by Sylvia Plath
I could read all day every day for the rest of my life and still be behind, so I do balance my mornings of lectures (which I love) and reading with a kind of cultural and social life. people are still infinitely more important to me than books, so I will never be an academic scholar. I know this, and know also that my kind of vital intellectual curiosity could never be happy in the grubbing detail of a phd thesis. I simply don’t believe that kind of specialization is for me. I like to read widely, in art, psychology, philosophy, french and literature, and to live and see the world and talk deeply to people in it, and to write my own poetry and prose, rather than becoming a pedantic expert on some minor writer of 200 years back, simply because he has not been written about yet. ideally, I would like to write in at least half of my vacations here, and publish enough to get some sort of writing fellowship, saxton or guggenheim, which would let me live without academic obligations (which I can make up myself after these 2 years) and write steadily, which is impossible here during the packed term. this is all rather private musing, and I would rather you kept it in the family and shared the more extroverted passages with other people.
perhaps what I do miss most here is the lack of my friends who have known me in my past. I can’t explain fully how much it means to have people who have shared years of one’s life and with whom you can assume a deep understanding and common experiences: people like marty, patsy, sue weller, gordon, phil, and, of course, my own dear family. while I am very happy here, and have many too many invitations to accept even half, all my acquaintances are at the same “historical stage” in knowing, and it takes only much time to achieve anything like the deep and vital friendships I left behind me at home. everyone here is so “new” and untried. I am glad that I am outgoing and open and intense, now, because I can slice into the depths of people more quickly and more rewardingly than if I were superficial and formal.
(next letter)
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 14 November 1955*
TLS (aerogramme),
Indiana University
monday morning, continued
well! it seems I have a good deal to spill over this morning, so I shall go on before my morning lectures in 17th cen. metaphysical poetry and ibsen.
to continue: it is a lovely blue and gold day: when it is nice here is is “very very nice, and when it is bad, it is horrid.”* I have gotten used to clouds of frosted air surrounding me as I breathe in the bathtub, and to concentrating on the cloud formations outside the diningroom windows as I eat my soggy sludgy mass of daily starch foods. my room is more and more a delight, and I now have my big earthenware plate heaped with a pyramid of fruit: apples, oranges, pineapple, bananas, grapes, and a large vase of bright yellow dahlias, which bring the sun inside to worship.
this week has been a rather mixed one as far as feelings go. I have mixed both sorrow and joy in fairly equal parts. I’ve told you about the problems. the nicer things involve people. last monday, I spent the whole afternoon and evening with mallory wober. he played the piano for me about two hours, and one of his friends dropped in and sang some songs for us. then he read aloud some light verse from lewis carrol which he made excruciatingly funny, and then, at about 10, we went for a late dinner at the indian restaurant, the taj mahal, where mallory is very much at home and we have our own favorite waiter. I biked home over the cam and down the starlit road feeling very happy.
dick wertz, sassoon’s roommate at yale and nancy hunter’s old flame, who is reading theology here, dropped over wednesday afternoon, and we had the first good talk we’ve ever had. I have been constantly surprised how much I miss sassoon, who is now at the sorbonne, and spent hours talking about him with dick. ironically enough, the boy’s here are sassoon’s age, but in maturity and integration they are babies compared to him. having created such vivid, brilliant worlds of talk and people and plays and art exhibits and eating and all those many minute and important things that make up shared experience, I find fragments of the things I so admired and appreciated in him scattered here & there among other chaps, but naturally miss not having them all together.
thursday I went to tea with john lythgoe, this sweet botanist who has traveled all over the world and is going to help me find out about exchange rates and travel to paris. we were going to motorcycle to ely (the cathedral town) sunday but it was too cold and raw and gray.
friday I had a lovely time with the first english boy I’ve met who is temperamentally like me: david buck.* he played the lead in one of the ADC nurseries (dr. triceps in mirbeau’s “epidemic”) and I have admired him ever since. he is reading english in his 1st year, after serving 2 years in the army in germany, and is very strong and versatile. he is a champion swimmer, and has a large role in “bartholomew fair” where I have five lines as a rather screaming bawdy woman* who gets into a fight. I think I will do it, even if it is so little a part, because it will give me a kind of stage presence and keep me active in the ADC. the advantage is that 5 lines will mean I only have to go to one or two rehearsals. it is a “cuttable” part, and I hope I can be good enough for them to keep it in. I have to be very rough and brazen, which might be fun. anyway, david and I had sherry at his rooms in christ’s (I still can’t get over the way people casually talk about: “come on over to jesus” or “I live in christ’s”!) and we went for an enormous and delicious dinner at the cambridge arms hotel,* very formal and victorian and gloriously ugly. we had fish, and turkey, and lots of lovely red wine. saturday we went to visit the editor of the “big” magazine at cambridge where, at david’s recommendation, I left a few stories and poems. david writes for them, too. we lunched at “the eagle”,* one of the arty bouffet pubs in town, which was lots of fun.
saturday afternoon, mallory took me punting on the cam, which was lovely, as he looks like a dark-haired, red-cheeked jewish greek god (if that is possible) standing at the helm and poling along perfectly straight (a feat) under the bridges where people leaned over and stared and took pictures, and he told me about the cambridge architecture we could see. afterwards, he came back for tea at my place (I had fixed up the room with fruit and flowers and gotten all kinds of breads and cakes . . . I love to have people in for a change, after going out so much). I had refused another date for the evening, as I figured it would be anticlimactic, so I just sat and mused nostalgically on the paradoxes of life.
yesterday was most amazing. I was, as I said, to have gone to ely with john, but mallory had invited me to lunch, and it was a bad day, so I left a note on my door telling whoever read it to come to tea, and mallory delivered a note to john postponing seeing him. well, mallory took me and some of his jewish friends from israel, around king’s and the chapel, which was exquisite at dusk, with all the colored stained-glass windows (which mallory explained the stories of, and the history & architecture) and myriads of candles and lacy fan-vaulted ceiling. then mallory played the “emperor concerto” on his vic, and “greensleeves” and some other favorite ballads on his piano for me. we were biking back to my place with sandwiches for tea-lunch when john pulled up on his motor cycle, having read the note on my door and not having got my letter. well, nothing remained but to have them both for tea, which bothered me a bit as they are very different, john being most shy and sensitive and retiring and mallory being outwardly very witty and amusing. believe it or not, they both stayed from 4 till 10 at night, talking about everything from “is there a purpose in the universe” to the belgian congo no mention of supper! john left only after I invited him to tea today, and mallory took me to a lovely late steak dinner at the taj. my first “salon”, and most stimulating.
xxx
sivvy
TO J. Mallory Wober
Wednesday 16 November 1955*
ALS with envelope,*
Cambridge University
Wednesday also pm
Dear, dear Mallory* . . .
No, (I hadn’t quite rea
lized, but I hoped I wasn’t the only one to be enjoying it). If so, re company, the pleasure was quite mutual. YES! (I would like to repeat, continue and magnify it). YES! (we shall discuss this and much else on Friday). YES! (I received the note of yesterday, delivered, I presume, by one of those large carnivorous black ravens). NO! (I must admit I did not fully understand the contents until I received the more detailed explication in today’s missive).
Now, Mallory (I like to say that name out loud, because it has just the right number of syllables to give it so many kinds of dramatic expression – ask me to demonstrate some time –) I have come to a very difficult time where I have to make an important choice, specifically affecting the next two weeks & perhaps more. All day the pros & cons have been adding up on either side & the total seems to come out even. It is an extremely complex conflict, with large philosophical issues woven into apparently simple social phenomena. May I talk to you about this huge chaos Friday? Since you are, rather definitely, involved in some of this? It might be a good idea to meet earlier than 8 if we are going to discuss more than the weather during intermission. Then too, I always feel a little desperate if I’m conscious of the clock racing toward twelve – my bicycle might just turn into a pumpkin on the way back to Whitstead & then where would I be? If you possibly could or care to meet me before 8, let me know when & where & I shall appear at your bidding.
(next page!)
Hello again! I am being most wicked & prolonging this while I should be polishing off at least five Romantic tragedies before my supervision tomorrow! Why? I enjoy talking to you, even via paper, which is, in many ways, inferior to the experience in all four dimensions, instead of just these two: ↓
remind me to read you some eecummings, edith sitwell & dylan thomas when we next have a few quiet hours together . . .
I am, by the way, becoming quite delectably inebriated with your letters (the opposite of “fed up” – I am beginning to feel like an opium fiend – I need more & more to live on!) you definitely ought to make a wholesale deal for stationery. You are already a diplomat par excellence. (I favor a lawyer, who composes in his leisure time!)
No, I am not listening to your music from France, because you haven’t invited me to. I can’t spend my life in a room with no music, so that is why I am irresistably drawn to haunt yours (the only reason?) – and I sincerely wish you would wheel your piano up here at least once a week & fill my room with enough music to last till the next week! please do! (I have so much to talk to you about Friday!)
There is something quite mystical that happens to me when I think of you. Strange isn’t it, this process of learning to know & understand someone else!
Until Friday,
Your unmusical
Sylvia
*It must mean something, musn’t it???????????????????
TO J. Mallory Wober
c. Thursday 17 November 1955*
ALS (picture postcard),
Cambridge University