by Sylvia Plath
Thursday 16 August 1951*
ALS with envelope,
Indiana University
Thursday
Dear Mum –
All is relatively silent on the home front. Just cooked some corn fresh out of the garden for the little ones – it’s a cinch! Boil 20 minutes – c’est tout! Now, after much coaxing, Pinny naps, Joanne sleeps, and dishes are done. I really am enjoying myself – especially since I got those wonderful pastels. Already I’ve done a big full-sized self-portrait which came out sort of yellowish and sulky, but the face isn’t bad at all. Quite traditional. Thought that when I get home I could cut it down. I love the hard pastels – much more precise than the soft – and cleaner cut. Only thing I’ve got to get over is the “rubbing” habit. I liken it to putting too much pedal on a sloppily played piano piece – it only serves to blur mistakes. Next subject: Freddie. He’s the only one around here who can sit still.
Marcia is radiantly happy about Mike. Hope it lasts.
A short note from Dick says he may “drop in” Monday.* I am cross, because if he could have stayed for the supper hour, Marcia and I were planning a steak cook-out for our males. Oh, well!
You have no idea what a lovely relaxing evening I had after you left. I took a hot bath, and lay on my back in the tub, gazing out at the fog sifting whitely through the leaves. Read in bed, interrupted by Lane, whose dress hem I pinned, – and a small, serious Cupie-doll faced Freddie, who poked his head around the doorway, two large, abnormally pink ears sticking out at right angles from his head . . . cardboard, I later discovered, after emerging from a laughing fit he said gravely: “That was good driving you did. It’s good practice for you.”
And so, the job enhances itself day by day.
Love,
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 20 August 1951*
ALS with envelope,
Indiana University
Monday night
Dear Mum –
Dick has come and gone again, and this time our encounter was sane and rained-upon. All morning the sun shone, and I completed chores and marketed for hamburg and peaches. I had made date nut bars the previous evening, and so packed them, plus tomato sandwiches, oranges and eggs I stuffed this morning. All in all we made the picnic last through lunch and supper.
As soon as Dick came, before noon, a clap of thunder rent the sky and it began to pour. We ended up by cooking and eating at Lane’s house. The afternoon was spent in biking to Castle Rock & Marblehead, getting soaked by another shower, and finishing our food by a roadside in the car. Not quite what I had planned. However.
Conversation was spasmodic, but evidently I will plan to spend a few days down the Cape after I come from work. Only a very few, as far as I’m concerned . . . to see a little of Dick and to get future employment sounded out. I am not sold on waitressing. As a means to an end: money . . . it has it’s points.
Dick left at seven, and I felt the sudden need for some vicious activity, no doubt to get rid of a few months of physically barren living. Even a regular cadence of weekend dating provides enough male friction or magnetism, taken in small doses, at a distance. And that system can cope with this emotional business. But after not being regarded approvingly by a boy in three months, I have to get rid of my twisted sensibilities by battering my head out on a stone wall. For a moment I wondered what on earth I could do, standing in my room alone. Finally I had it. I looked at the angry gray ocean, darkening in late twilight. So I put on my bathing suit, and ran barefoot down to the beach. It is a queer sensation to swim at night, but it was very warm after the rain. So I splashed and kicked, and the foam was strangely white in the dark. After I staggered out, I put on my sweatshirt and alternately ran and walked the length of the beach and back.
As I walked into the house, my purpose accomplished, I said goodnight to the Mayo’s who gaped, “You went swimming? Alone?”
They must all think I’m crazy, what with never having a date, reading every spare minute and going to bed early. But what the heck do I care. They leave on the cruise in three days, and I’ll be on my own for the rest of my time here.
I expect grammy on Thursday the 30th to pick up my things. But, they have no idea when they’ll be coming home on account of weather, so I shall no doubt not know definitely till the last minute.
Soo . . . only about 12 more days! My how trivial! There is so much I want to do, and so little time to do it in!
Love to Warren. How is his social life? I’ll work on it when I get home.
xx
Sivvy
PS. Dick brought me a little wood picklefork he made – Also an oddly shaped thing that might be used for a paper knife. I didn’t dare ask what it was for. Tell Mildred I was pleased.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 23 August 1951*
ALS with envelope,
Indiana University
Thursday
Dear Mum . . .
Only eleven more days and I’ll be back home in the nest again. I finally know definitely that I will be home on Monday the 3rd of September . . . probably before lunch. I guess that they want to squeeze the last day of the week out of me. Anyway, I feel I owe myself a brief respite of leisure and no rushing around – heaven knows I have enough to do with the Cape job-hunting prospect, the driving appointment, the 10 minute speech,* and the few stories that I must write.
What do you think of the following merely descriptive lines:
“. . . The acid gossip of the caustic wind,
The wry pucker of the lemon-colored moon,
And the sour blinking of the jaundiced stars . . .”*
_____
Or have I degenerated horribly in my verbal expression?
Tomorrow is the day I have been waiting for for weeks. The Mayos, Meyers and Blodgett’s are leaving for a week’s cruise – and they are taking Freddie with them. Although he is my favorite, he is also the eldest and the ringleader. Pinny will be much more docile by herself, and will return to the babyish level of Joanne. Also, they will both be in bed by 7. Also they’ll have naps. I’ll see to it that we go to the beach and generally I’ll feel wonderful without always feeling a supervisorly eye burning into my back.
Helen, the Irish maid, will be here too, and will take care of most of the cooking so that I shall feel quite a deal more master of the situation.
I received a ten-page epistle from Ann Davidow – saying she’s coming east and wants to see me. She invited me to a great party in New York – said she’d provide me with a terrific date, too---but let alone the absurd money angle, I don’t want to move from home.
Love to that courageous grammy – to dear grampy – and my special Warren – and you
xxx
your sivvy
P.S. Yahoo! They drove off just a few minutes ago for a week – and Helen & I are planning for lambchop & steak dinners. Thusly I should learn a little about cooking meat. Joey & Pinny will be my babies, and this mansion my house for a week! Gracious, what a sense of importance and freedom! xxx
TO Marcia B. Stern
Tuesday 11 September 1951*
TLS with envelope, Smith College
September 10,
Tuesday
A gray afternoon, hair just washed, three hours of futile shopping just completed with the awful realization that material things are so desirable and impossible to obtain. A really swish wool or knitted dress is fine, and I dearly enjoy all that I walk into . . . with an extremely sensuous appreciation of soft textures, graceful lines and rich sooty charcoal grays to leafy maroons. Malheureusement, my head is suddenly filled with visions of the coat, the shoes, the hat, the gloves, and the other properly simple, elegant, and accordingly expensive accessories that would really be the thing . . . and I kick myself where I deserve to be kicked for such horrible and mercenary afflictions of wishful thinking. Again I say that in twenty years I may have wrinkles and the physical
charm of Eleanor Roosevelt, so what the hell, I work on my mental and invisible assets, such as they are. But that doesn’t prevent me from being avaricious as far as money is concerned and wondering why the hell I wasn’t born with a whole place setting of sterling silver in my mouth. Pardon the warped tone of this first and miserly paragraph.
To lift ourselves above the material plane: Cape Cod mission completed successfully inspite of 48 hours worth of misgivings. Last Wednesday, Mr. & Mrs. Norton picked mummy and me up and drove us down to our little tourist cabin in Brewster. On the way we picnicked on a typical Cape beach, and I got my dose of Pilgrim history at the Rock, under the guidance of “Uncle Bill” who is a History Prof and couldn’t see my living in Mass. for all these years without bowing my head at the shrine. You know what that sort of commercialized patriotism does to me, but I really did enjoy seeing what they have done for the place; my self-control is no end strong . . . I didn’t burst out laughing once.
My first encounter was Perry. The summer has done wonders for him . . . his hair is a fantastically delicious shade of sunbleached copper, and his tan is also great. From his towering height, he cast a very brotherly glance at me, and I felt that here was one guy I could really talk to. Funny thing, but I feel that if he were a girl or I were a boy, we would have the same Siamese-twin friendship that you and I experience in a way. As it is, our talks are few, intense, and always too brief. My love for him is purely intellectual, which amuses me. He is the first boy whom I can reason coldly and clearly about without any emotional surges. So his company did me great good. I hardly spoke to Dick all that first afternoon wherein the three of us went swimming with the three grownups. Something was definitely tense. It was Perry who ran all the way up the beach with me to get dry, and who pretended we were strangers and had to get acquainted, and who was terribly sweet and sat caressing my tan and making the sort of honest and healing remarks that I had been starving for all summer. That night we went for a long walk in the dark along roads smelling of the salt flats, and under the queer light of the stars. I wondered at random if there was any sense in falling or, more likely growing, in love with him. The outcome of the evening was that we kissed a few times, and both felt instant mental doubts. Perry is also a sort of alter ego of mine, on the male side . . . a very convenient thing to have. We discussed Dick, also Perry’s girl, and came away, swearing like troopers to be lifelong comrades and confidants. An odd relationship . . . but.
As for Schmootzy, or however the heck you spell it. We spent the second evening with Uncle Bill, Rit (his handsome waiter roomie)* and Katherine, a forty-year-old professional waitress from Latham’s . . . all of us visiting Joe Crowley . . . head of a little place (capacity 90) Dick had in mind for me next year. I laughed my head off . . . . Joe is the size of the fat cook on the side of the Sunshine Crackers box, and wears the traditional white bread loaf hat. God, the world is full of peculiar people!
But . . . as you may imagine, the evening was not just what I had in mind. So by the third afternoon, I managed to spend an hour down on a deserted beach with the dear man who came armed with a Physics Book. Somehow he couldn’t concentrate, and kept asking me questions about what the summer had done to me. Unsatisfactory. Nothing actually said. For my money our dialogue could have been as decisive as John James Audubon trying to converse with a Dovetailed Kingfisher. So I decided, hell, old girl, speak out.
“I would like,” I said suddenly and calmly, “to level your skull with this book; maybe you’d then say something.”
“I know,” he replies. “That’s what worries me.”
That night we plan to have a truth talk. He suggests it; two of his friends who are now married had one. All you do is ask questions; the other person answers them as truthfully and openly as possible. The answer to the answer is usually just “Oh . . . ” with any number of possible inflections. So it is dark; there are a million stars, all falling or shooting or what ever they do on early autumn nights. There is great silence and tenseness. We hie ourselves to a great deserted open field and sit braced back to back. His voice comes from very far off. Sylvia learns that her letter made him feel she didn’t particularly care about him any more. Hence the miffed attitude. Misinterpretations straightened out. Great scene of reconciliation in which terms as compromising as “Darling” were bandied about ferociously.
Hell, I can’t keep talking that way. The fact is that he wishes I were three years older, and also feels a strange sense of longing . . . when he gets letters from his two married roommates . . . . We listed all the things we had in common . . . and also faults. The resultant proceedings were tender and quite wonderful. He came to the cabin the next morning at seven, before breakfast, and made mine for me. So that is all fine. Except I’m not sure yet that he is the temperamental mate for me. I wonder if I don’t need someone a little less managing and positive . . . a little less uncompromising and more easy going. I don’t know if I could keep up with him physically or not. But if I continue going out and meeting new men, I should soon find out.
At any rate, I drove all the way back from the Cape, and Uncle Bill and I got really acquainted, while Aunt Mildred and mother chatted in back like two schoolgirls. The results were that Bill would love dearly to have me for one of his daughter’s-in-law . . . which fact made me feel a little like crying. I have told no one about the understanding between Dick and me . . . not even mother. I feel that if it works out, a lot of people will be happy. But there is a long time for me to make sure yet, and a life time isn’t something you can swear away while wrapped in a rosy cloud of romance and fire. So I feel that a terrible lot depends on me and my attitudes in the next few years. All of which leaves me convinced of the awful and great implications of maturity and independence.
You know. And we will meet soon again, and chart our courses. I have a feeling that if we really decide what we want, we can work out a way to have it. You see, it is a sort of testimonial of our mutual relationship that makes me write things I could hardly describe to anyone else. I am proud enough to keep quiet, rather than make this business of growing love a prosaic, verbalized newspaper fact. You at least know what lies behind my inadequate statements.
The best with Mike during his visit.
Love,
Syl
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman
Wednesday 12 September 1951
ALS with envelope, Smith College
September 12, 1951
Wednesday
Dear Davy –
Boy, do I feel frustrated! The thought of you coming East and heading back without me having a chance to see you really threw me for a loop. You see, I have long since finished my job in Swampscott – your wonderful mammoth letter got there after I’d left. They forwarded it to 26 Elmwood, of course, but it waited unopened there for precious days while I stayed in a tourist cabin down the Cape, visiting Dick. The climax to this unhappy story is that when I came back from the Cape I opened your letter, only to find that it was in the middle of the dates you gave for coming East. Not knowing how the hell to reach you in N.Y.C., I slowly beat my head against the mailbox. Mother was equally disappointed at not being able to have you out – she has heard so much about you, and naturally looked forward to saying hello in person. Say something quick to stop me from kicking myself and muttering, “Damn, IF only I hadn’t gone to the Cape. IF IF IF . . . ”
And your letter! Glory, what a masterpiece. I was so proud, reading it, that I am going to read it aloud to Dick when he comes home, saying, “see, I knew her . . . ” Honestly, I would like to have typed flyers made of that part about the “party system” and send them shooting down from an airplane into all the half-empty cocktail glasses of young socialites. Bravo! I can only admire your process of thinking, Ann, and you say things so cleanly and ferociously that it does my heart good – I think we both talk best when we need to blow off steam about something.
I can see just what you mean about the artificialities in party life, but everything is relativ
e. As for me, I have had such a boyless summer, that I got to lusting for a handsome tall twelve year old who lived across the drive from the house where I was confined. Three dates in three months, all absurd, is not exactly the thing for a frustrated young college girl. When you knew me, I demanded a high powered combination of height, good looks and especially intelligence. After this summer of being a glorified child’s companion, maid and babysitter, and washing up cocktail glasses while the husband and wife swished to one party after another, I got a terrible complex that the world was topsy-turvy, and that really the 30-year old couple should be knitting and sipping cocoa on the terrace, while gay young me went wild with the men. To put it bluntly, I need a good dose of tall young men cutting in on me at a few dances to bring me back to my old way of looking at life. It’s bad enough to wander about and desire sex, when you are continually in the company of eligible men, but when you are in the company of children day and night you built up the idea of emotional passion to abnormal mental proportions – and get to wondering half-jokingly about just how people seduce husbands anyway.
The only thing that has kept me from going totally mad is Dick, working way way down the Cape, with only Monday off (I had Tuesday.) I lived, as I said, in a tourist cabin with his mother and father and my mother, for about a week. In the morning he would come over before work and cook my breakfast, and we’d go swimming in the afternoons. Nothing happened till the last night, when we both had been rather disturbed about our relationship. So we decided to have a truth talk . . . and get a lot of problems straightened out. So we walked a long way along the cape roads, smelling of the salt flats, under the queer light of a million stars – shooting all over the sky the way they do in autumn. At last we saw a big open field, where we sat, braced back to back, talking. It happened that he committed himself verbally to the extent that he wished I were three years older, and he’d like to marry me eventually, or someone like me. No proposal, requiring yes or no, but just a “let’s wait and keep our fingers crossed deal.”