NEW YORK, N.Y.
JUNE 4, 1953
Dear Mother,
So incredibly much has happened so quick and so fast these last three days.
… From my window I look down into gardens, alleys, to the rumbling Third Avenue El, down to the UN, with a snatch of the East River in between buildings. At work at night at my desk, I look down into a network of lights and the sound of car horns wafts up to me like the sweetest music. I love it.
… Whooshed up to the sixth floor of 575 Madison; spent morning with other Eds filling out endless forms and job data in mirrored dark-green and pink conference room, which is our headquarters … I talked with Rita Smith, Fiction Editor (also sister of Carson McCullers!), Polly Weaver, Jobs and Futures Editor (who had my job on Press Board when she was at Smith), and Betsy Talbot Blackwell, fabulous Editor-in-Chief.
… Afternoon—rewrote poetry squibs again [Article: “Poets on Campus,” thumbnail accounts of interviews with Alastair Reid, Anthony Hecht, Richard Wilbur, George Steiner, and William Burford].
… Assignments announced. One of my best friends from Washington State is Editor-in-Chief. I’m Managing Ed and moved my typewriter into Cyrilly Abels’ office today. At first I was disappointed at not being Fiction Ed, but now that I see how all-inclusive my work is, I love it.
I work in her office, listen surreptitiously to all her conversations on telephone and in person, read all copy and do a lot of “managing”—deadlines, dirty work, etc., but it is fun. Her secretary is a girl I knew at Smith last year, so all is relatively un-tense now, almost homey, in fact.
I have to write comments on all the stuff I read. Just got through criticizing Elizabeth Bowen’s speech she gave the very day I talked to her—intellectually stimulating. Also will have a chance to criticize poetry, etc., so my fiction interests are included here, too.
… affairs scheduled include fashion tours (e.g. John Frederics hats), UN and Herald Trib tours, movie preview, City Center ballet … TV show, dance at St. Regis Roof and dinner—sounds exotic, what? … Love,
Your managing ed, Syrilly
JUNE 8, 1953
… Work is continuous. I’m reading manuscripts all day in Miss Abels’ office, learning countless lots by hearing her phone conversations, etc. Reading manuscripts by Elizabeth Bowen, Rumer Godden, Noel Coward, Dylan Thomas, et al. Commenting on all. Getting tremendous education. Also writing and typing rejections, signed with my own name! Sent one to a man on the New Yorker staff today with a perverse sense of poetic justice.
… Have a horrible feeling I probably won’t get into O’Connor’s course [Frank O’Connor’s prestigious course in creative writing at Harvard summer school]. Send “Mintons” … AND the first section from one of my creative writing assignments this year called “The Birthday.” … Erase comments if possible, or better still, retype, and send … I’m dubious about getting in as all people in U.S. will no doubt try to.
… Life happens so hard and fast I sometimes wonder who is me … Love hearing from you. Letters mean much. So much to do, and a month is such an infinitesimal amount of time.
August issue will be full of us all—several pictures, also last word—introduction to whole issue which I just got finished writing in my capacity as managing editor. Poet feature all done. Looks great.
Wearily, still amazedly that there are so many people and animals in the big huge world.
Your citystruck Sivvy
Love specially to Warren, whom Mrs. Prouty also thinks is wonderful and would like to meet. How is he? I miss him more than anybody and am learning a lot about the world that I will tell him.
Saw a yak at the zoo and a soft-nosed infinitely patient eland … Will go again when more kinds and different names are awake … it was twilight when I went. But I heard a heffalump snore. I know I did.
Love and more love,
s.
UNDATED; WRITTEN MID-JUNE 1953
Dear Mother,
… My job in the office is, I am sure, the most valuable I could ever have. Met Santha Rama Rau yesterday (she’s a very good friend of Miss Abels), went to lunch with Miss Abels and Vance Bourjailly (he’s the co-editor of a new and wonderful literary periodical, Discovery) and had a lovely talk…. Paul Engle, poet-teacher of a new program at Iowa State, where you can get your MA in creative writing, dropped in, talked, read some of my poems … and said he’d send us booklets describing the Iowa graduate program. He’s coeditor of the O’Henry collection this year.
Lots of the other girls just have “busy work” to do, but I am constantly reading fascinating manuscripts and making little memo comments on them and getting an idea of what Mlle publishes and why. I am awfully fond of Miss Abels and think she is the most brilliant, clever woman I have ever known…. Thoughts are with you and Warren at [Exeter] graduation this weekend [June 13—14]. … Really, I couldn’t have come with the cost of it. Money goes like water here, and I rebel against ever taking taxis, but walk everywhere….
Your rested daughter,
Sivvy
UNDATED—LATE JUNE, 1953
Dear Warren,
… I have learned an amazing lot here: the world has split open before my gaping eyes and spilt out its guts like a cracked watermelon. I think it will not be until I have meditated in peace upon the multitude of things I have learned and seen that I will begin to comprehend what has happened to me this last month. I am worn out now with the strenuous days at the office and the heat and the evenings out. I want to come home and sleep and sleep and play tennis and get tan again (I am an unhealthy shade of yellow now) and learn what I have been doing this last year.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve realized that the last weeks of school were one hectic running for busses and trains and exams and appointments, and the shift to NYC has been so rapid that I can’t think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated—all of which goes to make up living very hard and newly. I want to come home and vegetate in peace this coming weekend, with the people I love around me for a change.
Somehow I can’t talk about all that has happened this week at length, I am too weary, too dazed. I have, in the space of six days, toured the second largest ad agency in the world and seen television, kitchens, heard speeches there, gotten ptomaine poisoning from crabmeat the agency served us in their “own special test kitchen” and wanted to die very badly for a day, in the midst of faintings and hypodermics and miserable agony. Spent an evening in Greenwich Village with the most brilliant, wonderful man in the world, the simultaneous interpreter, Gary Karmirloff, who is tragically a couple of inches shorter than I, but who is the most magnificent lovable person I have ever met in my life. I think I will be looking for his alter ego all over the world for the rest of my life. Spent an evening listening to an 18-year-old friend of Bob Cochran’s read his poetry to me after a steak dinner, also at the Village. Spent an evening fighting with a wealthy, unscrupulous Peruvian delegate to the UN at a Forest Hills tennis club dance—and spent Saturday in the Yankee Stadium with all the stinking people in the world watching the Yankees trounce the Tigers, having our pictures taken with commentator Mel Allen; getting lost in the subway and seeing deformed men with short arms that curled like pink, boneless snakes around a begging cup stagger through the car, thinking to myself all the time that Central Park Zoo was only different in that there were bars on the windows—oh, God, it is unbelievable to think of all this at once—my mind will split open.
Sylvia interviewing Marianne Moore for Mademoiselle, 1953
Sylvia talking with Elizabeth Bowen on a Mademoiselle assignment, summer 1953
… do you suppose you could meet your soot-stained, grubby, weary, wise, ex-managing editor at the station to carry her home with her bags? I love you a million times more than any of these slick admen, these hucksters, these wealthy beasts who get dronk in foreign accents all the time. I will let you know what train my coffin will
come in on.
Seriously, I am more than overjoyed to have been here a month; it is just that I realize how young and inexperienced I am in the ways of the world. Smith seems like a simple, enchanting, bucolic existence compared to the dry, humid, breathless wasteland of the cliff dwellers, where the people are, as D. H. Lawrence wrote of his society, “dead brilliant galls on the tree of life.” By contrast, the good few friends I have seem like clear icewater after a very strong, scalding martini.
… Best love to you all—you wonderful textured honest real unpainted people.
Your exhausted, ecstatic, elegiac New Yorker,
Sivvy
* [“Sivvy” was Sylvia’s family nickname.]
* Eddie Cohen, a Chicago boy who wrote Sylvia a fan letter when her first story, “And Summer Shall Not Come Again,” was published in Seventeen.
* Actually, the girl in question was not suicidal; perhaps Sylvia’s earlier Thanksgiving depression was influencing her words here. Yet when Sylvia found herself in a similar state two years later, razor blades and sleeping pills were her first thoughts.
* While Sylvia’s scholarships to Smith were generous, she was never granted a full scholarship.
PART TWO
Summer 1953–August 12, 1955
My mother and I met a tired, unsmiling Sylvia on her return from her month as guest editor for Mademoiselle in New York City. I dreaded telling Sylvia the news that had come that morning—that she had not been accepted as a student in Frank O’Connor’s short-story writing class.
I knew Sylvia would see it as a rejection of her as a competent or even promising writer, despite all the writing honors and previous publications she had to her credit. At this point, success in short-story writing was her ultimate goal, and Sylvia was too demanding of herself.
As we left the station I said as casually as possible, “By the way, Frank O’Connor’s class is filled; you’ll have to wait for next summer before you register for it again.” I could see Sylvia’s face in the rear-view mirror; it went white when I told her, and the look of shock and utter despair that passed over it alarmed me.
From that point on, I was aware of a great change in her; all her usual joie de vivre was absent. My mother tried to reassure me that this was no doubt temporary, a natural reaction to the strains of the last year. There had been no respite at all, so we encouraged her to “just let go and relax.” We packed picnics and drove to beaches in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. At home, she would sunbathe, always with a book in hand, but never reading it. After days of this, she finally began to talk to me, pouring out an endless stream of self-deprecation, self-accusation. She had no goal, she said. As she couldn’t read with comprehension anymore, much less write creatively, what was she going to do with her life? She had injured her friends, “let down” her sponsors—she went on and on.
Sylvia’s self-recrimination even extended to reproaching herself for having published “Sunday at the Mintons’,” one of the two prize-winning stories in the August 1952 edition of Mademoiselle. She felt it had been unkind to the young friend who supplied the germ of the characterization of Henry, one of the two characters in the story. This reaction might be considered a foreshadowing of her emotional recoil from The Bell Jar when that autobiographical novel appeared in London in 1963, shortly before her death.
In an effort to pull herself together, Sylvia, who had by this time decided not to attempt any courses in Harvard Summer School, felt that some form of scheduled activity would keep her from feeling that the whole summer was being wasted. Her plan was that I should teach her shorthand for an hour each morning so that she could “get a job to support my writing—if I can ever write again.” For four lessons we worked together. But her disjointed style of handwriting did not lend itself well to the connected strokes of the Gregg system, and I was relieved when she agreed with me that this was a skill she could manage to live without. Later, I regretted that we even attempted it, for the abortive experience just added to her increasing feeling of failure and inferiority.
One unforgettable morning, I noticed some partially healed gashes on her legs. Upon my horrified questioning, she replied, “I just wanted to see if I had the guts!” Then she grasped my hand—hers was burning hot to the touch—and cried passionately, “Oh, Mother, the world is so rotten! I want to die! Let’s die together!”
I took her in my arms, telling her that she was ill, exhausted, that she had everything to live for and that I would see to it that she wanted to. We saw our own doctor within an hour; she recommended psychiatric counseling, and the long summer of seeking help began.
The first psychiatrist unfortunately reminded Sylvia of a handsome but opinionated date she felt she had “outgrown,” and did not inspire her with confidence. He insisted that a series of shock treatments would be beneficial. I felt so inadequate, so alone. A kind neighbor took Sylvia and me to the hospital for the treatments; it was she who sat with me, holding my hand as we waited for Sylvia to reappear, for though I had pleaded to accompany her, I was not allowed to do so.
The consultations with the referred psychiatrist, an older man, gentle and fatherly, gave me a ray of hope. He prescribed sleeping tablets, which he told me to administer each night, and which I kept locked in a metal safety case. Sylvia still talked to me constantly in the same self-deprecating vein, becoming very agitated at times as she noted the approaching date of the fall term at college.
On August 24, a blisteringly hot day, a friend invited us to a film showing of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Sylvia said she wanted to stay home with her grandparents, who had recently returned from the Cape, but urged me to go. She looked particularly well this day; her eyes sparkled, her cheeks were flushed. Nevertheless, I left her with a sense of uneasiness, feeling that her buoyancy was contrived.
I found it difficult to concentrate on the slow-moving, archaic ceremony on the screen, and in the middle of it I all at once found myself filled with terror such as I had never experienced in my life. Cold perspiration poured down me; my heart pounded. I wanted to get out of my seat and rush from the theater. I forced myself to remain quiet until the close, then begged my friend to drive me home at once. Propped against a bowl of flowers on the dining-room table was a note in Sylvia’s handwriting: “Have gone for a long walk. Will be home tomorrow.”
Grammy came from her room, distraught, saying, “We had no idea she was so ill, she should not have been left alone.” Grampy was crying. The nightmare of nightmares had begun.
The report of Sylvia’s disappearance, which I phoned to the police, was issued over the radio. Then I discovered that the lock to my steel case had been broken open and the bottle of sleeping pills was missing.
At noon on the third day, while we were eating lunch, Warren was the first to discern a moan coming from the region of our basement. He dashed from the table before any of the rest of us could move, and then we heard his shout, “Call the ambulance!” He had found his sister, returning to consciousness in the crawl space beneath the downstairs bedroom, the entrance to which had always been blocked by a pile of firewood. A partially empty bottle of sleeping pills was by her side.
In minutes she was carried into the ambulance, and we followed to the Newton-Wellesley hospital. When I was allowed to see her, there was an angry-looking abrasion under her right eye and considerable swelling. Her first words were a moaned “Oh, no!” When I took her hand and told her how we rejoiced she was alive and how we loved her, she said weakly, “It was my last act of love” While her voice was weak, her speech was completely coherent and rational. I told her that she was now to think only of complete rest and that with medical care, recovery would follow. She replied, “Oh, if I only could be a freshman again. I so wanted to be a Smith woman.”
The next weeks were anxious ones; her desire to live had not reasserted itself. She was transferred to the psychiatric wing of the Massachusetts General Hospital, where association with other patients much more severely disturbed than she cau
sed her to regress.
As soon as the news of our finding Sylvia was made public, I received a sympathetic telegram from Mrs. Prouty, who was vacationing in Maine. One of Sylvia’s deep concerns throughout her illness had been that she had not proven herself worthy of the scholarship help given her. Now Mrs. Prouty again held out hope for us all, for her telegram read: HAVE JUST LEARNED SYLVIA HAS BEEN FOUND AND IS RECOVERING AT HOSPITAL. I WANT TO HELP. AM WRITING. OLIVE H. PROUTY
Several letters and visits followed; Mrs. Prouty had herself suffered a breakdown, and during this period she and Sylvia became especially close.
SEPTEMBER 2, 1953
My dear Mrs. Plath:
… It is good news to know that your general practitioner finds no trace of psychoses, though I know well that a neurosis can be long drawn-out and requires even more wise handling because recovery is just around the corner and the wrong kind of treatment may delay it.
I think your idea of Sylvia’s going to Provincetown with your friend, who is a trained nurse, is excellent—at least as a first step. Of course Sylvia doesn’t want to see anyone now. It will take some time, you say, for her face injury to heal. (Poor child! I am so sorry!) Certainly you do not want to send your sensitive child to a place of closed doors and restraint. I heartily agree! But when she is physically stronger, should she not have the constructive help and advice of some wise doctor who has had experience with a nervous breakdown such as hers? I value my nervous breakdown (of some twenty-five years ago) because of what I learned about living from Dr. Austen Riggs (a very great philosopher as well as doctor) of Stockbridge, Mass., where I went to get away from home and too much solicitation and care from those dearest to me. Like Sylvia I felt I had become a burden and wanted to get away to relieve them. So I went to Stock-bridge and in time recovered completely. I am better equipped to meet life because of my nervous illness. I wish Sylvia might benefit by a recovery similar to mine …