The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  Operator: Ah des can’t tell you-all wheah that silly li’l old boat done gone floatin off to.

  Joe Friday (suavely) Ten thirty-four. One clue: operator’s accent gaver away. Boat obviously in Norfolk, Virginia.

  Absinthe (coming to): Zut alors! (begins wailing a Gordonian Plain Chant).

  Joe Friday (suavely): Merde de vaches!

  Radio Technician: Damyata! This whole show’s shot to hell! (short circuits the mike and leaves for dinner at the Hilltop and a quick tour of Cornelius Vanderbilt’s summer playhouse.)

  * * * * * *

  enough of this farce. dear gordon, I missed you. from your last letter* I gathered euphemistically that I could plan to see you some day this weekend and would talk things over definitely if you called friday. in fact, your mother and I made plans which gathered momentum, so that, after trying to call you and learning we could only send a telegram, we rakishly did that.

  receiving from you no negative, we acted positive. anyway, after the naked horror of the deserted wharf, we had a lovely dinner and tour of the “breakers” and, in spite of the reputedly death-dealing traffic (according to the sepulchral radio warnings of rudolph king*) I drove about two hundred miles without scratching a fender. and I did enjoy spending the day with your mother. she is so lively and a good deal of fun.

  hot here. mountain of clothes in kitchen to wash and iron tomorrow. alone in house, except for a few ghosts lurking in shadows and an amphibious troll inhabiting the washing machine. I’ve been so social that I love being here quietly alone with books and papers and letters and no (well hardly any) people. even without telling anyone I was home, my aunt Dot and cousin Bobby came over with my mail (10 letters), baby Ann and Pixie wandered through the hedge to leave tricycles and beg for cookies, Mrs. Aldrich sent Libby over to ask me for Sunday dinner tomorrow. my life is one of unpacking and repacking and reunpacking. monday I hope to move to Cambridge. as I have a dentist appointment friday afternoon (the 9th) I’ll be home all next weekend. these weekends seem farther and farther apart! I live lifetimes between seeings of you, and now, after today, I muse in wonder and wishfulness about having you warm and vital and near: those miracles of proximity, mental and material, ethereal and earthy . . . once they begin they are already vanished . . . only to appear again, more and very muchly better . . .

  fog on cape conduced to reading Sons and Lovers by dhlawrence and The Great Gatsby by fscottfitzgerald and beginning of Babbitt.* danny kaye in “knock on wood”* with warren and sue hitchcock (that vivacious girl I discovered on nauset beach) . . . visit to marcia and mike plumer at pleasant bay camp* . . . stone through train window lacerating man behind me . . . fantastic accidentally overheard telephone call . . . so sleepy . . .

  here is a piece of virginally white paper to end all this on. you might keep it for statistics, among other things. my summer address is:

  Apartment 4

  Telephone: Trowbridge 6-0848

  Bay State Apartments

  1572 Massachusetts Avenue

  Cambridge

  I promise I will be home all weekend from friday supper on, just in case you really do come home.

  I am enclosing my class picture which looks as much like me as any of the others do, which is a safe statement as the others are very few and very bad. the main, and perhaps sole, virtue of my face is that it is extremely mobile. therefore photographs are not ME, or even a reasonable facsimile thereof. because, in normal life, I do not stay still that long, and my fluid features are always riverrunning together. but here is my burnt offering anyway. at least it’s better than that snooty profile that makes me look as if I wish I were at a coming-out party.

  * * * * * * *

  that is all factual, above. this part, underneath the stars, is, too, but more softly labial . . . because the more I live and think and read the more I am amazedly glad that you are there to be knowing more and vividly . . . every choice or event I measure as best I can by the limitations and difficulties it involves (which is rather like evaluating a landscape by its shadows, instead of its highlights) . . . and all I can think of that I regret in the growing and evolving tenderness I have for you is that we do not have a more constant, consistent environment to learn to know ourselves in: like a summer job at chatham, or a daily college companionship of study and celebration, both situations hypothetically offering a more valid approximation of actual living conditions . . . in contrast to the accelerated pitch of life I save to pour into our weekends . . .

  when I am sleepy, darling, I can have recapitulating talks, but I cannot create or think and read fiercely. I need sleep, about nine hours a night. while I love the night, to read and talk and love late, and easily sleep till noon, I really live and work best if I go to bed generally early and get up to work by 8. from then, till lunch at 1, are my best thinking hours.

  it follows that I am not disciplining my thinking now; I am more vaguely stream-of-consciousness and uninhibitedly fond of you. for you I want to be like a chameleon on a paisley shawl . . . . paradoxically always and yet never the same . . . the more always and vividly I love you the more newly and variously I want to tell you how this you-i linking affects me . . .

  how private are typewriters, anyway? mine is more dear and intimate to me than quill or parchment. it would like now to talk about the warm, structural lines of your strong neck and the way your voice can go soft and lyric when it wants to . . . all those gordonian elements which are suddenly all-at-once You, which I could leave inarticulate, (and which you might rather I did that way,) sheathing them in that abstract, ambiguous, and ambivalent word “love” . . .

  sometimes I’m tough and then sometimesI’mnot . . . but I will try to explain openly anything . . .

  and I will also be quiet (when I’m asked . . . )

  so all there is left now to say before I drift into dreams which are even now weaving around me is that I would rather see you rising from the sea than any pagan triton . . . so might I have glimpses that might make me less forlorn than that vacant newport landing . . .

  until whenever,

  lovingly,

  sylvia

  TO Melvin Woody

  Monday 5 July 1954

  TLS, Smith College

  july 5

  recklessly . . . calling up old tendernesses, and beginning, like joyce in the wake, with the end of a cycle (viconian) and delineating another . . . yes, it has been eclectic and packed as a plum cake, this past month . . . and now I sit alone in an island of hot honest sun, blazing toward a tan, with the second cup of coffee cooling on the grass beside me, next to a copy of babbitt which I am reading for the first time with “god-yes!” notes getting scrawled in the margins beside satire, irony, and those shocks of recognition and a little horror . . . not that I feel the danger of the hustling, banal, automatic mass-media dictated responses of those blithering floral heighters, but because I wonder if there is not a more subtle, dangerous specimen in our midst: the graduate school bohemian babbitt who makes a fetish of criticizing, denying and skeptically disagreeing, of patronizing foreign coffee shops and avant garde bars, discussing the organic horrors of hyman bloom,* pavlov tchlitchev* (pronouncing it eliminates the nasty necessity of trying to spell it!) . . . the vitriolic vitality of delmore schwartz and kenneth patchen and the sentimental romanticism latent beneath the small lettered scattered typographical forms of ee cummings’ poetry (with a hiho, the wind and the rain) . . . all this because, with my own very clean swept and acutely architectured tastes for the plexiglass facets of joyce, lawrence, woolf, braque, klee, kandinsky, and all the other names (as yet, my names are not obscure merely for the sake of esotericism, thank god) . . . I wonder where the line is between the sweatevolved personal standards of art appreciation and the sveltely surreptitious zietgeist of the modern age itself, suavely feeding us our predilections intravenously and letting us claim them as our own . . . all of which is sylvan mental meandering after having read fromm’s escape from freedom last month and writing a
paper on fromm/and my boy neitzsche (seems every paper I’ve written this semester is on somebody-and-nietzsche) . . . my summer reading, by the way, although constricted by the active life I’ve been leading, has been infinitely stimulating, ranging from the sublime to the . . . well, satirically ridiculous. . . children’s books among the sublime: alice in wonderland again, and the little prince (saint-exupery is about the one author who can make me shed those clear, lyrical tears which are, in a larger sense, the result also of the pity-and-terror catharsis of greek tragedy) and then the great gatsby (there is miraculously noone like fitzgerald for describing the atmosphere of a cocktail party . . . no, not even eliot!) sons and lovers (found great smorgasbord for thought about mother-child relationships) the sun also rises (which, except for the bullfighting and fishing episodes, I find different from the avalanche of sexily-covered hardtalking paperbound books only because of the name hemingway on the cover . . . his short stories, esp “hills like white elephants” and “the snows” are muchly superior to his novels, I think) . . . and, for slow, scholastic digestion, I am spicing my days with reading the convoluted and explicated skeleton key to finnegan’s wake* (which one charming cape codder thought was a murder mystery . . . well, to each his own!)

  new paragraph, leaving book reviews alone now (but really, you and I are so intensely involved and stimulated in what we read, and by what we’ve read that a personal bibliography might be as effective in describing our personality development and orientation as anything else!) miraculously I got a full scholarship to harvard summer school, and nan got a half one, so we’re moving into our plush apartment in cambridge (which we’ve sublet very cheaply from some harvard law students*) tomorrow and we’ll be living with two other girls from lawrence house who are working in boston, and doing, god help us, our own cooking . . .

  I’m extremely exhilarated at the prospect of introduction to the cultural stimulation of cambridge this summer as, eventually, I hope to do graduate work there . . . and plan to really hit that accelerated elementary german course (10 hours a week of class) hard so that I can plow through goethe and schiller at smith next year with a minimum of difficulty . . . also will audit either frank o’connor’s course in the 19th cen novel, or howard mumford jones’* class in modern american lit . . . brattle theatre foreign films and the spasmodic (or is it sporadic) presence on weekends of a delightful ensign (graduated in english from amherst in 53) who I’ve spent time getting reacquainted with since he’s come back from a cruise in the med . . should complete a potentially vital and intellectually valuable summer . . . during the four weeks before smith reopens, I’ll begin to plunge into dostoevsky (just got his enormous diary and notes* from marboro) in preparation for my thesis . . .

  oh, mel (which devilishly enough means honey in latin) there is so much to talk to you about . . . I get so tempted to take you verbally by the scruff of the neck and shake you when I hear you talk about solitude, or exile, or what verges on the horrible “Ennui” (which is more than boredom of the dilettante, but rather a huge and horrible cosmic yawn of the intellectual, highly sensitized being in face of life and death and whatever you may mean by eternity) because the cataclysmic downward gyre I plummeted to symbolic death in last summer, when the center did not hold because there was none, or rather (as you wrote), too many, has given me an understanding of the black and sustained hells a mind can go through . . . and the enormous insulated loneliness when you feel that no human hand or love could reach or move you (if even one could it would be allright, because that one would symbolize contact with the human race)

  you and I are alike (and different) in many ways, but there is, I think, a psychic brotherhood, a sort of amusingly ectoplasmic umbilical cord between us, which makes it possible to pick up our thread of communication any time and any place, no matter how raveled it has become . . . you and I have the sort of intense relationships that make it possible to emerge from nowhere to see a friend for coffee and passionate hard talk and then to disappear or be silent again for an indefinite and unexplained time . . . I would like to think that you felt you could always come and see me, call from california, and come for a cup of coffee . . . whenever you felt there was noone to commune with; which is naturally an arrogant attitude for me to have for it implies that I am a damn good high priestess of the intellect (which, by the way, I am) . . .

  statistics . . . marcia’s wedding restores faith again in fact that convention can be permeated with life and originality . . . wonderful reunion with carol pierson, whom I hadn’t seen for a year . . . all most simple, honest and vital . . . nan at house for five days of turkish nightclubs with harvard instructors that I am fond of, tea with olive higgins prouty, cape excursion to nauset beach and birthday dinner for my future roommate and her amherst david . . . for me, a week at the cape with ten mile strolls along up the fantastic solitude of nauset beach, with powerful surf crashing on hardpacked sand, and a treacherous undertow sucking back into itself with a low chuckle of rocks and pebbles . . .

  now, unbelievably domestic (with, I hope, a great difference and delight) I’ve been living alone at home this weekend, washing mountains of month’s back laundry, ironing while listening to hindemith and poulenc, reading and sunning half naked while the clothes dry . . . cooking little steaks and chops and deviling things with onion and cheese in preparation for my nervous debut as ¼ of a cook this summer . . .

  this letter is the last blast before the rigors of summer school preoccupy me to the exclusion of long epistles. statistics here, degenerately facts:

  saw marty and mike for 10 minutes at cape hideout: both look tan, married and damn happy and healthy: address: pleasant bay camp, south orleans, cape cod.

  I live during the week at: Apartment 4

  bay state apartments

  1572 massachusetts avenue

  cambridge (trowbridge 6-08*

  in case you write or drop by . . .

  crane* and the man who died* will be resurrected for you by mail sometime in the next week . . . much thanks for the constructive loan . . . remember that I’ll always be around and glad for coffee, wine, talk with you as long as we’re both vagabonding about the terrestrial globe . . .

  also like letters . . .

  love,

  syl

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  Monday 19 July 1954*

  TLS, Indiana University

  MONDAY (whoops) moaning

  liebling . . .

  weekend world diminuendos into monday dawn with lingering fugal wunderbars . . . and I am a little proud that I can concentrate on separable prefixes even while being separably betwixt time and space shared so creatively with you . . .

  tired, yes, but all afternoon I will curl up like a foetal rose petal and in the darkness of daysleep, dream of your warm nearness and rise reborn from rivering waters of love and rest . . .

  now it is shortly past 10, and I have had my first hour of german, gone shopping, and returned to the apartment to gather moral courage and verbal proficiency for the next onslaught at 11 . . . then frank o’connor, lunch with nan, bed, supper, and study and again, bed (Early) (I Promise!)

  last night, in a semicomatose state, I fought and was cursed at by long lines of sunday drivers clad in the modern armor of autometal, with radio ariels held aloft for lances . . . took me over three hours to make the greyhound terminal, which I rushed into thinking only that your mother must have been wearily, frantically, and possibly desperately have been waiting for me about an hour. miraculously enough, her bus arrived at the moment I did, and she had also been wondering if I was waiting in the same adverbial state as I hoped she hadn’t been. sweetly she drove me to cambridge with all my paraphernalia, and dropped in for a few minutes to see the apartment and meet the girls . . . every one of my roommates remarked enthusiastically, after your mother left, upon her vital, attractive personality, and voted that she was, without a doubt, the most delightful sort of mother a boy could have . . . which I thought might please you, as it
did me . . .

  last night I showered gratefully, washed clothes, wrote out german exercises, called mother, and literally crawled (almost oozed) into bed as nan arrived at midnight from a late steak dinner which edwin* cooked for her at his apartment (he’ll make some strange woman a wonderful cook!) and we talked together, recapitulating the mutual weekends and events . . .

  also today I had a charming talk with one of our landladies . . . Mrs. O’Clare has a son* on a fulbright in england, who is getting his phd at harvard in english next year, so she suggested that I write him about my tentative plans to apply for one, and find out the inside story from him, which I shall do later today . . . I enjoy having numerous irons in the fire (what in heavens name are they doing in the fire?) or, better, several potent irish stews bubbling creatively on the firey range of my life.

  with you and we so both quite new, it is tempting to forget, at least for a little while, that there is an external word of facts, people, and events which also must be occasionally placated with a raw hunk of attention tossed into the avid mouth of the insatiable lion . . . and so, while I would Rather be on a sunny pacific (or, pacifistic) atoll with you, mangoes, and grass huts full of books, I feel that as I get to know you more and better and increasingly lovingly, I will be more able to work hard at studying or jobs with the constant pervasive joy that I am working for you and that you are There with me . . . but now, when with you, the external world is pleasantest, of course, but almost superfluous in comparison with the deep universes in your greenbrown eyes . . . and I want to inhabit infinite islands of insulation with you until we are quite used to the miraculous fact that we shall work and write and live and love sometime perhaps organically together . . .

  all of which is only trying again to say that I amazingly do love surely you . . . and, loving you, I love the world as I never could alone, because you symbolically make the world “so various, so beautiful, so new”* . . .