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.