On 19 April, Sylvia announced to her mother that she had met Richard Sassoon, whose father was a cousin of the British poet Siegfried Sassoon. She described Richard as a slender “Parisian fellow,” even though he was a British subject and had family in North Carolina. She delighted in his outré conversation, which he would carry on in youthfully pretentious letters, large parts of which were written in French. Perhaps Sylvia enjoyed the wordplay of his rather decadent manner, so at odds with contemporary culture. She liked his “wicked laugh.” He presented himself as an exile, and that surely appealed to her.

Richard was a Yale student, and Sylvia, familiar with New Haven after her outings with Dick Norton and Myron Klotz, appreciated just how much Sassoon stood out from his contemporaries. Constance Blackwell, Smith class of 1956, sometimes joined Sylvia and Richard on their Yale weekends. Blackwell recalls that Sassoon was “generally regarded as the most clever and worldly wise of all—he was very amazing and witty—it was he who belonged to the Elizabethan Club, where we went once or twice to have tea and smoke clay pipes. Richard was preparing himself to be a great literary figure.” This social club housed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books and Shakespeare folios, and promoted literary conversation while Irish maids in black uniforms and white aprons served the quintessential English beverage. In such a setting, Plath may have felt welcome enough to level with Richard Sassoon in a way that was not possible with other males of her generation. In the only “heart-to-heart” talk Blackwell ever had with Plath, Constance remembers Sylvia saying “how difficult it was to speak about our own dreams and ambitions with young men we adored—because they themselves had their own demons of ambition.”

More than a decade later, in the fall of 1968, when Yale went coed, women still found the “maleness of Yale” overwhelming. “Male eating clubs, male-populated streets, even a male-oriented health program. Walking down a Yale street we became acutely aware of the staring. We were conscious of ourselves as objects, common objects to be looked over and appraised,” Janet Lever and Pepper Schwartz write of their experience in Women at Yale: Liberating a College Campus (1971). “You were expected to be a mixture of Margaret Mead and Scarlett O’Hara,” Lever told a Time interviewer. Well, Sylvia Plath, three-time reader of Gone with the Wind, was prepared.

Richard formed part of an unusual male grouping inspired by the charismatic Henri Peyre, described as a “quintessential Frenchman” in his New York Times obituary (10 December 1988). Author of more than thirty books, including French Novelists of Today and The Contemporary French Novel, Peyre told a Newsweek interviewer, “The only sport I enjoy is conversing with women. Most of life is a purely nuanced affair, and women help men realize this. Yale is much too masculine a place.” For Peyre’s acolytes, literature was a way of life. At Smith, Constance Blackwell suggests, literature was more of an acquisition, almost a commodity. Sassoon and his friends had an appealing vulnerability, she recalls, and were just the right antidote to hard-drinking Yale men. Sassoon & Co. were authentic. When they drank, Constance noted, they drank sherry, which put her, so to speak, halfway to England, where she wanted to study and mature as a writer.

So Richard Sassoon was a kind of literary dream come true for Sylvia Plath. He seemed magical, the kind of lover Plath describes in the refrain to her villanelle, “Mad Girl’s Love Song”: “I think I made you up in my head.” On so many evenings out, Sylvia scorned men who did not know how to talk to her. She rued her own efforts to rid herself of any original expressions that might intimidate her dates. Even someone like the literary-minded Gordon Lameyer was a project Sylvia had to shape to suit herself. With Richard, she did not have to summon a compliant demeanor to mask her true emotions. The soigné Sassoon was also a master at planning dates, excursions to the city, and cultural events. He was too small for her physically, Sylvia would often say, and yet she found a man who exuded aestheticism very appealing. The story, as Constance Blackwell heard it, was that Richard’s father had initiated his son into the delights of sex by taking him to a prostitute.

Sassoon had a Volkswagen, Constance Blackwell recalls, and was “a bit of a hypochondriac. We used to tease him that he and his Volkswagen got ill at the same time.” Sylvia told Phil McCurdy about a gas station stop on the Merritt Parkway, where she enjoyed the spectacle of herself sleeping in Sassoon’s Volkswagen, seated among wine bottles and books on Baudelaire and attracting attention that she greeted with “blithe abandon.” To Aurelia, she almost apologized, describing Sassoon as a “very intuitive weird sinuous little guy whose eyes are black and shadowed so he looks as if he were an absinthe addict … all of which helps me to be carefree and gay.” Sassoon was a decidedly bohemian corrective to her orthodox dates. Nancy Hunter thought Sylvia built Sassoon into a Byronic hero but also an “amusing toy.” Sometimes Sylvia even seemed to find him repulsive, telling her roommate, “When he holds me in his arms, I feel like Mother Earth with a small brown bug crawling on me.” The only way Nancy could explain Sylvia’s continuing dates with Sassoon was to conclude, “She could not resist exploring the bizarre or ugly, even when it frightened or sickened her, and I could not help feeling that for a girl with a delicate equilibrium it was a dangerous pastime.”

When a Lawrence House girl called Sassoon a worm, Nancy explained how powerful Sassoon made Sylvia feel. Marilyn Martin got a firsthand glimpse of what Nancy meant. Marilyn was used to seeing Sylvia with Gordon Lameyer, whom Marilyn described as “all American … such a handsome, charming person.” Sylvia and Gordon looked wonderful together, like a poster couple. After a date with a guy from Amherst, Marilyn had returned with him to Lawrence House. They were on the porch, the make-out spot couples would repair to after the girls signed in and waited for the bells signaling they should return to their rooms. Marilyn watched Sylvia approach the porch with a date Marilyn did not recognize. He was small and swarthy. Later she learned it was Richard Sassoon. Couples usually looked for a dark corner. But Sylvia, in full view, virtually attacked her companion, leaning over Sassoon, who was sitting on a railing. “It was kind of embarrassing,” Marilyn said. Sylvia was “very passionate, more passionate than most people on the porch would be.” This was a “level of sexuality that I was not comfortable with … in literature, yes, but right here?”

Constance Blackwell thought Richard was a little afraid of Sylvia. To Constance’s boyfriend, Alex Holm, a shocked Sassoon reported that Sylvia had said to him, “I wish I could take your penis back to Smith with me.” Unlike the Catholic and Jewish girls Constance knew, the Protestant Sylvia seemed to have no guilt about sex. Yet to watch her cross the campus she looked like a typical Smith girl. With her flowing hair and robust health, you expected her to have a tennis racket in her hand. Blackwell’s vision evokes Katharine Hepburn in her prime. “I think Richard knew he wasn’t up to Sylvia. Charming as he was, he didn’t have that private strong character. When I saw Sylvia with Ted, there was a man big enough for her,” Blackwell concluded.

Sylvia admitted to Phil McCurdy she did not fully follow the French her “little expatriate frenchman” spoke to her, although she certainly understood “je t’adore.” That Richard was a little wearing, though, is apparent in Sylvia’s confession to Phil that she sometimes wanted “good healthy vulgar american sun, sweat, and song … entendu?” This was, after all, a Smith undergraduate who enjoyed bragging about climbing an 830-foot-high fire tower with three others to gape at the “circling crown of lights far far below,” an all-at-once brave, scary, ecstatic experience. The arch and elusive Sassoon could be quite a trial at times. Here he is trying to placate Plath: “Please do not say you do not know me. That has depressed me a little.… And do you think I know myself well enough to tell you?… I have said much about the world—surely not without some self-revelation. And I have made you smile, I have made you laugh—perhaps I have even made you cry—was this not me! and me alone?”