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

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

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On 24 August, a day when Sylvia seemed to be doing better, Aurelia went out with a friend, and then returned home to find a note saying her daughter had gone out for a long walk. Sylvia went missing for three days, until Warren heard what sounded like a moan coming from the basement. There he found Sylvia in a crawl space, half-conscious after throwing up some of the sleeping pills she had swallowed to end her life. She had a gash on her face that would leave a scar, but otherwise she seemed to recover rather quickly from her physical ordeal. In September, she began to recuperate under the supervision of Dr. Ruth Beuscher at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts. Sylvia later described her therapist to Gordon Lameyer as “one of my best friends, only 9 years older than I, looking like Myrna Loy, tall, Bohemian, coruscatingly brilliant, and most marvelous.”

Sylvia’s disappearance and discovery were widely reported, and she became news in a way she never intended but which had a remarkable impact on her vocation as a writer. Eventually, she would realize that dying had become part of her true subject matter. The notion of living with thoughts of death would suffuse some of her best, most sincere material. She had meant to die and had felt more strongly about dying than about any other decision she would ever make. Suicide, a kind of ultimate commitment, repudiated deceit and her false facades. Whatever happened next would have to be measured against the authenticity of that act.

There was no easy way back from death, which has a sureness and finality to it that appealed to Plath. Recovery was a far less decisive process, fitful and fraught with confusion and doubts about her capacity to revive her creativity. Certainly she was in no shape to return to Smith. Literary critic Robert Gorham Davis, one of Sylvia’s favorite professors, wrote Aurelia offering his help, mentioning that his daughter knew Sylvia well. He and his wife, whom Sylvia also admired, were taken aback because Plath had seemed so gay during her last semester at Smith: “Though we have both had some experience with upsets of this sort in other people, we did not notice in the Spring any signs of stress of this kind, though this may have been imperceptive of us.” Indeed, Davis had once confided to his colleague, George Gibian, that unlike other neurotic creative writing students, Sylvia seemed entirely whole and healthy. He did add, though, that Sylvia had demanded “far too much of herself.”

Professor Elizabeth Drew, another Plath favorite, wrote directly to Sylvia.

I know exactly how you felt, because once in my life I had a similar depression, though for a different reason, & it seemed the logical & the only way out. But now that is all over & you must remember all the time how good life is & how much joy & adventure there will be in it for you. As to your work, you are by far the best student in English in the College & you don’t have to strain to be. You could do it standing on your head or in your sleep! I suspect you were pushing yourself much too hard in the spring … You just burnt yourself out for a spell. Now you’ve got to let life flow in all over you again & it will, never fear.

Such letters testified to the powerful impact Sylvia Plath had at Smith, signaling how dearly she was missed and what a warm welcome she would receive on her return.

Gordon Lameyer’s letter was perhaps just as important to Sylvia: “I admire you, Sylvia, I admire you more than any girl I know. More than anything I don’t want you to feel differently about me now. I want to be your dearest and closest friend as you have been ever since June to me. Believe me, please believe me, I can understand anything. Your happiness is everything to me, so please get well as soon as you can.” Lameyer would write her long letters while at sea during his service in the navy.

These letters do not seem to have had an immediate impact on Sylvia, judging by Aurelia’s letter to Olive Higgins Prouty, who wanted to be informed about Sylvia’s care and also to contribute to it financially. Prouty had suffered a nervous breakdown twenty years earlier and had recovered completely under expert care that made her “better equipped to meet life.” She wanted no less for Sylvia. Aurelia wrote Prouty that the psychiatrists told her Sylvia had not confided to her mother just how insecure she felt. That Sylvia also craved the guidance of a father figure came as no surprise to Aurelia. To Sylvia, suicide seem preferable to years of incarceration in a mental institution, the kind of facility she associated with Olivia de Havilland’s harrowing performance in The Snake Pit (1948). Prouty visited Plath in early October and wrote on the 14th to Dr. Beuscher, expressing concern that Sylvia was not mixing well with others and seemed disheartened because she was not coordinated enough to do the kind of handwork (sewing, in this case) that treatment programs often prescribed for patients. Sylvia tried weaving, and though her doctor thought it was well done, Sylvia disparaged her efforts.

In November, Sylvia received shock treatments—this time administered with more preparation and with Dr. Beuscher by her side—and insulin therapy, the latter the subject of “Tongues of Stone.” In the narrative, a young girl watches her body grow fatter with insulin treatments, and in her dreary state she cannot read words that look to her like “dead black hieroglyphics.” She has lost her tan and shies away from the sun, wishing she could shrink to the size of a fly’s body. Day after day she reports that the insulin shots have made no change. She believes she is drying up and in the final stage of withdrawal from a preposterous life. She had been “pretending to be clever and gay, and all the while these poisons were gathering in her body, ready to break out behind the bright false bubbles of her eyes at any moment crying: Idiot! Imposter!” Like Sylvia, the young girl dreads another sixty years with a brain folding up like a “gray, paralyzed bat in the dark cavern of her living skull.” In the story, the girl interprets her rescue as defeat, since she has been resuscitated into a zombie, sallow-skinned and bruised and “jolted back into the hell of her dead body.” “Tongues of Stone” ends abruptly in a transition that seems forced, even if it is true to Sylvia’s case: Suddenly, in her sleep the girl sees light breaking through her blindness, and every fiber of her mind and body flares with the “everlasting rising sun.”

Sylvia treated her period at McLean as resulting in full recovery. Jane Anderson, a fellow patient and a Smith student who went on to become a therapist, doubted that Plath had worked hard on her therapy. She did not make “much of a commitment to it in terms of trying to understand what was going on in herself and she was angry about that.” When Anderson commented on Plath’s rather passive response to treatment, Sylvia seemed to become “less friendly and less willing to talk about things in depth.” Aurelia would later write to Ted Hughes’s wife Carol, “Anyone who did not know Sylvia before she had her first [electric shock] treatment (and that includes Dr B) never knew the whole Sylvia.”

By early December, Sylvia seemed to have emerged from her depression. Wilbury Crockett, her high school teacher, visited and reported to Aurelia that Sylvia seemed happy playing bridge with fellow patients and behaving sociably. Until her suicide attempt, he had never seen her depressed, and now she had recovered her sparkle. Sylvia told her mother she wanted to return to Smith for the spring semester, beginning in January 1954. At the end of December, she wrote a long letter to Eddie and then decided not to send it, entrusting what she wrote instead to her mother as a record of the summer of 1953. Aurelia duly included a part of the missive in Letters Home.

Essentially, Sylvia presented herself as a fraud who had wasted her junior year at Smith taking the wrong subjects and committing herself to a thesis on James Joyce, even though she had only a superficial grasp of his work. Depleted after her New York City ordeal, she had been dismayed that her friends seemed content with their accomplishments. Sleeplessness, futile appointments with psychiatrists, and writer’s block all contributed to her suicide attempt. Her body had resisted her best efforts to drown herself, then she took too many sleeping pills and botched her bid for oblivion. Like the girl in “Tongues of Stone,” she had been angry about her rescue. Then Mrs. Prouty intervened, and to Sylvia’s surprise she had gotten better—just like the character in The Snake Pit, who had the benefit of a wise and compassionate therapist. Sylvia also mentioned Gordon Lameyer’s letters. He continued to write and promised to return to her even though she had not sent him a word in four months.

In Letters Home, Aurelia identified Eddie only as “E” and omitted this crucial invitation: “I do miss you to talk to … please do write me frankly and fully what’s been with you the last months or so … Aw, please, scold me, placate me, tell me your loves and losses, but do talk to me, huh? as ever, syl.” If Sylvia did not send the letter she handed to her mother, some version of it did reach Eddie, who replied on 29 January that he had not been forceful enough in insisting that she get psychiatric help. He had even debated the issue with a psychiatrist friend, who told Eddie he had no standing in the case and could not intervene. After all, he was making assumptions on the basis of a few letters. To Sylvia’s query about whether he had seen news reports of her attempted suicide, Eddie admitted he had, but thought it best to wait for her to communicate with him. Then he told her what she probably wanted to hear most of all: She sounded like the old Sylvia, the one whose “easy flow of words” and “electric communication” had attracted him. When that Sylvia had disappeared from her letters, he had become alarmed. But now she had put herself together again, he insisted.

What mattered to Sylvia, Eddie understood, was her writing—above all, her style. When she had lost the ability to imagine, she was as good as dead, a point she explored in “The Wishing Box,” published in Granta (1956). Agnes is envious of her husband’s extravagant, literary, Technicolor dreams, which become a staple of his life. She dreams only vague nightmares—nothing like her wonderful childhood dreams of the “wishing box” and of Superman, who flew her over Alabama. She goes to the movies and watches television, but her imagination has shut down. She is in a panic and cannot sleep at night. Her mind, no longer able to form images, is condemned to a “perfect vacancy.” She comes from a long-lived family and dreads the prospect of “wakeful, visionless days and nights.” She takes the fifty sleeping pills prescribed for her all at once and commits suicide, an act that is presented as a kind of victory in the last lines of the story, which describe her “secret smile of triumph, as if, in some far country unattainable to mortal man, she were, at last, waltzing with the dark, red-caped prince of her early dreams.” Such a story suggests that the act of suicide itself is neither shameful nor solely the response of a disordered mind. On the contrary, suicide, in certain circumstances, has an attractive inevitability to it when the human capacity to create a world has disintegrated. It is not such a stretch from this story to one of Plath’s last poems, “Edge,” in which the perfected woman reposes in a “smile of accomplishment.”

Sylvia presented the first months of her return to Smith in idyllic terms, writing to Enid Epstein on 18 January describing a snow-laden sylvan scene. She also wrote about walking in the shadows of trees on the path into Northampton, playing bridge and other games with friends, hanging out in the coffee shop with Marcia Brown discussing Dostoevsky, and seeing good movies. To Sally Rogers, who considered applying to Smith, Sylvia wrote a letter extolling the college’s intimate atmosphere. As a scholarship student, Sylvia did not feel out of place, since even the girls from wealthy families dressed casually. There were so many different kinds of residences, large and small, that Sally was sure to find her niche. The small classes and supportive faculty, who often visited the residences, suited Sylvia, who did not like the idea of large lecture halls. Sally could be as social as she liked, or remain studious and benefit from faculty members who took an interest in students, inviting them into their homes. Of course, there were times when Sylvia had been “blue,” but it all depended on “you,” she told Sally, to make what you would of yourself—not an easy task, Sylvia admitted, when “you’re still growing up, the way we are.”

You could not live in Lawrence House and not hear about Sylvia’s dramatic suicide attempt. Several freshmen had read her work in Seventeen. Marilyn Martin, class of ’57, recalls it was as if the walls were whispering, “Sylvia is back. Sylvia is back.”

CB Follett (’Lyn), class of ’58, later wrote a poem that captured the Sylvia Plath mystique.

We all knew, didn’t know,

knew of her—

never pointed

just a flinch of our head

as she walked

cool and brilliant

along campus paths …

In Follet’s poem, Sylvia’s scar is one sign of her difference. She was one of them who had tried death and entered the “shock chamber,” then returned, somehow whole again, making them feel fragile. She looked like other college girls in her pageboy June Allyson hair, and yet “she was, in her camouflage, / an exotic we added to our collection.”

Outside of Lawrence House, though, what had happened to Sylvia was the subject of much speculation. Ravelle Silberman, a freshman with literary aspirations that included writing poetry and following Plath’s example, thought, like other underclassman, that Sylvia had been pregnant and had gone away to have her baby. Unwanted pregnancy was usually to blame when Smith girls had to interrupt their education. Ravelle, who lived in Gillette House, did not get to know Sylvia well until Plath returned to teach at Smith. To a freshman like Ravelle, Sylvia and her cohort in Lawrence House appeared rather snobbish in their carefully groomed Smith outfits, as Ravelle shunned skirts for jeans. She steered clear of these scholarship girls, even though Ravelle herself was on a scholarship and shared many of their literary aspirations. Her fascination with Plath would later yield insight into Plath’s marriage to Hughes, and also into the aura Sylvia began to establish for herself much later in London.

Several Smith alumni remember their freshmen fondness for Sylvia, an outgoing, friendly upperclassman. They were flattered by her attention. As she wrote in a letter to Phil McCurdy, she had picked out a freshman, Kathleen Knight, to date her brother Warren. Kathleen believed Sylvia picked her because Kathleen was tall, light-haired, and pale-skinned like Sylvia. Kathleen said Warren was shy and very sweet. Like Judy Denison, a promising physicist, Kathleen was a scholarship girl who welcomed Sylvia as a sort of alternative role model. “Freshman girls were told they should aim to be ‘good members of the Junior League,’” Kathleen recalled. In other words, women were supposed to forsake careers and engage in volunteer work for charitable and educational purposes. “The scholarship girls looked at each other and said, ‘What?’ This is why they were going to college.” Judy summed up the way lots of Smith girls felt: “Somebody was complaining about her boyfriend. He said he couldn’t make any commitments because it would upset all his plans. And we said, ‘We can’t even make any plans until we have a commitment.’”

Helen Lane, then in her freshman year, remembered that students were instructed not to mention Sylvia’s suicide attempt. In fact, it was not hard to treat Sylvia like a normal Smith student. She wore her shoulder-length hair in a popular pageboy style and tossed her head a bit when she laughed. She wore knee socks, Bermuda shorts, Shetland sweaters, and plaid skirts. “Very collegiate looking,” remembered Judy Denison, another freshman. Judy mentioned that Sylvia had a dazzling smile, and Helen mentioned that Sylvia laughed easily. Sylvia counseled Marilyn, who was applying for an internship at Mademoiselle, and encouraged her to attend a symposium at which Alfred Kazin and New Yorker editor William Maxwell spoke. “Sylvia said there was more to Smith than attending classes. She opened that to me. I don’t think I would have gone otherwise,” Marilyn said. Sylvia sat beside Helen, then reading T. S. Eliot, and discussed “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock.” It astonished Helen to discover that Plath was also an accomplished bridge player and played only with the best, as beginners watched her handle the cards. Later, Helen thought of Sylvia planning to take each trick the way she would strategically work out a line of poetry or prose.

On 25 February, Sylvia typed a cheerful eight-page, single-spaced letter to Jane Anderson. They were not especially close friends, but Jane had grown up in Wellesley and had dated Dick Norton. She had taken a special interest in Sylvia’s case and had even presented Sylvia with newspaper clippings about the latter’s three-day disappearance and Warren’s discovery of her underneath the house. Like Sylvia, Jane traced a good deal of her suicidal feeling to her conflicted relationship with her father. She admired Sylvia’s accomplishments, but she also believed that through electric shock treatments Plath had taken a shortcut, never really dealing with the underlying causes of her suicide attempt. In The Bell Jar, Jane is transmogrified into Joan Gilling, a rather eerie mental institution companion and a sort of upsetting double whom Esther regards with appalled fascination. In the novel, Esther recovers, but Joan commits suicide. But in her newsy report to Jane, Sylvia was sunny, telling Jane how well she had readjusted to college life—a message that seemed written for the benefit of Dr. Beuscher, since Sylvia urged Jane to show the letter to the therapist. Sylvia was pleased to have her old room all to herself, a situation made possible because the girls in Lawrence House made sure no one else took it. During her reading of Dostoevsky, the subject of suicide came up in class, and like Hester feeling the heat of her A in the Scarlet Letter, Sylvia “felt sure” her scar was “glowing symbolically.” And yet, she discovered that not only could she discuss the subject openly, she felt like a sort of expert on suicide—although no one dared to question her about her own attempt. She had already gone on several dates, and even though she was a year behind and would miss some of her graduating friends, she seemed content and even happy to spend another year at Smith. She loved her course work, especially classes in American and Russian literature.

Sylvia also had a new “alter ego,” Nancy Hunter, a freshman who lived in the room Sylvia had chosen for the fall semester of 1953 but never occupied because of her breakdown. Nancy had spent her first semester surrounded by the ambiance of Sylvia Plath, hearing stories about a student who had already become a legend. The first time Nancy caught sight of Sylvia, however, she was startled and blurted out, “They didn’t tell me you were beautiful.” Sylvia and everyone else laughed. Nancy wrote that Sylvia could have been “an airline stewardess or the ingenuous heroine of a B movie. She did not appear tortured or alienated; at times it was difficult for me to believe that she had ever felt a self-destructive impulse.” Hunter believed no photograph she had ever seen of Sylvia did her justice, a remark that Ted Hughes would later second. Judging by Sylvia’s 15 April letter to Phil McCurdy, Nancy held her own in discussions about sex, war, and capital punishment. A later letter described Nancy as “tall, slender, with an enchanting heart-shaped face, green Kirghiz eyes, black hair and a more than pigmentary resemblance to a certain Modigliani odalisque.”

An exuberant poet wrote to her mother on 16 April that she had written her first sonnet in a year. “Doom of Exiles” details the descent from a cheerful world of green alleys into the “infernal haunt of demon dangers.” Like a good deal of Plath’s early verse, the poem stiffens as she works out an intricate rhyme scheme and stanza structure that is at once impressive but also too self-consciously poetic. This time she was trying to balance a sense of a defeated humanity against its indomitable desire to “crack the nut / In which the riddle of our race is shut.” It is not hard to picture her—thesaurus in hand, as Nancy Hunter reports in her memoir—searching for the precise word in an agonizing, plodding process.

On 19 April, Sylvia announced to her mother that she had met Richard Sassoon, whose father was a cousin of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon. She described Richard as a slender “Parisian fellow,” even though he was a British subject and had family in North Carolina. She delighted in his outré conversation, which he would carry on in youthfully pretentious letters, large parts of which were written in French. Perhaps Sylvia enjoyed the wordplay of his rather decadent manner, so at odds with contemporary culture. She liked his “wicked laugh.” He presented himself as an exile, and that surely appealed to her.

Richard was a Yale student, and Sylvia, familiar with New Haven after her outings with Dick Norton and Myron Klotz, appreciated just how much Sassoon stood out from his contemporaries. Constance Blackwell, Smith class of 1956, sometimes joined Sylvia and Richard on their Yale weekends. Blackwell recalls that Sassoon was “generally regarded as the most clever and worldly wise of all—he was very amazing and witty—it was he who belonged to the Elizabethan Club, where we went once or twice to have tea and smoke clay pipes. Richard was preparing himself to be a great literary figure.” This social club housed sixteenth– and seventeenth-century books and Shakespeare folios, and promoted literary conversation while Irish maids in black uniforms and white aprons served the quintessential English beverage. In such a setting, Plath may have felt welcome enough to level with Richard Sassoon in a way that was not possible with other males of her generation. In the only “heart-to-heart” talk Blackwell ever had with Plath, Constance remembers Sylvia saying “how difficult it was to speak about our own dreams and ambitions with young men we adored—because they themselves had their own demons of ambition.”

More than a decade later, in the fall of 1968, when Yale went coed, women still found the “maleness of Yale” overwhelming. “Male eating clubs, male-populated streets, even a male-oriented health program. Walking down a Yale street we became acutely aware of the staring. We were conscious of ourselves as objects, common objects to be looked over and appraised,” Janet Lever and Pepper Schwartz write of their experience in Women at Yale: Liberating a College Campus (1971). “You were expected to be a mixture of Margaret Mead and Scarlett O’Hara,” Lever told a Time interviewer. Well, Sylvia Plath, three-time reader of Gone with the Wind, was prepared.

Richard formed part of an unusual male grouping inspired by the charismatic Henri Peyre, described as a “quintessential Frenchman” in his New York Times obituary (10 December 1988). Author of more than thirty books, including French Novelists of Today and The Contemporary French Novel, Peyre told a Newsweek interviewer, “The only sport I enjoy is conversing with women. Most of life is a purely nuanced affair, and women help men realize this. Yale is much too masculine a place.” For Peyre’s acolytes, literature was a way of life. At Smith, Constance Blackwell suggests, literature was more of an acquisition, almost a commodity. Sassoon and his friends had an appealing vulnerability, she recalls, and were just the right antidote to hard-drinking Yale men. Sassoon & Co. were authentic. When they drank, Constance noted, they drank sherry, which put her, so to speak, halfway to England, where she wanted to study and mature as a writer.

So Richard Sassoon was a kind of literary dream come true for Sylvia Plath. He seemed magical, the kind of lover Plath describes in the refrain to her villanelle, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”: “I think I made you up in my head.” On so many evenings out, Sylvia scorned men who did not know how to talk to her. She rued her own efforts to rid herself of any original expressions that might intimidate her dates. Even someone like the literary-minded Gordon Lameyer was a project Sylvia had to shape to suit herself. With Richard, she did not have to summon a compliant demeanor to mask her true emotions. The soigné Sassoon was also a master at planning dates, excursions to the city, and cultural events. He was too small for her physically, Sylvia would often say, and yet she found a man who exuded aestheticism very appealing. The story, as Constance Blackwell heard it, was that Richard’s father had initiated his son into the delights of sex by taking him to a prostitute.

Sassoon had a Volkswagen, Constance Blackwell recalls, and was “a bit of a hypochondriac. We used to tease him that he and his Volkswagen got ill at the same time.” Sylvia told Phil McCurdy about a gas station stop on the Merritt Parkway, where she enjoyed the spectacle of herself sleeping in Sassoon’s Volkswagen, seated among wine bottles and books on Baudelaire and attracting attention that she greeted with “blithe abandon.” To Aurelia, she almost apologized, describing Sassoon as a “very intuitive weird sinuous little guy whose eyes are black and shadowed so he looks as if he were an absinthe addict … all of which helps me to be carefree and gay.” Sassoon was a decidedly bohemian corrective to her orthodox dates. Nancy Hunter thought Sylvia built Sassoon into a Byronic hero but also an “amusing toy.” Sometimes Sylvia even seemed to find him repulsive, telling her roommate, “When he holds me in his arms, I feel like Mother Earth with a small brown bug crawling on me.” The only way Nancy could explain Sylvia’s continuing dates with Sassoon was to conclude, “She could not resist exploring the bizarre or ugly, even when it frightened or sickened her, and I could not help feeling that for a girl with a delicate equilibrium it was a dangerous pastime.”

When a Lawrence House girl called Sassoon a worm, Nancy explained how powerful Sassoon made Sylvia feel. Marilyn Martin got a firsthand glimpse of what Nancy meant. Marilyn was used to seeing Sylvia with Gordon Lameyer, whom Marilyn described as “all American … such a handsome, charming person.” Sylvia and Gordon looked wonderful together, like a poster couple. After a date with a guy from Amherst, Marilyn had returned with him to Lawrence House. They were on the porch, the make-out spot couples would repair to after the girls signed in and waited for the bells signaling they should return to their rooms. Marilyn watched Sylvia approach the porch with a date Marilyn did not recognize. He was small and swarthy. Later she learned it was Richard Sassoon. Couples usually looked for a dark corner. But Sylvia, in full view, virtually attacked her companion, leaning over Sassoon, who was sitting on a railing. “It was kind of embarrassing,” Marilyn said. Sylvia was “very passionate, more passionate than most people on the porch would be.” This was a “level of sexuality that I was not comfortable with … in literature, yes, but right here?”

Constance Blackwell thought Richard was a little afraid of Sylvia. To Constance’s boyfriend, Alex Holm, a shocked Sassoon reported that Sylvia had said to him, “I wish I could take your penis back to Smith with me.” Unlike the Catholic and Jewish girls Constance knew, the Protestant Sylvia seemed to have no guilt about sex. Yet to watch her cross the campus she looked like a typical Smith girl. With her flowing hair and robust health, you expected her to have a tennis racket in her hand. Blackwell’s vision evokes Katharine Hepburn in her prime. “I think Richard knew he wasn’t up to Sylvia. Charming as he was, he didn’t have that private strong character. When I saw Sylvia with Ted, there was a man big enough for her,” Blackwell concluded.

Sylvia admitted to Phil McCurdy she did not fully follow the French her “little expatriate frenchman” spoke to her, although she certainly understood “je t’adore.” That Richard was a little wearing, though, is apparent in Sylvia’s confession to Phil that she sometimes wanted “good healthy vulgar american sun, sweat, and song … entendu?” This was, after all, a Smith undergraduate who enjoyed bragging about climbing an 830-foot-high fire tower with three others to gape at the “circling crown of lights far far below,” an all-at-once brave, scary, ecstatic experience. The arch and elusive Sassoon could be quite a trial at times. Here he is trying to placate Plath: “Please do not say you do not know me. That has depressed me a little.… And do you think I know myself well enough to tell you?… I have said much about the world—surely not without some self-revelation. And I have made you smile, I have made you laugh—perhaps I have even made you cry—was this not me! and me alone?”

Eddie Cohen seems to have been the only one of Sylvia’s correspondents who did not take her recovery at face value. On 28 April, he wrote a detailed response to two of her letters describing her breakdown. Something was missing for him. Why did she descend into such a deep depression at the very moment when “life should have been at a peak”? He realized that he was probing experiences that were still raw, but he seriously doubted that Sylvia could go on for long without understanding why she had chosen that manner of suicide and why her initial therapy had been so ineffective. He was asking her, in short, to examine her reactions: “Attempting to cherish that old life when things were so relatively uncomplicated will do you little good, and when reality intrudes, as it eventually must, you will merely bounce back to where you so recently returned hence.”