The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

yelling, no horror,” instead merely a “complacent yawn.” This is also how The Bell Jar begins. In many ways, her novel ten years later is a substitute for Sylvia’s missing journal entries for June 1953.

Neva Nelson, not knowing any better, was herself guilty of the nationwide “complacent yawn” that decimated Sylvia. On the morning of June 19, Neva entered the Barbizon coffee shop as she did every morning. She saw Sylvia at the counter, joined her, and ordered her fail-proof breakfast of a bear claw Danish and a milky coffee. It was clear that Sylvia was agitated, and when Neva asked about it, Sylvia gestured at the newspapers on sale. But Neva was clueless: clueless about politics, clueless about who or what exactly was a Jew, clueless about the trial and the impending execution. Sylvia swept out, calling her “stupid,” deservedly. Neva rushed after her, following Sylvia down into the subway just as a train was approaching out of the tunnel. She stood frozen midway down the subway stairs and watched Sylvia turn her face away from the screech of the subway as it barreled in through the pitch-black tunnel, electric sparks flying.

The Bell Jar describes this day more accurately still: “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York. I’m stupid about executions. The idea of being electrocuted makes me sick.…” But why did she not turn to Cyrilly Abels, the leftist fellow traveler (if not completely the card-carrying communist that George Davis, the former associate editor who had gone to the FBI to report on her, tried to suggest)? Abels would have understood Sylvia’s horror on June 19 that the Rosenbergs were to be executed that night.

Sylvia was distraught by her job, her workload, the Rosenbergs, the lack of eligible men, the lost dream of New York. The Bell Jar: “Only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself. I just bumped from my hotel to work and to parties and from parties to my hotel and back to work like a numb trolleybus.” The other guest editors regularly found her crying. Janet Wagner had tried to help, but by the third week, like the others, she would walk away. It was too much.

Sylvia largely hid her inner turmoil from her mother in her letters home, offering a glimpse here and there, hidden within the descriptions of clothes and the overly enthusiastic pronouncements of her love for Cyrilly Abels. On June 8, she wrote to her mother, “Life passes so fast and furiously that there is hardly time to assimilate it. I’m going to bed early tonight…,” and then again she repeats, in the same letter, “Life happens so hard and fast I sometimes wonder who is me. I must get to bed.” In The Bell Jar, she writes, “I was supposed to be the envy of thousands of other college girls just like me all over America who wanted nothing more than to be tripping about in those same size-seven patent leather shoes I’d bought in Bloomingdale’s one lunch hour.…”

By the end of June, Sylvia could sense that something had shifted inside her, that New York had changed her, but not in the way she had hoped. She would need time to process what she had seen, heard, felt, and experienced—and also what she had not, even as she had desperately wished to. Writing to her brother a week before she was to leave New York, she admitted, “I haven’t thought about who I am or where I come from for days. It is abominably hot in NYC… the humidity is staggering… I have learned an amazing lot here: the world has split open before my gaping eyes and spilt out its guts like a cracked watermelon. I think it will not be until I have meditated in peace upon the multitude of things I have learned and seen that I will begin to comprehend what has happened to me this last month.” And it wasn’t just the drama at work, or at the Barbizon: part of what happened, quite possibly, was sexual assault, or at least attempted sexual assault. Just the day before she wrote to her brother, Sylvia had been at a country club dance in Forest Hills, where she met a Peruvian man named José Antonio La Vias. Her calendar shows she returned to his apartment on Manhattan’s East Side. Elsewhere, she notes he was “cruel.” Janet Wagner, who was at the country club with Sylvia that night, had an entirely different recollection: their double date was with two Brazilian men, and it was Janet who had had to fight off a brazen, daytime sexual assault; she smashed in his white fake veneers. According to her, they had been trailed by an editorial assistant sent out by Mademoiselle to keep an eye on them after they mentioned where they were going, and it was he who rescued them in his convertible, dropping them off at the Barbizon, whose walls they joyfully ran toward, exhausted, laughing about their lucky escape.

But it is difficult to believe this version, especially when read alongside The Bell Jar. In the novel, Esther, Sylvia’s protagonist and alter ego, is at a suburban country club in Forest Hills, where she is assaulted, almost raped, by Marco, a wealthy Peruvian and friend of the disc jockey (whose name is changed from the real Art Ford, whom Carol LeVarn was now dating, to the fictitious Lenny Shepherd). The assault is powered by explosive misogyny from the very start: Marco clasps her arm so hard that it bruises, which he then shows her with delight.

Whether or not Sylvia suffered a sexual assault, her time in New York left her out of sorts, discombobulated in a way that was unsettling for someone who was always planning her life. Sylvia summed up her month in New York to her brother: “I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened and enervated.…” After