.

  Marcia Brown, so logical and sensible according to Sylvia, offered solace and companionship, and Sylvia was heartened in May when they both secured summer babysitting jobs in Swampscott, Massachusetts. By this time, after a month or so of rhapsodizing about Dick, Sylvia was beginning to have her doubts. What was behind his jocular tone? She suspected, for all his casual confidence, that he was uneasy about something. On 14 May, she told her mother that she had ripped off part of his irritating “jovial mask.”

  Sylvia took the typical Smith safety route, finding summer employment babysitting the Mayo family’s children, aged six, four, and two. She called them three “adorable” kids, but they seemed far less lovable after a long day of helping with breakfast, making beds, doing the laundry, ironing, and bathing the baby at night. In her journal she lamented the tragedy of womanhood. She wanted to be out in the world, hitting the road and consorting with soldiers and sailors, hanging out at bars—doing the scene like Jack Kerouac. But her mere presence would be taken as an invitation to have sex.

  Sylvia felt awkward in the kitchen, since she knew little about cooking. She now realized how her capable mother had spoiled her by not ever requiring her to learn the rudiments of meal making. It was a lot of work, and she was having murderous thoughts about her “darlings.” By July, she was fed up with the peripatetic schedule that had her going “in spurts” from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. She was well treated and did take some pleasure in caring for her charges, but inevitably she suffered in the role of supernumerary, which brilliant women before her—Marie Curie and the Brontë sisters, among others—had endured in their demeaning apprenticeship years. She had to grit her teeth, as they did, and deal every day with unruly children. In her journal and letters she actually sounds rather like Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. What is most unbearable about such situations is that no one notices the beautiful genius in their midst. No one complimented Sylvia on how well she looked. She admitted to Ann Davidow that she felt diminished. The recognition of others was always important to Sylvia, who did not care for the role of solitary genius. She longed to hear from Eddie, but he had fallen silent after she failed to answer his last two letters. To Aurelia, she confessed to feeling “cut off from humankind.” She could do no work of her own, since her main task was always to superintend the children. She had lost her tan and looked hollow-eyed. So no trysts with Dick, she decided, although she eventually did see him when he could get away from waiting tables at the Latham Inn. Marcia had taken a job similar to Sylvia’s with the Blodgett family and saw Sylvia frequently. Even so, in her journal Sylvia reprimanded herself for allowing fear and insecurity to dominate her.

  Sylvia’s forlorn letters after a month of babysitting reflect how much her grandiose sense of herself had been affronted by her employment. Her 7 July letter to Aurelia suggests how keenly she felt the discrepancy between the fan letters forwarded to her from Seventeen and her own uncertainty about herself. Reading fan mail provoked an ironic comment in the third person: “Sylvia Plath sure has something—but who is she anyhow?” She quoted a line from William Ernest Henley’s famous poem, “Invictus”: “My head is bloody, but unbowed,” to which she added her own line, “May children’s bones bedeck my shroud.” Those children would be the death of her, she implied in her gruesome poetic joke, which was such a counterpoint to Henley’s own concluding lines: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” Sylvia had a few inconsequential dates that summer, and in late August she enjoyed a few days with Dick. But mostly she was learning, as she wrote to Aurelia on 4 August, the “limitations of the woman’s sphere.”

  As so often, though, what Sylvia said on one page would be contradicted on another. Her shifting moods made it impossible for her to settle down. Thus a journal passage written after her return to Smith for a second year pays tribute to blind dates and the thirty-odd boys who had made her more conversant and confident. She was making her entrances downstairs in Haven House with a “practiced casualness,” no longer worrying whether her slip was showing or her hair uncurling. Now Sylvia could see herself as an attractive creation. It was show time at Smith College. What had bothered her so much about her babysitting stint in Swampscott was, as she put it in her journal, living in the “shadow of the lives of others.” The very expression of this sentiment in the passive voice suggests how much Sylvia missed the spotlight.

  Resuming correspondence with Eddie Cohen was one sure sign that Sylvia had recovered from her summer in shadow. She had also come to realize how awful she had been to Eddie after his long ride to see her. She told him about Dick’s tentative courtship, which Eddie diagnosed as her suitor’s uncertainty about himself and Sylvia. Eddie did not need to read her journal to sum up her problem: the huge discrepancy between the way she was living and her ambitious plans, a discrepancy that marriage would complicate. But he did not know that Sylvia was also keeping score, estimating that a woman had only about eight years before the wrinkles began to show and she was no longer physically attractive.

  Then Sylvia had one of those Jane Eyre/Thornfield Hall episodes. Everyone in Haven House was invited to Maureen Buckley’s coming-out party at her family’s mansion in Sharon, Connecticut. Maureen was the sister of William F. Buckley Jr., then a senior at Yale and later the founder of the National Review and one of the guiding lights of American conservatism. Bill had brought along his Yale class to meet all the Smith girls. Sylvia, sought after by several dance partners, gloried, perhaps for the first time, in her womanhood, feeling like a princess escorted by the scions of wealthy families, including Plato Skouras, son of Spyros Skouras, head of 20th Century Fox. One of her courtiers actually addressed her as “Milady.” Another said she looked like the Botticelli Madonna hanging over the Buckleys’ fireplace. That night, as she drifted off to sleep and into “exquisite dreams” in what might as well have been Thornfield Hall, she could hear the wind “wuthering outside the stone walls.”

  This idyll—coming so soon after a summer of baby-
minding and Sylvia’s provisional romance with Dick—she transformed into lines that placed her in the pastoral world of Renaissance poetry, picturing the sculpture of a bronze boy “kneedeep in centuries,” bedecked with leaves heralding the passage of time. From longing to frequent barrooms to frolicking on landed estates, Sylvia Plath could hardly contain herself. Returning to the Smith campus, however, she confessed to Aurelia that the course work frightened her, and she could not keep up. She saw her future as only work and more work.

  Eddie was talking of coming east again, and this time Sylvia wanted to show him a better time, alerting her mother that she would like to invite him to their home. He remained a kind of reality check on Sylvia’s tendency to romanticize events. When she described Constantine, one of the Buckley party cavaliers who had invited her for a Princeton weekend, Eddie (sounding like Nelson Algren) observed: “He reminds me, in a vague way, of someone I know. I dunno some romantic type critter I run into now & again who discusses love & literature & atomic power with equal glibness & appears and disappears with the suddenness of Mephistopheles.” Sylvia quoted Eddie’s verdict to Aurelia, concluding succinctly, “Not bad for a thumbnail sketch!”

  Sylvia, for all her worries, survived the fall semester of 1951 and, as usual, did well in her studies. In January 1952, she spent a weekend at Yale with Dick, who took her on his rounds as a medical student. She witnessed a birth, which she seemed to take in stride. She was not prepared, though, for the shocking revelation that Dick, who had led her to think otherwise, was not a virgin. She was angry about his deception and sudden confession. She was generally mad at men, who could play around in ways that women could not. Her reference to him now as a “blond god” was surely sarcastic. Sylvia was no prude, but Dick was different. She had built him up into a pristine idol. Now he seemed just like other men, some of whom she might have bedded if she had loved them or was not so worried about emotional involvements and pregnancy. She was still holding out for a taller, more romantic figure than Dick, so that she could wear heels and do the romantically impractical thing. Even at her most passionate, sooner or later Sylvia took the measure of her men. She yearned for the recklessness of romance, but she also read the newspapers and worried about world events, still pouring out her anxieties about nuclear war in letters she had resumed writing to Hans.

  Only Eddie, though, saw what really troubled Sylvia about Dick. Did it ever occur to her, Eddie asked, that she was not so much a woman deceived as “an engineer whose latest airplane design didn’t quite come up to specifications in performance?” Eddie had no interest in defending Dick, but he thought the larger issue was Sylvia’s fear of what sex would do to her in a committed relationship. Her quest for a “Golden God” seemed a symptom of her desire to force some kind of resolution of her anxieties. He noticed that in her latest letter she had used the word “rape” at least five times. “Keerful, gal, your dynamics might be slipping,” he cautioned her. Had she noticed that every sinus attack, as well as other illnesses, had come just after a breakup or some other contretemps with a male? Eddie was no expert on psychosomatic sickness, but he was beginning to wonder.

  Dick, on the other hand, continued to sound in his letters very much like Samuel Richardson’s unreal gentleman, Sir Charles Grandison. “I am aware of the joy, the honor of being near you and under your spell,” Dick wrote on 28 January 1952. That kind of banality could be briefly soothing, but his formulaic letters explain why Sylvia said she sought someone “more intuitive.” Dick wrote in phrases that could have been copied out of a conduct primer. Sylvia wanted the praise, of course, but it had to be delivered with panache. If Eddie had been able to confect a style that brought Sylvia both to the drawing room and the barroom, he might have succeeded in winning her.

  Eddie Cohen never lost sight of Sylvia the writer. But Dick did, as he mused about the life of a doctor’s wife, making Sylvia doubt he had any idea of the space and time required to write. Her work was not a sideline, and she believed she would lose respect for herself if she simply became absorbed in her husband’s career—especially since Dick had become more assertive on their well-planned dates. Was this the result of a “mother complex”? Like Aurelia, Dick’s mother was a “sweet, subtle matriarch,” but she was also the manipulative mom that Sylvia had been reading about in Philip Wylie’s influential Generation of Vipers. Momism, Wylie argued, was emasculating men and pacifying women into a conformism that would become one of the dominant themes in books about the American family in the 1950s. Mrs. Norton handled the family’s finances and ruled the home, reducing her husband, at times, to a supplicant, the weak father that was also a feature of 1950s situation comedies. Perhaps Dick’s seduction of the Vassar girl he told Sylvia about was his own version of rebelling against Momism, Sylvia speculated. And would he now seek to impose a submissive pattern of behavior on Sylvia, so as to forestall her domination of him? A medical career might well represent the best way to fend off a demanding wife and mother. His not entirely successful bid to achieve supremacy over Sylvia perhaps accounted for their contradictory denial and acceptance of one another. In sum, she believed they were both scared of what they might do to one another—as she would later reveal in her story, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear.”

  Sylvia confessed in her journal that she was not capable of love—at least not then—because she was so entirely dedicated to her art. She wanted the freedom to try on other lives the way she tried on dresses. Nagging at her, though, was the middle-class yearning for security, for settling into the comfortable. Forsaking Dick could mean a lost opportunity. Or, as she put it while summing up her sophomore year, she was now more aware of her limitations. She believed she had a more sober sense of her ambitions to publish and to go abroad as a Fulbrighter, which would entail not merely hard work but campaigning for herself. She would need to get elected to honor board and become involved in Smith’s journalism program, as well as work on the Smith Review. In effect, she acknowledged the politics of excellence, which the more introverted Sylvia of her freshman year had not been prepared to pursue.

  Eddie thought Sylvia was overcomplicating her love life. He bluntly stated that her troubles with Dick and other males had more to do with her superiority than anything else. Usually Eddie found her rather haughty words about her dates off-putting. (Both the number of unworthy suitors and Sylvia’s superior tone are reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara.) He could see that Sylvia had already destroyed whatever love she had for Dick, and if their relationship continued, that only meant she was not yet ready to relinquish the dependability Dick offered. Of course, Eddie was not a disinterested party. By the spring of 1952, he was openly declaring his love for Sylvia. He admitted his jealousy and his desire for her, especially after Sylvia said that she still felt a strong physical attraction to Dick.

  Throughout Sylvia’s sophomore year she continued to work on her fiction, staying up late at night in the Haven House kitchen typing away. Much of her work met with rejection slips that hardly seemed to dent her determination, which was rewarded in early June when she won Mademoiselle’s $500 fiction prize for “Sunday at the Mintons.” Plath put her hostile feelings about Dick into the story, transforming him into Elizabeth Minton’s fussy brother, Henry, who chides his sister for daydreaming and for an impractical nature that has left her directionless—barely able, in his view, to perform her duties as a town librarian. She is an aging spinster who has come to live with her brother in his retirement. This, of course, is the fate that Sylvia was determined to avoid: getting stuck with a male companion whose intellectual arteries would harden and in turn ossify her own existence.

  She wondered in a letter to her mother if Dick would recognize himself in the story. It only becomes clear in the conclusion that Elizabeth has daydreamed Henry’s drowning during a gallant effort to retrieve their mother’s brooch, which Elizabeth has dropped on a rock about to be washed by the waves of an approaching storm. In a neat reversal that made the story palatable for a juvenile audience, Elizabe
th’s revenge fantasy actually stimulates her sympathy for her brother, who would no longer have anyone to look after him in the slimy, murky depths of the sea. But the story’s saving grace is surely its ironic commentary on the expired, smug male reflected in Elizabeth’s question to herself: “Who would listen to him talk about the way the moon controlled the tides or about the density of atmospheric pressure?”

  Sylvia was working a summer job scrubbing tables at the Belmont Hotel when she received the good news about the Mademoiselle prize in a telegram from Aurelia. Sylvia screamed with delight and hugged the startled head waitress. Plath had just begun her job, but she was already disgruntled, again discovering she was ill prepared to deal with the menial side of life. Even more disappointing, she had been assigned to the side hall because of her inexperience. That assignment meant she would not be getting big tips in the main dining room. More than money was at stake, though, since Sylvia always wanted to be seen and admired. Even waitressing, to her, had rankings, and she realized she did not rate.

  The day before learning of her prize, Sylvia wrote in a note not included in Letters Home that carrying trays one-handed terrified her. She knew nothing about her job, she confessed. She consoled herself by saying she would be harvesting a good deal of the summer for her writing. Indeed, in her journal, she catalogued no fewer than twenty-two characters, each labeled with an appropriate epithet: “Oscar, the birdlike, picayune, humorous band leader … stoic-faced Harvard law student and straight-backed busboy Clark Williams … Mrs. Johnson, the tall, sharp Irish chef’s wife with the acid brogue and the fiery temper,” and so on.