The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  As for the major ones: those remain to be knocked down, too. And for being so understanding and tremendously helpful . . . again – thank you more than I can say. Whereever you are – or finally go in the world – only think of me in very special places now and then, and by some telepathic magic, I’ll maybe partake of the scene – or become part of it – I only wish I could make this denouement something as poetic as scattering ashes! But it’s a lot more difficult than that. – Please, keep thinking of me now and then, and wish me luck –

  yours,

  sylvia

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Thursday 17 December 1953*

  ALS (postcard, excerpt), Unknown*

  Thursday

  . . . I am doing occasional work over at the library – and an having my 6th treatment tomorrow I hope I won’t have to have many more …

  sivvy

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  Friday 25 December 1953

  TLS, Indiana University

  Christmas day . . .

  Dear Gordon . . .

  Today will be chalked up as one of the most notable in recent history for several reasons. First of all, I’ve been able to celebrate the holly-crowned festival at home, which in itself is a pleasure. In fact, I’m now sitting at the diningroom table pounding away at my brother’s square masculine typewriter, munching on homemade Yuletide cookies. Secondly, I’m smiling back at the most genial and attractive of friendly faces: I’m more pleased than I can say with your picture and want to thank your mother for it over and over again . . . it will follow me back to McLean tonight, and keep me company on my subsequent travels (around the world or whereever, as the case may be). Also, Axel’s Castle,* which I’ve always been meaning to read (you know how those best of intentions may deviate from the straight and narrow!) will take me back to new depths in my dearly loved Yeats, Joyce and Eliot . . . and into new fields as well, serving as a springboard into Stein,* Proust,* etc. All of which will help me communicate more rewardingly with you in the future!

  After the best of festive turkey dinners with the best of families, I curled up in the biggest armchair in the livingroom and had a protracted “conversation” with you which involved reading all your delightful letters* consecutively and wishing I could talk with you in person right then and there. (I do want to explain my scandalous silence in the line of correspondence: I’d been undergoing months of therapy which left me feeling rather unconversational temporarily.) At any rate, I’m feeling 100% better now, and am looking forward to increasingly frequent visits home, ending up in an eventual permanent sojourn there, with visits to Boston and a couple of courses to be audited either at Wellesley or B.U.

  Next year, as far as I can see now, I’ll probably finish up my degree at Smith . . . they’ve been really princely about everything. As have the deepest and closest of my friends: you first and foremost. Someday I hope I’ll be able to find the right words to tell you about how very tremendously important you have been in speeding me on the road back to the full and vital world again. Your letters, which I am just now growing able to fully appreciate, have made me want, more than any other single thing, to find my way back to the world which I am again sure I can love with a deep intensity once more. Some day I hope I’ll be able to express my appreciation face to face. Your own particular brand of therapy has been most meaningful to me; I’ll be wanting to keep you posted regularly, now that I’m feeling so very much better.

  Life at the hospital has improved with my move to a new dormitory* where I’ve met some extremely delightful girls, one of whom I’d especially like to have you meet someday: she’s a creative, energetic Vassar graduate who composes her own songs and words to go with them: everything from torchy love lyrics to bouncy novelties. Right now she’s peddling them around the music marts in Boston. I spend a good deal of my time in the Coffee Shop, a pine-paneled den of smoky sociability, and have struck up a fast friendship with the librarian here (Smith, ’49); she’s even let me type up all the stencils for the hospital newspaper (McLean “Gazette”) and do the marginal sketches. We have a most active music department at the hospital which puts out everything from organ concerts to piano recitals, too, and an enormous record library which is going to entertain me on rainy afternoons.

  The family is now getting ready for leaving for my aunt’s house in Weston for yet another Christmas celebration, so I’ll be signing off for a short while, to be taking up conversation again very soon. Once more, Gordon, my dearest accumulated love and thanks for giving me such incentive for rapid recuperation . . .

  your rejuvenating

  sylvia

  TO Edward Cohen

  Monday 28 December 1953

  TLS, Indiana University

  Belknap House

  McLean Hospital

  Waverley, Mass.

  December 28, 1953

  Dear eddie . . .

  The rather enormous lapse in time between the date of this letter and the date of your brief-but-eloquent plea* for me to write needs an explanation. I don’t know just how widely the news of my little scandal this summer traveled in the newspapers, but I received letters from all over the United States from friends, relations, perfect strangers and religious crackpots; and I’m not aware of whether you read about my escapade,* or whether you are aware of my present situation. At any rate, I’m prepared to give you a brief resumé of details, in case you aren’t aware of them already. However, at this late date, I’m not sure whether you’re in South America, father of five children, still alive, or what. I hope you won’t follow my bad example, but will send me as soon as possible a fat letter revealing recent news about you. I assure you, I would have written much sooner, if I had been able, but I didn’t receive your letter till a short while back, and it wasn’t until today that I could sit down and give you the wholehearted attention you deserve.

  At any rate, just in case you haven’t been briefed on the past half year or so: I worked all during the hectic month of June in the plushy air-conditioned offices of Mlle magazine, helping set up the August issue. I came home exhausted, fully prepared to begin my two courses at Harvard Summer School, for which I’d been offered a partial scholarship. Then things started to happen. I’d gradually come to realize that I’d completely wasted my Junior year at Smith by taking a minimum of courses (and the wrong courses at that), by bluffing my way glibly through infrequent papers, skipping by with only three or four exams during the year, reading nothing more meaty than the jokes at the bottom of the columns in the New Yorker, and writing nothing but glib jingles in an attempt to commune with WH Auden. I had gaily asserted that I was going to write a thesis on James Joyce (when I hadn’t even read Ulysses thru thoroughly once) and take comprehensives in my senior year (when I wasn’t even familiar with the most common works of Shakespeare, for God’s sake!) Anyhow, there I was, faced with the impossible necessity of becoming familiar with the English language, which looked as coherent as Yiddish to me, in the short sweet space of one summer. When I had come to think Psychology, Sociology, Philosophy (which I somehow never sullied my hands with) were infinitely more worthwhile, valuable, and unattainable.

  To top it off, all my friends were either writing novels in Europe, planning to get married next June, or going to med. school, or something. The one or two males I knew were either proving themselves genii in the midst of adversity (e.g. Allan,* who was becoming a writer, a buddy of W. C. Williams’, and a researchist at the tb san) or were not in the market for the legal kind of love for a good ten years yet and were going to see the world and all the femmes fatales in it before becoming victims of wedded bliss.

  Anyhow, to sum up my reactions to the immediate problem at hand, I decided at the beginning of July to save a few hundred $$$, stay home, write, learn shorthand, and finesse the summer school deal. You know, sort of live cheap and be creative. Truth was, I’d counted on getting into Frank O’Connor’s writing course at Harvard, but it seemed that several thousand other rather brilliant
writers did too, and so I didn’t; so I was miffed, and figured if I couldn’t write on my own I wasn’t any good anyhow. It turned out that not only was I totally unable to learn one squiggle of shorthand, but I also had not a damn thing to say in the literary world; because I was sterile, empty, unlived, and unwise, and UNREAD. And the more I tried to remedy the situation, the more I became unable to comprehend ONE WORD of our fair old language. I began to frequent the offices and couches of the local psychiatrists, who were all running back and forth on summer vacations. I became unable to sleep; I became immune to increased doses of sleeping pills. I underwent a rather brief and traumatic experience of badly-given shock treatments on an outpatient basis. Pretty soon, the only doubt in my mind was the precise time and method of committing suicide. The only alternative I could see was an eternity of hell for the rest of my life in a mental hospital, and I was going to make use of my last ounce of free choice and choose a quick clean ending. I figured that in the long run it would be more merciful and inexpensive to my family; instead of an indefinite and expensive incarceration of a favorite daughter in the cell of a State San, instead of the misery and disillusion, of sixty odd years of mental vacuum, of physical squalor, I would spare them all by ending everything at the height of my so-called career, while there were still illusions left among my profs, still poems to be published in Harper’s, still a memory at least that would be worthwhile.

  Well, I tried drowning, but that didn’t work; somehow the urge to life, mere physical life, is damn strong, and I felt that I could swim forever straight out into the sea and sun and never be able to swallow more than a gulp or two of water and swim on. The body is amazingly stubborn when it comes to sacrificing itself to the annihilating directions of the mind.

  So I hit upon what I figured would be the easiest way out: I waited until my mother had gone to town,* my brother was at work, and my grandparents were out in the back yard. Then I broke the lock of my mother’s safe, took out the bottle of 50 sleeping pills, and descended to the dark sheltered ledge in our basement, after having left a note to mother that I had gone on a long walk and would not be back for a day or so. I swallowed quantities and blissfully succumbed to the whirling blackness that I honestly believed was eternal oblivion. My mother believed my note, sent out searching parties, notified the police, and finally, on the second day or so, began to give up hope when she found that the pills were missing. In the meantime, I had stupidly taken too many pills, vomited them, and came to consciousness in a dark hell banging my head repeatedly on the ragged rocks of the cellar in futile attempts to sit up and, instinctively, call for help.

  My brother finally heard my weak yells, called the ambulance, and the next days were a nightmare of flashing lights, strange voices, large needles, an overpowering conviction that I was blind in one eye, and a hatred toward the people who would not let me die, but insisted rather in dragging me back into the hell of sordid and meaningless existence.

  I won’t go into the details that involved two sweltering weeks in the Newton-Wellesley hospital, exposed to the curious eyes of all the student nurses, attendants, and passers-by---or the two weeks in the psychiatric ward of the Mass-General,* where the enormous open sore on my cheek gradually healed, leaving a miraculously-intact eye, plus a large, ugly brown scar under it.

  Suffice it to say that by fairy-godmother-type maneuverings, my scholarship benefactress at Smith got me into the best mental hospital in the U.S., where I had my own attractive private room and my own attractive private psychiatrist. I didn’t think improvement was possible. It seems that it is.

  I have emerged from insulin shock and electric (ugh) shock therapy with the discovery, among other things, that I can laugh, if the occasion moves me (and, surprisingly enough, it sometimes does), and get pleasure from sunsets, walks over the golf course, drives through the country. I still miss the old love and ability to enjoy solitude and reading. I need more than anything right now what is, of course, most impossible; someone to love me, to be with me at night when I wake up in shuddering horror and fear of the cement tunnels leading down to the shock room, to comfort me with an assurance that no psychiatrist can quite manage to convey.

  The worst, I hope, is over. Ironically enough, Allan’s former Smith flame (the one I superseded) is also here. When I entered (in the “middle” ward) she was in the highest-ranking ward (where I am writing from now); a display of temper, however, involving her breaking several windows, involved her ending up in the “lowest” ward, and I haven’t heard from her since.* Somehow, all this reminds me of the deep impression the movie “Snake Pit”* made upon me about six years ago. I only hope I don’t have any serious relapses, and get out of here in a month or two.

  Our ward of ten people is very attractive, having a diningroom, two bathrooms, a large livingroom overlooking the golf course and the lights of the town below, and containing several bridge tables, a lovely piano, and a TV set to amuse away the evenings.

  I can now have visitors, go for drives, supervised walks, and hope to have “ground privileges” by the end of this week, which means freedom to walk about the grounds alone, to frequent the Coffee Shop, and the library, as well as the Occupational Therapy rooms.

  Among the other girls here are several from Vassar, a couple from Radcliffe, and one from Cornell. As the basic fee for room and board alone is $20 a day, the backgrounds of most here is quite different from mine. When I think of how I could be living in Europe on that amount, and with what lovely people, I sometimes get a bit sour.

  Anyhow, the handsome Amherst grad (now an ensign in the navy) who has faithfully written to me (in spite of not getting any answers for four months) and who promises to be around when I get out is being sent to Europe for half a year next week, so I won’t be able to see him until, at the earliest, next May. And God knows what will happen by then. I may be out of here. Or I may not. He is too good to be true.

  Allan, who certainly owes me nothing after the way I treated him last year when he was down and out, is heading off for a hedonistic tout to Europe with a male friend of his. (I think it would be the best therapy possible for me to go with him and live a high life for a while, but somehow few people agree with me.)

  I do miss you to talk to. If you think it would be worth your while to spiel forth to a sympathetic, though fouled-up old female---(even though she is incarcerated temporarily she still has her lucid . . . and very lonely . . . moments)---please do write me frankly and fully what’s been with you the last months or so. I would like somebody to talk to again very much. The student nurses here are all cuties and very sweet, and I like some of my fellow inmates very much---BUT I will be glad as all hell to get my final writ of dismissal. I am able to communicate with several concert pianists here, plus an atomic genius from MIT (a jolly professor who has hit his second childhood, or something), but every now and then I long to be out in the wide open spaces of the very messy, dangerous, real world which I still love. In spite of everything. Because, mainly of the people who have kept writing, who have kept coming, even tho I botched one of the nastiest sins on the church records.

  Anyhow, I’d love to be able to loll around in Acapulco, or in some sunny tennisy clime for a while: much more therapeutic than enduring the New England winter on Waverley Hill, even if it IS the best place of its kind going.

  Aw, please, scold me, placate me, tell me your loves and losses, but do talk to me, huh?

  as ever,

  syl

  1954

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  Sunday 10 January 1954

  TLS, Indiana University

 
  Memorandum sheets; each page has a separate heading>

  (1)

  TO

  dear gordon

  FROM

  sylvia

  SUBJECT

  Life in general & particular

  DATE

  jan 10.

  (2)

  TO />
  you

  FROM

  me

  SUBJECT

  continued

  DATE

  ",

  (3)

  TO

  gordon

  FROM

  Sylvia

  SUBJECT

  ad infinitum

  DATE

  same,

  (4)

  TO

  g

  FROM

  s

  SUBJECT

  "

  DATE

  ",

  (5)

  TO

  The Ancient Mariner

  FROM

  Alice-in-Wonderland

  SUBJECT

  cabbages and kings

  DATE

  ",

  (6)

  TO

  g. a. lameyer

  FROM

  s. p.

  SUBJECT

  "

  DATE

  ",

  new year’s salutations, ensign! every now and then I am the victim of a compulsion to type à la e. e. cummings and ignore capitals and other conventions. so bear with me. also, home for the weekend, I find all sorts of intriguing remnants of stationary and paper at hand which I feel like using up for fun. and now that the form of this epistle is accounted for, on to items with more content.

  against my acquisitive instinct, I am warming my frostbitten fingers at present over the dying glow of your last letter,* scrupulously observing your request therein. ashes to ashes. but darn it, that was a good letter. and I am often moved by considerations of the future: for example, some day years and years hence, when I am peddling unsalable villanelles for a penny apiece on sleety streetcorners, I just might be glad to earn a few more days food supply by turning over my collection of g. a. lameyer’s (“you know his latest novel, of course, my dear . . . herman wouk just didn’t stand a chance by comparison--wrote all his logs in prose, the pedestrian creature!”) early letters to some avaricious publisher. but then. honor among thieves . . . and friends, as the case may be.