The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1
Page 124
Well, I must bike off through mud and slush to hear David Daiches lecture on Joyce’s “Dubliners.” In spite of all, I am stoically inured to the winter, and working hard so that the spring will be a true and deserved flowering. My best love to all of you: keep well and happy for me!
your own loving
sylvia
TO J. Mallory Wober
Tuesday 7 February 1956*
ALS with envelope on
Newnham College letterhead,
Cambridge University
Whitstead
Tuesday
Dear Mallory . . .
Am in a very grubby mood this week and except for a few literary affairs such as ‘Philoctetes’ and editorial meetings, I am growling and ferocious. Grrr. Hence, please allow me to default tomorrow. Be angry. Stick pins in images. But let me make like Greta Garbo, huh? ‘I vant to be alone.’ Or just fall in bed & sleep for a week.
your disagreeble,
idiosyncratic
psuedo-misanthrope –
sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 10 February 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Friday morning
February 10
Dearest mother . . .
I am so happy and bubbly today that I just had to share some of it with you! Guess what! Just heard by telegram from Sue Weller that she has been awarded a Marshall scholarship for Oxford next year! I am overcome with joy. That means we shall go to London on weekends, to see plays, go skiing in the Alps, travel together: all so perfect, because she is the ideal companion! That girl really deserves this and has a marvelous career ahead of her, I’m sure.
Another, more tentative bit of news which I want you to keep strictly to the family, is that I heard from the Fulbright commission that my application for renewal has passed the first stage and I’ll hear finally in mid-April. I quote the entire letter, which, in spite of the Ifs has an optimistic sound:
“I am very pleased indeed to be able to inform you that your application for a renewal grant has been recommended to the Board of Foreign Scholarships for its final approval. I trust that this recommendation at this time will serve to clarify your own plans, both academic and personal, in such a way that the rest of this year will be used to best account.
“I do not anticipate that we shall be able to inform you of the Board of Foreign Scholarship’s final decision before mid-April. At that time, we will also state the arrangements for payment of a summer maintenance allowance. As you already know, you are eligible to receive such an allowance only during the period you actually remain in the United Kingdom.
“If you do win a renewal, you will be expected to use your return travel entitlement to America at the end of your second year . . . .”
So I wait! I’m also re-applying for the $1000 fellowship I was awarded last year at Smith, just in case, and have received a most sweet letter from the woman on the graduate scholarships panel in answer to a note of mine, telling her about my life here. I feel so happy, now: not because of any ideal false-rosy-colored dreams, but simply because it is possible to work and love and make a good creative life on this earth in spite of sickness, suffering, uncertainty and sorrow, which I continue to believe are necessary as a tempering fire to the growing soul. With this faith, I can face suffering, without fearing it, or running from disappointment, which surely will come, too.
I am gifted with the dearest, most wonderful friends: Nat LaMar, Gordon, Elly Friedman, Sue Weller, Marty Plumer, Sassoon---Mrs. Prouty, Dr. Beuscher, Mr. Fisher at Smith, Mary Ellen Chase (who is coming over in spring) and the whole faculty there. I love the world, and want to sing of it, with its muck and its angels, its blind alleys and its moments of holy radiance. I love people, individually, and somehow am lucky enough to impart this to the ones I know. I am very, very happy.
It is cold, biting, with blizzard flurries, and I bike home from classes and market, laden with apples, oranges, nuts, and daffodils. I am grateful for all the uncertainty, and all the horrors of suffering when I thought I was doomed to be mad for ninety years in a cell with spiders; I am solidly, realistically joyous; I like living in hope of publication; I can live without the actual publication. I write, however poorly, or superficially, for fun, for aesthetic order, and I am not poor or superficial, no matter what I turn out.
So rest happy in knowing that no matter what comes, I am willing to face it. And know, too, that I just happen to be living in the most marvelous university in the world! It is hard to choose between all the cultural delights: am going to the play “Philoctetes” tonight; In a little over a week, I’ll see Euripedes’ “The Bacchae” In Greek* (!) which is performed here every 3 years (even Oxford gave up plays in Greek in 1932!) Am thoroughly enjoying my film society membership:* probably told you that I saw Dali’s fantastic “L’Age d’Or” a magnificent surrealistic film; Cocteau’s enchanting “fairy tale for adults”: “La Belle et la Bête!”* and lots of films synchronized to music. In spite of the constant pressure, I find time, every night, over hot milk, for contemplation and a little incidental reading: am browsing Kierkegaard, loaned me by a fine, Israeli friend of Mallory’s (who is taking me to a fencing match and play in London in early march,) named Iko Meshoulem. Today I spend the afternoon with Chris Levenson. I love my lectures, and am reading about 15 to 20 plays a week. Never again in my life will I have such a concentrated spell (2-years!) to read and read, gradually devouring my ever-increasing “Wanted” list! I keep frustration at bay, by thinking that I get to know one play-wright really well each week. If I were working, I’d be very lucky to read one book a week. I need this time very badly, because I have a shocking lack of background: in poetry and novels, too; the one compensation is that what I know, I know almost by heart: like Chaucer, Yeats, Dostoevsky, etc. I can’t tell you how I love being able to plan for the continent! Have been invited to join some friends to the Isle of Majorca this spring, in case I don’t choose to go to Italy---much will depend on my summer plans, when I hope to see you, Warren, Elly, Mrs. Prouty, Mary Ellen Chase, and even Jane Anderson! Life is quite fine: all things come to those who work and wait. Love to dear grammy & grampy.
your own
sivvy
TO Elinor Friedman Klein
Friday 10 February 1956
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College
friday morning
february 10
dear dear elf . . .
listen, I am going quite mad with thinking about this summer! there is a cold wind blowing straight from siberia, and our gas fires went off at the most frigid time of the year, leaving us with frostbite, breath coming in great white clumps, and no place to hide. much less type. now all is cheerio again, and I am dancing on the orange tile rooftops and kicking over chimney pots.
LISTEN: how about you and me traveling for a hell of a long time together this summer!!?!! I can’t think of anybody on god’s green earth I would rather run around greek arenas with, and if I know us, we might just end up straddling the sphinx or masquerading as arabs in morocco or fighting for zion. I am teetering in wait for hearing about my fulbright renewal which, if it comes, will make me rich with not a worry, and if it doesn’t come, will make me start selling matches in moscow and trying to make a fast buck on the place pigalle. could be worse. today, though I am optimistic as mary martin.*
gordon is coming over this march to look for a university in germany at which to study next year; which couldn’t mean less, except it’ll be nice to have a hunky man to travel with on navy-expense account this spring; mother is coming this summer (to austria) if my grandmother gets over her recent operation for stomach cancer o.k., and I’ll be seeing her and showing her london, cambridge, england for about a week from june 13-to-yup, 21st! after that I’ll have 3 or 4 weeks (at least, depending on fulbright) and then summer term here which I may shorten, but s
hould take, and from august 20th to sept 30th definitely free. now all is contingent, like the best things in life, so let me know your dates, desires, and so on and on. I’m game for anywhere, esp, greece, italy, spain, africa, egypt, just to name a few, and would love to get some vague, cloudy, rose-colored idea of where you’d like to start out at, so I can think about easter. I’m a pro-motor-bike driver know, and it is fun, and quite comfortable, like a livingroom armchair, maybe. also, hitchhiking is a very real possibility.
let me, just to make you go utterly mad, tell you what happened christmas: and from now on, when I start telling you that I am in love with an arabian giant and everyone else looks like insects, laugh loudly and strongly in my face and tell me to wait a week. or even a day or 2. for I now have olympian perspective. and all because I didn’t get sick on the channel boat. I lived in Paris for 10 glorious rainy hell-and-heaven days with Sassoon: saw Ballet de Paris: Buzz Miller,* take it from me, is out-of-this world: danced george simenon’s surrealistic “La Chambre”, cyclic, detective, drama with vampire woman reminding me rather drastically of you, with black hair miles long, in her face, and all over the place; god, what a dance; seduces him and murders him; convulsions great. Went mad in stained-glass Ste. Chapelle, cried over all the colors, just all glass, many-colored, staining white radiance of eternity, etc. and notre dame on chrismas morning, frigid cold and dark; saw hundreds of whores, thanks to dear richard, who obligingly quoted price ranges: even heard one petite blond refuse someone, poor guy; hours walking, in lights: montmartre under snowpalace domes of sacre coeur, champs elysses, place de la concorde; mona lisa smiling pale yellow, winged victory hunking like god’s wife in louvre; impressionists: van gogh all yellow sunflowers, cezanne’s other-world blue-green “lac d’ annecy” which makes you realize all reproducers should be toasted in hell and their eyeballs burnt out; jardin de tuileries, where, yes, we went to puppet show with little kids and played on swings, and with sailboats, Christmas toys.
New Year’s Eve we took midnight express to Riviera, Sassoon and me. my first shot of the new year was the red sun exploding up out of the blazing blue of Angel’s Bay in the Med. Sea like the cyclops-eye of god. I made it a poem.* we lived in Nice, in a cheap room, with its own little wrought-iron balcony overlooking a garage and the surrounding mountains. Could see alps maritime like white breasts of aphrodite in distance; blue sea incredible; rented Lambretta, me learning to drive, rode through Beaulieu, Villefranch, Menton, round Cap Ferrat, through Monaco (where we gambled and lost at Monte Carlo and I bowed my head down and muttered the name of Grace Kelley), to Italian frontier. Then, another blue day, up in the little hills, with palms and orange trees, to Vence to the Matisse Chapel, which is god’s own heart and into which we entered by a miracle which I just wrote a 25-page story about which should immortalize me. love enters everywhere: I know this, and it sounds like hell or the ladies’ home journal, but its true. Sassoon and I shared all this, all life, crying, kicking each other, madly in love, growing, and all that. God, what a life.
And we have now said good-bye: reality comes in: he goes back to the states to be killed in the army (I’m sure it will kill him, he’s got such bad, sensitive health), and to find his metier (he’ll always earn pots of money; he’s lucky, the child of the devil and dionysus) and we both go about our responsibilities, which is the way grown-up people do. it is hell, because all the dear, sweet boys (mostly jewish and negro) here are loves, but none I could marry. we’ll see. I’ve years yet. and am damn happy. Tell some of this to Mr. Fisher; he knows all, anyway, and I admire him and he’ll always be The Force in my writing life: I’m wicked now, though, and have turned from poetry to prose, which gets in the bigness and people, and plots I’ve got to say now. LET ME KNOW ABOUT THE SUMMER.
Love & more love –
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tues.–Sat. 14–18 February 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Tuesday afternoon
February 14, 1956
Dearest mother . . .
Happy Valentine’s Day! A little late, but I’m thinking of you today, which is it. I do hope all is going well at home and that grammy is improving and that you are weathering the toll this must have taken from your energies. I am experiencing the drowsy, but relaxed, state that comes after my beginning of the week cram and late night of work before my supervision, and am freshly washed, my room cleaned and stocked with fruit and nuts and tea things, the fire going, and a lovely white flurry of snow outside the window.
One small piece of good news came this morning in the form of a check for 5 pounds 17 shillings which is the equivalent to $16.50, for my 7-page article on Cambridge life for the C. S. Monitor;* they also bought the pen-and-ink drawing that went with it: a view of house gables and chimney-pots from our little bathroom at Whitstead! Well, this is the most I’ve gotten from them yet, and hope to have some sort of letter telling me about it, as the check came from a London bank. Do send me a couple of copies of the Youth Page when it comes out, because I want one for myself to see the changes they made in the article for future reference, and think it would be a good idea to send a copy to the Fulbright people, as I have made so much of writing about university life here and sharing it with the untold millions who read the C. S. Monitor that I would like to prove it; there is nothing as convincing as newsprint!
I sent off those 3 checks by regular mail quite a while ago (Prouty’s for $25, the $100 Lyric check, and the Harvard Coop one, and just sent Mrs. Prouty’s $150 check this week). I am anxious to hear if you get them all right.
Saturday noon,
February 18
Hello again, dearest mother . . .
I received the checkbook and news articles with much thanks. I trust it is my check for $150 from Mrs. Prouty which you deposited and am still eager to hear if the others reached you. I don’t relish losing $125!
It is a lovely crisp bright day, and it snowed all morning, the first we’ve had here which has stayed more than two minutes after the sun came out. I had a very fine evening yesterday. Chris Levenson and I took the train to London late in the afternoon (after he’d just come back from lunch with E. M. Forster & others) and we had a pleasant ride through a flat, ugly white countryside, with the sun orange as an egg-yolk setting in the west. We went for supper in Soho, at a polyglot restaurant, which was very respectable, with crimson curtains and white-linen table cloths and flaming braziers for show and last minute warming, and waiters with foreign accents, but both of us were homesick for the intense, warm rapport that comes from the heart which pervades French restaurants. Anyway, we had good hors d’oeuvres, shish kebab, red wine and cheese, and dashed off to the Arts Theater of which we’re both members, to see W. S. Merwin’s* verse play “Darkling Child,” something that Christopher Fry’s experiments made possible, no doubt, about the Puritans and witches, with an intriguing play on the double-theme which I enjoyed (plus lots of contrast of light and dark in the verse, flame and sun, versus dark, and grave metaphors); as always, in verse, it is difficult to make it “move” (the way Shakespeare’s did) and Christopher Fry often makes his blazing language take the place of action, but here there was a certain fluidity of action, seasoned humor, and an interesting movement through ideas of Puritanism, love, and darkness which must be accepted on this earth.
Sometimes I come conscious of living here, in England, with a sharp jolt: life goes so fast and there is so much to do here, from week to week, that, out of simple practicality, one becomes dulled to all those little detailed differences that made the first adjustment so challenging and even exhausting: I accept the cold, the perpetual shivering, the bad coffee and starchy food, with a stoic amusement, and walk through historic arches with familiarity and a certain regrettable ignorance about their background in time: however, I get thrills of delight every time I pass the spires of king’s chapel, or go by the fruit and flower stands in market hill, or cross the bridg
e of sighs to climb the circular stone staircase to a cocktail party in st. john’s. I enjoy walking and looking alone, and thinking. Already I am planning about walks we will take, and all the things I want to show you when you come!
Occasionally, I am chastened and a little sad, partly because of the uncertainty of the coming years, and the cold whispers of fear when I think of the enormous question mark after next year (which is still not finally financed). I feel no real desire to come back to the United States, somehow, and would much rather either get a writing fellowship to live in the heart of Europe, or get a job of reporting (which is difficult to make practical) which would take me traveling and meeting people. The political frontiers here are most interesting, and I wish I could think of some angle which would result in a job which would challenge me to learn and keep intellectually awake. I am just about through with the academic community and beginning to itch for the practicality of work. I would like so much to work for a paper like the Monitor, but of course, don’t know how to break in. Ah, well, if you have any ideas, let me know. Meanwhile, love to all, and I hope grammy is getting much better and that you are keeping well.
your own –
Sivvy
TO Gordon Lameyer
Saturday 18 February 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Saturday afternoon
February 18, 1956
Dear Gordon . . .
I can’t really believe that I’ll be seeing you this April! I am afraid I get very sentimental about the idea of your coming from “Home”, and would love it if you could possibly manage to see mother before you leave (if you’re in Wellesley) and find out with your own eyes just how things are going there, how she is, etc. Perhaps you know that my grandmother just had an operation for stomach cancer, and I am quite concerned about mother’s bearing up under the double load of teaching and nursing. She is planning to come over to Europe this summer if all is well at home, and I am crossing my fingers that she makes it. Also, that Warren may get an Experiment grant to come to Germany.