In letters to Aurelia and Olywn, Ted revealed no hint of Sylvia’s summertime funk. On the contrary, he pictured her as a poet on the go. Did he not see the suffering of a soul who said marriage to him was like sharing one skin? Was Ted keeping up appearances, or writing in wish fulfillment? Judging by Sylvia’s journals, he was so absorbed in his own routines that he did not take in her torment. And she did not let on to her mother, writing instead that she was reading about the sea for poetic inspiration and resuming her study of German because of her attachment to her roots.
By late July, Sylvia began producing poems again, breaking a ten-day drought. This cycle reprised the summer before on Cape Cod, when it had taken two weeks or so for her to settle down to a writing regimen. Prose remained an obstacle. With plenty of ideas for stories, she was stymied when it came to plots, as well as feeling she had been spoiled by the early success of her fiction in Seventeen and Mademoiselle. Even on the level of slick magazine pieces, she thought she had to step up her game.
Although Sylvia had always supposed she would wait to have children until after the publication of a novel or a first book of poetry, she began to yearn for motherhood. On 2 August, she complained to her journal that her life with Ted had become “ingrown.” In Letters Home, Aurelia describes Sylvia and Ted’s reaction to a visit on 3 August with friends and their three children. The two-year-old girl latched on to Ted, while Sylvia reverently examined the one-year-old as though discovering some treasure she had been seeking. Aurelia imagined what it would be like to be a fairy godmother waving a wand, producing a home, and greeting her daughter with all she needed to have a family and her writing, too.
To Sylvia, though, having children in America meant capitulating to an overwhelming complacency. She hated the way her Aunt Dot looked down on Ted because he did not have a job and was not career oriented. Having those solid, middle-class achievements meant succumbing to the desperation that Sylvia disliked in her mother. Better the anxiety of the artist than the neurosis of the conformist. Sylvia averred that security was inside herself and Ted. She had the confidence of seeing “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” in the 9 August issue of The New Yorker and imagining readers all over the world marveling at her work.
The move from Northampton to Boston in early September cheered Plath, especially since she now had a good view of the Charles River. City noises took some adjusting to, she wrote to Elinor Friedman Klein. Plath sometimes suffered from painful menstrual cycles that could exacerbate her moodiness and discomfort with how little she had accomplished. On 11 September, she was suffering through cramps and a fever. She tried to distract herself with compulsive behavior: arranging the new apartment, scanning job ads in the paper—all the while telling herself she had to get on with her writing. Instead, she brooded over Elizabeth Taylor taking Eddie Fischer away from Debbie Reynolds. She asked herself in her journal why this should matter. And yet it did, because Sylvia Plath seemed wired into what critic Leo Braudy has called the “frenzy of renown.” Ted Hughes was along for the ride, but Sylvia Plath drove herself just as wildly as the movie stars she read about.
Three days later, Sylvia noted in her journal that they were both in a “black depression.” That their moods coincided so perfectly seemed yet another proof to her that he was her male counterpart—this time, though, she saw a dark side. Were they, like vampires, feeding off one another? She was in a suspicious mood and admitted her confusion. No longer part of an academic regime, she felt like a dilettante. If she got a job, at least she would be earning something and taking pleasure in a day’s work. On 16 September, Peter Davison, a former lover and publishing contact, visited her and observed a “tense and withdrawn” Sylvia. His visit, however, was good for her. Two days later she was writing again, beginning with an analysis of Davison’s character. She got a few “well-turned” sentences out of him. It was ever thus with her: relieving her depression with writing that converted her anxieties into satirical fiction. Davison preferred the “simpler, less poised,” woman who had told him touchingly about her suicide during the summer he dated her. He disliked the overly controlled narrative she later produced in The Bell Jar, deploring her “clumsy irony, the defenses, the semifictionalized characters, the nastiness of temper that mar the novel for me.” But this was genuine Sylvia Plath, too: astringent and happiest with a cudgel-like writing instrument in her hands.
By mid-October Sylvia had a job at Massachusetts General Hospital typing up records in the psychiatric clinic, answering phones, and performing all sorts of office work. The job was a tonic that resulted in, by critical consensus, her best work of short fiction, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.” In the story, a secretary/narrator obsessively types up other people’s dreams. Although Plath believed she had profited greatly from her sessions with Dr. Beuscher, the story scorns modern medicine. Patients are “doomed to the crass fate these doctors call health and happiness.” The demented narrator becomes the scapegoat for “five false priests in white surgical gowns,” who place a “crown of wire” on her head and the “wafer of forgetfulness” on her tongue. In the psychologized 1950s, in the era of electric shocks, Plath imagines votaries protesting this crucifixion, chanting, “The only thing to love is Fear itself.” Electric shock therapy robs the patient not just of memory, but also of the dread that is debilitating but also essential to the fully human, fully creative self. And yet the machine betrays the technicians, and “Johnny Panic,” who embodies the fearful dreams the narrator has faithfully recorded, appears overhead in a “nimbus of arc lights” charging and illuminating the universe. Such an ending would seem to imply that fear is an ontological condition that cannot be medicalized—that is, cured. Plath was not endorsing fear per se—she knew too well how much it had immobilized her—but she regretted the bogus superiority of medical institutions that supposed they could manufacture a sense of health and well-being. The story is compelling and intriguing in large part because the narrator herself is unstable and yet commands a certain aura of authority—the kind of countercultural rebuttal to the establishment and to institutional psychiatric treatment reflected in novels like Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962).
Sylvia did not, however, present a bold front to the poets and publishers who saw her socially. In his memoir, The Fading Smile, Davison reports poet Stanley Kunitz’s observation: On visits Sylvia seemed to make a ritual of taking a chair and sitting slightly behind Ted, who took the main stage, so to speak. She played the adoring, “very mousy” spouse in Kunitz’s memory. This is the same role Sylvia assumed during her year of teaching at Smith, when, according to Daniel Aaron’s recollection, she was “very deferential … to her husband” and wanted him to be “included in everything.” These impressions accord with Sylvia’s journal entries, which portray Ted at this time as the superior poet. Unsure of herself, Sylvia resumed weekly meetings with Dr. Beuscher.
We know what was on Sylvia’s mind because she recorded Beuscher’s words in a 12 December journal entry: “I give you permission to hate your mother.” It was time, in other words, for Plath to acknowledge openly her loathing of the “smarmy matriarchy of togetherness.” It was such a relief just to tell the permissive Beuscher whatever she was really thinking. Unlike Aurelia, the therapist did not “withhold [sic] her listening.” Similarly, Sylvia reveled in the battles with Ted, in those rough-and-tumble arguments, seeking what Aurelia had absolutely no appetite for. Wasn’t Sylvia, in her own estimation, the mouse that roared? Wasn’t her therapy all about how when writing to her mother—and even more so in her mother’s presence—Sylvia surrendered to the role of dutiful daughter? Above all, this Sylvia wanted to please her mother, but in that very pleasing—that need to be good, that unquenchable craving for approval—she had betrayed herself and her urge to assert an entirely independent self, one that only got exercised in her fictional critiques of others. Why did she take an almost perverse pleasure in her rejection slips? Surely it was because this is what the world did: It rejected you. When a poem, story, or article did get accepted, Sylvia always reacted to her good fortune as if it were a kind of miracle, a momentary victory against overwhelming odds.