by Sylvia Plath
socially my life has really been looking up. I am beset with invitations to tea, sherry and dinner on every hand, and am meeting people with increasing rapidity. yesterday, for example, I went to tea with richard mansfield, a very handsome black-haired 3rd year man who was stage director for our play and has had me to tea once before. there I met an attractive fellow, mahmud, from iraq.* then to another tea at trinity (a beautiful college right on the cam) with john lythgoe, our set designer, where dick gilling,* our tall, skinny, utterly delightful producer was too. dick invited me to hear the BBC next week, and john begged me to have tea with his quaint grandparents in granchester after a trip on his motor bike. I then biked to a sherry party with brian corkery (who is very correct, and looks like the young t. s. eliot) who is taking me to the theater tonight.* then back to richard mansfield’s (after a hectic change) for a steak dinner with wine and full dress attendance at the 3 one-act plays put on by the mummers, another theater group.
whew! best of all (if there can be any best . . . everything is so lovely) I have at last met nathaniel lamar,* that boy from exeter and harvard who wrote the story “creole love song” in the atlantic!* when I heard he was at cambridge I begged some boys at pembroke to introduce me to him, so last night, richard and I caught him on the walk and I have a tea-date with him next monday. he is a lovely, light-skinned negro, and I look most forward to talking to him about writing, etc. sunday we have a large general meeting of the ADC to discuss our centenary production, and my favorite tall dark handsome fellow, mallory wober, has just invited me to meet some of his friends at a sherry party before dinner. my project for meeting as large a cross-section of people as possible this first term is certainly working out most pleasantly. I have simply been treated like a queen!
meanwhile, I am buying books, studying french, (have just begun “le rouge et le noire” which will probably take me all year); bought a dark, lovely braque still life* with browns and black predominantly, & lovely yellow lemon shapes and deep green, which is being framed for my room. also a green plant with bright red berries. (speaking of red, by the way, I loved your birthday card, which was so appropriate with my own exquisite red-velvet dress). all this biking in the cold air (which blows directly from the russian steppes) makes me feel simply grand: clean, fresh and strong. evidently the short terms here are packed with culture and lectures and concerts and exhibits and much serious work is done in long vacations. I plan to take advantage of this scheme and stay here about 2 weeks into december after end of term, just reading and reading and contemplating, before I take off for europe for the 3 weeks alotted by the fulbright commission. will write later in the week, meanwhile, much much love to you and warren and the dear grandparents.
your joyous birthday girl,
sivvy
TO J. Mallory Wober
Saturday 29 October 1955
ALS with envelope,
Cambridge University
Saturday
October 29
As Anna said to the King of Siam.* “I shall be delighted to come!”
Expect me then, Sunday at 12, at which time I shall be happy to encounter your friends, your piano, your polished table, your crocodile, and, of course, your highness himself.
Sylvia
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Saturday 29 October 1955
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Saturday afternoon
October 29th, 1955
Dear Mrs. Prouty . . .
At last I am beginning to feel a native of Cambridge and want to take time in the midst of this pleasant carousel of activity on a multitude of new fronts to tell you a little about how happy I am here! First of all, I have a room all to myself on the top of a quaint house for 12 girls (Whitstead) which is most homelike and, thank heavens, not at all like the cold red-brick institution of the main halls of Newnham! I wheedled enough bookcases for my brightly colored multitudes of books (to which I am adding rapidly), and bought a wonderful brown earthenware teaset from holland while in London and a lovely modern oblong coffee table on which I have art books, magazines, and a green plant with bright red berries. The wonderful Cambridge custom of having open market in the square every day lets me buy heaps of fresh fruit and flowers to pile about, while postcards of art reproductions deck the doors and cupboards. A sofa for two is placed in the window niche, where I can curl up comfortably and read or write overlooking a garden, treetops and orange tile roofs. In addition, I have a gas fire (which somehow isn’t quite enough to keep my fingers and toes from being perpetually blue,) and gas ring on which I can make tea, coffee, and perhaps eventually, if I am adventurous enough, a one-pot casserole!
I am going to about 15 hours of lecture and tutoring a week (in the mornings) and love every minute of it. slowly, very slowly, I am beginning to build bridges over some of the whistling voids of my ignorance. We have no exams until the end of our two years, and I chose subjects to “read for” which I knew least about: 2000 years of tragedy (!), the english moralists in relation to the ancients (which will let me read lots of philosophy); the history of english criticism as applied to english literature (which will enable me to read as much eng. lit. as possible) and french (I am now being tutored by a very nice research student and hope to try it out in paris in my first vacation!) during the week I write about one critical paper for my director of studies, prepare french lessons, and read and read. so much for my study program, which is most stimulating (as are lecturers like the caustic F. R. Leavis, wry Basil Willey, and vital David Daiches).
My social life has unfolded with amazing rapidity after about 10 days of feeling rather isolated. The English are slow to meet, but once I began to be introduced about, I have been treated like a queen, with invitations to sherry parties, tea, dinner and the theater piling up with agreeable rapidity. Perhaps mother mentioned my daring move to try out for an amateur dramatic society: my second week here was spent in rehearsing 8 hours a day for my part as (guess what!) a mad poetess in an 18th century farce! Our theater club (ADC-- Amateur Dramatics Club) is the only one of the many acting groups in Cambridge to have its own theater (complete with dressing rooms, lunch and tea room!) and I feel overjoyed to be participating in such vital activities. I met many delightful people through this play production and am now taking the women’s parts in a small play-reading group which meets once a week to read plays of shakespeare by the fireside. Since the ratio of men to women here is pleasantly 10 to 1, I find myself building up the beginnings of an agreeable salon of actors, producers, writers, embryonic lawyers, scientists, and so on. I still have a few important finishing touches to put on my room (such as couch cover, a large reprint or two for the walls) before I’ll feel sufficiently fit for entertaining in my own quarters (as yet I let the Englishmen make tea for me! I need practice before I will have face to serve them!)
The crowded, tantalizing smorgasbord of fine plays, excellent films, challenging lectures, concerts (I heard a marvelous sunday eve concert last week in king’s college with a handsome chap, a natural scientist who plays the piano superbly, speaks hindustani, and introduced me to cambridge architecture, music and indian food),--all this makes it necessary to do a great deal of reading in the long vacations, since the actual college term is so short. So I plan to stay here for about two weeks at the beginning of December after term ends and read and read and contemplate and write: life has been too full and active so far to allow for any meditative and creative work. This, of course, is only natural when one is plunged head over heels into a completely new life on all fronts.
I am most interested in acting now, and my ambition is to audition again and again until I get a part in one of the big plays: there is a companionship and fervor in producing a play which is equalled by nothing else: by the opening night, one feels a great rapport with everybody from the leading man to the electrician and wardrobe mistress! Next, I want to begin writing again in December, when I am not so intensely involved in the immedia
te prospect of discovering all that Cambridge has to offer by way of people, books, scenes, and events. Plans for vacation are still very tentative, but I hope dreamily for Paris, the Mediterranean (The Sun), and perhaps a bit of skiing in the Alps. Instead of wishing rather frantically, as I once did, to be brilliant, creative, and successful all at once, I now have a steadier, more practical approach which admits my various limitations and blind spots and works a little day by day to overcome them slowly without expecting immediate, or even eventual perfection. Life is rich, full and I am discovering more about it by living here every challenging day. I’ll write again soon.
Meanwhile, much much love to you,
sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 7 November 1955
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Monday morning
November 7
Dearest mother . . .
It is a wet, warm, gray November day, and the yellow-green trees are letting go their leaves in the sodden wind. The week has been crowded with books and people, and I am slowly learning by experience the kind of life I want most to live here. With so many challenges on all fronts, academic, social and extracurricular, I have to be firmly disciplined in choosing.
To sum up the past days: I saw a good bit of that outgoing, creative negro boy, Nathaniel LaMar (from Exeter and Harvard) and went to coffee with him Monday at the bohemian coffee house* here where I had the first really good open “bull session” I’ve had since I’ve been here. Temperamentally, Nat is very much like me, enthusiastic, demonstrative, and perhaps trusting and credulous to the point of naivté. A strong contrast to the Englishmen, who have a kind of brittle, formal rigidity and, many of them, a calculated sophisticate pose. Anyhow, Nat had a friend from Harvard who is now in Paris (reminded me of Clem) come and visit him, so I went out with them to hear Louis MacNiece (who never turned up) and then to the Coffee House with a whole group of boys where I observed human nature over cups of café espresso.
Went to a series of surrealist films Wed. night in a torrent of rain with Richard Mansfield, a very good-looking boy, but not without a certain amount of vanity and pose. Films were magnificent: a green, watery poem of motion and music called “Bells of Atlantis”,* all fluid, with primal rhythms like embryo green worlds and white women floating yet unborn through waves and leaves. Then a gay Norman McClaren* experimental film of abstract colored forms leaping about in time to music; and a hilarious Charlie Chaplin film (I’d never seen him before). The chef d’ouevre was “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”,* that classic expressionist film where the jagged black-and-white sets grow out of states of mind and there is the subtle reversal between the worlds of sanity and insanity. Really wierd and haunting. Somnambulist Cesars reminded me of those Poe horror tales where decomposing men are kept alive by hypnotism, and the frustrating cramped red-tape of the official business world recalled the surrealistic tales of Kafka where it is realistically possible for a man to wake up in the morning to find himself turned into an insect. Well, it is the sort of movie I enjoy most: it shocks one into new awareness of the world by breaking up the conventional patters and re-molding them into something fresh and strange.
Also went out to dinner at the Union* (the one place in Cambridge where women are not allowed unless escorted: the debate club) and saw a rather good repertory production of my favorite “I Am a Camera”* (which you remember we saw* with Mrs. Cantor and the Braggs, I think) which made me want to turn immediately to writing again. Acting simply takes up too much time. I was really glad I didn’t get a part in the coming production of “Bartholomew Fair”, (although of course it injured my ego slightly) because I have so much reading to do, and I would rather be a mediocre writer than a bad actress.
Had one very charming tea on Thursday: John Lythgoe (set designer for our little play, and natural sciences major: specialty, fungi) took me speeding through the dusk on the back of his motorcycle to his grandparents’ house in Granchester: a lovely, stately place, with orchards, formal gardens, and greenhouses. His grandfather, Sir Arthur Tansley* (evidently the name is well-know in botannical fields, and he also worked with Freud, I think) was in the hospital, but his ancient grandmother was a delight: dry, witty, full of reminiscences about royalty and cambridge, etc. Had buttered scones and much tea by a cosy fireside, and she gave me some apples from her orchard in parting. John is one of those sweet, tender souls (there are many in Cambridge) who bring out the maternal instinct in one and exactly nothing else. His mother* (a scientist) may invite me to visit them in London for a few days this Christmas vacation, which would be nice, as John knows the place well.
Academically, I feel very ignorant, as I knew I would, choosing subjects I know nothing about, but still, although I have allowed myself a year before I start making judgments, ignorance is not a pleasant state. In practical criticism, for example, we have to “date” poems which is for me impossible since I’ve never read any 17th and 18th cen. poetry (I’m taking an excellent series of lectures of 17th cen. metaphysicals now). Also, I’ve never read the classics, or all the multitude of prose & poetry writers outside the colossi: Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare and the 19th and 20th cen. My only job is to go on reading slowly and steadily, and this I am beginning to do, ruthlessly cutting out all teas and social engagements for the main part of the week. I am now reading French, (I do love my gay supervisor here), Ibsen, 17th cen. poets, Restoration tragedy and a bit of criticism. My main concern is that I must appear rather uneducated to my Director of Studies, who will have to write my recommendations for Fulbright renewal in December, which is much too early for her to realize that I am progressing as well as is humanly possible. I can’t wait till those two weeks in December which I shall spend here, without the load of 15 hours of lecture, just reading and writing. One of the Cambridge “little magazines” has accepted two of my poems* and I’m meeting the Editor* this afternoon. I feel about increasing my scope of reading much as I did about my thesis: I know it will take place eventually, but am irritated sometimes at the slowness.
Love to all,
Sivvy
PS Had a lovely time last night at playreading of “King Lear” being wicked Regan in gothic-spired turrets of St. John’s College.
PS: could you please get me a pair of RED pappagallo ballet shoes (7M) as soon as possible, before I leave on vacation. I think Wilbar’s* has them. You can tell them by the striped red & white inside. Don’t take a reasonable facsimile! Only the gen-you-ine article!
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 14 November 1955
TL (aerogramme),
Indiana University
monday morning
november 14
dearest mother . . .
it has been so nice to get your letters this week. I enjoy everything, big and little, which you write about. I received the snapshots of warren and me about two weeks after you sent them and have put my favorite up on the mirror: the one of us in the backyard, both smiling sort of up and out. I like it better of warren than the stern, heavier prussian one which makes him look too much like a captain of industry. the blessed new yorker comes now, after their card announcing it, which got missent to cambridge maryland, of all places. I didn’t realize how much I missed the “atmosphere” of humor and cultural and geographical “assumptions” which I so love in the new yorker. every night, before bed, I make a point of relaxing over a pot of hot milk and crackers by my gas fire and reading for fun in it.
there are several frustrations in my work, which, although I allowed for them abstractly, nevertheless bother me still, while I do my best to take them easily. in the first place, the girls in my practical criticism hour have a much broader background than I in the periods of literature, and so I am utterly left out when they have to “date” bits of prose and poetry from 16th, 17th, & 18th centuries. naturally none of the selections are from chaucer, sh
akespeare, milton, the russians, and only very rarely from the 19th or 20th, so I feel very ignorant. there is no preparation I can do for this class, except to read, very slowly, as I am doing through the poetry of these centuries. also, in my “supervision” in tragedy, with the same woman, miss burton, I again feel enormous handicaps reading, as it were, in a vacuum where I have had no background, such as dryden and otway in restoration tragedy. I’ve done only one paper for her so far on corneille which, in spite of the fact, I read the plays in my still rusty french, seemed to be acceptable, although we get no marks and just discuss them with our tutor. these are my two most painful hours in the week as I invariably make some verbal faux pas out of simple ignorance and can’t throw around the names of a host of minor writers in the augustan age, etc. the kind of reading I have to do slowly to remedy this too early over-specialization of mine is exactly what I wanted to come here to do, but it is still often difficult, in face of some of these glib girls, to compete on levels where my own lack of reading stands in my way. occasionally, I would just like to catch them off guard with our early american literature!
another thing, I probably won’t hit my stride till the third term, when I have done enough reading to be at least competent enough to talk about it, and by then it will be too late for the fulbright people to appreciate this. my director of studies, miss burton, is also my supervision in tragedy and practical crit., so she sort of governs (unfortunately, I think) whatever judgments are written about me this december when our applications for renewals go in. and I can hardly tell her that my very ignorance has dictated the new fields I’ve chosen (tragedy for 2000 years, moralist philosophy, french and criticism) and that I will be worth the price of keeping on for another year. I really must finish this course, and in many ways it is the hardest thing I’ve ever done, for, instead of concentrating in my favorite specialties and periods, as I did at smith, I’ve deliberately chosen to fill in the large gaps of my unknowledge. I have to give myself stern talks continually to go on slowly enjoying reading day by day without getting claustrophobic at the piles and piles of books rising up around me that I “must read”.