with adolescent nervous illness,
not the black smudge of mental disease—
perhaps I was wrong?
Miss Plath doesn't take to the ward.
Like a child in after-school detention,
it's as though she'd rather be set on fire
than retained here. She should animate,
not vegetate, at this stage of recovery.
What's wrong with her?
In group, I expose her to patients
who have never approached the door
marked “normal.” I had hoped Miss Plath
would find gratitude, realize that her situation
is not so dire. But she retires further into herself.
I have done this all wrong.
I want to help her get well.
I believe that I may be
the wrong doctor for Sylvia.
But wrong as I am,
will anyone be right?
Sylvia was examined by Olive Higgins Prouty's psychiatrist, Dr. Donald McPherson, and by Dr. Erich Lindemann, the head of Massachusetts General Hospital's psychiatric wing. Then at McLean Hospital, a part of the Massachusetts General system (McLean was considered at the time to be one of the country's best mental facilities), Sylvia was cared for by Dr. Ruth Beuscher. Sylvia was at Massachusetts General from September 3, 1953, until no later than September 28, 1953. The patients were segregated strictly by gender and no other criteria, so many of the residents surrounding Sylvia were extremely mentally ill.
Doctor's Notes
Dr. Ruth Beuscher, Sylvia's lifelong psychiatrist Fall 1953
Sylvia slumps on the couch,
neither lying nor sitting,
uncomfortable in her sweater set.
Her scarred cheek still decides
whether or not it will heal itself.
I remember the boiling teapot
of pressure attending the Ivy League
produced—those days only a few
years in my past. I relate
to Sylvia, must be careful,
must find a way to help her
without falling into a vortex myself.
I believe we can salve her demons together.
If she can begin to trust me,
perhaps she'll learn to trust herself.
My two little ones, my divorce,
my express imperative to be
a professional woman and a wife
and a mother. She observes how
I roll my sleeves, and next session
she has cuffed them exactly like mine.
I reveal myself to her, diary page by diary page,
watch pale Sylvia attain a soft rose
blush, silent but connecting
to me.
I think Sylvia will teach me
at least as much as I teach her.
The question is, what will we learn?
Dr. Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher was assigned as Sylvia's personal psychiatrist at McLean. McLean was a teaching hospital, and Ruth was a psychiatric resident. When Sylvia began psychotherapy sessions with Ruth, Mrs. Prouty and Aurelia did not know that Ruth was a novice therapist. In a letter Ruth wrote to Sylvia, she once said, “I have often thought, if I ‘cure’ no one else in my whole career, you are enough. I love you. Good luck—Ruth B.” Sylvia's death so shook Dr. Beuscher, she underwent therapy and divorced her second husband.
Abecedarian
Wilbury Crockett, Sylvia's high school English teacher
Fall 1953
Absent as a
bear in deep winter, her mind
can't connect, her memory appears
dead. Her ace brain has switched off.
Everyone worries for Sylvia.
For me the tragedy is acute. I refuse to
give up on her. I bring
her Scrabble letters. Arrange them
into simple words, AN or TAN, attempt to
jolt her mind into memory, into the
kinetic world. I grasp her finger—move the letters to form the conjunctive AND.
My star pupil, my friend—
never could I imagine that words would become
obsolete, inaccessible, a
puzzle her mind can't
quite solve. I
resist my impulse to
spell for her. Her brittle fingers
touch the letters foreign as braille.
Unlock the language, Sylvia, please. What
violence in her mind caused this?
Who will she be without words? An
X on her forehead where they shocked her
yellow and purple and black.
Zealots every one of them, under medicine's reckless thumb.
Sylvia's hands tremble. She pushes the letters,
slow as an hour hand.
She looks up at me with an almost smile.
The word on the table is THANKS.
have I been prouder.
An abecedarian is a poetry form in which each of the twenty-six lines either ends or begins with the sequential letters of the alphabet. In the poem above, the lines begin alphabetically. Mr. Crockett visited McLean Hospital once a week for the five months that Sylvia was there.
Debate
Nurse at McLean Hospital/Sanatorium
Fall 1953
You hear 'em all bicker
like an alley of hungry cats,
not really in a claw fight
but each of them wanting
to outscreech the other.
Poor thing, that Sylvia,
lies in bed like a coma victim,
like she don't know where she is
most days. Everything hazy and half-lit
to her. While they jabber
over insulin treatments, head-shrinkin',
which little pills
I should drop into her cup,
she barely blinks. They whisper
that they might strap her
to that shock table
we call Frankenstein's bed.
Poor child's mother—
thank goodness my Libby
ain't holed up in here.
I ache for these trembling
little girls with slashed wrists,
their minds stranded
at the side of the road.
Don't know what I'd do
with all these doctors purring
at my heels, scratching my leg
to get their way. I'd want to lift
my baby out of this white-walled crib.
Guess in the end, that's what they all want.
McLean was a private mental facility in Belmont but part of the Massachusetts General system. The hospital offered pleasant surroundings, individualized attention, and the most advanced techniques. Electroshock therapy and psychotherapy were used to treat suicide and psychotic episodes. Daily insulin treatments and long periods of unstructured free time in which Sylvia could elect to engage in occupational therapy were prescribed for Sylvia by Dr. Beuscher. Mrs. Prouty complained that this form of therapy was isolating and bad for Sylvia.
Sylvia was first diagnosed by Dr. Lindemann with an adolescent nervous illness, from which she was told she would recover fully. He believed that Sylvia suffered no mental disease or psychosis. Dr. McPherson diagnosed Sylvia as having had an acute schizophrenic episode, which at the time meant that Sylvia had suffered a period of disassociation from which patients usually emerged. Dr. Beuscher treated Sylvia for depression leading to suicidal tendencies.
Madness
Dr. Beuscher, Sylvia's therapist
Fall 1953
Repression cuts off
circulation like a tourniquet,
and Sylvia throbs with desire.
I advise Sylvia to experiment,
to stop fretting over a white
wedding dress. Does this shock
the patient? Not really.
Sylvia has been slicing at her arm,
waiting for someone
to grant her permission.
A junior in college,
she may be ready for this.
“But what would Mother think?”
Sylvia snickers. She wraps a mink stole
of secrets around her shoulders,
luxuriates in playing foul
behind her mother's back.
Perhaps when she holds back
her desires, her mind
splinters into madness, into deadwood
that we must burn away by electric shock.
I encourage her to release her idea
of the bad girl, punishable for physical contact.
I ask her to think about herself, not her mother,
about how Sylvia represses Sylvia.
I want to tell her to do what she wants.
I need to help her to let go of her fears.
Dr. Beuscher met with Sylvia for daily psychotherapy sessions, during which the doctor explained to Sylvia her methods and techniques and why she was using them. Sylvia responded well to this sort of inclusion and respect. Dr. Beuscher employed fairly orthodox Freudianism, which entailed leading analysis and discussions about Sylvia's childhood. At the time of the above poem, Sylvia and Ruth met at McLean Hospital for inpatient treatment, but later they would have sessions at Dr. Beuscher's private practice. They were in weekly contact via phone or letters, or in person, until Sylvia's death ten years later.
Oxymoron
Warren Plath
January 1954
The road piled in snow.
The windows a slimy fog.
I wasn't speeding, but the car
hit a patch of black ice
slick as baby oil
and we might have plunged eternal
into Paradise Pond,
except that I did right,
turned hard into the skid.
My knuckles blue, I held the steering
wheel so tight.
We avoided the rocks.
The street was a ghost town,
no other fools suffering travel
in that weather. We collided
with an embankment, a soft jolt
backward like hitting a bumper
during a crash test.
Sivvy clawed the dashboard.
Her eyes closed
as if to welcome death.
She trembled
the rest of the drive to Smith.
She never blamed me, exactly,
anyone might have lost control
of the car, but I could hear
in her thank you, her goodbye,
that she will likely never ride
passenger with me again.
She did not want to drive
into her death. Pill herself
to long sleep, maybe—
but to die at the hand
of ice and motorized sheet metal
and my mismanaged driving,
Sylvia would not be subject
to that or any epitaph she didn't script.
Sylvia missed only one semester at Smith, the fall of what would have been her senior year. She took a lightened course load when she returned to Smith at the beginning of 1954, and this caused her to have to attend another full senior year, fall 1954 through spring 1955.
Blond Ambition
Nancy Hunter, Sylvia's friend
and later roommate at Smith
Winter 1954
She bottles her hair white gold
so she radiates among the crowds.
She types her way back to health,
click-clack of keys, composing her own words,
not secretary to her mentor's manuscript. She types to be heard,
and when she calls out into the cave
of the Smith Review and Harper's Magazine
the editors echo back, “Yes, Yes.”
She wears celebrity well, known as
the campus Lazarus, back from the dead. She has seen
the other side, now an entourage swarms her feet.
She confides to me in the dark hours—
that stagnant swell before dawn,
that she took the pills to erase tedium—
that precursor to depression's quicksand.
She says she killed her father—wished him dead
when she was a little girl,
and when he obliged, it was like she
had strangled a part of herself.
A heavy chain of guilt threatens
to pull her into drowning at any time.
And last August she became too tired to swim.
Lethargy, inertia, the stagnant water over her head.
Sylvia and Nancy roomed together at Lawrence House during Sylvia's senior year at Smith, from 1954 to 1955. After college, they kept in touch and remained friends.
Golden Girl
Richard Sassoon, roommate of two other boys Sylvia dated,
one of her great love affairs
Spring 1954
Golden girl,
Neck of pearl,
Sylvia dates us all.
Statuesque, a pall
Around her edge,
She constructs herself
Out of typewriter ribbon,
Takes it as a given
That men fall
One after the other,
Spelled by her talk,
Her golden locks,
Her little shocks,
They're just domino blocks
She knocks down.
I ask if she'll accompany me
To New York City,
She agrees.
For what I foresee
Is a future where Sylvia
Falls for me.
Richard Sassoon was related to Siegfried Sassoon, an acclaimed English poet of the Great War generation.
Twins
Nancy Hunter, Sylvia's friend and roommate at Smith
Summer 1954
Sylvia feeds off my leftovers. I toss Edwin curbside
after a night of skirting around
the divan, escaping his advances.
Most girls would run from this sort
of brute, move out of the way
of Edwin's falling anvil.
But Sylvia reviled
and then followed after Edwin.
Almost magnetized, she accepted
his calls and dinner invitations,
only to feel buyer's remorse.
He cut her, the bastard,
ripped her during intercourse
so that blood like lava
gushed between her legs.
Sylvia said it was her first time.
When the bleeding wouldn't stop,
I took her to the hospital for repair,
forced the little weasel to drive us there.
He said he'd check on Sylvia tomorrow,
but I knew his intentions
were fake promissory notes.
I wanted to spit on his trench coat,
dunk his big head in a vat of tar
and roll him in dirt,
but instead I told him
not to bother calling.
I protect my Sylvia and she watches
after me. I will stop her from jumping
in front of trains, even if I have to bind
my own hands and feet to the rail.
The author Ronald Hayman asserts in his The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath that Nancy felt that Sylvia sometimes counted on “crises to give her creative inspiration,” and that “for the sake of her poetry and her stories she [took] risks and [depended] on other people to rescue her from dangerous situations.”
Marriage
Gordon Lameyer, a boy Sylvia dated in college
August 1954
Sylvia sings,
not angelic, but like a Mozart
recording, comfortable, well listened to,
a few scratches on the LP so the record
jum
ps about but always settles into beauty.
Her hand in mine—
she, the proverbial key opening my lock.
I tell her I will hold her hand forever,
do not fear pregnancy,
do not conceive of maternity
as a trapdoor one can't squirm out of,
but rather as a portal to safety
and security, to a room in the adult world.
We are adults, after all.
Bridesmaid at her friend Marcia's
wedding, Sylvia stands near the altar.
Why then is she so afraid?
Syl tells me I am the one,
that she loves me.
I resound, “Yes, Yes,”
like something out of a Joyce novel,
but Sylvia switches her senior thesis
from the Irishman
to exploring literary doubles in Dostoevsky
and other men.
Sylvia feared marriage at this time because she struggled over the question of how one can be an artist devoted to her work and a wife and mother. In August 1954 Sylvia worried that she had become pregnant by Gordon, and she did not want to be forced into marriage because of an untimely pregnancy. It turned out that Sylvia was not pregnant.
Sylvia's struggles over the question of marriage and how to reconcile that with her need to be an artist fill her journal pages.
Sylvia's original senior thesis was on James Joyce, but she switched it to a study of Dostoevsky's novels The Double and The Brothers Karamazov, specifically examining Dostoevsky's use of dual images and characters that mirror one another. The subject was personal for Sylvia because it reflected her awareness of her own divided and tumultuous nature.
Iconic
A freshman at Smith
Fall 1954
There she is, Sylvia Plath,
Books in tow, lips red and chapped.
See the scar, dark under her eye—
She tried to off herself, I'm not sure why.
So lovely and published, a star in Smith's sky.
If I had all she has, I wouldn't want to die.
They follow her like a herd of geese,
Ladies lunching at her knees.
I might do so too, show her who I am.
But like the Golden Girl I'm not a lamb.
Hearsay tells she charms many men.
They fall like rain, not content to be friend.
She squirrels about, her many trees to tend.
Then climbs high branches that never end.