American Isis (15 page)

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 turn 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.

Jane Baltzell Kopp, a fellow American student, cringed sometimes in Sylvia's company, because the latter was so brashly American and apparently unaware of the jokes that Cambridge students made about her. Actually, Sylvia was not as oblivious as Kopp supposed. She knew quite well that she put people off with her “emotional, irresponsible gushing,” as she wrote in her journal, but often she could not help it. In her perfectly decorated room, she would enthuse about how she enjoyed a certain piece of furniture, and her English acquaintances mused over the oddity of using a verb like enjoy in connection with the decor. Out on the streets, Sylvia sometimes seemed like any other gauche American tourist. She was girlish, Kopp recalled, pedaling her bike with the frenzy of a small child. One of Plath's professors remembered that she wore “charming, girlish clothes, the kind of clothes that made you look at the girl, not the garments, hair down to the shoulders still, but ever so neatly brushed and combed, and held back in place by a broad bandeau on the crown.” Kopp called Sylvia's style “‘Ivy League College Girl': jumpers, turtlenecks, skirts, and pullovers, loafers.”

As Kopp admits, she had a rather fraught friendship with Plath, who regarded the similarly educated Kopp as her double—no doubt a conceit heavily influenced not only by a reading of Dostoevsky, but also by Edgar Allen Poe's story, “William Wilson,” in which the eponymous hero's double turns up at the most inconvenient times. Kopp did not quite fit that role, and she rejected this characterization of her when Edward Butscher interviewed her. But something odd was going on between these two women, since Kopp kept doing things that set Plath off. Some instances seemed inadvertent—like Kopp leaving a key in the lock on the inside of a shared Paris hotel room door, preventing Sylvia from entering and sleeping off a late-night jaunt. But others—like writing in Plath's books—seem, consciously or not, provocations of the fastidious Sylvia. The refrain of Kopp's reminiscence is that Sylvia took herself too seriously, an attitude that always seemed, for some reason, to surprise Kopp. In her journal Sylvia wrote admiringly of Kopp's humor, good looks, and magnetic personality. She saw the two of them in frankly competitive terms: “It is a mutual grabbing for queenship; both of us must be unique.” The solution, said Sylvia—sounding like Elizabeth fending off Mary, Queen of Scots—was to keep separate and not “overlap in too many places.”

Belonging to a theater club made all the difference in Sylvia's adjustment to Cambridge, since she developed an immediate rapport with cast and crewmembers and joined them for socializing. “I have simply been treated like a queen!” Sylvia wrote on 29 October, two days after her twenty-third birthday. She seemed delighted to have been cast as a mad poetess in an eighteenth-century farce, telling Mallory Wober it was the producer's “stroke of intuition.” On the same day, in a letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, Sylvia presented a somewhat sober persona to her patron, reporting that her fingers turned blue in her ill-heated room, and that she was attending fifteen hours of lectures a week, as well as sessions with a tutor each morning. She was less prone to want immediate success, and more inclined to perfect herself and her work gradually.

By early November, Plath seemed content that a small Cambridge literary magazine had accepted two of her poems. She was beginning to regard her drama club activities as a drain and decided she would drop out if she did not win any major roles. The next term, she confided to Wober, she would forsake the “riproaring life & become a sedate femme du salon.” She was also working out a schedule that permitted her to write two hours a day, no matter what. Waiting for the perfect time, she told Wober, meant you became “paralysed from lack of practice.” Although she enjoyed her studies, she concluded that an academic career was not for her. It seemed too confining and pedantic and static—in other words, not a real world. She described the small number of women dons as spinster freaks, unappealing models for a young woman who wanted the world and a mate, too.

Sylvia seemed exhausted by the newness of her environs, where she was without any of her old friends. The frigid Cambridge climate took its toll, too—not to mention the starchy, soggy, sludgy food, so different from the appetizing meals at Smith. Homesick, she stocked her room with fruit. Sinus attacks signaled stress. In her journal she declared that the English winter might do her in.

Sylvia admitted to her mother that she missed Sassoon, now at the Sorbonne. He seemed more mature than the Cambridge men she met, although David Buck, whom she had just dated, had some of the aesthetic and worldly qualities she treasured in Richard. Her first letter to Sassoon on 22 November reads like a parody of his style, a baroque and curiously abstract poetic set piece describing artificial fires reflected in goblets of sherry. For all its “culture,” Cambridge was also stuffy and insular. “In the beginning was the word and the word was Sassoon,” she said. To Mallory Wober, she wrote an opaque letter on 23 November, referring to her penchant for adopting various personae and closing with the admonition, “Watch out for schizophrenic women.” She was playing a whore in
Bartholomew Fair
and wrote a note to Wober on the 24th thanking him for coming to her performance. It made her feel like a prima donna, or at least a “glorified & sublime tart.”

Now experiencing full-blown nostalgia for home, Sylvia thanked her mother profusely for a Christmas box packed with large hazelnut cookies. Cooking and homemaking, she wrote to Mrs. Prouty, mattered a “great deal.” Plath was not a “career girl,” a term that denoted a woman alone, deliberately forsaking married life. She was jettisoning her former prize student, award-winning, collegiate self, she told her benefactor. Away from home at Christmas for the first time in her life, she felt like a female Ulysses, “wandering between the scylla of big ben and the charybdis of the eiffel tower.” She engaged in an orgy of letter writing—thirty messages in all—to the wonderful people she knew. Some received cards and short notes with drawings. This burst of correspondence made her feel thankful and gratified.

To Elinor Friedman Klein and others, Plath made Cambridge into a setting for her misadventures. She enjoyed creating a sensation and then describing the consequences to friends—as she did with a horseback riding exploit that had left her black and blue. Her mount, Sam, had forsaken the sedate pleasures of a country ride and plunged her into a busy Cambridge intersection. Plath reveled in the chaos that ensued: “I find myself hugging Sam's neck passionately. old women & children run screaming for doorways as we heave up onto sidewalk. such power: like the old gods of chance: I felt like one human, avenging thunderbolt,” she wrote to Elinor Friedman Klein on 14 December. Sam eventually wearied of his romp and came to a full stop. Twice before, she had careened her way toward destruction: toppling down a ski slope and breaking her leg, then floundering in a spinning car as Warren skidded into an icy Northampton on the day of Sylvia's return to Smith after her suicide attempt. She would soon set off for a Christmas holiday in France and seemed fixated on the hazards of departures and arrivals.