Sylvia was already preparing for one of her editor assignments: interviewing and being photographed with a famous author. She had sent the magazine her preliminary choices: Shirley Jackson, E. B. White, Irwin Shaw, and J. D. Salinger. Of course, she would have read them all in The New Yorker, the publication she most wanted to appear in herself. Catcher in the Rye would later serve as a model for The Bell Jar, but how different its author was from Sylvia Plath, who sought fame even as Salinger was developing a mystique as an elusive writer erasing himself from public view. In the end, even before leaving for New York, Sylvia had secured the requisite interview with British novelist Elizabeth Bowen.
Home for just two days between the end of her examinations at Smith and her departure for New York City, Sylvia frenetically packed and planned for her month at Mademoiselle, all the while urging her mother to do something for herself—maybe write articles, which Sylvia would love to edit, about her teaching for women’s magazines. Out the door, Sylvia was carrying with her words of overwhelming gratitude for all her mother’s sacrifices, which had resulted in so many opportunities for her children.
Betsy Talbot Blackwell, editor-in-chief of Mademoiselle, interviewed all guest editors on their first day. As her title denoted, she had final say over all copy and departments. She also sized up the guest editors and decided on their suitability for the magazine’s various departments. The guest editors were then divided into small groups to lunch with the Mademoiselle staff. Sylvia soon learned that editing meant not merely writing and revising, but also functioning as errand clerk and typist, as a memo sent to her cohort explained. She put an exclamation mark in the left-hand margin next to the following statement: “Magazine deadlines are as final as exam dates, and are to be observed religiously—no extracurricular activities will be scheduled until deadline crises are past!” This may have been her first inkling of the pressures that would undo her, reminding her of the nerve-wracking build-up to exams. Crises? Sylvia had already had enough of those, and now, before the first day on the job, she was on notice to expect more. Like everyone else, she was required to “pitch in” on assignments in any department that needed help. Although the memo promised “lighter moments,” it also declared this was no “glamor job.” After such sobering words, the memo ended with a section on extracurricular activities, mentioning visits to designers, fashion shows, meetings with famous people, theater parties, dinners and dancing, and special screenings. Half-skeptical, half-hopeful, Sylvia wrote at the bottom of the memo: “Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it!”
“Citystruck Sivvy,” as she dubbed herself in a letter to Aurelia, spent her month on the sixth floor at 575 Madison Avenue working late. In the evening, from her room (1511) at the Barbizon Hotel she could marvel at the sight of Manhattan lighting up, with glimpses of the Third Avenue El and the East River. Laurie Levy, another summer guest editor, recalled an outing with Sylvia: “We billowed about the steaming summer-festival streets trying to keep cool in below-calf cotton skirts.” They passed one another in the Mademoiselle hallways, “our teeth white against the magenta lipstick of 1953.” Sylvia was given all sorts of copy to read and rewrite, including submissions from Elizabeth Bowen, Rumer Godden, Noël Coward, and Dylan Thomas. She rather relished writing a rejection slip to a staffer at The New Yorker, but she also worried that she would not get into Frank O’Connor’s much-prized summer writing class at Harvard.
Sylvia admitted to her mother that the end of semester rush and quick removal to New York had been both heady and daunting, and that she had trouble dealing with high-pressure situations. At Mademoiselle a handwriting expert had delivered this analysis of Sylvia:
STRENGTHS: Enjoyment of working experience intense; sense of form, beauty and style, useful in fields of fashion and interior design. Eager for accomplishment.
WEAKNESSES: Overcome superficiality, stilted behavior, rigidity of outlook.
Plath appreciated how much important work Mademoiselle managing editor Cyrilly Abels assigned to her. Sylvia signed herself “Syrilly” in one letter to Aurelia. Abels was, in the words of a Mademoiselle primer for guest editors, “boss of the deadline.” She approved all copy. Owing to her wide-ranging contacts with writers, publishers, and agents, she was also the magazine’s ambassador to the literary world.
Elation and exhaustion were compounded when Sylvia and several other guest editors came down with ptomaine poisoning. Even so, she was meeting well-known authors such as Vance Bourjaily, dating boys from all over who were working at the UN, and spending time in Greenwich Village. Then the cheerful letters dwindled. It would take years for the full story to come out.
During this busy month, the horrifying execution of the Rosenbergs, convicted of participating in a Soviet spy conspiracy to steal the secret of the atomic bomb, intruded with such force that Sylvia felt nauseated. The pacifist of “Bitter Strawberries,” who had been shocked by the head picker who wanted Russia bombed off the map, reappeared in a journal entry on 19 June describing a stylish, beautiful “catlike” girl waking up from a nap on the conference room divan, yawning and saying with “beautiful bored nastiness: ‘I’m so glad they are going to die.’” Everyone else went about business as usual, planning the weekend without a thought for the preciousness of human life. It seemed ironic to Sylvia that the prevailing mood deemed it right to execute the Rosenbergs for purloining the secret of her country’s zealously guarded mechanics of inhuman invention. Too bad the electrocution could not be televised that evening, she remarked, since it would be so much more realistic than the crime shows. She imagined the country taking these deaths as nonchalantly as had that blasé beauty in her office.
More than twenty years later, in The Public Burning Robert Coover would publish a scathing portrayal of the Rosenberg execution that included the kind of spectacle Plath imagined. Like Plath, Coover believed the execution had tainted and degraded his nation. Both writers were concerned with the individual’s connection to history and—like Rebecca West in the prologue to her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon—deplored the fact that people could be so idiotic as not to see how their fates were entangled with the lives of millions of others. No matter how much it meant to be working at Mademoiselle, Sylvia never lost sight of the world elsewhere, to which she was irrevocably connected by her consciousness of what it means to be fully human. The events of June 1953 became the basis of The Bell Jar, in which Plath transmogrified her traumatic month into a fable, a Catcher in the Rye–style story that captures all the glitter and gore of New York City, the abode of the brilliant and the phony, the predatory and the pretentious.
When Sylvia returned home in late June, Aurelia found her daughter unusually somber. That intense period in New York hit others hard, as well. Laurie Levy wrote, “We dispersed in different directions to have our letdowns alone.” Aurelia dreaded breaking the bad news: Sylvia had not been chosen for Frank O’Conner’s Harvard writing class. Like many ambitious people, Sylvia did not care how many awards she won, only that the acceptances kept coming. (O’Connor would later say that he thought Sylvia too advanced for his class). But Aurelia, expecting her child to be disappointed, was aghast to see that the news drove Sylvia to despair.
Even if it was the proximate cause of her depression, it is unlikely that one month in New York, however trying, had produced this humorless and even dull Sylvia. For well over a year, Eddie Cohen had been warning her that something was seriously amiss. During that year she wrote as though the power of positive thinking would pull her through. But working at a high-energy Madison Avenue magazine wore down her will to succeed, already severely weakened by doubts she could take her talent to the next level. To put it another way, Sylvia’s stint in Manhattan accelerated the crackup Eddie had tried to head off.