Free American Isis by Carl Rollyson Page B

her cold letters afterward as an indication that she did not think she had measured up to his expectations. If so, Eddie insisted she was quite mistaken. He had come away all the more impressed with her, although, according to Paul Alexander, Eddie became disturbed at Sylvia’s tendency to pose, to pretend pleasure—like she did while listening to bad jazz in a Boston club. She was too studied, lacked spontaneity, and seemed “ all mask.” In her journal, Sylvia would later liken herself to Nina Leeds, a character in Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude, a play that experiments with the use of masks to dramatize the disparity between what people say and what they think as they withhold themselves from others.
    On 23 September, Dick drove Sylvia, in a state of high tension, to Smith to begin the fall term. Now withdrawn and withholding, he upset her. Was she at fault? Did he sense, as she put it in her journal, that she was jealous of him? She turned to his more outgoing brother, Perry, always a favorite of hers, who reciprocated her warm confidence in him. He admitted he was anxious about Dick, who was “tough to take when he is ‘that way.’” Perry wondered if Dick’s emotional problems had to do with his conflicted views of his parents and the moral standards they set for him. Was Dick capable of love, Perry wondered, adding, “He certainly needs someone to believe in him.” But Sylvia should not blame herself: “Syl—you are wonderful. You always are helping me, giving, never taking, never asking. What would I do without you. Love, love, Perry.” He remained an openhearted admirer, and years later he assisted biographer Edward Butscher, who could not secure Dick Norton’s cooperation.
    For all her reservations about Dick, Sylvia felt bereft because of his coolness, and she depended even more on her affectionate correspondence with her mother, who sent news in early October that a story, “Initiation,” had won a $100 prize from Seventeen, where it would be published in January 1953. “Initiation” deals with a high school girl’s ambivalent feelings about the hazing ritual of the sorority she is pledging, feelings that are reinforced when the sorority spurns her best friend for not wearing the right clothes and not conforming to the group’s sense of propriety. Sylvia herself had gone through her own “initiation,” telling her mother that she had been required to ask everyone on a bus what each had for breakfast. One playful passenger replied, “Heather birds’ eyebrows on toast,” explaining that these creatures lived on “mythological moors.” Put that in a story, Aurelia said. Letters Home contains a note explaining the circumstances of “Initiation”’s origin, yet another effort on Aurelia’s part to counteract the merciless portrait of her that would later appear in The Bell Jar. In this case, Olive Higgins Prouty seconded Aurelia’s suggestion. “Think of the material you have!” Prouty exhorted Plath. As Paul Alexander suggests, this was a pivotal moment in Sylvia’s vocation as a writer, training her focus on the world in front of her.
    In early November, Dick Norton told Sylvia he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis and would be staying in a sanitarium in Saranac, Massachusetts. Tests soon showed she had not contracted the disease, but their enforced separation depressed her. On 3 November, she wrote in her journal that this was the first time she had ever really considered committing suicide. She envied Dick’s enforced leisure. His meals, the time he had to relax, and his freedom to read what he wanted riled her. Smith had become a cage. Thoughts of suicide, however, were just that: thoughts to be dismissed as the desire to annihilate the world by annihilating oneself. “The deluded height of desperate egoism,” she opined, despising herself for