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…”
CHAPTER 4
I AM NATURE
(1955–57)
September 1955: Plath arrives in England; 25 February 1956: First dramatic meeting with Ted Hughes; 16 June: Plath and Hughes marry and honeymoon in Spain; 1957: Plath earns her Cambridge degree, and the couple moves to America.
In September, Sylvia sailed to London, enjoying a short shipboard romance and a stop in France, where “men know how to look at one,” she assured Elinor Friedman Klein. Sylvia reveled in London’s centuries of tradition, suffused with the silvery, misty light of a Constable painting. She walked for miles through the parks, toured Soho, and visited the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, a Dickensian pub, and bookstalls. She was already assembling a submission list of British literary magazines.
Cambridge did not disappoint. She was still in that romance of travel mood that made her digs seem charming, with a gas ring and fireplace that meant, of course, no central heating. The formal gardens, the “quaint crooked streets,” the River Cam, and King’s Chapel were all part of an enchanting, cozy picture she presented of herself. She was surrounded by her books and anticipating the purchase of a tea set and prints for her bare walls. “Here all is to begin again,” she wrote Aurelia on 3 October. She studied the classics of the ancient and modern stage, philosophy and ethics, and literary criticism. She described the controversial literary critic F. R. Leavis lecturing: “a magnificent, acid, malevolently humorous little man who looks exactly like a bandy-legged leprechaun.” She hoped Richard Sassoon would make good on his desire to study at the Sorbonne. She could not think of a better escort during her foray to Paris.
By mid-October, Sylvia had been to a Labour Club dance and was meeting men (they outnumbered women ten-to-one at Cambridge). First up was Mallory Wober, tall, dark, and handsome, a Londoner who had spent nearly a decade in India. He took her punting on the Cam and reminded her of Dmitri Karamazov, Sylvia wrote Elinor Friedman Klein. Indeed, Plath greeted Wober like a figure out of fiction as the “dark Dmitri Karamazov hewn out of the Himalayas,” who would descend on her “in a dark cloud” and astound the “wearied mahomette who will probably be trying feebly to hang herself with yards and yards of holly-ribbon conveniently supplied by an invisible troll who lives under the staircase.” Other “chaps” were taking her to tea, to meals, to concerts, and for long, picturesque walks. None of these dates seems to have been very passionate. Wober was good company, supplying her with phonograph records and entertaining her on an organ he brought up to her room. She regarded him as a substitute for the brother she missed. For Edward Butscher, Wober recalled Sylvia’s stunning physical presence, how she could enter a room and turn heads. He found her energizing and empowering.
Sylvia successfully auditioned for the Amateur Dramatic Club, doing scenes as the clever and bold Rosalind in As You Like It and as Camille in Camino Real, based on Dumas’s famous courtesan, who had been transfigured into Greta Garbo’s dying goddess character in Camille. Sylvia had her audience laughing as she described her idea of the stage set, and afterward a male member of the audience complimented her on her wonderful voice, which filled the room. She wrote many playful illustrated letters to Wober, picturing herself awaiting his visits to her room, “languishing like Camille amid my withered yellow dahlias.” She found rehearsals demanding and wrote to Wober about her dealings with “dramatic tyrants.” She was joking, no doubt, and yet she seemed relieved to think of him as both her escort and her escape. She liked to say the name Mallory, she told him. It had the right number of syllables to achieve a dramatic effect, which she would demonstrate for him sometime.