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

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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Eddie was talking of coming east again, and this time Sylvia wanted to show him a better time, alerting her mother that she would like to invite him to their home. He remained a kind of reality check on Sylvia’s tendency to romanticize events. When she described Constantine, one of the Buckley party cavaliers who had invited her for a Princeton weekend, Eddie (sounding like Nelson Algren) observed: “He reminds me, in a vague way, of someone I know. I dunno some romantic type critter I run into now & again who discusses love & literature & atomic power with equal glibness & appears and disappears with the suddenness of Mephistopheles.” Sylvia quoted Eddie’s verdict to Aurelia, concluding succinctly, “Not bad for a thumbnail sketch!”

Sylvia, for all her worries, survived the fall semester of 1951 and, as usual, did well in her studies. In January 1952, she spent a weekend at Yale with Dick, who took her on his rounds as a medical student. She witnessed a birth, which she seemed to take in stride. She was not prepared, though, for the shocking revelation that Dick, who had led her to think otherwise, was not a virgin. She was angry about his deception and sudden confession. She was generally mad at men, who could play around in ways that women could not. Her reference to him now as a “blond god” was surely sarcastic. Sylvia was no prude, but Dick was different. She had built him up into a pristine idol. Now he seemed just like other men, some of whom she might have bedded if she had loved them or was not so worried about emotional involvements and pregnancy. She was still holding out for a taller, more romantic figure than Dick, so that she could wear heels and do the romantically impractical thing. Even at her most passionate, sooner or later Sylvia took the measure of her men. She yearned for the recklessness of romance, but she also read the newspapers and worried about world events, still pouring out her anxieties about nuclear war in letters she had resumed writing to Hans.

Only Eddie, though, saw what really troubled Sylvia about Dick. Did it ever occur to her, Eddie asked, that she was not so much a woman deceived as “an engineer whose latest airplane design didn’t quite come up to specifications in performance?” Eddie had no interest in defending Dick, but he thought the larger issue was Sylvia’s fear of what sex would do to her in a committed relationship. Her quest for a “Golden God” seemed a symptom of her desire to force some kind of resolution of her anxieties. He noticed that in her latest letter she had used the word “rape” at least five times. “Keerful, gal, your dynamics might be slipping,” he cautioned her. Had she noticed that every sinus attack, as well as other illnesses, had come just after a breakup or some other contretemps with a male? Eddie was no expert on psychosomatic sickness, but he was beginning to wonder.

Dick, on the other hand, continued to sound in his letters very much like Samuel Richardson’s unreal gentleman, Sir Charles Grandison. “I am aware of the joy, the honor of being near you and under your spell,” Dick wrote on 28 January 1952. That kind of banality could be briefly soothing, but his formulaic letters explain why Sylvia said she sought someone “more intuitive.” Dick wrote in phrases that could have been copied out of a conduct primer. Sylvia wanted the praise, of course, but it had to be delivered with panache. If Eddie had been able to confect a style that brought Sylvia both to the drawing room and the barroom, he might have succeeded in winning her.

Eddie Cohen never lost sight of Sylvia the writer. But Dick did, as he mused about the life of a doctor’s wife, making Sylvia doubt he had any idea of the space and time required to write. Her work was not a sideline, and she believed she would lose respect for herself if she simply became absorbed in her husband’s career—especially since Dick had become more assertive on their well-planned dates. Was this the result of a “mother complex”? Like Aurelia, Dick’s mother was a “sweet, subtle matriarch,” but she was also the manipulative mom that Sylvia had been reading about in Philip Wylie’s influential Generation of Vipers. Momism, Wylie argued, was emasculating men and pacifying women into a conformism that would become one of the dominant themes in books about the American family in the 1950s. Mrs. Norton handled the family’s finances and ruled the home, reducing her husband, at times, to a supplicant, the weak father that was also a feature of 1950s situation comedies. Perhaps Dick’s seduction of the Vassar girl he told Sylvia about was his own version of rebelling against Momism, Sylvia speculated. And would he now seek to impose a submissive pattern of behavior on Sylvia, so as to forestall her domination of him? A medical career might well represent the best way to fend off a demanding wife and mother. His not entirely successful bid to achieve supremacy over Sylvia perhaps accounted for their contradictory denial and acceptance of one another. In sum, she believed they were both scared of what they might do to one another—as she would later reveal in her story, “The Fifty-Ninth Bear.”

Sylvia confessed in her journal that she was not capable of love—at least not then—because she was so entirely dedicated to her art. She wanted the freedom to try on other lives the way she tried on dresses. Nagging at her, though, was the middle-class yearning for security, for settling into the comfortable. Forsaking Dick could mean a lost opportunity. Or, as she put it while summing up her sophomore year, she was now more aware of her limitations. She believed she had a more sober sense of her ambitions to publish and to go abroad as a Fulbrighter, which would entail not merely hard work but campaigning for herself. She would need to get elected to honor board and become involved in Smith’s journalism program, as well as work on the Smith Review. In effect, she acknowledged the politics of excellence, which the more introverted Sylvia of her freshman year had not been prepared to pursue.

Eddie thought Sylvia was overcomplicating her love life. He bluntly stated that her troubles with Dick and other males had more to do with her superiority than anything else. Usually Eddie found her rather haughty words about her dates off-putting. (Both the number of unworthy suitors and Sylvia’s superior tone are reminiscent of Scarlett O’Hara.) He could see that Sylvia had already destroyed whatever love she had for Dick, and if their relationship continued, that only meant she was not yet ready to relinquish the dependability Dick offered. Of course, Eddie was not a disinterested party. By the spring of 1952, he was openly declaring his love for Sylvia. He admitted his jealousy and his desire for her, especially after Sylvia said that she still felt a strong physical attraction to Dick.

Throughout Sylvia’s sophomore year she continued to work on her fiction, staying up late at night in the Haven House kitchen typing away. Much of her work met with rejection slips that hardly seemed to dent her determination, which was rewarded in early June when she won Mademoiselle’s $500 fiction prize for “Sunday at the Mintons.” Plath put her hostile feelings about Dick into the story, transforming him into Elizabeth Minton’s fussy brother, Henry, who chides his sister for daydreaming and for an impractical nature that has left her directionless—barely able, in his view, to perform her duties as a town librarian. She is an aging spinster who has come to live with her brother in his retirement. This, of course, is the fate that Sylvia was determined to avoid: getting stuck with a male companion whose intellectual arteries would harden and in turn ossify her own existence.

She wondered in a letter to her mother if Dick would recognize himself in the story. It only becomes clear in the conclusion that Elizabeth has daydreamed Henry’s drowning during a gallant effort to retrieve their mother’s brooch, which Elizabeth has dropped on a rock about to be washed by the waves of an approaching storm. In a neat reversal that made the story palatable for a juvenile audience, Elizabeth’s revenge fantasy actually stimulates her sympathy for her brother, who would no longer have anyone to look after him in the slimy, murky depths of the sea. But the story’s saving grace is surely its ironic commentary on the expired, smug male reflected in Elizabeth’s question to herself: “Who would listen to him talk about the way the moon controlled the tides or about the density of atmospheric pressure?”

Sylvia was working a summer job scrubbing tables at the Belmont Hotel when she received the good news about the Mademoiselle prize in a telegram from Aurelia. Sylvia screamed with delight and hugged the startled head waitress. Plath had just begun her job, but she was already disgruntled, again discovering she was ill prepared to deal with the menial side of life. Even more disappointing, she had been assigned to the side hall because of her inexperience. That assignment meant she would not be getting big tips in the main dining room. More than money was at stake, though, since Sylvia always wanted to be seen and admired. Even waitressing, to her, had rankings, and she realized she did not rate.

The day before learning of her prize, Sylvia wrote in a note not included in Letters Home that carrying trays one-handed terrified her. She knew nothing about her job, she confessed. She consoled herself by saying she would be harvesting a good deal of the summer for her writing. Indeed, in her journal, she catalogued no fewer than twenty-two characters, each labeled with an appropriate epithet: “Oscar, the birdlike, picayune, humorous band leader … stoic-faced Harvard law student and straight-backed busboy Clark Williams … Mrs. Johnson, the tall, sharp Irish chef’s wife with the acid brogue and the fiery temper,” and so on.

Even so, it was difficult for Sylvia to overcome the Belmont Hotel experience by turning it into fiction. She felt humiliated by her physical clumsiness and envious of waitresses expertly handling special dishes. She had believed she could somehow fit in. Intelligence and imagination seemed to count for little in occupations and organizations that depended on fast footwork and excellent coordination. Not being a quick study in a summer job is humbling indeed for a writer with a superiority complex. Sylvia Plath wanted not just the praise of the elites, but also the respect of the rank and file. Otherwise, Sylvia could not have written, less than a week after Aurelia’s telegram, that her life seemed awful and the prize “unreal.” The work terrified and unnerved her, although she refused to slink back home to mother—always a temptation when she felt overwhelmed.

Another troubling concern absent from Letters Home is Sylvia’s disappointment that the other girls did not take to her. Why is not hard to understand. Sylvia assured her mother that she was self-contained and independent enough not to need the girls’ affection. And yet that was probably just the problem: They did not warm to Sylvia because she seemed so self-involved. The other irritation was Dick. He had retreated from his know-it-all stance. Had he read “Summer at the Mintons”? At any rate, Sylvia wished he would “stop being nice and leave me alone.”

On the one hand, Plath was receiving letters from New York editors expressing interest in her future work and wanting to know what books she planned. On the other hand, she slept through restless dreams that had her waitressing all the time. Ideas for stories continued to occur to her, and she decided to stick it out at for another month—until early August—so she would have a full month to work on her fiction before returning to Smith. But a sinus infection so depleted her that after three weeks at the Belmont she had to quit. A doctor advised her to return home to recuperate.

When the hotel called to say she could have her job back, Sylvia asked her mother to say it was not certain when her daughter could return. Reflecting on her three weeks at the Belmont, Sylvia realized that she had been caught up in a sort of squirrel cage that she detested. And yet she felt compelled to perform there. Looking at those days now she compared her view of them to lifting a bell jar off a “clockwork functioning community.” Routine ruled, and no matter how trying the repetitive nature of the work, that rigid structure gave purpose to the lives of those within that world. In an 8 July letter to Marcia Brown, Sylvia was already casting a retrospective glow on the Belmont episode, referring to the “blissful routine” of working hard for six hours, the weekends she managed to see Dick, and the girls who she had begun to enjoy and who were sending her nice notes. Now Sylvia had to regenerate her own sense of purpose. She apparently could not remain at home and write. Home, in fact, would never again be a refuge, one that she had forsaken as soon as she entered Smith. She could sense her own depressions reverberating in Aurelia. In effect, Sylvia confided to Marcia, Aurelia empathized too much and prolonged her daughter’s down periods. Returning to the Cape brought her back to the beach and closer to where Dick was working that summer.

It seemed imperative now to have “a Job,” she confided to her journal. Searching the want ads, she considered the possibilities: painting parchment lampshades, filing, typing, or assisting a real estate agent. She actually spent a day with a realtor, fascinated by the woman’s manipulative methods, but concluding that serving as her Girl Friday was not likely to pay very well. Even waitressing remained an option, but then Sylvia saw an ad for a housekeeper/babysitting position with well-to-do Christian Scientists, the Cantors. In spite of her vow of “NEVER AGAIN” when it came to such jobs, Sylvia liked the sound of Mrs. Cantor’s voice over the phone and enjoyed her interview, she wrote Marcia Brown. This time Sylvia would be in charge of two small children, but would also have the company of the Cantor’s teenage daughter. Sylvia could not resist the comfortable surroundings of this charming family in Chatham, Massachusetts, near the sea—always a draw for her—and a two-hour drive southeast from Wellesley.

Sylvia was treated well, more like a member of the family than in her previous home care experience. She had long conversations with Mrs. Cantor about Christian Science, which Sylvia enjoyed so much that she attended Sunday school, where she was proud, she wrote Aurelia, of knowing “all the right answers.” A skeptical Sylvia thought she was too much of a materialist to accept a doctrine that proclaimed the material world was a kind of illusion, a human-created evil that could be overcome by fealty to God’s word. But she did not dismiss the faith out of hand because she did believe in the power of good thoughts, in mind over matter, to a certain extent. After all, it was part of her artist’s credo that she could reshape the world. Christian Science, moreover, draws on the Platonic nature of Christianity that posits an irrefutable realm of what Sylvia called “absolute fact.” Individuals by their very nature could not have access to this ultimate source of truth. Sylvia sounds like Saint Paul, echoing his remark on the fallibility of human knowledge when she alludes to the individual’s own “particular grotesque glass of distortion.” In a fascinating journal passage, she compares the individual’s sensibility to a sounding board picking up various intimations of immortality. Wordsworth, Berkeley—a host of thinkers and artists—seem to suffuse Sylvia’s synthesis of her own experience, leading to a remarkable statement about the “radio programs … all around us, clogging the air, needing only a certain sensitive mechanism to make them a reality, a fact.” Sylvia would later write for the radio—the wireless as it was called in Britain—realizing how powerfully this spoken medium could penetrate the psyche, provoking the listener to create a simulacrum of the world. She thought of Hamlet’s line, “Thinking makes it so.” She thought of what she had made of her father’s death. Where Christian Science faltered was in its inability to distinguish between truth and the individual’s “dream-world,” valid enough for that person, for Sylvia herself, but was it near to the truth that others imagined? She could not say. She could only observe that these Christian Scientists certainly treated their beliefs as real—just as real as her “dream-bubble of reality,” a phrase that wonderfully captures the evanescence of perception. What was unchanging fact? Could it be found in a laboratory? These questions recall Dick’s own certitudes, which Sylvia could not share. Sylvia seems more comfortable with Wordsworth’s notion that we half-perceive and half-create our world; she was not willing to take the knower out of what is known. Perhaps the best one could do is master what she called the “counter positions,” the dialectic between competing versions of truth.

What had especially pleased Sylvia about “Sunday at the Mintons” is that although she had started out simply modeling Elizabeth on herself, she ended by creating a world that was not merely derived from her own. That development seemed like a breakthrough, creating a work of art that transcended her own concerns—creating, in fact, a story that dramatized the very tensions between dream and reality that her journal passage probed.

On 2 August, Sylvia wrote to her mother about meeting Valerie Gendron, who wrote love stories for the pulps and ladies magazines. Sylvia wanted to spend the day talking to a writer who had been “through the mill.” A subsequent visit with Val resulted in Sylvia’s decision to follow her mentor’s advice: Write fifteen hundred words a day, no matter what. Think of it as singing scales and doing warm-up exercises, Val told her during a five-hour talkfest that Sylvia treasured as one of her best adventures as a writer. It was a wonderful workout that included Val’s critique of a Plath story, a gesture Sylvia regarded as exceptionally generous. Sylvia poured over this experience in her journal, describing in detail the bookmobile Val ran to help support herself in a sort of disheveled independence that to Sylvia seem scrumptious—as did the three hunks of cake she duly recorded eating. Suddenly Sylvia’s journal brimmed with drafts of the kind of romantic stories that women’s magazines preferred.

Pleasant dates with Dick may also have stimulated some of this boy-girl fiction. In the quiet, scheduled summer of 1952, Sylvia seems to have suspended her doubts about Dick. A day off from babysitting felt like the lid on her life was blown off. She needed the security of knowing that in a few weeks she would be back at Smith and immersed in the delirium of study. Mrs. Cantor treated her like Little Red Riding Hood when Dick called one night near 11 p.m. Where did Sylvia meet so many boys? Mrs. Canter wondered. Now the unregulated atmosphere of the Belmont, the midnight-to-dawn dances and beach parties Sylvia described to Enid Epstein, a Smith classmate, seemed preferable to the confining Cantors. The Belmont was like “college with the lid off.”

A second encounter with Eddie before Sylvia began her junior year at Smith caused trouble. He judged her cold letters afterward as an indication that she did not think she had measured up to his expectations. If so, Eddie insisted she was quite mistaken. He had come away all the more impressed with her, although, according to Paul Alexander, Eddie became disturbed at Sylvia’s tendency to pose, to pretend pleasure—like she did while listening to bad jazz in a Boston club. She was too studied, lacked spontaneity, and seemed “all mask.” In her journal, Sylvia would later liken herself to Nina Leeds, a character in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, a play that experiments with the use of masks to dramatize the disparity between what people say and what they think as they withhold themselves from others.

On 23 September, Dick drove Sylvia, in a state of high tension, to Smith to begin the fall term. Now withdrawn and withholding, he upset her. Was she at fault? Did he sense, as she put it in her journal, that she was jealous of him? She turned to his more outgoing brother, Perry, always a favorite of hers, who reciprocated her warm confidence in him. He admitted he was anxious about Dick, who was “tough to take when he is ‘that way.’” Perry wondered if Dick’s emotional problems had to do with his conflicted views of his parents and the moral standards they set for him. Was Dick capable of love, Perry wondered, adding, “He certainly needs someone to believe in him.” But Sylvia should not blame herself: “Syl—you are wonderful. You always are helping me, giving, never taking, never asking. What would I do without you. Love, love, Perry.” He remained an openhearted admirer, and years later he assisted biographer Edward Butscher, who could not secure Dick Norton’s cooperation.

For all her reservations about Dick, Sylvia felt bereft because of his coolness, and she depended even more on her affectionate correspondence with her mother, who sent news in early October that a story, “Initiation,” had won a $100 prize from Seventeen, where it would be published in January 1953. “Initiation” deals with a high school girl’s ambivalent feelings about the hazing ritual of the sorority she is pledging, feelings that are reinforced when the sorority spurns her best friend for not wearing the right clothes and not conforming to the group’s sense of propriety. Sylvia herself had gone through her own “initiation,” telling her mother that she had been required to ask everyone on a bus what each had for breakfast. One playful passenger replied, “Heather birds’ eyebrows on toast,” explaining that these creatures lived on “mythological moors.” Put that in a story, Aurelia said. Letters Home contains a note explaining the circumstances of “Initiation”’s origin, yet another effort on Aurelia’s part to counteract the merciless portrait of her that would later appear in The Bell Jar. In this case, Olive Higgins Prouty seconded Aurelia’s suggestion. “Think of the material you have!” Prouty exhorted Plath. As Paul Alexander suggests, this was a pivotal moment in Sylvia’s vocation as a writer, training her focus on the world in front of her.

In early November, Dick Norton told Sylvia he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and would be staying in a sanitarium in Saranac, Massachusetts. Tests soon showed she had not contracted the disease, but their enforced separation depressed her. On 3 November, she wrote in her journal that this was the first time she had ever really considered committing suicide. She envied Dick’s enforced leisure. His meals, the time he had to relax, and his freedom to read what he wanted riled her. Smith had become a cage. Thoughts of suicide, however, were just that: thoughts to be dismissed as the desire to annihilate the world by annihilating oneself. “The deluded height of desperate egoism,” she opined, despising herself for blubbering in her “mother’s skirts.” Suddenly she understood how masses of people could succumb to Hitler, thereby alleviating themselves of the awful responsibility of thinking and doing for themselves. She was beginning to understand that for someone like herself, and like the women she admired—Sara Teasdale and Virginia Woolf—the idea of living happily ever after was the “fallacy of existence.” In a telling journal passage, she admitted that because she did not know how high she should set her ambition, she was feeling especially low. More than ever, she missed Ann Davidow. Marcia had moved off campus to live with her mother, and Sylvia felt no rapport with her new roommate, Mary, a high-achieving science student.

Dick wrote on 8 November, virtually confirming Perry’s analysis: “I have become aware of a few of my shortcomings, especially a false superior smugness, an inflexibility, a childish search for sensuous pleasure, a certain degree of bewildered prudery, and an unwillingness to face facts honestly.” The words sound a little like the “making amends” confessions and apologies of those undergoing treatment in Alcoholic Anonymous. Dick’s letter did little immediately to ease Sylvia’s distress.

On 14 November, after a tension-relieving night at Joe’s Pizza in Northampton, Sylvia went to visit Marcia, who “touched the soft spot,” permitting Sylvia to “let go” and drop her “tight mask.” She cried and talked herself into working on her character. She had to stop playing the “spoiled child.” The next day she received a letter from Dick. At Saranac, Dick had begun reading Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, Conrad, and other Plath favorites. He relinquished a good deal of his confident demeanor: “I am now unreservedly grateful, and acknowledging the blindnesses on my part in former frictions between us, I can say ‘I love you’ with no qualms and without flinching.” He was not living in the “luxurious erotic Garden of Eden” Sylvia had invented for him.

A few days later, Dick attempted an even more direct approach: “How I would like to caress your warm, smooth, long back, slip apart the dutiful bra, press you away, and find those lovely large soft glandular breasts that cling to your chest wall and fall away slightly to be rounded and pointed with brown nipples … the curling soft hair…”

His erotic efforts seem rather forced and even clinical, and Sylvia’s depression did not lift. On 18 November, she confided to her journal: “You are crucified by your own limitations.”

On 19 November, an overwrought Sylvia wrote her mother, vilifying the science course that had undone her. In Letters Home, Aurelia observes that her daughter’s tirade against studying “barren dry formulas” that were driving her to distraction—even to suicidal thoughts that made her wonder if she should see a psychiatrist—represented the first sign of her daughter’s tendency to magnify a “situation out of all proportion.” The recent suicide of one of Warren’s classmates at Exeter set Sylvia off, Aurelia suggested, and was the subtext of her daughter’s extreme state of mind. But Sylvia had not shared with her mother the drama with Dick. Sylvia’s dread of becoming mired in what she called the nauseating, artificial absurdities of science might have been a displacement of her ambivalence about Dick. She still worried that she would have to settle down, like other Smith graduates, to a life supporting a husband whose interests were not her own. According to Aurelia, Sylvia returned to Smith after the Thanksgiving break, well rested and caught up in her studies. Evidently she made her peace with science, although her reprieve would be short-lived.

Sylvia wrote Eddie Cohen in late November suggesting they publish a version of their correspondence under the title “Dialogue of the Damned.” He did not relish becoming one half of a Sylvia Plath enterprise, “material” for her imagination, and her notion that they could portray themselves as representatives of a generation struck him as absurd. They were two “hyper IQed eggheads,” nothing like the masses. Unlike Aurelia, unlike Dick, unlike everyone else in her life, Eddie never indulged her. He never supposed he was anything like the brilliant writer he recognized in Sylvia Plath, but he also never acted as though he was any less intelligent than she—all of which meant he could often spot those times when she deluded herself with the egotism she herself had identified in her journals. Sometimes Eddie sounded like a voice inside of her, one that she desperately needed when she subsumed herself in negativity or in delusions of grandeur. He was not going to return the letters she had asked for until he was certain that she saw him as a “real person,” not a “byproduct of your life.” The clairvoyant Eddie already had a fix on the novelist who would, in The Bell Jar, do exactly what he suspected she would do: turn real people into byproducts of her imagination.

On 1 December, Sylvia wrote a cheerful letter to Warren about her struggles with joules, amperes, and other euphonious scientific terms. She was enthused about Myron Klotz, a brilliant Yale student and a pitcher for a Detroit Tigers minor league team. An impressed Sylvia wrote her mother that Myron had earned $10,000 in a single season. Perry Norton had introduced the “tall, handsome guy” to Sylvia. Myron was a product of Austrian Hungarian mineworkers who barely spoke English. She just loved this sort of combination, which was reminiscent of Ilo, the Estonian farmworker and artist. She knew nothing about baseball, but Myron sure was a “beautiful lug.” Sylvia liked to think of herself as fitting into a world of immigrants and guys and dolls, as well as consorting with ladies and gentlemen. She wanted to speak the language of literary bluebloods and of pulp fictioneers. She reminded Warren of their childhood treat, skalshalala meat (their term for “a morsel of meat that remains in your mouth no matter how long you chew it. Gristle, in other words”), even as she told him, “I love you baby, as Mickey Spillane would say.” A few days later, Aurelia received a similar letter (which she did not include in Letters Home), which mentions Sylvia’s thrilling meeting with Myron and also her disappointment in the poems and stories Dick sent her, none of which had much “feeling.”

Myron turned out to be great fun, Sylvia noted in another report to her mother. They had pizza at Joe’s and discussed baseball and poetry. On the way back to Smith, Myron played a gangster and Sylvia a gun moll, with the campus as their mise-en-scène. Sylvia later drew a fedora that Myron wore, a gift from his mother, who worried that he would catch cold. He also had a black gangster coat. It amused her that he also sported a Phi-Beta-Kappa key: “Such a mixture of vanity (how much is cover up I don’t know) and real sweetness.” She was touched that he had memorized one of her letters.