Free Sylvia Plath: A Biography by Linda Wagner-Martin

unfulfilled. The whole thing sickens me.” She ironically called herself “the American virgin, dressed to seduce.... We go on dates, we play around, and if we’re nice girls, we demur at a certain point.”
    The wry candor of Plath’s journals did not show in any of her published writing from these years. In August of 1950, as she was about to enter Smith, Seventeen published “And Summer Will Not Come Again.” Based on Sylvia’s tennis court dates of the summer before, the story is about a high school girl who falls for the college boy who coaches her, only to discover that he already has a girlfriend. The story established her reputation as a writer at Smith, but it was less important in itself than as the impetus for her five-year friendship with Ed Cohen, a Chicagoan who wrote to her after he read the story.
    A student at Roosevelt University, a small, politically radical liberal arts school, Cohen introduced himself as a former University of Chicago student who wanted to be a psychiatrist but would never have the patience to go to medical school, a “cynical idealist” who was impressed with Sylvia’s writing. Four years older than she, Cohen came through even in his first letter as a comparative “man of the world.” He smoked, he had recently broken off with a live-in fiancée, and he had temporarily dropped out of college so that he could live in a way he considered more full. He was, in fact, about to vacation in Mexico, a statement that was more alluring than he could have known to the little-traveled New England girl.
    There were letters from Cohen on August 8 and 19, and one on August 25 from the Hotel Belpra in Mexico City. Once back in Chicago, Cohen wrote — usually in the middle of the night (and for Sylvia, who needed ten hours of sleep a night, his writing habits were as exotic as his vacations) — every week in September. Each letter, single-spaced, ran from four to ten pages. All Cohen’s letters were candid, troubling accounts of his alienation from society; all attempted to involve Sylvia in his life. Cohen and Sylvia were soon corresponding the way she and Phil McCurdy had always talked — openly and with an element of self-dramatization that might, given the right circumstances, topple over into fiction.
    Much of Cohen’s correspondence had to do with sex. He recommended that Sylvia read Walter Benton’s This Is My Beloved , a book of graphic sexual poetry popular at the time. He frequently advised her about her own sexual behavior (“I not only did not advocate promiscuity, I think I very specifically said the person who indulges in it is likely to be unhappy”).
    Cynical humor dotted Cohen’s letters, and Plath frequently borrowed his epigrams: “It is quite true that women grow up faster than men do; however, they never seem to grow up quite as far.” “Life might be simpler if we were born in pairs.” “Those who believe in God are mental cowards; those who devote their lives to his service are physical cowards as well.” “The meek shall inherit the earth — but how long will they stay that way?”
    An important element in their correspondence was their shared disgust with the Korean War. Cohen described the “state of terror” he and his friends lived in, because of the draft, and wrote about coming home from Mexico only to hear Truman “telling me that after all this living, I’m going to die in Korea. Why? WHYWHYWHY? I want to know what the hell it’s all about. I’m damned if I intend to stop living for a lot of fancy slogans.” In other letters, he described the way his friends and he felt about the draft and about war. On September 21, he wrote that Sylvia’s antiwar letter — a letter she had recently sent him — which he called “a powerful document,” had helped him to change the views of several friends from prowar to antiwar.
    In quality as well as quantity, Cohen’s letters impressed Sylvia. In many ways, the two were kindred spirits, and she