by Sylvia Plath
Honestly, Gordon, there is so much to talk to you about that can never get across in letters, no matter how fast my fingers fly to catch up with ideas! I really look immensely forward to being with you and would enjoy traveling with you very much. As yet, I am not sure if I will get a Fulbright renewal or not (they have a strict policy against renewals, as they want “as many” as possible to come abroad, and only give about 20 out of 200 applicants in the U.K. I won’t hear till mid-April, although I do know that my application has passed the first round. I am staying to get my degree next June, no matter what, but would be glad to get this yearly financial uncertainty over with. As it is, I have to rack my brains to think of illegal ways to change my morally un-changeable pounds into foreign currency so I can go abroad in vacations and live on the grant then, too, which really pulls it thin). As a matter of fact, just letting myself think of seeing you makes me feel like bursting out with so much: thoughts, feelings, concerns, etc.
Ironically enough, I am intensely happy here and simply can’t imagine coming home again until I have made certain decisions. I love the excitement of living on the edge of the continent, with the nearness of tense political frontiers, different languages and countries, all available in a few day’s journey. I would give anything to get a grant to write abroad or a job reporting, all of which is no doubt pipe-dreaming, but I am rather tired of the slow, theoretical backwater of the academic community (which I would no doubt hunger for if I’d been away as long as you have) and long to Earn Money and write and Support Myself. I suppose I sometimes forget how good I have it, and am “supporting” myself through my classes & papers, reading dozens more books than I’d have a chance to if I worked, and having brief and intense tries at writing: which always goes better if compressed in a short space. Then, too, I’m having a wonderful chance at traveling on the continent, taking advantage of Paris, etc. off-season, and planning to try the more remote and unfrequented (by tourist) places in the long three-month summer.
Best news yet for me is that Sue Weller has a Marshall Fellowship to Oxford next year. I miss her terribly, as she was the best friend and confidante I’ve ever had and an ideal person to live & travel with, as we balance each other very well, temperamentally & intellectually. Could you, by the way, possibly get a pass to either Austria or Italy or both? I haven’t decided definitely where I’ll be the free week before you come, but think it will probably be Italy. We can decide as the Time draws near just where and when we should meet, depending on where your business takes you and where I am at the moment. Do write. I am so eager to see you again, and explore a bit of Europe with you, and talk and talk.
Love from Gardencourt,
Sylvia
TO Jon K. Rosenthal
Sunday 19 February 1956
TLS (picture postcard, photocopy),
Smith College
PAUL GAUGUIN – WHENCE COME WE? WHAT ARE WE? WHITHER GO WE?* 1897 – DETAIL – MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON.
Dear Jon . .
I was crushed that we missed so narrowly in Paris: I called your hotel as soon as I finally picked up my mail, and from a Kafka-like concierge, heard you’d just gone. Myself, left Paris with friend from Sorbonne, woke New year’s day on mediterranean, lived in Nice for a week, renting Lambretta motor-scooter for touring riviera. No tourists, nothing, all ours. Very fine, and I can’t believe people really live all year round in pink, yellow and orange houses under palms and lemon trees. Please tell me about your plans for future jaunts. I’m living in the usual attitude of prayer for Fulbright renewal.
love,
syl
TO Aurelia Greenwood Schober
Monday 20 February 1956*
ALS (picture postcard),
New York Public Library
6191 Peeter BREUGHEL (vers 1528–1569) Noce villageoise. Village wedding. Bauernhochzeit.* Nozze contadineche. Boda aldeana. Musee de Vienne (Ecole Flamande). Les editions nomis, Paris. Printed in France.
From: Sylvia Plath
Whitstead, 4 Barton Rd
Cambridge, England
Monday
Dearest grammy!
How happy I am to hear that you are home & coming along so well! I saw this gay card & wanted to share it with you! I am so glad you are enjoying the Talking Books – sometimes I would enjoy a voice reading my book assignments to me! It has been snowing a lot here this week, and I love seeing everything white, with black rooks & trees etching lovely landscapes. Tell mother I’m relieved she got all my checks safely & am very encouraged about her words on teaching. My best love to you and my very dear grampy. Get a little better each day!
your loving granddaughter –
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 24 February 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Friday afternoon
February 24, 1956
Dearest mother . . .
I am being very naughty and self-pitying and writing you a letter which is very private and which will have no point but the very immediate one of making me feel a little better. Every now and then I feel like being “babied”, and most especially now, in the midst of a most wet and sloppy cold, which deprived me of a whole night’s sleep last night and has utterly ruined today, making me feel aching and powerless, too miserable even to take a nap, and too exhausted to read the lightest literature. I am so sick of having a cold every month; like this time, it generally combines with my period which is enough to make me really distracted, simply gutted of all strength and energy. I wear about five sweaters and wool pants and knee socks and still I can’t stop my teeth chattering; the gas fire eats up the shillings and scalds one side and the other freezes like the other half of the moon. I was simply not made for this kind of weather. I have had enough of their sickbay and hospitals to make me think it is better to perish in one’s own home of frostbite than to go through their stupid, stupid System. How I miss the Smith infirmary, with the bliss of medication, enticing food, strong cocaine sprays, and all the comforts possible to make sinus and pain bearable! Here, the people have such an absurd inertia. They go around dying with flu and just plodding on and on. Perhaps the most shocking indication of their neglect is evident in their teeth. Almost every single British boy I know has his whole appearance ruined by the absence of several important front teeth; it is horrible, they evidently just let them rot in the mouth, and don’t seem to mind the gaps, like Emily Hahn* said. At present, you may gather, I feel like a total martyr. I am sick of being constantly shivering & biking in siberian winds.
Even while I write, I know this too shall pass, and someday, eons hence, it may possibly be spring. But I long so much for some sustaining hand, someone to bring me hot broth, and tell me they love me even though my nose is ugly and red and I look like hell. All the nagging frustrations and disappointments that one bears in the normal course of days are maliciously blown up out of all proportion simply because I am not strong enough to cope or be humorous or philosophical: my Vence story came back from the New Yorker (and now looks very absurd & sentimental to me); I cant smell, taste, or breathe, or even hear, and these blunted senses shut me off in a little distant island of impotence. Jane Baltzell, that beautiful blonde English major, suddenly seems incredibly gifted; you know how it is when someone seems to do everything better than oneself: well she sings, plays piano, writes, and has a joan-of-arc cap of blonde hair and eyes that are gray, green or blue, depending on what color she wears. She is very casual and lucky and goes around with the scottish girl in the house, and I am being sorry for myself, because there isn’t anyone here I can be deeply close to, like Sue, or Elly. I went through a period of telling all the boys I knew here that I couldn’t see any of them again (partly because they all reminded me how very different they unfortunately were from Richard), but now I ha
ve steeled myself to being very kind and sweet and only seeing them for the simple human contact, of talk over coffee, or a play; once again, I am accepting invitations, because I just can’t live merely in my head. Richard will be going back to America this year, to serve in the army, and heaven knows when I’ll ever see him again. I sometimes despair of ever finding anyone who is so strong in soul and so utterly honest and careful of me; having known him, in spite of his limitations, makes it so much more difficult to accept the companionship of these much much lesser beings.
In addition to all this slough of despond, I am robbed of a good two days studying and all my tight, careful plans for writing a paper and reading have gone up in one frosty breath. I am so appreciative of the family environment, where, no matter what, one rejoices with the success of one’s kindred and helps them through the hard places. I would take such delight in feeding and caring for my husband or children when they were sick or sad; human beings need each other so; they need love, and tender care. I was so lucky to have such a bright, strong constellation of friends at home; I have friends here, too, but so much time is spent reading and studying that all we share is occasional plays and teas or a walk now and then; nothing that approaches that depth of experience when you work or live side-by-side with someone, sharing the daily texture of life. It is so hard not to have anyone care whether one writes or not; I miss that very subtle atmosphere of faith and understanding at home where you all knew what I was working at, and appreciated it, whether it got published or not. It is the articulation of experience which is so necessary to me; even if I never publish again, I shall still have to write, because it is the main way I give order to this flux which is life. I have written one or two poems this week* which I shall copy out in my next letter. Please don’t worry that I am sad; it is normal, I think, when one feels physically shot and lousy, to feel helpless. But I am stoic, even though I feel very much like being petted and loved, and I shall weather this long barren winter. At least it makes me feel I deserve joy and pleasure and clement weather! This summer I shall follow the sun and participate in the primary joys of life, which are all frozen up now. Do bear with me, and forgive me for overflowing; but I really needed to talk to you, and spew out those thoughts which are like the blocked putridity in my head. Please give my love to grammy and grampy and my dear Warrie, too.
your own
sivvy –
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 25 February 1956
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
Saturday noon
February 25, 1956
Dearest mother . . .
I felt that after the wailing blast of the last letter, I owed you a quick follow-up to tell you that it is a new day: bright, with sun, and a milder aspect, and my intense physical misery is gone, and with it, my rather profound despair. I got some really potent nosedrops today, and, except for feeling a bit bushed from the maelstrom of pain and utter agony of yesterday, am somehow getting optimistic again. I had a complete physical exam last week (having had a chest xray) & was pronounced fine, but they suggested that I might see their psychiatrist* to fill in the details of my breakdown, and so I would know him, in case the stress of completely new circumstances made me feel I wanted to talk to him. Well, I went over to see him this morning, and really enjoyed talking to him. He is a pleasant, keen middle-aged man and I felt a certain relief in telling someone here a little about my past: in a way, it makes me feel a certain continuity. Well, I found myself telling him about my opinions of life and people in Cambridge, and as I went on, I realized that what I miss most is the rich intellectual and emotional contact I had with older people at home and at college. I am literally starved for friends who are older, wiser, rich with experience, to whom I can look up, from whom I can learn. I had such fine contact with Mr. Fisher, Mr. Kazin, Mary Ellen Chase, Mr. Gibian---in fact, all my professors at college, and then I enjoyed Mrs. Prouty, Betty Aldrich, Dr. Beuscher, the Cruikshanks, the Cantors and so on. I know there are no doubt brilliant dons here at Cambridge, and many men who are mature and integrated emotionally and intellectually, but I just haven’t met them. The best ones we get on the lecture platform, but our women supervisors in Newnham are, as I have said so often, bluestocking grotesques who know about life second-hand. As a woman, my position is probably more difficult, for it seems the Vitorian age of emancipation is yet dominant here: there isn’t a woman professor I have that I admire personally! I am not brilliant enough to invade the professors at the men’s colleges (the biggest ones only teach research students, and the dons supervise the men in their own colleges) but there is no medium for the kind of rapport I had at Smith. I realized with a shock this morning that there isn’t one person among my friends here or in Europe who is more mature than I! All the girls and boys I know are younger or barely equal (however brilliant they may be in their subjects) and I am constantly being sister or mother: only when I am sick, it seems (Chris Levenson came over last evening and gave me a certain amount of comfort and strength which helped turn the tide toward convalescence) can I be the dependent one. I have decided to make a point of seeing the nice man (Mr. Clarabut) and his wife whom I met on the train my first day here during Easter vacation. I would like to talk to an older couple, and he studied English here 20 years ago; I feel that while I am ignorant and untutored in much, I can give some of my native joy of life to older people, and balance our relation this way. I also am going to look up that couple whose address Dr. Beuscher gave me: I’ve put it off and off, and will try this. It seems that my chief complaint is the isolation on this island of the young, the immature, so often rash and desperate and unconsidered; I really need deep contact with the mellowness and perspective of older people which the orientals do so well to reverence. Knowing this, I shall take every chance to find some. I am going to talk to this Dr. Davy again in a couple of weeks, because he is the first adult I’ve spoken with in Cambridge, and it is an immense relief to get away from these intense adolescent personal relationships which go on among students here.
Tonight I am going to a party celebrating the publication of a new literary review* which is really a brilliant counteraction to the dead, uneven, poorly written 2 lit. magazines already going here, which run on prejudice and whim; this new one is run by a combination of Americans and Britains,* and the poetry is really brilliant, and the prose, taut, reportorial, and expert. Some of these writers are Jane’s friends, and I must admit I feel a certain sense of inferiority, because what I have done so far seems so small, smug and little. I keep telling myself that I have had a vivid, vital good life, and that it is simply that I haven’t learned to be tough and disciplined enough with the form I give it in words which limits me, not the life itself. Even in the midst of all this muttering, I feel I will go on, and be perhaps a competent writer who occasionally gets published: it is a very necessary ordering of experience for me, an aesthetic religion which gives a certain form and meaning to the flux of experience which is my life, and, as such, I will always need it. I feel very calm and steady now, and am learning to bear not being always “the best”; that is a consequence of giving my energies out to people and shared experience, as well as to reading, studying and writing: I could never be either a complete scholar or a complete housewife or a complete writer: I must combine a little of all, and thereby be imperfect in all. Although I would like to concentrate on writing in intense spurts when I feel like it. As it is, I must turn to rush off a Racine paper* and do some French translation which I have neglected scandalously while being sick. Do know that I am really happy, and it is not a contradiction to say that at the same time I am debating inwardly with problems: that is just life, and I am ready to take it and wrestle with it to the end of my days. I love you very much, and hope you will understand my present frankness and know that it has made me feel much better just to know that you are listening.
your own lov
ing –
sivvy
TO Richard Sassoon
Thursday 1 March 1956
TL (excerpt),* Smith College
March 1:* Thursday
It is somehow march and very late, and outside a warm large wind is blowing so that the trees and clouds are torn and the stars are scudding. I have been gliding on that wind since noon, and coming back tonight, with the gas fire wailing like the voice of a phoenix, and having read Verlaine and his lines cursing me, and having just come newly from Cocteau’s films “La Belle et La Bête” and “Orphée”* can you see how I must stop writing letters to a dead man and put one on paper which you may tear or read or feel sorry for.
So it is. Stephen Spender was at sherry this afternoon, blue-eyed and white-haired and long since become a statue who says “India, it depresses me terribly” and tells of the beggars who will always be beggars throughout eternity. Young men are leaving ships full of flowers and poems, and souls---delicate as snowdrops---duck belled white heads in my teacups.
I can hear the wounded, miraculous furry voice of the dear bête whispering so slow through the palace of floating curtains. And the Angel Heurtebise and Death melt through mirrors like water. Only in your eyes did the winds come from other planets, and it cuts me so, when you speak to me through every word of French, through every single word I look up bleeding in the dictionary.
I thought that your letter was all one could ask; you gave me your image, and I made it into stories and poems; I talked about it for awhile to everyone and told them it was a bronze statue, a bronze boy with a dolphin, who balanced through the winter in our gardens with snow on his face, which I brushed off every night I visited him.