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Carl Rollyson on the Teenage Years of One of America's Most Famous Female Poets
Sylvia’s diaries, meticulously kept for almost every day from 1944 to 1949, reflect her early realization that you could broadcast your own life, as Jack Benny did on his radio show (another of her favourites). The show dispensed a running commentary on his funny failings, his desire to get ahead, and his preening, and had a cast—including Rochester, the faithful, if not uncritical African American factotum—that became Benny’s retinue, commenting on his every mercenary move.
Later, in London, in the last years of her life, Plath would speak of a desire to create a salon of writers, a following that would situate her at the centre of literary life. At an early age, Plath realized you could incorporate yourself in a medium. You could reach out to the public and command a hearing. She would later exploit this medium in her appearances on BBC radio. Her best poetry, she would come to realize, should be spoken aloud, perfected in a voice that she worked on, transforming a regional New England accent into a broader Anglo-American style of speaking that reflected her transcontinental ambitions.
These early diaries show a sensibility already well formed and with a presentiment of destiny, which she defined in her diaries by setting down certain markers:
January 20, 1944: Today is the biggest day of my life. I had a dreamless sleep and woke as fresh as dew on spring buttercups. All day I was in another world, far better than this. I took the bus to Boston with mother and Warrie to see Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at the Colonial Theatre. It was too perfect for words. I am keeping the program as a souvenir. We took the train to Wellesley and there were no separate seats. I sat next to a young sensitive boy from the navy. He had blond wavy hair and blue eyes. In all my life I will never love anyone as I did him. Our talk was of travels, life, Shakespeare.
Later, her marriage to Ted Hughes would seem impulsive and hasty, but in fact she had been looking for just such a man almost as soon as she could write. She had a sense of the transcendent, of how art can supersede all else, before she turned twelve.
Wayne Sterling remembered that sometime in 1944, when Sylvia was twelve, she initiated a conversation about what it was like to be Jewish. She had no contact with Jews in Winthrop or Wellesley, so Wayne couldn’t say what prompted her interest. Her diary entry for January 15 mentioned “trying to make a crazy statue of Hitler in the snow with no success.” Perhaps that swastika on the flagpole in Winthrop had caught her attention. Her diary entry for November 25, 1945, recounted a “very interesting” Sunday School talk by a Jewish girl about Jewish customs and beliefs. “She promised to take us to a Jewish Synagogue in the future. I had a beautiful time listening to her.” On January 25, 1946, a neighbor, Mr. Norton, took her to the Temple of Israel in Boston. The light in the shape of the Star of David entranced her, as did the impressive white marble pulpit and the Torah in the ark. She listened to a rabbi explaining Judaism. She was impressed. “I had a beautiful time,” she confided to her diary. She drew a kiddish cup, challah, and a Star of David.
School assignments like a “problem paper” on “Roman People’s Places, and Things” and the work for her Scout “World Knowledge Badge” meant that as she entered adolescence Sylvia Plath was already attuned to the history and geography that propelled her later work. By the age of twelve, Plath’s school curriculum included a social studies class that covered, for example, units on the Albany Plan of Union (an early effort to unite the American colonies in a common defense) and General Braddock’s North America campaign against the French during the Seven Years War. She drew several maps of the United States and mapped out important historical events like the Louisiana Purchase and the issuance of the Monroe Doctrine.
At twelve, Sylvia measured five feet three and one-half inches, weighed about ninety-five pounds, and was athletic, participating in volleyball, baseball, field hockey, and basketball, where she played the position of guard. She collected stamps from all over the world and exulted in a trip to to purchase a stamp album at the Harris Stamp Company. She tended her own garden and marvelled how in the spring it looked “lovely as it is full of sprouting green leaves and sweet smelling, fresh overturned earth.” She watched birds. “I saw the most beautiful bird today,” she wrote in her diary. “It was a little smaller than a robin and had the most beautiful blue plumage and red breast. I found out later that it was a bluebird and the first I have seen this spring.”
On March 27, 1945, her class visited the Christian Science Monitor building where she saw the printing room and watched how the newspaper was cut and printed, an excursion she meticulously documented in her diary entry about a “magic afternoon.” Some of her first articles would be published in the Monitor. Her own diaries, profusely illustrated—sometimes in color—suggest the importance of book making to her. In the eighth grade, on the staff of her school publication, The Phillipian, she was determined to put out a “super magazine.”
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The war was an ever-present part of young Sylvia’s life. She played a game called “Russia” about the German invasion of the Soviet Union. On April 11, 1945, she mentioned she was put in charge of Defense Stamps at school. The next day she recorded her shock: “ROOSEVELT DIES!,” adding: “He died, like Lincoln, soon—very soon before the peace treaty and end of a long, cruel war!” On August 8, 1945, Sylvia wrote in her diary: “Atom bomb!” She read that 60 percent of Hiroshima had been destroyed, but made no comment other than to report President Truman’s statement that nuclear energy could be used for both destructive and constructive purposes.
On August 14, at 7:00 p.m., Sylvia heard on the radio the “official word…that Pres. Truman has received the note from Japan saying ‘We surrender unconditionally.’ The end of World War II!!!!!! How the people shouted! How the whistles blew. At night we set off firecrackers and rockets. We all thank God for answering our prayers.” The war penetrated her consciousness in other ways too. DPs, as displaced persons were then called, appear in a diary entry describing how she joined a group of girls dressed in “old rags” who “went to one house to pretend we were refugees, but, fortunately, (for us, probably), no one was home.” Does it make too much of this early effort to say she was already impersonating the persecuted, even if others would be offended and would call a poem like “Daddy” a despicable act of appropriation?
Sylvia read widely in teen and young adult novels that exposed her to many different cultures and to European and world history. On September 23, 1945, she mentions finishing A Sea between Us, reviewed in Commentary. This novel, by Lavinia R. Davis, struck close to home: “The heroine encounters the dragon of anti-Semitic prejudice early in the story during a visit to her fiancé’s family in a locality resembling Cape Cod.” The reviewer concluded: “For the problem of anti-Semitic prejudice, long underground in American life, to have forced its way through the pasteboard walls of a story for girls probably indicates that its pros and cons are more largely discussed today than many of us realize. It is comforting to learn even from a young ladies’ handbook that our society’s mores still denounce discrimination against Jews as unfair and undemocratic.”
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Wayne Sterling remembered a bike ride in which he discussed with Sylvia the suicide of a Wellesley student who had hung himself from a tree. Sylvia seemed mainly concerned with what it would be like to be “almost dead”—a curious phrase that calls to mind her later interest in D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Died,” about a resurrected Christ-like figure, and also, of course, her own “Lady Lazarus,” which suggests the speaker has a gift for coming back from the dead. Was Plath, with the early death of her father, already drawn to near-death experiences and beginning to think of life as a series of resurrections? This is the premise of Connie Palmen’s biographical novel about Plath and Hughes, Your Story, My Story.
Plath’s early diaries (1944–1947), studded with exclamation marks in many entries, and her letters and postcards from camp to her mother and Warren express an exuberant personality, eager to share her adventures and pleasures with her family. Warren and Aurelia reciprocated and Sylvia rejoiced in their “fat” and “meaty” letters that other campers envied. She made going to camp seem like a family enterprise, and that dynastic delight carries through right to her final days in England, when she wrote home wishing that newly married Warren or his wife could join her.
Her desire to assemble a salon, a group of likeminded souls, is reminiscent of her days at camp when she celebrated in letters and diaries the new friends that formed a circle around her. She began diary entries “Dear Diary,” as if addressing an alter ego and putting her life in order. “Dear Diary—you’re one of the ‘musts’ for peace of mind,” she wrote on October 11, 1945. Sometimes she wrote as if addressing a future self: On April 29, 1946, she announced: “Today the most wonderful thing happened!” She had sent in a “picturesque speech” to The Reader’s Digest: “A milkweed parachute hitchhikes on a passing breeze.” To her diary, she confessed “It may sound amateurish to you later, but to me it sounded pretty good.”
Entering her teens, diary entries no longer are studded with quite as many exclamation marks. She was developing a remarkable vocabulary, composing a poem, “A Winter Sunset,” that describes a sky of “copen shades.” Ice on the trees shimmers like diamonds. Teachers noticed her talent. Mrs. Warren told her she had a “flair” for English. “She firmly believes I have a talent for oral talks,” Sylvia recorded in her diary for February 12, 1946. A month later, Mrs. Warren took her aside and told her any professor would regard her work highly and she could apply to college as a scholarship student. But like most students, she tired of the school regimen: “Ugh! I am getting very eager for vacation,” she confided to her diary on March 25.
Was Plath, with the early death of her father, already drawn to near-death experiences and beginning to think of life as a series of resurrections?
Some days were just ecstatic. Coasting with Warren on the playground: “We had a super time. The hill rose shining, white and vacant. We flew down and the stinging wind brought tears to our eyes. It was glorious!” She drew a picture and wrote: “I’ll never forget the feeling of those silver runners slashing through the crusty snow!” These early revelries in snow would in just a few years dissolve into the symbolism of a numbing snow/cold that would haunt her later letters and depressions. In “Tulips at Dawn,” a poem written on the cusp of 1947/48, she speaks of plunging into the “depths of austere whiteness,” and of “white flashes of cold” lancing her wings, a “captive / Of white worlds.”
Sylvia liked to write about cooking in Food class—quite a variety of desserts, sandwiches, and main dishes—not to mention making her favorite molasses cookies at home (“yum yum”). She also took up knitting. On January 28, 1946, she recorded a visit to an Observatory: “I will never forget my first view of Saturn through the telescope! I expected a little point of light and gasped as I saw the three rings of moonlets whirling about the silvery planet.” Like other bright young girls of her generation such as Susan Sontag, Plath enthused over Richard Halliburton’s travel books: The Royal Road to Romance, The Flying Carpet, The Glorious Adventure, and New Worlds to Conquer. “They’re full of lovely expressions and descriptions,” she wrote to a friend. When a schoolmate lent her Richard Halliburton’s Complete Book of Marvels with a picture of him on the back, she confessed: “I am in love with him. I feel as though I understand him. (Being on his fourth book.)”
But another kind of adventure also appealed to her. On April 8, 1946, she had her first dream about the “lives and works” of American artists. Her imagination took another turn with mystery-horror stories like “The Mummy’s Tomb,” which began: “[A] gloomy atmosphere of foreboding pervaded the chill air.” She added a sentence to her friend Margot’s horror story: “The delicious smell of frying flesh reached my nostrils.” She hoped that after camp was over, she could spend part of the summer with Margot: “Can’t you just see us lying on soft pine needles,” she wrote to a friend who also wrote stories, “and writing best-sellers in the quiet serenity of the woods?”
But it wasn’t ever just a make-believe world for her: In a Memorial Day school assembly (May 29, 1946), a soldier spoke about “incidents of war and victory overseas, not forgetting to mention the long rows of white crosses filling the many green clearings holding the American and allied dead. It was really quite sad. Oh! but I do hope that there will be no more wars”—a sentiment she expressed many times in her diaries, and a few years later in an antiwar poem, “Seek No More the Young,” inspired by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, depicting the “iron men” who fall limp on “spattered stone” with “eyes glazed blind.” She felt “very strongly about the subject of world peace,” she asserted in an April 2, 1947, diary entry: “I felt as if I had suddenly come into contact with the turbulent political world outside when Carrie showed us the paper, among those distributed by the Socialist party…I was gripped by a cold, tense excitement that made me and my ideas an important part of the chaos in the world today.”
With only the chirping of purple grackles, and the sight of her Grampy’s “cheery pile” of “treasured compost,” she wondered how “murder and ugly quarrels” could go on in such a “beautiful world.” But then a fire engine came “screeching around the corner.” She would remain the same, more than a decade later, cultivating her own garden in her Court Green country home retreat, thrusting her hands in the soil while worrying about the strontium 90 radioactive fallout in mother’s milk.
Excerpted from The Making of Sylvia Plath by Carl Rollyson, Copyright © 2024 by Carl Rollyson. Published by University Press of Mississippi. All rights reserved.
https://lithub.com/how-a-young-sylvia-plath-found-her-literary-voice-through-diary-keeping/
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