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

Автор книги: Carl Rollyson

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 25 страниц)

Back at it on 6 May, Eddie would not let go—this time pointing out how Sylvia tried to incorporate her male suitors into stories of her own making. Eddie proved to be intractable material when he showed up unannounced. Since Sylvia had not scripted the occasion, what “could have been an exhilarating experience turned into a stiff debacle,” Eddie complained. The super-organized Sylvia had been overwhelmed by her experience at Mademoiselle, Eddie pointed out, because so much of her routine mandated that she respond to the demands of others: “You like to plot all the possibilities in your future as if it were a short story. When I first heard of your problems last summer, I could not but wonder what went wrong that you had not counted on.”

Two days earlier, Sylvia wrote her mother, “Just a note in the midst of a rigorously planned schedule…” She seemed to revel in a ten-hours-per-day reading project that would take her through the end of May, writing Phil on 13 May after a “full day of rigid discipline” finishing War and Peace and Anna Karenina. She was looking forward to the summer—a little too exuberantly, as it turned out. Pace Eddie.

Sylvia went home with bleached blonde hair. A shocked Aurelia adjusted, admitting in Letters Home that the change was flattering. Sylvia told Gordon Lameyer that she thought her new hair color drew attention away from her facial scar. After a round of visits to New York and a short stay in Wellesley, Plath joined Nancy Hunter for a summer in Cambridge, studying German at Harvard summer school and attending many cultural events. They visited Olive Higgins Prouty on the way. The giddy and irrepressible girls ate two helpings of cucumber sandwiches in a most “unladylike display of gluttony,” Hunter wrote.

Hunter has provided a striking portrayal of Sylvia’s summer in a memoir that was first written in the 1970s to correct certain misapprehensions about Plath. For all her high-powered ambitions and her literary interests, Sylvia was in many ways a conventional Smith girl. She was no rebel and indeed disapproved of a Lawrence House contingent of nonconformists who spurned Smith proprieties. She took her world as it was, Hunter notes, not imagining that it would change much—or that she had any obligation to challenge its conventions. One of Sylvia’s projects that summer, in fact, was to work on her cooking, an undertaking that impressed Nancy. Sylvia’s tastes were sophisticated, and though they had a food budget, she tended to ignore the staples, expecting Hunter to take care of those, while Plath worked on her creations. Although Hunter complained that her roommate’s penchant for specialty items was putting a strain on their limited resources, Sylvia brushed off this concern as Nancy’s problem.

Plath did not seem at all sensitive about discussing her previous summer’s breakdown. Indeed, she provided Nancy with a startling comment on Otto Plath (not surprising to readers of “Daddy”), calling him an “autocrat” and saying, “I adored and despised him, and I probably wished many times that he were dead. When he obliged me and died, I imagined that I had killed him.”

The roommates agreed to accept all dates that included dinner, although a wary Nancy had second thoughts about a professor, identified as “Irwin,” they met outside Widener Library, where Esther Greenwood meets her Irwin in The Bell Jar. According to Steiner, Irwin later called and asked Nancy for a date. She was surprised to learn on the way to dinner that he would be preparing it. She had not been alone with a man in such circumstances and only agreed to accompany him when he told her he would keep the door open and that his landlady was nearby. In the course of the evening, though, he made a pass and ended up chasing Nancy around his apartment. She escaped and told an intrigued Sylvia about her misadventure. When Irwin phoned, Sylvia took his calls and eventually agreed, to Nancy’s amazement, to date him. The message was clear: Plath felt she could handle such a man, a “wolf” in the parlance of the 1950s. Indeed, she wrote to Gordon Lameyer about Nancy’s tendency to overreact. Nancy was like “sun-silver on a dark, moody lake, and her calm is a result of tensions which break open at home in shrill, neurotic screaming.” Learning to deal with Nancy had been good for Sylvia, she told Gordon, since she had been able to work on her own equanimity to compensate for Nancy’s “eternal crises.”

But Sylvia returned from her date in distress, bleeding copiously. She admitted Irwin had raped her. A terrified Sylvia—in morbid fear of hospitals and of the kind of attention she had received after her suicide attempt—made Nancy call a doctor Irwin had previously summoned to treat Sylvia, and on the phone Nancy took his instructions as to how to treat the hemorrhage. When the bleeding proved intractable, Nancy finally persuaded Sylvia they had to go to the hospital. Nancy then called Irwin, insisting that he drive them to the hospital to meet the doctor there and pay for Sylvia’s treatment. While there, Nancy heard the doctor say that Sylvia would have no more trouble. And then he added that what she had experienced was not surprising. He had treated other girls in the same situation. To Nancy’s astonishment, Sylvia continued to see Irwin.

How to account for this seeming masochism? As the doctor’s parting comment suggests, the conception of sexual abuse in the 1950s was quite different from contemporary attitudes toward such behavior. To the Irwins of Sylvia’s day, women were fair game, and the women themselves were blameworthy. How Sylvia saw her culpability is not clear, especially since Hunter apparently was not privy to her roommate’s motivations.

Sylvia may not have been able to explain her behavior to herself. She seemed to be undergoing a transformation that had gone underground, so to speak, provoking an irritated Eddie to complain on 10 August that her letters were “too sparing.” She was dodging him, teasing and tantalizing, Eddie concluded. Nancy noted, “Sylvia seemed to regard man as an object that could be manipulated at will.” Nancy and Sylvia remained friends but were never again so close. Nancy believed that Sylvia “absorbed the essence of people like doses of a unique psychedelic drug designed to expand her consciousness. Sometimes she seemed to forget that they had emotions and wills of their own.”

Kay Quinn, one of the Smith girls who had shared the Cambridge apartment with Sylvia and Nancy, later told Helen Lane that Sylvia sometimes acted “strange,” prompting Kay to suspect that she had not overcome the behavior that resulted in her suicide attempt. Kay also mentioned an incident in which Sylvia, bleeding heavily from her vagina, asked Kay to hold her. Whether this incident is related to Irwin’s rape is not clear. But Plath’s reckless involvement with Irwin—even after she had been warned by Nancy—seems a precursor of her later desire to take on the daunting Ted Hughes.

The accounts of Irwin in Nancy Hunter Steiner’s memoir and in The Bell Jar are so similar that Plath scholar Peter K. Steinberg—after noting that Irwin is referred to as Edwin in Paul Alexander’s biography—decided to track down the real man. In the Frances McCullough Papers at the University of Maryland, Steinberg discovered a letter, dated 11 January 1975, from the poet Donald Hall speculating that his friend, Edwin Akutowicz, was Irwin. Akutowicz had just written Hall a letter expressing surprise that the Sylvia Plath he had dated had become famous. Hall called Edwin “totally unworldly. He went around making love with women, at an extraordinary rate, without any affect at all, as far as anybody could tell.” This description certainly fits the oblivious Irwin in the novel and the memoir, as does the fact that, like Irwin, Edwin (with a 1948 Harvard PhD) was a mathematics professor. On 10 March 1975, McCullough wrote to Akutowicz, explaining she had edited Plath’s letters and was curious to learn his impression of Sylvia, who when he knew her was just beginning to reengage with the world after her suicide attempt.

On 25 March, Akutowicz replied, observing that he could hear Sylvia’s “gently malicious laughter” at his superficial impressions of her. He did not detect any “deeper tensions” in her. In fact, at first glance one might suppose she was “beautiful and dumb.” But she was hardly that, he added. In fact, he remembered not only conversations about poetry (Edmund Spenser in particular) but about probability, a subject that of course interested a mathematician. He remembered her hearty laugh and her unembarrassed description of crawling under the porch to take her own life. She was less neurotic than most young women he knew. What made her unusual, in his estimation, was her rather somber memories of her father, her intense dedication to poetry, and the way she “caught on to the idea of suicide as a reality.”

At the end of summer, Sylvia returned to her family home in Wellesley. Sylvia wrote relentlessly upbeat letters to Aurelia, who had taken the summer off to join her parents on Cape Cod and to recuperate from a recurrence of bleeding ulcers. To others, Sylvia made passing references to her “very attractive, but nervous mother, whom I see as little as possible.” Sylvia mentioned enjoyable weekends cooking for Gordon Lameyer. They had also seen Dr. Beuscher, on whom Sylvia still relied.

By the time Sylvia returned for her final year at Smith, she had decided to apply for a Fulbright scholarship to study at either Oxford or Cambridge. She was lining up her references: Elizabeth Drew, Mary Ellen Chase, and Newton Arvin, all distinguished Smith faculty, favorites of hers, and writers with national reputations. She thought a letter from Dr. Beuscher would be the best way to handle the story of her breakdown and institutionalization, which had resulted, in Sylvia’s view, in a complete cure. She was also applying to graduate school, with Harvard, Yale, and Columbia heading her list. She had reverted to her naturally brown hair to highlight a demure, studious look.

In the fall of 1954, Sylvia made friends at Smith with Elinor Klein, who was expecting to meet a “shy spectacled, unattractive kid in the corner clutching her Dostoevski for dear life.” But this was a willowy beauty with “great soft dark eyes,” a “wide laughing mouth,” and a “tumble of light hair.” Sylvia immediately dispelled any “worshipful attitudes” by showing Elinor her rejection slips, which Sylvia seemed proud of because they were proof of her hard work. They talked nonstop on the first of many glorious afternoons. Klein fondly remembered her friend’s humor, which bubbled up effortlessly, even during their “most serious conversations.”

Jody Simon, Smith ’55, knew Sylvia slightly. They shared a philosophy class, where Simon noticed that Plath’s comments were particularly insightful and interesting. “She always seemed to me to be trembling slightly” and fidgeting with her hair, Jody remembers. “I recall it as an inner intensity externalized.” Simon’s overall impression, though, was of a calm and confident person. “I appeared shy and reticent, described as ‘quiet’ in our ’55 yearbook, and I felt Sylvia extended herself toward me in a kind, interested and thoughtful way.” In a German course, Darryl Hafter watched a very quiet, unassuming Sylvia gradually master the language, in class presenting a Rilke poem in a powerful English translation of her own devising.

Sylvia attributed her good spirits that fall to her bohemian summer, suggesting to her mother that she had needed a break from her practical self—the one who stuck to a schedule, budgeted her time and money, and expressed her conventional, unoriginal, and puritanical side. Dr. Beuscher had evidently encouraged acting out, to rid Sylvia of the “good girl” mind-set that had made her resentful of her mother, the embodiment of prim and proper decorum. To Nancy Hunter, however, Sylvia had gone too far in the opposite direction, forsaking not merely the traditional behavior of a Smith undergraduate, but showing a disquieting lack of sense. Sylvia rationalized her “blazing jaunts” as learning the “hard way” to be independent.

Sylvia was aware of her penchant for mythologizing herself as she turned to Dostoevsky, preparing a senior thesis: a study of the double in his novels. In what is perhaps the study’s most revealing passage, Plath wonders whether Golyadkin, the protagonist of The Double, deals with a real alter ego or simply a projection of his imagination. She cites various critics who fault Dostoevsky for not clarifying his main character’s sense of reality. Plath concurs, but obviously the issue itself—what is real—exercised her deepest emotions. What she wrote about her childhood in essays like “Ocean 1212-W” and “America! America!” formed part of her essential myth. Was not the “Plath” of her journals and letters also her double and alter ego?

Marilyn Martin remembers a conversation with Sylvia about Henry James’s novel The Portrait of a Lady “and how we become what we read sometimes. We move into that world. Sylvia and I talked about this. The difference in reading when you had to write about it rather than step outside and criticize. Identifying with the characters.” Like so many creative artists, Sylvia absorbed art into her bloodstream, and it took considerable effort for her to function outside of that assimilated sensibility and write as a literary critic. In fact, on her first English assignment at Smith, she had been dismayed to receive a B–. It is often said that her worries about doing well at Smith were a product of perfectionism, but such an analysis ignores how strenuous it was for a sensibility like hers to conform to the academic model of learning. Her thesis on Dostoevsky proves that she could learn to write a scholarly paper perfectly well, but her letters also show that doing so put a strain on her. Her switch from Joyce to Dostoevsky also suggests that she found a theme in the Russian author that resonated more deeply in her than anything Joyce wrote.

That Sylvia Plath perceived her mythologizing tendencies did not mean, of course, that she could control them, or that she would not make mistakes, misconstruing the dream for the reality, as Golyadkin does. Going to England on a Fulbright scholarship (if she was fortunate to be offered one) would be another test, she wrote her mother on 13 October. Taking up her scholarship would mean relinquishing the security of her native land, finding new friends, and attempting to succeed in a formidable, intellectually unfamiliar world. As she worked on the first draft of her senior thesis, she worried about having something new to say about an old topic. Isn’t this also what England represented: daring to do well in a culture far older than her own and daunting to an upstart American? She did not consider, however, that England, too, would become a Sylvia Plath project, seen through her own special lenses, which could distort as well as discover reality.

The literary world became more palpable for Sylvia Plath when she encountered Alfred Kazin, author of On Native Grounds and a prominent American literary critic, teaching a course at Smith. Her description of a curt and aloof figure is apposite. In New York Jew, Kazin recalls that she looked like any other Smith student. When she showed him her work, he became suspicious, because it was so polished and professional. Suggesting that she was presenting him with plagiarism, Kazin named the magazines such work appeared in. “I know,” Plath replied. “They’ve already taken them.”

He warmed up when he realized that Plath was a published author and deadly serious about writing. He liked that she had worked her way through college. He had been disappointed with his apathetic students and at first assumed she was simply another “pampered Smith baby,” Sylvia wrote her mother on 25 October. He invited her to audit his class, which she did, vowing to learn as much as she could from “such a man,” who told her the class needed her contribution. She did not elaborate, but what Kazin offered her was another version of independence. He took the money and the tributes from the academic world in stride, but unlike her other professors, he was not really part of it. The point was to write; there were no excuses for not doing so. “You don’t write to support yourself; you work to support your writing,” was his message to Plath, one she quoted to her mother. She soon became a Kazin favorite. Constance Blackwell can still hear him calling her: “Syl-via, Syl-via.” In the letter he wrote in support of her application to graduate school, Kazin noted he was not in the habit of writing on behalf of students—and certainly not with the superlatives he used to describe Plath. “She is someone to be watched, to be encouraged—and to be remembered,” he concluded.

Sylvia was still aiming at publication in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, and she enthused over Kazin’s interest in her—which included a kind of command performance at his home, reading and discussing her story, “Paula Brown’s Snowsuit.” At the same time, she continued her impersonation of a “regular girl”—to quote from New York Jew, the “first to clear the dishes after coffee.” Sylvia did not seem to mind building up her hopes because, she told Aurelia on 7 December, she loved living “in suspense.” Kazin had invited her to an informal lunch and was writing a recommendation for her Woodrow Wilson fellowship application. Just how extravagant she could become is clear in her final comment on Kazin, “I worship him.” Yet to Kazin, she appeared “guarded to an extreme. I knew nothing about her and never expected to know anything.” She simply presented an image of perfection, the pet of what he called, in New York Jew, “the nervous English department.”

Sylvia spent part of her Christmas break in New York City, with Sassoon playing Prince Charming to her Cinderella, as she described it in a letter to a friend. Gordon Lameyer, still very much in the picture, was in the navy’s gunnery school in Virginia. In a typical description of her itinerary, she mentioned breakfasting on oysters in a scene that would not be out of place in a Hollywood romance, and ending her day in film noir fashion, “talking to detectives in the 16th squad police station.”

Sylvia continued to write poetry for a creative writing class, and she submitted a story to the Ladies Home Journal, which rejected her work but wanted to see a rewrite—an encouraging sign, since rejections usually included an invitation to submit her next story. More rejections followed from The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines, but always having something on the way to a publisher seemed to drive her on. She fretted over what seemed to her the slim chances of studying at Oxford or Cambridge, and kept calculating which graduate school would serve her best, considering that, as she told Aurelia on 29 January, “writing is the first love of my life.”

Sylvia Plath’s strongest inclination pointed toward study and perhaps teaching abroad. Her pacifism and sense of international solidarity put her at odds with Cold War America and McCarthyism, which she wanted to counteract, as she put it in a letter to Aurelia on 11 February, by acting on her realization that “new races are going to influence the world … much as America did in her day.” She considered teaching in Tangier. Then on 15 February, Sylvia wrote that Cambridge had accepted her, and that the Smith College English department was behind her in their rejection of “machine-made American grad degrees … P.S. English men are great!” Writing several poems a week, Sylvia was also thinking of submitting a book to the Yale Younger Poets series.

More exciting trips to New York and an encouraging letter from The Atlantic Monthly made the spring of 1955 seem a reprise of the fateful 1953 season when the heady round of success and frenetic activity had only served to panic Sylvia. This time, though, she was nearing graduation and pleased with her senior thesis and her advisor, her Russian literature professor, George Gibian. He had been deeply impressed with her, describing Sylvia as the ideal student to Edward Butscher. Even a “lame” suggestion from Gibian turned into a wonderful chapter of the thesis, Gibian remembered. She also babysat for him and enthusiastically wrote to Gordon Lameyer, “I was holding the deliciously warm twins and feeding them bottled milk (after five glasses of sherry I felt an overwhelming impulse to strip and nurse them myself!)”.

Sylvia remained under the steadying influence of Dr. Beuscher, whom she saw periodically, as well the sobering encouragement of Alfred Kazin and the kind attention of Professor Mary Ellen Chase, who made sure Sylvia knew, step-by-step, how her Cambridge application fared and what to expect next. Sylvia formed new friendships, purposely not isolating herself as she had done before her suicide attempt. Sue Weller had become a close friend as copasetic as Marcia Brown. Sylvia invited Sue to accompany her home for spring break.

Sylvia continued to see Gordon Lameyer and briefly considered an engagement to him. She decided against it because she did not want to cut off opportunities or be saddled with a commitment to supporting his career. She thus avoided another awkward involvement of the kind she had backed away from with Dick Norton. Richard Sassoon was another case altogether. He might write passionately, but he came nowhere near the subject of marriage: “I bear the name of love tonight and bear myself alone and alone to boredom’s bed and bear my love like a cross—so cross you are not with me—a cross forever until you are with me—that’s true, I swear—and swear madly because it is true—o god of the godly keep off the pidgins! Ah to conquer death—not to avoid it—but to have it now and then—in between the now and then—until then, all my love, Richard.” These letters evidently amused Sylvia, who proposed taking Sassoon along on one of her visits to Olive Higgins Prouty.

Sylvia was beginning to meet major contemporary poets like Marianne Moore and John Ciardi. She did a public reading of her work for an intercollegiate poetry contest (she tied for first place) and enjoyed making the audience laugh. Later, the college radio station recorded her reading her work. Moore made a deep impression, appearing as a sort of fairy godmother and expressing a wish to meet Aurelia, Sylvia wrote in a 16 April letter to her mother. A letter from The Atlantic Monthly requested revision of a poem that Sylvia thought might ruin the work’s spontaneity. She regretfully admitted, “I battle between desperate Machiavellian opportunism and uncompromising artistic ethics.” The former won out.

Plath was thrilled to get a letter from Ciardi calling her a real poet. She was also hoping that May would bring further publication in Vogue, The Atlantic Monthly, and Mademoiselle, as well as several more prizes from Smith. Reading her letters is rather like making the rounds of perpetual desire. This time there were fewer disappointments. At pains to show how fulfilled Sylvia felt in the late spring of 1955, Aurelia noted her daughter’s happy birthday call in Letters Home: “Thank you, Mother, for giving me life.” In early May, Sylvia was invited to judge a contest at a writer’s festival in the Catskills. She enjoyed the work and the attention—mistakenly thinking, however, that her well-received public performance meant that she would enjoy a teaching career.

The official award of a Fulbright to study at Cambridge was announced in late May at the same time as Edward Weeks, editor of The Atlantic Monthly, wrote Sylvia to say that her original version of “Circus in Three Rings” was better than the revision the magazine had requested. He would publish her work in the August issue. After his call for more new work, Plath practically chortled to her mother, “That fortress of Bostonian conservative respectability has been ‘charmed’ by your tight-rope-walking daughter!” In the same 21 May letter, Plath listed the eleven awards she had received that year, totaling $470. At graduation, Sylvia listened to Adlai Stevenson give the commencement address, watched Marianne Moore receive an honorary degree, acknowledged Alfred Kazin’s wave to her as she accepted her degree, and whispered in her mother’s ear, “My cup runneth over!”

The apotheosis of Sylvia Plath seemed perfected in June, when letters from Gordon Lameyer and Richard Sassoon arrived with breathtaking tributes—and, in Sassoon’s case, a new, almost pleading eroticism that complemented Lameyer’s earnest adoration: “From you … I have found a language, a way of looking at life, a beauty in the terrible paradoxes. You have given me courage to work in the dark, energy to concentrate on my work, vision to clear the shelf of the masters who sit starting down on me with their chilling jeer, confidence to act in the Hamlet play of life. I have taken all you had to give—and you gave more than anyone.” Sassoon wrote his letter on 4 June, a day later, abasing himself even as he exalted her: “O my darling sweet clever Sylvia! You will make the heavens answer someday … if ever I am there … and I shall be.”

A new note of urgency verging on panic enters Sassoon’s letters that summer, as he realizes he may be losing her: “I do not believe I shall ever love another woman so deeply, so happily, so sadly, so confidently, so desperately, so fully … something in me has broken … Goodbye my very dearest Sylvia … love—it is a great thing, even when it has failed. And it was the love really that faltered or failed, was it? Because it lives.”

The next day, 19 July, Sylvia mentioned to her mother that in Cambridge she had gone out to dinner and a play with Peter Davison, now another of her lovers. Alfred Kazin had introduced Plath to Davison, then twenty-seven and an editor at Harcourt, Brace. At Smith, Davison met a typical undergraduate, robust and ingenuous, but also driven to write and full of questions about the world of publishing. The conventionally pretty girl in the Smith sweater-and-skirt ensemble formed a “curious, even a disturbing alliance” with her intensity of expression, he pointed out in Half-Remembered. Davison asked Plath to show him her first novel whenever she wrote it. Davison seemed especially suitable for the summer before her departure for Cambridge because, she told her mother, his voice sounded “nice and Britishy and tweedy.” He was a Harvard man who wrote poetry and had a Scottish poet for a father, she told Warren.

The affair began easily enough, with a dinner date and with Sylvia slipping into Davison’s bed quite casually. He soon learned that she was hard on her lovers and suspected he did not measure up. Because they shared a certain “mutuality,” only Richard Sassoon seemed to have satisfied her sexually. Like Eddie Cohen, Davison felt Plath held back. Only once did her mask slip, when she disclosed the horrifying details of her suicide attempt and her hostility toward her mother and scorn for her father, “a sort of fuddy-duddy professor who dealt with bugs down in Boston.” Davison found Plath an entrancing companion who shared her ambitions and experiences freely, as he did during their summer romance, which ended abruptly after a visit to the Plath home.

Davison met Aurelia for the first time and was struck by her formality and correctness when she greeted him as though she were greeting one of Sylvia’s serious suitors. (Eddie Cohen had received a similar reception.) At home, Sylvia treated her mother with affection. In his walk with Sylvia later, it was another story—not only with regard to Aurelia, but also to himself. Sylvia let him know that their time together had ended now that she was off to England. She dismissed him in such a way that he felt used and rather callow, even though she had initially approached him with respect. In her journal, Plath explained that she was “too serious” for Davison, and that only Richard Sassoon understood the nature of her “tragic joy.” Although the affair with Davison was brief, he would return later as an important figure in her publishing career—and still later in the biography wars involving the Plath estate.

Everything seemed under Plath’s control. Gordon Lameyer wrote to say he would wait for her, and Richard Sassoon remained in the picture with his paeans: “Sylvia, you are a great big, healthy, powerful woman!” She should never forget it, even when she was not feeling so, Sassoon wrote on 9 August in a letter written in an extraordinary fatherly tone. In Letters Home, Aurelia mentions no strain between herself and Sylvia during this summer, but Sassoon’s letter refers to his regret over “so much hatred and frustration in your home.” Knowing that he was touching on a fraught subject, the wary Sassoon nevertheless ventured to advise her, “Believe me, it is no good to leave a home with a foul taste in the air. Particularly, as we never know what will happen in the absence. Please think about it, Sylvia. Just say she is one hell of a bitch and then determine to get along with her for the last month. It was after all your purpose in staying at home this summer, and you will feel better to have accomplished something there.…” Without Sylvia’s side of the correspondence, it is hard to tell exactly what troubled her, or how she reacted to Sassoon’s admonition—or what she did about it.

In other moods, Plath was just as likely to confess, as she did to Warren on 28 July, that she was already feeling the homesickness that always began before she departed on trips. She wanted him to know how much she loved him. She hoped he would confide in her and write to her while she was away on her two-year journey. She had been wandering about in a “blue streak of incredible nostalgia.” You had to pick your day with Sylvia Plath. She declared to Warren, “My wings need to be tried. O Icarus…”