The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  I made your image wear different masks, and I played with it nightly and in my dreams. I took your mask and put it on other faces which looked as if they might know you when I had been drinking. I performed acts of faith to show off: I climbed a tall spiked gate over a moat at the dead hour of three in the morning under the moon, and the men marveled, for the spikes went through my hands and I did not bleed.

  Very simply, you were not wise to give me your image. You should know your woman, and be kind. You expect too much of me; you know I am not strong enough to live merely in that abstract Platonic realm out of time and flesh on the other side of all those mirrors.

  I need you to do this one more thing for me. Break your image and wrench it from me. I need you to tell me in very definite concrete words that you are unavailable, that you do not want me to come to you in Paris in a few weeks or ask you to come to Italy with me or save me from death. I think I can live in this world as long as I must, and slowly learn how not to cry at night, if only you will do this one last thing for me. Please, just write me one very simple declarative sentence, the kind a woman can understand; kill your image and the hope and love I give it which keeps me frozen in the land of the bronze dead, for it gets harder and harder to free myself from that abstract tyrant named Richard who is so much more, being abstract, than he really is in this world . . . . For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Saturday 3 March 1956

  TLS (aerogramme),

  Indiana University

  Saturday morning

  (excuse me,)*

  March 3

  Dearest mother . . .

  I am sitting on the floor in front of the gas fire drying my freshly washed hair in my favorite lounging costume: gold slippers, charcoal gray slacks and socks, and a fine paisley velvet overblouse which I don’t think you’ve seen as I just got it before leaving NYC: it has my favorite colors: black, white, aqua and yellow in a rich print and I love it. I am preparing for a stoic weekend of solid work: reading and writing two papers, and in general catching up on all I missed last week with this devastating sinus cold; I still can’t go out of doors without gasping like a beached fish and feel “just over” the border as far as strength goes, but if I can plod through the obligations of this next rough week, I feel light and air are just ahead: already the grounds of Newnham are purple and gold with crocuses and white with snowdrops!

  I do want to tell you how much your letters mean to me: last Monday those phrases you copied from Max Ehrman (sp?)* came like milk-and-honey to my weary spirit; I’ve read them again and again: isn’t it amazing what the power of words can do? I also loved your two letters which came today. I don’t know if you’ve felt how much more mellowed and chastened I’ve become in the last half year, but I certainly have gotten beyond that stage of “not listening” to advice, and feel that I have been confiding in you through letters more than ever before in my life, and welcome all you think wise to tell me. Perhaps you still don’t realize (why is it we are so much more articulate about our fault-findings than our praises, which we so often take forgranted?) how very much I have admired you: for your work, your teaching, your strength and your creation of our exquisite home in Wellesley and your seeing that Warren and I went to the Best colleges in the United States (best for each of us, respectively, I’m sure of it!) All this is your work, your encouragement, your produce, and as a family, we have weathered the blackest of situations, fighting for growth & new life: perhaps I most especially admire your resiliance and flexibility symbolized by your driving, which seems to open new possibilities for a richer, wider life in many other ways, too. I want you to know all this in words, for while I have been most verbal about all the limits in our lives, I don’t think I’ve ever specifically told you all that I love and revere, and it is a great, great deal!

  I am at present wrestling with my own private angels, and the hardest part is having to wait through the next interminable days of work & slow recovery, still fighting weakness & that depressing blocking of breath which makes all that should be a delight in work an arduous task. But I shall come through, and have great hopes for spring, having pruned and planned changes in my future program here, involving much less weekly supervised work, concentrating, as well as spreading out my subjects, and giving time to write. Only 2 more weeks, and then easter vacation.

  I have made a sharp alteration in that radical treatment of men I’ve been giving hitherto (telling at least 4 that I could never see them again) and instead of cursing them all for not being Richard, or not being strong enough to overcome his image in my heart, I am casually accepting friends and dates merely for the present companionship and asking for nothing more than human company; I am also being much more generous and kind and tolerant, and taking life easier. There is no reason why I can’t enjoy plays and movies and a little talk with boys who are nice & personable, just because I think I am made for a “great love.”

  Anyhow, after Monday & Tuesday spent in my room, nursing myself & cooking meals on the gas ring, I started classes & life again, even though still weak. I went to a charming light opera “Sir John in Love”* (libretto from “Merry Wives”) put on by the Cambridge Opera group Wednesday with Iko Meshoulam, a very nice, cynical Israeli friend of Mallory’s; Thursday I went to see Cocteau’s modern, psychological fairytale film “Orphée”* with Derek Strahan,* a sweet, if rather mixed-up boy in the French society (the film was most dynamic: a fantastic modernization of the legend, including love between the worlds of earth & death, with mirrors as the gate of death, and motorcyclists, frighteningly anonymous & powerfully destructive, as death’s henchmen); last night, I saw Frank Sinatra---I admire him immensely as an actor---in Nelson Algren’s story “Man with the Golden Arm”,* a fine film about drug-addiction, marred only by the improbable ending, great photography; seen with Hamish Stewart,* a rather impossible Canadian who drinks & smokes too much, but is aware of a certain pub-life & pub characters in Cambridge which I find occasionally refreshing after weak intellectual tea.

  Speaking of that, had sherry at Chris Levenson’s Thursday with Stephen Spender & others. When I get a few more recent (and more sociological) poems ready, I’ll send them to his magazine; one thing, British literary circles are so inbred; every writer ends up in London, knowing everything about the work, mistresses & personal idiosyncrasies of everyone else & talks and analyses the others continually; blessed be America for its catholic bigness! Met, by the way, a brilliant ex-Cambridge poet* at the wild St. Botolph’s Review party last week; will probably never see him again (he works for J. Arthur Rank in London) but wrote my best poem* about him afterwards: the only man I’ve met yet here who’d be strong enough to be equal with; such is life; will send a few poems in my next letter so you can see what I’m doing.

  much much love,

  sivvy

 

  PS: just a very few practical requests: my favorite plaid viyella shirt just dissolved at the elbows yesterday after five years of constant wear: if you ever see a warm, neatly tailored wool shirt of good plaid or black & white like Cantor girls, do send it: they don’t have them here; also could you look out for some gold-mesh slippers with lowcut foot (not high to ankles like yours) for mine are hanging about my feet by several shining threads! will also eventually need more thyroid: they don’t think it exists here!

  xxx

  sivvy

  TO Gordon Lameyer

  Sunday 4 March 1956

  TLS (aerogramme),

  Indiana University

  Whitstead

  Sunday evening

  March 4, 1956

  Dear Gordon . . .

  This letter is in the nature of an sos: I woke up from a week’s seige of sinus this morning and realized I’d stopped shivering for the first time in 6 months; purple and yellow crocuses sprang up under my feet when I went to lunch; I also have been dreaming about you: we are always skii
ng! A look at the calendar shocked me in to realizing that in roughly a month I will be in a foreign country I’ve never seen before, probably and preferably, with you. Is this true?

  Perhaps this letter bristling with questions will cross one of yours in the middle of the Atlantic, but in any case, I beg a few firm commands from your direction, and soon. I want you to feel perfectly free to see me when and for how long you want and where, likewise, but I will tell you that I can make all my vacation plans revolve around you, and would like very very much to do so. Hence, I shall throw up various combinations and permutations and tentative ideas, which I beg you to sift out and decide upon.

  First: I am “free” from the last week in March to the 14th (or, at latest, 16th) of April. According to your last letter, you’ll be in Germany the first days of April and will want to do business in Hanover & look for universities, check? So much is sure?

  Well, I have a feeling, after looking at a map of Europe for several hours with undivided attention, that Munich would be the best place to meet. The date is up to you, contingent on the following factors:

  I have a passionate and irrational desire to spend a good part of spring in Italy: gondoling in Venice, blowing glass, seeing Florence, Rome, and hopefully Naples and Capri. Now maybe you have done all this; I forget. Or maybe don’t give a damn about doing this in April. If so, tell me, and I will probably go to Italy myself before I see you, meeting you in Munich as soon as you want to see me and touring universities with you.

  IF you would be at all interested in going to discover Italy with me after your university hunt, there is another possibility or two: I might be able to drive this woman from Dover (right over the channel most of the way down to Trieste, meeting you in Germany, or even Switzerland or Italy after you have done all your business in Germany, and go to Italy for a week or ten days, probably beginning later in April, around the 7th or 9th, to let you get your German deal over with. This woman is going to write me (I answered an ad in the Times!) and it might be a little cheaper and more pleasant to slowly drive her Morris minor across the continent, but I’d have to leave her a week at least before the end of her trip, so I don’t know if she’ll want me. Ideally, I’d like this best; of course, I might like it even better going around Germany with you from the day you get there and heading to Italy with you afterwards. In any case, I must spend a week in Italy either before you come or with you afterwards.

  Now, I am floundering between two x factors: you and the woman in the Morris minor. My choice (if she gives me one) will depend on you. If you don’t want Italy, I’ll probably drop the Morris and go there before you come, meeting you early in Germany. If you do want to go to Italy after you finish in Germany, I’ll either drive to meet you with her, or come on my own earlier. (The driving would postpone our rendezvous, of course). Please, please, tell me what you’d like best to do!

  Classes for me begin around the 17th of April, and if you aren’t completely fed up with me by then, perhaps you’d like to come to Cambridge for a few days & go hear Daiches & Leavis or whoever is lecturing, and let me initiate you into the delights of Cambridge. Maybe we could see a play or so in London. “Everything”, as they sing so sweetly, “depends on you!” Well, almost.

  I am just finished writing a 15 page paper on “Passion and Destiny in Racine’s Plays”,* and thus am in rather a stupor, having been typing steadily for about 2 days. I scarcely have a minute to realize how much I am reading that I didn’t even know existed last year: Ibsen, Strindberg, Chekhov, Synge, Yeats, Racine, Corneille, Chapman, Marlowe . . . I’ve devoured over 50 plays this term, read a little 16h cen. French, worked in classical tragedy (will you believe it, I’d never read a Greek tragedy till I came here!) Heard & saw: the Greek version (!) of Euripides’ “Bacchae” here last week, complete with Cambridge students chanting Greek choruses, modern original music; heard opera “Sir John in Love” (from “Merry Wives” by Vaughan Williams); also Cocteau’s magnificent films; “La Belle et la Bête” and “Orphée”, fantastically fine surrealist fairytales. God, Gordon, every week there are magnificent plays put on by the amateur theater groups, and terrific movies: am going to see Shakespeare’s “Troilus & Cressida” next week.* Do come over here and join me! It is so wonderful to think you are going to be on the continent next year.

  WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Love from your April fool,

  sylvia

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Tuesday 6 March 1956

  TLS (aerogramme),

  Indiana University

  Tuesday morning

  March 5, 1956*

  Dearest mother . . .

  I loved your wonderful letter this morning, & trust that although the “enclosed” was not enclosed, that it will be “coming”: meaning that I hope nothing was enclosed originally because it wasn’t there in the letter. You have no idea how much I appreciate your voice; I can even hear the capitals, for emphasis, and must admit that I love every word. The most difficult lack here is, as I have said before, not so much that everyone I know is younger than I, but that there is no balance of older, wiser, characters which combine understanding and humor and creative stimulation: I deprived myself of all my “father figures” in the form of my professors at Smith, and all my mothers in the form of you, Dr. Beuscher, Mrs. Prouty, Mrs. Cantor, and my woman professors. I feel none of the bravado of the little tailor who killed “seven giants at one blow,”* for I am only too aware that a healthy, reciprocal relationship between older and younger people is of inestimable value, for both sides, as long as there is no perilous and ambivalent dependence or over-domination involved.

  I am working hard to “compensate” for this influence: I have three excellent lecturers: Basil Willey (in the moralists; a world-wide expert in his field); Dr. Redpath, former lawyer, brilliant in discussion classes in aspects of tragedy, a real challenge; and dear, humanist David Daiches, a visiting lecturer in the modern novel (much more vital, flexible than the dour puritannical Dr. F. R. Leavis, whom I also enjoy, in a more limited way) whose course is a total delight: Joyce, V. Woolf, Huxley, Samuel Butler . . . I admire the man as well as the mind. But these people are all removed to the lecture platform, and there is no personal interplay, which I savored so much in my units at Smith where one could literally “imbibe” the genius of a Patch, a Kazin, a Fisher, a Drew, and, although one’s mind was ignorant, it was receptive, and there was a reciprocal current of ideas: our papers received comment, we did not just drink in the lecturer’s words in notes. Now, there is a vivid, brilliant, opinionated young woman* lecturing in the moralists here whom I am really angling for as a supervisor next term and next fall; I feel I could “grapple with” her mind; she seems the kind one would work like mad for, and I miss this among the women here so much: their grotesqueries and sublimations as people undermines a really deep complete admiration of them: I believe so strongly that the “whole life” must be judged and not just the worth of academic essays.

  I have also several projects for consolidation of my program: I am very excited about becoming really proficient in French and German, and am going to drop all ideas of taking Italian next year and find out about being tutored (at my own expense, since German is not a part of the English tripos) in German next term and next year, while reading French daily on my own (how I love that language) and perhaps going to lectures just to hear it. I feel perfectly justified in arranging my program to my best advantage, and German & French are required for advanced degrees in America, and while here, with Germany and France at my fingertips, I want to plunge into the languages. I also am going to campaign for one supervision a week instead of 3, so I won’t feel this rat-race of cramming, where no matter how hard & much I work, I still can’t feel I’ve done all that’s required. I need time to write. So, I feel I am facing my problems, and doing the best I can with them. I really want to stay here next year, because I love it here; I need to build up the kind of independence which can get along
on its own, while preferring of course to be surrounded by a rich group of friends of all ages; this too will come.

  This two-week siege of sinus has really been the cause of my temporary despair, because I felt so frustrated: having so much work I wanted to do, and being totally exhausted from coughing and not sleeping because of not being able to breathe: I simply don’t see how one head can manufacture so continually such green guck; it is appalling. But with this week and the end of term coming in 10 days, I see light again, even if I still am battling this inner putrescence (I miss my cocaine sprays; I really must build up a drastic medicinal attack which I can use when this comes again; I’m not alone in suffering, lots of people have been miserable – English, too! but with sinus, it hangs on & is much more unpleasant).

  The “Jane Baltzell myth” has at last been dealt with, too, thank goodness. The explosion came when she wrote & underlined in pencil all over 5 new books I’d just loaned her; she’d evidently felt that since I underlined my own books in black ink, nothing further could damage them. Well, we had a real session, both of us agreeing to get all our troubles out in the open, and I feel much better. Actually, we are too much alike to be friends, and this “overlapping of identity” has bothered us both in different ways: we are both “American girls who write”, with similar humor, and used to being “queens” among our men, and together we puzzled this odd situation out; very simply, we will never be at all close (as we might have been in America) ironically, because one of us here is enough in any situation, and both of us intuitively dominate social affairs. She admitted that in my presence she suddenly got very clumsy (as I felt obtuse, I suppose) & we came to a positive working agreement which got rid of all suspicion and resentment & makes a healthier “laissez faire” situation. So I go on facing my private dragons, and finding a rather powerful satisfaction in wrestling with angels. So don’t worry; I’ll use your coming check for a weekend in London after term is over.