Sylvia Plath: A Biography (10 page)

Break break break on the cold white slopes oh knee. Arriving Framingham Tues. night 7:41. Bringing fabulous fractured fibula. No pain just tricky to manipulate while Charlestoning. Anything to prolong vacation.

Sylvia’s telegram to Aurelia belied the real pain and torment of the injury: how would she get around the Smith campus in midwinter with no car and no bus service? For the next eight weeks, the busy girl dragged a heavy cast over an icy, snowy campus. For Sylvia, who always raced from job to job, class to class, her situation was impossible. The broken leg was the final blow to her already troubled psyche. As her January 8, 1953, letter to Aurelia shows, she was beside herself and losses of temper were not uncommon: “I’m sorry I made such a fuss by being a baby and crying but forgetting that carton broke the last straw of my nervous control: I felt so badly and scared by so many things that I could hardly manage to be gay and cheerful.”

No one would expect a student with Sylvia’s workload facing the sheer physical labor of getting to and from class to be “gay and cheerful.” Again, the discrepancy between the behavior that was normal and the behavior Sylvia felt she had to maintain was obvious, and confusing.

Letters from Norton were no help, either. He seldom even mentioned her leg. His attention remained entirely upon his own health. Later in the winter, he wrote disapprovingly that his mother had told him that Sylvia was taking sleeping pills because her leg hurt at night. Not only was Dick doing nothing to help Sylvia’s state of mind, he was also giving her a running account of his budding romance with one of the other patients.

As 1953 moved toward spring and Sylvia’s cast finally came off (she wrote a friend that she was going to build a bonfire of the pieces of the cast), her spirit received other setbacks. The Lynns’ charming son had been accidentally killed. Dick was not improving and would not go back to Harvard in the fall as he had planned. He was, in fact, scheduled for surgery in May. Meanwhile, Sylvia’s relationship with the Norton family was disintegrating. Dick’s mother thought that Sylvia was selfish because she refused to work as a waitress in Saranac during the summer. Mrs. Norton also complained that because Aurelia Plath always taught in summer school, Sylvia should also be working. Sylvia replied that she had made $1000 during the year from her writing. She did not need a low-paying, exhausting job, especially not in Saranac.

Her relationship with Dick could only have been weakened by her romances with other men during the school year. Over Thanksgiving break, she had met Myron (Mike) Lotz at the Nortons’ home. She found him handsome, talented, intellectual, and athletic, and invited him to the Lawrence December dance.

Number one in his class at Yale (Perry Norton was second), Mike during the summer pitched for a Detroit Tigers farm team. From Warren, Ohio, the son of an Austrian steel worker, he was a scholarship student at Yale, but he also had money from playing ball and was about to buy a car so that he could drive to Smith. He had been accepted at Yale Medical School.

Aside from Lotz’s height, build, and dark good looks, Sylvia admired Mike for his ambition: “power, strength. Mentally and physically he is a giant.... He wants very hard what I want very hard.” Mike asked Sylvia to go to the Yale Junior Prom. From then on, they saw each other every few weekends. With him she had her first plane ride; they went to see the Northampton mental hospital; they shared long afternoons in the country, and became both physically and intellectually close. In her journal, Sylvia wrote that Mike was the only man she would consider marrying, though she then asked herself, “Do I want to crawl into the gigantic paternal embrace of a mental colossus? A little, maybe, I’m not sure.” She did stress that “with him there would be a great, evolving intellectual dignity to life.”

In late spring, however, the relationship with Lotz cooled suddenly. Over spring break, Sylvia had visited Dick at Saranac. She had also spent a weekend in New York with a casual boyfriend from the previous summer. While Sylvia was gone, Mike dated someone else. Angry over what she called his “betrayal,” she was honest enough to admit her behavior was as bad. But the truth was that Sylvia reacted furiously and vindictively whenever a boyfriend showed signs of losing interest in her. She usually called that behavior betrayal, while at the same time she nearly always pretended to be so absorbed in other aspects of her life — or other men — that she hardly noticed the absence of the beau. The cultural emphasis on a woman’s belonging with (and to) a man combined with Sylvia’s personal insecurity to make her relationships with men the most important — and the least rational — part of her life.

Toward the end of the term, coming back from a poetry reading by W. H. Auden, Sylvia met Gordon Lameyer, an Amherst English major whose home was also in Wellesley. Ready to go to Officers’ Candidate School for his Navy service, the tall blond Lameyer asked Sylvia out and they dated much of the summer of 1953. Whatever her situation with Norton and Lotz, Sylvia ended spring term angry, describing her dates as “unlovers,” men who were not worthy of her affection. Although she felt that she had not found the right man yet, she knew what she wanted. It was, she wrote, “to live hard and good with a hard, good man.”

Meanwhile, she continued to publish and to win honors on campus. (She had been chosen editor of
Smith
Review
and had a prize assignment on Press Board.) She sold three poems to
Harper’s
for $100; won two Smith poetry prizes for $120; won third prize in
Seventeen’s
fiction contest with “Initiation”; sold a poem called “Mad Girl’s Love Song” to
Mademoiselle
, and was doing well in that magazine’s College Board contest (the completion of exercises in design, writing, and critiques of previous issues took most of the year).

Much of the fiction and poetry Sylvia wrote during this year was done on assignment for Robert Gorham Davis’s creative writing class. One interesting piece was a long dialogue between the characters Alison (probably Sylvia) and Marcia (Marcia Brown). Written in January of 1953, the dialogue drew heavily on Sylvia’s anguish during the fall. Alison, described as a “free spirit,” criticizes Marcia for her “rotten layers of middleclass morality.” Marcia, in turn, asks Alison if all the responsibility for making up her own rules, her own world, isn’t frightening. Alison then describes her fall depression: “I wasn’t anybody at all. And I began to get afraid that all at once maybe my eyes would break open like soap bubbles and everybody would see there wasn’t anything there, just a vile mess. And I was afraid that maybe the rot inside me would break out in sores and warts, screaming: ‘traitor, sinner, imposter.’”

Part of her unrest during her junior year resulted from the fact that she was trying to break away from the most basic of her family’s ideals: working hard, behaving impeccably, always aiming for self-betterment, living thriftily. While she quietly tested the boundaries in some areas of her life, she flaunted her extravagance in other areas. Clothes continued to attract her (she sometimes stayed on at Smith after vacations began, shopping alone for bargains in the Green Street shops), and during the 1952-53 year, she spent $310 on her wardrobe, much more than she had spent the first two years together. Such spending was never guilt-free, however, as this passage from her journal shows:

Today I bought a raincoat ... with a frivolous pink lining that goes good to my eyes because I have never ever had anything pink-colored, and it was much too expensive — I bought it with a month’s news office pay, and soon I will not have any money to do anything more with because I am buying clothes because I love them and they are exactly right, if I pay enough. And I feel dry and a bit sick whenever I say “I’ll take it” and the smiling woman goes away with my money because she doesn’t know I really don’t have any money at all.

Part of Sylvia’s clothes-buying at this time was in preparation for a major event: the big news during spring term was that she had been chosen for the
Mademoiselle
College Board. Working on the staff of the glossy fashion magazine, “the magazine for smart young women,” she would live in New York from June 1 through 26, along with nineteen other outstanding women from campuses across the country.

Reaction at Smith to this honor was all Sylvia could have asked. Robert Gorham Davis and his wife Hope invited her to dinner; Smith’s novelist Mary Ellen Chase invited her to a celebratory coffee. The news even overshadowed her interview with W. H. Auden, who spent several days on the Smith campus that spring. As a favored student of Elizabeth Drew’s, Sylvia took her poems to the great poet and came back — all too quickly — with his word. She was to work hard on verbs. She also took the time to go to Amherst to hear Dylan Thomas, one of her favorite poets, read.

Arriving in New York on May 31, Plath made her way to the Barbizon Hotel at Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street, where all the guest editors were to stay. The plush lounge and library contrasted with the cell-like rooms, where green walls matched the green and pink coverlets and drapes. The young guest editors were impressed with even these modest surroundings, however, and with the Barbizon’s indoor swimming pool. They felt like real New Yorkers in their hats, heels, and gloves. Eating breakfast at the hotel or a nearby drug store, they set off for the magazine offices in groups, arriving around 9:00. They spent much of their time at special events — luncheons, fashion shows, art galleries, performances, including a Balanchine ballet, visits to the United Nations and the
Herald
-
Tribune
, movie previews and television shows, and a formal dance on the St. Regis Starlight Roof.

Mademoiselle
also tried to arrange individual activities according to personal interests. Sylvia asked to meet the writers she admired: J. D. Salinger, Shirley Jackson, E. B. White, Irwin Shaw. None of her choices was available but she was assigned an interview with Elizabeth Bowen and treasured the meeting and the thank-you letter Bowen wrote her afterward. Other of the guest editors met Imogene Coca, William Inge, Hubert de Givenchy, and Richard Rodgers.

In the words of one of the guest editors, Sylvia was regarded as “one of the leaders of the group, one of the smartest and funniest.” She usually was outspoken and a little argumentative, a hard worker who was proud of her talents. In the words of another guest editor, Sylvia was “filled with a healthy love of mankind and great artistic vitality.” She kept her smile even during the torrid afternoon in Central Park when all the guest editors were photographed in their human star formation, each wearing wool kilts and long-sleeved blouses.

A few days after they arrived, assignments were made, and Sylvia was thrilled to be chosen guest managing editor, the second-most-important position on the staff. She worked directly with Cyrilly Abels,
Mademoiselle’s
managing editor. Fiction editor might have been the ideal assignment for Sylvia, in that it would have meant less involvement with layout and business details, but Abels herself was interested in fiction and poetry (she later became a successful literary agent), and she wanted someone in her office who had strong literary abilities. A few days after the assignments had been made, Abels asked Sylvia to move her desk into Abels’s office. Initially, Sylvia was excited; the days wore on, however, through the oppressive city heat, and Sylvia often worked till 6:00 and had a late supper in the cafeteria.

The work the twenty guest editors did was unequal. Some of the women reported to editors who had very little planned for them; actually, by mid-June, the September issue of the magazine was nearly finished. Sylvia’s role was busier, however. As Anne Shawber, another of the editors, said, Sylvia had “
the
toughest job on the magazine. Sylvia was an artist. She was sensitive ... lacking confidence in the world outside the mind.”

The job Sylvia was asked to do was difficult, but it was especially difficult for her. The atmosphere at
Mademoiselle
was sometimes critical and threatening. Barbed comments from staff members were common. In addition Cyrilly Abels was known at that time as a tough editor who insisted on nothing less than perfection, as she defined it. For her, Sylvia wrote and rewrote her feature on five rising young poets (Richard Wilbur, Anthony Hecht, George Steiner, Alastair Reid, and William Burford). She had begun writing the story, “Poets on Campus,” during May, corresponding with the poets. She thought the feature was done before she arrived in New York, but for the next three days Abels taught her what
Mademoiselle
style meant. Sylvia was no novice; she had written hundreds of press releases and features as a Press Board correspondent, in addition to her published essays, fiction, and poetry. But Abels’s criticism shook her confidence about her writing abilities. She signed herself “Syrilly” in her letters home, but she also wrote to Aurelia that she had trouble remembering who Sylvia was.

Working so closely with Abels also meant that Sylvia got to know very few of the other staffers. She was therefore completely dependent on Abels’s opinion of her. Although Abels included Sylvia in lunches with young writers such as Vance Bourjailly and introduced her to people who came into the office (Paul Engel and Santha Rama Rau, for instance), she was also critical of Sylvia’s proper, demure intellectualism. “Where is your own thinking, Sylvia?” Because Sylvia did not know at this time, and was bright enough to sense that she did not have the answers Cyrilly wanted, Abels’s blunt interrogation devastated her. As she wrote candidly to Warren,

Somehow I can’t talk about all that has happened this week at length, I am too weary, too dazed.... I can’t think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated — all of which goes to make up living very hard and newly.... It is unbelievable to think of all this at once — my mind will split open.