The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1
Page 109
I have taped up my small colorful art reproduction postcards artistically on my wooden wardrobe and the back of my door and finally found accomodation for all my books by wheedling a 2nd duplicate case (much like my black one at home) from our housemother and then trading it for a marvelous tall 6 story affair which was gracing the room of my fellow fulbright biology major (they have so few texts). Slowly, and with great deliberation and delight, I shall shop for a few choice pottery bowls and so on for fruit, nuts, and candy and flowers The handcrafts around here are unbelievable and very expensive, but fortunately, I get enormous pleasure just staring at them.
Imagine, mother, one woman weaves bedspreads and then prints them with carved block-print potatoes! Another weaves cloth from wool she has combed herself and dyed with vegetable dye. The native pottery is enchanting: ranging from rough earthenware jugs with textured designs to delicate glazed yellow fruit bowls.
Monday, I opened a bank account at Lloyd’s, where the charming man in the foreign department advised me on everything from theater memberships to where the best furniture store was! He also told me that I could open an American dollar account, the details of which I shall find out if ever there is a prospect of getting a check from America for writing (ha!) or something. It is very important to keep separate accounts, for the English are severely restricted in their currency usage. Dollars, blissfully, are good everywhere. And of course I must squeeze through our two long vacations in winter and spring on my dollar travellers checks.(We’re allowed 3 weeks abroad each vacation, so I hope to use time to the full, and spend the extra week or two living here monastically and reading and writing like mad). All the while I pray that I will earn some hunk of money to take me through the 3-month summer.
Monday I also began using up some of my book allowance (we have to spend it on books, or turn it back; what a pleasant coercion! At last I can buy art books!) Rode to town on the back of an Italian Vesper (motorcycle) with a delightful, vital South African girl in Whitstead, shopped some more, met another Fulbright American (Winthrop Means*) from Harvard and had an excellent talk with him over tea, everything from religion to art. Yesterday, on the way to town with Lois Marshall,* the very attractive Fulbright Biology student at Whitstead, a nice, if rather playboyish, Britisher* asked us in to coffee & told us about his service in Kenya.
In the afternoon Tuesday,* Dick Wertz (from Yale, studying divinity here) came over and took me punting up the backs: it was really idyllic, with swans and ducks bobbing for the apples fallen in the water from border gardens, innumerable crew shells and quaint low bridges, and weeping willows trailing over crenellated walls and the lacy spires of St. John’s college, of Trinity Chapel, and the rest, which I still can’t completely name, passing slowly by. If it is this lovely now, what must it be in spring, with chestnut blossoms and fruit trees in bloom!
I can’t wait to start meeting the British men, instead of all these familiar Americans. Imagine, the ratio here is 10 men to each woman! Evidently, as this vivid Margaret Roberts* (the S. African with the motorcycle) told me, you could spend all your time doing nothing but seeing men socially, once you begin meeting them! I bought the Varsity Handbook,* which tells about absolutely everything here, and is quite witty. Extra-curric life makes organizations at home look like child’s play! There is a club for everything from Esperanto to Wine-tasting to Gepettos (puppetry) to tiddleywinks! Clubs for each Faculty, social clubs, talent clubs, and hundreds of musical and theatrical societies. Writing is evidently “in the doldrums”. I gather the university magazines rise and rapidly wither, and from the one I glimpsed on the stands, poetry is fast fading from galloping consumption. I’m going to try finding out the British lit magazines, and pounding at them. My first poem published here officially will make me feel honestly a literary citizen.
Today I see my Director of Studies: don’t know how I can ever choose between the miraculous smorgasbord of lecturers: much more tantalizing even than Smith! Bye for now. Love to all.
Your own happy,
Sivvy
TO John Lehmann
Thursday 6 October 1955
TLS, University of Texas at Austin
Whitstead
4 Barton Road
Cambridge
October 6, 1955
Mr. John Lehmann, Editor
THE LONDON MAGAZINE
31 Egerton Crescent
London, SW 3
England
Dear Mr. Lehmann:
I am enclosing a selection of poems,* some of which I hope you may find suitable for publication in THE LONDON MAGAZINE.
At present, I am an American Fulbright scholar, reading for an Honours B.A. Degree in English Literature at Cambridge. In the States I have had poems published previously in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Lyric, Mademoiselle, The Nation, and The New Orleans Poetry Journal.
Hoping to hear from you, I am
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 9 October 1955
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Sunday morning
October 9
Dearest mother . . .
It is one of those luminous silvery-gray days which seem to be usual here, and I have just finished a pleasant leisurely breakfast downstairs with the other 9 girls and 2 faculty residents of Whitstead. I wish you could see my room, it is becoming so much home. I am having such pleasure conquering the material objects and corners, one by one, and bringing them from the realm of the disorganized and impersonal into a warm, vital solar system of relationships which is uniquely mine.
Slowly I have been buying a few things, and as yet the window-couch needs to be covered (which will be done by the housekeeper) and I’ll want to get several bright-colored cushions to toss about there and on the bed. Also, I want to save up and get a reprint or two framed for the walls. And a green plant. If all goes well, my teaset ordered in London, should come the next week or so. As is, my new coffee table is a blessing. I can curl up on the couch by the window and read day and night, with coffee or tea, and art magazines and papers on the lovely natural wood, so convenient, a kind of focal point for the whole room. I have bought three lovely woven rush-mats (embroidered with stylized black thread by the Debenham weavers) for the table, bookcase shelf, and cabinet; a round stoneware ashtray with a dark brown-black inner glaze and the most enchanting small cup vase which has a story all its own: it has a pale yellow glazed base, a wide white outer surface, with a brown rim, trailing little irregular streams, and inside all is the most delicate robin’s egg blue. Here, I shall draw it!
Today is the anniversary of my first week in Cambridge, and as yet, all is poised on the threshhold, expectant, tantalizing, about to begin. Lectures started Friday, and I have already been to four, but I have yet to establish the regular schedule of my days. I am most excited about my program, which I arranged with my director of studies, Miss Burton, an apparently very nice woman who is to be my supervisor of studies this term (e.g. I meet with her and another student once a week and do papers on Tragedy) and practical composition and criticism tutor (also one hour a week). This is apparently the only regular work I will be asked to produce, as there are no exams until a year from this coming June! I have chosen the exams I will “read for” and am at present wondering how two years will eve
r be enough! My lectures are chosen to lead into the subjects I’ve picked for exams.
There are 6 exams in all, three required. Of these, two are on composition and criticism (general) and one enormous one on 2000 years of Tragedy! This is marvelous for me, because over the next two years I’ll be reading tragedy from the classics up to the modern french playwrights pirandello, cocteau, etc., which includes enormous hunks of literature I’ve never seen before. (This term I’m attending lectures in the history of tragic theory, tragedy from Racine* to the present, and Elizabethan and Jacobean Tragedy).
Next year, I’ll probably concentrate on ancient tragedy. Of my three free-choice papers, I’ve picked French (for language) and plan to get a tutor in the language itself this year, and to read the texts next (the “set books” are wonderful: Stendhal’s “Le Rouge et Le Noire”,* Ronsard’s* Poems; “Les Fleurs du Mal”,* and so on. I can’t wait to get over this inferiority complex I have about French). The other exam is on the English Moralists in relation to the history of Moral thought, which is a fat exam with a huge reading list, and I picked it not only because I know nothing about it, but because I’ll have a chance to read a great deal in philosophy and ethics: from Aristotle to D. H. Lawrence! The third paper I chose was the history of literary criticism, with reference to English literature. This again seemed excellent, because I’ll have to read both criticism and the literature.
For the first time, I’m taking a program which should slowly spread pathways and bridges over the whistling voids of my ignorance. My lecture schedule is about 11 hours (morning) during the week with men whose books are beginning to fill my shelves: F. R. Leavis* on criticism: a magnificent, acid, malevolently humorous little man who looks exactly like a bandy-legged leprechaun; Basil Willey* on the moralists (he’s written enormous, readable books on the 17h, 18th, and 19th century backgrounds); and, if I have time next term, David Daiches on the Modern English Novel. (Really “modern”, I think, instead of the usual concept of “modern” here: e.g. “modern poets” are considered to be Wordsworth, Arnold, and Coleridge!) I must admit, my enormous ignorances appal me (all I seem to have read is Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the 19th and 20th century* writers!), but instead of feeling frustrated, I am slowly slowly going to remedy the situation by reading and reading (most work here is independent reading) from the lists until my awareness grows green & extensive as my philodendron at home! (next letter)
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 9 October 1955
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Sunday morning
Dearest mother . . .
Hello again! To continue: I shall probably be so involved with work and orientation this first month, that I shan’t have time to write to more than you, and a few scattered friends like my dear Sue, so please share whatever parts of my letters are of common interest with neigbors, relatives and friends! I shall appoint you my press agent!
Daily life here is at last becoming usual, so before everything becomes natural, I’ll tell you a few details that struck me as unique at first. Our rooms are cool enough to keep butter and milk in (!) and I can see why there are so few iceboxes here. Imagine, in the morning when I get up to wash in the bathroom, my breath hangs white in the air in frosty clouds! Once a week in Whitstead we get a hunk of New Zealandbutter which we keep in our own dish and use until the next week. The cold here is certainly damp, and I rushed to the “chemist’s” yesterday to buy a bottle of iron pills and one of vitamins to build up my resistance (everyone seems to have colds or sinus). For lunch and dinner we eat in Hall, a tall room with ornate white woodwork which always makes me feel Im sitting inside of a frosted wedding cake. Although the architecture is atrocious and victorian, it reminds me of Smith, as both were built about the same time, in the 1870’s, and we have lovely formal gardens and walks, with a small lily pond and a dear cupid wrestling with a dolphin* which I imagine are exquisite in spring.
We wear black gowns to class and after dark, which somehow gives a pleasant feeling of belonging, although at first seeming awkward and unnecessary. In lectures, women are very much the minority, which is a pleasant change, and I imagine, much the way it is at Harvard and Radcliffe.
Although my academic work will be most demanding, I hope to join at least one or two clubs where I can give intensely in an informal way and meet British people, instead of S. Africans and the ubiquitous Americans, who seem to be everywhere, probably because I know several, and they stand out of the crowds. I’m going to investigate a Dramatic society* today, and if there is no room for amateur beginners like me, I’ll try the college newspaper.* I hope to submit to the little pamphlet magazines here “free lance”, and perhaps shall join the Labor Club, as I really want to become informed on politics and it seems to have an excellent program. I am definitely not a Conservative, and the Liberals are too vague and close to the latter. I shall also investigate the Socialists, and may, just for fun, go to a meeting or two of the Communist Party (!) here later on. Anyhow, I hope to join a group where I can meet people socially who share my interests, instead of just viewing them from afar at lectures.
Merely walking about in Cambridge itself is a privilege! I enjoy the sense of time and space dimension so much. Dick Wertz (Sassoon’s roommate at Yale and Nancy Hunter’s old friend) took me to visit his college (for theological students) yesterday, Westminster, and I was amazed at the dark, ancient, monastic atmosphere of the place. A hod of coal was outside everyroom for coal fires! Grace here is said solemnly in Latin, and everybody seems to have a classical background; Dick himself is rapidly learning Greek!
Newnham is to be honored on October 20th by a visit from the Queen herself and the Duke (their first visit to Cambridge) and so the place is already in preparation for her coming. I can’t believe I shall actually see her in the flesh. Imagine, she’s coming to open a new veterinary laboratory:* how poetic!
I received your packet yesterday, with the three rejections which, I admit, were as encouraging as rejections could be. As yet, the shoes have not come, and as I shall be wearing them as “shoes”, I bought a pair of wool-lined slippers for winter which are deliciously warm and comfortable, in bright red felt. When it gets really cold, I shall no doubt want to buy a pair of furlined boots which they wear as shoes, indoor and out (often it’s colder in lecture than outdoors, and there are ubiquitous drafts which slither along the floors and in cracks of window frames.)
When I am acclimated here, to the work, first of all, and the people, I want to try to do a few articles on the atmosphere here, and if I am ambitious, a sketch or two, to try out for the Monitor. As yet, I feel too much an initiate to hold forth. The same holds true of writing. We’re allowed only 3 weeks abroad by the Fulbright each of the small vacations (December and April, roughly) so I think I shall stay in Whitstead for a week or two in each of the 5-week Cambridge vacs, to write and catch up on my reading, as it is less than $2 a day to stay on for board and room. Lord knows what I will finally do in my vacations; I would like to ski in the Tyrolean alps and go to southern France and Italy, but it remains to be seen when and with whom. As yet I do not know if Sassoon is going to be at the Sorbonne, which I sincerely hope he will be, because it would be ideal to have such a connoisseur escort me around Paris. But that is still a vague dream.
Don’t forget to give my love to Warren and to tell me all the news about him. Also, congratulate Betty on the new baby boy. I certainly enjoy your newsy letters as they contain the real flavor of home. Keep on gaining weight, too! There’s nowhere to go from the bottom of the mountain but up!
Much love to all,
sivvy
TO J. Mallory Wober*
Thursday 13 October 1955*
ALS with envelope,*
Cambridge University
Whitstead
Thursday
Mallory . . .
I look forward to coming to tea with
you today at 4.30. However did you guess that I have no sense of direction? . . . Your charming map, as lucid as it is thoughtful, will be of great help in my travels!
Until this afternoon, then . . .
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 14 October 1955*
TL (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Friday afternoon
5:30 p.m.
Dearest mother . . .
It was so good to get your fat letter today (written last Monday). To clear up a few practical questions first: the slippers came (I didn’t have to pay anything) yesterday having been mailed Sept. 25. Yes, of course I picked up the traveller’s checks in London! One thing you never have to worry about is my neglecting a source of income! When I say the Cam is “narrow” I mean about as wide as Weston Road! River traffic is an ever-present and often amusing problem.
I’m writing a little earlier than usual (I set Sunday morning aside for communications at present) because the next week will be full and hectic, so I seized this gratifying momentary lull in my room to brew a cup of coffee, have a piece of bread butter and honey (I plan to buy fruit regularly, so don’t worry about the starch), and talk to you.
The past week has been both terrible and glorious. I have learned about socialized medecine the hard way, by coming down with my annual fall sinus cold. Medical treatment here is very peculiar. It is fine if you are completely healthy or very sick (e.g., running a temperature, which I wouldn’t do even on my deathbed), but if you’re just miserable and can’t breathe with sinus, you’re left to fend for yourself. Thinking that I’d get the kind of potent medication (e.g. cocaine sprays and penicillin) and good diet that I received at the Smith infirmary, I let myself be persuaded to go to the “Newnham Hospital”,* a sort of 3-bed sickbay, Wednesday morning, after nursing myself ineffectively in my room Tuesday. Well, what a rude awakening! They have one stony-hearted and absolutely “rule-bound” nurse over there, and the strongest and only medication is aspirin. When I asked innocently for some kleenex, the nurse kindly offered to rip up an old sheet for me (paper is evidently very scarce here . . . we never have napkins, and so I am getting used to going around feeling rather sticky and jam-ish!) By subtle questions, pleading ignorance about “the way medecine worked” in England, I found that, unless I ran a temp, no doctor would come see me. Meals were ghastly: white fish paste and white potato, stewed fruit and custard on uncooked dough, with nothing to drink to wash it down! No greens, no fresh fruit or red meat! Well, I was jolted into a most amused frame of mind, and, first thing Thursday morning, “picked up my bed and walked – out”, so to speak. I biked downtown to the Doctor whose “panel” I had signed up on (he sees you free, and all his prescriptions cost you only a nominal shilling (14¢) to fill). This was the first intelligent being I’d met since I got sick. The waiting line was about 20 in his office hour, but I got in after only half an hour’s wait. He is a very nice guy, this Doctor Bevan,* asked me rapidly and thoroughly about my sinuses, prescribed a new kind of nosedrops and told me to come back in a week for a checkup. If I can’t breathe by then, he’ll xray my head. This I tell you not to alarm, as I feel really good now, but to show you that if I needed attention, I could get it. Anyhow, my major resolution now is to lay in enough canned food that I could cook lunch and supper in Whitstead myself if and when I get sick again, to get through the worst “runny” days on my own, with nosedrops. Perhaps I’ll get Dr. Bevan to prescribe a rest-cure on the Riviera for me in winter vacation and make the Nat. Health Service pay for it! It is true that the damp here is continuous. Heavy morning and evening mists make me feel I’m moving about in a ghost-play. Rumor has it that the mists extend later and later into the morning and earlier in to the afternoon until the day is quite eclipsed and we won’t see sun again until May! But I am becoming stoically indifferent to this wet, learning to dress warmly in several layers, wearing heels and stockings (so my feet aren’t flat on the ground) and biking everywhere. I must admit I’m rather proud of my biking; although to the natives here I must seem rather unique in my style: I had to get used, first of all, to cars going on the left side of the street, to about 6000 other bicycles in this small, crooked-streeted, cobbled town, and to various objects of terror like two-decker red busses and roaring motorcycles which have a habit of just grazing one gently as they pass.