Late December 1952
When Sylvia cartwheeled
into the snowbank
she believed her fractured fibula
signified the end of us.
Sylvia pays for this symbol,
hobbles around campus for months,
recovers from her fall. Still bedridden,
I recover from the fall of us.
Sylvia does crazy things
to harm and sicken herself,
to extricate herself from situations
that frighten and exhaust her.
Sylvia treats me like a boring, ailing aunt.
She perplexes me, I am paper
perfect, what else could she want
in a mate? Bonne chance!
I hope she enjoys her hard-won
convalescence, and hope
she doesn't pray too hard that it lasts.
Sickness is a curse, not a cure.
When Sylvia visited Dick in the sanatorium over Christmas break 1952, she tried skiing for the first time. Dick was still very ill and laid up in bed, so Sylvia faced the slopes alone. She attempted a hill that was too advanced for her novice skills and broke her leg. An account of this incident appears in Sylvia's journals and in her novel, The Bell Jar.
Pretty, Tall, Crippled
Gordon Lameyer, a boy Sylvia dated in college
February 7, 1953
She descends the stairs
on crutches like a crippled
old man and I sigh, think,
Boy, this date's gonna be
loads of fun.
Sylvia speaks
as though she's unloading
an automatic rifle, one idea
shoots after another,
until every thought her mind holds
has been discharged
and she finds herself with nowhere to run.
My mother more or less
instigated this date,
so I expected Sylvia
to be pretty and intelligent,
and fairly dull.
But she shines
metallic. She admires me,
which, crutch or not,
jumps her a few stairs
in my estimation.
She writes letters
as though we will
get “pinned,”
as though fission
pulls us together.
“We'll see more of each other,”
I tell her.
We'll see,
I tell myself.
Gordon and Sylvia dated seriously from this meeting well into the summer of 1954. Sylvia was not, however, exclusive with him. When she became preoccupied with Richard Sassoon in November 1954, Gordon drifted from her love life.
Pleasure
Marybeth Little, Mademoiselle's College Board
interviewer and judge
April 1953
We are pleased
to inform you
that you have won
a 1953 Mademoiselle guest editorship.
Please inform us
if you accept and will come to New York
for the month of June.
We are pleased
with you—
your decorum, your
fashion, your editorial
eye. You exemplify
the Mademoiselle girl.
We are pleased
to have you role model
and model our fall must-haves.
We think you
have that special something,
that “It” factor,
and, oh, you craft fine sentences too.
We are, after all,
pleased with you
but can't pay you much.
We'll connect you, put you in touch
with prominent writers,
New York culture, and men.
We'll house you at the Barbizon
Hotel. You have a bright future,
this we can tell.
We are pleased
to have you swell our staffs,
type copy, edit paragraphs.
Socialize and represent
the magazine's ethics and intent.
We are pleased, Sylvia,
please don't disappoint, Sylvia,
accept this appointment.
You are a star, Sylvia,
in the vast sky of American girls.
So be worthy, Sylvia,
of this stellar opportunity.
Twenty guest editors were selected each year, bright, ambitious women from the country's best colleges. Mademoiselle housed the girls in New York City's Barbizon Hotel for Women. Each girl was expected to write two articles for the magazine and perform editorial assistant duties, but one of the main goals of the program was to expose these young women to New York culture. They had very full and obligatory social calendars. The pay for the month's work was $150. Sylvia's guest editorship ran from June 1 to June 26, 1953.
Excellence
Cyrilly Abels, Managing Editor, Mademoiselle
June 1953
Impeccable.
Error free. On time.
I select Sylvia to be
my managing guest editor,
under my command.
I know
she can be pushed
to my standards.
Unlike the other girls
she rigors, a crossword
puzzler
who fills in all the blanks
correctly in blue ink,
no erasures. She sits
at her desk, changing
typewriter ribbons
after hours. Her Achilles'
heel that box of Kleenex
and those brown watery eyes,
but she holds her tears
around me.
I will suffer
none of these college girls
blubbering or blundering.
They are privileged,
must earn
their A+ status with me.
My hemline's exact,
cuticles clipped,
hair tucked smartly
behind my ears.
This magazine
is us. We must present.
I instill this in Sylvia.
She regards me
with glass eyes
and nods agreement.
She is accustomed
to a woman's high
expectations, to do
well by the family name.
She will make Plath
synonymous with greatness.
To be average
is to hibernate—
a lair neither I nor my staff
dare enter.
Mademoiselle Managing Editor Cyrilly Abels “was notorious for being immaculately groomed, seriously intellectual, and she enjoyed close friendships with literary giants like Katherine Anne Porter and Dylan Thomas.”—from Rough Magic by Paul Alexander
Cyrilly Abels is the role model for Jay Cee in The Bell Jar. She and Sylvia stayed in touch throughout Sylvia's life and would have lunch whenever Sylvia visited New York City. Cyrilly published Sylvia's poem “Parallax,” which won an honorable mention in Mademoiselle's 1954 Dylan Thomas poetry contest.
Stigmata
Janet Wagner, a fellow Mademoiselle guest editor
with whom Sylvia became friends
June 1953
Raised red bumps
that melded within a minute
into a crimson blush of shame,
a burning of the arms.
Sylvia feels the Rosenbergs'
electrocution as if they were relatives.
She burns with them, identifies
with spies. She eats nothing all day.
She stalks Dylan Thomas,
haunts his hangouts, but never
meets the man. She flings
her clothes, every garment
out the window of the Barbizon.
Asks me for an outfit
t
o wear on the train ride home.
I give her my old green dirndl skirt
and white peasant blouse
with eyelet ruffled sleeves.
She shoves her ratty blue
bathrobe into my arms. Insists
I take it. Tears spill
out of her eyes as she thrusts
the terry cloth at me
and she boards her train.
After that last New York
day, I never see Sylvia Plath again.
Janet Wagner is fictionalized in The Bell Jar primarily as the sweet, farm-fresh Betsy from Kansas, but in reality she had a little bit of the more worldly Doreen character in her as well. It is Betsy who gives the novel's lead character, Esther Greenwood, clothes to wear home after Esther empties her suitcase out the hotel window.
Shock Treatment
Aurelia Plath
June 1953
Grammy and I shift weight
heel to heel
on the platform.
We have been standing here
for over an hour
awaiting Sivvy's train.
Sylvia carries no baggage
but looks as though
her purse is filled with boulders.
No jaunt to her step, just a grimace
of resignation and relief
when she spies us. I erupt
into a pink, painted-on grin.
A vacancy blinks
behind her eyes like Sylvia's
checked herself into
a strange roadside motel
in the middle of nowhere,
surrounded by vagrants
but utterly alone. I smooth
her hair, but she's cold to my touch.
I must form my words
carefully. She fugues today
lowered into a pit I recognize.
When I tell her
the summer fiction class
at Harvard is full,
she sees the transparency
of my words, that she was not
accepted.
She slumps into her blanket
of inadequacy. The summer air's
hot and foggy on the windows,
but our car ride home
rattles and freezes my bones.
Sylvia's backseat tears icicle to her face.
Sylvia's anguish over not being accepted into the summer fiction course Frank O'Connor taught at Harvard is chronicled in her journal entry of July 6, 1953: “You could be taking O'Connor's novel, etc.—but why blind yourself by taking course after course: when if you are anybody, which you are no doubt not, you should not be bored, but should be able to think, accept, affirm—and not retreat into a masochistic mental hell where jealousy and fear make you want to stop eating. …”
Stalemate
Dick Norton, Sylvia's on-and-off college boyfriend
July 1953
Sylvia makes me sadder
than my TB.
Stymied like a fly
stuck in amber, she writes
that she cannot write,
confides in her mother
that her muse has retired,
abandoned her, left her
with no imagination, just
nerve ends of worry.
Unquiet swarms
her brain. She gallivants
about New York City,
dines at 21 with the literary elite,
but cannot endure
a single blemish—her skin
is that sensitive.
Not being accepted
into Harvard summer school
makes her feel as though
her whole face is marred.
She may know real pain
one day and appreciate
how good she has it.
I fret for Sylvia.
She appears anchored
to the idea of sinking,
which is silly when she so clearly
soars above almost everyone.
Still, inertia withers
the bones. I know this too well.
I advise her to break her stasis.
Dick and Sylvia were writing letters to each other at this time.
Shock Treatment
Aurelia Plath
July 29, 1953
I hold my baby in my arms,
her legs scarred by razor
just to test if she had the nerve
to drag the blade across her skin.
She begs me to die with her.
I schedule Sylvia an appointment
with a psychiatrist. He suggests
we shock her out of depression.
Metal probes attach
to her forehead. She is rigid,
alone in that room, prostrate
on the table, but we follow
the doctor's orders. I will not
be foolish with Sylvia as I was
with Otto. We will seek out
and listen to medical professionals
before it is too late.
Sylvia doesn't sleep. A return
to infancy, she cries and wakes
in the night. I lock her sleeping pills
away, distribute them judiciously,
as prescribed, even though Sylvia
begs for more. Sylvia's electrified—
pills or no pills, she struggles to shut her eyes.
Suicide Watch
Warren Plath
August 24-27, 1953
Sylvia has shielded herself
with a coffin lid as long as
I can remember. She vampires
under full moon, sleeps fifteen
hours or not a wink. My sister
of extremes, shifty as the moon,
Syl suns herself beachside
or rots in a dark cupboard.
She scares us like kids
on Halloween, wants to ghost
this home instead of live in it.
She leaves a note that she has gone
for a long walk and will return
tomorrow. But Mother knows better,
the lockbox of sleeping pills smashed.
Ambulance lights swirl our brains.
We phone the police, report her missing.
It seems to me Sylvia has been missing
since she returned from New York.
The neighbors scour the fields
with flashlights and hound dogs.
The headlines report Beautiful
Smith Girl Missing. Then Grammy
hears it—scuffle and moan,
like a large rodent in the cellar.
Thump from behind the wood stack.
I remove logs and panel
and find Sylvia swaddled
in a blanket, covered in vomit.
Her cheek bloody, she is blue-lipped,
blue-fingertipped, her skin pallid
purple. I feel her exhale on my palm
and carry her to the ambulance.
She nearly nailed herself
in this time, burrowed
into her wooden death box.
But the ghosts refuse her,
not enough room in this house
for another apparition.
Our father's presence lingers.
Thank God I found Sylvia, that
on the third day she rises.
I pray that she recovers.
Sylvia's illness weighs heavy on my back.
I grow weary, like Atlas shouldering the world.
How many times can I carry Sylvia to safety?
I do not want to lose my only sibling.
Our family's stability hinges on her presence.
Sylvia's novel, The Bell Jar, is a fictional account of this suicide attempt. The Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, and the Boston Post
all ran stories about Sylvia's disappearance and recovery. That Sylvia attempted suicide was not mentioned in these accounts.
August 1953
Imagining Sylvia Plath
In the style of “The Fearful”
Her summer is a winter—
Frostbite, gangrene that devours her inside out.
Her wintering is a glass bell—
Frozen crystal tongue without tingle, without chime.
Her glass bell suffocates fireflies, honeybees,
Jars them in heat, turns off their little minds.
Her fireflies must be shocked, relit.
Depression oozes from her fingers, softens her brain.
Her brain quiets under the cupboard.
She presses herself inside a wooden cellar box.
The cupboard is a faulty coffin—too many
Breathing holes won't let her be snuffed out.
She broke her mother's locked box
Of pills and swallowed them all.
Broke her mother's heart, but her stomach
Saves her, betrays her, won't keep death down.
More dead than alive, they found her
Blue-lipped but breathing, three days later.
“The Fearful” was written November 16, 1962. It is included in the Pulitzer Prizewinning The Collected Poems. A less well-known poem, certain lines in “The Fearful” link to the same drive toward suicide Sylvia struggled with not only in November 1962 but also back in 1953. For example:
The voice of the woman hollows—
More and more like a dead one,
Aid
Olive Higgins Prouty
August 27-28, 1953
Read in paper about Sylvia, stop.
I offer her assistance, stop.
No worries about money,
I'll finance her recovery, stop.
Broke down once myself, stop.
Understand how low one drops.
Have great doctors to recommend.
Syl will be stitched up, will mend.
She will never do this again, stop.
Olive Higgins Prouty paid for all of Sylvia's medical expenses. She even convinced doctors and hospitals to reduce or waive their fees. Prouty sent money and aid to Sylvia throughout Sylvia's life, not only for medical expenses but to help support Sylvia as a writer. Olive Higgins Prouty is fictionalized as Philomene Guinea in The Bell Jar. Chapter fifteen describes the events of the poem above.
Doctor-Patient Relations: Trial and Error
Dr. Lindemann, Massachusetts General Hospital
September 1953
I diagnosed her