Rough Magic Page 15
On June 19, a Friday, the Rosenbergs were executed as scheduled. “The morning of the executions, Sylvia met me in the Barbizon coffee shop looking very down,” Janet Wagner, a guest editor who had become a friend of Sylvia’s, would one day write.
She refused breakfast and argued about the appropriateness of the impending executions with one of the other girls. Suddenly she turned to me in disgust and asked how I could eat when the Rosenbergs were about to be fried just like the eggs on my plate. I immediately lost my appetite. Sylvia got up in a huff without eating at all, and I followed her out. Then the strangest thing happened. It was a very hot, humid day so we decided to go underground through the cool subway to work. Along the way, Sylvia kept asking me the time. Finally, at exactly nine o’clock, she looked at me in horror and said, “Now it’s happening,” meaning the Rosenberg execution. She stopped and held out her arms to me and there were, raising up on her arms from her wrists to her elbows, little bumps. Soon, they sort of bled together like welts from burns. Obviously, Sylvia was experiencing burns all over her arms in empathy for the Rosenbergs who were—she believed—being electrocuted at that moment. I was mortified yet, deep down, impressed with the eerie strangeness of it all. It somehow connected in my mind with the Stigmata of Christ that sometimes happens to very religious people. We continued on to the office in silence. Neither of us ever brought the subject up again, but it stuck vividly in my mind forever.
(In fact, Sylvia mistook the hour of the Rosenberg execution, which did not take place until evening.)
There had been other instances of Sylvia’s occasional weird behavior. The most telling had been what came to be known to some of the guest editors as “the Dylan Thomas episode.” That summer, Abels was negotiating with Thomas for the rights to his drama Under Milkwood. On the day Abels had lunch with Thomas unexpectedly, Guest Fiction Editor Candy Bolster accompanied Abels, because Sylvia was out of the office. When Sylvia found out, she fumed. For the next two days, she became obsessed with Thomas. She hung out in his favorite tavern and lurked in the hall by his hotel-room door. She never saw him, and eventually she gave up, but her distress seemed grossly exaggerated.
On the weekend after the Rosenberg execution, the guest editors went to a New York Yankees-Detroit Tigers baseball game at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. Also, on Saturday night, Sylvia and Janet attended, along with some of the other guest editors, a dance at the tennis club in Forest Hills, Queens. The climax of the evening occurred when a Peruvian United Nations delegate, with whom Sylvia had become friendly at the party, made a sexual advance to her. Fortunately, Sylvia and Janet were escorted back to Manhattan by Sylvia’s date, which the magazine had provided.
On Monday, Sylvia plunged herself into her last week in New York. She toured the New York Herald Tribune and Macy’s, went to George Bernard Shaw’s Misalliance at the Barrymore Theatre, and stopped by a farewell cocktail party at Mrs. Blackwell’s Fifth Avenue apartment. On Sylvia’s last day of work, Cyrilly Abels took her to lunch as a token of her appreciation. Since the August issue had been put “to bed,” Plath, the issue’s major contributor, could see the result of her month of work. Besides her interview with Bowen and “Poets on Campus,” she had contributed “mlle’s Last Word,” blurbs under pictures, and her poem “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” Also, she appeared in photographs—a group shot taken in Central Park and the portrait of her sitting on a divan holding a rose. Finally, her career was discussed in “Jobography,” and her handwriting was analyzed by expert Harry O. Teltscher. “Sylvia will succeed in artistic fields,” Teltscher wrote. “She has a sense of form and beauty and an intense enjoyment in her work.” But because the magazine would not list each girl’s weaknesses, the following was not printed: Sylvia must “[o]vercome superficiality, stilted behavior, rigidity of outlook.”
To celebrate her last Friday night in New York, Sylvia went on a date with Ray Wunderlich, her friend from Columbia Medical School. The date, which included a ride on the Staten Island Ferry, progressed without incident, but Sylvia’s last encounter with Janet Wagner was another matter. “Sylvia came in my room [at the very end of the month] and asked if she could have a dress to travel home in because she had thrown all hers off the roof of the hotel,” Wagner later wrote about an episode that Aurelia Plath would deny happened. “At the time I dismissed this as one of Sylvia’s fictions, said to attract attention. I offered her my old green print dirndl skirt and the white peasant blouse with the eyelet ruffles on the sleeves.” In return, Sylvia gave her her bathrobe, which she insisted Janet accept even though Janet did not want to.
By mid-afternoon on Saturday, Sylvia had checked out of the Bar-bizon and was on her way to .Wellesley by train. It had been an exhausting month. During her final week, she wrote her mother that at home she wanted to sleep, play tennis, and go sunbathing, for, though she had been excited by her month at Mademoiselle, she had also become severely depressed. Because of this, she hoped her mother would meet her at the station when her train^-"my coffin"—arrived. More than fatigue was plaguing Sylvia; she suffered from extreme disillusionment as well. The world had “split open . . . like a watermelon,” she wrote from New York, the city’s “guts” spilling out before her “gaping eyes.” She had been stunned by the callousness and promiscuity present in the city. When she discussed her feelings with fellow guest editors—and she did specifically with Laurie Totten, a Wellesley resident whose outlook on life coincided with hers—she realized just how disappointing the Mademoiselle experience had been. And, in an act of transference, she came to see herself as having disappointed others, especially those whom she regarded as her sponsors. Near the end of June, Sylvia wrote Wilbury Crockett a note in which she apologized at length for letting him down, much to Crockett’s puzzlement. Like so many other clues from the summer of 1953, her note to Crockett showed that Sylvia was descending into a dangerously unhappy mental state, the true severity of which no one in her life at that time fully identified.
6
In Wellesley, as she got off the train, Sylvia saw a welcome sight—her mother and Grammy waiting on the station platform. Tired and haggard, Sylvia hugged the two women, who were both glad to see her. Then the three of them loaded Sylvia’s baggage into the car. On their way home, they talked casually until Aurelia said to Sylvia, as if offering an aside, “By the way, Frank O’Connor’s class”—at Harvard Summer School—“is filled; you’ll have to wait for next summer before you register for it again.” Nervously, Aurelia glanced in the rearview mirror to see Sylvia’s reaction. Her mother may have chosen her words, tone, and occasion carefully, but Sylvia deduced the obvious: the class was not full, O’Connor had rejected her. All at once, seized by an overwhelming sense of panic, Sylvia could feel her face drain white and a knot of sickness form in her stomach. To any other student, the failure to be admitted to a writing workshop might have been a disappointment. For Sylvia, whose work as a writer and an intellectual had come to define her to herself, whose ambitions had been encouraged not just by the adoration of her mother, the respect of her friends, and the special treatment of the entire Smith faculty but by successes with publication practically unprecedented for a person her age, the effect was alarming. It was as if a major portion of the structure of her life, which she had worked so hard to construct, had suddenly eroded.
Over the rest of the weekend and the coming week, Sylvia tried to unwind from her year of studying, writing, and working capped by her singular month in New York—and to accept O’Connor’s rejection. She went on a picnic with Marcia Brown in Cambridge, on the banks of the Charles River; dated Gordon Lameyer, who was home awaiting his enlistment in the navy’s Officer Candidate School—one afternoon they read aloud Joyce’s Finnegans Wake—but mostly she debated with herself whether, now that she could not take O’Connor’s class, she should even go to Harvard Summer School, which began on July 6. (On the partial scholarship Harvard had granted her, she could have chosen from many other subjects.) As she wrote an entry in her
journal that she titled “Letter to an Over-grown, Over-protected, Scared, Spoiled Baby,” she weighed the pros and cons. Finally, she concluded: “I AM NOT GOING TO HARVARD SUMMER SCHOOL.” Instead, she would remain in Wellesley, study shorthand with her mother, and write on her own, even though she felt terrified by the latter since she feared she might fail.
During that first week home, however, Sylvia found she could not focus her attention, could not—and this disturbed her most—write. In the backyard, while she sunbathed on a lounge chair, she could not concentrate enough on a book to comprehend the meaning of its sentences. She just stared at the pages. One particular book she could not read was Ulysses, which she needed to finish, because she still intended to write her senior thesis on Joyce. Often, Sylvia wandered about the house in a daze. Finally, she confided in her mother that she had lost her imagination and that she had let down those people who had championed her most, although she did not reveal one thought forming in her mind: she wanted to die.
During her second week home, Sylvia continued her visits with Gordon, who, after joining the navy, was now booked to leave for candidate school in Newport, Rhode Island, in mid-July. At Gordon’s mother’s apartment, they spent most days and some evenings together: they listened to classical music, discussed Finnegans Wake, and marveled at recordings of Dylan Thomas reading his poetry. To Gordon, who left as planned on the 13th, Sylvia maintained a carefree, “golden-girl” persona, but, to Dick, she had shown her disquiet. In a letter in early July, she complained about her severe unhappiness; Dick responded on the 7th by saying that, even though he was “saddened” by her “intense unrest,” he wanted her to remember that it was “one thing to be concerned with aliveness and sincerity and creativity, and quite another to remain more or less deeply troubled and rootless and uncertain.”
Following Gordons departure, Sylvias depression worsened. Writing in her journal on the 14th, she sounded dangerously disturbed. “All right, you have gone the limit,” she wrote, adding that all of her friends were either married or “being creative.” “You saw a vision of yourself in a straight-jacket, and a drain on the family, murdering your mother in actuality, killing the edifice of love and respect built up over the years in the hearts of other people.” One subject that occupied her subconscious, which she did not write about in her journal—she could not admit this until she entered therapy years later—was her father. Dead now almost thirteen years—how she remembered The Tempest’s “Ariel’s Song,” which began “Full fathom five thy father lies"—he haunted her memories.
Bored and unable to write, Sylvia searched out distractions. She gave up shorthand after four lessons, because the squiggly characters confused her. At her mother’s suggestion, she took a mornings-only part-time nurse’s-aide job at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital; the staflF placed her in charge of feeding patients too weak or too near death to feed themselves. But, despite her activities, she sank deeper into a depression. She still could not sleep. She went to the local drugstore to buy popular psychology books, in which she found ample evidence that she was “losing my mind.” And she desperately believed that, if she had a nervous breakdown, her family would be ruined financially. One morning, after Gordon left for candidate school, as Sylvia dressed in the bedroom she again shared with her mother (Warren had come to Wellesley for the summer and taken over his old room), Aurelia noticed partially healed scars on Sylvia’s legs. Questioning her, Aurelia got the answer: “I just wanted to see if I had the guts!” Then Sylvia became near-frantic. “Oh, Mother, the world is so rotten! I want to die! Let’s die together!”
Taking her in her arms, Aurelia tried to calm her. Within hours, Aurelia had Sylvia in the office of Dr. Francesca Racioppi, the Plath family physician, who strongly recommended that Sylvia consult the psychiatrist Dr. J. Peter Thornton. After he had seen Sylvia at home on the 18th, Thornton advised Aurelia to bring her into his Commonwealth Avenue office in Boston on Tuesday, and following that appointment Thornton scheduled another.
One night over the weekend of the 25th, Gordon, home on leave, ate supper with Sylvia at Elmwood Road. During the evening—indeed, throughout the whole weekend—Sylvia appeared so like her old self that Gordon would never have guessed that she had lately been considering suicide. On July 27, the Monday after Gordon left, Sylvia saw Thornton a third time, again in his office. Then, Thornton reported his diagnosis to Aurelia: Sylvia suffered from a severe depression that would leave her hovering on the brink of nervous collapse unless she received the medical treatment believed at that time to intervene most dramatically with emotional distress—electroshock therapy. Aurelia, who felt more alone now than she had in all the years since Otto’s death, hesitated at first. She considered the doctor too young and could not forget Sylvia’s comment that he reminded her of an ex-boyfriend she didn’t care for. But eventually she gave in. As soon as he could make arrangements, Thornton told her, the sessions would begin on an outpatient basis at the Valley Head Hospital. Full hospitalization did not seem necessary.
That evening, the Plaths—Aurelia, Warren, and Sylvia—visited Olive Higgins Prouty’s. They strolled through her gardens, drank Old Fashioneds on the terrace, and ate supper. But they did not openly discuss Sylvia’s depression and impending shock treatments. On the sly, Aurelia did confess to Prouty—to quote letters Prouty would subsequently write—that Sylvia “seemed deeply depressed because she could not write or do any constructive work on her senior thesis,” and that she (Aurelia) feared Sylvia “was having what might be a nervous breakdown.” Sylvia, though, did not talk about her sickness with anyone besides her immediate family and doctors. Not even Gordon, to whom she felt closer now than ever.
On the 29th, Sylvia’s reluctance to discuss her depression became academic. On that day she received her first round of electroshock therapy, which caused her to cease communication with other people almost entirely. The day’s routine would be repeated for all future sessions. A neighbor drove Aurelia and Sylvia to Valley Head Hospital, after which Aurelia, at the doctor’s request, sat with her friend in a waiting area while Sylvia underwent the procedure in a treatment room. Metal probes were placed on Sylvia’s temples so that powerful dosages of electricity—"shocks"—could be shot through her body. Following the session, the staff returned Sylvia to Aurelia, and the two of them left the hospital. On that first day and on three additional days, Thornton oversaw the session. At some point in August, he went on vacation and left a Dr. Tillotson to oversee several more sessions.
In later years, standard medical procedure would demand that doctors administer electroshock therapy only after the patient was given a muscle relaxant and a general anesthetic. Also, a doctor or a nurse would stay with the patient during the recovery period, to provide support and counseling. In the case of Sylvia Plath, none of this happened. Because she had taken no muscle relaxant, her body was rigid with fear. Because she had received no anesthesia, she was, in effect, nearly electrocuted. Because no doctor or nurse accompanied her in recovery, she experienced a painful, numbing loneliness as she lay on the table by herself. With her psyche ripped open by raw wattage, she was more vulnerable than she had ever been. And to whom could she turn in this ultimate moment of need? No one. Rather, she became haunted by thoughts of abandonment. In theory, electroshock therapy lowers a patient’s level of anxiety by interfering with the brain’s normal functions and by creating temporary memory loss. Yet, in a very real sense, Plath’s level of anxiety increased with electroshock therapy, if for no other reason than the manner in which her doctors conducted the sessions.
As a side effect of shock therapy, Sylvias sleeplessness turned into acute insomnia. In August, night after night passed during which she did not sleep at all. It seemed she had become immune to the sleeping pills she now took. By the third week in August, as she continued her shock treatments, Sylvia had not slept all month. Now desperate, Aurelia began putting the sleeping pills under lock and key in the family “safe”—actually a metal lockbox that she k
ept in the bedroom she shared with Sylvia.
On the night of August 21, Sylvia took two sleeping pills (out of a new bottle of fifty) and slept fretfully on and off through the night. The next day, Saturday, she felt well enough to go on a double date to the beach with Dick Linden, an acquaintance of Gordon’s. As the two couples lay in the afternoon sun, Sylvia questioned her friends about the best way to commit suicide. At that time, Dick and the other couple did not take Sylvia seriously. Yet, on this day, as she would later tell Eddie, she did flirt with suicide: she swam out into the ocean alone and tried to drown herself. She was saved, she said, because she finally could not force her body to give in to the destructive wishes of her mind. Later that night, the two couples went dancing at The Meadows. Nothing unusual happened.
August 23rd seemed to pass uneventfully, but Sylvia—in truth— had reached a low point. After an exhausting academic year, after a disillusioning month in Manhattan during which she came to see herself as a failure, after enduring the insult of O’Connor’s rejection, after being subjected to poorly executed electroshock therapy—which she feared might continue—Sylvia decided that she did not want to live. On Monday, August 24, around 2:00 P.M., she waited for her mother to leave with a friend to watch a film of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, and for her grandparents, just returned from a vacation, to go sit in the backyard (Warren was at his summer job). Sylvia dressed in a blouse and a pair of dungarees, broke into the metal lockbox, and, with the sleeping-pill bottle and a blanket in hand, proceeded downstairs to the dining room. There, against a bowl of flowers on the dining-room table, she propped a note: “Have gone for a long walk. Will be home tomorrow.” Then, in the kitchen, she drew herself a small jar of water at the sink, crossed to the door leading to the cellar, and, shutting the door behind her, descended the stairs. On the other side of the cellar, she put down the blanket, water, and pills long enough to shove to one side the stack of firewood that blocked a tiny two-and-a-half-foot entrance to the crawl space under the front porch. Next Sylvia gathered up the blanket, water, and pills, put them beside the firewood, and hoisted herself up into the space—it was about five feet off the ground—before she restacked the wood so that it appeared untouched. Finally, secure in the crawl space, she lay down. Wrapping the blanket around her, she opened the pill bottle. Because she had only taken two, forty-eight pills remained—more than enough. One by one, Sylvia placed each pill on her tongue and washed it down. She did not know how many were left in the bottle—there were some—when eventually the pills she had swallowed took over and she quietly passed from consciousness.