by Sylvia Plath
SUBJECT
minutiae
DATE
mar. 24
sun aslant along blue blotter . . . flesh sunwarm
clean air greenlucid and splattered with
sundrops . . . tender sproutings of spring
among bluepurple gauze hills, tweed
fields and lightblue denim skies
purple crocii leap vital
in bloodstream
and the dead corngod puts forth green buds . . .
and this inside . . .
and I sit with a checklist
hearing at my back time’s wingèd jetplane . . .
somehow I will and must
see you
How Is This? you call me in Wellesley at Wellesley 5-0219-J (26 Elmwood Road) sometime or other between Thursday March 25 and Saturday March 27 and tell me which configuration of time would be best for us to see how we each live: statistically: I fly to New York Sunday March 29 to live with the Estonian artist at 2023 Lexington Avenue till Thursday April 1 when, up to now, Marty and Mike were going to drive me back to Boston. I could (1) stop off at New Haven that Thursday; but I think you have vacation then. Or you could (2) come see me in Wellesley anytime from April 1 to 6 when I go back to Smith . . .
Call to let me know which what and where . . .
Till then when you call soon . . .
love,
syl
TO Gordon Lameyer
Tuesday 6 April 1954
TLS, Indiana University
Tuesday, April 6 . . .
Dear Gordon . . .
It has been long . . . I’m not sure exactly how long, since I talked on paper with you. Now it is night, the last night of my two-week spring vacation, and as I look out the window before the desk in my room, I see a blurred reflection of myself imposed on the black inscrutable void outside. The only light is from the streetlamp, and that light is slick, like india ink, on the slippery and rain-sluiced road . . .
Downstairs mother irons and listens to Il Trovatore;* in the room across the hall my grandparents sit and survey television, as a novice singer gives with “I’m-as-corny-as-Kansas-in-August”* in a too-frantic voice at a too-hectic tempo. Cloistered in my sanctum, I sit selecting and sorting the collage of memories I have shored up these past two weeks which have been for me the intensest and most exquisitely cataclysmic of my young and oh-so-green psychic and physical existence . . . where to begin?
At the beginning, as the little girl said. Once-upon-a-time there lived in Lawrence house a Smith girl . . .
The first weekend home I was introduced to Harvard for the First Time in 21 years of living in the environs of Cambridge. Result: I could live in that Place contentedly for the rest of my days . . . (Provided I saw the world in leisurely fashion first). Warren took me to his room where I met his three superlative and handsome and most brilliant roommates: Luigi Einaudi,* blond, blue-eyed grandson of the President of Italy; Clem Moore, young, precocious son of a brilliantly successful free-lance-writer mother and chemistry-research father . . . a guy with intense black eyes, a cosmopolitan drawl, who is playing around with existentialism; and Alec Goldstein,* a dark, sinuous good-humored fellow who was, at the time I met him, collecting six cheeping black chickens as a surprise gift for his girl, whom he’d promised a “furry present” (undoubtedly she was expecting a mink stole!) Warren treated me to a lovely Egg Foo Yong at Young Lee’s,* to a humanities class, and to a meeting with “his girl” . . . a breezy, tall, brown-haired, spontaneous and enchanting Radcliffe creature named Margo Dennis. I could have accepted her for a sister then and there . . .
Margo came home for dinner that night, after which I went for a cup of coffee at the Shopper’s World in Framingham with Dr. Ruth Beuscher, my psychiatrist, who is now one of my best friends . . . only 9 years older than I, looking like Myrna Loy, tall, Bohemian, coruscatingly brilliant, and most marvelous . . . we had an excellent comradely time, and she approved heartily of my plans for spending a week in NYC this vacation and of taking an accelerated course in beginner’s German at Harvard this summer . . .
That night it was dancing and beer at the Meadow’s* . . . the next day I went to a bohemian Cabaret Dance at Harvard’s Adams House . . . my escort being that 19-year old illegitimate medical artist I may have told you about . . . who wants to prove he’s twice as talented as most legitimate people . . . which he fortunately is. He gave a punch party in his room at which he let me hold a minor salon with all the graduate resident instructors in the house . . . bright young guys all, getting Phd’s or teaching Byzantine history or Romance languages and whatnot, all being most chivalrous and stimulating.
My most intriguing contact was made at the dance itself . . . which was in a hall set about with individual red-and-white checked tables, candles in wine bottles, and intinerant gypsy violinists. Phil introduced me to a ruddy-faced, genial fellow, “Scotty” Campbell,* the Assistant Director of the Summer School, no less.
Scotty claimed to remember me as a result of my application last year and remarked that he’d just interviewed Warren for residence in Adams house next year and was most impressed . . . fortified by wine, I boldly remarked that I’d been hesitant about applying for a scholarship this summer as I’d refused the one offered last year. Scotty was most encouraging, insisted that I apply, saying I had a good chance. Come the last dance set, he asked Phil for me, and whirled me away. I kept saying to myself: “He is a professor, and here he is, telling me all these fantastic things in my ear . . . ” I attributed Scotty’s fervor to the wine and figured he’d forget it and be cross with himself come dawn . . . . but the next day came a scholarship blank with a letter saying he had all my records from last year, so all I had to do was sign on the dotted line and let the rest go to blazes . . . so it sort of looks like this year I will be living in Cambridge all summer!
Next day: Scene: Logan Airport.
Character: Young girl who never was up in big plane, only a little one once last spring.
Props: Huge suitcase and Dostoevsky’s book, The Possessed.
Destination: NYC: from Harlem to Greenwich Village.
I arrived at LaGuardia after one hour of tilting flight during which I sat with my eager nose flattened against the window, staring down at the redundant squares, triangles and rectangles of brown-toned land, threaded together by rivers and railroads . . . flashes of blue sea at first as we wheeled above Boston, and the houses and ships falling away under the slanting silver-winged airship . . .
Settling in a descending spiral outside of NYC, we landed and taxiied in, I being met by my 35-year old Estonian artist and whisked off to stay with him and his mother Hilda at their dark, dingy 3rd floor walkup at the corner of Lexington and 123rd in the center of Harlem, where a nucleus of Estonians, Latvians, and Russians have gathered.
A ceremonial dinner was prepared to greet me, with aunts and uncles, none of whom could speak more than broken English . . . and I soon found myself speaking slow broken English myself, trying, to the merriment of all, to imitate the gutteral and sibilant hisses of Russian sounds, and assuring everybody that after I began learning German this summer I would start Russian immediately upon entering grad school . . . That night it was to re-see the “Confidential Clerk”* with Ilo, who is an artist and architect’s draftsman.
Against the advice of mother and friends, I insisted I could manage myself equally well in Ilo’s apartment as at Smith . . . and everything went according to my calculations, except that Ilo startled me slightly Monday by waking me up and announcing that he’d decided to stay home from work that day. I told him coldly, in a flash of inspiration, that I was engaged to be married in a few months, and so was to be considered as a friend, and absolutely nothing more . . . which information succeeded in making him behave with upmost solicitude and tact for the rest of my stay . . .
That day I walked by myself for over a hundred blocks across town through the center of Harlem to Columbia and Morningside Heights, and down Broadway till I reached
the upper fifties and met Cyrilly Abels, managing ed of Mlle, for a long lunch of lobster salad and avocado pears at the Ivy Room of the Drake Hotel . . . conversation being mostly about authors I’ve read and she knows personally . . . she’d had Dylan Thomas over for dinner the week before he died and confirmed the story about his drinking to great excess on an empty stomach all the time . . .
Afternoon: I met Ilo at the Metropolitan Museum and saw the exhibit of Medieval art and early American art (Sargent, Whistler, and Mary Cassatt).* I must say my tastes are arrantly modern! That night Ilo had gotten tickets to William Inge’s sparkling play “Picnic”* which I enjoyed to the hilt . . .
Tuesday morning I walked from 125th street down 5th Avenue to 43rd and the museum of Modern Art, which seemed closed . . . a young, big-eyed vital-looking woman approached me to ask the time just as I went up to the locked museum door and informed me that the museum didn’t open till noon, and we had yet an hour to wait. Somehow we got talking about art, and began walking and talking intensely about progressive schools and education and politics . . . at which juncture we discovered we’d walked fifteen blocks and were at Lord and Taylor’s. “You must see the Bird Cage” my delighted companion informed me, so we went up for a delicious lunch for 95¢ and talked heatedly over coffee. Turned out she’s a painter and has an apartment in the Village with her two boys and husband, who’s an Hungarian psychiatrist . . . that afternoon we spent together in the museum and seeing the three socio-psychological films* that were showing there . . .
Come night, I dressed up black velvetly, with a red rose in my hair from the half-dozen Ilo had presented me as a combined apology and farewell present and waited for Bish,* a charming student at Union Theological Seminary (of all the fantastic places for a friend of mine to be!), to come take me to dinner.
We took the subway downtown to the Village and sat for hours at Asti’s* eating rare lampchops and chef’s salad and listening to the singing waiters and waitresses who continually sang operatic arias . . . after this, all I could take was a long windy ride on the Staten Island ferry, where we stood alone on the whistling deck (all the other herds of people stayed warm and untransfigured inside) drinking hot chocolate and watching the glittering skyline of Manhattan recede and the statue of liberty grow green and big, and then the statue dwindle, and the lights rise tall and shining above us in the windy dark . . . at this point I was in a skipping mood and felt like chanting Millay: “We are very tired, we were very merry, and we went back and forth all night on the ferry . . . ”*
Next day, I told Ilo I was going home, which I wasn’t, and I took a crosstown taxi to Union where I woke up Bish, had breakfast, and heard Paul Tillich* and Reinhold Niebuhr* (that last name is the devil to spell!) lecture at his classes, had lunch, and went to a practice room to play piano badly in accompaniment as he sang opera in a creditable tenor . . . all of which was gay fun.
I then headed to Jan Salter’s apartment in Greenwich Village* . . . her adopted father,* a fat dead-pan humorous German free-lance artist who makes great money doing bookjackets, met me at the door of their 9th floor studio apartment which is all books, original paintings and wide windows overlooking the lights of the village.
Jan’s kindly, whitehaired mother,* who used to be a social worker in the city, took one shrewd look at me and then pointed to the bedroom . . . “Baby, you need a little nap,” she smiled. I lay down gratefully and conked out for two solid hours . . .
Dinner, sherry, conversation, and Jan and I headed for the Greenwich theater* for two superlative Hitchcock thrillers: “Maltese Falcon” with my boy Peter Lorre, and that now-deceased hulk, Sid Greenstreet. “Shadow of a Doubt” with Joseph Cotton as the handsome strangling uncle, played with it, and Jan and I were both so tense afterwards that we looked for evil leering little men in every shadowed alley. A daiquiri at a hotel bar, and conversation (Jan is one of the few girls who can outtalk me!) and to bed . . .
Thursday Bish and I had lunch, went for a long walk in Morningside Park, argumentatively discussing philosophy and theology and calling each other all sorts of bad names like “humanist” and “Existentialist” (he to me) and “pseudo-preacher” and “arrogant absolutist” . . . all in all, I grew philosophically in the proverbial leaps and bounds this week . . nothing so conducive to growth as to have to battle with one’s opposite (being, as I fear I am only too often, the devil’s advocate!)
That night I dined at Cyrilly Abels 5th avenue apartment in a neat foursome including her brilliant, opinionated lawyer husband* and his nephew, a young Jewish news reporter who works on the midnight to 8 a.m. shift on the Voice of America . . . conversation centered around legal cases, book cases, and whatnot . . . another daiquiri and more conversation with the reporter at some Greenwich dive or tother . . . then “home”, which is where I hang my nylons . . .
Friday luncheon with Jan and Smith friend Dee Neuberg at the Time-Life building, watching the out-of-season skaters pirouette and twirl in the Plaza . . . then to Grand Central, that soap opera stage where “a million lives play daily” . . . *
I stopped off in New Canaan on the way home at the home of Clem Moore to have dinner with the Moores and Warren, who was driving down on vacation from Harvard with Clem. Mrs. Moore, a vital, black-eyed, black-haired (Italian-cut) woman with a beautiful mobile face, met me at the station. As she has been one of my “ideals” for a long while now, I was most eager to meet her, and we hit it off immediately, with she telling me all about her writing start, her unfortunate first marriage (she eloped with a society playboy whose family subsequently disinherited him and left him to live off Mrs. M’s writing earnings, while he made cigarette money by selling life insurance to his parents . . . finally he became a professional pilot in the air force, leaving Mrs. M. in peace with a lovely baby who is now Clem.)
Now happily married to a benevolent giant of a chemical research man, Mrs. M. lives in a modern dream house in the plushest part of the New Canaan woods . . . I told her, after a tour of the plateglass windowed woodtextured roughbricked clean uncluttered haven, that was all sunlight and fresh blue air, that in 10 years I would buy the place from her. Her studio really won me over: separate, all windows looking out into trees and lakes, walled with books and files, with the typewriter the central talisman on this writer’s altar . . .
I played with young Peter and Michael* till Warren and Clem arrived, then delighted in a quick chicken supper (Mrs. M reassured me by insisting that she, too, hadn’t known how to cook, but that it was simple and speedy with all the modern conveniences . . . and even a free-lancer could eat in style) . . . she also took a look at me and insisted that I sleep there overnight, so I washed the grime and soot from New York from my weary body, luxuriating in the hot shower and the clean sheets of the bed (such pleasant physical comforts when one is footsore and beat . . . )
Awoke to sunlight and treebranches, almost touchable . . . coffee, eggs, bacon, and strawberry jam . . . the boys saw me off at the station . . . stopped in New Haven for lunch at George and Harry’s* with a psychic brother of mine, Mel Woody, and borrowed so many of his poetry books that I had to kidnap him and take him along on the train to carry my things home . . .
Home in time for dinner with the two Crockett’s and more talk . . . as yet I had not contracted laryngitis . . . more poetry reading . . . bed . . .
Monday was lunch with Olive Higgins Prouty at Joseph’s* . . . and over swordfish and sherry I recounted my adventures to my fairy godmother . . . who has literally sunk untold thousands into my scholarships and hospital bills. I enjoy keeping her posted regularly, which is the only price I have to pay . . . this, lest she wave her wand and reduce me again to a pauper, and my English bicycle to a pumpkin! Vicariously I conquered Mt. Everest* at the Exeter theater . . . dinner at Harvard with Phil and a tour of a superlative one-man art exhibit* of modern mosaics and pottery which I think you’d have loved . . . all the rough stone textures and structured drawings . . . the colored polish of small stones a
nd rough carved tile . . . the inlays of wood grains in unique and balanced forms . . .
Today . . . the respite: the day with noplace to go at no particular time: I’ve been playing sentimental songs on the piano, listening to opera, brunching on chicken livers and bacon, reading elf stories and being an obliging galloping horse to the children across the street while telling Mrs. Aldrich, that delightful young mother of five, about how it is possible to synchronize a logical city and walk around it in a week . . .
Tomorrow . . . back to Melville, Tolstoi, James (my introduction to him) and Hemingway and Faulkner . . . and to what I hope will, out of this barren gray rainlacerated womb of beginning April, be spring . . .
My fingers falter on the keys . . . Gordon, when will you be stationed hereabouts? . . . everytime I see the ocean or a sailor, it induces me to think even more frequently of you . . . saw a jovial Texan machinist’s mate fresh from the somethingorother William Rush* (is there such?) who asserted that he had tied up alongside the Perry somewhere or so . . . whither goest thou this summer, Ulysses, my roving one . . . ?
Properly, I was struck by your letter* on the pros and cons of professoring vs. salesmanning . . . I argue not so much to you, as to myself, since I am torn between jobbing it or going on to grad school for pure mental hedonism to learn languages and expand to comparative lit on someone else’s money . . .
But I think that you overestimate the exigencies of teaching . . . granted, the academic community requires thinking, reading, correcting . . . but this very thinking and leisure is conducive to writing, not, as some think, abstract and ivory-towered . . . long vacations allow plunging into work for three months without the nagging doubt: “What am I doing writing when I should be contacting so-and-so about the such-and-such deal?” If reality and the everyday world is necessary for grist for the writer’s mill, summer months could be spent working on a boat, in Europe . . . anywhere, and this living would reciprocally enrich the teacher’s ability to offer himself and his growing mind and psyche to his students . . . after my article on poet-teachers, I feel very strongly that teaching is a vital profession for those that have the guts to make it such, and I say this, I think, without being blinded by a rosy haze of dreamy impracticalness . . . If I taught and didn’t write, at least I’d be growing (because that is the only kind of a teacher I would want to be . . . a kinetic one) . . . and I would be in contact with the side of life which is most important to me . . . the artistic, creative side, with a minimum of social pressures to conformity, even though within the academic environment there are also pressures: to “publish or perish” or get degrees, etc.