The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  Ostensibly (isn’t that a smug, annoying world of a word – almost as bad as oecumenical!) I write to tell you there is a cabin next door with a bed with your name on it in large godlike script, wreathed with gordonian knots – for you, if and when you are able, baker – no, no – wishing to come – because you do no longer have the usual title of “visitor” – which implies all sorts of formalities, but are somehow quite different . . . a name not yet found . . .

  Just do please let me know by mail or call or male call where, when & if to pick you up – friday or saturday, or sunday – I do hope you’ll feel like coming, even for a little, ideally – for a lot!

  oh, gordon – living in a place like this for a summer, I feel I perhaps could write really again – away from social phones, eager & sometimes too attentive friends, and sophisticated syphilizations . . .

  pines, sand, sea – and oh, for a typewriter – some day you will be in a study – (gayer than brown) like this with no one but perhaps a scrupulously unobtrusive cook-secretary to disturb you – on summer vacation to find your “portals of discovery”* & sail through, like ulysses, on & on like columbus to novels, stories – do let me be your typist!

  And do come down to see us!

  your obed. sec.,

  s. p.

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  Tuesday 29 June 1954

  ALS, Indiana University

  Tuesday, June 29

  Very dear Gordon . . .

  A sad and foggy day it is, and in the old green rocking chair I’m sitting surrounded by pocketbook editions of “discovery” and “New World Writing” . . . Without my typewriter I feel aesthetically and technically castrated (or perhaps unfertile would be more apt!) . . . yet, in my artistically crippled state I still want to communicate with you: a fetish, these letters . . . making me feel somehow closer which is how I want to be with you . . . very, and much more . . .

  Ride back sunday: lurid and lonely: evil red and orange kerosene lights flickering and leering over two miles of devilish hacked-up road with cars moving two way trafficly, coming at each other head on till one chickened out & pulled aside in a ragged ditch: I being very stubborn, forced all the other approaching cars into the sideditches: being myself too numb to get either scared or polite, and rationalizing that I had no male tarzan along to extricate me in case of trouble . . . and so to the canal, too sleepy to even talk or think to myself . . . which I generally enjoy doing. I stopped for two quick shots of hot coffee on the rocks to keep my reflexes awake as I navigated the tortuous second lap of route 6 . . . hot milk, like a baby . . . and the sweet clover quilts of bed and sleep . . .

  Yesterday, I walked two miles down nauset from the coastguard station to meet sue hitchcock* and we took off in her family’s beach buggy for a day of travel . . . first to dick’s camp (tonset*) in orleans where I saw the boy for the first time in six months . . . oh, gordon, it was so strange: I felt much as I did when I went “home” to winthrop last week: dick, too, seemed to have shrunk, telescoped up, like alice-in-w, both physically and psychically . . . I had lived so hard and so much and deep that never again could I go back to the same small country of his personality which once, years ago, I had seen as vast and glittering with promise . . . I felt only a little sorry for the boy who has had such hard things happen in all areas of his life . . . and who has again reverted to the “cousin” he was before I began dating him . . . sue and I swam with him and saw the infirmary he’ll run, and he loaned me his bike for the rest of the week . . . and I left, feeling a mingled relief and pity – at his everpresent, inverted snobbery, puritanically directed against smoking, drinking, women with short hair and lipstick – all excesses of comfort and artistry and imagination – now that I have such increased distance in time and space from this major influence on my life, patterns and problems emerge more clearly articulate, and I feel desirous of describing to myself (and, by corollary, to you) the shaping furnaces that helped to forge this plastic plathian phenomenon which is the me, the I, the subjective center of the relative psychic solar system . . .

  dick is, inside, a middleaged rigid, paternally authoritative bachelor who lives by maps, compasses and anatomy books: that, and his stubborn uncompromising critical attitude, constitute the essential tragedy of his personality . . . once I thought, for the benefit of future generations, that science should balance art, as the north pole does the south, with a wellrounded world in between: and, as a metaphor, it sounds fine – but I’ve been thinking over what you said so recently about blind spots, about learning, (say about the guts of cars) – and I feel that we are, you and I, creatively and natively clever enough to assimilate knowledge less poetic, though perhaps more practical, than joyce & thomas – and we can perhaps also help each other grow and learn as we do so ourselves, teaching and sharing on a mutual plane – not in a rigid teacher-student character – but rather as if we both were perpetually students – both learning, discovering and creating life . . . and maybe even art . . .

  now and then, because of the multiple and complex ways you are always growing dearer to me – so that every time I say “I love you Gordon,” the word love is a new word, deeper, and rich as a plumcake with nuances of taste and texture – because of all this, I wonder, in time and space, how long and continuous an interval I would need so that I could sit in the same room with you and read (I’d have to write shut up in a closet!) for hours without saying a word or interrupting to talk, discuss, or share something with you – read without some private voice dancing and capering and exulting most indecorously inside me: “Gordon is here . . . here . . . here!” As yet, I cannot pretend I do not hear the insistent, clamoring voice which makes me feel that getting to know you, wanting to understand you is so important when I am with you because I am with you so little – such a small proportion of hours, compared with the hours of my past life – even my present life . . . all this I think over and want to say to you here because it is new to me and I am so always very happy now that I am capable of such an enormous and potential tenderness and admiration – “love” is the biggest word I can think of for this insistent growing feeling – which is bigger than words used usually because it compares them all in an immense, fertile, bubbling, jolly Irish stew – that can produce exquisite aromas for the abstract, intellectual aspects of my need for form and artistic artifice – as well as earthy, succulent meat, for the physical, emotional facets of my scarlett-o’-hara,-molly-bloom elemental eva nature . . .

  my needs and givings consist of polarities and counterpositions – and you and I are the lords of them . . . we will patent a new synthesis . . . and yet a newer one . . . we will be hobo and hoyden, duke and duchess . . . and learn cold by knowing hot, black by white, and yet be experts and connosieurs of warm grays as well . . .

  darling, I do love you and, loving you, want to tell you so, and, telling you so, want to describe and make metaphors to qualify and specify this unique attitude of me (s) for you (g) . . . and I want to work (in time, as well as on this space) to make a four-letter word full of multitudes of connotations – so when I tell it to you, the meanings are infinitely individual . . .

  This letter began as a sort of itinerary of the last two days – believe it or not . . . (“ah buhleeve it!”) and switched somehow from the general to the particular . . .

  I did drive with sue to see warren & clem in cotuit – explored 20 acres of “the pines”, met characters – rowed to a bird sanctuary, discovered my first colony of fiddler crabs (fantastic creatures!) was swooped at and screamed at by irate white terns as we blundered among their nests – they added injury to insult by dropping well-aimed liquid white messes on our bare shoulders . . . back, and reading in bed . . .

  today, rainily, I baked some cookies and spent hours talking (and mostly listening) to our loquacious cape cod landlady hold forth colloquially (“colloquacious” – not bad – but it could never approach your “bikeening”!) on her adventures as “home-made” bakeress of the cape – and her enc
ounters with cape cod characters – one “as Irish as pat murphy’s pig, you know, the one who perfected the chemical they use to embalm the boys’ bodies sent home from overseas!” . . . I only wished I could take surreptitious shorthand to record her vivid untutored twists of speech, her vital vernacular – she’s great story material . . .

  you said you didn’t object to my impulsive outbursts via mail . . . so I take you up here – and hold forth, even without the artistic regularity and discipline of the typewriter – because I want you to know me as much as I want to know you . . . and as we are both growing fast – (hope we always will) that is a colossal task – like trying to codify a rapidly increasing language – buth oh, I love you more than the alphabet and Roget’s thesaurus combined . . .

  sylvia

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Friday 2 July 1954*

  TLS with envelope on Smith College letterhead, Indiana University

  Friday night

  10 p.m.

  Dearest mother . . .

  It seems that my life is so full that even when I’ve only been away from someone less than a day, so much has happened in the interim that it would take volumes to recount it in detail!

  I’m all freshly showered, shampooed, and squatting like a sleepy buddha on my lovely bed christening my typewriter (beloved thing) for the first time since I’ve been back.

  Thought you might like to know the little practical details that you are always concerned about. Well, the house hasn’t blown up yet (although diSTANT (hmm!) firecracker and cannon explosions tonight at first had me thinking that the preserve jars were blowing up one by one in the basement.) and I’ve aired it, and put it in apple-pie order and gotten the mess of unpacking cleared away.

  The ride home on the train was hot and tiring, the only event being that the man in the seat behind me was cut badly on the face by some vandal kids who threw a rock, of all things, through the train window, shattering the glass in all directions: probably they were aiming at me, and missed! It was a shock to the whole car, as you may imagine, and we all felt suddenly like a row of wooden ducks set up behind glass for any novice assassin!!

  A taxi sped me through the traffic to the busstop, and I didn’t wait half an hour for the Manor Ave, but leapt aboard the one there. Luckily a greasy young character in a yellow convertible saw me struggling with my suitcase after only a few paces from Weston Road, so I sacrificed maidenly integrity to practicality and gratefully took the free ride home.

  First thing, no mail. I called Dot right away, and she obligingly brought mine over in the nick of time, as she had been about to forward it. I got a letter from Bob Cochran and one from Mrs. Cochran inviting me for the weekend in Chatham last week, so I’ll write an apology for missing her mail immediately. Nancy wrote a nice letter: poor girl is working like a dog selling refrigerators and can’t wait to come East. Joan Smith* wrote from the apartment,* saying the number is changed to Tr 6-0848, and Mel Woody wrote a good intellectual letter. Also my application photos came, 12 of them, the best small pictures I’ve ever had, I think . . . so I’m sending you one* as a little present to remember me by . . . saving the rest for the countless applications for scholarships I’ll have to make out next fall.

  Had a tunafish sandwich and peaches for lunch, so tired I couldn’t eat more, and washed hair and relaxed on chaise lounge for an hour after visiting for a few minutes with Dot and Bobby, and Mrs. Aldrich and Ann later.

  Mrs. Lameyer picked me up about 6 and we had a lovely supper of salmon and peas at her house* after which she drove me shopping to the Star Market which was packed with pre-holiday shoppers. For under three dollars I stocked up on 2 quarts of milk, mayonnaise, donuts, tomatoes, carrots, lettuce, green grapes, grape juice, frozen orange juice and toothpaste. Felt very competent and matronly with my list and enjoyed cleaning and rearranging refrigerator.

  For some reason Gordon’s phone call never came through, so I sent a telegram from Mrs. Lameyer’s house telling him we’d be down at Newport for lunch tomorrow . . . and the most fantastic thing happened: remember this, because it’s the queerest coincidence: Mrs. Lameyer evidently has a party line, because the line was busy when I lifted the received to call western union. Somehow, some wicked instinct made me keep listening to the woman’s voice on the line, thinking that I’d call the minute she got through so she couldn’t have the chance to make another call. Well, she talked on and on, and then began to talk about her daughter Ann, who was working on the cape and had met an awfully handsome boy about 19 who was a sophomore at Harvard. I was amused at the mention of Harvard as a prestige factor to the other mother, but when she continued, “Yes, he has an older sister who was a year ahead of Ann at Wellesley High and is now at Smith,” I practically choked. “Ann thinks he may be a little young for her, actually, but evidently he is a charming boy” . . . and it came back to me about meeting Ann Burnham* on the beach when I was over in Cotuit and how interested she was when she heard that Warren was working at the Pines too! When you think of all the chances that made up this coincidence of hearing, by chance, over a party line at someone else’s house the mention of me and Warren, the possible odds are staggering, aren’t they?

  Anyhow, I’ve never enjoyed anything so much as being home alone . . . it seems so big and palatial and airy, with so many rooms . . . I feel I could hold a ball in the kitchen! I really am very tired, and look so forward to being very rested to cope with the new adjustments of the apartment and studying.

  Tomorrow is Newport. Sunday I’ll stay home all day, cook chicken or steak, with a fresh salad, preceded fashionably by vichysoisse . . . wash the mountain of clothes on the kitchen floor, iron, and pack one suitcase with necessaries. The heavy things I’ll save till the weekend when dear Gordon will be home at last, unless he’s hung from the yardarm for assassinating the captain.

  Don’t worry about a thing . . . all is very fine here, and I want you to get rid of those nasty ulcer pains.

  Be sure and tell grammy and grampy I send my best love and regret I can’t be there to celebrate with Frank and his family, but it is all for the best that I start summer school liesurely and rested.

  Love to all . . .

  your very own daughter,

  sivvy

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  Saturday 3 July 1954*

  TLS on Smith College letterhead,

  Indiana University

  saturday night

  dear ponce de lameyer (en route) je pense de la mer

  bang is how an opening sentence should begin; or, rather, BANG!! (just to make sure you are there, ready to listen all awake and aware) . . .

  I am squatting on my bed like a sleepy buddha, untergiversating typewriter in my languid lap at last, sound only of clacking keys, smug tick of clock damn conceited about being on time for a change, distant slither and hush of cars on pike, and a few spasmodic chirrups of somnolent birds of no appearance . . . .

  so we have a scene of sounds set, and here I am: the Question is: where are You? as of today, my new philosophy of life is: Assume-Nothing-And-Jehovah-Won’t-Jilt-You . . . or, in times of crisis: Assume-The-Worst-But-Serve-It-With-Parsley (that last is out of my “joy of cooking” book from the section on what to do with leftovers)

  I don’t even hazard when this letter will reach you . . . viconian recoursing may bring it to you tomorrow, or next year in tibet . . . I thought of addressing it to “the terrestrial globe”, but then thought that the cretin post officials might take that to mean the third, and not the first and more general websterian definition, and be confused because you are technically on the aquatic globe . . . anyhow, by now maybe you got my gay little telegram about how your mother and I were jaunting down to lunch on the ship with you in newport today, ho ho and a hey nonino. perhaps you do not see why we planned on coming; well, it was all because of Assuming Things and happened like so:

  Moment’s silence. A few haunting bars of “Bobbie Shafto” with Wanda Landowska* on the Harpsichord (or, fo
r variety, a melalcholic perversion of malice in wandaland with chorus harpies along the bar). Fade out.

  Narrator (in highly suggestive tones): Yesterday we left our heroine Absinthe Lutely Plathtered struggling valiantly through the yuccas and the thith (shuchks, fluffed again!) thistles to get to her destination hundreds of ohms away in Newport, the Celestial City. Armed only with stale toll house cookies (to annihilate venomous nematodes) and Rinso Flakes (to keep her Nylons lovely longer), Absinthe ponders to herself the happenings of the past ninety-eight hours.

  Absinthe: Oh, rather! That quite nice letter in the (com.) (,) post from Humperdinck Chimpendale Eccemann saying as how his galleon is hawl-a-day saturday, sunday and monday and there will be a caul friday for which I left a message as to where I would be as I wouldn’t be where originally I was going to be.

  Narrator: (ominously) Vraught by the sveldtering noonday headt, Absinned hears the dingle of a sturm nearby und yearns for a drang of vatever iss in it, HomoChinEyezed or uddervise. Liddle doss she know that this sturm is 100% mescalin flowink from a leak in a hidden moundand still.

  Absinthe: (drinking like it was High octane ChampagnE) Oh, Weltschmerz! (She passes out cold.)

  Narrator (undaunted): Yes, Absent had heard by post from Humperdinck and expected him to call. Friday. Meanwhile, in another part of town, Humperdinck’s mother, imprisoned for days by the underworld gangster, Shrimp Casserole, escaped to call our herowine and offer her a ride to Noport sadherday. ALP accepted with joy.

  Impatient Newscaster (seizing script and kayoing narrator): Awright awready, let’s get dis over an done wit! Goil and guy’s mudder have dinna friday. No call. Line must be busy or somethin so they send telegram. Leave early. Arrive Saddy. No ship. Flew coop.

  Joe Friday (walks on set by mistake, knifes newscaster, plays “dragnet” theme on deviated septum): Ten thirty-one. Nothing turned up yet. Grilled sentry. Called Descant. No dope. Except the operator.