Rough Magic Read online

  Still, because of Press Board deadlines, Smith Review commitments, and classes that were proving to be unusually difficult, Sylvia felt emotionally exhausted. During October, developments in Dick’s life made her feel even worse. On the 3rd, he told her that he had possibly contracted tuberculosis, a disease that then afflicted many medical students. Fearing that Dick’s left lung’s upper lobe had become infected, doctors took chest X rays, the results of which would be known soon. (Sylvia too had an X ray; it came out negative.) Three days later, Dick informed Sylvia that he did not have the disease. Regardless, a weird energy defined their visit on the weekend of the 10th. After that weekend, Dick described Sylvia as having “lovely-long-blonde-cleanly-fresh hair, merry brown eyes, and a rather saucy and quite red mouth"—language that did not reflect the uncertainty in their relationship. As the month wore on, Dick’s problems continued. Hospitalized on the 22nd for a reassessment, he learned that he did have active tuberculosis. The treatment, his doctors said, would be highly disruptive to his life, since tuberculosis, untreatable with medication at that time, would require him to be committed to a sanitarium for one to three years.

  In early November, Dick began his convalescence in Ray Brook, a sanitarium in Saranac, New York. Sylvia’s reaction to this hospitalization can only be described as bizarre. “Sick with envy,” she wrote in her journal, because after reading a letter from Dick she imagined him “lying up there, rested, fed, taken care of, free to explore books and thoughts at any whim.” The catalyst for this decidedly abnormal sentiment was Sylvia’s further descent into a depression that had actually prompted thoughts of suicide. She felt in her head a “numb, paralyzing cavern, a pit of hell, a mimicking nothingness,” she wrote. “I want to kill myself . . . to crawl back abjectly into the womb.” Clearly out of control, she summed up her mental state. “Time, experience: the colossal wave . . . drowning, drowning.” On the 14th, in Marcia’s oflF-campus bedroom, she broke down, weeping helplessly. It felt good to “let go, let the tight mask fall off,” she confessed of the episode. And as she had talked to herself, the “stone of inertia [rolled] away from the tomb.”

  At mid-month, looking for a scapegoat, Sylvia concluded that her instability resulted from the hatred she felt for her physical-science class. The course was a waste of time, she thought, and the hours she spent studying for it were torture. On the 19th, two days after she had had tea in Alumni House with Mademoiselles Maiybeth Little, who was traveling to campuses to get to know girls who, like Sylvia, had been accepted for College Board, Sylvia wrote her mother an alarming letter in which she confessed to considering suicide. And why? Because of this dreadful science course! she said. Should she see the school psychiatrist? Would the college possibly allow her to drop the yearlong science class at Christmas? “I am driven inward, feeling hollow,” she said, so ill that a stay in the infirmary would not “cure the sickness in me.” Instead, she looked forward to Thanksgiving holidays, for then she hoped that visits with her family and the Cantors would cheer her up. As it happened, the visits—a traditional dinner at home on Thanksgiving Day, a trip to the Cantors’ the next afternoon—did help. But when she went back to Smith on the 30th, she was by no means well. To complicate matters, upon her arrival she discovered an angry letter from Eddie, who answered her recent proposal that they collaborate on a story by saying, “The two letters I have received from you since June indicate that I have ceased to be, as I once was, a real person . . . and have become instead, as have so many others of the males you have told me about, material for one of your future books, and a byproduct of your life.”

  Had it not been for her physical illness and emotional distress—the source of which she still identified as her science course—how she hated jargon like erg, joules, valences, watts, coulombs, and amperes— December might at times have been an upbeat month. Seventeen published her poem “Twelfth Night,” which prompted from Olive Higgins Prouty praise and an invitation to tea over Christmas break. Mary Ellen Chase presented her with a copy of her Recipe for a Magic Childhood in which she had inscribed, “For Sylvia Plath with admiration and confidence.” And the Fall 1952 Smith Review reprinted “Sunday at the Mintons’.” Professionally, the month’s only setback was a New Yorker rejection. It was, in fact, her second from the magazine. (The first, refusing a single poem, contained the anonymously written, although—to Plath—encouraging, note, “Please try us again,” a request that had prompted Sylvia to write her mother a letter in which she fantasized that one day she might actually publish a poem in The New Yorker. “Well, nothing like being ambitious.”)

  Also in December, Sylvia struck out on a new romance. During Thanksgiving break, at a supper at the Nortons’, she had met a friend of Perry’s from Yale, a slender, good-looking boy named Myron Lotz. Sylvia had made an effort to get to know him. The son of impoverished Austro-Hungarian immigrants, Myron, nicknamed Mike, was so brilliant—first in his class at Yale—that he was on a three-year undergraduate track to Yale Medical School, and so athletic—one only had to glance at his body to see this—that during the summer he pitched for the Detroit Tigers’ farm team. (Over the past summer, he had earned the impressive sum of ten thousand dollars by playing baseball.) After the supper, Sylvia offered and Mike accepted an invitation to the Lawrence House Dance. On the afternoon of the night of the dance, Mike arrived early, and in the course of taking a long walk to get to know each other he and Sylvia ended up straying all the way into Northampton. Passing the mental hospital located in the town, they stopped to stare at the building, whereupon, in the quiet hush of twilight, they could hear the patients’ wolfish screams echoing from inside. “Ooooooo,” one patient wailed. The voices stayed with Sylvia. Back at Lawrence, she could still hear them clearly in her mind as she held Mike close to her, dancing.

  Despite her promising early encounters with Mike, Sylvia’s boyfriend throughout December remained, at least superficially, Dick. In several letters at the beginning of the month, he detailed his current writing and reading habits, which had become extensive since he had nothing but free time. He considered some influential literary figures to be— and Plath appeared to concur—Eliot, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, Ford Madox Ford, and Gertrude Stein. At the moment, he was reading D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love, about which he commented to Sylvia that “Lawrence certainly writes in your style” and that he was “amused at the way the men sit around naked most of the time and admire themselves.” Also, he had just completed writing a longish Hemingwayesque boys’ adventure story which, after he sent it home for comment—“favorable”—he submitted to Boys’ Life. Previously, he had suggested that Sylvia travel to Ray Brook during Christmas break. There was a ski slope located near the sanitarium—“for, uh, amateurs,” he pointed out. And, he added, Mount Pisgah stood only four miles away.

  Early in the month, Plath began suffering from insomnia, which weakened her body and caused her to develop a sore throat. Fed up with her physical and emotional problems, she relented on December 15 and saw the school psychiatrist. Afterwards, she checked into the infirmary, where she remained until Christmas break. At home, between the 20th and Christmas Day, Sylvia had tea at Mrs. Prouty’s, dated John Hodges, ate supper with the Nortons twice, spent an afternoon at the Cantors’, and hiked with Philip. Following Christmas, she decided to take Dick up on his offer of a skiing trip. The Nortons drove her to Ray Brook and visited with Dick briefly; Sylvia stayed on for a week, lodging with the Nortons’ friends the Lynns. On the 27th, even though she had never skied before, Sylvia borrowed skis and, with Dick—a rank amateur—as her instructor, hit the slopes of Pisgah. That day, all went well. But the next day she took a spill—she slammed, cartwheeling, into a snowbank—and injured her left leg. Though not in pain, she played it safe and had her leg X rayed on the 29th. The X ray revealed that she had fractured her fibula, a break that would require her entire leg to be placed in a cast. Wiring her mother, Sylvia downplayed the episode, even joking that she guessed her leg would be “tri
cky to manipulate while Charlestoning.” On the 30th, fractured fibula and all, Sylvia left Saranac.

  When a frjend inquired about their romance, Dick, who naturally felt saddened by Sylvia’s departure, had responded, or so he wrote to Sylvia, “I-was-fond-of-Sylvia-but-dont-know-how-she-feels.” Finally, he was beginning to sense the ambivalence that Sylvia had felt for months. In fact, after wavering so long, when the issue of marriage came up in conversation on her first day in Saranac, Sylvia made up her mind once and for all. She simpty could not spend the rest of her life with Dick: this is what she told herself, if not Dick. In the future, she would interpret her broken leg as a symbol for her final “break” with Dick. Actually, the Saranac trip did spell the end to their relationship. They were never close again.

  When she returned to Smith, Sylvia realized how difficult life was going to be with her leg in a cast. Merely to get across campus was an ordeal, especially given the snow that covered the ground. She just could not make some trips on foot, which meant that she had to hire a taxi—an added expense. (Sylvia approached Miss Mensel and learned that such emergency expenses could be deferred by a Smith fund out of which Mensel presented her with a twenty-dollar bill on the spot.) Also, Sylvia could only bathe by lowering herself into the tub sideways, and she had.great difficulty moving from floor to floor in Lawrence. Despite all this, she reported that she remained cheery about her circumstances. She was, in fact, extremely upset. Over Christmas, bad with a broken leg, she had written Eddie to complain about “Allan,” her science course, and her new roommate, Mary, whom she regarded as horribly inarticulate. Eddie’s no-holds-barred reply was dated January 2, 1953. Concerning “Allan,” he did not waver. “You may recall that on our last night together, I spent several hours trying to convince you that the relationship between you and Allan was vicious, biting and competitive, and would end, if pursued as far as marriage, in unhappiness if not violence.” Eddie was just as honest when he wrote about Mary. “Is there any chance you dislike her so much because she is such an apt portrayal of everything you have most feared being yourself?” As for the science course, her hysterical reaction to it was a metaphor for a larger mental instability. Her “behavior and state of mind” caused him to be “vitally and deeply concerned.” Fearing she was approaching “the ultimate breaking point,” he begged her to seek medical help. “Syl, honey, I think youve moved much too close over these past few months, and, if my words and judgement mean anything at all to you, let me implore you to get yourself into some sort of psycho-therapy as soon as possible.”

  Around Christmas, Sylvia had presented the Administrative Board with a petition requesting that she be allowed to audit her science course in the spring term. In late January the board, much to her delight, approved her request. She felt ecstatic, she wrote her mother, adding that, instead of anguishing through her “hated” science class, she could take Milton for credit. As for science, she would only have to sit in on the classes: there would be no reading, studying, or tests. With this issue settled, Sylvia looked forward to her other courses. Besides Milton, she would sign up for Elizabeth Drew’s Modern Poetry, Davis’s Creative Writing, and Honors hours. On the day she began her classes, Eddie wrote “to nag you on the subject of a psychiatrist.” Jokingly, he threatened to fly east and “seize you by your pretty hair and drag you, caveman style, into the office of the nearest available witch-doctor.” That same day, Dick related his own literary news. Boys’ Life had rejected his story, but The New England Journal of Medicine had accepted his biographical sketch of William Carlos Williams, whose Paterson Dick had recently read and admired. (When Dick had mailed him a copy of the sketch, Williams, a general practitioner, responded favorably.) Dick also attached to his letter something else he had just written—a “review,” as he called it, entitled “Individualism and Sylvia Plath: An Analysis and Synthesis,” which discussed “Den of Lions,” “Sunday at the Mintons’,” “The Perfect Set-up,” “Dialogue,” “Initiation” (which appeared in the January Seventeen), and a selection of Plath’s religion papers. Interestingly, Sylvia never told Eddie about the “review,” which Eddie would surely have attributed to Dick’s unconscious desire to compete with her. Then, on January 31, Mike arrived in Northampton for the weekend; he and Sylvia had ginger ales at Rahar’s on Saturday night and dinner and supper at Lawrence on Sunday. As Mike revealed details of his life to Sylvia, she realized that his youth had been much more austere than she had thought. Growing up among minorities in underprivileged neighborhoods, he had little chance of ending up at Yale. But here he was.

  In February, after finals, Plath received her grades. In her “hated” science course, which she was sure she was going to fail, she earned an A—. With the pressure of the semester weighing down on her, she had obviously lost all ability to perceive her own talent accurately. She also did well in her other two classes, making an A — in Creative Writing and the only A in a class of ten students in Medieval Literature. Encouraged by these grades, Sylvia tried to resolve her relationship with Dick. In February, she wrote him four letters in which she strongly hinted that their involvement had disintegrated into a friendship. On the 25th, she spelled out her feelings to her mother. She could not marry Dick, she said, because she needed a man who was, physically, a “colossus,” who, mentally, would not be “jealous of my creativity in other fields than children.” For his part, Dick finally deduced Sylvias feelings, not only from her letters but from her actions. When he asked her to join him at the Middlebury Carnival, which took place on February 20, she refused. When he invited her to visit him during her spring vacation, she would not commit herself. This could not have happened at a worse time for Dick: in early February, he learned that his condition had not improved sufficiently for him to re-enroll in medical school for the fall.

  As Dick faded from the picture, Sylvia dated other boys. Besides Mike, who was so taken with her that he had written that he could “think much more clearly while away from [her] biological magnetism,” and whom Sylvia described as a “hercules” with a photographic memory, she was seriously attracted to one other boy. An Amherst College senior, an English major enchanted by Joyce, a graduate of Choate, and a resident of Wellesley (where he and Sylvia had never met), Gordon Lameyer had been told by his mother about an adorable, intelligent blonde—Sylvia—who had addressed the Smith Club of Wellesley back in the fall. Lately, Gordon had telephoned Sylvia to ask for a date on February 7, the day after her leg was to be re-X-rayed. (The bone had not mended.) That night, when Gordon arrived at Lawrence, Sylvia clunked down the stairs, her leg still in a cast. Even on crutches, she was as captivating as Gordon’s mother had said. Peering from the steps, Sylvia saw a vision of her own: tall, slim, handsome, Gordon was all one could hope for in a blind date. Because of her cast, they kept the evening simple; following supper in Gordon’s fraternity, they went up to his room to listen to music and to read Joyce aloud. Later, once Gordon had dropped Sylvia off at Lawrence, she suspected she would be seeing more of him, although she felt concerned by what she perceived as Gordon’s jealousy over her literary success.

  Subconsciously, Sylvia was haunted by thoughts of boys—and sex. For years now, she had fought her sexual urges, sometimes with success, sometimes not. Lately, the urges had become clouded by an air of violence. In one recent journal entry, she recorded a telling fantasy, that of being taken to a mountain cabin to be “raped in a huge lust like a cave woman, fighting, screaming, biting in a ferocious ecstasy of orgasm.” It would be years before she would meet a man who satisfied this dream.

  Dates—no matter with whom—came easier after February 19, the day Dr. Chrisman cut the cast off her leg. Although the fibula wasn’t totally healed, which caused her to stumble and feel acute pain when she walked, and although the sight of her yellow, shriveled leg horrified her, Sylvia was excited to have the cast off. On the 23rd, she wrote to her mother that she could now put all of her weight on the leg without its hurting at all. This was fortuitous, because so muc
h was happening in her life, both professionally and socially, that she needed nothing to hold her back. For her guest editorship application, she was submitting manuscripts to Mademoiselle. In late January, she had mailed in a cartoon spread and an article about health; in early February, a short story (not part of the requirement, but it would help her chances if the magazine accepted it, she hoped); and in late February, her recent theme, “The Ideal Summer,” and an essay about a Harvard Medical School dance. In its March issue, Seventeen published her poem “Sonnet: The Suitcases Are Packed Again,” which prompted the college newspaper to run an article about Plath and the poem. It had been written, the paper said, “when she was returning home for summer vacation [in 1951].” Then, on March 5, she headed by train to New Haven for a long weekend with Mike. On Friday, they toured Yale’s baseball facilities and ate a rare-roast-beef supper at Silliman. That night, they went to the Yale junior prom and danced, along with the other five hundred couples, to the Tommy Dorsey band until the early hours of the morning. On Saturday, they drove along the Connecticut shore; on Sunday, Sylvia had lunch with Perry, who, during their whole meal, never mentioned Dick.

  In March, Sylvia continued to drift out of Dick’s life. In particular, Sylvia’s dates with other boys threatened him. Instead of confronting her directly, he made an unusual move: he wrote to Aurelia. In his letter, Dick expressed his concern about the future of his and Sylvia’s relationship and wondered if Aurelia believed they would marry. To his cordial but inquisitive letter, Aurelia responded immediately. “When Siwy came home from the Cape this summer, she did say to me very positively that she was, at present, ’not at all matrimonially minded’. To the query—why then did she go out with you so much— came the answer—because she enjoyed being with you more than with any other person. . . . 1 probably won’t be married for a long long long while yet,’ [Sylvia continued]. 1 have a lot of growing up to do still.’ ” Closing her letter to Dick, Aurelia wrote: “I only hope with all my heart that no hurt comes to you through . .. any of us. In my affections you have a place very close to that of my two who come first.”