Rough Magic Read online

  Meanwhile, Sylvia had become busy with her career. The New Yorker rejected two villanelles, but an editor, who told her to “Try Us Again,” had penciled in changes on the poems. Seventeen bought “Sonnet: To a Dissembling Spring.” She received a manuscript back from The Atlantic Monthly. And Mademoiselle returned her short story—a bad omen, she decided, for her guest-editorship application. By the end of March, Plath considered herself a failure; she even signed one letter to her mother “Your rejected daughter.” Yet, despite her feelings of defeat, Plath remained a mainstay of the invitation-only teas Mary Ellen Chase had at her home on Paradise Road. During these teas, Plath talked to Ruth Mortimer, an English Honors student now writing a senior thesis on Dostoevsky with the working title The Design of the Dream in “Crime and Punishment.” (It would be the first Smith thesis devoted wholly to a Russian author.) They also discussed Plates thesis, in which she planned to write about Joyce.

  April was an even more important month in Plath’s literary life. Seventeen published her poem “Carnival Nocturne.” On the 10th, she attended a reading given by W. H. Auden at Sage Hall. One of England’s most respected poets, Auden was serving as a visiting Neilson Professor at Smith for the spring term. Obviously consumed by his thoughts—or perhaps transported into his own world by the alcohol he was rumored to abuse—Auden had often been sighted strolling about campus in his bedroom slippers. Thin, big-headed, gray-haired, he was perfect, according to Plath—not just because of his writerly appearance but because of his poetry. During the reading, Plath sat enthralled; in Auden she had discovered her “God.” Afterwards, as she walked back to Lawrence with Gordon, whom she had run into at the reading, she referred to Auden as an angel. Days passed, seven of which she spent sick in the infirmary, before, on the 24th, Russell Lynes of Harpers purchased, for one hundred dollars, three poems— “Doomsday” and “To Eva Descending the Stair,” the villanelles The New Yorker had rejected, and “Go Get the Goodly Squab.” Three days later, The Smith Review appointed Plath editor-in-chief for the coming year. That same day, she enjoyed Auden’s visit to Chase’s Modern Poetry. In Chase’s living room, while he spoke about a number of subjects, he theorized that Caliban is the “natural bestial projection,” Ariel the “creative imagination.” Finally, at the end of the month, the telegram for which Plath had been hoping arrived. Signed Marybeth Little, it read:

  HAPPY TO ANNOUNCE YOU HAVE WON A MADEMOISELLE

  1953 GUEST EDITORSHIP. YOU MUST BE AVAILABLE FROM

  JUNE 1 THROUGH JUNE 26. PLEASE WIRE

  COLLECT IMMEDIATELY WHETHER OR NOT YOU ACCEPT

  AND IF YOU WANT HOTEL RESERVATIONS. GIVE MEANS

  AND COST OF TRANSPORTATION BETWEEN HERE AND

  HOME IN SEPARATE WIRE IF NECESSARY.

  The accolades continued in May. Plath’s Press Board articles appeared regularly; The Smith Review printed three villanelles, the two Harpers had bought and “Mad Girl’s Love Song"; and Olive Prouty wrote to congratulate her on her successes and to invite her, Warren, and Aurelia to tea. The month’s only source of frustration came from boyfriends. Beginning on May 1, Ray Wunderlich, a Columbia Medical School student whom she had met at The Belmont, treated her to a trip to Manhattan. She may have expected Ray to try to seduce her (she jokingly wrote to Warren that she was afraid he might), but nothing of a sexual nature occurred. On Friday, after they had supper at La Petite Maison and saw The Crucible, they went to Delmonico’s and stayed until five in the morning. On Saturday afternoon, they attended Carmen—Plath’s first opera; later, they ate supper at the Gloucester House before seeing Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real, which Plath described as surreal and shocking. Perhaps because of this trip, Sylvia became disillusioned with Mike, whom she visited on the weekend of May 9 at Yale. She now considered him emotionally insecure and overly concerned about his own problems, never anyone else’s. Yet the most disturbing news of the month involved Dick, who was operated on for tuberculosis. (A twenty-stitch scar would be left under his left shoulder blade.) Though she felt concern for Dick, she became angry at his mother who was not happy over Sylvia’s refusal to accept a summer waitressing job that had been lined up for her in a town near Ray Brook. The purpose of the job was clear: if she were close to Dick, she could see him regularly. But how could she turn down a Mademoiselle guest editorship? To pass up Manhattan for a waitressing job near Saranac was nothing short of absurd.

  Sylvia’s only real woriy centered on money. The $150 Mademoiselle paid for one month’s work would be a fraction of what she needed to earn over the summer. Also, if, as planned, she attended Harvard Summer School beginning in July—she wanted to take Frank O’Connor’s fiction-writing class—she would have no time for a lucrative summer job. So, she decided she would just have to supplement her Mademoiselle salary by selling her own writing—one of the stories she hoped to write in O’Connor’s class, an article about her New York experience, or the ten-thousand-word pulp piece, “I Lied for Love,” that she had cranked out in April in hopes of selling it to True Story.

  May was hectic for Plath, in part because Mademoiselle required her to start two assignments early. One was an article about five young poets—George Steiner, William Burford, Alastair Reid, Anthony Hecht, and Richard Wilbur, the last of whom she had met through his mother-in-law, Edna Ward, a friend of Aurelia’s. The other was a profile of Elizabeth Bowen, whom she interviewed on the 26th at the home of May Sarton at 14 Wright Street in Cambridge. Back at Smith, Plath prepared for her final exams, which she had to take early to get to New York by June 1. When the exams were done, she had earned her usual excellent grades: Modern Poetry, A; Creative Writing, A; and Milton, B + . (At present, Plath ranked first in her class.) Also, the college awarded her two prestigious prizes for poetry, the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize and the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize. On the 29th, the day the Daily Hampshire Gazette ran the article “Smith Correspondent for Gazette Honored,” which detailed Plath’s upcoming stint at Mademoiselle, Sylvia returned home for two days to pack and to write her piece on Bowen. Finally, on May 31, she boarded the train for Manhattan, where she was to spend twenty-six days that would change her life forever.

  5

  In the aftermath of World War II, New York City was booming. Business had never been better, and when the United Nations decided to locate its headquarters on the East River, the city could claim to be the most influential in the world. Day and night Manhattan never stopped moving. Trains rattled below street level and along elevated tracks one story or more above ground. At rush hour, yellow cabs, cars, and buses crowded the streets and avenues, some still boasting trolley tracks or cobblestone paving. And everywhere you turned you saw row upon row of skyscrapers, new steel-and-glass boxes rising up amid the pre-war stone buildings. Not only did New York attract a constant flow of tourists, but by the early fifties it had became a mecca for artists and intellectuals. Writers and academics settled on the Upper West Side, because of its low rents and proximity to Columbia University. Sculptors and painters congregated in Greenwich Village; a group of abstract expressionists led by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman emerged to capture world attention and be acclaimed as the New York School. George Balanchine choreographed dances. Joe DiMaggio played for the Yankees. In 1953, the city replaced existing mayor Vincent Impellittei with Robert F. Wagner, Jr. The former had taken over for William O’Dwyer, who, implicated in several city government scandals, had been quickly appointed by the President as ambassador to Mexico. But this was not the only political scandal that demanded the attention of New Yorkers in the early fifties. A second one proved considerably more sensational. International in scope, it involved spying, Russia, and a married couple named Rosenberg.

  Victorian, stately, ornate, the Barbizon Hotel for Women, where Mademoiselle put up its guest editors, stood on the corner of Lexington Avenue and Sixty-third Street, in the middle of Manhattan’s Upper East Side. A fixture of the neighborhood since 1927, through the years the hotel had been a favor
ite of young women attending Seven Sisters schools. Stepping from the taxi she had caught at the train station, Sylvia headed for the hotel. After she checked in, she rode the elevator to the thirteenth floor and walked down the hall to the group of small, single rooms reserved for seventeen of the guest editors. (Three had arranged private lodgings.) In her room, which contained a bed, bureau, and chairs but no bath, since the girls shared one at the end of the hall, Sylvia took in her view of the Third Avenue elevated train, the tops of buildings, rooftop gardens, and a slice of the East River. Later, once she had unpacked, Sylvia mingled with the other girls, most of whom had now arrived. The other guest editors were: Janet Wagner from Knox College; Laurie Totten, Syracuse University; Candy Bolster, Bryn Mawr; Carol LeVarn, Sweet Briar; Betty-Jo Boyle, Allegheny College; Anne Burnside, University of Maryland; Neva Nelson, San Jose State University; Anne Shawber, Northwestern University; Laurie Glazer, University of Michigan; Malinda Edgington, Miami University; Eileen McLaughlin, Pratt Institute; Dinny Lain, Stephens College; Gloria Kirshner, Barnard College; Ruth L. Abramson, University of Pennsylvania; Grace Macleod, University of Oklahoma; Margaret Affleck, Brigham Young University; Nedra Anderwert, Washington University; Madelyn Mathers, University of Washington; and Del Schmidt, Skidmore College. These young women, students in some of the country’s better schools, were bright, ambitious, highly motivated. They reflected Sylvia’s own talents and motivations in many ways. But over the next four weeks one difference would emerge. In coming to know her fellow guest editors, Sylvia learned that they did not feel the same pressure to excel intellectually as she did. Though smart, they had been encouraged by their schools and families, at least more than she had, to express their emotions.

  One timely topic of conversation among the young women was, of course, the impending execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In a front-page trial that had ended in March 1951, the Rosenbergs, accused of spying for the Soviet Union, had been found guilty and sentenced to die in the electric chair. Because their appeals had been denied and President Eisenhower had refused all pleas for clemency, the executions were scheduled for this June. Excited to be in Manhattan yet strangely anxious about the Rosenbergs’ imminent death, Sylvia slept restlessly her first night at the Barbizon. Early the next morning, she ate breakfast (the hotel coffee shop became a favorite haunt of the girls) and walked the handful of blocks to 575 Madison Avenue, the address of Mademoiselle’s offices. Upstairs, on the sixth floor, Sylvia and the other guest editors, most of whom wore hats and gloves to accessorize their “business” dresses, gathered in the conference room for a meeting that convened at nine o’clock.

  Following Marybeth Little’s opening remarks, Editor-in-Chief Betsy Talbot Blackwell took over. A diminutive, pretty woman who was “so tightly corseted that she had difficulty walking in her little heels,” as her copyeditor Sally Jenks remembers, Blackwell addressed the group, her trademark cigarette-smoker’s voice crackling. Speaking only briefly, she stressed that the girls should put “health before genius.” Then she introduced the other editors, two of whom were legendary. Fiction Editor Margarita G. Smith, the sister of Carson McCullers, headed a department known for publishing the first work of such authors as Ilona Karmet, William Goyen, and Truman Capote. More notorious than Smith was Managing Editor Cyrilly Abels. Immaculately groomed and seriously intellectual, Abels enjoyed close friendships with literary giants like Katherine Anne Porter and Dylan Thomas. On the job, she demanded that her staff meet every deadline even while they aspired for perfection. But just as memorable as her personality was her physical appearance. “She was something of a paradox,” Jenks recalls. “She had a lovely figure. A great sense of style when it came to dressing. But an ugly face. A face that I would prefer not to look at directly too long. Watery blue eyes and a pursed mouth. She wore blue, almost invariably, because it brought out the blue in her eyes. It transformed an ugly face, by my standards, into something not quite so difficult to look at.”

  After Blackwell, other editors spoke quickly. The meeting broke up at ten, and each girl proceeded to a conference with the editor to whom she had been assigned to work. For Sylvia, this meant reporting to Cyrilly Abels: even though she had requested guest fiction, Plath had been appointed guest managing editor. A former winner of the magazine’s fiction contest and a published short-story writer, Plath would have been natural for guest fiction, as would have Guest Health and Beauty Editor Dinny Lain, who was interested in writing prose and who would subsequently publish both fiction and nonfiction as Diane Johnson. That first morning, Sylvia immediately met with unpleasant news when Abels told her that her “Poets on Campus” would have to be rewritten in a style more appropriate to Mademoiselle. Once she had spent the rest of the morning beginning that rewrite, Sylvia had lunch alone with Blackwell and Abels at the Drake Room—an honor afforded her because of her guest-managing-editor status. In the afternoon, Sylvia left her rewriting long enough to be photographed. Holding a freshly cut red rose, she sat on a divan. As he had each of the other guest editors, the photographer posed her. “You always look as if you are going to cry when you are laughing,” he said at one point, and Sylvia broke into tears. “I too was on the verge of crying,” remembers Neva Nelson, another guest editor. “The photographer was very concerned with himself, explaining that he was a delicate creature and used to only the best equipment and top models and was working under terrible conditions.”

  Monday’s pace set the tone for the week. When she was not working in the office, she attended a fashion, show at the Hotel Roosevelt and a tour of Richard Hudnut’s Fifth Avenue salon. But for the most part, Sylvia, whose typing-table desk sat next to Abels’s regular-size one, remained at 575 Madison to finish her “Poets on Campus” revision, write “mlle’s Last Word,” read manuscripts, and type rejection letters. She felt a certain amount of satisfaction—and no doubt learned a lesson about the inner workings of the publishing industry—on the day she typed out and signed a rejection letter turning down work by a member of the staff of The New Yorker.

  Her second week was just as busy. On separate occasions, she met Paul Engle, editor of that year’s O. Henry short-story collection and founder of The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, and Vance Bourjaily, a first-novelist who had just edited the premier issue of the literary magazine Discovery. One night, she attended a formal dance in the Saint Regis Hotel’s Terrace Room, where in the frigid ballroom—the hotel had turned the air-conditioning system up too high—she remarked how the tablecloths, chairs, and decorations were all colored pink, how the city lights glowed brightly beyond the windows, and how the music never ceased, since two bands alternated, one band descending into the stage floor as the other ascended and picked up with the same song. The week’s most memorable night began when, on their way to the New York City Ballet, the taxi in which Sylvia and three other guest editors were riding became stuck in traffic. As they sat there in the heat, a tall, pleasant-looking man approached the car and said, “Too many pretty girls for one taxi. I’m Art Ford, the disc jockey. Come in for a talk.” While Ford paid their fare, the girls piled out to join him for a drink. In the bar, Ford talked Carol LeVarn and Sylvia into meeting him after his radio show, which ended at three in the morning.

  At the ballet, Sylvia watched George Balanchine’s Metamorphoses and Scotch Symphony, Lew Christensen’s Con Amove, and Jerome Robbins’s Fanfare. Afterwards, she and a friend barhopped Third Avenue. Then she and Carol met Art Ford, who showed them Greenwich Village. The next morning, with almost no sleep, Sylvia dragged herself into the office for a full day of work.

  Over the past two weeks, the pace she had been keeping, and the unsettling nature of the events themselves (the evening with Art Ford had contained its share of sexual energy) had started to affect Sylvia. Neva Nelson heard her complain about how she hated the drudgery and the “ugly details” of her job, and Polly Weaver, a full-time Mademoiselle editor, stopped in Abels s office one afternoon to find Sylvia crying because she h
ad to work late. The next two weeks, though, would be even more disturbing.

  Because she did not have the money for the train fare to Andover, Sylvia missed Warren’s Exeter graduation exercises, which took place on the weekend of the 13th. Instead, she wrote her mother that her thoughts were with her and with Warren, who had received a full scholarship to Harvard for the fall. Sylvia stayed in New York and mailed in late her writing sample—“Sunday at the Mintons’”—in support of her application to O’Connor’s Harvard Summer School class.

  Her third week in New York was the most eventful—and traumatic. On Monday, the guest editors toured Living magazine; Tuesday, the offices of the advertising agency Batton, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn, where they were treated to a luncheon featuring crabmeat salad. That night, Sylvia dated Gary Kaminloff, a Wellesley friend now employed as a simultaneous interpreter at the United Nations. Back in her hotel room, she awoke nauseated in the middle of the night. Sure she was going to throw up, Sylvia rushed to the bathroom, only to find it full of other guest editors who were also sick. The crabmeat salad, they soon determined, was tainted and gave them all ptomaine poisoning. The next day, few girls made it to work. Later in the week, most felt well enough to tour the United Nations and the magazines Vanity Fair and Charm, go to the premiere of the Jane Wyman-Ray Milland movie Let’s Do It Again, and visit John Fredericks Hats.