Sylvia
Plath’s summer 1953 breakdown and suicide attempt are said to have hinged on
being denied admission to author Frank O’Connor’s short-story-writing course at
Harvard Summer School. The course catalog said enrollment was limited, but how was it that Plath, a well-published writer at age 20, was not
admitted?
Irish-born
writer O’Connor (1903-1966) in 1953 was internationally famous, a literary star.
Enrollment in his course that summer was not restricted to undergraduates or
Boston-area locals. Anyone could apply. The catalog entry stated only a
preference for those with some experience in creative or critical writing.
Plath recorded
her very reasonable doubts about competing for admission with “professional
writers and grown-ups” from across the nation (CL1, 636). Plath saw the summer-school
course catalog in March (CL1, 586), but applied only after Harvard offered her
a $75 scholarship, news that arrived at her home in Wellesley around June 3. Plath
was in New York for the month. Her mother Aurelia Plath, opening Sylvia’s mail,
relayed this information, and also that O’Connor’s course required applicants
to send in a writing sample. Plath asked her mother to retype her story “Sunday
at the Mintons’” and mail it to her in New York. From there Plath mailed her
sample between June 8 and 13 (CL1, 636).
Andrew Wilson’s
2013 biography Mad Girl’s Love Song hazards that because Wilson did not
find Harvard’s rejection letter among the hundreds of other letters in Plath
archives, Mrs. Aurelia Plath “perhaps” intercepted and destroyed what was in
fact an acceptance letter so as to keep Plath at home serving family members that
summer (pp. 209-212). If so, it was the only time Mrs. Plath shot down her
writer daughter’s rising star to get her own way. Biographer Carl Rollyson gave
no source for a claim that O’Connor deemed Plath “too advanced for his class” (American
Isis, 64). Heather Clark’s Red Comet notes that source is an
unpublished Plath biography archived at College Park, Maryland.
All of that is wrong.
It is
unlikely that Mrs. Plath, an educator, plotted to deny her daughter instruction
from the moment’s most celebrated short-story writer at the nation’s most
prestigious university, where Sylvia might write stories to sell for badly needed money. Wilson guesses that Sylvia was fooled but then discovered, too late, her mother’s treachery, triggering that summer's matricidal and suicidal urges. The
“Sylvia was too advanced” theory flatters Plath. A 2010 essay by Peter K.
Steinberg reasoned:
Plath had, after all, published five stories and four poems
in Seventeen and Mademoiselle before June 1953. In addition, she
had three poems and three journalism pieces in The Christian Science Monitor,
and more than two dozen articles published anonymously as a Press Board
correspondent in the Daily Hampshire Gazette and Springfield Daily
News. While she had no published criticism, it would be surprising if other
candidates for O’Connor’s class had such a résumé. (1)
This ingenue’s résumé might not have impressed
O’Connor, an Irish Republican Army veteran, former political prisoner, W.B. Yeats’ playwriting protege at Dublin’s Abbey Theater, biographer, poet, translator, critic, memoirist, and fiction
writer. Knopf published his collected stories in 1952. An O’Connor
biography, quoting O’Connor's assistant, said Plath’s writing sample made O’Connor think her “demented” and when Plath’s suicide attempt made local and national news that summer O’Connor said it proved he had been right (2). Mrs.
Plath wrote in Letters Home (LH, 123) and elsewhere that
Sylvia’s application, sent in mid-June, was a late one for a course that began on July 6 and had
already filled.
In Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, a careworn Esther
Greenwood, just back from New York, sourly accepts this bad news. Esther soon receives
and opens for herself a follow-up letter:
Propped
on the table I found a long, businesslike letter from the summer school and a
thin blue letter on leftover Yale stationery, addressed to me in Buddy
Willard’s lucid hand.
I slit
open the summer school letter with a knife.
Since I
wasn’t accepted for the writing course, it said, I could choose some other
course instead, but I should call in to the Admissions Office that same
morning, or it would be too late to register, the courses were almost full. (Bell Jar, 97)
If this
second letter is as much fact as fiction, and O’Connor’s assistant told the biographer the truth, Harvard and not Aurelia Plath denied
Sylvia admission to the writing course, the only course she cared to take that year. Sylvia
Plath’s Journals (pp. 185-187, pp. 546-549) show her weighing and
dismissing summer-school alternatives and choosing, for financial and not familial reasons, to
stay home in Wellesley and write on her own.
Maybe O’Connor’s
choice not to admit Plath to his writing course was unfair. Maybe, as Steinberg
suggests, “Plath’s creative self . . .was still forming,” meaning Plath was
adolescent and so was her work. At age 20 no writer, even Plath, is too
advanced to learn from a successful writer with 30 years’ experience and an
international reputation. “You are too
advanced” is to this day a common rebuff to an
applicant maybe naïve enough to believe it. “The course has filled” also softens a “No.” For whatever reason, “no” was a disappointment, the
greater because Plath had planned her entire summer around O’Connor’s course.
Showing professionalism
rare in disappointed young writers, Plath never groused in writing that
O’Connor had misjudged her tremendous value or that her qualifications had
entitled her to admission--or that it was Mother’s fault she didn’t get in. Plath
wrote in her journal that the course “was closed to me” (J 543), and to
correspondent Eddie Cohen that she had felt “miffed” (CL1, 655) rather than
devastated or furious. In a few years she would pore over O’Connor’s stories, seeking the secrets of success.
(1) Peter
K. Steinberg, “They Had to Call and Call: The Search for Sylvia Plath,” Plath
Profiles 2010, p. 108.
(2) My blog post of November 1, 2022 documents in detail the source of this remark, mentioned in passing in Deirdre
Blair’s “Enmity, Torment, Adversity,” review of Voices: A Life of Frank
O’Connor, The New York Times, Section 7, page 11, May 22, 1983.