by Sylvia Plath
but listen: I want you to have some idea of your potential. it is great. like me, when you’re good (as a person, versatilely) you’re very very good, and when you’re bad, you need rehabilitation; ergo: we both have a great deal of growing (maturing) to do, and it is by our relationships with other people (after all, what is life but people) that we will grow to ripe stature. in other words, the self-examinations that are induced by our problems and disappointments in relation to others are paradoxically the best incentives to growth and change we have. And it does take guts to grow and change, especially when your horizon is lighted up by what looks like the very best of good things: e.g. dotty, gordon, or whatever.
all this may be annoying to you; perhaps the girl had written already, perhaps not. lord knows, I admire her enormously and would be happy for you if it chanced you could grow along together for a good while. but at this age, growing is a chancy thing, and, for instance, sometime an “older” girl could be an enriching experience for you to know, or then, later, a much younger one. it is rare to parallel someone else’s growth and meet needs for a sustained period when we are so flexible.
what I am rambling around and trying to say is, How Much I think you have to work with and how much I want you to have the sure, positive, creative feeling of the one or two men I’m lucky enough to know: that your security and love of life don’t depend on the presence of another, but only on yourself, your chosen work, and your developing identity. then you can safely choose to enrich your life by marrying another person, and not, as ee cummings says, until.
I sure hope you take all this talk the way it’s meant, and maybe drop me a line sometime to let me know you don’t think I’m talking through the top of my sun-bleached head. I want you to grow to a certainty of your identity (which I think is the most important thing in life) which will never ask for another court of appeal but your own conscience. that often means sacrificing the tempting urge to spill over All (blues, defeats, inscurities) to another person, hoping for advice, sympathy, or sometimes even scolding as punishment. It means knowing when to go off for a socratic talk to yourself; sometimes it’s a help to have one with someone who knows you and will always love you no matter what whenever; such as me.
anyhow, I want you to have a chance at europe next summer, so start applying to the harvard office Early in the year (one thing to learn is that there is always time for what you Really want to do, believe me) and ask for a job chauffeuring, translating (your german and french (?)) might help here, etc. I’ll work on my end from bonny england.
it grows late, now, and I must sign off. tomorrow I spend in cambridge; afternoon at harvard with patsy o’neil; sandwich supper with george gebauer on his way to maine (he thinks, by the way, according to some chemical formula, that as exact opposites, we would be very happily married!) and then a much-looked-forward-to evening over peter davison’s* reading aloud and talking. he’s a harvard man, good friend of howard mumford jones, once had fulbright to cambridge, and is delightfully in the midst of publishing, authors, and poets and editors. his father is a scotch poet, too. a pleasant person. remember, there will be a lot more pleasant women in the world, warren, intelligent, beautiful, sometimes both together, sometimes not. but it is all living, preparation for the final intelligent beautiful one you will somday marry. I’ll write again soon. meanwhile, my best love to my favorite brother.
your own,
sivvy
TO Gordon Lameyer
Wednesday 3 August 1955*
TLS, Indiana University
wednesday morning
dear gordon . . .
just got your last letter* and wish somehow there was an intercom (don’t know exactly what it is, but it sounds professional and may very well be the word I want) rigged between us. I am trusting this missive to airmail, praying you’ll be getting it by friday. in case not, I’m also writing you a note in care of your mother.
life has been all up in a heaval lately. I am now wondering if you have watch or not this weekend. I am hoping, in a way, you do. because I am scheduled to be interviewed and taken apart by an agent down the cape, and the appointment was made for me by an editor* I know through mr. kazin. this is to arrange a homeport for any and all stories I do abroad, and it is my once-only chance. I had said I would take any time this agent could see me. so I have to take it. I’ll be gone friday to sunday.
the worst that could happen would be for you to come up this weekend thinking I’d be here. for lesser things than this, women have been decapitated. the fact remains that I Must See You Before I Sail. I simply can’t leave this country without seeing you. I am damn ritualistic, I know, but you are woven so into the tissue of my life that I may reason about it in the top of my head, but can’t deny the fabric of my feeling. so I beg you again, to understand.
best of all, I would hope you had watch this weekend and would come up any other, to beach, play tennis, and (very much so) talk. I need a talk with you. quite a good deal. please, please write or leave a note at the house or something, so I’ll know if I have a chance to see you before I go. do understand.
love,
sylvia
TO Gordon Lameyer
Thursday 4 August 1955
TLS, Indiana University
august 4, thursday
dear gordon . . .
a note only, to catch you in transit in case the air mail was not kind enough to speed my letter as of yesterday to you. I leave for martha’s vineyard tomorrow to see agent about stories. arranged for me by young editor at harcourt brace whom mr. kazin philanthropically steered my way.
I still hope, selfishly, that you have watch this weekend and may come up later, for I expect to eternally be home until sailing time. and, as I said in my other letter and repeat here, I would like enormously to see you once before I go. please?
I am on my sweltering way to the doctor’s to have both arms and a leg (perhaps) punctured for the second time. tetanus, typhoid and possible vac. hope it doesn’t disable my cocktail arm, as I’m having pre-dinner drinks with marcia and mike plumer (those dears) in cambridge at their new apartment* before seeing “othello” at the brattle* which I’m sure won’t come up to amherst performance.
enclosed:* article my by favorite dame, sent kindly by your mother, who has been most dear and helpful to me these last weeks.
leave a note at the house if you’re home, huh? glance into the august 6 nation for fun. such news.
much love,
sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 9 August 1955
TLS, Indiana University
tuesday noon, august 9
dearest mother . . .
so nice to get your letter and card this morning: all mail otherwise has been unusually dull, just bills, circulars, ads, and nothing from warren. glad you like “two lovers and a beachcomber”; it’s my favorite of the later ones, too, and I’ll never quite forgive mademoiselle for what they did to it. I think I could have found a more dignified resting place for it. but then, someday I hope to see it shrined in book form, and the mlle credit will look good.
nothing but nice things to tell you. the weekend was fantastic. very hot, sunny, blowy and ominously hurricanish,* but wonderful for sailing and swimming. on the way down (we tried to catch the 5 pm ferry as peter got out of work early) we were stopped for speeding and just missed it. however, I was just as glad, for as we went into a woods hole bar for a cold beer, peter saw an elderly couple he seemed to know. the man was very irish and evidently a poet, while his salty, amusing, seasoned wife was a reviewer. turned out to be padriac and mary colum, old friends of peter’s father. they treated us to a drink, and padriac told me his poem on the book of kells* was in the atlantic just the month before mine. delightful people, who spoke so familiarly of names that have been legends to me.
peter and I had dinner at a lovely wharf restaurant: the landfall*, where there was candlelight and a piano and organ player through a delicious dinner. all d
uring the ride to the island on the ferry we stood at the helm, and by the time we got to vineyard haven, it was pitch dark. I felt very strange meeting all the people of barn house* in the dark, because I couldn’t see their faces as there were no lights, and we all sat around in the dark and talked before going to bed early.
I was stationed in the “luxury” main house, which meant that I had a large attic room on the second floor with a bowl and running water, all very bare and barny, with a view of the sea. peter stayed in one of the “coops”, little cabins scattered out in the fields for families.
in the morning I learned more about this amazing place and met more of the amazing people. it was set up after the first world war by a group of families who were all part-owners, and they invite friends and acquaintances to stay there. the big barn on a hill is the center of activities and meals are served there at regular times (8, 1, and 6:30). everybody serves themselves from the main dishes, and does the dishes together afterwards in a very specific ritual way.
peter and I were the only young people there, except for a fifteen year old boy who was a lot of fun. among the elderly couples was the president of rutgers university and his wife* (an englishwoman with a beautiful singing voice), an english professor from williams* and his writer-wife* (she did the article on the boy with the tumor in the last lh journal), a couple of lawyers and a german count and countess* from bonn. these were the people I ate and wiped dishes with! I was amazed at the casual informality: everybody came to meals in shorts and pitched in together.
saturday morning, peter and I went sailing with the 15 year-old boy in menemsha harbor. we swam off the boat and had a lovely time. in the afternoon, peter and I went up to vincent cliffs and found ourselves swimming along with a nudist colony. we met several interesting people there, among them, a psychoanalyst and a commercial artist. then we climbed the sand cliffs and ran down in great seven-league leaps until we were exhausted, and then modeled clay faces on the clay cliffs, walking a couple of miles down the beach back home.
saturday night, the count and countess had a party at the barn during which we had gallons of champagne with peaches floating in it. a lovely lobster dinner followed, and then peter joined a group playing old elizabethan airs on a trio of recorders. he is very much like dick norton in his social ease, sort of playing on the keyboard of people like an organ, and hysterically funny in the stories he tells.
anyhow, sunday was a lovely long breakfast, and we went swimming again, running for long laps and battling the enormous surf till dinner. after which we left, and stood again on the helm of the ferry, dashed with spray, in a very rough crossing back to mainland. rain was welcome, and peter cooked me a delicious dinner on coming back. I’ll never dare to cook for him now, he’s such a conoisseur and knows all about touches of herbs and spices, etc. at least I can be properly appreciative, because he cooks magnificently with wine and sherry and cream, and has all sorts of interesting notes like pumpkin seeds and bacon rinds with garlic.
the last two days have been a dream. low humidity and bright sunny weather in which I can accomplish twice as much in an hour as in a whole sultry day. monday I shopped for food and finished the whole “platinum summer” story. today I will polish and rewrite a few parts, then type it up and send it off. I was up at 8:30 this morning, had a huge breakfast, did machine and hand laundry, mopped, dusted, washed hair and gave my self a manicure and pedicure out in the drying comfortable sun, where I am sitting now preparatory to working again on my story.
received a lovely encouraging letter from mary ellen chase* about england, and feel really good now. I can just sense a beginning desire to get back deep into books and thinking, perhaps the preview of autumnal weather has brought it on, but I shall count this summer well spent if I am fresh and eager to begin studying in the fall. by writing I am building up a background hunger to study, which is good.
have a lot of business to attend to this week. will call for my lovely suit* this afternoon and hope to hit boston again with you when you come back. if only I’d earn a big hunk of money, I’d feel better. but I feel very creative just now, and am determined to write much and often, continuing while I am in england. once I start selling to the slicks, I’m made.
so interesting, your plans to tentatively join aunt mildred abroad next summer. hope you do, it’s such fun to have a confidant there when you want one. seems I’ll be visited, too, by my friends. mary ellen chase will be over in the spring, and I hope to see richard in paris (he sent me a delectable box of marrons glace this week: glazed chestnuts, which I have been begging for ever since I read about them somewhere. delectable, and so thoughtful of him). peter, if all works out well, plans to take a six weeks vacation in europe also next spring, and if we’re still as congenial as now, I’ll probably see a bit of him. all in all, my fears are gone and I am feeling quite elated about going.
I’ll probably be driving down next monday or tuesday, depending on weather and my story progress, planning to stay a couple of days and get back to wellesley before the weekend. I’ll let you know before I come.
meanwhile, much love to all,
sivvy
TO Gordon Lameyer
Thursday 11 August 1955
TLS, Indiana University
11 august 55
dear gordon . . .
it was good to get your letters,* the one waiting scrupulously in my mailbox when I returned from the vineyard and the one yesterday mailed from maryland. thank you, as always, for being so damn understanding. my life has been so undisciplined and hedonistic this past summer that I will be glad to get back to a kind of strictness and routine this fall. this summer I have really done nothing I didn’t feel like doing: stayed up late to read, read dozens of periodicals, hit or miss, beached it, swum, sunned, shopped extravagantly (I just better get some money soon from something or they won’t let me go over because of debts), and eaten meals whenever I happened to feel hunger.
naturally, I feel chagrined in a way that I haven’t studied an hour each of french and german, as I was going to, and read all the many books in my library I haven’t read, and written ten stories and several pulitzer prize novels. but after two solid years of schooling without halt, I feel this summer is profitable by the very fact I’ll be eager to get back to books in october and really plunge in. of course, they say the life there is much more “social” than here, with all kinds of clubs and teas and stringent intellectual discussions. I’m going to have to learn to get over my habits of impressionistic, indescriminate gush and straighten up. what appals me most is my lack of conversational versatility. I know absolutely nothing about politics and history and very little about art, nothing about music and a smattering (no novels) about english. I begin to wonder why intelligent people bother with me at all, I am such a tyro. but the time has come to branch out and get rid of the feeling I’m “an eagle too aged to try its wings.”
on the positive side of the ledger, only a few things: wrote another gay, silly love story for the slicks called “platinum summer” and sent it off to collier’s yesterday with the usual combo of foolish optimism and cynical defeatism. I have been mentally spending large sums of money which will accrue from my first slick story sale, but it might be more practical to sell one before I started these dreams of glory. still haven’t heard from the reader’s digest about the article, but expect the rejection any day now. worseyet, they may have lost my return envelope and junked it all.
have visited over at marty and mike’s apartment and will have my close friend from smith, elly friendman, the theatrical mexican-looking one, stay with me this weekend. hope we have the hurricane. just elly, me and connie: very cosy.
had a wonderful and rather peculiar weekend on the vineyard. went down with this friend of mr. kazin’s who worked with him when he had his books come out at harcourt. you’d like him, I think. he’s now assistant to the director of the harvard press, peter davison by name, and my god, the writers he knows are phenomenal. (his father is
the scotch poet, edward davison).
while waiting for the ferry we wandered into a bar where mr. davison seemed to know an elderly and very witty couple who treated us to a round of drinks. turned out to be the poet padriac colum and his critic wife, mary. on the vineyard we stayed in a co-operative settlement called barn-house, where everybody helped with the work. except for a precocious and very funny fifteen year old boy, I was the infant there.
I found myself wiping dishes with the president of rutgers and an english prof at williams whose wife is a writer. a german baron and baroness gave a champagne party (peaches floating in it this time) in the barn, and it was all very casual and folksy, with the english prof making up a trio which played elizabethan folk songs on the recorder.
as far as the agent part goes, I think I’ll have one quite definitely. I’m waiting till I see the reception to this last story and then probably will have an appointment at the new york office just before I sail, which, by the way, is wednesday afternoon, september 14.
now, if all goes well and I should make some money, (which I doubt), I hope to fly to washington to stay with my dear sue a few days. this would probably be between august 26 and september 4, but I am very tentative and indefinite yet. will let you know before, because it would be infinitely more convenient for you to see me there, n’est-ce pas?
anyhow, I’ll see you before I leave, either down there or up here. you must speed this female ulysses on her way with a kind of creative blessing. I’ll need it. I certainly will.
for now, love and fond thoughts,