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

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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CHAPTER 2

MISTRESS OF ALL THE ELEMENTS

(1950–53)

August 1950: Sylvia publishes “And Summer Will Not Come Again” in Seventeen; 1950–53: Korean War; 1950–51: A scholarship student at Smith College, Plath begins dating but does not find her Mr. Big; 1951–52: She works at a hotel and then as a mother’s helper to earn spending money; 1952: Sylvia’s short story “Sunday at the Mintons” wins a prize and is published in Mademoiselle; 1953: First issue of Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

On 3 August 1950, Sylvia Plath received her first fan letter. Twenty-one-year-old Eddie Cohen had read her short story “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” her first appearance in Seventeen after the magazine had rejected more than forty earlier submissions. In this story of a doomed romance between a young girl and her tennis instructor, Cohen detected a temperament that transcended the crude sentiment of popular magazine fiction. The story’s title was taken from a Sara Teasdale poem, “An End”:

I have no heart for any other joy,

The drenched September day turns to depart,

And I have said goodbye to what I love;

With my own will I vanquished my own heart.

On the long wind I hear the winter coming,

The window panes are cold and blind with rain;

With my own will I turned the summer from me

And summer will not come to me again.

“What I wouldn’t give to be able to write like this,” fourteen-year-old Sylvia had written in her journal. “Like this” meant not only commanding the simplicity and grace that were Teasdale’s signature traits, but also the ability to exquisitely evoke her own sensibility, to describe why the poet wrote out of a melancholy sense of self-injury. Such concerns constitute a leitmotif in Plath’s journals.

Critic Steven Gould Axelrod has shown how much of Teasdale’s sensibility suffused Sylvia Plath’s work. Teasdale developed what he calls the “rhetoric of anguish.” Celia, the heroine of “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” quotes a part of “An End” that evokes a powerful sense of loss, of getting caught in a self-defeating dynamic. Eddie Cohen, still wondering what to do with his life, identified with Sylvia’s heroine when he perused his sister’s copy of Seventeen. He thought he might have talent as a writer, and like Sylvia, he was checking out the market. He was expecting, however, just to pick up a few pointers. He was taken aback when the story actually moved him. His first letter to Sylvia is rather condescending—in effect a message from an older boy telling a younger girl that maybe she has something there. He wanted to find out.

Over the course of their correspondence Eddie would prove, again and again, that he knew how to read Sylvia, the person and the writer. He detected tensions in her that no one—not even Aurelia—identified. Cohen found in Plath a “trapped voice,” to use Axelrod’s term for Teasdale’s “bereaved speakers.” And like Teasdale, Plath wrote poems and stories with inconsolable narrators. Indeed, Plath’s affinity for Teasdale, as well as the similarities of their suicides—both triggered by the departure of a powerful man—brought them together, early and late, in Plath’s career.

Despair is an underlying theme in much of what these two poets wrote, as both struggled to balance their vocations as writers and their lives as women. Recurring metaphors of nature, especially of the sea, function as calming influences on the exquisitely fragile sensibilities of poets who sought to anchor their work in classical forms, even as they embraced modernity. Somehow Eddie Cohen divined that more was at stake in “And Summer Will Not Come Again” than in the formulaic fiction Seventeen ordinarily published.

On 6 August, Sylvia replied to Eddie, telling him she had his number. If he would drop the superior tone and level with her, she would enjoy corresponding with a critic. She had no illusions about her story, saying it resembled the usual Seventeen “drivel.” So why the “subtle flattery”? she wondered. Did he have a wager with Hemingway about “would-be female writers”? The question shows she already resented the segregation of women in the literary canon. Eddie had aroused her competitive instincts, and she wanted him to know that she was as tough as any male, not some “sweet and trusting” Seventeen hopeful he could manipulate.

Two days later, Eddie did open up, calling himself a “cynical idealist,” a good handle for a sensibility as earnest as Sylvia’s but chastened by a few more years of failed expectations. Sylvia admitted that her own brand of sarcasm masked her fear of getting hurt. Like Eddie, she liked to remain a little aloof and even caustic in her judgments. When Sylvia admitted that she tried not to let her “vulnerable core” show, Eddie eagerly replied that his roommates remembered him saying exactly the same thing about himself.

When Aurelia objected many years later to Sylvia’s cruel characterizations of her and others in The Bell Jar and in letters, journals, and stories, she did not fully take in her daughter’s need to put people in their places, lest she lose her own sense of singularity, the exceptional identity her father had fostered and exemplified. Sylvia shared the power to pinpoint flaws with Virginia Woolf, who shaped her diaries as both literary and identity-strengthening exercises. And like Sara Teasdale, Plath maintained her fragile equilibrium by encasing it in the equipoise of the poetic line.

By the end of September, Sylvia had begun her freshman year at Smith, sending her mother upbeat reports in daily postcards and in letters that provided copious details. It was almost as if Sivvy, the loving and anxious child, were taking her own temperature for her apprehensive and adoring parent, whom she called “my favorite person.” Sylvia’s room in Haven House was “homey,” everyone was friendly, and the food was “fabulous.” She had already met Ann Davidow, who would become a lifelong friend. Ann had Jewish parents, as Sylvia told her mother, but was “a free thinker,” and loved to discuss God and religion and men. Nearly as tall as Sylvia, Ann sparkled. Sylvia was already being advised that she should enjoy herself, which meant socializing and becoming an “all around” person.

Eddie seemed amused at Sylvia’s first gushing letters from Smith, calling them “breathless.” He was also pleased that she asked him to keep writing. Not to worry, he assured her; Sylvia had gotten “under my skin.” She had found his weak spots. She flattered him “nicely.” What male could resist that? But she did not hesitate to contradict him, and he found her independence attractive.

Sylvia never displayed her devastating irony in letters home. They expressed her generosity and genuine desire to include Aurelia in her enthusiasms. Aurelia was a ready-made audience. She understood that for Sylvia decorating her room was as important as meeting a boy who turned out to be a poet. Sylvia blazoned her new identity in capital letters, the equivalent of billboarding herself: “I’M A SMITH GIRL NOW.” Her letters did not, however, reflect pressures that were building internally as she sought to equalize her commitments to herself, to her writing, and to the world, now centered on college. Writing in a letter dated 26 September (which Aurelia did not include in Letters Home), Sylvia confessed that she loved journalism because it made her less self-conscious and eager to understand others.

Of course, Sylvia could not forget herself for long, especially after a physical exam, a requirement for all freshman instituted in 1924 that ended only in 1969. Daryl Hafter, who graduated a year after Sylvia, remembered, with a shiver in her voice, walking naked into a very large gym to be looked at by a phys ed teacher. Posture photographs were taken to identify conditions such as scoliosis that might result in orthopedic problems. Good posture was considered essential to good health, not just at Smith but also at colleges and schools throughout the country. Only much later were such exams viewed as intruding on student rights and enforcing a standard of conduct deemed coercive.

Sylvia reported to her mother she was now 5' 9", 137 pounds, and so terribly conscious of maintaining a good posture that in aligning her ears and heels she neglected to “tilt up straight.” This last comment prompted the teacher’s comment, “You have good alignment, but you are in constant danger of falling on your face.” Even as Plath worried about her deportment, a copy of Mabel Elsworth Todd’s The Thinking Body lay on Marilyn Monroe’s bedside table. In this era, women—whether in finishing schools, Ivy League colleges, or businesses—did not slouch.

Eddie Cohen, industriously “digging between the lines,” as he put it, detected Sylvia’s unease in a bewildering new world that was “indifferent” to her and that eluded her full understanding. He had dropped out of the high-powered University of Chicago and only recently begun attending classes at Roosevelt University. Eddie detected “something close to terror” in Sylvia’s account of one of her dates. She was so impressed with Eddie’s analysis that, surprisingly, she let her mother in on it. Writing on 8 October in another important letter Aurelia did not include in Letters Home, Sylvia admitted that she had been frantically seeking refuge, and that Eddie, with his customary perceptiveness, “hit the nail on the head.”

Sylvia was already beginning to experience colds, sinus infections, and related ailments that sometimes put her in the infirmary. She worried about grades, telling her mother she did not expect to get a single A, and that she feared failing history, a subject notoriously difficult even for sophomores and juniors. Reading forty pages of history every night persuaded Sylvia she had “no background.” It was like beating your head “against the knowledge of centuries,” she confided to her journal. For someone Sylvia’s age, her understanding of the past and of contemporary affairs was impressive. But now she realized the difference between the scholar and the merely well informed. Too often her worries over her studies have been portrayed merely as a psychological problem, as though she were too hard on herself. And in a sense, she was. But what made Sylvia Plath great—not just as a poet, but as an imaginative mind—was her profound humility, her submission to history as a subject that had to be mastered. Surrendering to the authority of a discipline is part of what ultimately made her a writer of genius. Before she could be bold enough to exert the mastery exhibited in her mature poetry, she had to be mastered by what she studied.

The strange new world that Eddie Cohen described included this daunting desire for mastery. Other than Wilbury Crockett, before college Plath had not had a teacher who could have challenged and unsettled her the way reading history at Smith did. Eddie Cohen, who had had his problems with the demanding University of Chicago curriculum, knew exactly what Plath confronted: an intellectual anxiety that goes far beyond clichés about adjustment to freshman year.

Other aspects of collegiate existence also rattled Sylvia. She wanted to enjoy the social life, but she did not see how she could spend all night playing bridge the way other freshmen did. After three blind dates, she wrote in her journal of feeling undesirable, an astounding admission that left her wondering at herself. She had been so popular before leaving for Smith, full of confidence in her ability to attract males. Now she complained about the dating system, about wandering with boys from one fraternity to another, or visiting them at nearby colleges and then returning with reports on who one saw and what one did. This hardly seemed the way to find a congenial male.

Downhearted, Sylvia leaned heavily on Eddie, telling him he was her “dream,” although she hoped never to meet him because as matters stood, their relationship played into “my writing, my desire to be many lives.” She was beginning to shrug off his desire to meet her. For all his perspicacity—or perhaps because of it—she dreaded the idea of his coming so close. After all, it was her writing, not herself per se, that first attracted him to her. Eddie, though, thought of himself as more than her alter ego and served notice that he saw no reason why they should not meet. He was looking for the one “Golden Woman” capable of sharing “all facets” of his existence. Sylvia was seeking essentially the same thing: a tall, handsome, sensuous, but also intellectually serious young man—in essence, Ashley Wilkes. She had already told Eddie that, judging by the photograph he sent, he was good looking, and he was starting to hope that maybe he and Sylvia were suitable—although he recognized that they shared only a “paper world,” one that she had called “unreal,” much to Eddie’s dismay. He admitted that he was pleased when her dates did not work out and jealous when they did.

Sylvia’s mood swings at Smith are apparent in a postcard dated 28 October that Aurelia chose not to include in Letters Home. At the library a professor sat next to her, and she discovered he knew her name. Smith suddenly seemed much less impersonal: “Are there any colleges other than Smith?” she asked. Like her contemporary, Susan Sontag, then attending the University of Chicago, Plath was an enthusiast. But while the inevitable disappointments made Sontag bitter, wary, and cynical, Plath felt hurt and betrayed any time a person or place she built up proved unworthy. The letdown would be devastating, and it could occur at a moment’s notice. Sontag was more broody and introverted. Not learning to play bridge would never bother her. She saw no value in conforming, but not playing the game troubled Plath, who wanted to fit in. She was as self-absorbed as Sontag, but Sylvia was also incredibly alive to her culture, allowing it to impinge on her in ways that Sontag, with her strongly defended sense of self, could reject at will. Both women were insecure and could hide their vulnerability in haughtiness, but only Sontag made that haughtiness into the armature of her identity. The walls of Plath’s fortress would be breached again and again, so that she felt overrun. In an 11 November letter to her mother, she casually mentions suicide, saying she advised her close friend Ann Davidow against it because “something unexpected always happens.”

In the midst of her hectic fall, Sylvia was thrilled to learn she had received a scholarship from Olive Higgins Prouty, the author of the novel Stella Dallas, a tearjerker made into a radio soap opera, as well as two films. Prouty wanted Sylvia to write about her future plans. The scholarship bolstered Sylvia. To Aurelia, she declared that Smith was stretching her, pulling her to “heights and depths of thought I never dreamed possible.” She believed she was storing up experiences—and even pain—that would produce art.

In her 1 December thank you letter to Prouty, a rattled Sylvia wrote about watching the faces of six hundred freshmen on the steps of Scott Gym, and feeling that she was “drowning in a sea of personalities, each one as eager to be a whole individual as I was.” What makes Sylvia such a significant figure—a cynosure, in fact—is her refusal to simply play the alienated artist or disaffected individual, even though she believed her true calling as an artist was elsewhere. Beginning with her first year at Smith, she was trying, in earnest, to live through her contradictions.

When a twenty-five-year-old soldier, a Korean War veteran who had spent two years in a hospital convalescing from a lung wound, attacked her during a late night walk on campus, Sylvia was shocked by how little she knew about the world. He desisted when she cried out, but she was amazed at how offended he was, since he presumed their night out would culminate in a rape—although neither he nor Sylvia would have used the word then. A chagrined Sylvia realized how naïve she had been and actually comforted the aggrieved man, who put his head in her lap. She understood something was wrong with this picture. Shouldn’t he be apologizing to her? Yet the times were such that neither of them could see past what were then conventional cultural markers of their encounter. It perplexed Sylvia that she should have made such an elementary blunder, and she vowed never again to put herself in such a vulnerable position. Back at Haven House, a shaken Sylvia talked over the episode with friends and discovered they had had similar experiences.

On 8 December, Eddie Cohen set her straight:

Although you have an unusual understanding of the world in terms of ideas and groups of people, you as yet do not understand the individual in conflict with himself or society, or the impact of emotion upon an individual to the extent that it overcomes his rational aspects. This results from two things: never having had the experience of facing a demanding personal situation on your own; and never having had a really compelling, overwhelming love affair. In these shortcomings, time will bring you through—your attitude is almost exactly my own two years ago, and I have since learned those things which only experience can bring. Logic isn’t everything.

No one talked to Sylvia Plath this way. She fell silent, as Eddie noted in two follow-up letters.

Because she was depressed, Sylvia did not write. She admitted as much to her mother, saying she had given up carving a block of wood that now represented her own blankness. To counteract her “black despair,” she had attended a life class and felt her spirits lift as she made sketches of a posing Smith girl. But Sylvia still wondered how she would make it to Christmas. She also told Aurelia that Ann Davidow was dropping out of Smith because she did not feel smart enough to do the work. Ann, in fact, was suicidal, Sylvia said. In Letters Home, Aurelia would add a note suggesting her daughter was exaggerating and that Ann’s mood was, in fact, a projection of Sylvia’s own.

On 24 December 1950, Sylvia wrote to her pen pal Hans, describing Smith in very positive terms, though she admitted she felt “a little lost.” She still believed the world was likely to come to a grim end: America was like the Roman Empire, “new and bright,” and yet falling apart. On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s novel about the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, would not be published for another seven years, and yet Sylvia was already imagining not only the extinction of her hopes, but of the world’s. She made it through the Christmas season but returned to Smith in a glum mood. She missed Ann Davidow. Sylvia wrote to Ann, addressing her as “Davy,” to say she was lost without her confidant. Sylvia was not unhappy for long, though. She made friends with Marcia Brown, a cheerful companion who loved debating ideas on long walks. Sylvia went home with Marcia to New Hampshire in early February for a brief visit.

Eddie Cohen suddenly appeared at Smith in early April, exhausted from his cross-country drive from Chicago and ill-prepared for Sylvia’s frigid reception. He drove her home in near silence. Their awkward meeting shook his confidence. He wondered if perhaps he had misled her and was not the good-looking guy in the photograph he had sent her. At any rate, he took the blame for their misadventure and told her he was going to therapy. He suspected that somewhere in him a piece was missing, and he was “rather anxious to find what and where it is.”

Eddie had been replaced by Dick Norton, a med student at Yale, tall and handsome, and the older brother of Perry Norton, whom Sylvia had dated in high school. The older neighbor boy noticed she had grown up, and he invited her for a weekend at his school—always a special kind of invitation, requiring arrangements for travel by train and a place to stay, insuring all was in order for a Smith girl intent on preserving her chastity. Dick was a master of the routine, and at first he impressed Sylvia. He was friendly but not too familiar, writing correct letters that inquired about her studies, discussed their families, and expressed interest in what she was writing. He also described events on his campus, including the visit of Reinhold Neibuhr, a theologian then popular owing to his talent for addressing a broad range of readers concerned about America’s place in history. Like Plath, Niebuhr feared the country was going the way of the Roman Empire.

If Dick was promising, he also needed work, Sylvia confided to Ann. He acted like an “indulgent older cousin,” memorizing poetry and reciting it to her, even though he had discounted “emotional expression” unless it had a scientific basis “or something,” Sylvia trailed off. Whereas go-for-broke Eddie saw a glorious future for Sylvia as a writer, the practical Dick observed, “You won’t be badly off, Syl, if she [Aurelia] can teach you shorthand and if I can impart some enthusiasm for natural science. One or both may come in time.” Sylvia had to set aside such small-minded advice in hopes that there was more to Dick. Right then, it was Dick—or more of those dreadful blind dates.

Their first weekend was a great success. Dick made headway, it seems, because he was gentlemanly and sure of himself, traits Sylvia admired. Unlike her blind dates, he was not cowed by her intelligence; indeed, he found it lacking in some respects. The very idea that she might have shortcomings sent Sylvia to the moon over Dick, as she revealed in a 5 March letter to Ann: “I never felt so shallow in my life.” And he knew how to show a girl a good time, attending an exciting swim meet, biking, and dining at a Chinese restaurant. Reporting to her mother about the weekend with Dick, Sylvia summed it up this way: “He knows everything.”

In her journal, Sylvia gave Dick a portentous fanfare. She might as well have written a Harlequin romance, for the scene is set at night, with the wind whipping up a froth of expectation, as she strides forward on “silver feet,” holding hands with her beloved under the starkly shining street lights, “Two of us, strong and together.” Overhead she observes a cathedral of constellations, and Dick says it is like “being in church.” They kiss, again and again. Sylvia salivated over that “glorious specimen of Dick-hood,” who addressed one letter to her, “Dear Incomparable One” and signed another “Your willing slave.”

To her mother, Sylvia spoke in conventional terms of catching a man. In her journal she chided herself, “so proud and disdainful of custom,” for thinking of marriage as a viable option, one that required her to subordinate herself to a husband and to channel her creativity through his career. Even so, Sylvia hoped her man would tolerate her freelancing writer’s life. The idea of a career—the very word—bothered her. She had not entirely abandoned the idea of earning an advanced degree, but like Susan Sontag, born just a year after Plath, she regarded the routines of academic institutions and the paraphernalia of the scholar’s life with ambivalence. How could a creative person function in so much harness? Marriage itself, Sylvia confided to her journal, might drain her of creativity, although she conceded that having children might do just the opposite, making her a more fulfilled artist.

Marcia Brown, so logical and sensible according to Sylvia, offered solace and companionship, and Sylvia was heartened in May when they both secured summer babysitting jobs in Swampscott, Massachusetts. By this time, after a month or so of rhapsodizing about Dick, Sylvia was beginning to have her doubts. What was behind his jocular tone? She suspected, for all his casual confidence, that he was uneasy about something. On 14 May, she told her mother that she had ripped off part of his irritating “jovial mask.”

Sylvia took the typical Smith safety route, finding summer employment babysitting the Mayo family’s children, aged six, four, and two. She called them three “adorable” kids, but they seemed far less lovable after a long day of helping with breakfast, making beds, doing the laundry, ironing, and bathing the baby at night. In her journal she lamented the tragedy of womanhood. She wanted to be out in the world, hitting the road and consorting with soldiers and sailors, hanging out at bars—doing the scene like Jack Kerouac. But her mere presence would be taken as an invitation to have sex.

Sylvia felt awkward in the kitchen, since she knew little about cooking. She now realized how her capable mother had spoiled her by not ever requiring her to learn the rudiments of meal making. It was a lot of work, and she was having murderous thoughts about her “darlings.” By July, she was fed up with the peripatetic schedule that had her going “in spurts” from 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. She was well treated and did take some pleasure in caring for her charges, but inevitably she suffered in the role of supernumerary, which brilliant women before her—Marie Curie and the Brontë sisters, among others—had endured in their demeaning apprenticeship years. She had to grit her teeth, as they did, and deal every day with unruly children. In her journal and letters she actually sounds rather like Anne Brontë’s Agnes Grey. What is most unbearable about such situations is that no one notices the beautiful genius in their midst. No one complimented Sylvia on how well she looked. She admitted to Ann Davidow that she felt diminished. The recognition of others was always important to Sylvia, who did not care for the role of solitary genius. She longed to hear from Eddie, but he had fallen silent after she failed to answer his last two letters. To Aurelia, she confessed to feeling “cut off from humankind.” She could do no work of her own, since her main task was always to superintend the children. She had lost her tan and looked hollow-eyed. So no trysts with Dick, she decided, although she eventually did see him when he could get away from waiting tables at the Latham Inn. Marcia had taken a job similar to Sylvia’s with the Blodgett family and saw Sylvia frequently. Even so, in her journal Sylvia reprimanded herself for allowing fear and insecurity to dominate her.

Sylvia’s forlorn letters after a month of babysitting reflect how much her grandiose sense of herself had been affronted by her employment. Her 7 July letter to Aurelia suggests how keenly she felt the discrepancy between the fan letters forwarded to her from Seventeen and her own uncertainty about herself. Reading fan mail provoked an ironic comment in the third person: “Sylvia Plath sure has something—but who is she anyhow?” She quoted a line from William Ernest Henley’s famous poem, “Invictus”: “My head is bloody, but unbowed,” to which she added her own line, “May children’s bones bedeck my shroud.” Those children would be the death of her, she implied in her gruesome poetic joke, which was such a counterpoint to Henley’s own concluding lines: “I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul.” Sylvia had a few inconsequential dates that summer, and in late August she enjoyed a few days with Dick. But mostly she was learning, as she wrote to Aurelia on 4 August, the “limitations of the woman’s sphere.”

As so often, though, what Sylvia said on one page would be contradicted on another. Her shifting moods made it impossible for her to settle down. Thus a journal passage written after her return to Smith for a second year pays tribute to blind dates and the thirty-odd boys who had made her more conversant and confident. She was making her entrances downstairs in Haven House with a “practiced casualness,” no longer worrying whether her slip was showing or her hair uncurling. Now Sylvia could see herself as an attractive creation. It was show time at Smith College. What had bothered her so much about her babysitting stint in Swampscott was, as she put it in her journal, living in the “shadow of the lives of others.” The very expression of this sentiment in the passive voice suggests how much Sylvia missed the spotlight.

Resuming correspondence with Eddie Cohen was one sure sign that Sylvia had recovered from her summer in shadow. She had also come to realize how awful she had been to Eddie after his long ride to see her. She told him about Dick’s tentative courtship, which Eddie diagnosed as her suitor’s uncertainty about himself and Sylvia. Eddie did not need to read her journal to sum up her problem: the huge discrepancy between the way she was living and her ambitious plans, a discrepancy that marriage would complicate. But he did not know that Sylvia was also keeping score, estimating that a woman had only about eight years before the wrinkles began to show and she was no longer physically attractive.

Then Sylvia had one of those Jane Eyre/Thornfield Hall episodes. Everyone in Haven House was invited to Maureen Buckley’s coming-out party at her family’s mansion in Sharon, Connecticut. Maureen was the sister of William F. Buckley Jr., then a senior at Yale and later the founder of the National Review and one of the guiding lights of American conservatism. Bill had brought along his Yale class to meet all the Smith girls. Sylvia, sought after by several dance partners, gloried, perhaps for the first time, in her womanhood, feeling like a princess escorted by the scions of wealthy families, including Plato Skouras, son of Spyros Skouras, head of 20th Century Fox. One of her courtiers actually addressed her as “Milady.” Another said she looked like the Botticelli Madonna hanging over the Buckleys’ fireplace. That night, as she drifted off to sleep and into “exquisite dreams” in what might as well have been Thornfield Hall, she could hear the wind “wuthering outside the stone walls.”

This idyll—coming so soon after a summer of baby-minding and Sylvia’s provisional romance with Dick—she transformed into lines that placed her in the pastoral world of Renaissance poetry, picturing the sculpture of a bronze boy “kneedeep in centuries,” bedecked with leaves heralding the passage of time. From longing to frequent barrooms to frolicking on landed estates, Sylvia Plath could hardly contain herself. Returning to the Smith campus, however, she confessed to Aurelia that the course work frightened her, and she could not keep up. She saw her future as only work and more work.