The Barbizon Paulina Bren (read along books txt) 📖

writing to him, she said she was planning to head down to the Barbizon’s swimming pool and then out onto the sundeck, in a feeble urban attempt to replicate one of her most favorite places—the beach.

In The Bell Jar, Esther famously tosses her clothes from the Amazon’s rooftop on her last night at the hotel and the evening after Marco’s assault at the country club. But in “real life” at the Barbizon, Sylvia’s emptying of her wardrobe onto Lexington Avenue was less poetic. Just as on the very first night, so too on the last all the GEs gathered in Grace’s room at 9:00 p.m.: it was her birthday, in fact, and there was champagne, wine, leftover liquor, and cake. They had planned to perform a round of limericks for the Mademoiselle editors as a jolly goodbye the next day, but that plan soon evaporated in the wake of cake and alcohol. To everyone’s shock and amusement, Neva related a story from her time at the cannery, about a dark-haired girl in short skirts who used to turn tricks in the parking lot, using Coca-Cola to douche herself as a form of preventative birth control. Others would line up in front of the vending machine and count off how many Coke bottles had been bought that night. Sometimes it was as many as twelve.

It was in this state of intoxication that Sylvia and her best friend Carol headed to the elevator and up to the roof with armfuls of Sylvia’s clothes, stopping Neva to ask if she wanted any of it. Neva said no, thinking Sylvia would need them just as much as she did, having no idea of their plan. Sylvia and Carol shrugged, pushed the elevator button up, and walked out onto the roof. There was a slight breeze and a dark sky, the sun had already set hours before, and Sylvia extracted articles of clothing from the pile that she had accumulated with such care and cost, and tossed them, one by one, off the side of the Barbizon. Neither Sylvia’s letters, the other guest editors’ recollections, nor The Bell Jar offer a satisfactory explanation, but the gesture can be read in multiple ways: bravado, romanticism, resignation, madness.

Sylvia would return to her mother’s house in Wellesley, Massachusetts, wearing Janet Wagner’s green dirndl skirt and white eyelet peasant blouse. In return, Sylvia gave Janet her last remaining piece of clothing: her green striped bathrobe. In her suitcase, instead of clothes, Sylvia carried avocados and a pair of plastic sunglasses in the shape of two starfish. She had purged herself, or so she believed.

A month before, as she had readied herself for the adventure of her life at the Barbizon and Mademoiselle, Sylvia had thrilled at the idea of leaving Smith College, of experiencing so much more than she had ever before. She understood that exposure to the outside world was what she needed for her writing: “More than anything now, I realize I have to Live and Work with People… instead of forever being sheltered in this blissful academic environment where all the girls are the same age and have the same general range of nervous tensions and problems. My summer experiences have proved most versatile in story-background data.” But the “real world” had shown itself to be more than Sylvia could handle, and her fairy godmother “woosh” fantasies must have seemed grotesquely naive by the end of June.

Two weeks after leaving the Barbizon, on July 15, Sylvia came down the stairs of her mother’s home, legs bare. Her mother saw right away the scars on her legs that were neither fresh nor healed. It was clear that her daughter had done this to herself. Sylvia pleaded with her mother: she wanted them to die together right there and then because “the world is so rotten!” Within two hours, Sylvia was being ushered into psychiatric counseling, and at the end of July 1953, electroshock treatments began, in the crudest and cruelest way possible, without anesthetization, so that each shock reverberated through Sylvia’s body, splitting her open just as she believed New York had done to her. In the days that followed, Sylvia wrote to Peggy Affleck, the Mormon in her guest editor cohort. She wanted to know more about the Mormon view of the afterlife, which staked its bets on a parallel life for the soul after the mortal body had perished.

At the end of August, back home again, Sylvia pried open her mother’s metal locker, removed fifty sleeping pills, wrote a note to say that she was going for a long walk and would not be back for a day or so, and folded herself into the crawl space under the house with the pills and a glass of water to help them go down. What happened next would be splashed across national newspapers: a nationwide manhunt for the Smith girl, the talented writer, the Mademoiselle star. It was her brother who would finally find her, beneath the house, still alive despite the pills she had swallowed. It was Sylvia’s first suicide attempt.

She had returned from New York a different person—just not in the way she had hoped. On the one hand, Sylvia adorned herself with all the privilege that came with her particular kind of life; on the other, she eschewed it, tossing all her carefully curated possessions over the side of the Barbizon. Nothing ever lived up to the hype, nothing was ever as good as it should be; the perfection she craved was indeed a fairy tale.

CHAPTER SIX

J

OAN

D

IDION

The Summer of 1955

This might well be the earliest and least-known public photograph of Joan Didion. With one year left to graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, Didion was in New York in 1955, staying at the Barbizon as a Mademoiselle guest editor. Looking very young and very happy, she poses for the camera while interviewing Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist and short story writer