The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (ebook reader browser TXT) 📕

and caps. Sylvia, as always, gave a positive spin to it in her letter home: she pronounced the tartan outfits to be “very cute.” But they were not. They were itchy-looking, unbecoming. The girls were herded to the park in a van, made to stand in 94°F sun “in identical woolen tartans and 40-inch bust-producing longsleeved button-down boy-shirts… our arms flung wide, while a mad photographer aimed at us from a footbridge.” Laurie Totten, Sylvia’s neighbor in Massachusetts, hated the “silly beanies” they were forced to wear on their heads even more than the awful kilt and blouse. Sylvia secretly resented the infantilizing baby-blue blouse that finished off the preposterous look. Nevertheless, in the group photograph, Sylvia is at the top of the star formation, smiling widely.

Another five days later and Sylvia was still trying to convince herself that losing out on being guest fiction editor didn’t matter, even as her letters revealed her unusually heavy workload: “Work is continuous… I’m reading manuscripts all day in Miss Abels office, learning countless lots by hearing her phone conversations, etc. Reading manuscripts by Elizabeth Bowen, Rumer Godden, Noel Coward, et al. Commenting on all. Getting tremendous education.” Even if somewhat disingenuous, she was thrilled to send a rejection letter to a New Yorker staff member after having suffered countless rejections from them.

Yet Cyrilly Abels had thought she was doing Sylvia a favor by offering her the prestigious role of guest managing editor. Moreover, Abels was in fact Sylvia’s greatest advocate at Mademoiselle. It was she who had tagged her short story as a standout, writing in her signature blue: “Imaginative, well written, certainly superior: hold.” It is unclear whether Sylvia understood that Abels was championing her, but more lies to her mother followed. And they were just as much lies to herself as to her mother: “All the other girls just have ‘busy work’ to do, but I am constantly reading fascinating manuscripts and making little memo comments on them, and getting an idea of what Mlle publishes and why… I am awfully fond of Miss Abels, and think she is the most brilliant clever woman I have ever known.” And while Plath continued to insist in The Bell Jar that Esther liked Jay Cee, her boss, “a lot,” she described her as “plug-ugly,” although with the qualifier that it didn’t really matter because she had brains and spoke multiple languages.

Carol LeVarn, who had the room on the right of Sylvia’s at the Barbizon, would become Sylvia’s comrade in arms that summer. Carol too had submitted a short story for consideration; in the Mademoiselle offices, she found it hidden inside a file, with one word scrawled across it in Abels’s blue pencil: “UGH!” But Carol, when she found the file, probably laughed. She was very blond, very tan, very flamboyant, and very witty, much like Doreen in The Bell Jar, who “had bright white hair standing out in a cotton candy fluff around her head and blue eyes like transparent agate marbles… and a mouth set in a sort of perpetual sneer. I don’t mean a nasty sneer, but an amused, mysterious sneer, as if all the people around her were pretty silly and she could tell some good jokes on them if she wanted to.” When Carol was sent news of her acceptance to join the 1953 GEs, her college, Sweet Briar, “the Smith College of the South,” was also notified of the good news. Instead of congratulating Carol, they immediately contacted BTB and suggested that Mademoiselle reconsider its decision because Carol was not a typical, representative Sweet Briar student, and they did not want the magazine thinking she was. (Carol was at the time dating the future writer Tom Wolfe, then at Yale, and would later also show up in one of his novels.) But Sylvia, who was not getting enough of the New York adventure she craved and that she had fully anticipated after her spring weekend with the medical student, was thrilled by her new friend’s wild nature. One time, unable to cross a congested street in New York, Carol walked up to a cab, rapped on the window, and asked the passenger inside if he might scoot out so they could climb through the cab to get to the other side. He obliged, but she and Sylvia never made it across the seat and instead found themselves at a bar with him.

As much as these few adventures were fun, what Sylvia wanted most was to meet some eligible men in New York. She had set her sights on Mademoiselle’s formal dance at the St. Regis hotel’s rooftop, where she was hoping to meet “some interesting guys so I can go out without paying for it myself and see New York.” The St. Regis event was as glamorous as it could get, with two live bands that alternated throughout the night, one rising up from the floor as the other descended, one finishing off the tune of the other, the whole place aglow in rose, down to the Mademoiselle-pink tablecloths. There is a photograph in the August issue (of which Sylvia wanted a copy for herself, lamenting it would show up in the magazine too minuscule to see) with Sylvia and fellow guest editor Anne Shawber laughing raucously alongside two men: Sylvia’s date had sat on the glass-topped cocktail table, as instructed by the photographer, and it had shattered just as the photo was snapped.

Despite the festive mood, the evening had not brought forth any eligible young men for Sylvia. In part the problem was height; both Janet Wagner and Sylvia Plath were tall, and the men rounded up for the evening were lamentably short. Sylvia, still hopeful when she set out for the ball, had worn her strapless silver lamé gown, the same one she wore to the Yale dance following her whirlwind spring weekend in New York, but it seemed now to have lost its magical quality in hot, dusty, and enervated June. In The Bell