When Sylvia Plath went on her first date
Dream-Team: Ted Hughes und Sylvia Plath
Those: picture alliance / dpa / PA Media
In 1952, years before her liaison with Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath is still young and “collects men.” A medical student who doesn’t read poetry is definitely not the right one for her. This also has to do with a bed scene.
She was 19 when she received a scholarship to Smith in 1951, the most prestigious women’s college in the United States. The following year she wins a paid internship at the women’s magazine “Mademoiselle” in New York. That means: modeling a bit, attending events, writing articles – the big world, finally! Demimonde and obscure men are also part of it, and Sylvia, the inexperienced, strict-bred wonder girl from Boston, cautiously holds back: “I collected men with interesting names. I already knew a Socrates. He was tall, ugly and intellectual” – unfortunately that’s not enough for love. In high school, she dated Buddy Willard, who is now a medical student at Yale. Such an appreciable, tidy young man! Good looking, reliable – Sylvia’s mother is enthusiastic. Sylvia doubts. She wants to write poetry.
Buddy thinks poetry is boring. One day he asks her if she knows what that actually is, a poem? No, what, what does he mean? Then he: “A heap of dust.” Good Lord! She spends weeks pondering a scathing answer, and finally comes up with it: that the cadavers Buddy dissects in anatomy class are dust, too, but like poetry, they’re still useful.
Sylvia Plath shakes her head
Before she can hurl that truth at him, Buddy asks an even more tricky question: “Have you ever seen a man?” meaning, of course, a naked man. When she shakes her head, he begins to undress, even dropping his underpants, which are made of “some kind of nylon fishnet” (“My mom says they wash easily”). So “he stood in front of me and I stared at him”. What now? praise, delight, desire? Nothing there, quite the opposite: “I couldn’t think of anything else but turkey neck and turkey stomach and I was very depressed.” Oh, oh!
Sylvia Plath tells this story in her only autofictional novel “Die Glasglocke”, which begins so casually and wittily that you don’t even want to believe it. How can a young woman in prudish America of the 1950s feel the comedy of the situation and the then-not-sex so precisely? Doesn’t her name stand for melancholy and tragedy?
Rightly so, because in the long run the confident self-mockery does not match the dull feeling of existing under a glass bell. Sylvia, who is called Esther in the novel, has no intention of becoming a “suburban housewife”. She asks: Who am I? Who do I want to be? What do I want to do? And if I’m afraid to say it, then at least I have to write it down, in poems, no matter how enigmatic they may be…
Sylvia Plath in an undated photo
Quelle: picture alliance / Everett Collection
With another grant she flees to England, straight to the heart of the most attractive British poet whom she marries. Mr. and Mrs. Ted Hughes are a passionate dream team, two children appear, but poetry does not bring bread. Supported by her colleague WS Merwin, who lets the couple use his London apartment as their daily place of writing (Sylvia in the morning, Ted in the afternoon), she changes genres and within three months in 1962 writes the novel of her own youth in the hope of earning much-needed income , but also to cope with her depression and the bad experiences with American psychiatry. Loved to this day and a cult book of feminism, “The Glass Bell” became a long seller and reading comfort.
Sylvia Plath would have been 90 years old on October 27th.
It is said that all writer’s life is paper. In this series, we present evidence to the contrary.