Sylvia Plath in New York: 'pain, parties and
work' by Andrew Wilson
Sylvia Plath travelled to
New York City in June 1953 full of excitement and ambition about a guest
editorship at Mademoiselle magazine. But soon her anticipation turned to
suffering. She was to return home a changed person.
Sylvia Plath leaves her
home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, on her way to New York City. Photograph:
Contrasto/eyevine
While studying at Smith College
in Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath had been
submitting assignments to Mademoiselle magazine
and secured one of 20 month-long placements starting in June 1953. She knew
winning the guest editorship was an important step towards fulfilling her
literary aspirations. So far, success had come easily: Sylvia had published
many short stories and not only won two poetry prizes from Smith – the Ethel Olin Corbin prize and the Elizabeth
Babcock award, which netted her $120 – but she had also been commissioned by
Mademoiselle to interview Elizabeth Bowen in Cambridge. She just hoped, as she
wrote to [her brother] Warren, that the world wasn't destroyed by war before
both of them were able to enjoy the fruits of their labours. An implosion –
rather than an explosion – was indeed on the horizon. Sylvia's world was about
to be nearly destroyed, not by an external enemy but by forces much closer to
home.
On 31 May 1953, Sylvia
travelled by train from her home in Wellesley to New York City. Accompanying
her on the journey to Manhattan was fellow Mademoiselle guest editor
Laurie Totten, a junior at Syracuse University. "We lived only two blocks
apart in Wellesley and so, when I heard that she had won it too, we got in
touch and travelled to New York together," says Laurie. "We hit it
off right away, but I must say I thought she was a typical co-ed – at that
first meeting there was nothing remarkable about her."
At Grand Central Station,
the two young women – with the help of a couple of soldiers they had enlisted
to carry their suitcases – fought their way through what Sylvia described [in
her journal] as a rather threatening crowd. The yellow cab honked its way
through the glass and steel canyons of Manhattan and pulled up outside the
Barbizon, a women-only hotel on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 63rd Street.
On the morning of her first
day at Mademoiselle, she dressed in a smart suit, but just as she was
about to leave her room she suffered a nose bleed; drops of blood splattered on
to her outfit, forcing her to change into a brown dress. From the Barbizon, she
walked the eight blocks to the offices of Mademoiselle at 575 Madison
Avenue. At 9am, in the magazine's dark-green and pink conference room, she met
the magazine's legendary editor, Betsy Talbot Blackwell – "the force which
propels and inspires the magazine forward" – who had been with Mademoiselle
since 1935. "She took plain young women to New York, where she put them in
stylish clothes, restyled their hair and makeup and then put their pictures in
her magazine," wrote one observer.
According to Edith Raymond
Locke, who worked on Mademoiselle as associate fashion editor at the
time, Blackwell saw the magazine as something that "nourished young women
inside and out" and indeed her first words of welcome to the 20 guest
editors on that June morning included a plea to put "health before
genius".
Sylvia Plath with her two sons.
In many ways, the New York
offered by Mademoiselle was like a stage set, an artificially
constructed world that Sylvia knew was a sham. On 10 June, Sylvia and her
fellow guest editors were invited to a formal party at the terrace room of the
St Regis Hotel on 55th Street and Fifth Avenue. On the surface, it was all
rather lovely – in the restaurant, with its ceiling painted the colours of a
sky at sunset, Sylvia enjoyed the music from two alternating bands. As each
course of her dinner – shrimp, chicken, salad, then parfait – was taken away
she was whisked on to the dance floor and, with a daiquiri in her hand, she
could look down from the roof terrace across the glittering skyline of
Manhattan. Yet there was something not right about the evening. For a start,
all the men, albeit young, handsome specimens, had been hired for the occasion
by the magazine. As she went on to write in The Bell Jar, from an
outside perspective a witness would assume she was having the time of her life.
Wasn't this the perfect example of the American Dream? For 19 years, a girl
from a poor background has lived in some nondescript town, wins a scholarship
to a top college and "ends up steering New York like her own private
car".
Sylvia Plath, aged three. Photograph: Contrasto/eyevine
The truth was more complex.
As Plath writes of her fictional persona, Esther [in The Bell Jar], she
wasn't capable of steering anything, let alone herself. She knew she should
have been excited about the month in New York, but there was something wrong
with her reactions. She felt hollow and lifeless and compared herself to the
calm centre of a tornado, "moving dully along in the middle of the
surrounding hullabaloo", she writes.
Sylvia maintained that she
enjoyed New York, yet the more time she spent in the city the more she realised
that she had led a relatively sheltered existence. In a letter to her brother,
whose graduation from Exeter in mid-June she couldn't attend because of lack of
funds, she compared her relatively simple and straightforward life at Smith to
the hyper-charged intensity of Manhattan, populated with people who seemed, to
paraphrase DH Lawrence in Women in Love, like "dead brilliant galls
on the tree of life".
In the same letter, Sylvia
said that, over the course of only a few weeks, she had witnessed the world
split open before her eyes and [it had] "spilt out its guts like a cracked
watermelon". The image had its roots in a physical purging that Sylvia
experienced as a result of ptomaine poisoning that she had contracted on 16
June, during a lunch at an advertising agency.
Sylvia described her time
in New York as a deadly mix of "pain, parties, work" and it's interesting
to speculate on the significance and source of her suffering. We know she
endured extreme discomfort – in addition to the food poisoning itself, the
treatment involved injections with hypodermic needles – and she found the heat
of the city in June oppressive and energy-sapping. The agony she wrote about in
this entry in her journal could refer to the anguish she felt when faced with a
city she found alienating and altogether too modern for her sensitive soul. In
a letter to her brother, she described one day in Manhattan when she got lost
on the subway, where she saw a number of beggars, disabled men with amputated
limbs, holding out cups for small change. She recalled what she had seen in the
zoo in Central Park and posited that the only thing that differentiated men
from the beasts was the fact that there were bars on the windows of the cages.
When she tried to think of
everything she had witnessed, and experienced, she felt like her mind would
split open. In the same letter to Warren, she also compared the train that
would take her home from New York to Wellesley to a coffin; and, although a
spirit of black humour runs through the lines, there is no doubt that by the
end of June Sylvia was feeling seriously disturbed.
What had she experienced to
make her feel so ill at ease? On 20 June, at a country club dance in Forest
Hills, she had met a Peruvian man, José Antonio La Vias, whom she described in
her journal as "cruel". She did not expand on this, nor did she
detail how his cruelty manifested itself. All we know, from the brief entries
she made on a 1953 calendar – which featured idyllic scenes of the cities and
landscape of Austria – is that Sylvia returned to his apartment on the East
Side. What happened there we will probably never know, but if we take The
Bell Jar as our guide it seems as though Sylvia could have been the victim
of a rape or a near rape.
Sylvia Plath as a child with her mother, Aurelia. Photograph:
Contrasto/eyevine
In the novel, Plath
provides a devastating description of a sexual assault at a country club in the
suburbs of New York involving Esther, her alter ego, and Marco, a wealthy
Peruvian, and a friend of disc jockey Lenny Shepherd. On their first meeting,
Esther cannot take her eyes off Marco's diamond tiepin, which he hands over to
her with the promise that, in exchange, he would perform some of kind of
service "worthy of a diamond". As he gives her the jewel, his fingers
digging into the underside of her arm, Esther realises that Marco is a
misogynist. "Women-haters were like gods: invulnerable and chock-full of
power," Plath writes. Later that night, Marco hits her, repeatedly calls
her a slut, rips off her dress and then forces himself upon her.
In the novel, Esther
manages to beat him off, but is left dirtied, humiliated and abused, and on her
return to the Amazon [the Barbizon] goes up to the roof of the hotel and throws
all her clothes off the parapet. As she stands there, in the hour before dawn,
she watches her outfits – the outward symbols of her false self – disappear
into the dark heart of Manhattan. "I heard she did do that – she went up
on to the roof of the Barbizon and threw her clothes off," says Ann
Burnside Love [fellow guest editor at Mademoiselle]. It wasn't just a
few items either, but "her entire wardrobe, dress by slip by gown, on the
last night of her residency there as a guest editor," she adds.
On her return from
"Babylon", as one of her Smith professors described New York, Sylvia
was met by her family at the station. Her mother described her as looking
"tired" and "unsmiling" and, as a result, Aurelia dreaded
telling her daughter the news that she said had come that same morning – that
Sylvia had not been accepted on to Frank O'Connor's short-story class at
Harvard summer school.
During the first few days
of July, she debated whether she should still go to Harvard and take another
subject, such as elementary psychology or O'Connor's 20th-century novel course.
Her main worry was the money, as she estimated that the experience would cost
her around $250. In her journal, she wrote again about the fact she did not
come from a rich family and how she only had limited resources to cover the
following year's expenses. She was also concerned that, if she did go to
Harvard to take another course – and, in effect, earn nothing over the summer –
it would reduce her chances of getting a good scholarship from Smith when she
returned in September. She resolved that, instead of going to Harvard, she
would read Joyce, whom she considered writing about for her thesis, and try and
write for Seventeen, Ladies' Home Journal, perhaps also the New
Yorker and Accent on Living.
Although she was tempted to
retreat from life, she realised she would have to force herself to live in as
an imaginative way as possible. Such a task required not only creative thinking
but some kind of clever strategy too.
Plath with Gordon Lameyer in 1954, around the time they were
unofficially engaged. Photograph: Lilly Library, Indiana University
She tried to take her mind
off her immediate anxieties by spending more time with [new boyfriend] Gordon
Lameyer, who was living with his mother in Wellesley while he waited to enrol
in the navy's Officer Candidate School in Newport. Sylvia and Gordon saw each
other almost every day for the next two weeks, often at his aunt's house in
Jaffrey Center, New Hampshire, listening to the symphonies of Beethoven and
Brahms and recordings of Frost, ee cummings and Dylan Thomas reading their own
poetry and ploughing their way through sections of Finnegans Wake.
"We both felt that Joyce's final work was a great compilation of enigmas,
a Chinese box, a labyrinthine puzzle, a Gordian knot which seemed impossible to
cut."
With Gordon, Sylvia acted
as though nothing was wrong and he had no inkling about the private hell his
girlfriend was suffering. By 6 July, she started to regret her decision not to
take one of the other courses at Harvard summer school and she felt trapped by
a stifling negativity that threatened to consume her. She recognised that she
was "sick" in her head and told herself that she had to stop thinking
about self-harming by cutting herself with razor blades, even the possibility
of ending it all. Her insomnia was so severe by 14 July that she was managing
to get only two hours' sleep a night. She was plagued by visions of ending up
in a straitjacket, locked away in a mental asylum, and felt so full of
murderous rage that she even considered killing her mother, with whom she was
sharing a room.
In "Tongues of
Stone" – an autobiographical short story she wrote in 1955 and which she
entered for the Mademoiselle fiction contest – Plath wrote of how her
main character lay in her bed listening to her mother's breathing, a sound so
annoying she felt like getting out of bed and strangling her. By doing so at
least she would stop the awful process of decay that she witnessed, something
that "grinned at her" like a "death's head".
On 15 July, when Sylvia
came downstairs, Aurelia noticed that her daughter had a couple of partially
healed scars on her legs. After being questioned about them, Sylvia told her
mother that she had gashed herself in an effort to see if she had the guts.
Then she took hold of Aurelia's hand and said: "Oh, Mother, the world is
so rotten! I want to die! Let's die together!"
It's significant that
Sylvia's psychological crisis manifested itself not only in a desire to end her
own life but also in a wish for her mother to die with her. Aurelia took her
daughter in her arms and tried to reassure her that she was simply exhausted
and that she really did have everything to live for. Within an hour, the two
women had booked an appointment with the family doctor, Francesca Racioppi, who
recommended immediate psychiatric counselling.
After a session with a
psychiatrist – whom Sylvia did not like and who soon left for vacation – she
was taken on by Dr Kenneth Tillotson. Tillotson recommended a course of
sleeping pills for his new patient. Perhaps it would also be a good idea if she
found a job that would take her mind off her own troubles? In theory, it sounded
like a good idea and, at first, Sylvia was pleased to help out each morning at
the Newton-Wellesley Hospital. One of her duties was to feed patients who were
too sick to do it for themselves. While she was there, Sylvia spoonfed her old
art teacher, Miss Hazelton, who was dying. In a letter to Gordon, which she
wrote on 23 July, she described the range of cases – children born with Down's
syndrome, old people suffering from senility, people who seemed healthy enough
but who returned to the hospital a few days later unable to recognise her.
The experience, she said,
gave her an insight into what we all could expect at the end of our lives. In The
Bell Jar, Esther gets a job at the local hospital on the suggestion of her
mother – the cure for thinking too much about oneself was to help someone else
worse off than you – and how, one day, she causes a scene by mixing up all the
patients' flowers in the maternity ward. After the women turn on her, she flees
the hospital, never to return.
Star struck: Sylvia Plath interviews the novelist Elizabeth Bowen for
Mademoiselle magazine, Cambridge, MA, May 1953. Photograph: Black Star/eyevine
Sylvia did not last long as
an employee at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital either, because soon she was
receiving treatment there as an outpatient. Gordon noticed that "she began
to buy paperbacks on psychology at a local drugstore. Retreating into herself,
she felt she was gradually but progressively losing her mind. She confessed
that it was a dangerous thing to have so little knowledge." Gordon also
recalled that, one weekend in late July, when the two of them were necking she
accused him of being "lascivious". Did the intimate contact between
them bring back memories of the sexual assault she had suffered in New York?
"It seemed to me that Sylvia, being very forthright and loving to play
roles, pretended to being more sensuously involved than she was willing to
be," says Gordon. "Like Zelda before she was married to Scott
Fitzgerald, Sylvia enjoyed giving the impression that she was sexually more
knowledgeable than she actually was."
In order to try to shake
her out of depression, Dr
Tillotson prescribed a course of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) beginning at
the end of July. Sylvia was driven to the hospital by Aurelia's friend Betty
Aldrich, who lived across the street. "I remember my mother telling me
that Sylvia really hated to go, but she knew she had to," says Peter Aldrich.
"Sometimes Aurelia had to force her into the car. I thought, 'What are
they doing to her?' I had visions of an electric chair. My only glimpse of her
after a treatment was one day when she was coming out of my mother's car and
she seemed uncharacteristically lifeless. I thought, 'That's not Sylvia. What
have they done to her?' It was almost as if the life had been sucked out of
her."
The treatment had been
developed in the 1930s, when Italian neuropsychiatrists Ugo Cerletti and Lucio
Bini had carried out a series of experiments on animals to induce seizures by
the application of electric shocks. In 1937, the doctors tested their new
technique on a person and by the 1940s the procedure had been introduced to
America and Britain as a treatment for depression. At this time, ECT was often
administered in an "unmodified" form – without the use of muscle
relaxants – and, as a result, patients suffered from convulsions so severe that
dislocations or fractures occasionally occurred. Sylvia's own experience, as related
in The Bell Jar and in her poetry, reads like something from a modern
gothic novel; later, Olive Higgins Prouty [the novelist and poet] would take Dr
Tillotson to task for the badly managed ECT, blaming him for Sylvia's suicide
attempt.
In "Sylvia's
flamboyant imagination, the EST [electric shock treatment] gear resembled some
kind of medieval torture equipment," says Gordon Lameyer. "Because
this psychiatrist did not give Sylvia a drug or a shot to anaesthetise her
before exposing her to this gear, Sylvia felt so traumatised by these EST
electrodes that were attached to her temples that she felt, not so
irrationally, as if she were being electrocuted for some unknown crime."
Sylvia believed that she was being punished, but for what? What had she done?
Had she been too ambitious? Set her sights too high? Was it because she was a
woman and a writer?
This is an edited extract.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/feb/02/sylvia-plath-young-new-york-andrew-wilson
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