The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  as for courses! imagine: twice a week I hear the pithy deadpan magnificence of f. r. leavis, a tan, devastating leprechaun of a man; basil willey on the moralists; david daiches next term on the modern novel. I’m being tutored in french and have chosen papers (exams) to read for in french, tragedy (2000 years of same), english moralists (covering all moral philosophy) and the history and theory of lit. crit. (with f. r. leavis) which will, all in all, demand the reading of just about every book in the world! will write more later. am dashing to tea in granchester, rupert brooke’s green spot with the honey and this clock perpetually set at 10 to three. Do write.

  Much love to you,

  sylvia

  TO J. Mallory Wober

  Wednesday 19 October 1955*

  TLS with envelope*

  on Newnham College letterhead,

  Cambridge University

  wednesday morning

  dear mallory,

  since my director of studies has made a previous appointment with me at midday why don’t you pick me up at my room about one p.m. I think if you appeared in person sometimes to arrange crucial items such as hour and place it might be several hundred percent simpler. unless I take to using carrier pigeons.

  s. p.

  TO J. Mallory Wober

  Friday 21 October 1955*

  ALS in greeting card with

  envelope,* Cambridge University

  Friday evening

  Dear Mallory . . .

  It was most tempting to come home this afternoon following hours of wind, rain, shopping and precarious cycling – and to find your thoughtful invitation. I felt a certain impulse to tell you that my inability to materialize at the George and Dragon* tonight is not because of work (which, alas, I don’t seem to have begun yet) but rather due to play – a one-act play, in particular.

  Tonight is the dress-rehearsal for the three A.D.C. “nursery” productions tomorrow night, and I am appearing (due to a stroke of intuition on the part of our enchanting producer) as a mad poetess in an 18th century farce. This week, as you may imagine, I have been living at the A.D.C. – Lovely place! At any rate, after Saturday, I should be able to return to a more balanced rôle. At least, by comparison with this week’s rugged rehearsal schedule, I’ll have the illusion of plenty of free time. (I think: life here seems like a carousel which accelerates considerably each day!)

  As we say, in the barbaric tribe I come from,: I’d like very much to “take a rain-check” on your invitation some time. Unfortunately, I can only carry a tune when at least 100 others are also bearing the burden – but I enjoy listening. It was, by the way, an exquisite map! Wish I could have used it!

  Sylvia

  TO J. Mallory Wober

  Saturday 22 October 1955*

  ALS with envelope,*

  Cambridge University

  Whitstead

  Saturday

  Hello, you!

  Sunday, indeed, seems an excellent day for enterprise, such as an Indian supper. I may be required to pay my respects to the A.D.C. later in the evening, but let’s plan on the Taj* for sure and let the rest wait – I am tempted by the College concert,* too & will do my best to get free of these dramatic tyrants! Expect me at your digs a bit after 7 Sunday – until then –

  Sylvia

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Monday 24 October 1955

  TLS (aerogramme),

  Indiana University

  monday night

  october 24

  dearest mother . . .

  “why, emmaline! where have you been?”

  “to see the queen!” yes, I stood about a yard from the gracious queen saturday morning, speechless with excitement. it rained and rained all morning, and the royal party was scheduled to visit newnham (for sherry and a few presentations) on their way to open a veterinary lab. (!) all of us gathered in the diningroom in our black gowns, on either side of the aisle up which the queen and duke were going to walk. I stood right at the foot of the little platform on which the ceremonies were to take place and felt an eagerness which surprised me.

  after many false alarms, there was a hush, then we all cheered as the royal couple walked into our humble dining hall with its white wedding-cake ceiling. the queen looked quietly radiant in a kelly-green princess-style coat and hat, and the duke was most talkative and humorous, with a smile that passed all believing: he was enchanting! they stopped at random and chatted with girls down the line, the duke making many amusing observations. then four of the top students of newnham were “presented” to the queen and duke. it was all quite lovely, and I ran out in the rain afterwards to see them go off in the royal car (again feeling unaccountably elated to be within touching distance of the handsome pair.) camera bulbs flashed, more cheers, and they were off for lunch at trinity college.

  a rather amusing sequel occurred in the afternoon: I was biking in the rain to the ADC theater for a last rehearsal before the performance that night, and saw crowds of people lining the long road down which I had to hurry to reach my destination. I asked a policeman when the royal car was coming, and he laughed and said: “in a couple of minutes; hurry up.” so the policemen (in their best white slickers) beckoned me on and I flew down the street in my red mackintosh on my bicycle, feeling that I should be scattering rose petals or something, while a ripple of laughter ran through the waiting crowds. if I’d had the courage, I would have bowed right and left as I went by, but didn’t want to create a mob scene! I must say the royal couple is most genial and attractive, with a kind of radiance which appeals to me. I do, however, envy them not at all the daily round of functions which must be their lot! apparently they enjoy it no end, though. and the people certainly all turned out to cheer their queen in the pouring rain!

  the play, by the way, went off fine, and was a lot of fun. I hope some day, though, that I can get a really challenging part with depth of character, rather than mere stylized cariacature. we shall see. this last week I have been quite lucky about being taken out to meals in town by various young men, and the prospect of going back to the pasty, tasteless white “hall food” this week is grim. the south african (sweet, but rather weak chap)* took me out to lunch and dinner the day of the play, and we had sherry and wine, chicken and mushrooms, which was lovely. I went to a large sherry party (these take the place of our “cocktail parties”, and I must say, appeal to me a good deal more) before the play (ours was the last of the 3 one-act things).

  sunday I rested in the morning after the strenuous week and was rather surprised to have mike lotz drop in on me. he had come over from oxford, where he is on a henry fellowship. strange, how time changes one’s perspective on people. I was very disappointed in him, and found myself extremely bored by his heavy, prosaic complacency (he is very well-off financially now, and boasts that he can live off the interest of his savings). we went to lunch, and I said goodbye with something of relief. I felt with renewed conviction that no matter what “labels” a person has, what outward achievements (like phi bete keyes, or “summas”, which mike also bragged about, or big cars, which he also emphasized), there is an inner vitality and keen integrity of being which is necessary to give them true worth, for me, anyway. I was really disgusted by his american materialism which has degenerated into a disagreeable self-satisfaction and conceit.

  anyway, to change to a much more agreeable topic: I had the loveliest time last night with the boy I met at the labor club dance and went to tea with last week: mallory wober. he gets more and more dimension each time I see him. first of all, he is extremely handsome in a rugged way, quite different from the pale, delicately-made englishman. he is tall, strong, with coal-black hair and vivid red cheeks and boldly-cut features. he is a natural sciences major, and imagine my delight when yesterday afternoon, a gray rainy time, he settled me in a large, comfortable chair with a glass of sherry and played the piano for me for over an hour: beethoven, scarlatti, haydn, with comments now and then! he plays excellently and has a sense of humor in his interpre
tations about it which helps me understand the music. then we dropped in at the ADC party, then to the most magnificent sunday night concert in the king’s college dining hall, where the architecture looked like a lace of shadows and light, and we heard hindemith (oboe and piano), bartok (two violins) and schubert’s songs* for 5 of heine’s poems! then the “taj mahal” an indian restaurant where mallory spoke hindustani. He introduced me to mangoes & bindhi gusht (he’s lived in darjeeling for 9 years) & the waiters. Biked home after a perfect evening. do hope to see more of him – must work hard this week.

  Very happy

  xx Sivvy

  ps: lovely holland earthenware teaset has come. also bought 6 lovely swedish glasses for sherry and stainless steel coffeespoons, very reasonably!

  PS: am buying apples (very good) oranges & dates (fruit) regularly at market and biking at least 5, often 10 miles a day to classes, town, dates, (men) etc.! feel very healthy in spite of drizzly rainy weather and am probably building up endurance like mad!

  love to all.

  sivvy

  TO Elinor Friedman Klein

  Thursday 27 October 1955

  TLS (aerogramme), Smith College

  thursday

  october 27

  dear dear cleo . . .

  there is no one like my girl. she can very easily make hunks of america look like airmail letters and fool the postman, but then they open up and like those pop-up pictures: there is smith and the 5 & 10 and autumn and god and a damn lot of sun: like those paper japanese flowers that you put in water and they open up and spread out and the colors keep coming and the petals keep unfolding and presto: venus on the cockleshell.

  dear venus: I am here. love,kilroy.

  cambridge is heaven. I sat myself down at the window last night, turned off the gas fire and the light, and looked out at the white mists rising in the moonlight. plath, I said casually to myself like I do when I am facing up to things, you have been here over a month, and what is with it? with it? I answered. you are living it up, is what.

  it is very cold here: the wind comes straight off the russian steppes and the cobbled streets are paved with blue frostbitten fingers that have dropped off people’s hands. people like me. no wonder they have to have tea. today I am going to two teas and then a sherry party with people named respectively john, richard and brian.* I promised myself that this first term I would meet as many people (meaning men: the women here are ghastly: two types: the fair-skinned twittering bird who adores beagling and darjeeling tea and the large, intellectual cowish type with monastically bobbed hair, impossible elphantine ankles and a horrified moo when within 10 feet of a man) as possible. next term, I am going to be discriminating.

  after my wonder and joy (and anger at not being able to get a roundtrip ticket to amherst to see oedipus) about you turning into jocasta,* I can hardly bear to tell you the foolish and exciting thing I have done for me: I was in the college “hospital” here for one hideous day learning about socialized medecine (they offered to tear up an old sheet for me when I asked for kleenex) with a sinus cold (gone are the good old smith days with cocaine, codeine, and sleeping pills) when suddenly I threw aside my lukewarm dinner of white fish paste, gray potato paste and yellow custard paste and biked off madly to the ADC (amateur dramatic club) here which is the only one of the many acting groups in cambridge to have its own theater (plus lunch room tearoom and bar where you can eat and drink by just signing a little blue piece of paper and smiling at someone: we probably have to pay eventually, but I hate to think about it).

  anyhow, in front of a hunk of nervously smoking new men and women and an esoteric hunk of old members, I auditioned with rosalind’s sarcastic speech on courtly lovers and the wonderful tennessee williams’ bit of camille talking to casanova camino real. as I could not quite breathe and felt consumption galloping all over me, I felt great rapport. result of all this: being catapulted into the ADC (notice the capitals, like I was maybe talking of god or something) “nurseries”: three one-act plays featuring all new members. my dear intuitive producer, with whom I immediately fell wickedly in love, cast me as a mad poetess in an 18th century farce called “3 hours after marriage” written by pope, arbuthnot, gay and others, evidently because no one man would take full responsibility for the very very bad double entendres. my favorite play that night was octave mirbeau’s “the epidemic” produced in a magnificent, grotesque stylized way by the artiest guy I ever did see: a real perfectionist, long hair, who brought his mistress to rehearsal and kissed her tenderly while yelling cruelly at the electricians and blaspheming the actors. there are plays here all the time and my main lust now is to work up so I can get to live a good part. I can’t tell you what that experience of living and working 8 to 10 hours a day for a week with my play-group did to me. I love them all, we were hugging and kissing each other and swigging gin from a common bottle and god knows what. all this you know from your guts, and I am feeling like a baby saying “ma-ma” for the first time to someone who knows the whole goddam dictionary. oh well. but the plays here! tremendous performance of webster’s “white devil” (raymond massey’s son* was the hero, brachiano . . . what a guy!) . . . decision for ADC centenary coming up this week, between, I think: Juno & the Paycock* and Darkness at Noon. enough, enough.

  lots of people here are named brian, colin, gavin and robin: I like. have been punting on river cam (about as wide as green street) where white swans bob for apples under weeping willows and the wedding-cake towers of st. johns and kings chapel rise along the backs; walked across meadows full of cows and brooding white horses to granchester where rupert brooke had tea at ten to three and they left the clock that way ever since: honey and scones beside roaring fire; play-readings of shakespeare at night where I am all the women, o mother earth; lots of delicate, pale fine-boned men and one tall, dmitri karamazov* guy with coal black reams of hair, scarlet cheeks and fantastic versatility (speaks hindustani from 9 years in india, nat. sci. major, sings, plays piano exquisitely, knows everything about architecture, indian food, bindhi gusht and other things with H’s) . . . his aloofness obsesses me: we shall see what comes of all this. do write; and keep all those home-fires flaring for me. more later. meanwhile, much much love.

  Sylvia

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Saturday 29 October 1955

  TLS (aerogramme),

  Indiana University

  saturday afternoon

  october 29th

  dearest mother . . .

  greetings from your happily agèd daughter! it was so lovely to get your telegram and the wonderful birthday gifts and letters from warren, you and dotty and dear grammy and grampy. I must say the best present anyone can give me is a fat typed letter: all the news from home, even the tiniest daily details, are most welcome. strange, but true, I feel so close to you all, as if I were only a short drive away. probably it is that the language is native to me (even if the accent isn’t!) and that from my childhood I built up by reading a feeling for england (I’d forgotten how many british writers I must have read, but so much here seems dearly loved already because I’ve met it before in my reading; the rooks and teatime from “the cuckoo clock”;* the poetry about granchester and the cam; crumpets (from t. s. eliot) and scones).

  my birthday was the happiest of days: I had just finished writing my first supervision paper on 4 of corneille’s tragedies (read, if slowly, in french!) wednesday, which was miserably cold and rainy. The 27th dawned crisp and blue-and-gold. I went to a lecture by basil willey (very good, on english moralists) and the supervision with my director of studies which I share with an indian girl (resplendent in vivid, red blue and gold saris!) where she went over our papers. then shopping for fruit and sherry at colorful market hill where the open booths spilled over with red tomatoes and apples, translucent green grapes, and armfuls of hot yellow and orange dahlias. I love just walking around that place, feasting my eyes on the colors and shapes like a glutton. after lunch, I came back to my dear room to fi
nd an enormous bouquet of yellow flowers in a lovely pottery vase (dark brown earthenware with designs scratched through to the dusty-pink clay) with a card saying “love, from whitstead.” so you see what sort of a wonderful house I live in! then ken frater (the sweet, if prosaic south african chap) took me for a green walk across the fields to granchester where we again had honey and tea at the “old orchard”, where rupert brooke’s picture smiled down on us. after supper, I went over to pembroke college to a playreading of “henry 4th, part 1” where I took the parts of the women (which are small and had the privilege of listening to the wilson brothers (david and peter)* read falstaff and prince hal . . . they are both magnificent actors and always play old men’s parts. david was “doctor fossil” the mock-hero of our farce last week, and all the boys are members of the ADC. this sunday night we are reading “the tempest” and I will be miranda. it is such fun sitting around a fire having coffee and reading aloud!