The strange new world that Eddie Cohen described included this daunting desire for mastery. Other than Wilbury Crockett, before college Plath had not had a teacher who could have challenged and unsettled her the way reading history at Smith did. Eddie Cohen, who had had his problems with the demanding University of Chicago curriculum, knew exactly what Plath confronted: an intellectual anxiety that goes far beyond clichés about adjustment to freshman year.
Other aspects of collegiate existence also rattled Sylvia. She wanted to enjoy the social life, but she did not see how she could spend all night playing bridge the way other freshmen did. After three blind dates, she wrote in her journal of feeling undesirable, an astounding admission that left her wondering at herself. She had been so popular before leaving for Smith, full of confidence in her ability to attract males. Now she complained about the dating system, about wandering with boys from one fraternity to another, or visiting them at nearby colleges and then returning with reports on who one saw and what one did. This hardly seemed the way to find a congenial male.
Downhearted, Sylvia leaned heavily on Eddie, telling him he was her “dream,” although she hoped never to meet him because as matters stood, their relationship played into “my writing, my desire to be many lives.” She was beginning to shrug off his desire to meet her. For all his perspicacity—or perhaps because of it—she dreaded the idea of his coming so close. After all, it was her writing, not herself per se, that first attracted him to her. Eddie, though, thought of himself as more than her alter ego and served notice that he saw no reason why they should not meet. He was looking for the one “Golden Woman” capable of sharing “all facets” of his existence. Sylvia was seeking essentially the same thing: a tall, handsome, sensuous, but also intellectually serious young man—in essence, Ashley Wilkes. She had already told Eddie that, judging by the photograph he sent, he was good looking, and he was starting to hope that maybe he and Sylvia were suitable—although he recognized that they shared only a “paper world,” one that she had called “unreal,” much to Eddie’s dismay. He admitted that he was pleased when her dates did not work out and jealous when they did.
Sylvia’s mood swings at Smith are apparent in a postcard dated 28 October that Aurelia chose not to include in Letters Home. At the library a professor sat next to her, and she discovered he knew her name. Smith suddenly seemed much less impersonal: “Are there any colleges other than Smith?” she asked. Like her contemporary, Susan Sontag, then attending the University of Chicago, Plath was an enthusiast. But while the inevitable disappointments made Sontag bitter, wary, and cynical, Plath felt hurt and betrayed any time a person or place she built up proved unworthy. The letdown would be devastating, and it could occur at a moment’s notice. Sontag was more broody and introverted. Not learning to play bridge would never bother her. She saw no value in conforming, but not playing the game troubled Plath, who wanted to fit in. She was as self-absorbed as Sontag, but Sylvia was also incredibly alive to her culture, allowing it to impinge on her in ways that Sontag, with her strongly defended sense of self, could reject at will. Both women were insecure and could hide their vulnerability in haughtiness, but only Sontag made that haughtiness into the armature of her identity. The walls of Plath’s fortress would be breached again and again, so that she felt overrun. In an 11 November letter to her mother, she casually mentions suicide, saying she advised her close friend Ann Davidow against it because “something unexpected always happens.”
In the midst of her hectic fall, Sylvia was thrilled to learn she had received a scholarship from Olive Higgins Prouty, the author of the novel Stella Dallas, a tearjerker made into a radio soap opera, as well as two films. Prouty wanted Sylvia to write about her future plans. The scholarship bolstered Sylvia. To Aurelia, she declared that Smith was stretching her, pulling her to “heights and depths of thought I never dreamed possible.” She believed she was storing up experiences—and even pain—that would produce art.
In her 1 December thank you letter to Prouty, a rattled Sylvia wrote about watching the faces of six hundred freshmen on the steps of Scott Gym, and feeling that she was “drowning in a sea of personalities, each one as eager to be a whole individual as I was.” What makes Sylvia such a significant figure—a cynosure, in fact—is her refusal to simply play the alienated artist or disaffected individual, even though she believed her true calling as an artist was elsewhere. Beginning with her first year at Smith, she was trying, in earnest, to live through her contradictions.
When a twenty-five-year-old soldier, a Korean War veteran who had spent two years in a hospital convalescing from a lung wound, attacked her during a late night walk on campus, Sylvia was shocked by how little she knew about the world. He desisted when she cried out, but she was amazed at how offended he was, since he presumed their night out would culminate in a rape—although neither he nor Sylvia would have used the word then. A chagrined Sylvia realized how naïve she had been and actually comforted the aggrieved man, who put his head in her lap. She understood something was wrong with this picture. Shouldn’t he be apologizing to her? Yet the times were such that neither of them could see past what were then conventional cultural markers of their encounter. It perplexed Sylvia that she should have made such an elementary blunder, and she vowed never again to put herself in such a vulnerable position. Back at Haven House, a shaken Sylvia talked over the episode with friends and discovered they had had similar experiences.
On 8 December, Eddie Cohen set her straight:
Although you have an unusual understanding of the world in terms of ideas and groups of people, you as yet do not understand the individual in conflict with himself or society, or the impact of emotion upon an individual to the extent that it overcomes his rational aspects. This results from two things: never having had the experience of facing a demanding personal situation on your own; and never having had a really compelling, overwhelming love affair. In these shortcomings, time will bring you through—your attitude is almost exactly my own two years ago, and I have since learned those things which only experience can bring. Logic isn’t everything.
No one talked to Sylvia Plath this way. She fell silent, as Eddie noted in two follow-up letters.
Because she was depressed, Sylvia did not write. She admitted as much to her mother, saying she had given up carving a block of wood that now represented her own blankness. To counteract her “black despair,” she had attended a life class and felt her spirits lift as she made sketches of a posing Smith girl. But Sylvia still wondered how she would make it to Christmas. She also told Aurelia that Ann Davidow was dropping out of Smith because she did not feel smart enough to do the work. Ann, in fact, was suicidal, Sylvia said. In Letters Home, Aurelia would add a note suggesting her daughter was exaggerating and that Ann’s mood was, in fact, a projection of Sylvia’s own.
On 24 December 1950, Sylvia wrote to her pen pal Hans, describing Smith in very positive terms, though she admitted she felt “a little lost.” She still believed the world was likely to come to a grim end: America was like the Roman Empire, “new and bright,” and yet falling apart. On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s novel about the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, would not be published for another seven years, and yet Sylvia was already imagining not only the extinction of her hopes, but of the world’s. She made it through the Christmas season but returned to Smith in a glum mood. She missed Ann Davidow. Sylvia wrote to Ann, addressing her as “Davy,” to say she was lost without her confidant. Sylvia was not unhappy for long, though. She made friends with Marcia Brown, a cheerful companion who loved debating ideas on long walks. Sylvia went home with Marcia to New Hampshire in early February for a brief visit.