Unhappy that their last visit together had not relieved his anxieties, Dick was getting testy, writing Sylvia on 23 February, “Your enthusiastic, career-oriented individualism sometimes chills the onlooker and presents marriage in the light of a hurdle or an undesirable estate for the less-fortunate and plodding humans.” If for no other reason than his prose style, Sylvia Plath could never have married anyone like Dick. Well aware that he was losing Sylvia, Dick tried a more conciliatory approach, on 10 March adding, “One of TB’s associated diseases is an unsureness of one’s essential value with ones friends.” He also wrote to her mother, trying to get a read on what was going through Sylvia’s mind. A tactful Aurelia consulted with her daughter and sent Dick a carefully worded letter saying she was touched by his concern, adding that at the moment Sylvia was not “matrimonially minded.” She tried to let him down easy: “I have always found Sivvy to be very honest. Should she hedge now, I am sure it would be because she was afraid of hurting you at a time when it might do you physical harm.…” But after more dilatory responses from Sylvia, a cranky Dick replied to Aurelia: “One should not worry about ‘hurting’ me, a concern better reserved for the five-year-old one is about to rob of a toy. My interest is ever with the ‘facts of the case,’ even if they are disturbing on first acquaintance. What is hidden from view generally is more dangerous to everybody than the transient discomfort of its discovery.” Once again the stiffness in Dick’s style surely put off Sylvia, just then composing an O’Neill-type drama of her life involving “the great God Gordon,” as she referred to him in a letter to her mother on 11 April.
If Sylvia had known more about baseball, she would have made Myron Klotz part of her “deep bench,” which included another new acquisition, Ray Wunderlich, a Columbia Medical School student she had met during her brief employment at the Belmont Hotel. He escorted her to plays in New York (Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real). The trip to the city revved her up for the Mademoiselle competition for aspiring young writers who would be selected to spend June in Manhattan as guest editors at the magazine. At the same time, she was thrilled at sighting W. H. Auden, the reigning poet of the period, arriving for a stay at Smith, telling her brother, Warren, that someday she would like to touch the “Hem of his Garment,” and present him with a poem, “I found my God in Auden.”
Sylvia was writing poetry again, always a difficult project while studying at Smith. She adored meter and verse formats like the villanelle, an elaborately rhymed and structured nineteen-line poem. She seemed encouraged when she received more than a form letter rejection from The New Yorker for “Doomsday,” a work Harper’s accepted a few months later that is included in the juvenilia section of The Collected Poems. It is a deftly composed and witty commentary on the vanity of human aspirations, including, no doubt, her own: “Our painted stages fall apart by scenes.” The images of breaking, shattering, fracturing, blasting, and toppling are reminiscent of her careening ride down a ski slope, ending in another fall when Sylvia tried to arise from her accident. The actors in “Doomsday” that halt in “mortal shock” are emanations of a sensibility that had experienced just such a crash. And the renegade Unitarian emerges in the line, “Our lucky relics have been put in hock.”
“Doomsday,” despite its grim theme, has a jauntily mordant tone that reflects the exuberant Plath of this period. In letters to her mother she enclosed poems like “Verbal Calisthenics,” which begins: “My love for you is more / Athletic than a verb…” She exulted in her election as editor of the Smith Review for the next year, her last at Smith. She seemed, in fact, to be winding herself up into a manic state, as the legend of Sylvia Plath spread on campus, transforming her in an apotheosis of herself. “Laurels for Recent Poem / Sylvia Plath Again Wins,” the 16 April issue of the school newspaper announced, as if she were a racehorse and not the author of another story in Seventeen.
On 27 April, Sylvia noted in her journal that Harper’s acceptance of “Doomsday” and two other poems marked her “first real professional acceptance,” and that “things have been happening like a chain of fire crackers.” At the home of Elizabeth Drew, one of Sylvia’s teachers and one of the country’s distinguished literary critics, Sylvia watched W. H. Auden sip beer and smoke Lucky Strikes while discussing The Tempest, commenting that Ariel embodied the creative imagination. Measured against her dreams of male greatness, even Gordon began to pale when she learned he was considering a career as an insurance salesman, and Ray seemed weak, physically and emotionally. He had not even made a pass at her. She wanted, she confessed, the impossible: a “demigod of a man,” a “romantic nonexistent hero.”
Writing to Warren on 12 May, Sylvia rejoiced at his acceptance to Harvard University, hoping that his scholarship would relieve Aurelia of a financial burden. In fact, Sylvia hoped that both of them would be self-financed for the next year, because she well knew how hard Aurelia had worked to give her children the best of everything: “Mother would actually Kill herself for us if we calmly accepted all she wanted to do for us.” Sylvia was sincere, but she was also appalled at the extent of Aurelia’s altruism—although Sylvia did not say so to Warren, or yet realize as much herself. Aurelia’s self-sacrifice took an enormous toll on her daughter, who wanted to feel less obligated, but who also found the need to perform for her mother excruciatingly painful, a sore point that got worse as the summer of 1953 wore on. But just the opposite was the case in the spring, when all the world seemed to be opening up to Sylvia. It was time to start paying Aurelia dividends for all that she had invested in her children, Sylvia exhorted Warren.
CHAPTER 3
QUEEN OF THE DEAD
(1953–55)
June 1953: Plath experiences an intense period in New York City at Mademoiselle and finds it exhilarating, then exhausting—her first foray into the high fashion urban megalopolis of fame she later dissected in The Bell Jar. Returning home in late June, she becomes depressed, then receives electroconvulsive therapy; 24 August: She attempts and nearly succeeds at suicide. She returns to Smith, apparently recovered; 1955: Sylvia graduates summa cum laude and leaves for England as a Fulbright scholar at Newnham College, Cambridge.
By early May the news got even better: Sylvia was awarded the Mademoiselle guest editorship. She had been selected by the magazine’s college board, headed by Marybeth Little. In “Your Job as Guest Editor,” the magazine explained that this was an opportunity to learn more about its readership. The position also provided awardees with valuable training and counseling and a “behind-the-scenes” look at the publishing world. The competition for this prestigious internship took into account not only the student’s writing abilities, but also her participation in extracurricular activities. These Sylvia listed as membership in the Studio Art Club, working on decorations for the freshman prom and charity ball, and on the editorial boards of the Smith Review and the Campus Cat (a humor magazine), serving as secretary of the Honor Board (one of the campus organizations dealing with honors students), and her experience as correspondent for the Springfield Daily News through the Smith College news office.
All guest editors would work a five-day week from 1 June to 26 June. A Mademoiselle editor wrote with suggestions about clothing: dark lightweight dresses, made of nylon, shantung, or other silks and cottons, and a bathing suit for weekends. “We plan to do one ‘do dress’ party, so you should bring along a gown, and don’t forget hats—we’re afraid they’re necessary for all the public appearances you will make,” wrote Marybeth Little on 5 May.