The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  Meanwhile, love to all from your own,

  sivvy

 

  TO Richard Sassoon

  Tuesday 6 March 1956

  TL (excerpt),* Smith College

  Tuesday afternoon: March 6, 1956

  Only listen to me this last once.* For it will be the last, and there is a terrible strength to which I am giving birth, and it is your child as it is mine, and so your listening must christen it.

  The sun is flooding into my room as I write and I have spent the afternoon buying oranges and cheese and honey and being very happy after having for two weeks been very ill, because I can see every now and then how one must live in this world even if one’s true full soul is not with one; I give of my intensity and passion in minute homeopathic spoonfuls to the world; to the cockney woman in the subway lavatory when I said: look I’m human and she looked in my eyes and believed me and I kissed her; and the crooked man who sells malt bread; and a little dark-haired boy running a dog which urinated on the bridge post over a pool of white swans: to all these, I can give my fantastic urges of love, in little parcels which will not hurt them or make them sick, for being too strong.

  I can do this, and must do this. I hoped in a night of terror that I was not bound to you with that irrevocable love, for ever. I fought and fought to free myself as from the weight of a name that could be a baby or could be a malignant tumor; I knew not. I only feared. But although I have gone crying (god, have I) and battering my head against spikes, desperately thinking that if I were dying, and called, you might come, I have found that which I most feared, out of my weakness. I have found that it is beyond your power ever ever to free me or give me back my soul; you could have a dozen mistresses and a dozen languages and a dozen countries, and I could kick and kick; I would still not be free.

  Being a woman,* it is like being crucified to give up my dearest lares and penates, my “household gods”: which are all the small, warm gestures of knowing and loving you: writing you (I have felt smothered, writing a kind of diary to you, and not mailing it: it is getting ominously huge, and each time is a witness of a wrestling with my worst angel) and telling you my poems (which are all for you) and little publishings, and, most terrible of all, seeing you, even for the smallest time, when you are so near, and god knows when we shall be pardoned for being so scrupulous.

  This part of the woman in me, the concrete, present, immediate part, which needs the warmth of her man in bed and her man eating with her and her man thinking and communing with her soul: this part still cries to you: why, why will you not only see me and be with me while there is still this small time before those terrible years and infinite years; this woman, whom I have not recognized for 23 years, whom I have scorned and denied, comes to taunt me now, when I am weakest in my terrible discovery.

  For, I am committed to you,* out of my own choice (although I could not know when I let myself first grow toward you that it would hurt, hurt, hurt me so eternally) and I perhaps know now, in a way I never should have known, if you made life easy and told me I could live with you (on any terms in this world, only so it would be with you)---I know now how deeply, fearfully and totally I love you, beyond all compromise, beyond all the mental reservations I’ve had about you, even to this day.

  I am not simply telling you this because I want to be noble; I very much didn’t want to be noble. That most intimate immediate woman (which makes me, ironically, so much yours) tormented me into delusion: that I could ever free myself from you. Really, how ridiculous it was: how should a mistress free me. When even you, and even what gods there are, can not free me, tempting me with all kinds of men on all sides?

  I thought even, at the most desperate time, when I was so sick and could not sleep, but only lie and curse the flesh, whom* I was going to marry two years ago in a spluge of contrived social-conscience: we looked so well together! So he is coming to study in Germany, and I thought perhaps if I could keep him skiing and swimming I might live with him, if only he never wrote, or let me argue with him (because I always win) or looked at a bed. This cowardice terrified me; for it was that. I could not admit then, as I do now, the essential tragic fact: I love you with all my heart and soul and body; in your weakness as in your strength; and for me to love a man even in his weakness is something I have never all my life been able to do before. And if you can take that weakness in me which wrote my last cringing, begging-dog letter and admit that it belongs to the same woman who wrote the first letter in her strength and faith, and love the whole woman, you will know how I love you.

  I was thinking of the few times in my life* I have felt I was all alive, tensed, using everything in me: mind and body, instead of giving away little crumbs, lest the audience be glutted with too much plum-cake.

  Once, I was on the top of the ski slope, having to go down to a small figure below, and not knowing how to steer; I plunged; I flew, screaming with joy that my body braced and mastered this speed; and then a man stepped carelessly in my path and I broke my leg. Then there was the time with Wertz when the horse galloped into the street-crossing and the stirrups came off leaving me hanging around his neck, jarred breathless, thinking in an ecstasy: is this the way the end will be? And then there are the many many times I have given myself to that fury and that death which is loving you, and I am, to my own knifing hurt, more faithful than is kind to my peace and my wholeness. I live in two worlds and as long as we are apart, I always shall.

  Now that this sudden articulate awareness of my most terrible eternal predicament has come to me, I must know that you understand this and why I had to write you then and now: if you do not ever want to write to me again, send me a blank, unsigned postcard, something, anything, to let me know that you did not tear my words and burn them before knowing that I am both worse and better than you thought. I am human enough to want to be talking to the only other human who matters in this world.

  I suppose I was most appalled that you should bind me to you (so that neither of us have the power to break this, through all hate, venom, disgust and all the mistresses in the world) and that you could leave me thus cut open, my heart utterly gone, without anesthetic or stitching; my vital blood was spilling on the barren table, and nothing could grow. Well, it still is spilling. And I wonder why you fear seeing me even in the time we have: for I have faith in you, and cannot believe (as I once wanted to) that it’s merely for convenience, so I won’t overlap with other women. Why must you be so much like Brand:* so utterly intransigeant?

  I could see it, if you thought your being with me would bind me to you more, or give me less freedom to find someone else, but knowing now, as I do and you must, that I am so far bled white that no mere abstinance of knives can cure me, why do you forbid our making the small, limited world we have. Why so tabu? I ask you to ask yourself this. And if you have the courage or understanding in you, to tell me.

  When I was weak, there was a reason; now I see none. I see not why I should not live in Paris with you and go to your classes and read French with you. I am not any more perilous, outside myself. Why do you make our case (which is hell enough, and we have enough to test us in these coming cruel years) so utterly and absolutely rigid? I can take the even harder horror of letting myself melt into feeling again, and knowing it must freeze again, if only I can believe it is making a minute part of time and space better than it would have been by stubbornly staying always apart when we have so little time to be near.

  I ask you to turn these things in your heart and mind, for I see a sudden deep question now: why do you flee me, if you know I would rather make life rich under shadow of the sword? You said before that I wanted something of you you couldn’t give. Well, so I do. But now I understand what must be (which I didn’t then) and understand also that my faith and love for you cannot be blunted or blinded by drinking or hurling myself into other men’s beds. I found this, and know this, and what do I have?

  Understanding. Love. Two worlds. I am simple enough to lo
ve the spring and think it foolish and terrible that you can deny it to us when it is the wonder of it that is uniquely ours. With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be. But in a way, it is harder for me, for my body is bound to faith and love, and I feel I cannot really ever live with another man; which means I must become (since I could not be a nun) a consecrated single woman. Now if I were inclined to a career as a lawyer or journalist that would be all right.

  But I am not. I am inclined to babies and bed and brilliant friends and a magnificent stimulating home where geniuses drink gin in the kitchen after a delectable dinner and read their own novels and tell about why the stock market is the way it will be and discuss scientific mysticism (which, by the way, is intriguing: in all forms: several tremendous men in botany, chemistry, math and physics, etc. here are all mystics in various ways)---well, anyhow, this is what I was meant to make for a man, and to give him this colossal reservoir of faith and love for him to swim in daily, and to give him children; lots of them, in great pain and pride. And I hated you most, in my unreason, for making me woman, to want this, and making me your woman alone, and then making me face the very real and terribly immediate possibility that I would have to live my life chastely as a schoolteacher who sublimated by influencing other women’s children. More than anything else in the world I want to bear you a son and I go about full with the darkness of my flame, like Phedre, forbidden by what auster pudeur, what fierté?

  In a way, I suppose, I felt you were like Signor Rappacini who bred his only daughter to exist solely on perilous poisonous food and atmosphere exhaled by a poisonous exotic plant:* she became fatally unable to live in the normal world, and a death-menace to those who wanted to approach her from this world.

  Well, that is what I became, for a while. I really cruelly wounded several people here, desperately, because I wanted to get back to that normal world and live and love in it. Well, I couldn’t, and I hated them for showing me that.

  Now this is all, and you must know it. But you must also let me know by some means that you know it. If you are not too scrupulous and why, now, are you? You might write me a letter and tell me honestly why, if you do not fear my childish pleadings, which are far far away and dead after today, why you refuse to let me make a few days of spring with you in Paris? I am coming, and I feel it is somehow now honestly superfluous and much too abstract and stringent of you to pretend there is left any important reason why you do not wish to see me.

  I know if I were coming in a chaos, a turmoil of accusations, or even making it harder to leave you again (which it may well be, but it is possible to manage this)---I know then that you would have a right to forbid. But all I want is to see you, be with you, walk, talk, in a way which I imagine people past the age of love could do (although I am not pretending I would not passionately want to be with you) but we have come into the time and understanding where we could be most kind and good to each other. Even if those eternal years are upon us, why do you now refuse to see me?

  I believe I can ask you this, and not have you feel that there is some disease of over-scrupulosity that makes letters reveal weakness or carry contagion. As a woman who know herself now, I ask you. And if you have courage, and look into yourself, you will answer. For I shall come, and respect your wish; but I shall also now ask why you so wish. Do not, o do not make an artificial stasis which is unbreakable; break and bend and grow again, as I have done only today.

  TO Elinor Friedman Klein

  Tues.–Thurs. 6–8 March 1956

  TLS (aerogramme), Smith College

  tuesday morning in march

  dear dear elly . . .

  by now it is thursday night which shows how time passes; I said “dear dear elly” and then a letter from sassoon came which sent me raving for two days, while running to supervisions and reading electras* and translating ronsard (o pick ye roses, roses, baby) and mourning faustus trying to leap up to his god: who pulls me down?

  you have got to listen to this, because I am full of it, and I spent one whole day banging my head into rocks and indulging in those salt sprees of crying, railing and saying: o my god. well, it’s like this. after all that, that paris and riviera and vence, we came to a point where for the first time in my life I felt I actually could see giving my life to this one man; all the nagging conventional society doubts while there, didn’t matter a damn. but, coming like rhett butler from his slambang hedonist life through love that is holy, sassoon, not saying “I don’t give a damn” and leaving her on the stairs holding a piece of red dirt, but saying: “two years of army (it may kill him) and I must make a fortune and only then found a family, and always in the holy skies our love is and will be: someday; meanwhile, I must be noble and give you your freedom.” so I went on a holy jag of vowing eternal faith and wrote a beautiful raging furiously inspired letter saying as how I was always here for him in this world, loving him, and being here making light and being here; on the stairs, with my little hunk of red dirt, coaxing it to grow, or at least sprout a few sonnets & give me enough to eat. but after two months I had that daily angel come wrestle with me: the kind that says: so okay, you are noble and holy, but why can’t you see him, because it is spring and paris, and then there is italy; so the eternal years are swording it over your head, but why can’t you just see him this spring, before he goes back to be killed in the army?

  well, I wrote him a crude, materialistic letter, dictated by this pragmatic angel, and sent it off, asking him to tell me if he would not see me in paris, italy, etc., and also to say he had a mistress, or a wife, or something that would get this obssession out of me and let me enter the normal real daily sherry-&-cashew-nuts world where I had become as deadly poisonous as rappacini’s daughter, hurting well-meaning people right and left simply because they were not richard sassoon. this letter disillusioned him terribly; he sent me a disquieting note, a dear postcard of him as a thinking gargoyle on notre-dame, and two letters he had written before and not sent: with the most fantastic holy reaction to my words of my first saintly letter, and a kind of promise to come crashing out of the aether in countless years hence and claim me amidst blood, thunder, and apotheosis as his woman and all the rest of it. well, I screamed, yelled, and kept finally calmer: I thought: so no one can free me from him, and I must face living in a world of midgets and parceling out my big huge crying love in little homeopathic doses, so no one will get sick, while he scrupulously won’t let me see him until he conquers the stock-market and all the professions; then I thought: if I am ready to accept this and not beg, or plead or be impossible as I was in the 2nd wailing letter, why can’t we be happy as hell in spring in paris anyway, if I choose to admit no absence will free me, because I am committed, until some big, brilliant combination of all the men I have ever met, plus jean marais* (alias orphée) comes and transforms me into the Woman I am with richard: writer, poet, reader, sleeper, eater, and all except skiier and like that. I wish to hell I would meet some other man who could break richard’s image & free me, because I miss being of the world around me: a kind of schizophrenic, living in cambridge with her clocks and books and running naked on the bay of angels in her head with sassoon.

  well, all this is so complicated, with all it’s qualifying nuances, that I can only hint at the turmoil it threw me in: especially as I am reading d. h. lawrence’s “the man who died” (god, you must must immediately read: it’s very short: but, with reversal, I can know how the man who died felt, and all that about the sun; read it, please) and lawrence died in vence, which was our last place. and I am also writing a paper of “passion as destiny” in racine’s plays and learning about the redemptive power of love in my moralist (!) lectures.

  well, now I am suddenly happy, because the world here is getting richer, a bit, and it is getting to be spring, which in itself is holy, with snowdrops. and on the spur of the moment I called a guy in london and said
I’d share expenses driving to paris with him at the end of march. I feel totally myself now, not desperate, or begging, but positive and seeing no honest reason to be so damn scrupulous; knowing about the honesty of that love is the hell: if he loved someone else it would be so simple; so “goodbye, it was just one of those things.” now, it is hell; but I have from somewhere got the guts to go to paris, stand in his door, rouse him from whatever mistress it is now, and say, smiling “here I am darling. how about coffee?” we shall see. then to gordon in munich, who will be sweet and kind and friendly and big and strong with wide shoulders.

  enough: I can’t wait to see you in june! I dream all my nights: let’s revel in spain & sun (portugal too) those 1st 4 weeks, & try just try to get across gibraltar to tangier! then, after my summer term, perhaps greece & maybe turkey . . . maybe maybe. write write. tell me you understand. just wrote some poems; must send you the black panther one. will send to mr. fisher too, in a week or so. understand about how I had to blather about sassoon; you know, so I tell you. it’s mad and holy, like dostoevsky. write write, love.

  SYL

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Friday 9 March 1956

  TLS with envelope,

  Indiana University

  Friday morning

  March 9, 1956

  Dearest of mothers . . .

  It is a beauteous morning, and I have my windows thrown wide open to let the crisp, clear air and pale sunlight flood into my room; song sparrows are twirping and chirring in the gutters under my windows, and the orange-tile roof tops are all sparkling in the light, which reminds me so of the chilled champagne air of Vence, Nice and the January riviera. I felt especially desirous of just hugging you and sharing this lovely morning, so, in substitute, I am writing this letter before I set out to the laundromat and my weekly shopping, and also sending you my two most recent, and, I think, best poems which I have written in the last weeks. (Pardon the rather smutchy carbons!)