by Sylvia Plath
Valentines, schmalentines / As long as you’re healthy
to Gordon / from Sylvia
Dear Gordon . . .
Couldn’t resist sending you this bit of frippery, even though, because of lateness of delinquent helicopters it may arrive later than the Day.
Life has managed to become a great deal more complex and varied since I last wrote, which I believe was not too long ago. Last night I went to the Hampshire Bookshop to hear a lecture by New England Novelist Esther Forbes,* and to meet her and chat afterwards. Tonight it is a dance drama “Green Mansions”,* with choreography by one of my best friends, Sidney Webber, and tomorrow it is a lecture by Mary Ellen Chase* and a reception at the President’s House afterwards . . . all of which promises to be most fun!
I’ll write more at length later . . . in the meantime, be good and enjoy yourself (if you can do both at the same time!) and accept my best wishes and best love . . .
s. p.
TO Margaret Cantor
Monday 15 February 1954
TLS (photocopy)* on Smith College
letterhead, Indiana University
February 15
Monday
Dear Mrs. Cantor . . .
This will just be a little note between classes to tell you how very much I appreciated your last wonderful letter---it simply exuded love and strength which I felt most deeply! I can’t say in words how much it meant to me to receive it, but I think you must understand.
Even though I steeled myself for all sorts of little awkwardnesses and problems in my coming back, I was met by such love and warmth that I still can hardly believe it. All the small difficulties that might have been seem to have melted completely away in my love of being back among my old and new friends. Everything is suffused with sunshine and love---as Mary Baker Eddy says: “We are sometimes led to believe that darkness is as real as light; but Science affirms darkness to be only a mortal sense of the absence of light, at the coming of which darkness loses the appearance of reality.” And so the darkness which I once believed real, has dissolved like a mist or fog, showing the clear, wonderful outlines of the true world, and the true self. And for helping me to see what I really was and am and always will be, for having faith that the “real me” was there, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart! Knowing you and timulating and beautiful experiences of my
est love to you all---I’ll write again soon.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Philip E. McCurdy
Tuesday 16 February 1954
TLS with envelope, Smith College
February 16
Tuesday p.m.
Dear Phil . . .
Here I sit after my luncheon of mushrooms and bacon, overcome by an early afternoon drowsiness (no doubt a result of my staying up till all hours last night discussing the intricate problem of personal relationships, both intuitively emotional and articulately rational.) A fat, disgusting pale yellow spider just dropped down from the ceiling beside my typewriter; I squashed the crawling monster most ruthlessly with a copy of Crime and Punishment and life is once again placid . . .
Your descriptive letter arrived today, and I enjoyed your sharing events and reactions with me a great deal . . . I hope future news about your mother* is auspicious. I understand your attitude in regard to that unfavorable news, I think, because of similar, and perhaps more shocking feelings of mine in regard to my own mother---which I shall probably discuss with you some day.
Went to a stimulating lecture by Mary Ellen Chase Thursday night on the imagination in the Old Testament, and to a reception at President Wright’s house afterward (I’d never been before---seems you and I are really becoming close in contact with people of stature) which included a crackling fire, coffee, and good talk . . . Sunday my alter ego (Marcia Brown) and I had morning coffee downtown and talked heatedly about Dostoevsky, theories of crime and insanity, and heard a fine Unitarian “sermon” on marriage and the Kinsey report.* I have always thought that the Unitarian church depends primarily on its minister for appeal, as the ritual is so bare and almost negligible, while in ritualistic churches, like the Catholic, the minister and priests are mere automata in the important sequence of the ceremony, and mean little as individuals. Our Northampton minister is more like a dramatic college lecturer with a subtle wit and keen intellect--and we take notes on our programs . . . .
Our house is in a great uproar today as one of the seniors is getting married at the Congregational church downtown. I haven’t been to a wedding since I was a flowergirl at my aunt’s (I was still in the pigtailed stage) and scattered rose petals blithely down the center aisle. Unhappily, I am rather unconventional in regard to the system of marriage, engagements etc. . . . I don’t worship in the cult of the diamond, or the elaborate service, because psychologically I am not oriented to outer trappings and display, but rather to the bare honest elementals of people. In my more radical stages I have thought that the marriage ceremony (as often overdone, with crowds of spectators, drinks and frills) would be best performed on a rock cliff overlooking the ocean (my personal symbol of life force and fertility) with only a few really deep friends there . . . sort of a pledge of honesty, relating one to the huge natural forces of procreation and life: a kind of pagan ritual, in some respects, clean and unadorned . . . but I shall go, anyway, to this and spectate.
Just bought (ah, the spendthrift!) a wonderful New Directions copy of my favorite Tennesee Williams play which I saw in New York before it folded last spring: Camino Real.* You must read it sometime (although seeing it is almost indispensable for the true emotional impact, as dance rituals play an important part). I’ll loan you my copy when next we meet--it only takes an hour or two to read. I remember lines like: “And these are the moments when we look into ourselves and ask with a wonder which never is lost altogether: Can this be all? Is there nothing more? Is this what the glittering wheels of the heavens turn for?” and “We have to distrust each other. It is our only defense against betrayal.” and “We are all of us guinea pigs in the laboratory of God. Humanity is just a work in progress.”* Oh, I wish you had seen that play with me . . .
Speaking factually now . . . I have been trying to persuade my brother to come up to Smith some weekend soon because I would like to see him, and also I know he would like to go out with some girls up here, and I have already a freshman picked out for him. But as yet I have no idea when he’ll possibly be coming. Anyway, I would like at least to extend you a blanket invitation to come visit me whenever you could best spare the time . . . for a day, an evening, a day or two some weekend. We could talk, go dancing, see a foreign movie . . . walk, have pizza and beer . . . or anything you’d feel in the mood to do. So maybe you’d want to get in touch with Warren and arrange to come up with him some weekend, or come alone . . . I don’t know. Just let me know about a week or so ahead if you ever feel like visiting me . . . I’d really enjoy it and think we could have a lovely time . . . I do wish somehow that you could visit some of my courses, but that is impractical, I suppose . . . .
bye for now. Till later . . .
Love,
Syl
TO Gordon Lameyer
Sunday 21 February 1954*
TLS on Smith College letterhead,
Indiana University
Sunday evening
Dear Neptune . . .
Early of a black slithering sunday evening, with rain walloping in swats against windows and the thin wind keening like a lost fox in the far stalwart purpling hills . . . car lights swing into the blithering rain, shouldering through curtains of holy beads and dwindling in tail lights of blurred red neon . . . streetlight caught in a black twigged nest of waterslick boughs . . . .
Shall shall shall I? I shall. Talk to him. But how to tell? How to tell, now that he has delved and delineated dreams that were once . . . but are now rememberings---there
is no more name playing left . . . he is so witbeguiling and so wayfaringclever . . . he is so blithevoweled and so competantly consonental, so lithely continental . . . how? But I shall. Talk. While other voices tell their griefs and joys in other rooms, while the live and the dead spin orbited nice, perilous and beautiful . . .
The letter came.* The post man brought the letter in a curiously carved box of quaint device. The letter weighed several thousand pounds, and contained within it the walls and walks of a city, the call of colleens, the fate of a man. Like the servile vapor that sprouted from Aladdin’s lamp, bowing and scraping and murmuring, “At your service, master!” the words sprang upward and leapt and danced and created kaliedoscopic mosaiced gordonian worlds. I read, I lived, I quoted it. I cut classes even, I did. reveling in evil . . . raveling sleepless sleeves . . . (you used up all the names in the world so you’ll just have to be satisfied with appallingly unconnotative page numbers!)*
Spring struck hamp with sundiamonded slush and voluptuous blunt mud for two days, and there was singing in the gutters where the coffee-colored rivulets ran riot to the sewerholes, and there was softening softening of sun in the haystacks of cloud and there was starsap in the song of orion swinging up over the housetops in spilling dippers of glory and the moon blew up balloonly, “a circumambulating aphrodisiac”* . . . boys and girls coupled like noah’s ark animals in the curving dark and it was the rally day of benevolent love . . .
Reading Winesburg, Ohio, she lay alone in the sun on the roof of the Alumnae Gym, the gravel under her slicker making waffle pique patterns in red on her white flesh, winterpale, and she faced the sun shuteyed with mystic smile of sylvan bliss, feeling the golden lust of pagan heat, and the vine leaves twining in her hair, and the rough gallop of the following centaurs in the grapeblue arboring vineyards . . . She dreams and reads, aloud because it is good aloud, with only the sun listening in a great core of golden silence: “Love is like a wind stirring the grass beneath trees on a black night. You must not try to make love definite. It is the divine accident of life. If you try to be definite and sure about it and to live beneath the trees, where soft night winds blow, the long hot day of disappointment comes swiftly and the gritty dust from passing wagons gathers upon lips inflamed and made tender by kisses . . . ”* And she underlines in black ink, and turns down the corner of the page as is her bad bad habit . .
Then she becomes inebriate of Christopher Fry: all about . . . “Creation’s vast and exquisite
Dilemma! Where altercation thrums
In every granule of the Milky Way,
Persisting still in the dead-sleep of the moon,
And heckling itself hoarse in that hot-head
The sun. And as for here, each acorn drops
Arguing to earth, and pollen’s all polemic---
We have given you a world as contradictory
As a female, as cabbalistic as the male,
A conscienceless hermaphrodite who plays
Heaven off against hell, hell off against heaven,
Revolving in the ballroom of the skies
Glittering with conflict as with diamonds:
We have wasted paradox and mystery on you
When all you ask for is cause and effect!”*
Adding for conflict and contrast the yet other facet of her nature that shudders in an ecstasy of horror when Mephistopheles in Crime and Punishment muses on the future life and says:
“And what if there are only spiders there . . . We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast, vast! But why must it be vast? Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bath-house in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner, and that’s all eternity is? I sometimes fancy it like that?”
And why should I quote? Speak in other voices? Because, like the archetypal wanderer, I am a part of all that I have met, and all that I have met is a part of me, and there is an mystic electric current of understanding and intuitive rapport that runs through all the subjective worlds we two share fragments of, and perhaps similar stimuli may achieve similar results . . .
Always people are talking to me . . . a young brash illegitimate boy who dreams to be a great medical artist to prove he is better than all the other accident-scorning legitimate bastards . . . a very German Fulbright from Stuttgart* who is the only one who knows the little town of Grabov where my father was born . . . somebody’s roommate who has a red scar on his face from where he got thrown from the truck when it turned over and who wanted to tell about the time in Nassau when he was sitting alone on a pier and a negro prostitute came along, and said: Are you lonely, and he said: yes, and she said: come, and he followed at six paces to a little room in a squalid alley where there was just space enough for a cot and the laundry that she did, and she knew he had no money, and he wanted to talk, so she talked and talked and that was how it was . . . and the fatherly Estonian artist who keeps sending more pictures and saying: think of all the museums and music and plays there will be when you come and live with my mother and I for days in the spring . . . and the med student cured of tb taking off on a boat for three months of wandering in Europe trying to find himself because he is lost, lost, lost . . . and the lovely unconventional blonde girl claiborne* who is marrying the jewish boy* with the communist sister who married a negro--she comes in and talks and listens, and it is two in the morning and there is all the question of free will and destiny and objective and subjective worlds to be considered more . . . and there is pizza and wine and candlelight . . . and wind blowing clean and hard like water across the mouth . . . and tan toned hills and tweed fields and light blue denim skies . . .
Oh, gordon gordon gordon . . . you are you forever and I am I and the hours and hours I could spend talking, reading aloud, listening, walking and communing with you are many and multitudinous.
The world is your oyster . . . venuses on the half shell and all that . . . worlds of words cannot convey what the liquidity of a look may say . . .
As T. S. E. says in “The Confidential Clerk”:
“There’s no end to understanding a person.
All one can do is to understand them better,
To keep up with them: so that as the other changes
You can understand the change as soon as it happens,
Though you couldn’t have predicted it . . . ”*
I don’t need to tell you that I like that idea.
I don’t have even to tell you, but I cannot give you a two-dimensional glance that would say it, so I will wait until I can be in the three and four dimensional kingdom before I begin to forsake words and substitute what the words are substitutes for . . .
Our names are protean and, please whatever gods there be, so are we
your provincial
polemical
nereid
s.
ps: you will unfairly deprive people of your humanity if you do not become a lawyer. you could, you know, and that would be stimulating and full of all people . . .
TO Jane V. Anderson
Thursday 25 February 1954
TLS with envelope (photocopy),
Smith College
February 25
Thursday
Dear Jane . . .
Not that I’m getting psychic in my middle age, but I had a dream about you last night, and today I received your letter---all of which reminded me forcibly that I have been planning to write you for a long time ever since I got back to the campus.
Miraculously enough, I am in the same big sunny three-windowed room I had last year, only now I have it all to myself, instead of with a roommate--the girls in the house moved around so that I could have it, which was much more than I ever expected.
The trip up was a story in itself: I had been hectically shopping and packing all my belongings in the very brief time I had before going, and Warren drove me back along with mother. We had to drive very slowly as the roads were bad, and going through Amherst it was clear . . . however, as s
oon as we neared Northampton we ran into a thick swirling blizzard which so shrouded the place that we couldn’t even make out College Hall through the blasts. On Paradise hill we got into the most fantastic and frightening skid I’ve ever been in: the car tilted dangerously and began to slide sideways down the steep unplowed incline--faster and faster, turning all the time. I saw with blinding clarity that we would either crash through the glasswindowed green house, or into the car in front of it, or roll over the hill and end up in (to make a bad pun) Paradise.
I remember the interminable seconds as we slid, utterly out of control, and I wondered if I really was living in a deterministic universe and had displeased the malicious gods by trying to assert my will and return to Smith. I felt an enormous affection for Warren sprout in me to insufferable proportions, and thought in absolute horror “this can’t happen to us--we’re different”---the same way a soldier must feel a certain invulnerability and indestructible identity before going into battle. Capriciously, the car turned about and skidded to a shuddering stop, facing up the hill which we had descended so precipitously, without crashing into any of the three alternatives that had confronted us.
So it was with literally shaking steps that I went apprehensively into the back door of Lawrence House. Fortunately, as I had thought, most of the girls were away, this being the free weekend, so only a small cosy group greeted us. Our wonderful new housemother gave us tea in her rooms, and the girls were so favorably impressed by Warren that everything went off very smoothly and I bade my security goodbye and went upstairs to unpack. Two of my old friends came over to visit, and I played bridge and typed the conclusion to another friend’s thesis, and was outwardly ensconced as the girls began to arrive on Sunday.
The first week, as I had forseen, was a round of visits to college hall---seeing officials and professors and getting my schedule settled, shopping for books and curtains, going to classes, and memorizing the names of the twenty new freshmen in our house. I was weary, slept soundly, and at the end of the week felt that I had been living here all my life---the past fading and integrating into the background with each succeeding day.