by Sylvia Plath
sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 12 August 1955
TLS with envelope,
Indiana University
friday morning, august 12
dearest mother . . .
a lovely rainy day, this, and I have just finished my usual huge great colossal breakfast of orange juice, chicken livers and bacon, danish rolls and much coffee. after my second cup of coffee, I always feel extremely creative, as if I could write a pulitzer prize novel. some week I shall drink nothing but coffee and thry this.
I am about to run downtown for a few last minute purchases, as elly friedman is coming in a couple of hours to stay till tomorrow. I am about to make up the bed in my room, feeling very hostessy, and have got out a big steak and some good sherry for dinner tonight. I love it here, and listen often to fm when I’m doing housework. I meditate and think, too, which is all to the good, kind of getting settled in equilibrium before the assault on the rich, complex old world.
got a nice fat letter from betsy (powley) wallingford from germany today, where she’ll be for a year with her husband. evidently she hadn’t got our pitcher, but that’s only natural. I now have several married-couple friends in germany and hope to visit them.
nice letter from cambridge, with a list of the exam papers I’ll have to write, about six in all. somehow I feel much better, seeing the specific choices. there was also enclosed a reading list for the required exam on tragedy with a good hundred books on it. I feel I should face this with the attitude that I can grow to be a well and widely educated person, even though now I am terribly narrow. It is exciting, too, rather than sickening, to look at the book titles and think that I shall be curling up in libraries and reading and reading. if I interpret rightly, the language can be either french or italian instead of both, which would be a blessing. I could hire a weekly tutor in french and by the second year my reading should leave me with no vestige of this old inferiority complex.
was most interested in your enclosed dance-notice. called up immediately and am scheduled for the first one next monday afternoon. they sounded very nice about it, and I know it will give me much need confidence to tell a tango from a rhumba and be able to do them both. lessons are private.
got a magnificent letter from my dear sue and have decided to fly to washington to visit with her over the weekend of the 26th if all goes well. I have my last shots with fran the 25th, and sue and our mutual friend dorri (licht) hildebrand will be there. sue’s life sounds magnificent. she is taking french at the language school, in charge of 30 visiting frenchmen in statistics for three months, and her dating life is magnificent, with all sorts of fascinating government boys, including lodge’s son.* I have made reservations to leave on friday afternoon the 26th, and hope maybe you and warren will be home by then.
will probably drive down the cape wednesday the seventeenth to pick you up. expect me then, if you don’t hear otherwise.
am feeling very rested and happy. read a magnificent article in the “writer’s yearbook”* about a slick writer who took the words out of my mouth: “You are a human being before you are a writer, and because of this you are apt to identify yourself too closely with your work. When this happens, every rejection you get throws you into depression, because you will be rejected as a person as well as a writer . . . . I learned I was certainly going to be in trouble if I went on thinking of myself as a writer first and a woman second. It had to be just the other way around. If you can think of yourself as an individual who, incidentally, writes, you’ll be able to accept your acceptances as well as your rejections as a professional must accept them. You will take them as a matter of course. The failures won’t be grievous wounds to your own sense of personal worth.” I would like to memorize this article forever etching it in my head. It is a directive to live by.
see you soon, love to all
Sivvy
TO Gordon Lameyer
24 August 1955
TLS, Indiana University
wednesday, august 25*
dear gordon . . .
it was great to get your letter,* and I do so look forward to seeing you before I go. I haven’t yet heard definitely from sue weller re details, but at present I’m planning to get a ride down to washington sunday night, august 28th (which means I’d miss the weekend) and I would be overjoyed if it were possible to drive back with you on friday, september 2nd! I can’t think of a more pleasant way to spend hours which are often tedious when one is on the road alone, unless an interesting hitchhiker happens along. do let me know if it will be possible to drive up with you then, so I won’t go mad over plane reservations. I hear vague and ominous rumors about the bad road conditions, due to the recent hurricane floods from temperamental diane,* but maybe we could go up together on plane or train, as the fancy suited you. anyhow, let me know your pleasure.
the most devastating occurence here recently has, of course, been the hurricane flooding rains. it seems almost incredible to me that two solid days of rain could botch up our whole clockwork civilization, but so it did. even the reliable boston trains weren’t running, and my cousin bobby was marooned for hours in a western massachusetts washout. as for me, I unerringly picked thursday last, the beginning of all this, to drive back from the cape, with my usual peculiar luck, I drove through flooded underpasses and places where whole sand bankings were flowing into the road, able to see nothing but the faint tail-lights of the car a few feet ahead. friday it was still pouring, and I couldn’t resist driving to cambridge to visit friends and take a look at the affluent charles. the harvard stadium stood like a greek arena on the mediterranean, for all soldiers’ field was under water and the river was lapping at the curbing in the lesser flooded places. sewers gushed up like miniature old faithfuls. somehow I was most exhilarated by all this . . . a bottle-mode of the 40-day act of God.
anyhow, I feel a kind of strong joy in battling the forces of nature. there is an ancient grandeur to it which I love, in contrast to the killing manmade devastation of war, which only sickens me.
my ticket finally came from cunard, and now it seems that if I can work my baggage problems out, I might actually get off on september 14. warren, I hope, will drive me down on the 13th, and I’ll see if I can work in a few new york appointments before I take off. I’m determined to go to tangier next summer for a few weeks and hope to write a feature article about the american school there. by that time, I hope also to be speaking parisian french.
I can’t describe the queer feelings I have now. this is the first time I have put all constants in life behind me and set off without a chart or friend to stabilize transition. I get flashes of intense joy at the potential of living and studying abroad, stabs of fear (will I have enough to give to it? or will much magnificence be lost on me? will I grow, like my favorite isabel archer,* through struggle and sorrow? or will I want to run home crying for the laps of those I love? god knows,) not to mention blue days where I seem to be living in a limbo where my roots are already torn up from my home soil, but yet not put down to grapple with the chemical and physical differences of a foreign ground. Once I am on the damn ship, it will all be all right, because I can begin something. but now, there is no time for any sort of sustained reading or writing here, and I am eager to go through the fires of the queen elizabeth, london, and cambridge, to get to my room and roots at whitstead hall.*
an interesting note: mother had decided to give me my birthday present in advance: a summer special of 11 half-hour dancing lessons at the fred astaire studios in boston.* I decided that this would be more than worth it, so I wouldn’t run and hide under the captains table when the south american bands began, but would try my luck with a kind of confidence. well, my luck began when I walked into the studio last week, shaking slightly.
you can imagine what most of the male instructors are like: soft, pale, boneless, weak, and kind of slimy. well, the manager gave me my d.a. (*dance analysis) and said he’d take me on. he happens to be the most a
mazing character: tall, lean, with a white-blond crew cut and the most fantastic teutonic bone structure. his name is mr. hanzel* (I feel like a most fortunate gretel) and he is almost impossible to even begin to figure out. first of all, he is a most original and exquisite dancer, has spent a lot of time in cuba and is, as they say, polished. but most unassuming and intensely serious about life, philosophically speaking, while he can go absolutely wild with a deadpan mambo.
perhaps the most uncharacteristic thing about him is a kind of innocence and articulate wisdom which I have met in very very few college boys. to find this in the manager of a dance studio is rather unusual to say the least. I’m pretty sure he never got through senior high (he enlisted in the navy at 16) and yet his ideas on growth, maturity, the essence of character, death, and god knows what else, are more articulate and highly developed than any I’ve found. strange, but I’m curious as hell to find out where all this wisdom comes from. you’d be awfully taken by him, I think. maybe you could help me figure him out. he’s more than worth it. in our last coke break we were attacking the fallacy of plato’s state and coming out strong for the relativity of growth and necessity for a lifelong toleration of conflict, rather than a secure resolution of it. also, I’m learning how to tango, which at this point is my favorite dance. I am also learning how to do rocks without falling over, likewise, dips and backbends. la la la. such fun. if I can get to be a good dancer, I won’t mind not being able to sing so much. I’ve just Got to Express all this life I have inside me somehow in rhythm and patterns, freedom in discipline.
oh, gordon, there is so much to talk about with you. I hope so very much our trip back on the 2nd works out. for convenience, here is sue’s address again:
1514 – 26th Street NW, Washington 7. her phone number is Adams 4-3473.
I am sure that you will be one of the men to escort Miss America. if they could only have a picture of you, they would save you to escort the winner. do send me any publicity shots with you in them.
also, don’t forget that anytime you choose to fly to london, just off hand, I’d meet you at the airport. this may sound a bit overboardish, as I have to find out about cambridge rules, but the spirit is there. and you kind of symbolize the home continent.
if you have time, send me an airmail letter if it will get here by saturday telling me about the long way home. if not, send something to sue’s. I await news of you.
with love,
isabel
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 30 August 1955*
ALS (3 picture postcards) with
envelope, Indiana University
1) The Music Room at Mount Vernon; 2) View of the Building [National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC] from the Mall; 3) The Nativity. Engraving by The Master I. I. C. A. Italian (early 16th century). Rosenwald Collection.
Tuesday 1
Dear mother –
It seems almost impossible that I am here & seeing all this with Sue – I love Washington, it is all wide leafy green avenues & pseudo-Greek buildings. Georgetown, where Sue lives* is exquisite – all pale pink, blue & yellow houses with ivy and patios. Quaint, idiosyncratic shops, all most lovely for browsing. Sue has a large pale green room with a door leading out on a dear back yard terrace – books, music, and so homey. Left at 7 a.m. Sunday in packed car with Pat Conmy* – talked a blue streak till NYC where we met Sue & lunched with her & Whitney and got here about 7:30 in time for supper (next card)
2
yesterday & today Sue took off. Monday we went up the clean-cut Washington Monument after window-shopping on the Capitols “5th Avenue”. Then walked up to the mall to spend hours at the National gallery (Mellon’s bequest). I think it must be the most beautiful building in the world – I love the Flemish school and plan to spend all Thursday there myself – wonderful Giovanni Bellinis, Rembrandts, van Eycks, and exquisite Raphael madonnas – got several postcards & imagine, they have courts & fountains inside! I can’t wait to go back – such a collection! pizza supper last night with Sue & George (a witty & pleasant friend of hers) – then saw Hepburn in “Summer Time”* – Technicolor Venice made me want to leave right away for Italy – (next)
3
Today we rented a new two-tone blue Ford Herz-you-drive-it car & took off along the scenic Potomac for Mount Vernon – exquisite grounds, 18th century formal gardens and colorful rooms; I love early American styles. Then we came back to visit the Lincoln Memorial which impressed me, emotionally & intellectually, most of all. Such a colossus, in such clean, enormous, simply carved white stone. I felt shivers of reverence, looking up into that craggy, godlike face – the view of the Wash. Monument in the reflecting pool was also spectacular. Tonight we drive to a country house for a steak dinner* – tomorrow I go to work with Sue – Thursday is mine, & maybe we’ll see “The King and I.”* Home Friday –
XXX
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 25 September 1955
TL (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Sunday afternoon, September 25
Dearest mother . . .
At last I am sitting at my typewriter, free for the first time, really, in the whirlwind of the past days where I have lived years in the space of hours. Orientation is over, and I have moved from my first residence at the lovely Bedford College set in the midst of Regent’s Park (complete with swans and boating lakes) to the YWCA* (!) directly opposite the British Museum. I am staying on the 4th floor (they call it 3rd here) in a large room which I am sharing with 3 other girls, (2 French, one another American Fulbrighter to study English at Oxford.) It is a most convenient spot, only 10s 6d per night, which here includes breakfast (roughly $1.50) and I achieve a keen aesthetic satisfaction from the incongruous act of sitting in our bathroom and staring directly into the Ionic columns and classic pediment of the British Museum where we went yesterday for a lecture, to see the famous Reading Room and Elgin marbles. I shall stay here till a week from Monday when I move on from the most magnificent city I’ve ever lived in to the more rural provinces of Cambridge.
Where to begin! I feel almost smothered when I start to write, this my first letter! I feel that I am walking in a dream. Perhaps I shall start at London and go backwards. This is really the first day on my own, and since Sunday mornings in any strange city are a bit sad, I took a walk and sat in one of the little green squares to read a bit from the London Magazine. My “shipboard romance” left this morning for his university in Manchester, and we have had the most ideal time discovering London together. He’s a genial, versatile Jewish Physics major from New York named Carl Shakin* and we’ve gone skipping about finding restaurants and plays and bookshops ever since Tuesday when we arrived. Imagine, in five days we’ve seen 4 plays and one superlative French movie, “Rififi”* which makes Alfred Hitchcock seem an infant. Theaters (there are over 40!) offer everything from operas, musicals (several American), melodramas, to symbolic poetics and kabuki dancers. The theaters are small, intimate, like the decorative inside of an easter egg, and in the intermissions tea (afternoon) or coffee (evening) is served at your seats in little trays (if ordered) for about 40¢, complete with sugar bowl and creamer and assorted cakes! We’ve seen a magnificent and peculiar existentialist play about a man’s dilemma in the midst of nothingness by Samuel Beckett (James Joyce’s secretary) called “Waiting for Godot”;* Terence Rattigan’s “Separate Tables”,* with Margaret Leighton and Eric Portman, really two related plays, a tour de force in structure; “Shadow of a Doubt”* with John Clements, a tense drama about a physicist trying to make a comeback after being accused of treason; and “The Count of Clérambard”,* a witty French piece. Acting is superlative, and I can see how the intimacy of a small theater helps a play succeed here, where it can flop in the enormous halls on Broadway. We’ve got excellent seats in the middle of the first balcony each night
for never more than $1.50! Such a life! I could go to plays forever. Also became a “member” of a small Arts theater* which puts on esoteric foreign plays for a nominal fee enabling me to buy tickets and take guests.
London is simply fantastic. So much better organized (beautiful “tubes” with artistic posters, two decker red busses, maps everywhere, all black cars and cabs, guides to theaters, all posted) than NYC; more beautiful than Washington (Parks with roses, pelicans, palaces, plane trees and fig trees and lakes and fountains) and infinitely more quaint and historic (obviously) than Boston). The “bobbies” are all young, handsome, and exquisitely bred; I think they’ve all gone to Oxford. Flower girls, fruit stands with enormous peaches, grapes, etc. on every corner. Chalk artists too, on the sidewalks at Trafalgar Square, (as in “Mary Poppins”,) who draw lurid sunsets and American movie stars and collect pennies. Discovered the book stalls up and down Charing Cross Road and browsed for hours. Wonderful art stores there, and found ancient books illustrated by our favorite Arthur Rackham. Ate at Chez Auguste,* an international restaurant in the cosmopolitan international section of Soho, and am a devotee of cafe expresso with foaming white cream, which I have at a colorful modern coffee house on Haymarket where there is a cubist water fountain, with water sliding perpetually down planes of colored glass overhead into a glass pool surrounded by white pebbles, green plants, and nudes and chickens carved out of finely grained wood. We’ve had lectures at Bedford (one on politics and economics with the Editor of “The Economist”* and several Members of Parliament . . . very fiery, re prejudice, colonies, nationalization of industries, fascinating) and one on education, public (Private to us) and state. Several impressive receptions, the first at the English-Speaking Union where the Countess of Tunis* received us and I met a tall handsome barrister, a member of the Queen’s Royal Horse Guards, who drank wine on the balcony overlooking Berkeley Square and had a most intriguing talk with me. (next letter).