by Sylvia Plath
& bleeds if I touch it. Sorry to bother you about it,
Much love,
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 23 September 1957
TLS, Indiana University
Apt. 3 rear
337 Elm Street
Northampton
Monday, September 23
Dearest mother . . .
Got your nice long letter today. Much appreciated the advice about deep breaths etc. I ricochet between chills & fever but am working on a rather devil-may-care attitude which seems to be best with me, as I am so over-conscientious I will never be anything less than conscientious at least. My first class is on Wednesday at 3 pm. My schedule is: a 3 o’clock on Wed, Thurs & Fri, and a 9 and 11 on Thurs, Fri & Sat. Thus, in effect, my 3 pm class will be a test for the next day’s two morning classes & I can revise mistakes in between. I have 3 office hours & “by appointment” and am supposed to see all my 65 students for conferences as often as possible, which I see now will take much of my time, but I want to be very conscientious about this, too.
I share an office in the Library on the top floor with a very nice old 18th cen. lit. woman, Miss Hornbeak* (lovely name!) who seems most kind & helpful---I have never had her for anything, so it is pleasant, not too personal. I am very lucky to be in the library---right between the class buildings* I teach in: I have 3 different classrooms, so shouldn’t have too much trouble placing what I’ve said to which classes. Did I tell you over the phone that Mr. Hill,* the acting chairman of the department, & his extremely kind wife* came over one evening last week. He stayed for coffee as she had a meeting of some sort, & the percolator made an excellent brew which I served with date nut bars. I had always avoided his course in the development of the British novel* (which as usual, I regret) as I thought he’d be dull, but I got along fine with him and really like him, which is convenient, & asked his advice about office hours, etc.
This next week is full of meetings: oaths of allegiance, Department & faculty meetings, bouffet supper & president’s reception next Wednesday. How I long to be busy! This brooding and isolation is something I must avoid. As soon as I am busy, with a hundred things to do, read, forms to fill out, I function very happily & efficiently. I am sure that once I get into a daily routine, I’ll find that I don’t have to spend all my time on class preparation & correcting papers, and it will be a relief to know we are discussing only 2 stories for tomorrow, say, instead of feeling, as I do now, the abstract simultaneous pressure of the term challenging me all at once. Ted is wonderful: so understanding & cooks me breakfast & cleans up the dishes. I hope I perhaps can see about his having driving lessons: he feels helpless, I think, not being able to drive the car & would like to do so. I can’t take it on myself to teach him in traffic & don’t want to wait until he gets friends enough with some other man, so shall see about driving schools: have you any advice about the kind of lessons to ask for?
I am trying at present to learn about our college library and reference catalogues and indexes as we have to teach the library and the forms of research papers to our students too, and I blundered along happily in my college days, practically ignorant of articles in magazines, or dictionaries of slang etc.
The head of the Hampshire bookshop, an ex-Smith woman,* very nice, sent Ted two little bottles of American champagne on his publication day, last wednesday, & Harper’s sent a telegram.* We drank one bottle then, by candlelight & will drink the other (about a glass each) when I’ve finished my first week of teaching on Saturday.
My first day of class is very routine: I’ll introduce myself, as you say, talk about the course & assign the terms books and the week’s assignments, and ask them to write out a questionnaire I’ll make up---about them, their interests, their reading, so I’ll have a profile of each one to help me get to know them & to aid in filling out my own information: I’m free to tell them (and encouraged) to come around to my office just to “get acquainted”, so will give my best to this, seat them alphabetically, etc. My 2nd class day I’ll begin really teaching: the most difficult book of the course: 2 chapters from Will James. The classes are not lectures, but discussions, so I can only prepare the main points to cover & perhaps a little background material, & must learn what I can draw from them. I also want to learn how to explain grammar mistakes: I have an editorial eye & know something’s wrong when I see it, but must learn the rules.
I was amused about Dotty & the hats. Don’t let her go shopping with you. You should let me come: she has no sense of adventure, style, or flair. The feather hat sounded lovely & you can always carry a stylish umbrella if it rains. Buy a real special one. I feel accessories are more important than a new dress: I feel really special with a good bag, shoes & belt & don’t mind wearing my basic dresses year in year out.
I noticed what you said about morale boosting was true, this Saturday. I desperately needed blouses, for I was afraid this hot tropical Indian summer weather would keep up & I would faint of heat in my sweaters. Do you or can you discover the crescent shoulder pads for my nylon short-sleeved blouse given me by Mrs. Prouty at home? Its a lovely blouse, but I can’t wear it until I find these detachable white shoulder pads. In my drawers?
I bought a very nice opaque nylon blouse with a round neck & becoming short sleeves for $5.95 and another special washable pure silk in a lovely taupe, browny, blacky pattern with a bow tie, lovely & floppy, which will be ideal with black suit, jumper & for afternoon teas. I have very particular taste in blouses, but do like them. As these are washable they’ll come in very handy.
Must run to my office now, where I plan to read all afternoon. Do call Wednesday eve at supper if you can get over to Aldriches. After six. I plan to spend the evenings home. We’re scheduled to go to NYc Sunday oct. 20 for a reception & half hour reading for Ted. Much love. Bless me on Wed, Thurs, Fri. & Sat.
your own
Sivvy
TO Lynne Lawner
Tuesday 22 October 1957
Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978
Apt. 3 rear
337 Elm Street
Northampton, Mass.
Tuesday, October 22, 1957
Dearest Lynne,
Courage! Your letters* have arrived, all, I think, and I only wish I could meet you in the atmosphere above the Atlantic for a vigorous heart-toheart about Cambridge & Life in general. Looking back, from a birds-eye view, I pluck the idyllic strings of my past life there (so much happened, that if I concentrate on the nice events & people they seem to fill up most of the time & space), but your letters reminded me of much lousiness that I slogged, trudged and agonized through in my first year. You are not unusual: you are, as you say, freezing, sick, and uncertain. Well, so was I. Cambridge is worth this: there is a Cambridge that is aesthetically heaven (wait till spring, alas, & you’ll see), intellectually rewarding & personally fruitful in human relations. However, you have to really fight through a lot of ice, sludge and sham to find it. I am sorry my former supervisor, Doris Krook, isn’t there this year, for she was my academic savior. You, however, will have Daiches, and he should be a great help. Let’s start at this thing topically. If I sound didactic, it’s partly because I know, through much misery, whereof I speak, and partly because everything came out all right in the end, in spite of crises, muddles and run-ins with the Newnham authorities.
Your academic program first of all. You seem to have two choices & it isn’t too late to change in October & “catch up” on the tripos. I forget the grant you have, or if you want to get a degree, or can bear at this point the idea of a 2nd year. However that may be, I strongly recommend your going to Miss Burton, explaining how upset, etc. you were on being away from home or something to that effect, and that you now see, as in a burst of clairvoyance, how very much of a good thing the tripos reading can be. If you are now feeling as ignorant, unread, unintellectual as I did (and still do: it’s a perennial feeling), you would do well to discipline yourself: the tragedy reading is stiff but fascinating, y
ou can go through the Greeks, Racine, Corneille, Ibsen (reading 20 plays), Strindberg, writing papers & really getting an extensive & thorough knowledge of drama. It is a Good Thing. Miss Bradbrook,* in spite of her reedy pipestem voice & queer grey Charles Addams head, gives good lectures on modern tragedy, from Racine to Eliot, & Northam* is good & entertaining on Ibsen. Practical Criticism supervisions will do you good too, although they terrified me & my other American cohort: we had absolutely no background in dating poetry or prose (and I’m still not much good at it), but buy the 3 or 4 centuries of Oxford books and start reading through them to get a sense of poetic development. Try Leavis’s lectures. I don’t know what other papers you’d like to read for: I did the moralists, which is too stiff for one year, French, which was fun, and Chaucer and the Scottish Chaucerians, who are delightful. But remember, I say this from the other end of having done them. I suffered, sometimes crammed, and got blear-eyed while in medias res. I do think it’s most important for you to have a well and strongly structured academic program: you won’t regret it & it will be a beginning at filling in those huge whistling gaps which I had, and still, of course, have, but which are less terrifying than they were. You can still keep up Daiches, and would be able to do the reading he advises, but would also be enriching yourself outside & feeling less blank. Start going to a certain number of lectures regularly, trying the ones I suggested maybe, and see if simple discipline helps a bit. If you are only planning to stay a year, you still can get a lot of directed reading done this way. Also, try to smooth things over with Burton, your tutor, and Miss Abbott.* Humble contrition, tearfilled eyes and honest endeavor (how Machiavellian are you?) always help. Admit you were wrong, confused, and sorry above all to have inconvenienced them in any way. It’s better to have them on your side, as you never know when you will decide to stop and write a book, get married, or something needing legal support. I honestly feel you’ll be happier with a normal tripos program: you have netted plums of varying flavors with Holloway* & Daiches, so start by getting interested in your work. Let me know what works out here: you really can have lots of fun reading for the tripos: tragedy and poetry especially.
Whitstead can be grim, as can anyplace, depending on your mood. My first year was harder, I think, as breakfasts were stiff and awkward, except for another American, a Scots girl* & a vital South African* who joined me in a certain humorous view of the prim Britishers. If you find a decent British girl, let me know. I found them all insufferable, shy, gauche and desperately awkward socially, or if social, dizzy butterflies. The good American mixture of blood and brains, savoir faire and common sense seems non-existent in Britain. I missed a woman or girl friend more than anything: and finally substituted Doris Krook and her friend Wendie Christie, whom I’d like you to look up for me if you feel like it (I never look people up myself). Wendie is in her thirties, I guess, a dear, lovely South African (I thought they were all black at first, but they’re not) widow whose husband died in Cambridge (she has never really got over it), who has 2 handsome children, is a wonderful cook & hostess. She has parties for the dons that are much fun & Ted & I ate and cocktailed with her a good deal in my second year. She lives, or did live (ask the phone operator) in 8 Harvey Street (bike up the Fen Causeway, cross left by the Royal Hotel & go down is it Lensfield Road to the big Catholic church, turn right on is it Hills Road? and then your first or 2nd left should be Harvey Street. Look it up on a map, which I don’t have. Tell Wendie, if you will, that I haven’t written because I’ve been in a black mood not because I’ve forgotten her. I will write her very soon, too. I remember her as one of my two favorite women in Cambridge – she balanced Doris Krook, who was a kind of female Plato, beautiful and Jewish & brilliant as a diamond and as dazzling.
Tell Wendie how you feel about things, if you happen to get along with her. She is very kind, and has this private sorrow of her own which must be really shattering. I know I found her dinners a delight for she knows the young and elderish dons & I was sick to death of young fops. Of course, even among the dons, there are even worse fops, but look at them with an observant Dickensian eye, if you can manage such so early. I couldn’t.
Practical advice about the miserable cold. Wear stockings (nylon) & wool kneesocks over them. You will be Known for this, but warm & so what. Wear piles of sweaters. Get a hotwaterbottle & pre-warm your bed at night. Get 2 or 3 pounds of shillings at a time from the bank, secrete them in a drawer & put piles in the gas meter at a time and don’t skimp. For colds, see your panel doctor (have you got one? try Dr. Bevan* at 2 or 3 Trinity Street), tell him you come down with hellish colds & try to get an advance supply of good nosedrops, some sort of antihistamine that will cut down the twitchings, and get also, for medicinal purposes, a bottle of good rum or brandy with which you will lace your hot milk at bedtime. Pamper yourself. Take all or none of this advice. Leave the Newnham infirmary alone, & if you come down with another cold, cut classes, supervisions – if possible go to the Silver Street butcher & get a good cut of steak, fry it over your gasfire or the kitchenette one, get frozen peas & lots of fruit, & try feeding yourself. I found Newnham food ghastly & sometimes rose actually gagged in the middle of the dinner meal and rushed out into the moonlit or raindrenched gardens to be alone away from the brittle British table babble. Or cooked at Whitstead for me & whatever man happened to be around.
The Granta crew et al are, just as you say, mainly pretentious babies. You may find one or two nice ones, honest artists, or something, but they are rare & you’ve got to wait & look & be patient. If I had known Ted would stalk onto my horizon on February 25th I would have been much happier, no doubt. He colors all Cambridge in retrospect, but I managed to live, however precariously, until then. I remember getting involved with the ADC my first term, playing for a couple of nights in a 9-night centenary performance the part of a cockney whore in yellow satin,* getting drastically ill, all chills and fever and no voice, and leaving to recuperate at Whitstead (a kindly Kingsman* brought an organ to my room & played me Bach in the afternoons, but that was luck) and finding they got on swimmingly without me after all.
Read “Lapis Lazuli” to yourself, and say how wise and noble you will be because of all this. Also try “Thou art indeed just, lord, . . .” and other Hopkins* sourdough poems. You can make it worth being there. But don’t be fooled into thinking it’s easy. It may be easy for the Mays,* but I doubt if you could care for that kind of life, or that kind of person, being her, I mean. Needless to say, this letter is a trade secret. Full of anti-British propaganda. There are fine ones. But they are rare.
You will probably feel more like going “out” when you’re well & doing more in your studies. Then, let gentlemen take you to dinner, plays, concerts (go to Kings evensong & Christmas vespers: feed your senses and spirit) and enjoy them for what they give you in a very pragmatic way: you give them your brilliance, looks, company: that’s more than they deserve. You stand every chance of meeting some really nice people: are you trying Europe in the winter & spring vacs? Do go with somebody. I remember a ghastly spring week freezing and outdoor-sketching in Paris* between travel-dates when I stopped going out after dark because I couldn’t walk around a corner without being solicited by street-apes and French gentlemen in foreign cars and it wasn’t at all romantic. Even if you’re with a man you don’t have anything more than a platonic relationship with, it’s better, I think, than going alone. Unless, of course, you are fortunate in chance meetings.
I’d better grind to a close. Tell me if any of this helps. Try the tripos & keep the big men too. And see if you like Wendie: she isn’t “intellectual” but is a kind, vital woman. You might well meet older people through her, and this could be a help.
I have myself been going through a black spell, after my 5th week of teaching 3 sections of freshman English at Smith, 65 papers to correct every other week, and a huge feeling, again, of ignorance among my old mentors & thirtyish Phd specialists. There is one young new British woman* here whom I hope to g
et to know who also feels “unacademic”, whose husband is also a writer while she teaches, but even she has had years of experience in Helsinki. And she doesn’t want to write herself. Which I do. So I have been exhausted, frustrated, etc. and find it very different to “teach” a story than to “know” it in my own head: we have to “teach” also, use of the library, which I managed never to learn about, but used with a kind of hit and run clairvoyance, and the technique of “research papers” etc. So I find myself slaving over correcting, private interviews, the next week’s preparation, & feeling apart from the faculty of veterans and champing at the bit to do my own writing. I am, like you, “unacademic” and enjoy reading & studying, but not the kind of grubbing one does for Phds. I also get very tired, & long to cook pineapple upsidedown cakes & write on a book of poems, but must put off such luxuries till June. Which is a large question mark. Ted’s book has gotten some good reviews & he gave a reading at the NYC poetry center this Sunday which was a treat for both of us. One has to sacrifice much to be a good teacher: either skimp on housewifery or outside writing & even then, I don’t have time to do more than prepare for my freshmen. One is, alas, human. Ergo, life is no blaze of success and lucky strikes. So imagine yourself teaching 70 Wellesley freshmen symbolism in Hawthorne* & the proper use of footnotes, count yourself in a potential heaven, have fun, and write me soon about everything.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
c. 3 November 1957*
TLS, Indiana University
Sunday afternoon
Dearest mother . . .
Enclosed, the letters from Warren which we enjoyed no end. I’ll write him in a day or so.*