The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1
Page 72
I don’t know about you, but I’ve realized that the last weeks of school were one hectic running for busses and trains and exams and appointments, and the shift to NYC has been so rapid that I can’t think logically about who I am or where I am going. I have been very ecstatic, horribly depressed, shocked, elated, enlightened, and enervated . . . all of which goes to make up living very hard and newly. I want to come home and vegetate in peace this coming weekend, with the people I love around me for a change.
Somehow I can’t talk about all that has happened this week at length, I am too weary, too dazed. I have, in the space of 6 days, toured the second largest ad agency in the world* and seen television, kitchens, heard speeches there, gotten ptomaine poisoning from crabmeat the agency served us in their “own special test kitchen” and wanted to die very badly for a day, in the midst of faintings and hypodermics and miserable agony, . . spent an evening in Greenwich Village with the most brilliant wonderful man in the world, the simultaneous interpreter Gary Karmirloff, who is tragically a couple of inches shorter than I, but who is the most magnificent lovable person I have ever met in my life . . . I think I will be looking for his alter ego all over the world for the rest of my life . . . . spent an evening listening to an 18 year-old friend* of Bob Cochran’s read his poetry to me after a steak dinnere, also at the Village . . . . spent an evening fighting with the wealthy unscrupulous Peruvian legal delegate to the UN* at a Forest Hills tennis club dance . . . and spent Saturday in the Yankee stadium with all the stinking people in the world watching the Yankees trounce the Tigers, having our pictures taken with commentator Mel Allen, getting lost in the subway and seeing deformed men with short arms that curled like pink boneless snakes around a begging cup stagger through the car, thinking to myself all the time that Central Park Zoo was only different in that there were bars on the windows . . . oh, God, it is unbelievable to think of all this at once . . . my mind will split open.
I am going to call up and find out about trains back to Boston on Friday after work, or early Saturday morning . . . do you suppose you could meet your soot-stained, grubby, weary, wise, ex-managing editor at the station to carry her home with her bags????. I love you a million times more than any of these slick ad-men, these hucksters, these wealthy beasts who get dronk in foreign accents all the time. I will let you know what train my coffin will come in on.
Seriously, I am more than overjoyed to have been here a month, it is just that I realize how young and inexperienced I am in the ways of the world . . . Smith seems like a simple enchanting bucolic existence compared to the dry, humid, breathless wasteland of the cliffdwellers, where the people are, as D. H. Lawrence wrote of his society “dead brilliant galls on the tree of life”.* By contrast, the good few friends I have seems like clear icewater after a very strong scalding martini.
There are so many things I have collected here, that I will send a few more boxes home, If I can find them. All I have needs washing, bleaching, airing. The soot, sweat, yellowness here pervades everything.
I am now going down to the swimming pool in the hotel, then to the sundeck . . . plans for beach fell through . . . I would melt into the sidewalk.
Write if you could pick me up Fri night or Sat am. Will let you know time tomorrow. Best love to you all . . . you wonderful textured honest real unpainted people . . . .
your exhausted, ecstatic, elegiac, New Yorker.
sivvy
TO Director of Graduate Schools, Columbia University
Friday 3 July 1953
TLS* (draft), Smith College
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
July 3, 1953
Director of Graduate Schools
Columbia University
New York City, N.Y.
Dear Sir:
I will be graduating from Smith College in June, 1954, and I am most interested in obtaining information at this time about your program of graduate study at Columbia University. I am particularly interested in the departments of Education and Journalism.
At present, I am a scholarship student, honoring in English at Smith, and would like to find out about possibilities of scholarship aid to Columbia Graduate School.
Any bulletins, course of study booklets, and scholarship information that you could send me would be very much appreciated. I would also like to become acquainted with your program for the departments of English and Psychology.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Gordon Lameyer
Thursday 23 July 1953
TLS, Indiana University
July 23, 1953
Dear Gordon,
Male orderly ambling ambiguously . . (no, not so in Sam’s Navy! I somehow cannot visualize you in your proper uniform, which, I trust you have received by now and thus become unstraggled) for letters, etc. Your barracks I can very well imagine, shining with polish, plus salivary aid, and I wonder if there are the bunk-orange crate variety, or, since Congressmen et. al. mosey in and out as the Investigating Committees dictate, whether you have minor luxuries, such as bedside bars with hot and cold running champagne, fritos and caviar, and a marilyn monroeish Wave to rouse you from slumber in the morning by crooning-- “Oh, what a Beautiful Day.” Tell me, doctor.
Life here is rainy at present and mostly goodly for a change. I always have an elemental urge to go walking in the stuff . . . the lovely rambling wetness of it all loire’s me on, so to seine.
Warren types furiously on, and mistakes make him take breathers and go into dynamic tension exercises. Really, the boy has a rather enormous lung capacity, now, and I’m pretty sure that crew is for him next fall. (Thanks to one who shall be nameless. And speaking of names, do you realize how many possibilities yours has? Just for kicks: e.g. God on la mer. Or filial reward for the mother: e. g. Guerdon la mere. May be it was a horse, that last, though. At this point, any interpretation seems bona fide. Joyicity is excelsis. One gets obsessed.)
I have a part-time job at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital mornings now, being a nurses’ aides’ aide, and the environment is very new and intriguing, while, of course, being very sobering at times. One of my duties is to help feed the patients who are too weak or too sick to eat themselves, and I never realized or paused to think about the side of the world where the people are reaching the other end of the line: senility, even death.
You get attached to certain patients, see them leave, apparently well, and then there they are at the beginning of the next week, (some of them) not recognizing you. The little woman who cries all the time and takes only liquids dies and is wheeled away rapidly. Mongoloid babies are born along with the other ones. There are whispered consultations in the halls, cautions to say nothing specific to the mothers because of the prize boners that have been committed--such as by one bright nurses’ aide who exclaimed, “My, Mrs. X, your husband will be proud it’s a boy.” only to find out later that Mr. X had run away without waiting to find out the gender of his offspring. In summary, it’s life. The River Liffey goes on. In devious ways.
Tell me, Gordon, just how many times you have read Ulysses, and whether you read the keys along with it simultaneously. Just from beginning the second time and doing a thumbing through of your books, I begin to wonder if everything hasn’t been keyed and written about. The reading is fascinating, but the commentaries explain everything, it seems. That’s why I’d like your opinion upon the potentiality of making any kind of valid statement about him (JJ) without either absorbing completely all the vast mass of scholarship behind him or depending completely on the work of other people like Gilbert,* etc.
What I am really asking you is, from your more advanced point of view, do you think the idea of a thesis on Joyce is really plausible. I thought so before I began outside reading--now I wonder.
Anyhow, let me know your ideas about this. And do tell me if there are any Captain Queegs about your station, will ya, huh?
Love,
sylvia
TO
Gordon Lameyer
Wednesday 29 July 1953*
TLS, Indiana University
July 29, 1953
Dear Gordon . . .
It scarcely seems possible that I saw you off only three days or so back . . . you looking so veddy starched and white and regimental. Your mother and I had a lovely ride home, went back and finished up the dishes and sat in your room for a leisurely chat, all most enjoyable. I can’t tell you how tremendously I admire her . . . with all her vigor and personal strength and richly-lived background! She is a phenomenal woman . . .
Monday night was lots of fun for mother and Warren and myself . . . we went over to Brookline for dinner with Olive Higgins Prouty, one of my former “benefactors”. I don’t know if I ever told you about her, but she’s the author of “Stella Dallas” and a whole series of novels about Boston society that made a big hit in their time, were turned into movies and plays starring people like Betty Davis.
Anyhow, Mrs. Prouty, now a widow, lives in a white and palatial estate, with sloping landscaped lawns, rock gardens, terraces, et. al . . . and has a French poodle for company named Taupe which she keeps for company, teaches tricks, goes to school with. But instead of succumbing to the temptation of idolizing a dog the way older people do cats, or a geranium, she said, rather wistfully in the course of conversation: “Taupe doesn’t care about me really; he’s self-sufficient. He is, after, all, only a dog.”
Olive Higgins P. is an attractive, alive woman still, blue-eyed, tall, gray-haired, writing now biographies of the people in her family for a few hours a day. We toured the garden, had Old Fashioneds on the flag stone terrace, and then a lovely salmon dinner served by a small ubiquitous maid at a table with blue glass goblets, candle holders, and plates . . . the clarity and intensity of a stained-window with the light through it.
I’ll be most interested to hear (if you get a minute moment in your rigorous schedule) about how the courses are going, whether and what VIP.’s have inspected your spit and polish, and what in general is the trend of your seamanship.
Was talking just today with Pat O’Neil, a high school confidante of mine who had to leave Smith last year to help at home as her father had contracted cancer . . . anyhow, her brother* trained at OCS at Newport two years ago and it was discovered in the course of tests and all that he had a high aptitude for scientific subjects, although he’d been strictly liberal arts at Dartmouth. As it developed, he got further training in electronics, etc., and is now flying jets and doing a particular type of perilous job (which is volunteer, because it is so dangerous) involving landing planes on small carriers. You probably know more about the types of specialized jobs available, or will, as time goes on, but just from what I’ve heard so far, I think the experience and chance for travel and technical skill development the Navy offers is great . . . my attitudes about the military life alter as I see vicariously what sort of things can be done with it. Who knows, some day you may find yourself wanting to write (understand that I am not idealizing or expecting!) from the fulness of your wide experience-to-be: travel, people, lord-knows-what . . . whether it’s the “Caine Mutiny” sort of thing or a personalized, and therefore individually styled saga of your own. (I sometimes wonder if it would be a human possibility to go beyond the “funferal” with HCE and ALP* as far as language is concerned, and the multifoliate meanings . . . )
Enough . . . I hope the trees and bushes aren’t too thorny, and that you manage to come home again sometime soon. You should let me know, if you’d rather not get letters that I’ve told you the news of, like the last one. I’ve got my fingers crossed for an easier time of it for you . . .
love,
sylvia
TO Myron Lotz
Tuesday 18 August 1953
TLS, Indiana University
August 18, 1953
Dear Mike . . . .
Say, but you deserve more than congratulations for your promotion* to the civilized northern regions . . . this coterie of ball clubs has a hierarchy of skilled ratings which is beyond me, but it seems that the lower and cruder elements are relegated to the humid climate of the southern regions (paralleling Dante’s Inferno?) while the more spectacular players migrate toward the fair modern northern climates . . . such as New York. That so? From the Mount of Purgatory heavenward.
I was really pleased to the core to get your letter, with its messages. Bob and Jill are among my favorite people, and I think the life they lead is rather wonderful. If two people are that much in love, then just being together would make any situation bearable. I got a very sweet note from Jill before I came back from the city, and managed to squeeze in time to write back before I came home.
Life here has been very placid . . . I had to give up the idea of summer school this year because life at home demanded attention: the doctor ordered me to take time off and rest, and so I have been helping with the house, visiting Cambridge occasionally, and taking a few trips to the beach. Swimming in salt water is my pet pastime, even if I do have to be careful about the eternal sinuses and can’t dive or play submarine woman. You sounded rather versatile yourself, sir, what with golf and tennis being among your increasing athletic skills?
The last paragraph of your letter touched me especially! Because I feel the same way about my acquaintance with you . . .
mutually . . .
syl
TO Gordon Lameyer
Monday 31 August 1953*
ALS with envelope,
Indiana University
Monday
Dear Gordon . . .
Mother brought up your letter* along with your wonderful flowers yesterday, and I don’t know if I can ever in the world tell you how tremendously important your words were to me . . . out of the experiences and confusions of the past it was most welcome to find some kind of constancy and friendship that I could identify with possible shared experiences in the as yet uncertain future . . .
You would be among the very first of my companions I would want to see . . . and perhaps during your ten day leave when you get your commission, I will again be seeable and free to begin to live again as I would like to. The reasons I can’t see people now are many and various – among them, that I have a few face bruises that need to heal – and of course I’ll be under doctor’s care for a while more. Whatever the outcome, please know that your letters and pictures are more welcome than I can say and news of you and the world and your work and ideas will always be appreciated as intensely as this last generous and understanding volume was. I don’t know why I chose the hard way to learn who the real people are and who they aren’t: but I’ll be mentally thanking you for standing by me now (I’m still sort of numb from all this) and will cherish your Friendship in the future – I know the hardest time will be then – when I rearrange life and make a comeback, new and a year or two late, perhaps: but (I hope) worthy of you and people as strong and good as you are. Now I’m perhaps “purple-passaging,” but it’s strange how, when you write sometimes (thinking only of attitude and not of new form) the words begin to have the tone of a campaign speech or a radio-spiel but I mean very much and want very much to tell you that although it’s a difficult and complex situation now, I will work twice as hard at recuperating so that I can again see you – and just walk and talk with you. “To learn to appreciate the green and the blue” again – and to make more of the rushing, fast, complex world become reality and part of the experience we form our lives from . . . The activity of which is sometimes – as at present – ordered to lie fallow for future use.
Gordon – please remember me smiling and thinking our way. I’ll answer again and mother and the home address will always be available when and if I change mine . . . I’m not sure about that now, but I am sure that your letter meant more to me than any I’ve ever received any time before . . . or probably ever will . . .
yours,
sylvia
TO Gordon Lameyer
Monday 7 September 1953*
ALS, Indiana University<
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Monday –
Dear Gordy –
When mother brought me the package containing your Amherst letter, along with your other letters,* I was so happy I could have cried – The meaning of the
Your mother also made me realize more fully what a dear friend I found in her – her letter and enclosure was lovely. I will write to her and tell her so – and I’ll tell you both also (here, via you,) how terribly much I enjoyed those last excursions of ours before you went to Newport. – New Hampshire, especially, I loved*. . . . . I’ll never forget the expert, rapid meal that was whipped up for us, culminating in the final dessert – wasn’t it soup plates of icecream, peaches, and short cake? The whole day was one of those that remains in mind, no matter what, sunset included . . . I want you to know Gordy, that bearing up under the “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,”* even if they are a result of one’s own mismanagement . . . is incalculably easier when one has two such marvelous people as you and your mother to be so thoughtful . . .
No matter what happens or has happened, I would want you to know how therapeutic it is to get news of your active, if tremendously demanding life: I can visualize you now in your uniform, and hope that perhaps I can beg a picture from you when reprints of your graduating shots are available: to contemplate from whereever I may be.
I am, at present still undergoing rigorous treatment – shots of penicillin practically by the hour for my incipient temp – which will rise . . . by now I’m becoming immune to any kind of needle whatsoever, which is a large step in my life – against the more minor of my fears.