by Sylvia Plath
Again, it all depends on what you want to pursue as interests . . . you can lean toward the studious type who gets to know the professors on an intimate basis (to the point of being invited to dinner at their homes) or lean toward athletics and star in Float Night (one of the most beautiful of college traditions: crew races and floats painted by the freshmen all on the dark waters of Paradise Pond at night under the glow of Japanese lanterns, with the choirs singing from the island, and generally a very obliging moon shining somewhere overhead) or you can be a weekending socialite and trip down to Yale, or Dartmouth, or Harvard . . . or just be casual and cross the river bridge to Amherst which is right next door. The facilities for choice are all there . . . all you have to do is pick and choose. And sometimes that’s rather hard with the plethora of interests and events one copes with.
Anyhow, I’ve been extremely happy in my Smith experience so far (of course everybody gets discouraged and blue at times) and I think that all you have to do is figure out generally what kind of a girl you really are inside (that’s pretty hard when you’re still growing up, the way we are) and what sort of experience you want out of college . . . and Smith can give it to you. That’s the way I found it.
Well, Sally, I could talk on for years about my favorite college, and I do hope that if you choose it that you’ll feel free to ask me any questions you like. Your faculty advisor and your junior class “big sister” can explain about everything you’ll want to find out about, and are wonderful at helping with advice.
I’ll be a senior next year, so if you are going to be a freshman then, please do write and let me know, and maybe we can get acquainted personally. That would be fun . . .
Best of luck in your college applications!
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Gordon Lameyer
Monday 25 January 1954
TLS, Indiana University
January 25
Monday morning . . .
cloudy, but bluing
with the coming-out sun . .
Dear Gordon . . .
And all I ask is a tall ship . . . claimed the salt-crusted gulled and crabbed sailoring poet. Oh, I sail most salubriously through your letters* . . . the parts about James,* and Europe, and imagination and intentions, at any rate; but when we plunge into shop talk about heavies and drones and the main director I climb like Alice through the looking glass, sighting a sea of terms and technicalities quite spanking fresh and most intriguing. You do manage to explain so well.
Future letters (says she, optimistically assuming) may (thank-whatever-gods-there-be including papa Freud) be addressed to Lawrence House, Smith, Hamp. Yup, I’m heading back for the second half of the year under stern injunctions to take a slow and sweet program, easing very gradually into the academic world again . . . as I’m taking a minimum of courses, I’ll be a senior next year, which will present minor problems as my friends are mostly graduating this June; but it’s going to be so much more swimming this way, since I can concentrate on new acquaintances in the junior class instead of coming into a Rip-Van-Winkle* village of relatively complete strangers next fall. Aw heck, nothing like taking five years to graduate. Like those ripe long-maturing wines.
My intellectual activity has been more or less confined to reading Kafka, cerebrating over the SRL’s double-crostics, and quaffing sherry before seeing plays. Last Friday it was Eliot’s “The Confidential Clerk”.* Excellent, thought I, entertainment. Though not as clearly defined as was the “Cocktail Party”. As one woman behind me exclaimed to her companion: “I know there are two levels to this, but I just can’t seem to get to the second one!”
Acting good (maybe you can get to see the play in England or something) . . . but then, I love Claude Rains anyway. And if an operation on my larynx could give me a voice the unique texture of Joan Greenwood’s, I wouldn’t think twice before calling up the surgeons. The Harvard Crimson* came out with intricate Christian interpretations of the whole performance . . . with Christ, Joseph, and the Virgin Mary and the rest of the Biblical gang all latent in the seven characters. My own private reaction, pagan secularist that I am, was philosophical rather than religious, mythical rather than mystical . . . and the compelling wish-granting, fate-directing woman who mixed babies up seemed to me to be a “good witch” type character, as in the old folk tales, rather than the Virgin. But then.
In your last letter, by the way, you seemed rather intuitively to be voicing one of Eliot’s ideas presented in the play: all that business about the importance of differences. “We have many likenesses,” said the girl to the boy, “but it is the countless differences inside those likenesses that are important . . . ”* or something to that effect.
Got up at the decadent hour of one o’clock on Sunday afternoon and spent a couple of hours visiting the Crocketts . . . did you ever meet him? Mr. C? I don’t think so, but I may have told you that he was my English prof all through high school . . . the kind of guy who symbolizes for me the highest form of the art of teaching, the sort whose pupils come back year after year, bringing their new husbands and wives for approval, and then the babies. I decorously drank about a whole pot of tea, devoured raspberry tarts, and had a wonderful time talking about Eliot, etc. . . . and listening to their excellent collection of Robert Frost recordings (you would have enjoyed it all, I think . . . ) with the roughhewn granitey voice reading the poems as simply as if Frost were talking with you over a splitrail fence.
Last evening was even better, if possible . . one of those small, intimate dinner parties across the street at the Aldriches (they’re the ones with five delightful children and a rambunctious pup). There were only five of us . . . Mr. & Mrs. A. (he being a lawyer, they being one of those Harvard-Radcliffe combos) a sister just back from Europe, and a brother at Law School. Between us, we had one of those scintillant evenings where conversation leaps, crackles and behaves the way good conversation should . . . the law man provided us with political and judicial flavor (everything from a heated discussion of “Fifth Amendment communists” to a case history of Russian roulette robbers) to balance our feminine contingent of primarily literates . . . and we afterdinnercoffeed while listening to recordings of Eliot, eecummings, Nash, Marianne Moore* . . . and the lyric Welshman I’ve been in mourning for these past months, Dylan Thomas.
And speaking of Dylan, I just got a copy of the tear sheets* from Cyrilly Abels at Mademoiselle containing his verse play “Under Milkwood” which I heard him read at Amherst last spring . . . I could get drunk just on the sound of the words . . . or on the boisterous Welshness of his humor . . . says he:
“To begin at the beginning: It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobble-streets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down the sloeblack, slow black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widow’s weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
“Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the under-taker and the fancy woman, the webfoot cockle-women and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or glide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the buckling ranches of the night and the jolly, rodgered sea . . .
“You can hear the dew falling, and the hushed town breathing . . . . Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is grass growing on Llareggub Hill, dewfall, starfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood. “Look. It is night, dumbly, royally winding through the Coronation cherry trees; goingthrough the graveyard of Bethesda with winds gloved and folded, and dew doffed; tumbling by
the Sailors’ Arms. Time passes. Listen. Time passes.”*
I didn’t mean to dive off the deep end in quoting, but the introduction was just too rhythmic and musically vowelish to cut short. And I can just hear his voice reading, the lovely curlyheaded, boozing hefty poetman.
I am eager to hear about the impressions you register of your first encounter with Europe: sounds, colors, textures, highlights and habits, taste and touch . . . and your ideas and attitudes. And all about (or at least some) how the rather xish character of “I, Gordon” adjusts and alters.
Misc. info: “Greensleeves” is one of my favorite ballads. I have a most congenial and comradely brother. Twenty-one is not as old as it seems. I am determined to learn how to ski no matter what. Only there is no snow now. I would like very much to travel in Europe next summer somehow not with a tour so much as with one congenial and stimulating person, so we could really mingle and stay where we liked as long as we wished without being part of a large gawking cathedralcounting Group. Life in the plural is fun and frolic, but life in the singular has often a more delectable essence.
So with those tagending thoughts, I will leave you for a while, trusting my missive to the whirring helicopters or the atomic subs, or whatever.
Like talking to you, you know. An alter ego of sorts, with all those differences inside the likenesses.
Very
very
best
Sylvia
TO Philip E. McCurdy
Thursday 4 February 1954
TLS with envelope, Smith College
Memorandum sheets; each page has a separate heading>
(1)
TO
Phil
FROM
Syl
SUBJECT
Life in general
DATE
Feb. 4,
(2)
TO
you
FROM
me,
(3)
TO
PEM
FROM
sp,
(4)
TO
male
FROM
female,
(5)
TO
x
FROM
y
SUBJECT
z,
(6)
TO
*
FROM
*
Hello . . .
I am being very naughty and un-Emily Postish by using up my favorite tag ends of inter-office paper for stationery . . . but I did enjoy employing them this summer, and I trust that you know me well enough not to mind my little idiosyncrasies . . . and my penchant for typing personal missives. Which this is.
You should, by the way, feel a bit honored, since this is The First letter I am writing to anyone from my new and most agreeable abode, in spite of the fact that I have a list of unanswered letters about as long as the road from here to Harvard. I hope you don’t hate yellow paper. But I like writing on unique things . . . like birch bark, for instance.
Your most excellent and quite delightful letter arrived in the mail this morning, and for some reason . . . or reasons, made me rather happy. You said everything so well, and I very much was pleased with the gist of your statements . . . Even the letter paper you used made me realize how close we are in so many of our tastes . . . the small material ones as well as the larger philosophical ones. Because I like gray paper with red letterheads (have some myself), and I always use black ink. Minor observation perhaps, but of interest nevertheless.
Before plunging into the more basic personal and philosophical topics, just a few words about what has happened since we last saw each other. I don’t know if I told you over the phone Saturday that last Sunday I spent the afternoon at the Crockett’s home. The whole affair was delightful; a ruddy fire was leaping and crackling in the fireplace, Mrs. Crockett served tea and homemade raspberry tarts, Mr. C. was at his intellectual best, and little Deborah was a dear---we got along well immediately, and evidently she was crushed that I couldn’t stay to eat supper with her. We all discussed Eliot’s play, which we’d seen, and then listened to an excellent collection of Robert Frost records. The poet’s voice is so appropriate to his poems--- as rough and textured as granite or the bark of wood; it’s just as if he were leaning over a split-rail fence and chatting in a neighborly fashion about country life. All in all, I had a fine time.
Warren drove me up to Smith through snow and sleet after I talked with you, and we almost had a rather drastic accident which left me pale and rather shaky for about half-an-hour afterwards. Coming into Northampton we drove into a thick dark blizzard, and as we began to descend the steep unplowed hill by Paradise (ironic name!) Pond, the car turned into a skid the likes of which I’ve never seen before and hope never to see again. We sped down the hill sideways, tilting dangerously and completely out of control. Ahead there were three possibilities, all equally unpleasant: We could smash through the glass windows of the green house on the left, crash into the car in front of it, or roll down the steep incline into Paradise Pond. I just remember saying in a repititious conversational way: oh god god god god god god . . . as we spun around and ended up facing up the hill from whence we had come. All’s well that ends well, as the cat said as he devoured the last of the canary.
Anyhow, I’m here, in my old room (now a single) in my dear old cooperative house, with two bookcases full of my books, and the sun streaming in the three big windows. I’m passionately in love with all my courses:* early American Lit. (Hawthorne, Melville and Henry James), Modern American Lit. with the well-known critic R. G. Davis (the one who went to Washington for the Communist trials last year), European Intellectual History of the Nineteenth Century with a magnificent and powerful german woman, Russian Lit. (Tolstoy and Dostoevsky) and Medieval Art History.*
Honestly, I wish you could some day come up just to audit some of my courses with me . . . I know you’d enjoy them immensely. I’ve spent most of my free afternoons (all my classes are in the morning) shopping for books and necessities to make my room look like home, plus having appointment with the powers that be in College Hall . . . all of whom have welcomed me back with open arms, so to speak, the lovely people.
Litza Olmstead* (or however you spell it) is in my house . . . a very attractive girl, I must say. In fact the underclassmen are all most intelligent and friendly.
Enough of this external commentary. If you are the way I am about such things, you have been impatiently skimming through all this and wanting me to begin on the more abstract and internal issues. So I will.
As far as seeing you again is concerned, you have no need to wonder at all about that. I’d really like very much to continue to see you often in the future, because you are, and most probably will always be, one of my favorite people. So if you ever feel like coming up for a day or so some weekend, just let me know ahead of time, and I’ll plan to be free for some good long walks and talks and so on. I don’t know if I’ll have the chance to come home for a weekend before spring vacation begins on March 24, but I certainly hope I will be able to, and if so, I’ll let you know, and perhaps we can get together. It’s all up to you about convenient times, etc.
As to our rather unique evening---any departure from conduct and “ritual” which has been agreed upon tacitly involves complexities in that it demands a reassessment of the situation, a consideration of former intentions in the light of an altered context. And for that reason our evening may have given rise to problems which, although complicated, may be resolved.
Our contact in the past has been what one may call “platonic” . . . and, I think, quite satisfying on an idealistic and intellectual plane, while involving walks, tennis, biking, and so forth. And our platonic relationship, as such, I think is capable of continuing without any emotional and physical involvement: in other words, it can continue to burn like a fire to which new kindling (of an evolving mental s
ort) is always being added. As long as we continue to grow individually, I think we will be close friends . . . .
But the recent addition of a new quantity to our relationship, while intrinsically pleasant, may confuse the issue, perhaps even unwisely so. Both of us Phil, I am pretty sure, know a good deal about physical attractions to the opposite sex (to be pedantic, and perhaps euphemistic) and have no doubt even accepted physical relationships of a temporary and unsubstantial sort just for the ephemeral transient pleasure of it . . . but while a kiss, let’s say, can be just a simple physical act performed out of mere biological hedonism, it can also by symbolic of a great depth of mental and philosophical rapport and appreciation. The difficulty is in distinguishing between the two aspects of the same act, and the effort can sometimes prove confusing. You expressed essentially the same thing when you talked about the difficulty of endowing the same words with new and sincere meaning. It’s a difficult job, I think.
And while we can satisfy ourselves physically with a great range of other males and females, an intellectual and spiritual (damn it, the words sound so trite) relationship such as we have had is rather at a premium, and therefore is much more important to retain than anything else. And since a physical relationship can add such complications to a companionship (which we hope to maintain far in the future,) it might be wiser to return to what we had before and leave it at that; I don’t know. But I don’t ever want to run the risk of spoiling the continued knowing of you, Phil . . . and somehow after a close physical relationship becomes impractical or impossible (for any number of reasons,) it is relatively unusual to continue the comradeship that gave rise to it originally. And I don’t want anything like this to happen. So it might be safer to just keep on seeing each other---for lectures, plays or dances or just talks and tennis---and let the rest of alone as far as each of us is concerned. I’m not sure just how you feel about it, but perhaps we can talk about this at length the next time we see each other . . . sometimes it’s easier to talk face to face, you know . . . .