Sylvia Plath: A Biography (16 page)

But before the move back, Sylvia had an important spring ahead of her. First as part of her tripos, Cambridge’s honor examinations, she finished and turned in a collection of poems, many of which came from her Smith manuscript of two years earlier, “Circus in Three Rings.” Then she took the examinations in her chosen areas for her official degree, a second bachelor’s. Receiving a second, she was disappointed that the result was not a first. Dr. Krook commented that, despite Sylvia’s excellent work, she had learned that Sylvia was a poet rather than a scholar. She was committed to becoming a better writer and approached her studies from the perspective of what she could learn that would relate to her own writing. Had she chosen, she could have stayed on for a Ph.D. in literature, but Sylvia wanted to write now. She had not written much that she liked during the year, although she had published in
The
Atlantic
Monthly
,
Poetry
(six poems, for which she won the Bess Hokin prize), and
The
Christian
Science
Monitor
(an essay about life in Spain and four drawings to accompany it).

After several weeks of packing their belongings, crates of books and china, Sylvia and Ted sailed for America. After another week, they were celebrating at Aurelia’s garden reception. A huge success, the party brought together Sylvia’s neighbors and the Crocketts, the Cantors, the Freemans, Ellie Friedman, Marcia Brown and her husband, Gordon Lameyer’s mother, Peter Davison, and other Smith friends. Radiant, Sylvia hugged the people she had not seen for two years, happily described her accomplishments, and introduced Ted, who felt somewhat lost in the hubbub of congratulations. He was a little overwhelmed by Sylvia’s steady exuberance. She, conversely, was euphoric over the striking effect Ted — her colossus — had on people.

Sylvia began her summer on the Cape writing stories about her own experiences, even though they were disguised. One story was called “Trouble-Making Mother,” a narrative about a mother who dominates her teenage daughter, even to flirting with her dates. Within a week, Sylvia had finished the story and sent it off, pleased. She wrote in her journal that it was a gripping story with a dramatic crisis, and growth in the protagonist. But it was to be the only fiction she finished that summer, though she intended to write another about a sister-in-law and one “like Kafka, simply told, symbolic, yet very realistic. How one is always and irrevocably alone.”

Mining the emotional centers of her life, Sylvia also planned to write a novel about her love for Ted and their first meeting in Falcon Yard — “
love
,
a
falcon
, striking once and for all.” In her journal, she traced much of her sense of fiction to Virginia Woolf, and she also admonished herself not to tell too much of the daily life of “Judith Greenwood,” her
Falcon
Yard
protagonist. Several years later, Plath used the name Esther Greenwood for the main character in
The
Bell
Jar
. “Greenwood” was her grandmother’s maiden name, but it also had the connotation of growth and youth. As she reminded herself in her journal, the character of Judith, or Esther, was to be symbolic: “Make her a statement of the generation.”

Ted meanwhile was writing fables for children, and having some success placing them in children’s magazines. He also was having considerable success with his poetry. Sylvia wrote to her mother that Ted would have fifteen poems coming out in August and September of 1957. In contrast, she got back her rejected manuscript of poems from the Yale Younger Poets competition.

Sylvia desperately wanted to write during those weeks on Cape Cod, but she was dissatisfied with what she was doing: “not touching on my deep self.” The days went on, adding to her litany of guilt. Either she spent too long in the sun and lost her energy, or she wrote badly and was even more disappointed in herself. Aurelia and Warren came for several visits, and she hid the real state of her work from them. Panic was setting in; the summer was going fast.

To make matters worse, Sylvia’s menstrual period was two weeks late. From late July to August 8, she was sure she was pregnant — and the plans she had made for the two of them, to be able to write and live without responsibilities until they had been successful, were ruined. As she wrote in retrospect,

I have never in my life, except that deadly summer of 1953 and fall, gone through such a black lethal two weeks. I couldn’t write a word about it, although I did in my head. The horror, day by day more sure, of being pregnant. Remembering my growing casualness about contraception, as if it couldn’t happen to me then: clang, clang, one door after another banged shut with the overhanging terror which, I know now, would end me, probably Ted, and our writing and our possible impregnable togetherness.

Pregnant, Sylvia would not be able to teach the year at Smith.

She described as well “crying sessions in the doctor’s office, the blood test Sunday, in avalanches of rain and thunder, riding the streaming roads, up to our knees on our bikes in the dips filling inch by inch with rainwater, drenched to the skin.” Already the pattern of Sylvia’s taking responsibility for their lives is obvious, another kind of burden that would unbalance and slant the ledger for the rest of the marriage. Her hysteria, her guilt, suggests that she thought Ted had no part in the problem — whereas his own view of the matter was quite different. He thought he was being as helpful and responsible as she expected. Once Sylvia had been tested for pregnancy, her period started. What was harder to erase was the deep anger she felt at the end of the summer — toward the loss of her writing opportunities, toward Ted for not assuming what she saw as his share of the household burden, but most of all toward herself for allowing these all-too-human things to happen.

10 - Marriage in America

1957-59

“I Boarded Your Arc”

Ted and Sylvia were lucky to find a three-room apartment at 337 Elm Street in Northampton, less than a mile from the Smith campus. Owned by a local police officer and his young wife, the third floor of the house had been remodeled into an apartment with its own back stairway and private entrance. The $85-a-month flat had a large bedroom and living room, and a smaller dining-room — study with no windows. The owners left the Hugheses to their quiet life, though the wives occasionally discussed recipes.

During the first semester, Ted wrote at the apartment most of the time. He was experimenting with radio drama and writing for children. His part-time teaching job at the University of Massachusetts, a few miles away in Amherst, would not begin until spring term. In late September, his collection
The
Hawk
in
the
Rain
came out, to good reviews and some invitations to read.
Sewanee
Review
and
The
New
Yorker
accepted Ted’s new poems, and
Jack
and
Jill
his children’s stories.

For Sylvia, returning to Smith meant an even busier schedule than she remembered from her student days. Coming back was hardly a triumph; no one much noticed her and once she had been given the syllabus for the freshman course, she was on her own. Mary Ellen Chase had retired. Her former professors seemed less friendly than they had been when she was a student. Depressed by her interpretation of her reception, she wrote in her journal on October 1,

I am middling good. And I can live being middling good. I do not have advanced degrees, I do not have books published. I do not have teaching experience.... I must face this image of myself ... and not freeze myself into a quivering jelly because I am not Mr. Fisher or Miss Dunn or any of the others.

To Warren, she called herself “the returned and inadequate heroine of the Smith campus.”

Sylvia’s students, however, thought otherwise. To them, she was dramatic, beautiful, glamorous, with long hair and different dangling earrings each day. She read poetry aloud wonderfully, and her performance in front of a class was enhanced because of her reputation as a Smith woman, a star who had studied at Cambridge and married a British poet. She and Ted were invited by students to houses for dinner. They were the Smith poets, along with Anthony Hecht, Marie Borroff, and Paul Roche, a British poet and translator who was teaching at Smith for a second year.

Sylvia’s colleagues, too, thought she was enjoying her teaching. The younger faculty — Marlies Kallmann, Wendell Johnson, Joan Bramwell, among others — saw her as a favored alumna and were relatively cool about making advances to her. Sylvia was also married and therefore less free to be friends with other faculty women who were still single — or so they thought. One day in the middle of fall term, Sylvia asked Marlies whether she might sit in on a class that Kallmann was teaching; she felt that she was having trouble getting students to participate. That was the only indication anyone had that Sylvia was worried about her teaching, and she told Marlies afterward that she had learned a great deal and that she felt much better.

Like most freshman English courses of the 1950s, the program at Smith combined literature with writing. Dostoevsky’s
Crime and
Punishment
was a standard novel, as was James Joyce’s
A
Portrait
of
the
Artist
As
a
Young
Man
. The bewildered freshmen struggled hard with William James’s
The
Varieties
of
Religious
Experience
. Short stories by Henry James, Hawthorne, Joyce, Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence; an anthology of poetry, much of it modern; and plays from Seneca to Ibsen were some of the texts Sylvia had her students read. Each class met three times a week, either Monday-Tuesday-Wednesday or Thursday-Friday-Saturday. Sylvia’s classes met at the end of the week so she had Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday free. Each writing assignment, however, meant that she would have seventy themes to read, and every third week a new stack of papers appeared on her dining room table.

She was bothered less by the work of teaching than by its performance aspect. She quickly came to realize that it was not enough to love literature and to be interested in students; the expert teacher controlled the classroom and the students’ responses every minute. Teaching was difficult for Sylvia, who called herself “a being who gets tired, has shyness to fight, has more trouble than most facing people easily.” Temperamentally, she was not a teacher. Every interaction with students was draining, and when she had to discipline one of the women, she anguished over the case for days. As an October journal entry recounted, “could not sleep, although tired, and lay feeling my nerves shaved to a pin and the groaning inner voice: oh, you can’t teach, can’t do anything. Can’t write, can’t think....”

Outside the classroom, other events also affected Sylvia, most notably the suicide of a freshman found in the woods near Paradise Pond on November 7. The woman had hanged herself, supposedly because of either a pregnancy or an abortion. Later that fall, according to the Smith newspaper,
The
Sophian
, there were other attempted suicides. When Sylvia was writing
The
Bell
Jar
, she used the paper’s account of the 1957 suicide as her model for the death in the novel.

Meanwhile, the Smith English Department disappointed Sylvia. During faculty meetings, she discovered that some people she had previously admired were less than perfect. The inevitable squabbles over petty matters, which mark most academic departmental discussions, were unexpectedly revealing. Sylvia came to see the teaching profession as less noble than she had thought and quickly decided that she did not want to continue teaching.

In the autumn, Ted broke his foot getting up suddenly from a chair. Sylvia was reasonably healthy until mid-December when she was struck by the flu, which had reached epidemic proportions on campus. Later, she developed pneumonia and was in bed for more than two weeks. Her illness cost her the holiday break, time she had planned to use to prepare for second semester courses, and it left her depressed because she was now not only weak and ill but behind in preparation. Her list of things to feel guilty about grew longer. She worried about “owing” people socially, and planned countless dinner parties for the Roches, the Hechts, and others. Most of them never materialized. She worried about preparing for her own courses and that of Newton Arvin — a class in Hawthorne, James, and Melville — which she was to grade papers for. (She thought the extra grading would pay $300, but the fee was only $100, which disappointed her.) She worried about household duties and cooking, about Ted, and about her own writing. She had no time to do anything creative. She resented the fact that Ted did have that time.

Recovering from pneumonia at her mother’s home in Wellesley, where she and Ted had been headed when she was taken sick, Sylvia realized that she could not teach a second year at Smith. She was exhausted; she was in worse physical and mental shape than she had been as a student. She was not happy — she was not happy teaching and, as she told friends, if she could not write, nothing else seemed meaningful. She wrote to Warren about her decision to give up the Smith job, hoping he would break the news to Aurelia. Sylvia knew her mother would think she was foolish to quit the post, but, as she explained, she and Ted hoped to rent a small apartment on Beacon Hill in Boston and write, “me part time and Ted full time” for the year. Then, on the basis of that year’s manuscripts, they would try for grants. Sylvia knew now how important writing was to her. She was becoming so jealous of Ted’s writing time that she complained about having to vacuum the rug under his desk because he threw down scraps of paper as he wrote. She still affirmed that Ted was “This one I have chosen and am forever wedded to,” but she found it easy to forget the Saturday afternoons they spent napping and making love, their walks gathering pine boughs and watching animals, their shared writing exercises and reading, and their excitement when the mail arrived.

Back at Smith after her illness, Sylvia continued to slide behind. She grew increasingly angry about teaching, about the quantity of time it took. By February, she had insomnia: “I’ve been through the worst, the hells of explaining snippets of ambiguous, ambivalent William James on 3 days and nights of no-sleep.... Tonight I shall manage dinner for 5 and coffee for an extra 2 with ease.” Her journal entries are less angry than they are guilty, however, even when she describes herself doing the clearing up alone, “elbow-deep in last night’s dishes.” She implies that if she were somehow better, she would be able to manage everything. She berates herself: “married gold ring, heels, silk stockings, hair up: how I confront myself and disbelieve. I am again behind, cramming: only till next weekend, then the next.” Sylvia seemed to believe she was a fraud, that Sylvia Plath Hughes the teacher was really Sylvia Plath the student. Worse, the world would soon discover that fact.

At times she cajoled herself into believing that such unremitting work was good for her (there are many echoes of the Plath family philosophy here). As she wrote after a dinner party for Ellie Friedman and her husband,

Work redeems. Work saves. Baked a lemon meringue pie, cooled lemon custard and crust on cold bathroom windowsill.... Set table, candles, glasses sparkling crystal.... Making orders. Shaping a meal, people, I grew back to joy.

But more often, she described her life as “a grim grind.” She wrote, “I deserve a year, two years, to live my own self into being.”

Depressing as the Massachusetts winter had been, spring brought vacation time and a miraculous flowering: Sylvia wrote eight good poems. During break, she scarcely stopped to do anything else. She felt revitalized. She could sleep, her “back quirk” was better. During spring term, however, she and Ted disagreed more often and, tired from the year and anxious for the term to end, Sylvia lost what little tact she had. They disagreed about money, about their future plans (should they move to Boston in June or wait until September? should they return to England?) and about their professional lives. Sylvia had felt only disapproval from the older faculty when she decided to give up her teaching post at Smith, and it was hard for her to withstand the pressure. She sensed that her colleagues thought that she had let down the very people who had gotten her the position, Miss Chase and Mr. Davis. It was also hard to relinquish the security of another year’s good pay.

While Sylvia was a fledgling teacher, Ted was a published and sought-after poet. He gave a reading at Harvard in the spring, followed by a houseparty in Boston, given by Jack and Moira Sweeney; and he read the part of Creon in the Smith College presentation of Paul Roche’s translation of
Oedipus
. Sylvia and he disagreed over whether she should come to hear the staged reading. She did; he seemed displeased. Then on the day she taught her last classes of the year, she had arranged for Ted to meet her both before the last class and after it, to celebrate. He failed to meet her as arranged and later, according to her account, she found him coming up the road from Paradise Pond with a student. Furious, she accused him of being like all men — faithless. She deserved different treatment, better treatment, she wrote. She had given him all her trust and love, not to mention money. Perhaps the last item was the most difficult for her. As she wrote angrily in her journal, “I have served a purpose, spent money, Mother’s money, which hurts most, to buy him clothes, to buy him a half year, eight months of writing.” Ted’s protestations of innocence only added to her fury. Then, after a fight complete with physical injury to each, everything was all right once more, wrote Sylvia. But as her journal entries record, Sylvia was developing a good deal of resentment toward Ted.

Summer was slow, relaxed, and for Ted — productive. Everything he wrote was good. Summer vacation began with five wonderful days in New York. Ted and Sylvia had dinners with Ted’s publishers and went to parties and visited Oscar Williams, Marianne Moore, Babette Deutsch, and other literary acquaintances. They celebrated their second wedding anniversary in Wellesley, and then Sylvia read for a Harvard Library recording of her poetry. (She had earlier done a recording for the Library of Congress.) And then home to 337 Elm Street in Northampton, where the most appealing feature of their location was Child’s Park, the small natural area that adjoined the house. She wrote to her sister-in-law, Olwyn, that she and Ted were thriving, and that they were working out a plan to somehow clear the next five years for writing. Political as always, Sylvia asked Olwyn to tell her more about De Gaulle, who had just founded the Fifth Republic in France.

Her tranquil tone in her letters, however, is contradicted by her anguished journal entries. Filled with the anxiety that attacked her whenever she had time to write (was she “good enough” to be a writer? should she be doing something to make money instead of trying to write?), she sank into her doldrums. Ted’s analysis was that Sylvia had gone to school for twenty years and that without that external structure she was apprehensive. Ted seldom had such worries. He judged his work by whether or not it satisfied him; publication was secondary. For Sylvia, however, being unsure of her role as writer, publication was all-important. She marked her progress in the field by the places her work appeared. When
The
New
Yorker
accepted two of her new long poems in June (her first acceptance by that magazine), she was jubilant. Not only would the payment ($377) take care of several months’ rent, but appearing in
The
New
Yorker
was one of her lifelong goals. She dreamed about the way her poems would look on the pages, and planned a strategy for placing fiction there as well.