American Isis (3 page)

Sylvia loved to watch her father propel himself through the waves like a seagod. He would carry her on his back with apparently no strain, leaving a wake behind him. Her fear of the murky depths vanished in the rocking motion of his body. While asthmatic Warren remained at home, father and daughter romped on the beach. The fair Sylvia never burned, instead turning a beautiful brown. This was all a fairy tale, and Sylvia knew it. Otto, suffering the effects of diabetes, could not have performed the physical feats ascribed to him. As
Letters Home
reveals, the seagod father was actually “Grampy,” Aurelia's vigorous middle-aged father. But Sylvia was concerned with re-creating the power of her father's presence, and the prowess she accords him is her way of dramatizing the hold he had on her imagination. As Richard Larschan explains in his myth-busting article, Plath also mythologized some of her early schooling, exaggerating the multicultural aspects of her upbringing to suit the temper of the times.

There was a war on, and Otto the German was under suspicion. Such mistrust was not fair, since he had nothing to do with Hitler or Nazism. But on radio, in comic books, and in movies, the voice of villainy was, in effect, Otto's voice. He was part of a mythology that his daughter could not quite separate from her own experience of the man. For a child, Otto's cruel rule could not be easily severed from a world of concentration camps, of newsreels that depicted the horror of Japanese prisoner of war camps. Like Susan Sontag, another child of the war, Sylvia Plath saw evil documented in graphic images that became embedded in her preteen psyche.

The searing nature of evil, and the way her own family could be contaminated with it, struck hard at a suburban girl living in Winthrop, Massachusetts, six miles from Boston. Disaster could strike at any moment—as it did with the great hurricane of 21 September 1938, when land and sea converged in a toss-up that pitched a shark into grandmother's garden. Sylvia saw the sea rear up with “evil violets in its eyes.” All day she heard her mother make frantic phone calls, anticipating the worst from an all-devouring storm that could annihilate the only existence Sylvia knew. It seemed like Armageddon, a toppled world with upended telephone poles and ruined cottages bobbing in roiling waters.

Sylvia felt the elation of terror, the next day finding the wreckage satisfying and somehow commensurate with her imagination of disaster. She was born to a biblical life, calling the torrential rain a “Noah douche.” She began writing poetry and stories almost as soon as she learned her letters, and the perfect storm that remade her universe became associated with her own creative cosmos, which could similarly reshape reality into her own realm. That tautological process of inventive perception, in which the world was bent back into the word wrap of phrase making, was the very stuff of life for her. When she succumbed to her first creative dry spell in the summer of 1953, she saw it as a living death and attempted to end her existence. A second, famously successful suicide would come later when she was an exhausted, worded-out poet who could no longer generate the energy that had peaked in her thirtieth year.

Sylvia Plath, however, was no solipsist. More than most children her age, she was a world citizen, enthusiastically learning geography in elementary school lessons and reports that she put together with A
+
accuracy. She could not have had a more encouraging mother, one who wrote her daughter notes full of praise and pride. Aurelia Plath, herself a top student, well-read and self-sacrificing, seemed the perfect parent, and Sylvia would often tell her so in notes written during summers spent away from home at camp. Unlike Otto, who made demands on his children, Aurelia offered suggestions, alternatives, and an array of esteem-building exercises—which her daughter would come to loathe. What was wrong with mother? In one sense, nothing. In another, what was wrong with mother was that she was not Otto Plath. He had the mystique and the majesty of higher learning his daughter revered. Aurelia did not expect any less from Sylvia than Otto did, but Aurelia had also been her husband's servant. How could she function as her daughter's master?

Otto's death on 5 November 1940 remained a suppurating wound in Sylvia Plath's life. How could such a powerful man die, especially before his time? He was only fifty-five. But he had refused to see doctors until it was too late. Even after his diabetes was diagnosed, he continued to consume a diet heavy in fats and sugars that hastened his demise. Aurelia nursed him through his dying days, restricting contact with the children to spare them the sight of their father's agony. She also decided not to have Sylvia and Warren attend the funeral. But to her daughter, Aurelia's actions meant that Sylvia was deprived of her father's affection and approval. This reaction made his death seem even more mysterious and arbitrary, a tyrannical disruption of her childhood that made him blameworthy, too. How could a father so dominate her world and then just disappear? It was monstrous. A child who, after her father dies, says she will stop speaking to God (speaking to, mind you—not praying to) is one who brooks no equals, let alone superiors, in her cosmos. She may for a moment—even a year—feel overpowered by another, but all of her writing speaks to a need to dominate the world's attention.

It was Aurelia who introduced Sylvia Plath to poetry, reading poems that she thought suited her child's love of rhythm and cadence. Matthew Arnold's “The Forsaken Merman” struck Sylvia as being addressed to her—or at least to children like her:

Come, dear children, let us away:

Down and away below!

Now my brothers call from the bay,

Now the great winds shoreward blow,

Now the salt tides seaward flow …

For a child who often visited her grandparents on a strip of Winthrop land called Point Shirley that had views of both ocean and bay, the merman's call to watery depths would echo in the image of riding on Otto Plath's back, gradually losing her fear of the dark and deep sea beneath their bodies as he swam his rhythmical strokes.

Arnold's poetry was her world “through the surf and the swell … where the sea-beasts ranged all round.” Poetry proved to be a median point between her and the world, a conjoining like that of land and sea. The merman, forsaken by his beloved Margaret, yearns for her return. But she remains on land in church, “her eyes … sealed to the holy book!” The merman's voice is the poet's and expresses the enchantment of words that Margaret has also forsaken, but that Sylvia, a “sea-girl” like her mother, swooned over, saying they made her want to cry but also made her very happy. Poetry had that power over her. She would live and die by it.

Plath published her first verse, simply titled “Poem,” in the
Boston Herald
on 10 August 1941. This brief nature poem featuring the sounds of crickets and the sights of fireflies appeared in the children's section, “The Good Sport Page.” Paul Alexander calls this first publication the most important day of that summer. But the occasion was more than that: Sylvia became aware that the world was watching. Publication is a form of judgment that another kind of sensibility—say, Emily Dickinson's—shrinks from, but Sylvia already had a habit of putting herself forward. She measured herself by having others take the measure of her.

Aurelia understood this aspect of her daughter. When in the fall of 1942 Aurelia sold the family house in Winthrop and moved her family to Wellesley, she was thinking of more than situating Sylvia in a college town. Sylvia Plath needed a bigger canvas on which to practice her art. She was already drawing quite well, one year after publishing “Poem” winning a prize for a picture of a woman wearing a hat. Like some other extraordinary writers—Rebecca West, Norman Mailer, and Susan Sontag, for example—Sylvia from an early age regarded writing as a form of serious play.

Jane Eyre
and
Gone with the Wind
were favorite novels, but Syl also liked to listen to
The Lone Ranger
and
The Jack Benny Show.
If Aurelia fussed over her child's devotion to radio the way parents today worry over how much television their children watch, such concern left no traces. Sylvia loved paper dolls and was overjoyed to get Rita Hayworth and Hedy Lamarr paper doll books. She also treasured her Bette Davis autograph. Syl may have seemed “brainy” to other kids, but her outgoing nature and wide-ranging interests and activities—swimming, sunbathing, and playing with boys—reveal nothing like the nerdy, introverted behavior often attributed to exceptionally brilliant students. Helen Lawson, Sylvia's ninth grade English teacher, told Edward Butscher that Sylvia, a perfectionist, “seemed to have the complete respect of her fellow pupils—not that of the ‘grind.'”

By the age of twelve, Sylvia had scored in the 160 range on an IQ test, well into genius territory, according to Dorothy L. Humphrey, who reported the results to Edward Butscher. Humphrey notes that Sylvia was not only unusually knowledgeable for her age, she took a remarkable interest in the test itself, seeming to enjoy the “whole lengthy procedure,” which she prolonged because she kept providing correct answers.

The next year Sylvia attended a performance in Boston of
The Tempest.
Aurelia dated the program 21 January 1945 and preserved it in the Smith archive, noting that her daughter had been “completely transported to the magic island of Prospero,” talking about the play on the train home. It was a brilliantly sunny day. To Aurelia, the play's “stuff that dreams are made on” seemed reflected in the shining piles of snow. Sylvia was reading Shakespeare, entranced by a poet who once again brought the sea of her experience home to her.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them—ding-dong, bell.

The sounds of this poem and the effect of the bell sounding a death knell create a magical resonance that could well captivate a child entranced not merely by poetry, but by all the wonderful sound effects on the radio—portentous music like the “William Tell Overture,” heralding the Lone Ranger's appearance. Sylvia loved to create radio melodramas in the schoolyard, and she was already writing short stories and plotting novels, even as she tried to get the fingering right during her piano lessons at camp.

And yet she still had time for fellow campers, taking on a new name, “Sherry,” and comforting a homesick girl. She assured Aurelia that her wonderful letters helped her daughter adjust to being away from home. Sylvia was “overwhelmingly happy” and eating well. If her accounts were accurate, she was stuffing herself. Why eat one bowl of tomato soup if she could down three? The same went for coffee cake and watermelon: She ate four slices of each. She reported her achievements, such as swimming sidestroke for a hundred yards and bravely diving into the cold water when everyone else malingered. Making new friends was a competitive activity. Joan Beales, for example, could play piano and violin and tap dance—and, most impressively, she sang on the radio. Ah, but she could not draw, Sylvia told Aurelia.

One feature of camp life that separates Sylvia's world from ours was the minstrel show. She dressed as a “pickaninny” and deemed her performance a “great success.” Sylvia had no Negro friends, to use the argot of those times. She would not have seen many African Americans in her neighborhood. As human beings, they were virtually invisible—not just to her, but to millions of Americans, as Ralph Ellison eloquently explained in
Invisible Man.
The most familiar Negro figure in Sylvia's life would have been Rochester, Jack Benny's sly factotum, who was always scheming to get a day off from serving his parsimonious employer. Benny's half-hour Sunday night comedy program delighted millions, who took in stride an anodyne version of house slave humor. Audiences laughed at jokes about Rochester's skin color—for example, his plea that Benny stop scraping the blackened toast in his servant's hands because “Boss, you're getting down to me.” The only other Negro role model was Mammy, Scarlett O'Hara's house slave, who insists that her rebellious teenage charge behave with a propriety befitting a woman of her class and race.

Caught up in what the movies purveyed as desirable daughterly behavior, Sylvia sought to please Aurelia and play the dutiful daughter to a mother as saintly as Scarlett O'Hara's mother, Ellen, who was always a lady. Aurelia resembled the kind parent who enforced a strict moral regime not through punishment, but through martyrdom to principles. Sylvia's postcards and letters from camp sound the continual theme of mother love. It was what saved her, Sylvia said, from her own “petty jealousies.” Sylvia ran to Aurelia for comfort just as Scarlett sought out Ellen's embraces. But Scarlett O'Hara could never be as nice as her mother, and Sylvia realized early on the same would be true of her.

Sometimes Sylvia relegated Aurelia to the role of an offstage mother like Stella Dallas. Aurelia would eventually watch her beloved daughter depart for England and a life just as separate and unreachable to her as Stella Dallas's daughter's life is to the protagonist of Olive Higgins Prouty's novel. Stella can only stand in the street and gaze yearningly up at the window into her wealthy daughter's grand new world. And yet, as Sylvia's letters show, Aurelia—again like Stella Dallas—had a certain power. On the radio, Stella, like Superman, often got people out of jams. She was a tower of strength for her daughter. It is telling that when Sylvia married Ted Hughes, she wanted only her mother by her side.

Throughout her secondary school years, Sylvia won awards for her writing and her art. Other than her mentor, high school teacher Wilbury Crockett, who ran his literature classes like college seminars, her teachers by and large did not see her as a genius, although Anna C. Craig, a guidance counselor at Wellesley High School, recalled for Edward Butscher that Sylvia “devoured” Shakespeare and was an avid reader and creative writer, a standout who was also a “loner.” One of Plath's classmates, Louise Lind, told Butscher that she and Sylvia “laughed and giggled together over school projects.” Many years later, when Aurelia was still pondering the reasons for her daughter's suicide, Wilbury Crockett told her: