The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  mr. kazin’s blinking eyes haunt me. like a kind of winking albatross. I shall write. come to europe to travel with me this summer. to greece. still have africa map. am flying to paris to hang tinsel on eiffel tower under escort of negro writer from harvard, nat lamar (“creole love song” in atlantic) and pay post mortem visit to sasson. write, write. london is lousy with dramat schools, christopher fry, etc. please come!

  much love –

  Sylvia

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  Monday 12 December 1955*

  TLS, Indiana University

  Dearest Gordon . . .

  A most Merry Christmas to you! There is so much to say that I feel almost paralysed, and want to just take you out for a cafe expresso at the desperately avant garde Soup Kitchen here for a long, long talk. The transfer of my old verbal tête-a-têtes at home (with people like Sue Weller, Marty & Mike Plumer, the Cantors, Mr. Crockett, Pat O’Neil, etc) to the typewriter is really an overwhelming and rather frustrating switch: I want to hand over great hunks of Cambridge (courtesy of the Eyes & Ears of S. Plath) and scorn mere notes. Hence the rather drastic infrequency of my letters. I manage a weekly vignette to mother and rely on her to disseminate the cultured pearls and grains of sand, such as they are!

  The term has been over for a week, and I am in the midst of my second week living in the relatively blissful, calm undemanding joy of solitude (also relative) in Cambridge. This term has been the most hectic, packed, over-stimulated two months of my life and I can now see what they mean when they say the terms are for “living” and the very long vacs are for reading and thinking. I shall be so happy for you to visit my room here: it is at last all mine: two enormous bookcases, toppling over with colorful volumes (multitudes bought on my Fulbright allowance, yet frustratingly inviting and unread), a satanic dark earthenware-and-white enamel teaset from Holland which has sustained many members of my selected and delightful “salon”, fresh mounds of fruit (apples, pineapples, pears, bananas, grapes, etc.) from the outdoor market in Cambridge, enormous Van Gogh-ish bouquets of yellow chrysanthemums, a flurry of vivid postcard modern art reproductions on door and wardrobe, (memoirs of Art Galleries from N.Y.C. to Washington to London), a long, low walnut coffee table, holding art books, pottery bowl of mixed nuts (to be cracked in person), hand-woven rush mats, rough-textured yellow pillows on favorite two-seater couch in window niche, perfect for curling up to read & meditate, Braque still life in fawns, rich russets, avocado greens & highlights of yellow: forest green, sun yellow, chestnut brown, plus accents of black & white, are the colors I live among. You must come see!

  For the first time since arrival I have been able to sit back and enjoy my room & the hospitality I can offer: I can cook steak dinners on my one gas jet, complete with sherry & hors d’oeuvres, salad, fruit compote, wine, cheese & crackers. I promise you one in advance, if you really come at the end of March to England!

  Actually, most of my energy here has been spent in trying out different kinds of life & becoming used to all the subtle differences in the daily texture of existence. My mornings were taken up with classes, & I spent a rather drastic amount of time at the A.D.C., which I have, with some regret, decided to give up this term, as it demands blood, and I am not that serious about acting, although the group of actors, set-designers & producers I met is the sanest, kindest, most creative throng going. I took the minor part of a screaming whore-mistress named Alice in the A.D.C.’s centenary production of Ben Jonson’s “Bartholomew Fair” (a technical feat to stage). We ran for 9 nights, got reviewed in the London Times, etc., and our costumes were straight from the Stratford wardrobe! I wore a lusciously trollopish yellow satin gown and most of my work was pantomime in the continuous crowd scenes. The chance to work with The Actors in Cambridge, & watch them rehearse (Dan Massey, son of Raymond Massey among them) was invaluable. However, the flu caught up with me the last two nights, & I decided to be contemplative& concentrate more on work and writing this next term. I’m almost dead sure the Fulbright won’t be renewed, (as it’s based on only one term’s work, & there are only a few renewals out of 150 applicants) & am rather wondering where the next year is coming from.

  In a sense, my outline of studies is just too juicy. And my century-background is, as I knew it would be, impossibly unbalanced (have read only major figures: Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, & nineteenth & 20th cen. poetry & prose, no drama). I can at last remedy this here, where instead of specializing, I can spread out, but I feel rather like a starving woman confronted like a smorgasbord of delicacies: such richness! the more I read, the more there is to read, & the inverted pyramid of desired knowledge grows without end.

  There is so little time in each day, it seems: I have discovered the early & late Ibsen (you must read “Brand” & “Now We Dead Awaken”, if you havent, especially the last, which is a surprisingly symbolic drama---I’d always narrowly thought of Ibsen as a social dramatist---about the need for the artist to sacrifice life to his creation and the deadly retribution he must pay, laying waste to the creative lives around him, yet having to follow his call). Am beginning on Strindberg: fascinating studies of destructive love-hate relations between men & wives. Meaty symbolism. Full of shrikes. “Spook Sonata”* is intriguing. All I can do is fight down that feeling of suffocation that I have every time I enter the University Library or Bookstores & go on slowly struggling toward brighter light in my understanding, versus the almost frightening accumulations of new books, specialized knowledge, etc. One must read, one must live, one must write. No one activity is fully possible without the others and each one demands complete devotion. I begin to feel I never can become a Phd person, but must go on reading widely in art, philosophy, psych, concentrating where I like, not where avid Phd candidates have been too bored to research, & live fully & create children, which to me is becoming even more primary than writing, which will never be a career, only an avocation for me. Now that I know it, I won’t go around with quite so many soap bubble dreams.

  The most rewarding part about life here is the people. I must admit the English girls are either too blue-stocking or two fluttery & Society (never both together) for me, and most of my good friends are men. There’s the American Negro from Harvard, Nat LaMar (whose story “Creole Love Song” I may have pointed out in the Atlantic) who is simply a dear: friendly, open, & wonderfully frank. We have periodic bull sessions like brother & sister (he went to Exeter & knew Warren) & he’s getting me a place to stay in Paris & promising to protect me & help me learn to speak French when I fly over Dec. 20 (excited, but scared, too). Then there’s a sweet Botanist who is very shy, & is exchanging my pounds illegally for francs & whose mother has invited me to stay with them in London next weekend (she’s a research scientist & John Lythgoe is the grandson of Sir & Lady Tansley, whom I visited in Granchester before he died.* Am going to a family wedding at the parish church there next week).

  Then there’s a wonderful Jewish Hercules (age 19) who was born on Warren’s birthday (see how sentimental I’m getting!) whom I have adopted completely. He has been a great solace when I had flu, & brought me an organ (carried it!) to play Bach, Beethoven, & Scarlatti while I lay in a delirium of fever. He comes from Darjeeling, India, & has a long line of Moorish & Syrian Jew ancestors: the English Jew is a paradox in terms, & I must admit I find the vital intensity, sensitivity and whole integrity of body & mind a relief from the childish & tea-drinking Englishmen, who idealize one embarrassingly. My mother-impulses are brought out like mad. I’ll be visiting Mallory’s family in London, too (all the relatives are gathering around to meet me, as a “Christian girl” is very rare & generally tabu in their midst: I find it difficult to explain that I’m not really Christian!)

  Had my first horseback ride yesterday with Dick Wertz, an old flame of Nancy Hunter’s from Yale who is studying to be a Theology professor here: wish you could have seen the debacle! “Sam” broke into an unexpected gallop toward a busy intersection on the wrong side of the road at the crucial momen
t that my right stirrup came off, whereupon I found myself hugging the horse’s neck with extreme warmth. A sharp right-angled turn, and we roared down the middle of the highway, cars stopping right and left, pedestrians flying for the bushes. Sam thought the sidewalks were safer than the street, which immediately made several elderly ladies think the opposite. Never has ever fiber of my mind & body been so simply & passionately concentrated, since I flew down the ski slope to fracture my fibula: nothing in the world mattered but keeping from under the flying hooves of that runaway horse! I managed, too, although I now move about a bit like an arthritic, vividly black & blue! I want so much to master in even a beginner’s way the power of horses, skis & sailboats! A lifetime won’t be enough.

  Am venturing to Paris & from thence to wherever chance calls me for 2½ weeks this vac. Hope to be forced to learn to speak French! Perhaps I can share some of Germany with you during my long vac at the end of March & early April. It would be such fun to discover castles on the Rhine, etc. & try to resurrect some German! Do write. My thanks in advance for the Moliere* your kind mother said she was sending for you!

  Love from Gardencourt . . .

  sylvia

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  c. 12 December 1955*

  ALS in greeting card,*

  Indiana University

 

  With Good Wishes / for Christmas / and the New Year / from

  Sylvia

  p.s. Felt this reproduction* particularly appropriate for us – cf. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” &, of course, our Stephen.*

  sylvia

  TO J. Mallory Wober

  Tuesday 13 December 1955*

  TLS in greeting card* with envelope,

  Cambridge University

  tuesday afternoon

  hello there! cambridge is simply not the same. there is a particularly devastating sort of vacuum about king’s and the arts theater, & I begin to feel much too noble and virtuous for my own good. actually, I’m not half as much of a stoic as I think I am, but I must admit that outside the circle of my scorching gas fire and gaily colored mounds of books, the gray, wet, sodden atmosphere is rather ominous. I feel like going bankrupt and buying hundreds of colored lights to hang on all the bare, skeletal trees. and draping holly wreaths about the necks of the grim, grubby-looking christmas shoppers.

  I’ve been reading some more racine in french, buying apples & now am in the midst of the huge project of writing christmas letters to the people I love best at home. not just simple little notes, these, but enormous hunks of paper re-capturing the texture of the past two months, the people, thoughts, and events that make up life: mood music, and so on.

  you probably have never been described so many times in your life. I am getting better and better at it, and perhaps may borrow you for a short story later: anything, so I can keep on writing about you. describing life at cambridge this term is impossible without presenting you acting in medias res. the room is very quiet now. I liked getting your letter and the railway rhythm poem: have you read t. s. eliot’s “wasteland”? I shall read part of it to you, as sections have a similar tone about coming into london. transition is always hardest, I think: the tearing up of roots & moving them. once I am in a place, I am too active in settling & living to be nostalgic. I think it is probably very good for me to be forced to be alone for a while, in preparation for the challenge of entering a new world . . . . .

  your enormous book came: you must read aloud to me from it next term! I hope I can finish my 20 long letters and 10 short cards tonight. then I can try to learn a few crucial french sentences, read strindberg, and feel an illusion of freedom to work as I choose. if I read every hour from here to the end of the year I still wouldn’t approach the bottom of the books “I must read!”

  I look most forward to seeing you sunday (it seems like months till then) and am sure that you are happily active at home: there is nothing quite as wonderful as having a family to go to. I must admit I feel a rather sharp wave of nostalgia for my brother, mother & grandparents, as this is the first christmas I’ve been away, a kind of feminine ulysses, wandering between the scylla of big ben and the charybdis of the eiffel tower. let me know when and where you want me to meet you sunday afternoon.

  much love to you,

  sylvia

  TO Olive Higgins Prouty

  Tuesday 13 December 1955

  TLS, Indiana University

  December 13, 1955

  Dear dear Mrs. Prouty!

  A very Merry Christmas to you! There is so much to tell you that I hardly know where to begin. First of all, I loved your wonderful pencilled-manuscript-paper letter:* when we write to each other I feel we are really communicating: almost as good as talking, but not quite! I feel I can talk to you like a second mother, perhaps even more frankly!

  Picture me sitting in my room in the blissful peace after term has ended: outside is the gray twilight landscape with the mists rising from the fens and the large black rooks circling about the bare, mottled sycamore tree outside my window. Within: a squeaking, cheerful gas fire (I’m quite fond of the little asbestos monstrosity now!), bright yellow accents: big, Van Gogh-type yellow chrysanthemums, rough-textured yellow pillows, bananas on a pile of fresh fruit from the outdoor market, and the bright lemon shapes in a reproduction of a lovely Braque still-life I had framed: my room colors are sunlight yellow, chestnut brown, holly-green, with black & white accents. How I wish you could be here to have tea with me! I have such a cosy place. All the students (except a very few) have gone home as of a week ago at the end of term, and I am staying here at Whitstead for two weeks to rest, read the pile of books accumulated during term, and assimilate the fast-moving life I have lived through since leaving New York last autumn.

  Most of my energy this term has been spent simply trying out different kinds of life, activity and people, and selecting the most important elements & cutting out the unessential. The main difficulty here is choosing between the over-stimulating variety of challenging activities offered: theater, little magazines, political groups, foreign movies, fascinating people (the hardest to limit), and, of course, the enormous and wide-spread reading program I have undertaken. These past two months my mornings have been occupied fully by classes with most exciting lecturers: dry, witty F. R. Leavis in criticism: incisive Joan Bennett* in 17th cen. metaphysical poets;Basil Willey in philosophy.

  I have lessons in French (and hope to be forced to speak it in Paris this Christmas vacation, where I am staying for 10 days) and a supervised class in Tragedy (2000 years of it!) in which I’ve written a mere 2 papers this term on Corneille and Ibsen. The reading is, for the most part, exactly what I need, but I really feel the lack of a “century-background” which these girls have, while I specialized in major figures like Chaucer& Milton & the 19th & 20th centuries. I have constantly to remind myself that this wider reading background is partly what I came for, and I must go on reading and enjoying slowly, and not want to devour the University Library at one desperate gulp. Even if I read every hour from now till the end of the year I still would never be close to finishing the ever-expanding list of book “I must read!” So I also realize that I never will want* to become a Phd scholar and know more and more about some minute details of knowledge: I want to read widely in art, philosophy and psychology, my special interests, and to live richly (I hope eventually with a family and children and write about life, people as I know them, and not distilled abstract metaphors and symbols in poetry).

  I wish you could have seen the Amateur Dramatic Club Centenary performance of Ben Jonson’s rollicking “Bartholomew Fair”! We ran for 9 nights & were reviewed in the London Times; our costumes were from Stratford-on-Avon! I had a very small speaking (or rather, shouting!) part and a lot of pantomime acting to do in the crowd scenes at the fair: I was Dame Alice, a mistress-of-the-game, which is a nice Jonsonian way of saying woman-of-ill-fame: had to add color and wickedness to the fair in a vivid yellow satin gown. It w
as really a privilege to work with The Cambridge Actors (some of whom are now on London Stage; Dan Massey, son of Raymond Massey, was hero of our play). However, the A.D.C. demands blood: e.g. all your time, and I am giving it up temporarily, for a more contemplative & literary life this next term. I must say that the actors, technicians & producers are the nicest, warmest, sanest, most creative lot I have met in Cambridge! I really felt I belonged at our dear, rickety theater. But the very very public grease-paint life is not for me: I am no Sara Bernhardt,* and will try the other side of the footlights for a while, having loved the experience of actually participating.

  My social life here has been more than one could wish. With a ratio of 10 men to each girl, it is quite a problem. I had to tell 4 young men this term I couldn’t see them any more because they were becoming much too monopolizing & serious & I couldn’t be sure of a moment’s peace, with them dropping in all the time to ask me out to dinner, or tea, or a play. Englishmen are quite naive, really, and idealize one almost embarrassingly over tea-cups. They talk and gossip extraordinarily, & I am very much against their being brought up in strict prep schools segregated almost completely from women. There is little of the healthy, friendly camaraderie I was so used to at home, & women are often treated like Dresden china. I have been very lucky, however, in making some special friends: