Sylvia Plath: A Biography (12 page)

Beautiful, fun-loving, and crazily humorous, Sylvia was an appealing new friend to Nan Hunter, Sue Weller, and Ellie Friedman. Most Smith women who knew her remembered Sylvia as a great talker, a genuine story teller. Ellie Friedman recalled long afternoons talking in her room about writing, acting, and the usual Smith topics — grades, clothes, careers, sex, and gossip. Sylvia was able to entertain with hilarious stories about teachers and dates or serious discussions about depression, her attempted suicide, and recovery — which she called “rebirth.”

Sylvia spoke to her new friends about the sheer pain connected with her illness. She said that “everything hurt,” that she was “on fire under her skin.” She vowed that if she ever were insane again, she would kill herself because “the pain is just too great. I cannot live through it again.” She spoke, too, about the supposed connection between writing and madness, and made clear that so far as she was concerned, there
was
no such connection. Her writing, she said, came from her sanest self. As she repeated, “When you are insane, you are busy being insane — all the time.... When I was crazy, that was
all
I
was.”

What Sylvia feared most was the loss of self. When mad, she explained, no person possesses a self. With her customary thoroughness, Sylvia read widely in the psychology and sociology of identity. Whatever was known about the problem in the 1950s, Sylvia researched. One of the results she seldom talked about, however, probably because it was frightening, was the effect shock treatments had had on her long-term memory. When she did talk about it, she said it was like being in a dream; she never knew whether she was awake or asleep and dreaming. It was as if she had lost events, people, years from her life.

Although Sylvia was the witty and irreverent star of some campus conversations, she was not popular on campus. One friend described her as a dramatic loner. Off on picnics with a date, she would not be huddled in conversation. Rather she would be posing — blanket or towel wrapped around her — at the center of some admiring group. People were more likely to be in awe of Sylvia Plath than close to her.

Sylvia’s campus identity during 1954 was that of the academic star, the writer who won all contests, the girl who had worked too hard and suffered a breakdown from fatigue. George Gibian, the young, dynamic professor of Russian and English who taught the course in Tolstoi and Dostoevsky which Sylvia took that spring and who eventually directed her honors thesis, wrote that she was, simply, the “exceptionally gifted student” that the English Department was so proud of. Gibian recounted Robert Gorham Davis’s having told him that Sylvia was the only talented writer in his course who was not in some way neurotic. She instead impressed her teachers as being “completely wholesome, healthy, and creative.... Her manner gave the impression that she was just back from skiing in Vermont or from the beach in Bermuda.”

Gibian knew her name even before she took his class, because he had been one of the judges for the Smith poetry prizes. Smith students annually competed for prizes under pseudonyms. Sylvia had submitted two groups of poems, using two different names — and she was awarded both prizes. When the names were decoded and the committee found that Sylvia had won twice, there was talk of giving one prize to another student. Gibian held out for Sylvia’s receiving both, which was what finally happened.

His description of Sylvia was typical of comments made by most of her teachers: “I came to know her handwriting — very clear, rounded, legible. Her exam was excellent (to the point, brief, right on target) — and then later I got to know her in person. Her work was absolutely brilliant. She just seemed to UNDERSTAND things, to get the idea, and to be able to push it further.” Although he did not know her well personally (she babysat for his young children on occasion), she wrote an essay about Dostoevsky for him and explained some of her personal circumstances in that paper: “I did not believe that psychic regeneration was possible. Then, unbelievably, a slow regenerating joy began to grow out of my gradual determination to live creatively.” She compared herself to Andreyev’s Lazarus, and to Kilroy in Tennessee Williams’ play
Camino
Real
, as a character who found nothing in life.

Besides Gibian’s Russian literature course, Sylvia was studying nineteenth-century American literature with Newton Arvin, a teacher and scholar she much admired, and intellectual history with Mrs. Koffka. She received A’s in all three classes and wrote to Aurelia that she had, indeed, recovered.

Although she would not graduate with her class, Sylvia kept busy spring term. She was chosen president of the arts honorary, and she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. She invited Evelyn Page, Elizabeth Drew, and Hope and Robert Gorham Davis to the Phi Beta Kappa dinner. Later she wrote caustically about the pink rose she was given as part of the induction ceremony, “symbol of god knows what: virgin intelligence with a faint blush of knowledge, mayhap!” She met weekly with Dr. Booth, Smith’s psychiatrist, and once in a while with her therapist and friend Ruth Beuscher.

Determined to continue at Smith as though her breakdown was only an aberration, Sylvia filled her days with activity or so she wrote to her mother. Because Aurelia thought that Sylvia’s depressions occurred when she “did too much,” Sylvia cruelly emphasized how busy she was in all her letters home. It seems evident that Dr. Beuscher wanted Sylvia to break her close ties with her family, as a way of finding self-confidence and strength. Sylvia accordingly wrote home less often than she had before her breakdown, and she used her breaks to travel instead of returning to Wellesley. During this spring break, she spent a week in New York, visiting her Lookout Farm artist friend, Ilo, and having lunch and dinner with Cyrilly Abels. In April, she wrote her first poem in nearly a year. The creative center of Sylvia’s life had taken the longest to recover, and she was ecstatic about “Doom of Exiles” — both because it was an effective poem, soon published in
Harper’s
, and because she knew she had recovered.

She continued to have a busy social life. She wrote regularly to Gordon Lameyer, who was on a five-month naval cruise and would not return to Boston until summer. She also wrote to Ed Cohen and Phil McCurdy. She saw Mike Lotz several times, once making an obvious play for a proposal from him. The spring of 1954 saw the beginning of the romance of Sylvia’s last year at Smith: on April 19, she met Richard Sassoon. A Yale rebel, who defied authority by cutting classes and making sly remarks about faculty, Sassoon was a history major who devoured Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Sartre and other contemporary writers, as well as nihilistic philosophy. Continental in dress and manners, Sassoon was related to the English poet Siegfried Sassoon. He and his roommate, Mel Woody, whom Sylvia dated simultaneously for a time, regarded themselves as existentialists.

Sylvia was fascinated by the intellectualism of the Yale campus, with Henri Peyre and Ernst Cassirer teaching there. She also enjoyed the expensive weekends with Sassoon in New York. One entry from her scrapbook, dated May 8-9, 1954, read: “Weekend in NYC — ecstatic rapport with intuitive and solicitous Sassoon — play in village — nuit d’amour, wine, poetry — gray dawn — enormous two-hour feast at Steuben’s.” Each weekend away was filled with theater, films, food both exotic and plentiful (another scrapbook list read, “Oysters, snails, herring and sour cream, onion soup, steak, lamb chops, avocados, strawberries all washed down with good French wine”). And love. Sylvia was dedicating herself to the experience of sexual love. Sassoon took the place once held by Sylvia’s best friends — Marcia Brown, Nancy Hunter, Perry Norton, and Ed Cohen. He was another searching, rebellious spirit. Part of his charm for Sylvia was that he cut classes and scoffed at his teachers with a wit that she envied. But while Sassoon pretended to be disdainful of Yale and its traditions, he belonged to the very elite Renaissance Club, and many of the letters he wrote to Sylvia were actually part of his assignment for a creative writing class that she did not know he was taking. He also did not tell her that he planned to publish their correspondence, at least his side of it.

Sylvia the rebel and outsider, as she now saw herself, responded totally to Sassoon. But it is revealing that she described their weekends away, which continued for several years, as “living as man and wife.” Sex may have been easier for her to accept, but she continued to think of such intimacy as the prelude to marriage.

Marriage was much on her mind that year. Besides housemates, friends from Wellesley and from Smith were married during the summer of 1954, most notably Marcia Brown. Sylvia was a bridesmaid for Marcia’s wedding and, again the next summer, for the wedding of her childhood friend, Ruth Freeman. That year she also received wedding invitations from several of her fellow guest editors at
Mademoiselle
, Janet Wagner among them. All Sylvia’s friends were marrying.

She tried to repress her worries. During the summer of 1954, Sylvia bleached her hair a brazen blonde and roomed with Nancy Hunter and two other Smith women in a sublet apartment just one block away from Harvard Square. She was on scholarship to Harvard for that “platinum summer,” as she called it, taking an intensive German course. The rest of the time she sunned, played tennis, met men, and learned to be a gourmet cook. She served her excellent meals, with dramatic flair, to Gordon Lameyer, finally home from his tour of duty; to a Harvard economics instructor; to a physics professor from M.I.T. ; and to men from other campuses in town for the summer. Nancy Hunter remarked that Sylvia’s flamboyant menus made heavy demands on the women’s joint grocery fund.

Sassoon was abroad for the summer, so Sylvia became involved in a sexual relationship with the physics professor. She simultaneously maintained her serious affair with Gordon Lameyer, discussing long-range plans — even marriage — on occasion. The relationship with the physics professor had an unexpected repercussion when Sylvia suffered a vaginal tear and lost a substantial amount of blood before the tear was stitched in a hospital emergency room. Sylvia’s story, when she retold it to Gordon and others, was that she had been attacked and that the bleeding was
not
the result of her being deflowered but of the professor’s manually raping her without provocation.

As Lameyer remembers it, Sylvia was deeply concerned about sexuality — she feared pregnancy, she feared losing her reputation, but she also feared seeming inexperienced. As their letters indicate, Sylvia and Lameyer were now quite in love. Knowing what Sylvia had been through the previous year, and knowing also that she was still meeting Dr. Beuscher for therapy, Gordon did not want to force his attentions on her before she was ready.

One weekend in late August, however, about two weeks after the incident with the physics professor, Sylvia abruptly indicated that she wanted to change their relationship, pretending, however, that she was still a virgin. As a result of this one evening, she became convinced several weeks later that she was pregnant, although her menstrual periods had never been normal. In early September, although she had not confirmed this suspicion with a doctor, Sylvia called Gordon with the news that she was probably going to have a child. What grieved her most, she said then, was how much she felt she had let down those who believed in her and who had helped her return to Smith for her senior year.

Lameyer was very deeply in love with Sylvia. He wrote her a letter, reassuring her of his intentions to marry her. Soon, however, her period began and Sylvia found that her driving ambition was not to marry, but to continue her stellar record at Smith. So that she need not work during her senior year, Smith had awarded her “the biggest scholarship yet,” for $1250. (The previous term, since Sylvia was not eligible for aid, Aurelia had cashed in an insurance policy to pay her expenses.) She concentrated on finishing her honors thesis on Dostoevsky’s use of the double in his fiction; she won high praise from Alfred Kazin for her creative writing; and then she took an independent study course in poetry with Alfred Young Fisher, for whom she wrote at least fifty-five new poems. She submitted nearly everything she wrote for publication.

Much of her time during the fall of this belated senior year went to applying for fellowships and for admission to graduate schools at Radcliffe and Columbia. She had recommendation letters from Alfred Kazin, Mary Ellen Chase, Newton Arvin, and Elizabeth Drew. Interviews for the prestigious fellowships were crucial. Rather than offend or alarm a committee of conservative professors, Sylvia decided to let her hair return to its natural brown color.

Through this senior year, Sylvia continued the discreet weekends in New York with Sassoon, seeing plays and good films, eating at good restaurants. She could also count on Gordon’s coming to Smith every weekend she would allow him to do so, because his ship was being overhauled in a Boston drydock and he was living at home in Wellesley. She often put him off with the excuse that she was working on her thesis, but she needed to know that she was still his best girl. Sylvia seldom ended relationships; she drew on everyone around her for support and admiration. As Nancy Hunter, Ellie Friedman, and Sue Weller could attest, Sylvia was demanding in her friendships, asking that her friends be understanding, supportive, and trustworthy. As Nancy Hunter realized after a year of being close friends with Sylvia, “I could not promise to keep her going like some intricate, erratic timepiece, and I could not face the guilt that would result if I failed to try. So I drew back instinctively....”

Sylvia’s relationship with Sassoon also had a dark side. A sadistic tone ran through his letters, a recurring emphasis on the notion that pleasure is enhanced by pain. His ideal, he wrote, was to “play daddy” to a naughty girl and Sylvia was, he said, the only woman he ever wished “to please and to punish.” Sylvia did not share any reservations about Sassoon with her friends, although she did humorously describe his comparatively small physique, as when she told Nancy and Ellie that when he embraced her, she felt like Mother Earth with a small bug crawling on her. Sylvia’s wit was consistent, though she used it carefully. She did not go after people publicly. She did, however, complain regularly to the Lawrence House president about women she disliked whenever they broke quiet hours. Sylvia could be difficult.