by Sylvia Plath
Had a wonderful final talk with Mr. Gibian, my adviser, today, as I handed my paper in. He is so interested in my writing and my fellowship applications, that I plan to visit with him second semester anyway, even if I don’t have a course with him!
Mr. Fisher has been having unofficial classes with me already for my Poetics course! We get along admirably, now that we are getting acquainted, and he is the most brilliant, enchanting man I’ve ever known, reminding me very much, in his way, of Gordon as he may be 30 years from now, who knows. Anyhow Mr. Fisher is exactly what I need for poetry criticism, and my first two “Batches” of about 10 poems he went over so thoroughly, I find myself just flying home to rewrite them, which is a rare drive for any writer, I think! I have polished the two long ones I wrote over vacation, and he is very pleased.
While speaking of people being pleased, did I tell you about my article for the Yale Intercollegiate Literary Magazine? I finished it at the beginning of this week, with a lot of legwork and interviews with the higher ups in college hall. The result was a good solid essay (often amusing) called “Social Life without Sororities: A Profile of Smith.” The News Office let me pick three or four wonderful photos to illustrate it, and the best thing is that both the Warden of the College and the Head of Public Relations were so delighted that they asked for a copy to use on their own later! So I am happy it worked out so well.
I am now in the finals for the Vogue Prix de Paris, and must write a “thesis” of over 10 pages (at least) on “Americana”: “on my discoveries in the arts this year . . . what I’ve found most exciting in the American theatre, books, music, etc?”* I’d really appreciate any advice you have on bird’s eye reading I could do, I feel that you would be much more aware of current trends than I, what with your Monitor and SRL! I hope to see more theater in NYC after next weekend, and also take in the latest additions to the NYC art galleries in preparation for this essay, which I am hoping to get done mostly before second semester begins . . . plan to do a research job on it in NYC.
Now I’ve run out of time & space. Hope I’ll be seeing you next Friday. Will let you know definitely as soon as I find out about interviews!
Love to all,
Sivvy!
p.s. am planning to re-write a really good, (if awfully naked & depressing) story* for Mlle contest between semesters! It has possibilities, & is in the nature of Illona Karmel’s “Fru Holm”, only more subjective – more fun!
xx
s.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 26 January 1955*
TLS on Smith Review Make-Up
Sheet letterhead, Indiana University
Wednesday morning
Dear mother . . .
Well, my vacation was just what I needed. I am back at my desk as of last night and will feel happy if I don’t move from Northampton till spring vacation, which after all was the purpose of my New York jaunt. I rested and played and whirled until I really wanted to come back to Smith, and now I am full of resiliant desire to work again, which last Saturday I thought was a physical and psychical impossibility . . .
The flight to New York was ecstasy. I kept my nose pressed to the window watching the constellations of lights below as if I could read the riddle of the universe in the braille patterns of radiance. It was a luxury to have coffee on the plane, and I began to forget those four men that went on arguing in my head long after I’d left them. At the airport, I had kept hearing the man announce: “Air France nonstop flight to Paris now ready for departure . . . ” and wondered if I could just switch flights at the last minute . . . I was very tired Saturday night, but by Sunday I felt revivified . . .
Sunday afternoon, I saw “Gate of Hell”,* that beautiful Japanese movie that the critics are all raving about. It was like all Oriental art: perfect economy and balance of line and color, a paradoxical illusion of simplicity in richness, richness in simplicity. Strange, but the foreign languages bothers one not a bit, which is a tribute to the universality of the performance and the excellence of the acting . . . one color poem after another . . . the Japanese have such intriguing rituals and disciplines . . . the whole set was a singing poise and opposition of bamboo columns with embroidered gauze hangings floating to enclose space . . .
That evening it was the last performance of a Russian-Jewish legendary drama: “The Dybbuk”* at a 2nd floor theater in Greenwich Village, where the audience sat on either side of the stage, and the actors used the aisles. This tale of the possession of a young girl’s body by the spirit of her lover (“The Dybbuk”) who died before his time and had no other home in eternity was uneven, but when good, very good.
Monday, I spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, which I am getting to know better and better. They were selling hot chestnuts outside, and somehow the people all look so intriguing. I looked up a few paintings of modern American artists to describe for my long feature article for Vogue which is going to take a heck of a lot of research. I stayed to see the late performance of the movie at the Museum that afternoon, and have never been so moved. I could hardly bear to sit out the whole thing. It was a silent French version of the “Temptation of Saint Joan”,* with written titles and piano music going all the time, not with the moods (for that would have been so dynamic as to be insupportable) but quite casually on its own, absorbing some of the powerful emotions aroused by the black-and-white counterpoint of faces . . . it was almost all faces . . . of Joan and her tormenters. The background was all white walls with windows and doors, and the psychic torture was cruel, so cruel that a picture image of Joan on a wooden stool with a paper crown and stick scepter in her hand contained all the impact of Christ and all martyrs. The burning at the stake was incredibly artistic and powerful, but the very lack of sensationalism, just the realism of fire licking at sticks, of soldiers bringing wood, of peasant faces watching, conveyed by the enormity of understatement the whole torture of the saint.
After it was all over, I couldn’t look at anyone. I was crying because it was like a purge, the buildup of unbelievable tension, then the release, as of the soul of Joan at the stake. I walked for an hour around Central Park in the dark, just thinking, and my date kindly took me for a ride in one of those horse cabs around the park, which was the slow paced black-and-white balance I needed to the picture. I fed the horse a lump of sugar I’d saved from lunch and felt much better. Experiences like that are rare. Human beings cannot bear very much reality, as Eliot says.
Most of the rest of my time was spent being enchanted in various French restaurants, very expensive and intimate, with small white linen tablecloths and tables elbow-to-elbow with editors and wives of millionaires (I overhead some intriguing conversations, which I mentally noted). I indulged at “Le Gourmet,”* and “Cafe Saint Denis”* and “Le Veau D’or”* among others, with vichysoisse, soupe a l’oignon, steak, veal in wine, lamb chops, aperatifs, white wine, cognac, french pastry, eclairs, tartelettes, and Dieu knows what else . . . oysters and clams and french breads and salads. It was all very wonderful, and I learned a great deal about myself in the process . . . this period of time lasts me about half a year, gives me incentive to work with spartan economy, and makes me actually grateful for plain cold water, brown bread, and hotdogs and coffee. There is nothing like living an extravagant illusion to make one appreciate the simple round of daily life . . . which I am appreciating with delight now, completely cured of my longing to be exotic. I have been. C’est fini. Now I look forward to catching up on letters, stories and poems, to spartan intellectualism.
Bye for now, your returned prodigal . . . .
sivvy
TO Enid Mark
Wednesday 26 January 1955
TLS with envelope, Smith College
Wednesday afternoon
Dear Enid . . .
It was a delight to hear from you. I am, to answer your question, the sort who can somehow always pick up a friendship that was very dear, no matter how long the
time, nor how wide the space in between. I am sure that if I went to Africa for ten years, I would come back naively expecting to pick up right where I left off, and hoping that everyone else would feel that way too. At any rate, it seems most natural to be talking on paper to you again, and the new name is strange and wonderful, too.
Life here at Smith has been incredibly rich this year. I am becoming a fatalist and think that somehow this postponed senior year was necessary for me to grow more slowly in time, like cider needing years in the dark to become mellow. At any rate, all avenues of life are full and miraculous. I found myself writing a thesis on “The Magic Mirror: A Study of the Double in Two of Dostoevsky’s Novels” with young, brilliant, delightful Mr. George Gibian, and being fascinated by my topic till the end, and reading all about mirror images, shadow legends, everything from ETA Hoffmann’s fairy tales to Freud!
To top it off, by accident (being assigned an interview) I took Mr. Kazin’s writing course also first semester, with the delight of his asking me in, long interviews every two weeks, and a final joy of his sharing a pizza and coffee with me at the Little Italy one rainy iceglazed December afternoon. I turned out a lot for him, mostly rough sketches, which have all been rejected by The New Yorker. However, one which I rewrote with a “plot” (very unusual for me) and a frothy sense of humor (more unusual) was looked at with interest by the Ladies Home Journal. They asked me to rewrite it and send it back, and now I am undergoing that excruciating wait, dying for the mail in terror and desire every day, telling myself sternly that they are taking all this time to write a very nice detailed letter of rejection! Cross your fingers!
I’d really love to see some more of your stories, Enid. Just for the joy of reading them; I’m so deep in rejections that I am hardly equipped to criticize! I too, hope to write for “Seventeen” someday. But they are very demanding . . .
Next semester is the usual review unit, continued Shakespeare with Miss Dunn, intermediate German, Mr. Kazin’s famed American Lit. course which everyone in the college seems to be taking, and a lovely private special studies unit with Mr. Fisher (whom I’m just getting to know) which He suggested: The Theory and Practice of Poetics. I have to turn in a “batch” of poems every week and a long critical essay that looks from here like another thesis. At any rate, the prospect is enchanting, and I do think the poems are coming better . . .
Gordon, the Amherst graduate, now an ensign in the Navy, is in Cuba at present, but I had a very good Christmas vacation in Wellesley with him . . . our times coincided exactly. I have, however, put off all thought of marrying him to a very indefinite future, for a multitude of reasons, primary among them, the precarious uncertainty of our future growth and activity. It is fine if a man is older, more mature, has crystallized out a bit, but even though Gordon is 25, he is amazingly young yet (or I am amazingly old) and I am Machiavellian enough to want to grow to the fullest . . .
New York has been most hospitable lately, with that charming young French boy, Richard Sassoon. This past week, in celebration of completed thesis and exams was a round of plays (“The Dybbuk”) movies (“Gate of Hell” and “Temptation of Saint Joan” at the Museum of Modern Art) and French restaurants like the Cafe St. Denis and Le Gourmet. Now, at last, I think I can bear cold water and brown bread, hotdogs and coffee for two months with joy, so glutted am I on escargots and huitres!
Do write, send stories, and I hope I may perhaps say hello to you and your wonderful husband in person sometime springvacation, if all goes well.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Gordon Lameyer
Wednesday 26 January 1955
TLS in greeting card,*
Indiana University
Since All the World’s a Stage / Why Postpone Things / No Need for Us to Dally / In the Wings / Let’s to Our Places / Let’s to Our Lines / On With the Play / Let’s Be Valentines / What Bliss that Cupid Thus Should Pair Us / In This Comedy of Eros
amour, cheri! / sylvia / (missive within)
Wednesday morning
January 26, 1955
Dear Gordon . . .
Well, and then again, well. I am wishing you a happy Valentine’s Day, and no doubt shall continue to do so for quite some time. Merci, first of all, for your most intriguing letter* about the suave antics of you and your compatriots (or is it expatriates?) underneath the sheltering palms (or is it in the sheltering arms?) of Cuba.
Now for news, inanities, and other such. (This letter, by the way, is being written in severe and sincere sobriety, contrary to what the tilt of the paragraphs may indicate.) To put it bluntly, I have never done so much in one small month in my small life. Since I saw you, I have taken two gruelling exams (Shakespeare was fun, so I don’t care what I got; German wasn’t, and I got a mere chilly 87) finished proofing my thesis, which cost me a cool $20 to have typed, but in my mid-exam state, was well worth it, sent off that research article “Social Life Without Sororities: A Profile of Smith” to the Yale Gargoyle (who apparently can neither spell nor gurgle), written poems for Mr. Fisher, and been interviewed at Harvard for the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship at what was probably the most difficult session I’ve ever had in my life . . .
I finished my two exams last Thursday, and immediately hopped a train for Wellesley in a state of writers’ cramp, having written solidly for five hours and being the possessor of a blackened middle finger on my right hand which is no doubt an omen of something, I don’t feel equipped to say what. Mother and Warren picked me up where I had fallen on the platform, frothing at the mouth and reciting future perfect passives in Elizabethan dialect. I spent one blissful day wandering around the house in my pajamas, eating or not eating, as I felt or didn’t feel like it. I bought $4 worth of piano music (“These Foolish Things” “September Song” “I’m in the Mood for Love” and “The Man I Love” among them) and sat at the piano for hours soupily crooning to myself in bad french, and getting a hell of a kick out of it . . .
Also managed to have an evening bull session with Dr. Beuscher which was fun, at her house, which is illegal, as she is not yet an American citizen, and discussed religion, philosophy, honesty, selfishness, and a lot of other potent, and perhaps more intimate, topics. Mother and I, by the way, are getting along much better. I have found an almost sure-fire way of sustaining a more than benevolent attitude toward her. A rather macabre way, to be sure, so I don’t think I dare tell you it. But it has worked admirably so far.
(Lift thine eyes to the hills . .)
Saturday I had that hideous interview. For one half hour I sat at a table surrounded by four skeptical men, all seasoned professors, and was the raw target for fantastically loaded and merciless questions, none of which I had dreamed of being asked. Mentally, I have been arguing with them ever since! All about my philosophy of teaching: terribly specific. Every remark I made, they took up, twisted to their purposes, and shot back at me. Like darts. Such fun. I was asked about obscure modern authors I’d never heard of, how could I combine writing and teaching (wouldn’t the level of freshman comp destroy my finesse?), why the hell did I put down Oxford, Cambridge and Radcliffe in that order, did I know it was impossible to get a Fulbright to Oxford or Cambridge? (It no doubt is, alas), had my Fulbright gone to Washington (It Had), would I give up teaching for marriage without a fuss, what about babies, would I marry a teacher (I felt like asking if it was a personal proposal), what would I do with the average student, how to interest, were English departments doing their jobs, was W. H. Auden odd to want to teach freshman comp instead of lecture at Swarthmore . . . and on and on . . . I would give my little finger to know what they said about me afterwards. I think they thought I just wanted to get married to a millionaire, but at least I convinced them about my ideas of teaching as a way of life . . .
Leaped from the Saints of Cambridge to a plane at Logan Airport and flew throu
gh the spangled dark to NYC, a much needed release. At the port, the announcer kept saying: “Air France nonstop flight to Paris now ready for departure,” and I was terribly tempted to switch reservations and trade the Empire State for the Eiffel Tower!
The three days I spent in NYC will amply suffice me till spring vacation. I was overjoyed to get back to Hamp last night after my orgy. Sunday I saw “Gate of Hell” that Japanese movie all the critics are raving about, and it was an exquisite work . . . one color poem after the other, with the incomparable Oriental illusion of richness in simplicity, simplicity in richness . . . not a superfluous gesture in the whole thing. I love the ritual and order of the passion in Oriental life: the sets were a poise and balance of bamboo poles, with floating gauze curtains to enclose space. That evening it was the last performance of a Russian-Jewish play “The Dybbuk” in a little 2nd floor Greenwich Village theater, where the audience sat on either side of the stage and the actors used the aisles. This supernatural symbolic drama of a “Dybbuk” (the soul of one dead before his time, with no home in eternity) entering and possessing the body, and then the mind and soul, of his beloved, was uneven, but when good, very good.
Monday, I spent the afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art, reacquainting myself with my favorite paintings and sculptures. I stayed for the movie, a magnificent French silent rendition of the “Temptation of Saint Joan” done in black-and-white, primarily with facial expressions and powerful understatement. I could hardly sit through it, it shocked and sickened me so, shuddered to the base of the soul . . . at first I wondered why the piano music was not at all dramatic, but very casual and unrelated to the emotions of the movie, but soon I understood that it absorbed some of the tremendous tensions aroused, and made the emotion more supportable. The sense of martyrdom grew agonizingly, until the least twitch of a monks’ eyelid conveyed the impact of a whole century of cruel blindness. The final scene at the pyre was perfect and terrible. I’ll never forget a close-up shot of a baby sucking its mother’s nipple, turning casually to the final agony of the saint, and then calmly resuming sucking. I was so purged and cleansed by this catharsis, psychic and spiritual, that I had to walk around Central Park in the dark for an hour, was treated to a ride in a horse cab, fed a lump of sugar to horse, and felt better. Rest of stay was a round of French restaurants, “Le Gourmet”, “Cafe Saint Denis,” “Le Veau D’Or” and wine and cognac and aperatifs, oysters, steak, lamb chops, eclairs and pastries, and all those other delights our sinful flesh is heir to. For two months I shall be completely satisfied with cold water and brown bread, hotdogs and coffee. Of such is the kingdom of heaven.