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

contend with the jarring reentry into regular life after the excitement of Madison Avenue—she was now signed on as a Ford model. For Neva Nelson, it was probably the hardest return home. When she was submitting her thoughts on the Kinsey Report and premarital sex, she did not yet know. She did not know until she was back in California, standing at a bus stop, and felt sick. Neva was pregnant. The father was John Appleton, her date at the St. Regis rooftop ball. Sylvia and Carol had been right after all, and Neva’s relationship with John Appleton had developed in the direction they suspected.

John Appleton had wanted Neva to stay in New York, and asked his grandfather at Street & Smith Publishers to help her find a job. The grandfather, horrified by Neva’s lack of pedigree, pretended to call her in for an interview and then instead paid her off: he settled her Barbizon hotel bill, which was still due because of mix-ups with her plane ticket, and told her to return to California. She did as he said, although what he had offered was no fortune; she took the sleek, silver bullet of a train, the California Zephyr (the same that Joan Didion boarded two years later as she made her way home), famous for its “Vista-Dome Views” from the glassed-in top deck. She boarded with a shoebox of tinned Spam, hard-boiled eggs, bread, and shelf-stable mayonnaise. When she finally arrived in Oakland, California, penniless, needing to get to San Jose, she called up one of her mother’s drinking buddies and asked for a bed for the night and a loan for the bus ticket. It was only later when she was standing at a bus stop in San Jose, and turned to be sick, that she knew. She spent the last couple of months of her pregnancy “in hiding” in a $12 attic room with only a bed, working in a hamburger joint to make ends meet. She met a couple who offered to help, eventually delivering the baby herself in their bathroom while they slept. Before they whisked the baby boy away, in what was almost certainly a baby racket they operated around Moffett Airfield, Neva gave him a name and wrote it inside his swaddling clothes: Michael Martin Murphey, Episcopalian. Neva would keep the secret for most of her life.

When the 1953 guest editors had introduced themselves to the magazine’s readers in their bios, they all wrote that they aspired to become wives, mothers (preferably of three children), while keeping up a career. But privately they said otherwise. Toward the end of the month, Laurie Glazer and Sylvia finished off a bottle of white wine in Laurie’s room, talking until the early morning hours. Conversation turned to the future, as it so often did in those days, and both swore they would not rush into marriage, perhaps not even get married, in fact anything to avoid ending up “in suburban boxes.” In The Bell Jar, Sylvia wrote: “And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard’s kitchen mat.” It is hard to know if Sylvia already believed that as she sat in Laurie’s Barbizon room in 1953, or if this feeling would come when she wrote the novel ten years later, having already experienced marriage.

Indeed, despite the promises to themselves and each other, they did all get married very soon after. Their stint in New York represented their ambition, which was now largely put aside because with marriage came babies, and fast. In 1956, Sylvia married the up-and-coming British poet Ted Hughes, whom she had met in Cambridge, England, where she was studying as a Fulbright scholar after graduating from Smith. They would become the darling couple of British literary circles, and she would have her first child in 1960. Diane Johnson returned home to marry the man to whom she had been engaged the summer of 1953. In a year she had a baby, and then within six years, she had another three. She was living the “1950s clichés, without believing in them, just stumbling in.” Anne Shawber married Dick Stolley, to whom she had been “pinned” when she was a GE, and who would become a founding editor of People magazine. Janet Wagner would be married to an attorney within two years after that summer.

The pressures, the double standards, the desires and the prohibitions were just too much. Earlier in the summer of 1953, the handwriting expert hired by Mademoiselle to analyze the twenty guest editors informed BTB that one of the group was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. There were rumors immediately that it was Sylvia, but in fact it was her best friend Carol (“Doreen”), who had just lost her father, and to whom the editors had given a wide berth because of this. But what was telling was that more than a few of the GEs, upon hearing this news through the rumor mill, feared it was they who had set off the mental health alarm bells. All of them felt palpable relief after learning it was not them. The point is: perhaps it could have been any one of them.

But it was Sylvia Plath, aged thirty in 1963, in her flat in London, recently separated from her husband, poet Ted Hughes, who took her life early one morning, her head in the oven, the gas on, the kitchen door sealed with wet towels to protect her two small sleeping children nearby. It was her final, successful suicide attempt, with the first right after June 1953, and others most probably in between.

“Sylvia saved me over the years,” Neva Nelson quietly confessed. “I didn’t want to be known as the other one who killed herself.”

Sylvia published The Bell Jar the year