by Sylvia Plath
don’t worry that I am a “career woman”, either. I sometimes think that I might get married just to have children, if I don’t meet someone in these two years. Mrs. prouty needn’t worry either, the dear. france gave me perspective on mallory who is fine, but so young. I do need to meet older men. these young ones are so fluid, uncertain, tentative, that I become a mother to them. I miss a mature humor and savor and love of career which older men have; I feel that I am certainly ready for that. the only man I have ever really loved (that is, accepting the faults and working with them) is sassoon, of course. and I fear for his particular nervous, intense fluctuating health when I think of children. oh well, so much meandering. but I am definitely meant to be married & have children & a home & write like these women I admire: mrs. moore, jean stafford, hortense calisher, phyllis mcginley etc. wish me luck.
much much love,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Greenwood Schober & Frank Schober
Friday 20 January 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Friday evening
January 20
Dearest Grammy and Grampy . . .
I was so happy to get your lovely letter with the wonderful smiling picture of mother and Warren that I had to sit down right now and tell you about it. I have the picture put in the border of my mirror over the gas fireplace, where I can turn to look at it all the time. I almost feel that I could step right into it, it brings home so much closer, somehow.
You can imagine how happy I was, too, to see mother looking so radiant and girlish! Be sure and tell her to take special care of herself the rest of this year so she will be fine and strong and positively fat for her trip to Europe this summer. Ever since I heard she is coming over, I have been walking on air. I have already been planning things I want to show her in London and Cambridge, and I would like her to make up a list of all the spots she wants to see, or activities she wants most to do, in both places, so I can arrange to be the best of guide possible. If Warren gets his Experiment fellowship to Germany, all I need is for you both to come over too, to make things perfect!
Naturally I miss home and sometimes get waves of feeling quite sad, but that is only normal: no matter how nice people are, they simply aren’t “family”, where you can be sure of undivided love and support. I am fortunate in having some good friends---three fine, attractive, intelligent girls in Whitstead here: Margaret Roberts, a South African girl studying Economics; Isabel Murray,* a Scottish girl; and Jane Baltzell, a creative, humorous blonde girl on a Marshall fellowship from Brown University in Rhode Island---plus several nice boys: Mallory, his friend Iko, a delightful chap from Israel, Nat LaMar, the warm, friendly negro writer from Harvard, and a few other more casual acquaintances. Perhaps one of the really exciting parts of living in Cambridge is meeting people from all parts of the world (some of which I hardly knew existed, like South Africa) and getting first hand accounts of politics (Israel-Arab conflict, for example) and life in general.
I am starting a rather more serious and solitary life this term, giving up the very demanding, if stimulating, acting in the theater and writing at least two hours a day, no matter what. It is amazing how much better I feel doing this. I am building up creativity from the inside out. Even though writing is difficult, often stilted at first, or rough, I firmly believe that if I work hard enough, long enough, some stories rising out of my rapidly growing perspective about people and places may be published. Somehow stories interest me much more now than the narrower, more perfect form of poems.
I can refer with authority now, to much of England, France, and America, and the texture of my writing gets richer as I live more fully. I want most of all to be able to publish some of my transformed experiences, to share them with others.
I am also reading and studying a great deal more, cutting down on all extra-curricular activities, and even if I never will approach what I want to read, or the demands of my long lists of books, I am making slow progress in the wide fields of my ignorance, going on with French, reading modern tragedy (Strindberg, now), which is sheer delight, and going to study classical tragedy (Aeschylus, Sophocles & Euripides) which I have, shockingly enough, never touched.
As I sit here now, in my cheerful room which I love better than any place I’ve ever stayed (I have found it a big help to make it as homey as possible, and gay, so I look forward to coming back to it: my favorite art reproductions, bowls of fruit, shelves of books, a bowl of mixed nuts, flowers, and cheerful yellow cushions to remind me of the southern sun)---the wind is wuthering about the gable eaves, swatting rain against the window, and I feel very snug, curling up with about ten plays by Strindberg I must read before I write a paper* this weekend.
I can’t believe that in June mother will be sitting here, and the windows will be opened over a spring garden! I am living for spring, really.
I was so sorry to hear you had that miserable gastritis and only hope that by the time this letter reaches you, you will be feeling much, much better. Know that I am thinking of you and wishing you healthy and well again.
So many times I think of my grammy and grampy, and how nobody in the world could have dearer grandparents than I do! One takes so much for-granted when one is living at home, and I want you to know now how often I think back with love at all the dear things that mean home to me: grampy’s whistling and gardening, grammy’s marvelous cooking, and sour cream sauces, and fish chowder, and those feathery light pastry crescents filled with hot apricot jam---our wonderful lobster dinner under the pines at the cape last summer---all these things we have shared. I feel unusually rich having such a dear family. Give my love to everybody, and thank Mrs. Magown* for taking the Christmas picture!
Love to all,
sivvy
TO Gordon Lameyer
Saturday 21 January 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Saturday morning
January 21, 1956
Dear Gordon . . .
It is a brilliant, frigid morning, and I sit by a whistling gas fire, burning on one side, with fingers polar cold, warming up on the keys before I begin my daily stint of two to three hours of writing. New Year’s Greetings from the frosty fens.
First of all, I was delighted by the signed edition of Wilbur’s “Misanthrope”; I regaled myself with it, savoring the witty rhymes, the sparkling style, and the sumptuous print and paper of the book itself; as always, you know so well what books I love best. “No Villain Need Be”* is resting on my bedtime reading pile (I give myself about an hour of utterly spontaneous reading over milk & bedtime snack) coming up now after I just finished Shirley Jackson’s amusing, uneven, yet at times most disconcerting novel “Bird’s Nest”, about a kind of quadruplicate schizophrenic girl, told in several different styles to follow the changing point of view.
It seems impossible that I have spent three weeks in Europe, yet my memories are rich and vivid, and I’m writing them down as fast as I can to freeze those elusive specific details on paper. I forget just where you and Reese rode on the continent, but I’ve a feeling our trails probably overlapped. I now have a new sense of power and wisdom (born of hard experience) which I certainly didn’t possess as I tremblingly set out to Paris on December 20th. I can find cheap hotels, cheap excellent meals, and even know that “bougie” means sparkplug in French, because that’s what always goes wrong with a motor bike!
For ten days I lived on the left bank in Paris, and although much of my time was spent in plodding through rain, buying potent nosedrops and arguing with my first hotel concierge on account of a very forgetful, casual roommate, I managed to spend Christmas morning in Notre Dame, visit the exquisite jeweled Sainte Chapelle on the Ile de la Cite, explore part of the enormous Louvre, smiling back at the golden Mona, bowing to the Winged Victory and looking for Breughel, spending a day among children and post-christmas toys in the Tuileries (and even going to the Grand Guignol---puppet show), viewing an excell
ent Impressionist exhibit at the Orangerie, walking miles and miles along the Seine bookstalls, up the lighted Champs Elysees to the shining Arc, navigating the traffic streams in the Place de la Concorde, climbing from Place Pigalle (where I finally saw countless whores, even overheard one sweet blonde thing refusing a man, etc.) up the steep streets of Monmartre to the Place du Tertre, under the illuminated white domes of Sacre-Coeur, like a dazzling snow palace. Add to this, oysters for breakfast and wine and wine, Paris Ballet, two movies in French, two plays (one a translation of Emlyn Williams’ “Le Monsieur Qui Attend” into French), and a moving, lyrical “Jeanne D’Arc” by Charles Peguy at the Comedie Francaise, and you have some of it.
Then: midnight express on New Year’s Eve to Nice, where I celebrated the new era by having breakfast on the train, watching a red sun rise like the eye of God out of a blazing azure Mediterranean. An unbelievable week on Angel’s Bay, renting a beautiful Lambretta motor-bike (two, really, after having trouble and a midnight breakdown with the first)--with blue, clear weather, biking from Nice along the lower corniche through Beaulieu, Villefranche, around Cap Ferrat, through Monaco (yes, even lost $3 at the roulette tables in Monte Carlo: I felt the gambling fever growing, so got out fast) and passed over the Italian border into Vingtimilia. Motorbike is ideal (IF weather is good, which it was), out-of-doors, little gas, can stop anywhere, and people don’t think you have pots of money, which helps. I glutted my eyes on pastel villas, orange and olive groves, snowcapped Alps Maritime, violently green palms, and that blazing blue blast of sea. God, what a blissful change from the gray of Cambridge, London, and even Paris! I was so hungry for color.
Biked into the country up to the exquisite town of Vence one day, to see the beautiful Matisse Chapel, and experienced an unusual entrance, which I am trying to write about in a story at this moment, still idolizing the intricate, polished style of the New Yorker, with its blend of intelligent wit and deep seriousness, excellent specific vocabulary (which I find hardest to cultivate). Am much more desirous of writing prose, good short stories, now, than poetry, which isn’t wide enough for all the people and places I am beginning to have at my fingertips. Am being much more introverted this term, giving up acting for writing (and do I feel better! I get actually spiritually sick if I’m not writing---even if it is only sketches of brief description) and reading more than going to lectures--still hearing Basil Willey, FR Leavis and beginning David Daiches next week.
PLEASE write about your plans to come over here in March! Could you do me a favor and let me be you exchange bureau for switching your dollars into pounds (no agent’s fee!) if you need any? I’m legally prohibited from taking pounds out of the country and need $$$ desperately if I’m going to travel my regulation 3 weeks in Europe this spring. I can’t believe you may actually be in Cambridge (this one) in two months! Do write and let me know if & when it shall be!
Meanwhile, love from
SYLVIA
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 25 January 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Wednesday morning
January 25
Dearest mother . . .
It was lovely to get your long letter this morning with the blessed purple stamps and rather amazing Harvard Coop check (seeing as I bought so little there). I hope especially that you don’t let those horrid comptometers and calculators (whose names even sound like malevolent mechanical ogres) wear you out or make you vulnerable to colds at this hardest time of the year---from now till April is a long pull, and it’s so easy to become run down. Do keep me informed of grammy’s progress; I only hope it is nothing serious, but as you have always understood, I would much rather know what is going on than be surprised later. So please don’t keep anything from me, thinking I might worry. I have the right to be concerned which is different from worry.
Now, to dissipate your concern about me: I am working under a completely new regime this term, and much happier at it. I have cut out the ADC completely (and feel such a freedom, which overbalances any traces of desire to be in the theatrical thick of things) and, except for seeing Mallory about once a week, have told all the boys of last term good-bye. I can’t tell you what a bother it was to never have peace, because of visits from so many boys, none of whom I felt more than a vague liking for; most of them were so emotionally immature that they shocked me; I felt so much like a wise old mother that I sent them all away, there is time enough for being maternal. Even Mallory seems so incredibly young now that I have had the perspective of being away; my whole view before was distorted by too great a nearness to life here, which dragged me into it, without that saving sense of humor. Now I am able to act, to make choices, to work, with a better sense of sureness.
I am writing at least a few hours every day, and after doing about 16 pages of factual description about Cambridge, Paris and Nice, have written the first draft of a 25-page story about the Matisse chapel in Vence;* you have no idea how happy it makes me, to get it out on paper where I can work on it, even though the actual story never lives up to the dream. When I say I must write, I don’t mean I must publish. There is a great difference. The important thing is the aesthetic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and as necessary for me is the absolution of the printed word as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church. I have no illusions about my writing anymore; I think I can be competent and publish occasionally if I work. But I am dependent on the process of writing, not on the acceptance; and if I have a dry spell, the way I did last term, I wait, and live harder, eyes, ears and heart open, and when the productive time comes, it is that much richer. This Vence story has my heart and love, and I am going to polish and polish now. I also have other ideas, pushing at each other.
When I talked about my health improving, I only meant that I had two bad sinus colds last term, and luckily fought off one in Paris, but had sinus most of the time there. Now, with a good nine hours of sleep a night, I am feeling wonderful. I am working for my supervisions, too, and although I never will match the superior period background of the others, I have the pleasant feeling that I am doing the best I can, and learning a great deal. This week, for example, I read 18 Strindberg plays and wrote a 15-page paper. This next week, it is Chekhov and the Russians; and I am beginning to study the classics. This reading and my writing combines to make me feel a core of peace in myself which I never had when I was running around to the theater and going out all the time last term. It is more than worth it.
Winter and spring seem to be my most productive times; I rejoice in a kind of spartan seige of work now, after the utter joy and rich magnificence of my 3-week vacation. This is the kind of cycle I need: complete work, complete relaxation, in long, rhythmic periods.
About the marriage question, please don’t worry that I will marry some idiot, or even anyone I don’t love. I simply couldn’t. Naturally I am sorry that none of the “nice” boys who’ve wanted to marry me have been right; but it’s not that I’m over-particular, it’s that they’re not the ones. I shudder to think how many men would accept only a small part of me as the whole, and be quite content, Naturally all of us want the most complete, richest, best parts of us brought out, and in turn will do this for another. Actually, as you probably know, Richard Sassoon is the only boy I have ever loved so far; he is so much more brilliant, intuitive and alive than anyone I’ve ever known. Yet he pays for this with spells of black depression and shaky health which mean living in daily uncertainty, and would be hard over any long time. But he is the most honest, holy person I know. And, in a sense, I suppose I will always love him, together with his faults; ironically enough, he “looks” not at all like the kind of man I could be fond of; but he is, and that’s that.
My dearest friend in Cambridge is Nat LaMar. I had a wonderful coffee-session with him Sunday and met a stimulating married friend* of his who works for Time and gave me a lead on some lucrative su
mmer jobs, which I shall write for. Nat is a blessing; the true friend, warm, dear and emotionally very much like me: sunny and extroverted, but with a profoundly serious creative side. He had Archibald MacLiesh, I Alfred Kazin; we both have to write and live richly. So I rejoice in knowing he lives in Cambridge, and love seeing him. Tell Warren I have always envied his ability to work & do so much; I have always felt inferior in this way. Funny how things sound so much easier than they ever are –
Love
sivvy
P.S. Am sending signed checks under separate cover –
TO Richard Sassoon
Saturday 28 January 1956
TL (excerpt),* Smith College
January 28*
it would be easy to say I would fight for you, or steal or lie; I have a great deal of that desire to use myself to the hilt, and where, for men, fighting is a cause, for women, fighting is for men. in a crisis, it is easy to say: I will arise and be with thee. but what I would do too is the hardest thing for me, with my absurd streak of idealism and perfectionism: I do believe I would sit around with you and feed you and wait with you through all the necessary realms of tables and kingdoms of chairs and cabbage for those fantastic few moments when we are angels, and we are growing angels (which the angels in heaven never can be) and when we together make the world love itself and incandesce. I would sit around and read and write and brush my teeth, knowing in you there were the seeds of an angel, my kind of angel, with fire and swords and blazing power, why is it I find out so slowly what women are made for? it comes nudging and urging up in me like tulips bulbs in april.