SYLVIA PLATH'S MYSTERIOUS LOVER

8 8 Y S Y L V I A P L A T H ’ S M Y S T E R I O U S L O V E R J E F F R E Y M E Y E R S Sylvia Plath’s short life and intensely emotional poems have been extensively studied, but at least one major gap remains. Ever since her death in 1963 many journalists and scholars have tried to track down Richard Sassoon. But none of her biographers has found or talked to this mysterious and elusive figure in her life, her first great love, the subject of ecstatic entries in her journals. Like the late J. D. Salinger, he is reclusive and proud of evading his pursuers . No one has ever interviewed him; none of the five biographies of Plath has reproduced his photograph. I have always been curious about Sassoon’s character, the nature of their liaison, why it ended and what became of him afterward. I did finally find him, but in a roundabout way. Though he refused to respond to my letters, I managed to discover – by interviews and by examining his writing – some interesting details about his background, life, and work, material which illuminates his relationship with Plath and explains why he was important to her. Plath’s first biographer, Edward Butscher (1976), cautiously hid Sassoon’s identity and inaccurately called him ‘‘Richard S— —, French grandson of a British poet.’’ One of the leading poets of the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon came from a Jewish family, was 8 9 R brought up as a Protestant, and converted to Catholicism. Linda Wagner-Martin (1987) said Richard was related to Siegfried; Anne Stevenson (1989) described him as distantly related; Ronald Hayman (1991) did not mention his connection to the poet; Paul Alexander (1991) said that Richard’s father was Siegfried’s cousin. Butscher provided some basic information, Wagner-Martin and Hayman added nothing new, and Stevenson filled in some background from Plath’s point of view. Alexander published some of Richard’s letters to Plath, now in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Richard Sassoon has never published the letters Plath wrote to him. All the known facts about him can be listed in one paragraph. Richard Laurence Sassoon was born in Paris in 1934 and brought up in Tryon, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina . He met Plath at Yale in April 1954, during their junior years, when she was a student at Smith College. In May, after they’d spent the first of many weekends in New York, he became Plath’s lover and was passionately involved with her for the next two years. He graduated from Yale in 1955, attended the Sorbonne during 1955–56, and during that Christmas holiday, when she was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, they spent a week in Paris and then traveled to the south of France. She was particularly impressed by the chapel in Vence, decorated by Henri Matisse. In February 1956 she met Ted Hughes in Cambridge, marked him as her prey, and began as she ended: passionately and violently. She famously wrote of their first encounter: ‘‘When he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. . . . The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.’’ Plath liked to have several competing suitors at one time. Though instantly besotted with Hughes she was still involved with Sassoon. On 25 March she spent the night with Hughes in London on the way to meet Sassoon in Paris, a trip that became one of the great turning points of her life. Though Plath did not find Sassoon attractive, she was drawn to his mind and could not imagine a sexual relationship without a powerful intellectual bond. He gave her a taste of the good life: cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and committed to high art. At ease in France, he introduced the provincial New Englander (who could 9 0 M E Y E R S Y read but not speak French) to French food and wine, literature and culture; he showed...