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.
A letter from Eddie that arrived in mid-December pinpointed Sylvia’s love of histrionics, which could be turned into a Henry James novel that fretted the action, worked it over, and projected it back into her sensibility. He noted, for example, how her attitude toward Dick had changed. Now she seemed keen to confect a melodrama out of ministering to the ailing hero. In fact, Dick told her that he was reading A Farewell to Arms, and it is tempting to see Sylvia imagining a role reversal in which it is not the dying Catherine, but rather Frederic Henry (Dick) who needs (Sylvia’s) support. Eddie, never one to blink at the truth as he saw it, rendered a devastating verdict. Wasn’t she creating a plot that satisfied her, rather than seeing the men in her life for what they really were? Wasn’t it the idea of a love story that appealed to her, and not the actual men who courted her? At the risk of sounding “ungracious,” he suggested that Sylvia remained more interested in the drama of these affairs than in the affairs themselves. Sylvia understood exactly what Eddie was saying, because she had noted as much about herself in her journal.