Текст книги "American Isis. The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath"

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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For all her professions of pride in Ted, his success did take its toll on Sylvia, as she recounts in her journal, saying his criticism of her work came at a bad time. She seemed blocked, unable to write the novel. She did grind out three pages a day, but what she wrote was “blither.” Part of the problem derived from studying for her June exams. She tried to relieve the pressure by biking, but she still beguiled herself with her novel about a self-destructive young woman who is redeemed by the power of love. Sometimes it sounded to her like she was producing a potboiler, a true-confession story, and not the “noble, gut-wrenching” account she had dreamed of writing. Part of Sylvia’s problem, she realized, was her earnest heavy-handedness. The antidote, she confided to her journal, might be a style resembling Joyce Cary’s in The Horse’s Mouth, a delightful, informal, foray into an artist’s mind that was vivid, funny, and yet an entirely serious aesthetic effort. She envied his popularity and wanted to emulate his other supple novels, such as Herself Surprised.

On 12 March, an elated Sylvia Plath learned that she had been offered a teaching position at Smith with a salary of $4,200, then a respectable yearly income for a college instructor. Although Sylvia had all along had reservations about teaching at Smith, now she could not imagine anything she would rather do, she told Aurelia. Teaching three courses a semester might prove daunting, but Plath supposed she would do well with good students and have lively discussions.

On 29 March, Olive Higgins Prouty replied to Plath’s good news, sending along what Aurelia deemed in Letters Home “intuitive remarks”: “There is no end to the thrilling things happening. It frightens me a little. I am very proud of you, Sylvia. I love to tell your story. Someone remarked to me after reading your poem in The Atlantic, ‘How intense.’ Sometime write me a little poem that isn’t intense. A lamp turned too high might shatter its chimney. Please just glow sometimes.”

A week later Plath completed a poem, “All the Dead Dears,” an extraordinary meditation on the skeleton of a woman in a stone coffin the poet had seen in Cambridge’s archeological museum. The poem’s speaker notes that “this lady” is no “kin” of hers, and yet “she’ll suck / Blood and whistle my marrow clean” to prove otherwise. What would Henry James have given to imagine a character like Sylvia Plath, so steeped in the past that she could sometimes feel it was eating her alive? The speaker imagines this figure of the ancient past hauling her in and making her feel the presence of other old souls who usurp the armchair—that is, make themselves at home in a kind of death-in-life scene that drives the speaker to think of humanity as “each skulled-and-crossbones Gulliver / Riddled with ghosts.” The living will lie with relics like the woman in the stone coffin, “deadlocked with them, taking root as cradles rock.” This extraordinary Gothic evocation of recurrence and continuity has the kind of brooding, brilliant, and haunting acuity that disturbed Prouty.

Sylvia now had written eighty single-spaced pages of “Falcon Yard” and hoped to complete a first draft of the novel before departing in June for America. Only fragments of the work survive, including a page titled “Character Notebook.” She was trying to work out a trajectory for her heroine, Peregrine, a “Voyager, no Penelope.” Another character, Lisa, is called a “male-woman” and is associated with Nancy Hunter and Olwyn Hughes. Kate, described as an older passionate woman and a priestess, seems derived from Dorothea Krook. A Mrs. Guinea would be introduced as a sort of Wife of Bath figure. Jess, an “honest dowd,” would be comforting in a sort of stodgy Victorian way. This would be a novel about a woman of the world, an “Isis fable,” Plath noted.

The women would be set against the Dionysian Leonard, a hero, a “God-man,” who is “spermy” and creative. Adam Winthrop, a version of Gordon Lameyer, a mama’s boy (Sylvia said as much in her journal), is dominated by women. She had it in mind to create a Cambridge fop based on Christopher Levenson, an acquaintance, and another frail suitor, Maurice, was a ringer for Sassoon, “a dark, sickly, lover-type.” Warm and intuitive like Mallory Wober, Maurice is too cerebral, and like Sassoon, too worried about money (he had, in fact, rejected marrying Sylvia before he had earned a fortune). Why the title “Falcon Yard”? This was the place on the Cambridge campus where Sylvia and Ted first met. Apparently love would be portrayed as a “bird of prey,” with “victors and victims.” The novel would be characterized by “depravity and suffering” that would give rise to “a fable of faithfulness.” The auras of the Brontës seem to preside over this work.

Even in its truncated form, “Falcon Yard,” is a revelation. Peregrine is clearly the dominant, even prey-driven woman that ruffled Eddie Cohen, who deplored Plath’s disdainful treatment of men. In her notes for Peregrine, Plath makes her character a goddess born out of a “perfect dream of love.” Like Isis, she roams the world assembling the parts of the god-man who will fulfill her love. The god-man becomes for Peregrine/Isis a father, lover, and priest, promising the “perpetually possible.” Plath, however, realized Peregrine’s plight: How can she accept the “fallible man as divine”? It is the question D. H. Lawrence asks in “The Man Who Died,” when the priestess of Isis wishes to believe that the man who died is Osiris. Unlike the Plath of Letters Home and correspondence with her closest friends, Peregrine expresses doubt in the god-man she has made. Peregrine identifies herself not only as Isis, but also as Lamia, the “sperm-sucking serpent” of Keats’s poem, and with Medusa, the “Mother of Madness, the Mother of Death.” Eventually Ted Hughes would flee Sylvia Plath, declaring she had a kind of “death ray.”

If Plath had trouble actually writing the novel, it may be because of its monumental nature. How to live the perfect life in a fallen world? Peregrine asks. The question of how to write the perfect female epic was evidently just as daunting. No wonder Plath responded with elation to Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest, the very epitome of the heroine Plath wanted to create. Sylvia broke off writing the novel as she prepared for exams, then worked fitfully on it while teaching at Smith. And she returned to it again after completing The Bell Jar.

On 9 April, Sylvia wrote Elinor Friedman Klein and Marcia Brown to catch them up on the news. While dreaming of the summer cottage on the Cape that Aurelia had rented as a wedding present, and anticipating her arrival on 25 June in New York—to be followed by a gala reception for her and Ted on the 29th in Wellesley—Sylvia was preparing for her grueling five days of exams covering two thousand years of “tragedy, morality, etc. etc.” She regarded her appointment at Smith as both exciting and terrifying. And oh how she relished her return to the land of modern appliances after two years of dealing with dodgy British models. Good-bye to coal stoves and wretched dental care.

To Marcia Brown, Sylvia described Ted teaching forty Teddy boys (gang members), who carried chains and razors but could not remember their multiplication tables. This was her English version of The Blackboard Jungle (1955), the film starring Glenn Ford as a neophyte English teacher determined to teach in a violent inner city school. As always, in her letters to American friends, she gave Ted Hughes the Hollywood treatment. He could not teach school without Sylvia making it a “moving, tragic, & in many ways rewarding experience.”

To both Elinor and Marcia, Sylvia spread the news of Ted’s prize, which had his publisher, Harper’s, wondering if success would spoil Rock Hunter—yet another allusion to a film, this one released in 1957 and starring Tony Randall as an ad executive, whose first success involves pretending to be the lover of a movie star in a campaign to sell lipstick. Only Sylvia Plath could glamorize Ted’s receipt of a publishing prize as though a new Clark Gable had suddenly been discovered and relieved of his obscurity. As for her, she drew on a sports metaphor, calling herself a “triple-threat woman: wife, writer, and teacher”—although she said she would trade in that epithet for motherhood.

London Magazine’s acceptance of poems by both Plath and Hughes had Sylvia dreaming of catapulting to fame, as she wrote her mother on 13 April. Ted now had a British publisher for The Hawk in the Rain. Faber & Faber had taken the book on the recommendation of T. S. Eliot, who had passed on a complimentary message to Ted, Sylvia reported to Aurelia on 10 May. At the same time, Plath was still hoping to “break into the slicks,” since a sale of several commercial stories could earn them a year’s income.

Sylvia’s ecstatic letters to her mother might be discounted, except that Ted’s to his brother, Gerald, were almost as rhapsodic. “Marriage is my medium,” he declared. He wrote about his and Sylvia’s working and walking about in incandescent terms: “We strike sparks.” He described them sitting by the river and watching water voles. The “unconscious delight” he attributed to her makes Sylvia seem very much like the sensitive Marilyn Monroe that Arthur Miller described in his memoirs and stories. “She’s the most responsive alert creature in the world, about everything,” Hughes concluded. And like Sylvia, he enthused about an America taking him into its embrace. Even when it came to family, he really did sound like Sylvia’s male counterpart, saying that his prize and the praise for him were all the more pleasing because they had fulfilled his mother’s dreams for him.

CHAPTER 5

QUEEN OF THE OCEAN

(1957–59)

1957: Plath and Hughes summer at Cape Cod before Sylvia begins teaching freshman English at Smith, while Ted obtains a part-time teaching position at University of Massachusetts, Amherst; 1958: The couple moves to Boston, and Sylvia resumes treatment with Dr. Beuscher; 1959: Sylvia befriends Anne Sexton in a poetry class taught in the spring semester by Robert Lowell. Sylvia and Ted spend a summer at Yaddo, the writer’s colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and then sail in December for England.

In early June, after the ordeal of exams that earned Plath the equivalent of about a B+ and a master’s degree, the couple headed for Yorkshire to stay with Ted’s parents before sailing to America. On 8 June, Sylvia described for her mother’s benefit a cozy family get-together with Olwyn, who had just arrived from France. Sylvia had cast aside what she thought of as the false, artificial world of Cambridge with T. S. Eliot’s line about “preparing a face to meet a face.” The couple took long walks on the moors.

A letter Ted wrote to Olywn on 20 June aboard the RMS Queen Elizabeth on the way to America suggests that not everyone was as simpatico as Sylvia said they were. “Don’t criticize Sylvia too badly about the way she got up and came after me,” Ted exhorted Olwyn, who thought Sylvia had been rude to John Fisher, Ted’s old and beloved teacher. When Sylvia abruptly rushed out of the room, an awkward silence ensued until Ted said he’d better look after her. Then, as he returned to his company, she had rushed down the stairs after him. Olwyn was clearly impatient with Sylvia’s moods, which shifted from high-pitched animation to sullen silence. Ted expatiated: A “nervy” Sylvia was still recovering from her exams and found company disturbed her need to rest. The “smarmy” behavior Olywn despised was Sylvia’s response to panic, when she was trying too hard to be “open & too nice.” Ted had seen a carefully hidden side of Sylvia that moved him to say apologetically, “She says stupid things then that mortify her afterwards. Her second thought—her retrospect, is penetrating, skeptical, and subtle. But she can never bring that second-thinking mind to the surface with a person until she’s known them some time.” Ted could have been Arthur Miller apologizing for Marilyn Monroe, whose erratic behavior often placed him in the same embarrassing situations. Both men felt deeply protective of the women who had inspired them far more than anyone in a superficial social setting could imagine. On the surface, it seemed to Olwyn that her brother had married a woman unworthy of him. Ted worked hard to bring Olwyn round: “You saw how much better she was the last day. Don’t judge her on her awkward behavior.” Like Miller, Hughes made his excuses, mentioning Sylvia’s “miserable past,” which he would in due course tell Olwyn about. Sylvia could be a harsh judge of people, Ted told his sister, but his wife had already developed considerable respect for Olwyn and prized her. How much Hughes was placating his sister, and how much he believed what he said, is impossible to tell.

The letters to his sister Hughes wrote aboard the Queen Elizabeth mention a period of depression, although aside from his complaints about the sumptuous food and boring sea, the reasons for his dejection are not clear. Of course, he was embarking on a new phase of his life, which in itself could have seemed daunting. But when Sylvia so often referred to him as her male counterpart, she may have been acknowledging a similar arc of mood swings that could make living together both wondrous and fraught.

Her journal entries written aboard ship focus mainly on the other passengers, whom she was sizing up as characters for her stories. She did mention, however, the “coffin-like bunks” and her difficulty sleeping in their cold cabin. A dreary sort of sameness seems to have overtaken Sylvia and Ted, who did not really have much to do on a ship monotonously rolling in the waves. Sylvia’s journal does not do much with the rather conventional fellow travelers she described.

Writing in late June to his brother, Gerald, and Gerald’s wife, Joan, Hughes described his first impressions of Wellesley and of the party Aurelia had arranged. He produced a classic description of 1950s conformist America, where everyone was expected to “mix,” join the “rat-race,” and put on a happy, “well-adjusted” face. The opulent food dismayed him, the meet and greets wearied him, and the fastidious surroundings made him want to engage in “private filthiness.” This world had too much glaze for him. “But I’ll learn my position,” he noted, as though these new surroundings constituted a sort of game. “It’s good for me to be surrounded by a world from which I instinctively recoil. I mightn’t waste quite so much energy here.” He enjoyed observing new birds, and he was on the lookout for the skunks he had heard about. And there was always fishing, one of his favorite pastimes. The huge cars—the materialistic culture of what he called “85ft long Cadillacs”—amused him. But what really pleased him was the lack of cruelty in literary life. Even the literary reviews, a notorious haven for the nasty, were “surprisingly honest, outspoken, but not venomous,” as they were in London, where Hughes despised the vicious, inbred, and underhanded clubbishness of literary life. As Sylvia approached with more abundant food—chicken and lobster sandwiches—Ted marveled that he had landed in the lap of luxury. Like Sylvia, he believed in his own destiny, which he had charted in horoscopes. “There is no explanation for it,” he said in a concluding line to Gerald and Joan, “though astrology, of course, explains it all.”

Accounts of Hughes’s behavior at the party differ, with some remembering a generally friendly, if taciturn, Ted, and others depicting a somewhat condescending, aloof figure. Of course, such impressions of him that survive have been refurbished with retrospection—not to mention suffused with the personalities of those who met him and later reported on his behavior. His letters suggest mixed emotions capable of sustaining nearly every available version of his American debut.

In Letters Home, Aurelia remembers a radiant Sylvia greeting her seventy guests and introducing her husband to them. Warren then drove the pair to the summer cottage Aurelia had rented so that they could have seven weeks or so of rest and quiet and time for their writing. A week later, Sylvia wrote to Marcia Brown, describing their “small gray cabin hidden in the pines” and their “easy living, no phones, simple meals,” which allowed them to dress like hermits in dungarees. They wrote in the morning, biked in the afternoon to the beach, and read a good deal in the evening. For Sylvia, this meant Virginia Woolf’s novels. Sylvia had trouble resuming “Falcon Yard,” although in late July she had better luck writing stories, which she regarded as warm-up exercises for more serious work.

Ted’s version of the Cape summer in a letter to Gerald and Joan was a little different. He attributed his own writer’s block as well as Sylvia’s to a paralyzing response to Aurelia’s generosity: seventy dollars a week for the cottage. Although Ted did not explain himself, it seems that the couple’s sense of self-sufficiency attenuated. And what Sylvia regarded as simple meals seemed to Ted virtual banquets, as she plied him with Himalayan heaps of food. Sylvia cooked to relax. She was a “princess of cooks” who delivered “fairy palace dishes,” a bemused Ted noted, regarding eating only as a necessity. But he grew to enjoy browning on the beach and even appreciated the kitchen, with all its modern conveniences. He liked the verandah, where they took their meals. And when Sylvia really got going with her writing, they actually did eat rather simply.

Sylvia loved walking on the beach and imagining Ted as a seagod, the perfect consort to her as earth goddess, she avowed in her journal. Plath associated her newfound maturity with her marriage to Hughes, just as Monroe, likewise married in June 1956, linked her yearlong break from Hollywood and journey to New York to be with Miller with her fulfillment as an actress. Just 160 miles southwest from Ted and Sylvia and at virtually the same time, Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe were walking along Amagansett beaches near the tip of Long Island—he treating her as a goddess to be cherished, and she looking up to her tall husband as her towering hero. Sylvia and Marilyn, both survivors of suicide, saw their mates as saviors. Having produced no notable work in the previous six months, Sylvia was sure that without Ted’s constant support, she would have gone mad. Marilyn, in virtually the same downward cycle and deeply disappointed over the outcome of her last picture, The Prince and the Showgirl, wanted to believe, as did Sylvia, that she was storing up energy for a new burst of creativity. But Sylvia Plath, like Marilyn Monroe, could in a matter of a few days, or even hours, execute a reverse angle shot of her marriage, or complaining in her 18 July journal about a “lousy day … No more dreams of queen and king for a day with valets bringing in racks of white suits, jackets, etc. for Ted & ballgowns and tiaras for me.”

A brooding Sylvia worked on a story about a troublemaking mother who wants her daughter to be a social success. The plot might as well have been stolen from Stella Dallas, although Plath made no mention of her mentor or her work. Ultimately, the mother is redeemed in the story, just as Stella is, both in Prouty’s novel and in its radio serial. Living in the wonderful cottage for the summer, how could Sylvia help but be grateful to Aurelia? At the same time, though, she hated the feeling of obligation, the sense of being beholden that Ted, too, disliked. The story, which seemed to her slick but good—exactly what a magazine like The Saturday Evening Post would publish (they later rejected it)—apparently did wonders for Sylvia’s mood. Ted reappeared in her journal as the salt-air seagod, smelling as fresh as a newborn.

But what followed was a horrifying two weeks during which Plath thought she was pregnant. She had been rather casual about contraception, she admitted in her journal, and now her period was overdue. How could she possibly handle her writing, teaching at Smith, and the responsibilities of motherhood? She wanted children, but not now! The energy they would have to devote as parents would put them into debt, robbing them of the time they needed to hone their talents. Even worse, they would regard the infant as an intruder. Ted referred to this period as their “black week” in a letter to Gerald and Joan, without specifically mentioning the dreaded pregnancy. Then all Sylvia’s worries dissipated in the “hot drench” of blood, two weeks late, that relieved her misery, and they both began writing at great speed, applying their brains “like the bits of electric drills,” a relieved Ted told Gerald and Joan.

On 6 August, Sylvia wrote her mother in some excitement over a short verse play, “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board,” later included in the notes section of The Collected Poems. She was suggestible and skeptical, indulging Ted in his occult occupations, which often had a materialistic motivation. He was a poet, like Sylvia, who thought a good deal about money and how to get it. To say that he had made an investment in Sylvia, this go-ahead American, may sound crass, but he loved her no less for it, and for being a canny woman who could figure out how to make five pounds go a long way toward paying their rent in Cambridge and feeding them as well. The Ouija board, in other words, became for both of them a conversation about how to generate capital, as it does for Sybil and Leroy in “Dialogue Over a Ouija Board.” Sybil is resigned to Leroy’s obsession with a “bare board” that has yielded contradictory results. Leroy wonders if perhaps Sibyl will be included in her white-haired benefactress’s will—a revealing gloss, perhaps, on why Sylvia was so assiduous about keeping open lines of communication with the wealthy Olive Higgins Prouty, and making sure that Prouty was among the first to meet Ted when he alighted on the American shore. “She was very amusing though she’s old now and her mind wanders a bit—still she’s plain and direct. I got on with her well,” Ted wrote to his sister, Olwyn.

“Dialogue” reveals a good deal about Hughes, who often portrayed himself as an amateur Plath shaped up for worldly competition. As Leroy, though, he is the one who wants to know from the Ouija spirit if he is to have his “fling at fame.” For Sibyl, the future is best left unknown. She is fixated on the afterlife and asks about her father, but she receives a garbled transmission. Though Leroy seems the more credulous of the two, Sibyl doubts his fealty to the supernatural, saying that if a bush began to speak to him he would kneel but then check for the wiring. “Dialogue” marvelously captures the playful, querulous strain in the pairing of these two sensibilities, who seem to agree in this instance that they are in thrall to imps, since neither Sibyl nor Leroy can believe that any major gods would come at the call of a glass maneuvered over a board. As Sibyl shrewdly points out, Leroy has no real need of spirits because, “You’d presume your inner voice god-plumed enough / To people the boughs with talking birds.”

Leroy teases Sibyl about her “inklings” of “doom.” He accuses her of opportunism—even when it comes to calling spirits, which she will placate if they prognosticate what she wants. It “pays to be politic,” Sibyl replies. The overlay of heroic lavender Plath used to scent Ted’s entrance into her life—not only in letters, but also in personal introductions of him to friends and family—is stripped away in the hard, if still good-natured give-and-take of “Dialogue.” Sylvia Plath had plenty of illusions about Ted Hughes, but she also had startling insights into the real man. After all, Sibyl calls the Ouija board “our battlefield.”

The piece ends with Sibyl and Leroy returning to the reality of their daily life. “[T]he dream / Of dreamers is dispelled,” he concludes. She wishes for the “decorum” of their days to “sustain” them, and he wants their actions to reflect that they mean well. As the lights go out, they make the same wish: “May two real people breathe in a real room,” perhaps a recognition of just how powerfully Sylvia and Ted could project their imaginations so as to create an unreal world. “Dialogue” confirms Oscar Wilde’s adage that art is a lie that tells the truth. Sylvia’s play seems so much more revealing than the performances Plath and Hughes put on in their letters.

Sibyl is, of course, the name of a prophetess, and Leroy is the cognomen of a king. Together the names signify the way these two poets mythologized themselves. With no evident trace of irony, Hughes remarks in his notes to The Collected Poems that his wife “mentioned flashes of prescience—always about something unimportant.” Did he not see the predictive value of “Dialogue”? Critic Jacqueline Rose notes that Plath “situates quite explicitly” in Leroy’s lines the “male invocation of poetry” associated with violence entering their room like an earthquake, turning Sibyl “ashen.” Like Hughes, Plath both venerated and dreaded the eruptive nature of his poetic gift and her own rage, which could erupt in response to it. In “Dialogue” Sybil ends their colloquy with spirits by smashing the glass.

About a week before the couple left Northampton for the fall semester at Smith, Ted wrote Olwyn the first of many scornful descriptions of an America wrapped in cellophane, “crapularised” into processed food that reflected a more general lack of texture in a “boundless” suburban uniformity, in which everyone was friendly in a facetious sort of way, but no one knew anyone’s else’s family history. He thought better of Northampton, which he had visited earlier in the summer when they were looking for lodgings. With its main street full of shops “huddled together,” it was “fairly English.” This letter and others demonstrate that Sylvia’s hope that Hughes would open up to America—which would in turn expand his poetic sensibility—was sadly mistaken. He associated affluence with inauthenticity.

In September 1957, Sylvia and Ted settled into an apartment in Northampton within walking distance of the Smith campus. On the surface (which is what Sylvia presented to her mother on 23 September), Ted was a considerate husband, making breakfast and doing the dishes. Sylvia had three classes and a total of sixty-five students, each of whom she would also be seeing in individual conferences. This work, plus department and general faculty meetings, would fill out her schedule.

Sylvia still found time to mull over in her journal ideas for several stories, including one about a woman who is shocked to discover that her poet-husband has not been writing about her, but about a “Dream Woman Muse.” Another story, set in Wuthering Heights country, is cryptically linked to Ted as a poet associated with decay and “aloneness.” This is perhaps Plath’s first recognition of his estrangement from an American scene that had separated him from the ghosts and spirits of his native land. Hughes’s letters reflect a sensibility ill at ease in surroundings that had no resonance or texture for him. Smith girls had a sort of machined beauty—“Chromium dianas,” he called them. “I sit for hours like the statue of a man writing,” he wrote to Lucas Myers in early October. “Two years will be our stretch in America,” he wrote, as though describing a prison sentence. Not even a visit to the Poetry Center cheered him, judging by his dismissive remarks about the dowagers and maidens who accosted him about his work.

By 1 October, Sylvia’s anxiety level seemed to peak. She had trouble sleeping, doubted her teaching abilities, deplored her lack of experience, obsessed over the perplexed expressions of her students—but most of all decried the demon in herself that demanded excellence when, in fact, she was “middling good.” Correcting papers exhausted her. She was ashamed to admit that she was afraid of not measuring up to Smith standards. She counseled herself to face reality, adopt a stoic face, and do her job as best she could. But of course, she could not leave it at that, admitting, “Not being perfect hurts.” Ted, more resigned to his teaching and unproductive writing regimen, admitted to Olwyn that life was pleasant, and he was in good humor, whereas Sylvia was “creaking under her burdens.” Sylvia complained to Warren on 5 November of a “rough class of spoiled bitches.” Her funk, she admitted, arose out of wanting to create her own metaphors, not discuss the ones in Henry James and D. H. Lawrence. Reading them was one thing; teaching them seemed to diminish her own creativity.

These words to Warren may have provoked Sylvia to take herself in hand. In her journal, she dismissed her complaints as those of a spoiled little girl. She deserved a good slap. She vowed not to weigh Ted down with her woes and to learn to live with her anxieties. Gradually, she pointed out to herself, she had learned to cope with her students, get enough sleep, write letters to friends, and finally do some baking. These small victories were confidence builders.

Sylvia’s initial disappointments as a teacher, and her eventual acclimation to the classroom, seem confirmed in the reminiscences of her students. As a Smith freshman, Barbara Russell Kornfield “struggled mightily as we read William James, no doubt why my first paper was a D+. She was a tough teacher for a 17 year old.” Of course, Kornfield did not know about her own teacher’s struggles to improve, or about what the sudden appearance of Hughes, a stranger to the class, meant to Plath. “I do remember quite clearly,” Kornfield adds, “we had no compunctions about asking her who he was. In an ethereal voice, she replied: ‘That is a man from heaven sent.’”

Part of Plath’s problem during her first months at Smith stemmed from her decision to adopt the Socratic method of her Cambridge tutorials. She had reveled in the hard give-and-take of her sessions with Dorothea Krook, which were quite unlike anything she had experienced at Smith—or her own students were prepared to endure. Anne Mohegan Smith remembers one of her Smith classmates, Merrill Schwartz, explained that in her freshman English literature section Plath began the year