The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 1

by Sylvia Plath

  Got six Chaucer critical books from college libe; will not get another thing till I’ve finished these and philosophy books---St. Augustine and St. Paul. Ridiculously enough, I’ve had trouble finding the right translation of the Epistles; bookdealers look at me like I’m crazy. Well.

  Today, a finishing of business and then work: laundry, odds and ends of shopping; etc. Read several Nations at Newnham libe---couldn’t resist finding your poem; it was there. Also several terrible pseudo-poems by wiseguy John Ciardi,* who I can’t really criticize as a person for he wrote many eulogic things after he heard me poetry-read at that contest last year and helped me get two published by sending editors names; the Nation is in very bad need of good poetry; a nice Robert Hillyer*---no, that was in the New Yorker, again about a bird, humming-bird, flying into glass window after bright illusion flowers and “hit nothingness, and hit it hard.”* The New Yorker poetry editor is a psychiatric case; they are split between the most appallingly sentimental nature and love poetry, very still in movement, unrhymed often as not, and this jig-jogging pirouetting funny-wit stuff, usually take-offs on some quoted news item of the moment. Read the story on Spain--“Road to Barcelona”,* and was furious; will write “Discontented Mayor”* and see if they take it; much room for vignette stories; short revealing episodes. To get a Story in there! No other news as yet; am sending severalpoems with letter to Editor Weeks* in answer to his---Dryad, November Graveyard, etc. Feel like Poetry lifted an albatross from my neck with those six blessed poems gone---all about love and you; they must be in the market for a female lyricist who sings the glory of love and joins herself with the green sprouted world instead of going psuedo-male intellectual Platonist like Kathleen Raine,* or bitter-sour lovelorn like Teasdale, Parker, or even Millay. Joy, joy. A woman’s place is in her husband’s bed. We shall be living proof that great writing comes from a pure, faithfull, joyous creative bed. I love you; I will live like an intellectual nun without you; I need noone but you and look forward in a queer way to the concentrated work loneliness will crush out of me this year. Loved your letter* and will use much of it, I think – the article is gestating; I feel it kick on occasion – will wait it out – I love you like fury –

  your own,

  sylvia

  TO Ted Hughes

  Thursday 4 October 1956

  TLS on RMS Queen Elizabeth

  letterhead, family owned

  Thursday, October 4

  Dearest Teddy-ponk . . .

  it is early, almost, and raw and gray; a huge many-legged green grasshopper has got in; mail over bitter acrid turkishy coffee quite uneventful, meaning no acceptances, rejections or large checks. Sweet note from Elly, back home, who is about to send book of TV scriptwriter Paddy Chayevsky’s plays;* should be fine guide to how America wants them; he’s The Fair Haired Boy; all his plays get on Broadway or in movies. A dear handwritten note from your dentist Kaplan, in answer to mine which I sent with check---thanking him for the care of that most precious orifice; he said he’d be glad to see you any time you’re in London for further attention---“further attention”---there’s something so discreetly hushed and mortuary about that, isn’t there? Also a note in feminine handwriting from someone named Terry* on a card showing giraffes, elephants and negroes bearing letters and mailboxes; this really put me off; this Terry-person has been advised by somebody or other in America that I can answer “her million questions” over tea, sherry, coffee---she gives me choice. I shall put it off and off; I shall ignore it. A new American Fulbright girl, Dina Ferran*---the Other, arrived yesterday; very sweet, more quiet blonde type doing archaeology and engaged to be married next August; took her to supper last night, asked her to explain flint to me, this morning am taking her shopping, leaving her in market hill after a few necessary purchases, and running home to write. I can’t wait till the other Old Guard comes---I’m damned if I’m going to play hostess to sundry Indians, South Africans, etc. Mrs. Milne brings them up to my den, where I growl welcome, as if I were supposed to be Perle Mesta*---god, I hate people; they are nice, but that isn’t it. I don’t want any of it.

  Yesterday, O Listen, I went to the tailor, fingered the beautiful cloth of your suit and jacket with tears; they just emphasized your absence by being empty, and paid the man the unprecedented sum of £37.13s! He is sending them off to Yorkshire today. I have now, in three days, spent the incredible sum of £70. But our bills are paid; I am left with £10 in the bank, and same in cash to last till November 20 (my next check must pay Newnham in October). So there it is. The £10 making up the £70 after paying your two bills went largely on postage stamps, bike repairs and things like soap. Was welcomed with open arms by the Lady of the Laundromat: “Well you’re a stranger---where have you been?” I told her; seems she will always remember me as the little girl who by accident dyed her clothes orange and purple last year because something wasn’t color-fast.

  I have the queerest feeling the New Yorker will buy some of Luke’s poems; let me know, they’re addressed to Yorkshire. The New Yorker makes me rather scared, and just a little sick; there are these great long articles, bristling scrupulously with facts, history and incredible Naming of Names: a long letter from Jaipur* (the secret is to go where noone’s ever been and write for “Our Far-Flung Correspondents”) and a tender piece explaining why the cedars in Bermuda* are all dead; a sestina by Elizabeth Bishop,* whom I formerly admired for her “Fish” and “Roosters” poems, using the end words: child, house, almanac, grandmother, tears and stove; guess what that sestina’s like. Teddy, the poems, I have cold-eyedly discovered, are all weak; that is it; write delicate weak poems; I wasn’t being funny, either, about the birds; this latest issue had orioles, thrushes* and “vulgar starlings”* in it getting drunk on choke-cherries. They are featuring tales about heads in the cartoons, of which I send you a sample;* rather lovely. A queer story, almost like your exercises in description wholly, about a little boy watching the sea* the last day of summer; very minutely and accurately described. I feel I can get in if only I write with care. Thurber’s fables are awful. They have a false ring, sort of singsong rhymed prose; I can only figure he is dying and they are buying at fabulous prices to pay the hospital bills.

  Last night was hell; I feel completely paralysed, away from you; I’m not hungry; I can’t sleep; can’t read; can’t think. I’ll be all right, but not by recovering from missing you; only by learning, and it must take a good deal of learning, how to live with this huge whistling hole in my guts and heart. God, I miss sharing thoughts and food and bed and all the warm lovely little things; I read Crowe Ransom last night and felt better---the “ten poor idiot fingers”* one, especially. I was awake and awake until 3 a.m. I’ll have to start taking night walks before bed; I dread going to bed now something awful. I feel terribly miserable and noble; like learning to live without legs and arms and with mechanical intestines after some colossal operation which nobody really thought I’d come out of; I’ll never stop this incredibly overpowering sense of absence; I’ll just learn to wall it up in a series of bare enormous rooms, which I don’t enter except when I’m alone; all the rest is rot. The reading will take a while before every other sentence doesn’t make me want to run and hackle over it with you; I still will want to, but will save it. I have got to learn to live this way, I know, but oh. Wrote a bad fourteen line poem last night; will probably write many such, bad because they are naked and do not have the sophistication of technique which cares how it says more than what it says; you must criticize coldly, even if you know it is all about you and done in such simple love:

  Monologue at 3 A.M.* it is called:

  Better that every fiber crack

  And fury make head,

  Blood drenching vivid

  Couch, carpet, floor

  And the snake-figured almanac

  Vouching you are

  A million green counties from here,

  Than to sit mute, twitching so

  Under prickling stars,

&nbs
p; With stare, with curse

  Blackening the time

  Goodbyes were said, trains let go,

  And I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from

  My one kingdom.

  I love you, love you, love you,

  your own sylvia

  TO Ted Hughes

  Friday 5 October 1956

  TLS on RMS Queen Elizabeth

  letterhead, family owned

  Friday morn, Oct.5

  Dearest love Teddy . . .

  This Cunard ship must keep sailing until it’s burned itself out; I believe in writing on everything including toilet paper. It is another ringing blue morning and bless it, it’s mine, now practicalia is done. Traitors Baltzell and Isabel, only old guard left, don’t arrive till Monday, leaving me with a growing houseful of sweet new green creaking aliens which Miss Abbott bestows on me to lead flocking across to meals like some mother duck, answering questions; la.

  They are nice, reserved; I will get to know not one; getting to know people takes time and energy; I don’t have any for them. One is from S. Africa (Natal),* one Eurasian Malayan,* several sari-ed Indians* to come, for whom Mrs. Milne no doubt waits with dreams of sugared saris dancing in her mean spectacled head. Oh how sweet I am. Miss Abbott deigned to visit me last night, which was to pot, since after supper I’d given the Malayan a map, on loan, much free advice, especially about warm clothes and dispatched her; Miss Abbott took longer; I told her about poems, you, family, summer, and when she said “It’s wonderful to see someone who’s life is so happy”, I murmured darkly about passing through the forge of sorrow, the valley of tears. She promised to find out the earliest legal date I can leave Newnham next June.

  I am just barely breaking into my old fields of concentration; I really haven’t concentrated since my Plato papers last spring on reading-thinking, albeit I’ve done a hell of a lot of concentrating on my own writing and private thinking. I found myself near hysteria at the sight of books piled on the floor; like having to eat one and only one dish at a smorgasbord while all the other cates and dainties obtruded with painful distraction on the sense. I’m learning. I’m really not a bad thinker. Have patience through this first week or two, Ted, while I finger my way back through the stacks of Augustine, St. Paul and Chaucer, man and critics. I’ll slack on all else till I get this conglomerate albatross off my conscience. Once I catch up, all will be eased.

  Began the epistles of St. Paul last night, going to sweet Bowes and Bowes for a change to get the proper modern translation cheap second hand, appealing in my childlike way, for them to tell me what were the epistles; hushed conference among the ones who knew; I was told; I went, gratified. I am standing at the crack, the hinge, the abyss, the suspension bridge between Greek and Christian thought. It awes me. I find the Christian writings of Augustine and Paul almost intolerable: the mystic workings of God’s plan, can, alas, be “known” (in the rich rounded sense of that word, distinguishing it from the mere “thinking knowledge” we use it to mean today) only by faith. That blind leap which so appalls me. And the whole tone of the Christian writings is so full of assurance--- one can see the appeal here, the assurance of immortal life, reward and redemption, in contrast to the wistful hazardings of my dear Socrates who presented his view and hope of immortal life as a fable to the skeptical worldling rhetoricians around him.

  Also, I find God hideously conceited; every time you want to argue with the apostles, the saints, about the origin of evil (my favorite black sheep which even drove Augustine almost wild), they blind you with some hocus-pocus about God’s inscrutability; having cake of doctrine but refusing to impart heavenly recipe for lesser cooks. God seems so often a rat---that same distaste I felt in reading Paradise Lost where God is such an egomaniac, spelling his objective pronoun Mee; “I do this in glorification of Mee . . . ” Also, Paul is ridiculously smug about his celibate state; the flesh always embarasses them so; they divide it completely from the soul; flesh means sin, nothing else; all men, because of Adam are born in sin, conceived in sin, etc.

  Paul writes: “It is an excellent thing for a man to have no intercourse with a woman (the married man is anxious about world affairs, how best to satisfy his wife---so he is torn in two directions) but there is so much immorality that every man had better have a wife of his own---Better marry than be aflame with passion!” Now this low view of the body, the senses, the flesh, is intolerable to me: “The interests of the flesh are hostile to God.” They speak of marriage as a regrettable necessity, allowing it as a kind of lesser evil, but smugly asserting: “He who does not marry will be found to have done better . . . I would like,” says pretty Paul, “all men to be as I am.” Now I, in my pagan earth-mother way, glorify my God through the flesh; through your flesh; and through our multitudes of unborn children. I find it horrible to cut the flesh from the soul and starve it, for thus it loses its roots in the earth and in turn starves the soul; this is my own private doctrine, and will come in many poems; it is my answer to the Christians and Kathleen Raine. I feel it my place as a singing woman; God how these writings stimulate my thinking, though; and I’m just humbly beginning. Tell me if you object to my tentative philosophizing rant, darling one. It helps no end to write it out to you.

  All while I was reading Paul, and Augustine’s confessions* about the sweets of sin in early youth, I heard the assurance of the Holy Spirit whose function is to sustain the faith of man through trouble; now I have a private holy spirit in small letters, an earth-faith which flickers, at times, in my need for stoicism away from you, but I cannot make the leap of faith to God, who seems so unreasonable to me and won’t let me argue with Him but announces that the world’s wisdom shall be confounded, and that man must become a “fool” if he is to be properly wise: meaning, I suppose, humble and full of faith and no sophistical arguments; but the riddle in Eden’s apple core remains: If God made man “free to fall”, wasn’t He glad man fell by “choice” so he could generously bend down and redeem him through Christ, grace, etc. and thus reveal his own Glory? Oh well.

  All through my reading I heard blessed Yeats:

  “Odour of Blood when Christ was slain

  Made all Platonic tolerance vain

  And vain all Doric discipline . . . ”*

  I understand that more perfectly now, in the midst of this terrifying strong blood-faith.

  I loved your letter* this morning; barged down in midst of a painful still correct breakfast and read it over three cups of coffee while Malayan asked South African “Do you have four seasons?” and such like. Laughed richly over Graves-nightmare story, read it to South African. “How does he know so much?” she asked. I thought, “He is,” I replied sweetly, “a kind of genius.” And so he is.

  Found your story-plot Terrific. I was very attracted by it and think it’s full of potential. The motives are the most important; I must learn enough about how Inns work to make conversion of farm probable; details, details. Maybe Sutcliffes* could help. It could be a great story. I leapt into the characters psychological problems right off, and they took sudden shape, still hazy about edges, and began to move about place resembling Sutcliffe’s.

  I liked your poem* very much; will ruminate on it, and write about it in a little while . . .

  Later: 6 p.m. The time of day I like least; I resent going to meals; people wound me; I shut up like a clam. Just finished St. Paul’s Epistles; this evening, further in Augustine.

  I miss you like hell. Certain words in the bible are like lovely clear sustaining water; you should cleave to me, it says; I honestly believe that by some mystic uniting we have become one flesh; I am simply sick, physically sick, without you. I cry; I lay my head on the floor; I choke, hate eating; hate sleeping, or going to bed; and am perpetually freezing cold (you can imagine from mere icy meetings with my chill hands what an ice age has come on me now away from you). I am living in a kind of death-in-life; when will the Word, these words I cram my eye with, assuage this hunger for your sweet incredibly dear
flesh; I never knew before what a newborn ghost must feel---I have somehow lost my most darling one; it is so strange to me---never before in my life have I been parted from one I love so immeasurably more than myself; my god, do let me be with you soon—

  Could I be a glutton and see you more than just once before you go? If I were good and slaved till then, could you come and I come to London the weekend of the 13th? (there’s that number again) Money’s no object, now I’ve got the Fulbright, and you could reserve a room at some hotel when you got there---I couldn’t bear being sociable with Jim* or anybody. I don’t know what you’ll be hearing from Carne-Ross, but I would give anything to see you---it is, today being Friday, next weekend. I simply don’t believe in killing myself with meaningless stoicism when you’re in the same country. Even if the BBC is during the week, or not settled then, will you come? I’ll probably have had a supervision in each class and will bring a book for the train. Teddy I love you so it is simply murdering me. And I am no baby really; but you are my own self for which I exist, somehow being father, brother, husband, son, in all one, the whole male principle of the world, in you, and without you how barren that world is, and sterile.

  Your books came, and the dear letter,* and the sweet note from your mother*---thank her for me. I will work some livable existence out of this, but only by freezing my most vital parts.

  The New Yorker is really like I said, crazy for nature life: peewits and towhees: the enclosed poem* is by a boy who knows the trade and strings his line short and sweet. “Virtue” probably netted him $10 all by itself; they want no blood and guts, just goldenrod* and wistful crayfish (same man had long crayfish poem* in couplets!)

  Must stop ranting or you will weary and flag each time you get a fat envelope. Wrote a poem yesterday,* and another today,* very slight, probably---I lose perspective away from our tennis-partnered volleyings of opinion; here’s the shorter: will send the other tomorrow with talk of your fine one: