He warmed up when he realized that Plath was a published author and deadly serious about writing. He liked that she had worked her way through college. He had been disappointed with his apathetic students and at first assumed she was simply another “pampered Smith baby,” Sylvia wrote her mother on 25 October. He invited her to audit his class, which she did, vowing to learn as much as she could from “such a man,” who told her the class needed her contribution. She did not elaborate, but what Kazin offered her was another version of independence. He took the money and the tributes from the academic world in stride, but unlike her other professors, he was not really part of it. The point was to write; there were no excuses for not doing so. “You don’t write to support yourself; you work to support your writing,” was his message to Plath, one she quoted to her mother. She soon became a Kazin favorite. Constance Blackwell can still hear him calling her: “Syl-via, Syl-via.” In the letter he wrote in support of her application to graduate school, Kazin noted he was not in the habit of writing on behalf of students—and certainly not with the superlatives he used to describe Plath. “She is someone to be watched, to be encouraged—and to be remembered,” he concluded.
Sylvia was still aiming at publication in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and she enthused over Kazin’s interest in her—which included a kind of command performance at his home, reading and discussing her story, “Paula Brown’s Snowsuit.” At the same time, she continued her impersonation of a “regular girl”—to quote from New York Jew, the “first to clear the dishes after coffee.” Sylvia did not seem to mind building up her hopes because, she told Aurelia on 7 December, she loved living “in suspense.” Kazin had invited her to an informal lunch and was writing a recommendation for her Woodrow Wilson fellowship application. Just how extravagant she could become is clear in her final comment on Kazin, “I worship him.” Yet to Kazin, she appeared “guarded to an extreme. I knew nothing about her and never expected to know anything.” She simply presented an image of perfection, the pet of what he called, in New York Jew, “the nervous English department.”
Sylvia spent part of her Christmas break in New York City, with Sassoon playing Prince Charming to her Cinderella, as she described it in a letter to a friend. Gordon Lameyer, still very much in the picture, was in the navy’s gunnery school in Virginia. In a typical description of her itinerary, she mentioned breakfasting on oysters in a scene that would not be out of place in a Hollywood romance, and ending her day in film noir fashion, “talking to detectives in the 16th squad police station.”
Sylvia continued to write poetry for a creative writing class, and she submitted a story to the Ladies Home Journal, which rejected her work but wanted to see a rewrite—an encouraging sign, since rejections usually included an invitation to submit her next story. More rejections followed from The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, but always having something on the way to a publisher seemed to drive her on. She fretted over what seemed to her the slim chances of studying at Oxford or Cambridge, and kept calculating which graduate school would serve her best, considering that, as she told Aurelia on 29 January, “writing is the first love of my life.”
Sylvia Plath’s strongest inclination pointed toward study and perhaps teaching abroad. Her pacifism and sense of international solidarity put her at odds with Cold War America and McCarthyism, which she wanted to counteract, as she put it in a letter to Aurelia on 11 February, by acting on her realization that “new races are going to influence the world … much as America did in her day.” She considered teaching in Tangier. Then on 15 February, Sylvia wrote that Cambridge had accepted her, and that the Smith College English department was behind her in their rejection of “machine-made American grad degrees … P.S. English men are great!” Writing several poems a week, Sylvia was also thinking of submitting a book to the Yale Younger Poets series.
More exciting trips to New York and an encouraging letter from The Atlantic Monthly made the spring of 1955 seem a reprise of the fateful 1953 season when the heady round of success and frenetic activity had only served to panic Sylvia. This time, though, she was nearing graduation and pleased with her senior thesis and her advisor, her Russian literature professor, George Gibian. He had been deeply impressed with her, describing Sylvia as the ideal student to Edward Butscher. Even a “lame” suggestion from Gibian turned into a wonderful chapter of the thesis, Gibian remembered. She also babysat for him and enthusiastically wrote to Gordon Lameyer, “I was holding the deliciously warm twins and feeding them bottled milk (after five glasses of sherry I felt an overwhelming impulse to strip and nurse them myself!)”.
Sylvia remained under the steadying influence of Dr. Beuscher, whom she saw periodically, as well the sobering encouragement of Alfred Kazin and the kind attention of Professor Mary Ellen Chase, who made sure Sylvia knew, step-by-step, how her Cambridge application fared and what to expect next. Sylvia formed new friendships, purposely not isolating herself as she had done before her suicide attempt. Sue Weller had become a close friend as copasetic as Marcia Brown. Sylvia invited Sue to accompany her home for spring break.
Sylvia continued to see Gordon Lameyer and briefly considered an engagement to him. She decided against it because she did not want to cut off opportunities or be saddled with a commitment to supporting his career. She thus avoided another awkward involvement of the kind she had backed away from with Dick Norton. Richard Sassoon was another case altogether. He might write passionately, but he came nowhere near the subject of marriage: “I bear the name of love tonight and bear myself alone and alone to boredom’s bed and bear my love like a cross—so cross you are not with me—a cross forever until you are with me—that’s true, I swear—and swear madly because it is true—o god of the godly keep off the pidgins! Ah to conquer death—not to avoid it—but to have it now and then—in between the now and then—until then, all my love, Richard.” These letters evidently amused Sylvia, who proposed taking Sassoon along on one of her visits to Olive Higgins Prouty.
Sylvia was beginning to meet major contemporary poets like Marianne Moore and John Ciardi. She did a public reading of her work for an intercollegiate poetry contest (she tied for first place) and enjoyed making the audience laugh. Later, the college radio station recorded her reading her work. Moore made a deep impression, appearing as a sort of fairy godmother and expressing a wish to meet Aurelia, Sylvia wrote in a 16 April letter to her mother. A letter from The Atlantic Monthly requested revision of a poem that Sylvia thought might ruin the work’s spontaneity. She regretfully admitted, “I battle between desperate Machiavellian opportunism and uncompromising artistic ethics.” The former won out.
Plath was thrilled to get a letter from Ciardi calling her a real poet. She was also hoping that May would bring further publication in Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, and Mademoiselle, as well as several more prizes from Smith. Reading her letters is rather like making the rounds of perpetual desire. This time there were fewer disappointments. At pains to show how fulfilled Sylvia felt in the late spring of 1955, Aurelia noted her daughter’s happy birthday call in Letters Home: “Thank you, Mother, for giving me life.” In early May, Sylvia was invited to judge a contest at a writer’s festival in the Catskills. She enjoyed the work and the attention—mistakenly thinking, however, that her well-received public performance meant that she would enjoy a teaching career.
The official award of a Fulbright to study at Cambridge was announced in late May at the same time as Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote Sylvia to say that her original version of “Circus in Three Rings” was better than the revision the magazine had requested. He would publish her work in the August issue. After his call for more new work, Plath practically chortled to her mother, “That fortress of Bostonian conservative respectability has been ‘charmed’ by your tight-rope-walking daughter!” In the same 21 May letter, Plath listed the eleven awards she had received that year, totaling $470. At graduation, Sylvia listened to Adlai Stevenson give the com
mencement address, watched Marianne Moore receive an honorary degree, acknowledged Alfred Kazin’s wave to her as she accepted her degree, and whispered in her mother’s ear, “My cup runneth over!”
The apotheosis of Sylvia Plath seemed perfected in June, when letters from Gordon Lameyer and Richard Sassoon arrived with breathtaking tributes—and, in Sassoon’s case, a new, almost pleading eroticism that complemented Lameyer’s earnest adoration: “From you … I have found a language, a way of looking at life, a beauty in the terrible paradoxes. You have given me courage to work in the dark, energy to concentrate on my work, vision to clear the shelf of the masters who sit starting down on me with their chilling jeer, confidence to act in the Hamlet play of life. I have taken all you had to give—and you gave more than anyone.” Sassoon wrote his letter on 4 June, a day later, abasing himself even as he exalted her: “O my darling sweet clever Sylvia! You will make the heavens answer someday … if ever I am there … and I shall be.”
A new note of urgency verging on panic enters Sassoon’s letters that summer, as he realizes he may be losing her: “I do not believe I shall ever love another woman so deeply, so happily, so sadly, so confidently, so desperately, so fully … something in me has broken … Goodbye my very dearest Sylvia … love—it is a great thing, even when it has failed. And it was the love really that faltered or failed, was it? Because it lives.”
The next day, 19 July, Sylvia mentioned to her mother that in Cambridge she had gone out to dinner and a play with Peter Davison, now another of her lovers. Alfred Kazin had introduced Plath to Davison, then twenty-seven and an editor at Harcourt, Brace. At Smith, Davison met a typical undergraduate, robust and ingenuous, but also driven to write and full of questions about the world of publishing. The conventionally pretty girl in the Smith sweater-and-skirt ensemble formed a “curious, even a disturbing alliance” with her intensity of expression, he pointed out in Half-Remembered. Davison asked Plath to show him her first novel whenever she wrote it. Davison seemed especially suitable for the summer before her departure for Cambridge because, she told her mother, his voice sounded “nice and Britishy and tweedy.” He was a Harvard man who wrote poetry and had a Scottish poet for a father, she told Warren.
The affair began easily enough, with a dinner date and with Sylvia slipping into Davison’s bed quite casually. He soon learned that she was hard on her lovers and suspected he did not measure up. Because they shared a certain “mutuality,” only Richard Sassoon seemed to have satisfied her sexually. Like Eddie Cohen, Davison felt Plath held back. Only once did her mask slip, when she disclosed the horrifying details of her suicide attempt and her hostility toward her mother and scorn for her father, “a sort of fuddy-duddy professor who dealt with bugs down in Boston.” Davison found Plath an entrancing companion who shared her ambitions and experiences freely, as he did during their summer romance, which ended abruptly after a visit to the Plath home.
Davison met Aurelia for the first time and was struck by her formality and correctness when she greeted him as though she were greeting one of Sylvia’s serious suitors. (Eddie Cohen had received a similar reception.) At home, Sylvia treated her mother with affection. In his walk with Sylvia later, it was another story—not only with regard to Aurelia, but also to himself. Sylvia let him know that their time together had ended now that she was off to England. She dismissed him in such a way that he felt used and rather callow, even though she had initially approached him with respect. In her journal, Plath explained that she was “too serious” for Davison, and that only Richard Sassoon understood the nature of her “tragic joy.” Although the affair with Davison was brief, he would return later as an important figure in her publishing career—and still later in the biography wars involving the Plath estate.
Everything seemed under Plath’s control. Gordon Lameyer wrote to say he would wait for her, and Richard Sassoon remained in the picture with his paeans: “Sylvia, you are a great big, healthy, powerful woman!” She should never forget it, even when she was not feeling so, Sassoon wrote on 9 August in a letter written in an extraordinary fatherly tone. In Letters Home, Aurelia mentions no strain between herself and Sylvia during this summer, but Sassoon’s letter refers to his regret over “so much hatred and frustration in your home.” Knowing that he was touching on a fraught subject, the wary Sassoon nevertheless ventured to advise her, “Believe me, it is no good to leave a home with a foul taste in the air. Particularly, as we never know what will happen in the absence. Please think about it, Sylvia. Just say she is one hell of a bitch and then determine to get along with her for the last month. It was after all your purpose in staying at home this summer, and you will feel better to have accomplished something there.…” Without Sylvia’s side of the correspondence, it is hard to tell exactly what troubled her, or how she reacted to Sassoon’s admonition—or what she did about it.
In other moods, Plath was just as likely to confess, as she did to Warren on 28 July, that she was already feeling the homesickness that always began before she departed on trips. She wanted him to know how much she loved him. She hoped he would confide in her and write to her while she was away on her two-year journey. She had been wandering about in a “blue streak of incredible nostalgia.” You had to pick your day with Sylvia Plath. She declared to Warren, “My wings need to be tried. O Icarus…”
CHAPTER 4
I AM NATURE
(1955–57)
September 1955: Plath arrives in England; 25 February 1956: First dramatic meeting with Ted Hughes; 16 June: Plath and Hughes marry and honeymoon in Spain; 1957: Plath earns her Cambridge degree, and the couple moves to America.
In September, Sylvia sailed to London, enjoying a short shipboard romance and a stop in France, where “men know how to look at one,” she assured Elinor Friedman Klein. Sylvia reveled in London’s centuries of tradition, suffused with the silvery, misty light of a Constable painting. She walked for miles through the parks, toured Soho, and visited the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, a Dickensian pub, and bookstalls. She was already assembling a submission list of British literary magazines.
Cambridge did not disappoint. She was still in that romance of travel mood that made her digs seem charming, with a gas ring and fireplace that meant, of course, no central heating. The formal gardens, the “quaint crooked streets,” the River Cam, and King’s Chapel were all part of an enchanting, cozy picture she presented of herself. She was surrounded by her books and anticipating the purchase of a tea set and prints for her bare walls. “Here all is to begin again,” she wrote Aurelia on 3 October. She studied the classics of the ancient and modern stage, philosophy and ethics, and literary criticism. She described the controversial literary critic F. R. Leavis lecturing: “a magnificent, acid, malevolently humorous little man who looks exactly like a bandy-legged leprechaun.” She hoped Richard Sassoon would make good on his desire to study at the Sorbonne. She could not think of a better escort during her foray to Paris.
By mid-October, Sylvia had been to a Labour Club dance and was meeting men (they outnumbered women ten-to-one at Cambridge). First up was Mallory Wober, tall, dark, and handsome, a Londoner who had spent nearly a decade in India. He took her punting on the Cam and reminded her of Dmitri Karamazov, Sylvia wrote Elinor Friedman Klein. Indeed, Plath greeted Wober like a figure out of fiction as the “dark Dmitri Karamazov hewn out of the Himalayas,” who would descend on her “in a dark cloud” and astound the “wearied mahomette who will probably be trying feebly to hang herself with yards and yards of holly-ribbon conveniently supplied by an invisible troll who lives under the staircase.” Other “chaps” were taking her to tea, to meals, to concerts, and for long, picturesque walks. None of these dates seems to have been very passionate. Wober was good company, supplying her with phonograph records and entertaining her on an organ he brought up to her room. She regarded him as a substitute for the brother she missed. For Edward Butscher, Wober recalled Sylvia’s stunning physical presence, how she could enter a room and tur
n heads. He found her energizing and empowering.
Sylvia successfully auditioned for the Amateur Dramatic Club, doing scenes as the clever and bold Rosalind in As You Like It and as Camille in Camino Real, based on Dumas’s famous courtesan, who had been transfigured into Greta Garbo’s dying goddess character in Camille. Sylvia had her audience laughing as she described her idea of the stage set, and afterward a male member of the audience complimented her on her wonderful voice, which filled the room. She wrote many playful illustrated letters to Wober, picturing herself awaiting his visits to her room, “languishing like Camille amid my withered yellow dahlias.” She found rehearsals demanding and wrote to Wober about her dealings with “dramatic tyrants.” She was joking, no doubt, and yet she seemed relieved to think of him as both her escort and her escape. She liked to say the name Mallory, she told him. It had the right number of syllables to achieve a dramatic effect, which she would demonstrate for him sometime.
After a month in Cambridge, Sylvia announced that she was “living it up.” She had two teas and a sherry party to attend on the day she wrote to Elinor Friedman Klein about her Cambridge “heaven.” Plath called herself popular, although when Edward Butscher later interviewed several of her Cambridge contemporaries, they seemed to regard her as a pill—too methodical even in the way she cut her egg and toast into squares, and too shiny with Samsonite luggage that stood out against the shabbiness of postwar England. Sylvia herself stood out amidst the “oppressive ugliness” and “threadbare” dirtiness of even upper-middle-class homes in a country still recovering from the ravages of war.
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