Nom de Plume (20 page)

Winter's Tales
—which was Dinesen's own favorite of her books—had a rather unlikely path to publication. This collection came out of Denmark in the midst of World War II, by secret diplomatic mails, to America. First Dinesen had traveled with the manuscript to Stockholm, where she visited the American embassy with an odd request: would someone there be willing to carry the manuscript on one of the planes headed for the United States? She was told that only political or other official papers could be transported. Then she went to the British embassy to make the same request. After she provided a few references in high places (including Winston Churchill), the favor was granted and the manuscript was sent to America on her behalf. Along with her stories, Dinesen had enclosed a note to her publisher, indicating that she was unable to communicate further: “I can sign no contract and read no proofs,” she wrote. “I leave the fate of my book in your hands.”

She would have no idea how things turned out until the war ended. “I suddenly received dozens of charming letters from American soldiers and sailors all over the world,” she said later. “The book had been put into
Armed Forces Editions
—little paper books to fit a soldier's pocket. I was very touched. They gave me two copies of it; I gave one to the King of Denmark and he was pleased to see that, after all, some voice had spoken from his silent country during that dark time.”

The book was critically well received, though without making the same splash as
Seven Gothic Tales.
“Many people, I feel sure, will read all eleven
Winter's Tales
as I did—as fast as possible in order to have as soon as possible the pleasure of reading them for the second, the third, and, inevitably, the fourth time,” William Maxwell wrote. Still, Dinesen was feeling bored, restless, and frustrated—partly because of the monotony of daily life brought on by the war—and suffered through periods of poor health, due to the syphilis she'd contracted years earlier. She was convinced that she would never produce a novel, but held out hope that she might.

A Frenchman named Pierre Andrézel would do it for her.

Here was yet another persona for Dinesen, at the age of fifty-nine, during the German occupation of Denmark. She had created Andrézel out of boredom, because she felt caged in as herself and wished to toy with a new disguise. The novel,
The Angelic Avengers
, was (as its title suggests) a thriller. Years later, Dinesen would laugh it off as “my illegitimate child.” She had done it, she insisted, simply to amuse herself. She asked her Danish publisher in Copenhagen for an advance, and for a stenographer to whom she could dictate the novel. Unsure of the story before she began, she wrote by improvising, dictating a little each day. “It was very baffling to the poor stenographer,” she said. It was also problematic: she would begin a session by announcing that a certain character would enter a room, only to be reminded by the stenographer, “Oh dear, he can't! He died yesterday in Chapter Seventeen.”

When the book came out, Dinesen denied that she had anything to do with it (or with Andrézel), despite a surge of rumors fueled by her own publisher. She said that even if she were the author, she would never admit it. When a friend wrote to say that he'd read the novel and found it “a profound joke,” she replied that she knew who the author was, but refused to reveal his identity until others discovered it for themselves (just as she knew, inevitably, they would).

The novel, which some readers interpreted as an allegory of the fall of Nazism, was published as
Ways of Retribution
in Copenhagen, in 1944. Although Dinesen refused to claim authorship, it wasn't long before she was unmasked, again by the pesky press. Dinesen was upset that journalists would not respect her desire to go incognito, a privilege lost to her long ago. The book became a best seller in Denmark (it was reviled by critics) and was published in the United States a few years later. The Book-of-the-Month Club chose it as half of the dual selection for January 1946 (along with
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House
, by Eric Hodgins). In its announcement, the BOMC remarked that
The Angelic Avengers
—“a fascinating story of mystery, adventure, and pure young love”—was written in wartime, and that “Pierre Andrézel” was surely a pseudonym, but: “Of whom? There were shrewd guesses, but nobody ever really knew. The author, whoever it is, continues to guard this anonymity. All that has been divulged by him (or her) is a plainly fictitious autobiographical note sent to the American publisher.”

Despite the author's contention that her latest novel was a bit of an embarrassment, something she had written to have “a little fun,”
The Angelic Avengers
marked another grand success, selling ninety thousand copies in America. One reviewer wrote that Dinesen was dealing with “somewhat coarser material than in the best of her tales, but dealing with it in such a way that this novel will certainly widen the circle of her readers.”

After the publication of
Winter's Tales
and
The Angelic Avengers
, Dinesen didn't publish again for more than a decade. In the final years of her life came
Last Tales
(1958), which she dictated to her assistant and said was written “with a leg and a half in the grave”; two years later came
Shadows on the Grass
and
Anecdotes of Destiny.
Her health had steadily worsened, owing to the syphilis. There were periods in which she would rally, but once her decline had begun she was never quite the same. A frail, gaunt figure, weighing less than eighty pounds, Karen was in and out of the hospital. In the morning she took amphetamines, stimulants that caused her to talk compulsively, in an odd, almost trancelike state. At night she swallowed barbiturates to fall asleep. Because of the wasting away of her spine, she was sometimes unable to stand or walk. In those last years she led a fairly isolated life, and in periods of illness she was especially ill tempered, sarcastic, depressed, and paranoid. Her moods, she admitted, were “coal black.”

Dinesen was well aware that she could be as difficult as she was charming. “As long as I live it will be bothersome for you to have to deal with me,” she once told a dear friend. She was a leading contender for the Nobel Prize until her death but never won, a fact that proved an ongoing disappointment. Yet by the time she died, in 1962, she was an international celebrity and her books had been published in twelve languages. When Sydney Pollack's Academy Award–winning film adaptation of
Out of Africa
was released in 1985, a new audience was drawn to Dinesen's work, and there was a resurgence of interest in the author as well. To the end, whether inhabiting Tanne, Karen, Isak, or any of her other selves, she believed absolutely that it was her right to assume a pseudonym, and that readers were obliged to respect it. Although her aliases had been promptly uncovered, a friend once wrote of his unknowable, inscrutable friend that “Karen Blixen as a person was always pseudonymous in varying degrees, [and] that she always wanted to be suspected behind her texts but under no circumstances caught.”

In her final months, she grew weaker still, her weight down to seventy pounds. She subsisted on glasses of vegetable and fruit juice, oysters, and biscuits—the few things she could keep down. She could no longer stand without losing her balance, and admitted in a letter to a friend that a doctor had said “that I have all the symptoms of a concentration camp prisoner, one of them being that my legs swell so that they look like thick poles and feel like cannon balls. This last thing is terribly unbecoming and for some reason very vulgar. Altogether I look like the most horrid old witch, a real Memento Mori.” On September 7, 1962, she spent the evening listening to Brahms. That night she fell into a coma and died in her narrow wooden bed. She was buried on the family property under a beech tree.

Five years before her death, an interviewer asked Dinesen whether she had led a happy life. “Yes, and with all my heart,” she replied. “At times I have been so happy that it has struck me as overwhelming, almost as supernatural.” She was asked what, exactly, had made her so happy. “In a way I believe that the only true, sure happiness one can talk about here is the pure joy of living, a sort of triumph simply because one exists.”

She found sexual satisfaction in picking her nose

Chapter 10

Sylvia Plath &
VICTORIA LUCAS

S
he was a good girl who loved her mother. That, at least, was the benign impression Sylvia Plath gave the outside world—a smiling façade of conformity; feminine, pure of heart; accommodating, polite, bright-eyed, and pretty. She admired her mother, Aurelia, and was desperate for her approval. There were no secrets between them. Aurelia was nurturing and boundlessly devoted; Sylvia was her dutiful, adoring daughter. Such was the seamless porcelain exterior of their relationship, and both players were invested in protecting it. Meanwhile, writing in her journals, Plath recorded the brutal truth. “I lay in my bed when I thought my mind was going blank forever and thought what a luxury it would be to kill her, to strangle her skinny veined throat which could never be big enough to protect me from the world,” she wrote on December 12, 1958, following a session with her therapist. “But I was too nice for murder. I tried to murder myself: to keep from being an embarrassment to the ones I loved and from living myself in a mindless hell.” She resigned herself to the ineluctable role she'd been cast in: “I could pass her on the street and not say a word, she depresses me so. But she is my mother.” Sylvia was adept at dealing with Aurelia. Before speaking to her, it was as if Sylvia had trained herself to neatly tuck in her fury and put it to bed, permitting it to stir again only in her mother's absence.

Plath's biography is familiar to just about every English literature major, reader of contemporary poetry, and suicidal teenager. She was toxic because she was so seductive, and seductive because she was so toxic. Her fame is immeasurable. Even many nonliterary types know that Sylvia Plath was the mercurial poet who gassed herself in an oven.

She was born at 2:10 p.m. on October 27, 1932, in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts. Her father, Otto Plath, was a biology professor at Boston University, a well-regarded etymologist, and twenty-one years older than his wife. “At the end of my first year of marriage,” Aurelia later wrote, “I realized that if I wanted a peaceful home—and I did—I would simply have to become more submissive, although it was not my nature to be so.”

By the time she was three years old, Sylvia proved quite brilliant. Once, while her mother was baking in the kitchen, she played alone on the living room floor. She was unusually quiet. Otto went to check on her, and, as Aurelia recalled, both parents were stunned to see what their daughter had done. Using a set of mosaic tiles she'd received as a gift, she reproduced “unmistakably the simplified outline of the Taj Mahal, the picture of which was woven into a mat in our bathroom.”

When Sylvia was eight years old, her father died of an embolism brought on by complications of diabetes. We know how well she came to terms with that loss; those who don't should read her notorious poem “Daddy,” which says it all.

She had a younger brother, Warren, born in 1935, with whom she felt competitive for her parents' affection, especially her mother's. Sylvia was always driven to be the best, and often was. The siblings' relationship did not become markedly closer until she attended Smith College (on a scholarship) and Warren was at Phillips Exeter Academy and then Harvard. Years later, their mother described the family with her typical fondness for nostalgia (steeped in denial). This false portrait presented a family close and uncomplicated in its affections: “We three loved walking by the sea, in the woods, huddling close by the fire and talking, talking, talking—or sharing a companionable silence,” she said.

Plath always knew that she stood apart from others. Because she was viewed as “dangerously brainy,” she felt it was in her interest to mask her sharp intellect and turbulent emotions. Not only did she embody the role of a perfect, straight-A student, but she was determined to become popular. She also pursued the approval of adults, both at school and at home. Other students might merely work hard, but she burned with determination. Before her first short story appeared in
Seventeen
(in the August 1950 issue), Plath had submitted forty-five pieces to the magazine. At eighteen, she berated herself in her journal: “What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want.”

One of her early poems, written when she was in tenth grade, was called “I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt.” A teacher who read it expressed amazement that “one so young could have experienced anything so devastating.” In this instance, the source of suffering was her unwitting grandmother, who had accidentally smudged one of Plath's pastel drawings. The final stanza read,

(How frail the human heart must be—

a mirrored pool of thought. So deep

and tremulous an instrument

of glass that it can either sing,

or weep.)

Such intensity of feeling would never leave her, despite her efforts to conceal and tame it. Aurelia added to this unbearable pressure by making Sylvia feel responsible for the well-being of both mother and daughter. Yet Aurelia might also be credited for Sylvia's supreme sense of confidence, her innate belief that she was “special” and destined for greatness. “The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt,” Plath once wrote, but when it did creep in, she pounded it like a Whac-A-Mole until her achieving self could surface once again. Then all was right with the world. And she was at least able to find consolation in what she once described as the “minute joys” in life: she admitted in her journals that she loved the “illicit sensuous delight” she felt when picking her nose. “God what a sexual satisfaction!” she wrote.

Early on, Plath was a baffling mix: highly empathetic but also self-obsessed. She absorbed everything and everyone around her. By the age of seventeen, she was investigating the bounds of the self and how to manage her troubled psyche. “Sometimes I try to put myself in another's place, and I am frightened when I find I am succeeding,” she wrote in her diary in 1949. “How awful to be anyone but I. I have a terrible egotism. I love my flesh, my face, my limbs with an overwhelming devotion. . . . I want, I think, to be omniscient. . . . I think I would like to call myself ‘The girl who wanted to be God.' Yet if I were not in this body, where
would
I be? . . . But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I—I am powerful, but to what extent? I am I.”

The struggle between selves would torment her for her entire life—in poems such as “An Appearance,” “Tulips,” and “In Plaster,” among others—and it served as a frequent subject of her journals. At Smith, she wrote a long paper on the theme of double personality in Dostoevsky's novels. Even when she was relatively happy, or at least emotionally stable, her inner turmoil never abated. It must have been exhausting. Often her fixation on duality and falseness reached a crisis pitch. “Look at that ugly dead mask here and do not forget it,” she wrote in a lacerating note to herself in a 1953 diary, referring to a recent photograph. “It is a chalk mask with dead dry poison behind it, like the death angel. It is what I was this fall, and what I never want to be again.” That year, she attempted to kill herself by overdosing on sleeping pills.

Despite her recurring depressions, treatments with electroshock therapy, and flirtations with suicide, she was not entirely obsessed with death. As much as she was preoccupied with it, she was also seeking to end her ego self, with its oppressive, needy demands that were impossible to fulfill. Perhaps it wasn't her whole life she wanted to stop, but a “shameful” part of herself. Over and over she expressed frustration at not measuring up to other poets and for feeling stalled in her work. “I, sitting here as if brainless wanting both a baby and a career,” she wrote in her journal in 1959. “What inner decision, what inner murder or prison-break must I commit if I want to speak from my true deep voice in writing . . . and not feel this jam up of feeling behind a glass-dam fancy-façade of numb dumb wordage.”

What she seems to have craved most, in fact, was a chance at rebirth, at resurrection. Even though she was sometimes able to produce (or recover) what she deemed an “authentic” self, the success did not prove sustainable. Plath's obsession with split selves—the pretty, superficial good girl who does everything easily and well, versus the raging, violent demon lurking within—left her perpetually confused: Which one was real? Which one should be shed? Which one should she kill off? In the end, the demon won.

In 1961 Plath won the Eugene F. Saxton Memorial Fellowship, a writing grant of $8,000. She had by then graduated summa cum laude from Smith, published poems and stories, and won a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge University. There she met the dashing British poet Ted Hughes, whom she married on June 16, 1956. (That date is Bloomsday.) After winning the Saxton, she was especially excited because she had applied previously, for poetry, but had been rejected. This time, she'd gone for it with a different project in mind. Although she had in fact completed her first novel,
The Bell Jar
, and even signed a contract for the manuscript with the British publisher Heinemann, this award would give her time to make revisions before the book's publication and provide monthly living expenses as well. Money was extremely tight. That fall, Plath wrote one of her usual cheery letters home to her mother, assuring her that all was well. (Many of Plath's missives to Aurelia opened with the effusive “Dearest-Mother-whom-I-love-better-than-anybody.”)

She mentioned that the
New Yorker
had just accepted her poem “Blackberrying” and shared the news about the Saxton. “Well, I applied for a grant for prose this time and got the amount I asked for,” she wrote. “They pay in quarterly installments as parts of a project are completed, so I should get my first lot in a week or two!” She continued: “Life in town has been more and more fun.” The letter began and ended with her standard loving greeting (“Dear Mother”) and sign-off (“x x x Sivvy”).

Less than two weeks later, she sent Aurelia another chatty letter, referring again to the grant but neglecting to explain what, exactly, her writing project was about. “I finished a batch of stuff this last year, tied it up in four parcels and have it ready to report on bit by bit as required,” she reported vaguely. “Thus I don't need to write a word if I don't feel like it. Of course, the grant is supposed to help you do writing and is not for writing you've done, but I will do what I can and feel like doing, while my conscience is perfectly free in knowing my assignments are done.”

What “Sivvy” failed to mention was that the “batch of stuff” was an autobiographical novel that would have killed her mother, or at least broken her heart. The narrator's voice, as in Plath's poetry, was icy and lucid. It was about the “crackup” of a well-behaved young woman named Esther Greenwood, described in the flap copy of the 1971 Harper & Row hardcover edition as “brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, successful—but slowly going under, and maybe for the last time.” The story was also, to put it mildly, an exploration of Esther's strained relationship with her mother, and how her repressed anguish leads to madness. There was only one way this devastating novel could be published by a “good girl” such as Plath, and that was to hide behind a pseudonym. She chose “Victoria Lucas”: “Victoria” was a favorite cousin of Ted Hughes; “Lucas” was the name of Hughes's good friend Lucas Myers. Heinemann published
The Bell Jar
in London on January 14, 1963. Twenty-eight days later she killed herself.

Plath lived long enough to read the reviews of her novel, and they didn't please her. The reception in Britain was tepid and condescending. “There are criticisms of America that the neurotic can make as well as anyone, perhaps better, and Miss Lucas makes them brilliantly,” Laurence Lerner wrote in the
Listener.
A critic in the
Times Literary Supplement
wrote that “if [Lucas] can learn to shape as well as she imagines, she may write an extremely good book.” Worse, Plath had hoped for publication in the United States, too, but that didn't seem forthcoming. Just after Christmas, she'd received a jarring letter of rejection from Alfred A. Knopf in New York, which had published her poetry book
The Colossus
the year before. A second rejection came from Harper & Row (“The experience remains a private one,” the editor wrote of the narrative, which seemed more a “case history” than a novel.) In the letter from Knopf, the editor expressed her regret: “We didn't feel that you had managed to use your materials successfully in a novelistic way. . . . Up to the point of her breakdown the attitude of your young girl had seemed a perfectly normal combination of brashness and disgust with the world, but I was not at all prepared as a reader to accept the extent of her illness.” The same could be said of Plath. No one—not even those closest to her, who were well acquainted with her despair—could fully comprehend its sheer velocity, its manic and unstoppable force.

The 1989 Plath biography
Bitter Fame
, by the poet and critic Anne Stevenson, opens with an apt epigraph from Dostoevsky's
The Devils
:

There was a tremendous power in the burning look of her dark eyes; she came “conquering and to conquer.” She seemed proud and occasionally even arrogant; I don't know if she ever succeeded in being kind, but I do know that she badly wanted to and that she went through agonies to force herself to be a little kind. There were, of course, many fine impulses and a most commendable initiative in her nature; but everything in her seemed to be perpetually seeking its equilibrium and not finding it; everything was in chaos, in a state of agitation and restlessness. Perhaps the demands she made upon herself were too severe and she was unable to find in herself the necessary strength to satisfy them.