Sylvia Plath: A Biography (17 page)

In the next few weeks,
The
Nation
and
Sewanee
Review
accepted Sylvia’s work, but she was already moving in a downward spiral. Her journal charts the decline: “I felt sicker and sicker. I couldn’t happily be anything but a writer and I couldn’t be a writer. I couldn’t even set down one sentence: I was paralyzed with fear, with deadly hysteria.” “Paralysis still with me.” “My mind is barren....”

She spent her free summer time avoiding chances to write. She rescued a dying bird and allowed its struggle for life to occupy a week of their time, night and day. Finally Ted gassed the bird — and Sylvia wrote of its being “composed, perfect and beautiful in death” — and they buried it with ceremony. Sylvia visited her old friend Ruth Freeman Geissler and envied her her three young children. She wrote a few poems she thought good enough to be included in a collection she was putting together (“Owl,” “Lorelei,” “Whiteness I Remember”) and thought about prose, which now seemed incredibly difficult to her. Her lethargy wore on, accompanied by intermittent high fevers, into the fall. Even after she and Ted moved to Suite 61, 9 Willow Street, in the Beacon Hill area of Boston, Sylvia could not shake her depression.

Moving to Boston was a part of Sylvia’s plan to surround Ted with the best of the American literary world. He had been bored in Northampton, impatient with what he saw as the parochial concerns of the Smith College faculty. Surely Boston — where, in Adrienne Rich’s words, “the world of literary celebrity and success was deeply meshed with that other world of Boston, old money and Harvard” — would be more interesting to them both. Sylvia knew some of Boston’s literati; Jack and Moira Sweeney had entertained after Ted’s Harvard reading, their apartment full of Picassos and Matisses, overlooking Boston Common. The back of Beacon Hill — Boston’s Left Bank or Greenwich Village — was the ideal place for two young, ambitious writers. And the tiny two-room apartment had two bay windows, one for each of them to write in. Sylvia loved the light, the quiet, and the sixth-floor view of the river.

But writing was the reason Sylvia and Ted had moved to Boston, and once again, Sylvia was blocked. She tried writing on the hoard of pink memo paper she had purposely taken from Smith to write her novel on. She set aside regular times for writing and other times for reading and studying languages. She pushed herself, cajoled herself, argued with herself — and worried about money. The plan for the year had become that Ted would take a full-time job, but he saw no reason to look for work. He was confident that they could live on their incomes from writing. He had applied for a Saxton grant, but that funding was administered by his publisher, Harper & Row, and he was therefore ineligible. He also applied for a Guggenheim fellowship but that funding — if he were fortunate enough to win the award — would not begin until the next summer. It was Sylvia, not Ted, who claimed to feel the pressure of financial responsibility, and toward the end of September she applied for a part-time job. As she wrote in her journal, she panicked. She wanted to write, but she also felt compelled to have a “real” job, to live in a world where people worked at things they might not care about doing. Even though Ted had just received a check for $150 along with an $850 prize for his poem “The Thought Fox,” Sylvia felt more comfortable having a regular job. She took work transcribing the dreams of patients, and acting as receptionist and general office clerk, in the psychiatric clinic of Massachusetts General Hospital.

Her job there put her in contact again with Myron Lotz. After his year at Oxford, Lotz had finished medical school at Yale and was now interning at Mass. General. Sylvia, of course, was delighted to see him and invited him and his fiancée for dinner. She served a traditional Boston seafood meal, which Mike raved about. He and Sylvia reminisced warmly; Ted seemed uneasy. When Mike teased his date about being so conventional, wanting to cook and keep house, Ted roused himself from a long silence to ask, “And what is so bad about that?”

After Mike and his date left, Sylvia and Ted repeated their argument from June. Each was capable of a powerful jealousy. Early in the summer, Sylvia had written, “I have a violence in me that is hot as death-blood. I can kill myself or — I know it now — even kill another.” Ted insisted that they spend the night at a hotel, implying that Sylvia had somehow defiled the apartment, and their argument raged to such violence that the hotel-room furnishings were damaged, according to an account Sylvia gave to a friend years later.

Although Sylvia recognized her sexual jealousies, she may not have realized her literary ones. As her journals show all too clearly, she became sick — either depressed or physically ill or both — whenever she and Ted were both writing full time. As in their early months in Boston, working outside the apartment seemed to be her solution, but Sylvia soon quit what she referred to as her “amusing” job at Mass. General. Being in those surroundings surely took her back to the fall of 1953, when she was a ward patient there. But the position had at least helped to rid her of what she had for several years called her “panic bird,” a state which froze her and kept her from any kind of profitable writing or living. At Mass. General, most of the patients had worse panics, and knowing their histories was in some ways a help to Sylvia, who wrote, “I feel my whole sense and understanding of people being deepened and enriched.”

Back in the apartment to write, however, Sylvia became depressed again. She knew she needed help. In early December, she secretly began seeing Ruth Beuscher, her therapist from McLean. As she wrote on December 12, “If I am going to pay money for her time & brain as if I were going to a supervision in life & emotions & what to do with both, I am going to work like hell, question, probe sludge & crap & allow myself to get the most out of it.” She was again working on the problem of her relationship with her parents, and after weeks of work with Beuscher Sylvia found that she could accept the situation she was left in when her father died. Beuscher helped her see that she could simultaneously love and pity her mother on the one hand, and also resent her for the attitudes about sexuality and work that Sylvia had come to mistrust. She was finally able to mourn her father’s death, and to trace her suspicion of men — and her conviction that they would eventually leave her — to the early abandonment of her father’s death.

She also realized how guilty she felt about disappointing her mother and all her benefactors and the other “mother figures” in her life: Mary Ellen Chase, Olive Higgins Prouty, Mildred Norton, Mrs. Lameyer, and other of her mother’s friends. She concluded resentfully, “I get very sad about not doing what everybody and all my white-haired old mothers want in their old age.” Her various mothers also represented the society that she felt expected her, and Ted, to work for financial gain, “The Writer and Poet is excusable only if he is Successful. Makes Money.”

Within a week after she began therapy with Beuscher, Sylvia wrote “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams,” one of her best stories. In this fantasy about a hospital typist who becomes a dream connoisseur, she wrote in natural-sounding, humorous prose. The year before, when she had been reading a great deal of Woolf and Lawrence, she had asked in her journal, “What is my voice?” She then had answered, “Woolfish, alas, but tough. Please, tough.” The Johnny Panic story is told in a slangy, tough woman’s voice. It was a breakthrough in fiction to a recognizable artistic voice that Sylvia had not yet made in her poetry, and she wrote five more stories during the spring of 1959, each one a success.

After Christmas, which Ted and Sylvia celebrated with Mrs. Plath at their apartment, Sylvia got a tiger kitten with green eyes, which she named Sappho. She was spending more time with female friends — afternoons with Shirley Norton, Perry’s wife, playing with the Norton baby and braiding rag rugs; having lunch with Norma Farber; entertaining Marcia Brown and her husband, Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell, the Philip Booths, Adrienne Rich and her husband, and others. Sylvia asked Rich, whose children were small, whether she thought a woman could both write and bring up children — to which Rich answered, “Yes, but it’s hellishly difficult.” Rich’s sense of Sylvia at that time was that she was Ted’s wife first, and a poet only after that. Charles Doyle, a young Australian poet who visited the Hugheses at the suggestion of Lowell, remembered Sylvia’s cooking a chicken dinner, clearing and washing dishes, and then sitting in the living room where Doyle and Hughes were discussing their poems. As Doyle recalls, “Nothing was said about her poetry. I didn’t know she was a poet.”

In early spring, Sylvia wrote in her journal that men interested her less and less. What she found fascinating was “women and women-talk.” At the same time, her marriage was evolving into a more traditional coupling, and less a partnership between two writers. Sylvia began thinking of Ted as the breadwinner, while he in turn berated her — sometimes publicly — for failing to sew on buttons or mend his clothes. It was an unsettling winter and spring, and any dissension between them was especially painful coming as it did while Sylvia was, in her therapy, reliving her father’s abandonment of her through his death.

She often experienced immense grief, crying her way through sessions with Beuscher (her poem “The Ravaged Face” was written after one of these). She was indecisive at times, unable to make up her mind about getting her hair cut, about studying toward a Ph.D. in psychology, about whether to entertain. Then on March 9, 1959, she visited her father’s grave on Azalea Path in the Winthrop Cemetery. Calling it “a depressing sight,” she described its location “on a flat grassy area looking across a sallow barren stretch to rows of wooden tenements.” The stone, marked
Otto
E
.
Plath
:
1885
-
1940
, was beside a path, likely to be walked over. Plath continued, “Felt cheated. My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead. How far gone would he be? No trees, no peace, his headstone jammed up against the body on the other side. Left shortly. It is good to have the place in mind.” The terse description shows the power of her unexpressed grief. The visit — her first in nearly twenty years since her father’s death — was crucial to resolving that relationship.

Later in the spring, Sylvia took another part-time job, this time as secretary to the head of the Sanskrit Department at Harvard. She relearned speedwriting and took comfort in the regularity of her hours and duties. She also was reading widely: Freud, Faulkner, Tolstoi, Ainu tales, the Bible (especially the Book of Job), lives of saints. She was fascinated by accounts of St. Therese, who was sanctifed after receiving visits from the Virgin. Sylvia’s notes include a long description of Therese’s many influenzalike illnesses with high fevers, her hatred of the cold, her fears before the visitations — tribulations which had echoes in Plath’s own life. They also include a description of the earlier St. Teresa, who founded the Discalced (barefooted) Carmelite order in sixteenth-century Spain, and the nuns’ early rising, fasting, meditation, and consistent gaiety (and Teresa’s own pragmatic wit and stability).

During her years in America, Plath moved in her extensive reading between the established great works of literature and philosophy to the very new. She devoured existential playwrights such as Ionesco and Beckett, and during the summer of 1959 read two novels that she liked a great deal — Philip Roth’s
Goodbye
,
Columbus
and J. D. Salinger’s
Seymour
:
An
Introduction
. She loved their terse humor and rapid pace, and laughed aloud at both books. Most important of all, she began to appear at Robert Lowell’s Boston University poetry workshop, where many young Boston writers gathered on Tuesday afternoons for several hours.

In 1959, Robert Lowell was regarded as America’s most prominent younger poet. His taut, involuted early writing was influential, and he had begun his own process of breaking out of the tightly-structured lyrics in a new book,
Life
Studies
, which would be published later that year. (Ted had previously given Sylvia a copy of Lowell’s
Lord
Weary’s
Castle
.) Kathleen Spivack had come to Boston from Ohio so that she might study with Lowell, and such poets as Stephen Sandy, Don Junkins, Henry Braun, Steve Berg, Anne Sexton, and George Starbuck were already in the class. Sylvia had an additional reason to be interested in Lowell’s work: he was the victim of frequent breakdowns.

She found his teaching style more disconcerting than helpful, however. He taught by shifting part of his authority to the workshop members, but at the same time he was encouraging their participation, he continuously probed, “What does this mean?” To Lowell, there were “major” and “minor” categories of poets and poems, and the workshop students often remained silent rather than offer a judgment Lowell might disagree with.

Because Sylvia was more accustomed to the teacher as an authority figure, she was never entirely comfortable in Lowell’s class. Sometimes she appeared, in Junkins’ words, “mousy, almost totally silent.” Other times, as Kathleen Spivack remembered her, she was curt and businesslike. “‘Reminds me of Empson,’ she might drawl as a student’s poem was handed around the table. Or she might cite a more obscure poet, out of another century.” Sylvia was less the warm-hearted fellow student than she was the erudite somewhat older writer, and her relationships with younger students in the workshop were never close.

But there was a student in Lowell’s workshop to whom Plath was drawn — talkative, vivacious Anne Sexton. A comparative novice to poetry (and to writing classes), Sexton did not have to unlearn all the rules that Plath was laboring under in 1959. Sexton was a fashionable and attractive suburban wife whose breakdown following the births of her daughters was the subject of some of her poems. She attracted Sylvia both because of her outspoken comments in class and because of their similar life experiences. Sylvia identified with what Sexton wrote; she also admired her innovative techniques. “You, Dr. Martin,” a poem written to an analyst, was one of Sexton’s workshop poems that Sylvia admired greatly. During workshop sessions, Sexton had also read “A Story for Rose,” a poem about a woman as story teller, and her long sequence poem, “The Double Image.” Plath’s long years of conservative poetic training tumbled down. It took some months before she could discover a poetic direction for her work as satisfying as Sexton’s was for her. Sexton’s poetry and friendship were resources Sylvia could find nowhere else — not even at home, because the imagery and subjects of Ted’s poems were remote from Plath. Sexton was already aware of her special province as a woman poet, and in that respect she influenced Sylvia as no male poet could.