American Isis (4 page)

As I have said to you several times, those who had asked me about Sylvia seem to disbelieve my recollections. But she was in my presence always affirmative, filled with exuberance, in love with life—with an unquenchable relish for the human adventure. Amusingly she seemed quite out of breath with it all. I loved having her come to the house … much hilarity—and, of course, much serious conversation. As you must realize, I came to know her well after three years of having her in class. And I do look back upon our relationship with great fondness.

If I were to single out a word to describe her, it would be
radiant.

Sylvia was perhaps too dutiful, too eager to please, to stand out in stereotypical fashion as an aloof, mercurial intellectual destined for greatness. She looked wholesome and, as she frequently said, tanned well. She liked to bike and play tennis, a game a neighbor boy, Phil McCurdy, taught her. Unlike other males, he did not seem especially daunted by a girl who scored 160 on an IQ test and could be formidable in conversation. By her junior year of high school, Sylvia was going out on dates and would not, for very long, be without the attentions of a boy like Perry Norton, who lived close by. There were many others throughout her years in school.

Looks mattered to Sylvia. So did what she wore. So did matters like good manners and diction. She complained that a couple of girls at camp used words like “ain't” and “youse” that hurt her ears. They were “
not
well brought up.” A middle-class sense of propriety remained a very strong feature of this poet even when she lived among the loucher types of the literary world. Her acerbic comments about people were a form of scrubbing away the squalor that surrounded some writers and other denizens of arty conclaves. Her favorite radio heroes—the Lone Ranger, The Shadow, and Superman—were part of a sort of cleanup detail, making the world morally immaculate. Sylvia had a visceral dislike of messes—moral and otherwise—that accounts for her extreme reactions later in life to her husband's appalling physical and moral hygiene.

Aurelia, and later Ted Hughes, never felt comfortable with Sylvia's astringent observations about themselves and others. They never seemed to realize that what seemed hurtful to others
entertained
Sylvia, who was by nature a satirist, as Diane Middlebrook clearly shows. This satirical bent explains why Jack Benny was so appealing to Sylvia during her teenage years. Benny's radio program relentlessly mocked his shortcomings, making fun of his violin playing, his toupee, his stinginess, and even his effeminate way of walking. The program ran a nationwide contest with $10,000 in prizes, asking listeners to complete the phrase, “Why I hate Jack Benny.” Sad to say, there is no way of knowing if Sylvia submitted an entry. A running gag in the show featured movie star Ronald Colman and his wife, forever trying to avoid meetings with Benny, their bumptious neighbor. And Jack gave as good as he got, making fun of his obese announcer, Don Wilson (who was so fat he got stuck in armchairs), mocking the shiftless Rochester, and ridiculing Phil Harris, the program's band leader, who could not read music—or anything else, for that matter. Sylvia had a habit of mind that naturally reveled in this kind of put down, which audiences encouraged by laughing uproariously at Jack, whether he was the butt of a joke or its author. Benny's kind of joking—the puncturing of pretentions, including his own—had an aggressive edge. His program regulars tried to outdo one another with comic insults, which built to a crescendo of audience laughter in the best shows. The high energy of these Sunday night programs had obvious appeal for Sylvia and millions of others readying themselves for another workweek. Indeed, anything that could make the competitive nature of society a pleasing diversion had enormous appeal for a young mind as serious as Sylvia's.

Wilbury Crockett's classes brought out Sylvia's competitive nature. After Crockett described a lengthy reading list and extensive writing assignments, one third of the first day's class did not return for another lesson, instead transferring to a less demanding section. He developed a cadre of twenty superior students called “Crocketeers.” Otto Plath would have approved of Crockett's intellectual esprit de corps. This notion of an elect—an elite literary strike force that was also political in nature, keeping abreast of the latest developments in Europe and elsewhere—spurred Sylvia to write about subjects such as the Korean War and the atomic bomb, faithfully following her father's pacifist politics.

In the spring of 1947, Sylvia began writing to a pen pal, a German teenager named Hans-Joachim Neupert. They would exchange letters over the next five years, revealing, on Sylvia's side, a keen desire to discover what the war had been like for a young boy living in a devastatingly bombed landscape. She was acutely aware of her own safe suburban upbringing, mentioning that the life of an American teenager must seem frivolous to Hans. Didn't he think that, in the end, war was futile? She told him she was considering careers as a foreign correspondent, a newspaper reporter, an author, or an artist. In later letters, she spoke of her writing and the rejections she had received from various publications. These last never seemed to discourage her. She already had the attitude of a professional who realizes that for every acceptance there are scores of dismissals.

In subsequent letters she drew a map of Massachusetts, stretching from Salem to Winthrop to Boston, Cambridge, Wellesley, and Boston Bay, where a sea serpent is shown popping out of the water with a balloon message: “Hello Hans!” The serpent's tongue and perky back flipper are visible above the calm water. But below the water line lurks a dragon-like figure with a long serpentine tongue.

Hans was evidently a good correspondent (his letters have not survived). Sylvia complimented him on his writing, revealing a good deal about her own temperament, which was so much like the sea, changing from “one mood to another—from high waves on dark, stormy days, to tranquil ripples on sunny days.” She found it disturbing that so much history was happening while her own surroundings were complacent and placid compared to the horrors Hans had witnessed.

These letters explain a good deal about the poet who wrote “Daddy” and her desire to integrate her own family story with the Holocaust. Even at this young age, she felt touched by history that had not yet touched her. Here was a sensibility that felt implicated in what had been done to Hans and his people. She wanted to
“
plunge into the vital world,” acknowledging ruefully that war could not be as real to her as it had been to Hans. It bothered her that this should be so. Expressions of yearning to go abroad to remedy the insufficiency of her own comfortable upbringing are startling to read in the prose of a tenth grader. Only two years later she would confide to her journal that she felt the
“
weight of centuries” suffocating her.

Sylvia spoke of her connection to Europe through her Austrian grandparents. Indeed, Aurelia had spoken German growing up in her family, the Schobers, and Sylvia heard stories about the anti-German sentiment abroad in America during World War I, when Aurelia was growing up in a primarily Irish neighborhood. Rather than rejecting her ethnic background, Sylvia said she took “patriotic pride” in it. She made a point of giving an oral report about Thomas Mann, a world famous author and anti-Fascist who had become a celebrated figure in America. She told Hans that in class she had read aloud part of his letter describing Mann's recent visit to Germany.

Sylvia sometimes stayed with her grandparents when her mother was working full time in order to afford extras like camp for both her children. In Sylvia's journal, she mentions Grampy's admiration for everything she does and Grammy's rich recipes, which appealed to a child with an enormous appetite. Sylvia was also fond of her Uncle Frank, who came to her in dreams dressed as Superman. This extended family, with ties to the “old country,” made Sylvia acutely conscious of what it meant to be an American, while also giving her, at a very young age, a remarkably cosmopolitan perspective that helped her shy away from any form of jingoism.

In her letter of 30 May 1950, Sylvia announced that she had been accepted to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, about ninety miles from Wellesley. With her high scholastic average and extracurricular record (working on the school newspaper, playing basketball, participating in student government), she could have been admitted to Wellesley on a town scholarship and saved money by living at home. But like many ambitious students, she wanted to test herself by going away to college and, of course, away from her mother. But not too far away. Aurelia was Sylvia's lifeline no matter how much she resented her mother—or at least her overwhelming need to confide in Aurelia. Aurelia bore the weight of what Sylvia expected of herself and seems not to have objected to her daughter's desire to attend Smith. Indeed, Aurelia later told scholar Judith Kroll that she welcomed all signs of her daughter's growing independence.

It obviously pleased Sylvia, as well, that even though she received some scholarship aid, she was going to have to work in order to afford her first year at Smith. As she wrote Hans, she would be laboring on a farm that summer, biking back and forth to work in fields and in a greenhouse, “rain or shine.” Her only previous experience of this kind had been a day at camp picking blueberries for ten cents a quart. She anticipated sore muscles but also seemed to enjoy the prospect of breaking herself in—and yes, getting a tan. Sylvia would stick it out through a long, tiring summer, making friends with farmworkers and experiencing for a brief period the hard manual labor of working-class life.

Sylvia told Hans about the Estonian and the Pole who picked fruits and vegetables beside her. She enjoyed their funny stories—about the only entertainment she had, since by the time she got home she was exhausted and was in bed by nine. It felt good to be working the earth. But it was more than that. The daily rhythms of hard labor soothed her. Lying in her bed at night thinking of the strawberry runners she would set the next day, she suddenly understood how for some people this kind of life was enough. Why demand more? she asked in her journal.

Sylvia did not tell Hans that Ilo, the Estonian boy, had lured her to his room—ostensibly to see his artwork—and had bestowed on her a passionate French kiss, her first. She left abruptly, realizing she would be teased about falling for Ilo. But she did not really shrink from the experience. She welcomed the idea of a fulfilling sex life, but she feared the consequences and wished to put off that kind of intense physical involvement until she found a mate she was surer of. In her journal, she called herself “the American virgin, dressed to seduce.” With Emile, another boyfriend from that summer, she necked and petted, feeling his erection as she pressed her breasts closer to his body. In 1950, casual sexual intercourse for a girl of her age and background was just too risky.

Talk of the Korean War made her angry. She saw no purpose to the fighting, except as a manifestation of rabid anticommunism. You can't kill an idea, she argued. Even if Hans told her she was simply a “silly girl” who did not understand how boys felt about fighting, she would say war was absurd. She had been reading Thomas Hardy's sad, wistful war poems, such as “The Man He Killed,” which she quoted to Hans. Hardy's lines dramatized not only the humanity of the men firing at one another, but also the oddity and irony of their behavior:

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat, if met where any bar is,

Or help to half a crown.

What hurt Sylvia was the way war destroyed simple acts of kindness and generosity and the desire to exchange confidences, as she did with Hans. She called the dropping of the atomic bomb “a sin.”

She used her summer farm experience to compose a fine poem, “Bitter Strawberries,” published on 11 August 1950 in
The
Christian Science Monitor.
The work reads a little like Thomas Hardy's war poems, or Siegfried Sassoon's, while also sounding a little like William Carlos Williams's vignettes of American scenes using direct speech. In the fields the talk is about the Russians, culminating in the “head woman” saying, “Bomb them off the map.” This was often said in the early 1950s, when certain Americans echoed what General Patton had declared immediately after World War II: Annihilate the Russians before they have the power to retaliate. The call for another atomic bomb drop took on urgency because of the new draft law alluded to in Sylvia's poem. A blue-eyed girl reacts in terror at the harsh words, and she is told sharply not to worry. This little drama ends with everyone returning to their picking, kneeling over the rows and cupping the berries protectively before their stems are snapped off “between thumb and forefinger.” The ironic poem's description of a crew organized by a leader dealing in delicate lethality is both a contrast to and evocation of the nuclear age Plath detested—an era of mutually assured destruction that would, she wrote in her journal, deprive her brother Warren of the opportunity to lead a full, productive life.

Sylvia would never forsake her early pacifism, perhaps also influenced by the devastating scenes of destruction depicted in
Gone with the Wind.
For her, pacifism meant not only rejection of war, but also a sense of solidarity with other places, other people. Writing to Hans helped wrest her from Wellesley, as did farm work, so that she could show up at Smith, as she did every summer at camp, with another shot at making something new of herself.

 

CHAPTER 2

MISTRESS OF ALL THE ELEMENTS

(1950–53)

August 1950:
Sylvia publishes “And Summer Will Not Come Again” in
Seventeen;
1950–53:
Korean War;
1950–51:
A scholarship student at Smith College, Plath begins dating but does not find her Mr. Big;
1951–52:
She works at a hotel and then as a mother's helper to earn spending money;
1952:
Sylvia's short story “Sunday at the Mintons” wins a prize and is published in
Mademoiselle;
1953:
First issue of
Playboy,
with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.