Sylvia Plath’s Sartorial New York Summer: Pain, Parties & Work
In honor of the late poet’s October birthday, we explore a little-known side of Sylvia and delve into the fashionable but grueling summer in New York that marked her life.
In 2013, author Elizabeth Winder published a book called Pain, Parties, Work: Sylvia Plath in New York, Summer 1953 detailing Sylvia Plath’s summer in Manhattan as a guest editor for Mademoiselle magazine. The experience inspired her only novel The Bell Jar and altered her legacy as a writer forever.
“There are a lot of biographies and critical studies of Sylvia’s work, but I felt that so little space has been devoted to this one month in her life. Many are very reductionist and oversimplistic — there’s a lot about her suicide and suicide attempts. But when I read her journals and letters, I see someone who loved life and engaged in the sensory world,” Windsor spoke about her book.
Sylvia Plath was immortalized by her own poems and journal entries as a neurotic, sensitive soul and grossly romanticized by many modern artists as the archetypal “sexy tragic muse”. In actuality, she suffered from major depression and possibly other mental illnesses. Had she lived in this century with more mental health resources, mental illness may not have ended her life. She was both brilliant and troubled, and her pain should not be fetishized. (Here’s looking at you, Ryan Adams).
Although mostly remembered for her tragic ending, while Sylvia was alive she experienced the world with an astonishing depth of feeling that enabled her to vividly describe her life’s most affecting moments in gorgeous detail. Her love of beauty is her true endowment. Sylvia was a heart-wrenching aesthete, and “Pain, Parties, Work” gives more insight into the intensely feminine, funny, and sensual part of her psyche that she is not always appreciated for. Winder’s purpose was to prove that Sylvia was more than just the tragic poetess she is remembered as.
Sylvia was a lover of life and all of its epicurean pleasures. She loved the warmth of the sun, the ecstasy of sex, the tastes of her favorite foods, and the feeling of fabric on her skin. Her journal entries and poems are wrought with descriptive, sensual imagery.
“New clothes left Sylvia reeling with happiness. For Sylvia, a shopping list was a poem. She always shopped alone—it suited her deliberate nature and the artistic joy with which she approached all things aesthetic—making the perfect cup of dark roast coffee, pulling on a silk stocking, arranging berries in a bowl.”
In 1950, after Sylvia graduated high school, she received a scholarship to Smith College. There she studied English, and in 1953 won a writing competition to become a guest editor at Mademoiselle in New York. During this time period, New York was just starting to be considered “a safe haven for women who were more interested in becoming fully formed adults than wives and mothers.” In this pre-feminine Mystique world, Sylvia belonged to that category.
Sylvia bought a whole new wardrobe for the experience, hoarding “blouses of sheer nylon, straight gray skirts, tight black jerseys, and black heeled pumps” which by the end of the month, she would drunkenly toss off the roof of The Barbizon Hotel in a final farewell to her New York summer.
Sylvia arrived in New York on June 1st, 1953 with her blonde June Allyson pageboy haircut, lots of her favorite red lipstick, and a suitcase full of new clothes, ready for the excitement the month would bring her.
“It was the golden age of fashion journalism. Russian art directors Alexander Liberman at Vogue and Alexey Brodovitch at Harper’s Bazaar were branding their magazines with bold futurist strokes. (Their designs and layouts have a touch of the paper-doll look of Russian cinema.) With the cultivated eccentricities of Harper’s Bazaar editor Carmel Snow and Vogue columnist Diana Vreeland, the world of fashion mixed comfortably with the literati and the avant-garde.”
Reality
The Barbizon Hotel for Women was situated on the corner of Lexington and 63rd and served as housing for Sylvia and the other 19 guest-editors for the summer. Every day, the girls walked from the Barbizon to the Mademoiselle offices on 79th for their work. The events of that summer were a flurry of fashion, social events, and feminine guile, but harsh realities were never out of reach.
Sylvia’s first work day as a guest editor unfolded in a series of imperfect and relatable events. She experienced a nosebleed all over her crisp white and blue suit dress and had to change, sweated through her nylons, and had an unpleasant introduction to the revered Editor-In-Chief of the magazine Betsy Blackwell, whom she learned kept vodka at her desk.
Betsy berated Sylvia after finding out she had given another guest editor a negative impression of her first day with Mademoiselle. Betsy called Sylvia to her office and insulted her writing, spitting that if it weren’t for her English teacher's mother, she wouldn’t be able to “put one sentence in front of the other.” Sylvia, who had wanted to make a good impression and do well that summer, retreated to the bathroom to sob. She emerged to the expectation that her photo was taken for a magazine spread about the guest editors. She managed a smile with her red, swollen face and held a rose upside down for the photo.
Sylvia’s first assignment as a guest editor was to interview poet Elizabeth Bowen, which she dressed in pearls, white gloves, and a smart-looking hat. She was clean and pristine. One would never have guessed the invisible cracks in her polished exterior. The poet’s charming personality and composed appearance hid her inner existential concerns well.
Though Sylvia is remembered as a writer, she had exceptional visual talent as well. She sketched, collaged, and even began designing paper dolls with fanciful clothing as a young girl. Sylvia was more than just a wordsmith, and it’s likely her appreciation for the intersection of words and beauty that led to her interest in Mademoiselle’s guest editor position in the first place.
Despite her aesthetic aptitude, she was made the guest managing editor for the month under the watchful eye of true managing editor Cyrilly Abels and worked long, grueling hours at a desk. Sylvia had preconceived notions that her work would be fun, glamorous, and full of clothes, but she was estranged from the other girls for a large portion of the time. She resented this, and the plain and “sensible” Cyrilly who had no love for fashion was shocked that someone of Sylvia’s intelligence and talent would be “caught up in the fashion whirlwind.” To be seen as a waste of talent merely because of a love for visual beauty must have felt demoralizing to Sylvia.
Although her work hours were long, Sylvia’s summer experience was still ripe with her beloved sensory pleasures whenever she wasn’t chained to her desk: She shopped at Bloomingdale’s, attended cocktail parties and lingerie shows, and even went on a few dates. She enjoyed herself in many happy moments over the course of the month. However, in the end, the experience left her jaded and she did not truly live up to her expectations of glamour.
“Above all, Sylvia prized beauty and form. She was addicted to beauty, devoted to beauty—she worshipped beauty. She often bought books for their color and texture. Even her boyfriends were classically handsome. She cut away at her life until it fit the gorgeous blueprint she made for it. The journals are gorged with relentless inquiry. But all that introspection is outnumbered by concrete description of skin, fiber, and tendon. Sylvia had Chardin’s love of flesh and blood things such as parsnips and tulips and old kitchen knives. She was wedded to the sensuality of language, not the grammar that might kill or distill it. She loved words—she loved them the way she loved milk and fruit in the summer, dishes of blueberries with cream poured over them. DuBarry cleansing cream as seen in Mademoiselle. Making devil’s food cake from a mix, or the sharp happy scent of fresh ground coffee. The pleasure of washing her hair with Halo shampoo, with its piney-clean winterberry heart. The soothing, synthetic scent of fresh magazines…. And she liked to be glamorous. She loved any chance to dress up… all this compulsive attention to detail made Sylvia a natural fit for the world of cold cream and chlorophyll pills. She would have been the perfect fashion editor.”
During the month, the girls were expected to show up fresh and pressed to every workday and event. They were walking representations of the magazine, and expectations for both performance and appearance were high. Towards the end of the month, Sylvia began to whither. She felt pale and exhausted and crushed under the pressure. She missed tanning on the beach and playing tennis. She wanted to sleep for days. She witnessed disabled men with missing limbs begging for change in the city, and in a letter to her brother, compared this experience to having been to the zoo in Central Park. Sylvia said that the only thing differentiating those men from the beasts were the bars on the cages. The glitz of New York was beginning to wear off, and her perception of the injustice of life was dampening her light.
After a month with food poisoning, a visceral reaction to the execution of the Rosenbergs, and a few more social events, by June 26th, Sylvia’s last night in New York, she was ready to go home. The girls had a party in one of the guest editor’s rooms, drinking and laughing and sharing one more bit of time together before everyone went their separate ways the next day. It was during this party that Sylvia brought all of her clothes to the roof and tossed them over the edge: an eternal goodbye to her expectations of opulence.
The next day, she dawned a dirndl skirt and plain peasant blouse she had borrowed from one of the other editors and began her journey home. Her experience in New York had influenced her in a myriad of ways, but her mental health had suffered as she flew neurotically between her glossy expectations of glamour and her inability to escape the darker themes of reality within her own mind.
The experience certainly left its impression. Ten years later, Sylvia would write her one and only novel The Bell Jar, depicting her New York experience under the guise of fiction with an almost unnerving accuracy. The novel follows Esther Greenwood through a month as a guest editor for Ladies’ Day magazine. Through her experience at her New England school for women, as well as through her attempted suicide, asylum experiences, and then finally her emergence back into the world after all of these encounters, she paints a picture of Sylvia’s own struggles.
This October, we remember Sylvia Plath as more than a tortured writer with a tragic ending, but as a lover of the world and all its facets. One whose sensitivities to her own sensory experience have allowed generations after her to feel what she felt and see the world as both beautiful and grave at the same time.
Though she may have felt stifled beneath the bell jar of her life, Sylvia saw out into the world from inside it, and at least at times, it magnified the light.