Sylvia Plath: A Biography (11 page)

In addition, worries about money peppered her letters, and she said she was planning to find some men to date “so I can go out without paying for it myself.” Her fellow guest editors frequently found Sylvia in tears.

Sylvia’s letters home did not tell the whole story, however. She may have been tired at 6:00 p.m., but she loved talking and giggling and eating with the other guest editors till early morning. She was usually ready for long walks and scouting expeditions to bars — where they might find the self-styled Western disc jockey she wrote about in
The
Bell
Jar
— and one night’s wait in the hallway of Dylan Thomas’s hotel, hoping to catch sight of him as he returned to his room.

The four weeks in New York City were frantic, but one of the most memorable events was the luncheon at the huge advertising agency, BBD&O, at which Sylvia and many of the other guest editors contracted ptomaine poisoning. After a long night of relentless vomiting, she was shaken with fear, but also aware of the irony of having eaten beautiful gourmet food only to be poisoned by it.

Weak from several days of ptomaine agony, Sylvia experienced more pain on the day of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s execution, June 19. Typical of her earlier behavior patterns, she focused on politics when her personal depression intensified. In the midst of her disappointment at the way her work with Abels was developing, she reacted strongly to the enormous public debate over the Rosenbergs’ electrocution. Her old friend Phil McCurdy was marching in Washington, D.C., to protest their deaths, yet when she tried to talk to her friends at the Barbizon about what she saw as the horror of their executions, she got very little response.

The situation peaked on the morning of the execution, when Sylvia criticized the women eating breakfast for their lack of concern, their being able to eat “at a time like this.” According to Janet Wagner, the peacemaker of the group, Sylvia left her coffee in disgust and stormed out to go to the office. Janet went along, at least partly because she did not want Sylvia to be alone. As they walked to the
Mademoiselle
offices at 575 Madison Avenue, Sylvia kept asking Janet what time it was. At 9:00 a.a., the time Sylvia thought the execution was set for, she turned to her friend and said, “Now it’s happening.” Then she turned the insides of her arms to Janet. Each arm was covered with red pinprick bumps and, as Janet watched, they elongated into each other and formed a series of welts running up and down Sylvia’s arms.

It was a dramatic reaction, but Sylvia had long thought of herself as having psychic powers. She often found that she was in painful empathy with troubled friends, and she remembered episodes from her childhood when she seemed to know well in advance of events what was going to happen. On this particular day, Sylvia let herself be assured by Janet’s telling her that the welts were only hives, and that she was having them because it was hot and she had not eaten breakfast. Neither of them ever spoke of the episode again to each other.

Fixed up soon afterward for a date with “a wealthy, unscrupulous Peruvian delegate to the U.N. at a Forest Hills tennis club dance,” Sylvia found herself paired with a violent woman-hater, a man who tried to rape her amid a torrent of verbal abuse. Traumatized, she found the male escort from
Mademoiselle
who was there as a chaperone, and he drove her and Janet Wagner back to the Barbizon. Although the women laughed about their respective dates all the way back, Sylvia was also angry: not even blind dates were safe in this mad city.

By the last night of her editorship, Sylvia was as bewildered as she was angry. She threw many of her clothes — old and new — out the window. Although she had spent more money on clothes for New York than she had thought possible, she now rejected the world of women’s fashion. It was as though she was announcing that the Sylvia Plath who was a guest editor for
Mademoiselle
would become someone different in the future.

Throwing away clothes was hardly characteristic behavior for Sylvia. It was certainly a cry for help. But the other guest editors were themselves so exhausted from the month in New York that few of them noticed what she had done. Even her friend Janet, to whom she turned to borrow an outfit to wear home, didn’t stop to think why Sylvia was asking her for clothes. As Janet recalled, “I didn’t pay her much attention, but I remember telling her she could have anything on the bed.... She went over to the bed and chose that green dirndl skirt and the white peasant blouse with the eyelet ruffles on the sleeves. She insisted on giving me her bathrobe with the little blue flowers on it.” It
was
characteristic that Sylvia would never take a gift without paying for it.

She arrived home to bad news. Her mother told her that she had not been accepted into the Harvard summer school fiction course taught by Frank O’Connor. Added to Abels’s criticisms of her and her writing, this rejection was shattering. Sylvia felt that she was a complete failure. All the prizes she had won scarcely a month before were forgotten as she continued her steady slide into depression. She would be living at home the rest of the summer, instead of moving to Cambridge; sharing her room with her mother; dependent on the family car and the family schedule for any time away from Elmwood Road.

Dating Gordon Lameyer the two weeks before he left for OCS helped. They spent long days together, driving to New Hampshire and to the Cape. More often they went to Gordon’s mother’s apartment and listened to his record collection — Beethoven, Brahms, Sibelius. Sylvia was fascinated as well by recordings of Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Robert Frost, e. e. cummings, and James Joyce reading from their own work, and she and Gordon read aloud to each other from
Finnegans
Wake
, Gordon having begun his study of Joyce several years earlier.

After Gordon left on July 13, Sylvia’s depression grew worse. She did little but sleep. She did not call friends or go to Cambridge to see Marcia; she seldom sunned. Even the mail delivery did not rouse her, although letters from Dick at Saranac came frequently. “How’s the shorthand going?” he would ask. Dick and her mother had decided that, since she hadn’t made the fiction class, she should study shorthand at home with Aurelia. Norton had learned it several years before and thought no girl should be without it. Dick’s other theme in his summer letters was his excited discovery of James Joyce, the writer Sylvia had tentatively decided to work on for her Honors thesis. And she heard from both Ed Cohen and Phil McCurdy, either of whom might have been able to understand her depression. Circumstances, however, made both unavailable to her. Cohen had married in June and was honeymooning in Mexico for two months with no forwarding address. McCurdy, too, was unreachable as he traveled the United States, hitch-hiking on his grand tour.

Concerned about Sylvia’s lethargy, Aurelia arranged that she take a nurse’s aide job at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital. She worked mornings, feeding patients who were too ill to feed themselves. But she did not stay long at the hospital; she was herself too ill. Her lethargy had changed to insomnia and she had found that — tired and distraught as she was — she could no longer read Joyce. The linguistic difficulty of
Finnegans
Wake
was far beyond her comprehension at this time. Worse, she could no longer write; her handwriting was nearly unrecognizable. Desperate, Sylvia called Marcia to meet her for dinner in Boston. When she told her friend that she had not slept for many nights, Marcia responded calmly and soothingly, thinking that Sylvia was once again exaggerating.

As days passed, time became Sylvia’s worst enemy. Each morning brought her closer to her senior year, the year in which she would write her thesis, for which she had no definite topic, and take the extensive comprehensive examinations, for which she felt completely unprepared. Each day also brought her closer to the planned late-summer vacation with Dick, who was coming to Wellesley at the end of August and then returning to Saranac, with Sylvia accompanying him. It would be a repetition of Christmas vacation.

Entries from Sylvia’s July journal chart the self-inflicted pain she experienced. Guilt and shame once again blinded her: whatever was wrong with her was
her
fault. She called herself “an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled Baby,” unable to meet real life. In a harsh scolding tone, she addressed herself in second person: “You are so obsessed by your coming necessity to be independent, to face the great huge man-eating world, that you are paralyzed ... shocked, thrown into a nausea, a stasis.” Later she cajoled herself, “I must make choices clearly, honestly, without getting sick so I can’t eat.” There was no reason, she continued, that she could not be “cheerful and constructive.” For a young woman to live the “good” life, the suitable life, especially in the wealthy suburb of Wellesley, she must have the right attitude and wear the proper face, even amid deep depression. Near the end of this July 14 entry, she raged, “Stop thinking selfishly of razors and self-wounds and going out and ending it all. Your room is not your prison. You are.”

Mrs. Plath described the horror of the summer in
Letters
Home
, recounting the morning in July when she saw gashes on Sylvia’s legs. Sylvia admitted that she had tried to kill herself, “‘I just wanted to see if I had the guts!’” Then she took Aurelia’s hand in her own burning hot ones and cried, “‘Oh, Mother, the world is too rotten! I want to die! Let’s die together!’”

That morning Aurelia took Sylvia to the bright and sympathetic woman who was the Plath family doctor. She of course referred them to a psychiatrist, a young man who talked with Sylvia and then recommended shock treatments. There was no second opinion. Sylvia received out-patient shock treatments — bipolar, electroconvulsive shock, given with no preparation and no follow-up counseling — at the direction of a doctor she disliked intensely. No sooner were the treatments begun than August came and the supervising doctor went on vacation, referring Sylvia to a colleague of his.

Her experience with shock treatments horrified her. “By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. / I sizzled in his blue volts” is a description in a late poem. Sylvia felt intense pain. She was frightened beyond the words left to her at this point in her depression. Her mother told her the treatment would make her well, but it was doing nothing of the kind, and her resentment at Aurelia’s advice would be a source of later anger.

In reality Aurelia and the Schobers were equally horrified, bearing their anxiety over Sylvia (and their fear of financial ruin from the expense of the therapy) in almost complete secrecy. Characteristically for the time, no one outside the family knew that Sylvia was in therapy or having shock treatments. Nor did Sylvia let on. She dated Gordon on two weekends when he was home from OCS, and as late as August 18, she wrote to Mike Lotz at his summer baseball camp that she was having a “placid” summer. The word was chosen with her usual wry irony. On August 24, she received a letter from Gordon asking whether he could come over in a few days when he was home on liberty.

But that same day, several days after a shock treatment, Sylvia broke open a cabinet that held sleeping pills and took the nearly full bottle, along with a container of water, to the crawl space under the first-floor bedroom, the entrance to which was usually blocked by a pile of firewood. She was wearing Janet Wagner’s green dirndl skirt and white peasant blouse. She left a note for her mother propped plainly on the dining room table: “Have gone for a long walk. Will be home tomorrow.” Then she crawled inside the hideaway and took such a quantity of sleeping pills that she lost consciousness for more than two days.

7 - Smith, a Culmination

1954 - 55

“I Shall Be Good as New”

On August 24, 1953, Aurelia reported Sylvia missing. Then followed what she called “the nightmare of nightmares”: police investigations; reporters; a volunteer group of nearly a hundred Scouts and Wellesley citizens, complete with bloodhounds, searching Lake Waban and Morse’s Pond; national news coverage. The story of Sylvia’s disappearance was carried in most papers, complete with a photograph and the caption, “Beautiful Smith Girl Missing at Wellesley.”

Two days into the nightmare, Warren heard a moan coming from below the house. He dashed from the lunch table and soon was shouting “Call the ambulance!” On Wednesday, August 26, at 12:40 P.M. the “beautiful Smith girl” — semiconscious, bruises and cuts under her injured right eye badly festering — was taken by ambulance to the Newton-Wellesley Hospital at Framingham, where the nurse on duty described her as “more dead than alive.”

Disfigured, temporarily sightless in one eye, and still thoroughly depressed, Sylvia had been saved. Although her mother had blamed the debacle on her daughter’s “writing block,” Sylvia’s writing block was itself more a symptom of her problem than a cause.

When her mother reached the hospital and was allowed to see Sylvia, her daughter’s first words were a moaned “Oh, no!” And when Aurelia assured her that she was much loved, that the family rejoiced in her having been found, Sylvia replied faintly, “It was my last act of love.” She went on to say, sadly, “If I could only be a freshman again. I so wanted to be a Smith woman.”

Bewildered by these responses, Aurelia tried to do what was best for Sylvia. She tried to find good psychiatric care, asking her minister to bring a psychiatrist he recommended as a consultant. She quickly wrote to Olive Higgins Prouty, Sylvia’s benefactor at Smith, who was then vacationing in Maine. Although Mrs. Plath had told reporters that Sylvia’s suicide attempt resulted from her inability to write, she told Mrs. Prouty that it probably was caused by Sylvia’s realizing, belatedly, how much she cared for Perry Norton, Dick’s younger brother, who had recently become engaged. Aurelia also gave another explanation: that Sylvia’s suicide attempt had occurred because her daughter knew that she was very sick and did not want to be a financial burden. Aurelia had saved a $600 emergency fund, but she was worried about costs of Sylvia’s treatment.

Mrs. Prouty replied promptly. She had wired Aurelia when she first saw the news stories about Sylvia. In the coming months, she would assume both the cost and the control of Sylvia’s treatment; and in the years to come, she would remain a constant source of both funds and encouragement.

Aurelia’s first plan was to have Sylvia live for a while in Provincetown on Cape Cod with a friend who was a trained nurse. Mrs. Prouty, who had herself successfully recovered from a breakdown twenty-five years earlier, cautioned that Sylvia would eventually need “the constructive help and advice of some wise doctor” in order to recover. Mrs. Prouty understood the complexity of the situation better than most of Sylvia’s friends. A few days after she had been found, for example, Sylvia heard from both Gordon Lameyer and Dick Norton, each of whom planned to come visit her on the weekend. They assumed that she was at home and that convalescence would be simple.

Expectations were that Sylvia would fully recover quickly. Psychiatrists found “no trace of psychosis” and no schizophrenia; several of her doctors predicted that she would recover “completely.” But her attitude was discouraging. It became clear that Sylvia did not want to recover and go home. In fact, she was soon taken from Framingham Hospital to the locked psychiatric wing of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, where insulin shock treatments were begun.

In mid-October, Sylvia was moved to McLean Hospital in Belmont, traveling in Mrs. Prouty’s car. The quality private institution boasted an excellent physician-patient ratio, beautiful grounds, and conscientious care. Most important for Sylvia, her treatment was taken over by Ruth Beuscher, an attractive young psychiatrist who Plath thought resembled Myrna Loy. Beuscher became both counselor and role model for Sylvia.

On arriving at McLean, Sylvia could neither read nor write. The one person she asked to see, Wilbury Crockett, her high school English teacher, then began visiting her at least once a week, bringing with him an anagram game. At first, Sylvia could hardly recognize any letters. He would begin with
a
and
n
; some days Sylvia could add a
d
to make the word
and
. Some days she could not. Crockett’s patient work, even to helping Sylvia move her hand to pick out letters, was a crucial part of the therapy that led to her recovery.

The key to Sylvia’s recovery lay at least partly in being accepted for herself, and by herself. As Evelyn Page, one of her favorite Smith teachers, wrote to her after her breakdown, “I want you to know that I am proud of you with the kind of pride that makes no demands upon you.” Page assured Sylvia that everyone who writes hits “rock bottom” at times, and that she would share her own history with Sylvia when Sylvia returned to Smith.

Dr. Beuscher continued the insulin therapy at McLean, and that treatment led to a significant weight gain. Sylvia was miserable about her appearance. As she wrote in a later story, “Tongues of Stone,” “she was caught in the nightmare of the body, without a mind, without anything, only the soulless flesh that got fatter with the insulin and yellower with the fading tan.” She was sensitive about the unsightly scab under her eye, which later became a dark scar. She stopped using makeup. She did not bathe or wash her hair.

Ruth Beuscher had her work cut out for her. She had to overcome Sylvia’s hatred of psychiatrists and her fear of electro-convulsive shock treatment. So frightened had Sylvia been by the earlier treatment during the summer that even the suggestion of it terrified her; she withdrew quickly into her most hostile posture. Beuscher was working to gain Sylvia’s trust, so that eventually the girl would allow electroshock, but she would not order it — or any other treatment — without Sylvia’s agreement. To that end, she set up an honor system: she and Sylvia would always communicate honestly.

As one step toward granting Sylvia her wishes about her own care, Beuscher restricted visitors. For several weeks during the autumn, Sylvia saw only Crockett and Prouty. By the end of that time, Sylvia had improved: she was typing manuscripts for Prouty, doing “exquisite” weaving, and asking for books on contract bridge — or so Prouty wrote to Aurelia Plath. To her own psychiatrist, however, Prouty wrote that Sylvia was still “feeling terribly inadequate, and inefficient, and inferior.” She was planning to remove Sylvia from McLean and place her in a hospital further away from Wellesley.

Beuscher’s rapport with Sylvia finally allowed her to begin the electroconvulsive shock treatments which, combined with the insulin shock, led to Sylvia’s recovery. During late November and December, Sylvia took one hurdle after another: she drank coffee with friends (a Vassar songwriter, a fellow Smith student), took ceramics classes, tobogganed, played badminton and bridge, typed and designed the hospital newspaper, saw movies, and celebrated Christmas at McLean with caroling, mass, and a holiday dance. She wrote to Enid Epstein and Marcia Brown, who were both recently engaged, that she was happy for them and that she was looking forward to being a bridesmaid in Marcia’s June wedding. She told them she was excited about coming back to Smith, although she would take things “more slowly but surely.” By late December, Sylvia had been given ground privileges at McLean, and by the first of February, she was back at Smith for spring term, taking three classes and doing her usual A work.

Beuscher and her treatment had worked a miracle. Following her suicide attempt, Sylvia had been completely hopeless. As she described her feelings, “There was no more sanctuary in the world.... Her grandparents would soon die, and her mother would die, and there would finally be left no familiar name to invoke against the dark.” Always dependent on people taking care of her — family, friends, teachers — Sylvia raged whenever those caretakers turned away from her. She was not yet ready to take care of herself. As she wrote to Ed Cohen toward the end of the year, although she was stronger she remained incredibly lonely: “I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible, someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey....”

Part of Sylvia’s therapy was to learn to trust herself. Beuscher tried to teach Sylvia to see that her relationship with her parents — her dead father as well as her mother — was crucial. She had to understand that she did not need to “do” anything to be worthy of love: love was a natural part of a loving family. And if Sylvia had difficulty relating to her family, then Beuscher was willing to stand in for family during the transition away from the angry dependence that now dominated her relationship with her mother.

Mentally and emotionally, Sylvia recovered in 1953 by leaving the hospital for home and then leaving home. She left 26 Elmwood Road to return to Lawrence House and Smith, and she tried to stay away from Wellesley after that whenever possible. Visits home were replaced by letters.

And the perfectionism that Sylvia had grown accustomed to was also subdued. Beuscher’s therapy tried to show her that her desperate and nearly insatiable demands for recognition through success were bound to meet with failure. Her unrealistic expectations about what she could accomplish led to her tendency to collapse when she felt unsupported, and to her quick anger when she felt that someone she had counted on had let her down. Sylvia still could not rest so long as she was trying to create “the self that should be,” the ideal Sylvia; but she had at least learned to watch for that obsessive pattern.

While Beuscher was trying to teach Sylvia to rely on herself, and to expect only reasonable successes, Sylvia had decided on her own program for recovery. She felt that it was time for her sexual emancipation. Hungry for experience and, always, hungry for caring and affection, she took lovers. Spring semester of 1954, when she returned to Smith, and her senior year there were marked by weekends away from campus that her family could never have approved. Sylvia came to see herself as a 1950s version of Brett Ashley — free-thinking, free-loving — but she actually was far from free of her earlier guilt and anger over sex and the double-standard social codes of the time.

During 1954, Aurelia heard from Otto’s sister that the women in the Plath family had histories of depression. Otto’s mother had been hospitalized at least once; his other sister and a niece also struggled with the problem. But Mrs. Plath never told Sylvia this — nor, so far as is known, did she ever tell her daughter’s psychiatrist. Her tactic with Sylvia was not to discuss her breakdown or anything relating to it.

She found Sylvia very moody, alternately affectionate and remote. There was a noticeable tone of command in Sylvia’s 1954 letters home: her daughter insisted that Aurelia cook a steak dinner for a roommate’s birthday, that Sylvia be allowed to have the car for a trip to the Cape, that she be allowed to invite a boyfriend for a weekend. From Smith, Sylvia asked repeatedly for cookies. Needing assurance that she was central in her mother’s life, Sylvia might have been forced into more realistic behavior if Aurelia had ever refused her. But the pattern had been set years before: her mother would never refuse to supply Sylvia’s physical needs, especially when she had been ill.

Sylvia returned to Smith in February of 1954 as a witty, sophisticated advisor to younger women — women new to Lawrence House, women who admired her writing skills and were, perhaps, intrigued with the notoriety of her attempted suicide. The truth of Plath’s return was that her earlier friendships were bound to change. As one woman who had been a close friend during Sylvia’s sophomore year remembered, it was as if Sylvia were a different person. Instead of the eager, vivacious, talkative Sylvia, she was now a person with an enveloping past:
attempted
suicide
.
Who
did
any
of
us
know
who
had
ever
done
that
?
Missing
a semester
was
bad
enough
,
but
missing
a
semester
because
of
a
suicide
attempt!
Enid Epstein remembered that, for all their earlier closeness, she could never bring herself to ask Sylvia how she had gotten the scar on her cheek.

Nancy Hunter, a transfer student who had been given Sylvia’s room in Lawrence House, recalled the aura of mystery and envy that Plath’s absence evoked during fall term. She also wrote about her surprise when Sylvia returned, to find her so beautiful:

Her photographs are misleading; Sylvia was a remarkably attractive young woman. She was impressively tall, almost statuesque, and she carried the height with an air of easy assurance. Her yellow hair, which had been lightened several shades from its natural light brown, was shoulder length and had been carefully trained to dip with a precise and provocative flourish over her left eyebrow. Her eyes were very dark, deeply set under heavy lids that give them a brooding quality in many of her photographs. Her cheekbones were high and pronounced, their prominence exaggerated by the faint, irregular brown scar that was the only physical reminder of the suicide attempt. The face was angular and its features strong, a fact that may explain the dark shadows that seem to haunt it in photographs.