In her letter of 30 May 1950, Sylvia announced that she had been accepted to Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, about ninety miles from Wellesley. With her high scholastic average and extracurricular record (working on the school newspaper, playing basketball, participating in student government), she could have been admitted to Wellesley on a town scholarship and saved money by living at home. But like many ambitious students, she wanted to test herself by going away to college and, of course, away from her mother. But not too far away. Aurelia was Sylvia’s lifeline no matter how much she resented her mother—or at least her overwhelming need to confide in Aurelia. Aurelia bore the weight of what Sylvia expected of herself and seems not to have objected to her daughter’s desire to attend Smith. Indeed, Aurelia later told scholar Judith Kroll that she welcomed all signs of her daughter’s growing independence.

It obviously pleased Sylvia, as well, that even though she received some scholarship aid, she was going to have to work in order to afford her first year at Smith. As she wrote Hans, she would be laboring on a farm that summer, biking back and forth to work in fields and in a greenhouse, “rain or shine.” Her only previous experience of this kind had been a day at camp picking blueberries for ten cents a quart. She anticipated sore muscles but also seemed to enjoy the prospect of breaking herself in—and yes, getting a tan. Sylvia would stick it out through a long, tiring summer, making friends with farmworkers and experiencing for a brief period the hard manual labor of working-class life.

Sylvia told Hans about the Estonian and the Pole who picked fruits and vegetables beside her. She enjoyed their funny stories—about the only entertainment she had, since by the time she got home she was exhausted and was in bed by nine. It felt good to be working the earth. But it was more than that. The daily rhythms of hard labor soothed her. Lying in her bed at night thinking of the strawberry runners she would set the next day, she suddenly understood how for some people this kind of life was enough. Why demand more? she asked in her journal.

Sylvia did not tell Hans that Ilo, the Estonian boy, had lured her to his room—ostensibly to see his artwork—and had bestowed on her a passionate French kiss, her first. She left abruptly, realizing she would be teased about falling for Ilo. But she did not really shrink from the experience. She welcomed the idea of a fulfilling sex life, but she feared the consequences and wished to put off that kind of intense physical involvement until she found a mate she was surer of. In her journal, she called herself “the American virgin, dressed to seduce.” With Emile, another boyfriend from that summer, she necked and petted, feeling his erection as she pressed her breasts closer to his body. In 1950, casual sexual intercourse for a girl of her age and background was just too risky.

Talk of the Korean War made her angry. She saw no purpose to the fighting, except as a manifestation of rabid anticommunism. You can’t kill an idea, she argued. Even if Hans told her she was simply a “silly girl” who did not understand how boys felt about fighting, she would say war was absurd. She had been reading Thomas Hardy’s sad, wistful war poems, such as “The Man He Killed,” which she quoted to Hans. Hardy’s lines dramatized not only the humanity of the men firing at one another, but also the oddity and irony of their behavior:

Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You’d treat, if met where any bar is,

Or help to half a crown.

What hurt Sylvia was the way war destroyed simple acts of kindness and generosity and the desire to exchange confidences, as she did with Hans. She called the dropping of the atomic bomb “a sin.”

She used her summer farm experience to compose a fine poem, “Bitter Strawberries,” published on 11 August 1950 in The Christian Science Monitor. The work reads a little like Thomas Hardy’s war poems, or Siegfried Sassoon’s, while also sounding a little like William Carlos Williams’s vignettes of American scenes using direct speech. In the fields the talk is about the Russians, culminating in the “head woman” saying, “Bomb them off the map.” This was often said in the early 1950s, when certain Americans echoed what General Patton had declared immediately after World War II: Annihilate the Russians before they have the power to retaliate. The call for another atomic bomb drop took on urgency because of the new draft law alluded to in Sylvia’s poem. A blue-eyed girl reacts in terror at the harsh words, and she is told sharply not to worry. This little drama ends with everyone returning to their picking, kneeling over the rows and cupping the berries protectively before their stems are snapped off “between thumb and forefinger.” The ironic poem’s description of a crew organized by a leader dealing in delicate lethality is both a contrast to and evocation of the nuclear age Plath detested—an era of mutually assured destruction that would, she wrote in her journal, deprive her brother Warren of the opportunity to lead a full, productive life.

Sylvia would never forsake her early pacifism, perhaps also influenced by the devastating scenes of destruction depicted in Gone with the Wind. For her, pacifism meant not only rejection of war, but also a sense of solidarity with other places, other people. Writing to Hans helped wrest her from Wellesley, as did farm work, so that she could show up at Smith, as she did every summer at camp, with another shot at making something new of herself.

CHAPTER 2

MISTRESS OF ALL THE ELEMENTS

(1950–53)

August 1950: Sylvia publishes “And Summer Will Not Come Again” in Seventeen; 1950–53: Korean War; 1950–51: A scholarship student at Smith College, Plath begins dating but does not find her Mr. Big; 1951–52: She works at a hotel and then as a mother’s helper to earn spending money; 1952: Sylvia’s short story “Sunday at the Mintons” wins a prize and is published in Mademoiselle; 1953: First issue of Playboy, with Marilyn Monroe on the cover.

On 3 August 1950, Sylvia Plath received her first fan letter. Twenty-one-year-old Eddie Cohen had read her short story “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” her first appearance in Seventeen after the magazine had rejected more than forty earlier submissions. In this story of a doomed romance between a young girl and her tennis instructor, Cohen detected a temperament that transcended the crude sentiment of popular magazine fiction. The story’s title was taken from a Sara Teasdale poem, “An End”:

I have no heart for any other joy,

The drenched September day turns to depart,

And I have said goodbye to what I love;

With my own will I vanquished my own heart.

On the long wind I hear the winter coming,

The window panes are cold and blind with rain;

With my own will I turned the summer from me

And summer will not come to me again.

“What I wouldn’t give to be able to write like this,” fourteen-year-old Sylvia had written in her journal. “Like this” meant not only commanding the simplicity and grace that were Teasdale’s signature traits, but also the ability to exquisitely evoke her own sensibility, to describe why the poet wrote out of a melancholy sense of self-injury. Such concerns constitute a leitmotif in Plath’s journals.

Critic Steven Gould Axelrod has shown how much of Teasdale’s sensibility suffused Sylvia Plath’s work. Teasdale developed what he calls the “rhetoric of anguish.” Celia, the heroine of “And Summer Will Not Come Again,” quotes a part of “An End” that evokes a powerful sense of loss, of getting caught in a self-defeating dynamic. Eddie Cohen, still wondering what to do with his life, identified with Sylvia’s heroine when he perused his sister’s copy of Seventeen. He thought he might have talent as a writer, and like Sylvia, he was checking out the market. He was expecting, however, just to pick up a few pointers. He was taken aback when the story actually moved him. His first letter to Sylvia is rather condescending—in effect a message from an older boy telling a younger girl that maybe she has something there. He wanted to find out.