Sylvia Plath attempted to commit suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills on 24 August 1953. Following therapy at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, she returned to Smith College in February 1954 and graduated on 6 June 1955. Plath did not keep a journal during her senior year at college.
From October 1955 until June 1957, Plath attended Newnham College at Cambridge University where she read English on a Fulbright fellowship. She initially lived at Whitstead, a small house for foreign students on the grounds of Newnham College, and spent her first winter and spring breaks on the Continent. Many of the entries in the following journal are excerpts from letters to Richard Sassoon.
Excerpt from letter1
November 22, 1955
Words revolve in flame and keep the coliseum heart afire, reflecting orange sunken suns in the secret petals of ruined arches. yes, the glowing asbestos thorns and whistling flame flowers reflect the cells of the scarlet heart and the coliseum burns on, without a nero, on the brink of blackness. so words have power to open sesame and reveal liberal piles of golden metallic suns in the dark pit that wait to be melted and smelted in the fire of spring which springs to fuse lumps and clods into veins of radiance.
so sylvia burns yellow dahlias on her dark altar of the sun as the sun wanes to impotence and the world falls in winter. birds contract to frozen feathered buds on barren boughs and plants surrender to the omnipotent white frosts which hold all colors cruelly locked in hexagonal hearts of ice.
at midnight, when the moon makes blue lizard scales of roof shingles2 and simple folk are bedded deep in eiderdown, she opens the gable window with fingers frozen crisp and thin as carrots, and scatters crumbs of white bread which skip and dwindle down the roof to lie in angled gutters to feed the babes in the wood. so the hungry cosmic mother sees the world shrunk to embryo again and her children gathered sleeping back into the dark, huddling in bulbs and pods, pale and distant as the folded beanseed to her full milky love which freezes across the sky in a crucifix of stars.
so it costs ceres all that pain to go to gloomy dis and bargain for proserpine again. we wander and wait in november air gray as rat fur stiffened with frozen tears. endure, endure, and the syllables harden like stoic white sheets struck with rigor mortis on the clothesline of winter.
artificial fires burn here: leaping red in the heart of wineglasses, smouldering gold in goblets of sherry, cracking crimson in the fairytale cheeks of a rugged jewish hercules hewn fresh from the himalayas and darjeeling to be sculpted with blazing finesse by a feminine pygmalion whom he gluts with mangoes and dmitri karamazov fingers blasting beethoven out of acres of piano and striking scarlatti to skeletal crystal.
fires pale askew to pink houses under the aqua backdrop sky of “bartholomew fair” where a certain whore slinks in a slip of jaundice-yellow and wheedles apples and hobbyhorses from lecherous cutpurses. water scalds and hisses in the tin guts of the kettle and ceres feeds the souls and stomachs of the many too many who love satanic earthenware teasets, dishes heaped with barbed and quartered orange pineapple and cool green globes of grapes, and maccaroon cakes that soften and cling to the hungry mouth.
when the face of god is gone and the sun pales behind wan veils of chill mist, she vomits at the gray neuter neutralities of limbo and seeks the red flames and smoking snakes that devour eternally the limbs of the damned. feeding on the furies of cassandra, she prophesys and hears the “falling glass and toppling masonry” of troy while hector pats her torn and tangled hair and murmurs: “There, there, mad sister.”
God is on vacation with the pure transcendent sun and the searing heat that turns the flawed white body of our love to glass: look! how the riddle of the world is resolved in this menagerie of mated glass, how clean and sparkling the light blesses these pure serene ones! suddenly from the bed of mire they ascend to astonish the angels of heaven who keep the light of their love enshrined in ice.
see, see! how the mind and mated flesh can make man the envy of god, who masturbates in the infinite void his ego has made about him. but do not ask for these tomorrow. he is a jealous god and he has had them liquidated.
I have talked to various little dark men who keep giving me, at my request, booklets colored yellow and titled: sunshine holidays.…
do you realize that the name sassoon3 is the most beautiful name in the world. it has lots of seas of grass en masse and persian moon alone in rococo lagoon of woodwind tune where passes the ebony monsoon.…
I am proud again, and I will have the varying wealths of the world in my hands before I come to see you again … I will have them, and they are being offered to me even now, on turkish tables and by dark alladins. I simply say, turning on my other flank, I do not want these jingling toys. I only want the moon that sounds in a name and the son of man that bears that name.
In the beginning was the word and the word was sassoon and it was a terrible word for it created eden and the golden age back to which fallen eva looks mingling her crystal tears with the yellow dahlias that sprout from the lips of her jaundiced adam.
be christ! she cries, and rise before my eyes while the blue marys bless us with singing. and when, she asks (for even eva is practical) will this ressurection occur?
Excerpt: December 114
What concerns me among multitudes and multitudes of other sad questions which one had better try to lure aside with parfaits and sunshine, is that there is a certain great sorrow in me now, with as many facets as a fly’s eye, and I must give birth to this monstrosity before I am light again. Otherwise I shall ressemble a dancing elephant … I am tormented by the questions of the devils which weave my fibers with grave-frost and human-dung, and have not the ability or genius to write a big letter to the world about this. when one makes of one’s own heavens and hells a few hunks of neatly typewritten paper and editors are very polite and reject it, one is, in whimsy, inclined to identify editors with god’s ministers. this is fatal.
Would it be too childish of me to say: I want? But I do want: theater, light, color, paintings, wine and wonder. Yet not all these can do more than try to lure the soul from its den where it sulks in busy heaps of filth and obstinate clods of bloody pulp. I must find a core of fruitful seeds in me. I must stop identifying with the seasons, because this English winter will be the death of me.
I am watching a pale blue sky be torn across by wind fresh from the russian steppes. Why is it that I find it so difficult to accept the present moment, whole as an apple, without cutting and hacking at it to find a purpose, or setting it up on a shelf with other apples to measure its worth or trying to pickle it in brine to preserve it, and crying to find it turns all brown and is no longer simply the lovely apple I was given in the morning?
Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing. There are two opposing poles of wanting nothing: When one is so full and rich and has so many inner worlds that the outer world is not necessary for joy, because joy emanates from the inner core of one’s being. When one is dead and rotten inside and there is nothing in the world: not all the woman, food, sun, or mind-magic of others that can reach the wormy core of one’s gutted soul planet.
I feel now as if I were building a very delicate intricate bridge quietly in the night, across the dark from one grave to another while the giant is sleeping. Help me build this o so exquisite bridge.
I want to live each day for itself like a string of colored beads, and not kill the present by cutting it up in cruel little snippets to fit some desperate architectural draft for a taj mahal in the future.
[Appendix 6 contains Sylvia Plath’s 31 December 1955 – 1 January 1956 journal fragment about her vacation in France with Richard Sassoon – ed.]
January 115
The crossing was terrible. It was fantastically rough and everywhere people lay in insular agony, retching into the bright orange basins which sloshed with curded vomit as the angry green sea smashed against the bow.
Below it was impossible, with stagnant, sweet fetid air and the stench of regurgitated slop, and people lying about groaning. I stayed above, while about 20 little girls, clad exactly alike in camel’s hair coats, argyle socks, plaid kilts and scotch berets with double feathers that made them look like a crew of human turkeys, ran about giggling and vomiting as the fancy took them.
from letter january 156
it is saturday night, turning as I write into sunday morning. the dark world balances and tips and already I can feel the dawn coming up under me.
outside it is raining and the black streets are inky with wet and crying with wind. I have just come back from a film: die letzte brücke.
It was a german-jugoslav film about the war, and the partisans fighting the germans. and the people were real people with dirty shining faces and I loved them. they were simple. they were men and both sides were wrong and both sides were right. they were human beings and they were not grace kelley, but they were beautiful from inside like joan of arc, with that kind of radiance that faith makes, and the kind that love makes.
the kind of radiance too that suddenly comes over you when I look at you dressing or shaving or reading and you are suddenly more than the daily self we must live with and love, that fleeting celestial self which shines out with the whimsical timing of angels.
that confident surge of exuberance in which I wrote you has dwindled as waves do, to the knowledge that makes me cry, just this once: such a minute fraction of this life do we live: so much is sleep, tooth-brushing, waiting for mail, for metamorphosis, for those sudden moments of incandescence: unexpected, but once one knows them, one can live life in the light of their past and the hope of their future.
in my head I know it is too simple to wish for war, for open battle but one cannot help but wish for those situations that make us heroic, living to the hilt of our total resources. our cosmic fights, which I think the end of the world is come, are so many broken shells around our growth.
sunday noon: very stingily blue whipped to white by wind from russian steppes. the mornings are god’s time, and after breakfast for those five hours somehow everything is all right and most things are even possible. the afternoons however slip away faster and faster and night cheats by coming shortly after four. the dark time, the night time is worst now. sleep is like the grave, wormeaten with dreams.
January 287
it would be easy to say I would fight for you, or steal or lie; I have a great deal of that desire to use myself to the hilt, and where, for men, fighting is a cause, for women, fighting is for men. in a crisis, it is easy to say: I will arise and be with thee. but what I would do too is the hardest thing for me, with my absurd streak of idealism and perfectionism: I do believe I would sit around with you and feed you and wait with you through all the necessary realms of tables and kingdoms of chairs and cabbage for those fantastic few moments when we are angels, and we are growing angels (which the angels in heaven never can be) and when we together make the world love itself and incandesce. I would sit around and read and write and brush my teeth, knowing in you there were the seeds of an angel, my kind of angel, with fire and swords and blazing power. why is it I find out so slowly what women are made for? it comes nudging and urging up in me like tulips bulbs in april.
February 19: Sunday night:
To whom it may concern: Every now and then there comes a time when the neutral and impersonal forces of the world turn and come together in a thunder-crack of judgment. There is no reason for the sudden terror, the feeling of condemnation, except that circumstances all mirror the inner doubt, the inner fear. Yesterday, walking quite peacefully over the Mill Lane bridge, after leaving my bike to be repaired (feeling lost, pedestrian, impotent), smiling that smile which puts a benevolent lacquer on the shuddering fear of strangers’ gazes, I was suddenly turned upon by little boys making snowballs on the dam. They began to throw them at me, openly, honestly, trying to hit. They missed every time, and with that wary judgment that comes with experience, I watched the dirty snowballs coming at me, behind and in front, and, sick with wonder, kept walking slowly, determinedly, ready to parry a good hit before it struck. But none struck, and with a tolerant smile that was a superior lie, I walked on.
Today my thesaurus, which I would rather live with on a desert isle than a bible, as I have so often boasted cleverly, lay open after I’d written the rough draft of a bad, sick poem, at 545: Deception; 546: Untruth, 547: Dupe, 548: Deceiver. The clever reviewer and writer who is an ally of the generous creative opposing forces, cries with deadly precision: “Fraud, fraud.” Which has been cried solidly for six months during that dark year of hell.
Yesterday night: coming in to the party at Emmanuel (ah, yes) they were hypnotizing someone named Morris in the dark, crowded room, lit with conscious bohemianism by candles in old wine bottles. The fat, yet strong, ugly boy was saying with commanding mastery and power: “When you try to go through the door there will be glass in the way. You cannot go through the door, there will be glass. When I say “gramophone” you will fall asleep again.” Then he brought Morris out of the trance, and Morris tried to go through the door, but stopped. He could not go through the door, there was glass in the way. The fat boy said “Gramophone”, and two laughing, nervous boys caught Morris as he fell. Then they made Morris become stiff as a steel bar; he seemed to know just how stiff that was, and went rigid on the floor.
And I talked and talked with Win:8 pink-faced, blue-eyed, blond, confident, on the beginnings of love with a girl he met skiing who is engaged and going home to see about breaking it off and coming back and maybe living and traveling with him. And I learned that I was not wrong about L., and that we both love N. and I talked of R. Such games. I talked of R. as if he were dead. With a deadly nobility. And tall good-looking John9 put his warm hand on my shoulder and I asked him intently about hypnotism, while Chris’10 eager, shiny, red-cheeked baby-face and curly hair floated on the edge, and out of misplaced kindness I refused to go into the raw room oozing dance music with John, and went to talk chastely with Win and drink and tell Rafe who was the host with a shining face and a bowl perpetually full of fruit and liquor of a different color each time he came; “You are a wonderful host.”
Then, Chris left, and in the back of talk, knelt to hug the little black-clad miniature Sally Bowles with minute black slacks and jersey and cropped blonde Joan-of-Arc hair and a long wicked cigarette holder (matching exactly her very small man Roger who was all in black like a pale ballet dancer and very little, with a review he had just written on Yeats in print in a magazine called Kayham, after Omar). Chris then sat a red-dressed girl on his lap, and then they went to dance. Meanwhile, Win and I talk very wisely and the appalling easiness of this strikes me down: I could throw everything away and make a play for John, who is now making a play for the nearest and easiest. But everybody has exactly the same smiling frightened face, with the look that says: “I’m important. If you only get to know me, you will see how important I am. Look into my eyes. Kiss me, and you will see how important I am.”
I too want to be important. By being different. And these girls are all the same. Far off, I go to my coat with Win; he brings me my scarf as I wait on the stair, and Chris is being red-cheeked and dramatic and breathless and penitent. He wants to be scolded, and punished. That is too easy. That is what we all want.
I am rather high, and distant, and it is convenient to be led home across the snow-fields. It is very cold, and all the way back I am thinking: Richard, you live in this moment. You live now. You are in my guts and I am acting because you are alive. And meanwhile you are probably sleeping exhausted and happy in the arms of some brilliant whore, or maybe even the Swiss girl who wants to marry you. I cry out to you. I want to write you, of my love, that absurd faith which keeps me chaste, so chaste, that all I have ever touched or said to others becomes only the rehearsal for you, and preserved only for this. These others now pass the time, and even so little a way over the boundary, to kisses, and touches, I cry mercy and back away, frozen. I am in black, dressed more and more often in black now. I lost one of my red gloves at a cocktail party. I only have black ones left, and they are cold and comfortless.
“Richard,” I say, and tell Nat,11 and tell Win, and Tell Chris, as I have told Mallory,12 and Iko,13 and Brian,14 and Martin,15 and David:16 There Is This Boy In France. And today I told John, who is an excellent listener and who is willing to sit and hear me say how I have once been happy, and once been the highest in me, and grown to the woman I am now, all because of this boy named Richard. And John says: “I could love you violently, if I let myself.” But he has not let himself. Why? Because I haven’t touched him, I haven’t looked into his eyes with the image he wants to see there. And I could. But I am too tired, too noble, in a perverse way. It sickens me. I wouldn’t want him, even as he became a victim. So I tell him casually that I won’t let it happen, playfully, because it is a stillborn child. I have given birth to so many of these.
And then, bitterly, I say: do I love Richard? Or do I use him as an excuse for a noble, lonely, unloving posture, under the perverse label of faith? Using him so, would I want him on the scene, thin, nervous, little, moody, sickly? Or would I rather cherish the strong mind and soul and blazing potency alone, refines from the marring details of the real world? Coward.
And coming into the diningroom unexpectedly at breakfast, the three bright ones turn with a queer look and go on talking the way they do when Mrs. Milne comes in, in apparent continuity, veiling the subject of their words: “so strange, just staring into the fire.” And they have condemned you for being mad. Just like that. Because the fear is already there, and has been for so long. The fear that all the edges and shapes and colors of the real world that have been built up again so painfully with such a real love can dwindle in a moment of doubt, and “suddenly go out” the way the moon would in the Blake poem.
A morbid fear: that protests too much. To the doctor. I am going to the psychiatrist this week, just to meet him, to know he’s there. And, ironically, I feel I need him. I need a father. I need a mother. I need some older, wiser being to cry to. I talk to God, but the sky is empty, and Orion walks by and doesn’t speak. I feel like Lazarus: that story has such a fascination. Being dead, I rose up again, and even resort to the mere sensation value of being suicidal, of getting so close, of coming out of the grave with the scars and the marring mark on my cheek which (is it my imagination) grows more prominent: paling like a death-spot in the red, wind-blown skin, browning darkly in photographs, against my grave winter-pallor. And I identify too closely with my reading, with my writing. I am Nina in “Strange Interlude”; I do want to have husband, lover, father and son, all at once. And I depend too desperately on getting my poems, my little glib poems, so neat, so small, accepted by the New Yorker. To revenge myself on the blonde one, as if the mere paper dykes of print can keep out the creative flood which annihilates all envy, all mere niggling fearful jealousy. Be generous.
Yes. That is what Stephen Spender17 misses in Cambridge criticism. And what I miss in the miserly back-biting which jokes and picks at grotesqueries: what of ourselves: Jane,18 gesturing clumsily with knives, knocking over toasters and table silver, breaking Gordon’s necklace with awkward clutching mirth, taking supper from Richard, sleep and a room and a key from me, and never caring, utterly casual. How symbolic can we get? Resentment eats, killing the food it eats. Can she resent? She is on the side of the big, conquering boys, the creative ones. We have the impetuous puppies. Could we find those others? We have our Chris, our Nat. But do we?
Generous. Yes, today, I forgave Chris. For deserting me, and hurting me a little, even as the two faceless girls he has known hurt me, only because, a woman, I fight all women for my men. My men. I am a woman, and there is no loyalty, even between mother and daughter. Both fight for the father, for the son, for the bed of mind and body. I also forgave John, for having a rotten tooth, and a lousy pallor, because he was human, and I felt “I need human kind.” Even John, as he sat there, distanced by those wise words of ours, even he could be a father. And I cry so to be held by a man; some man, who is a father.
So, now I shall talk every night. To myself. To the moon. I shall walk, as I did tonight, jealous of my loneliness, in the blue-silver of the cold moon, shining brilliantly on the drifts of fresh-fallen snow, with the myriad sparkles. I talk to myself and look at the dark trees, blessedly neutral. So much easier than facing people, than having to look happy, invulnerable, clever. With masks down, I walk, talking to the moon, to the neutral impersonal force that does not hear, but merely accepts my being. And does not smite me down. I went to the bronze boy19 whom I love, partly because no one really cares for him, and brushed a clot of snow from his delicate smiling face. He stood there in the moonlight, dark, with snow etching his limbs in white, in the semi-circle of the privet hedge, bearing his undulant dolphin, smiling still, balancing on one dimpled foot.
And he becomes the child in “When We Dead Awaken.” And Richard will give me no child. And it is his child I could want. To bear, to have growing. The only one whom I could stand to have a child with. Yet. I have a fear, too, of bearing a deformed child, a cretin, growing dark and ugly in my belly, like that old corruption I always feared would break out from behind the bubbles of my eyes. I imagine Richard here, being with me, and my growing big with his child. I ask for less and less. I would face him, and say simply: I am sad that you are not strong, and do not swim and sail and ski, but you have a strong soul, and I will believe in you and make you invincible on this earth. Yes, I have that power. Most women do, to one degree or another. Yet the vampire is there, too. The old, primal hate. That desire to go around castrating the arrogant ones who become such children at the moment of passion.
How the circling steps in the spiral tower bring us back to where we were! I long for mother, even for Gordon, though his weaknesses, symbolized by his impotence, his misspelling, even though they sicken me. And he will be financially comfortable. And he is handsome and strong. He skis, swims, yet all the attributes of god could not console me for his weak mind and his physical weakness. God, I would almost have him just to prove he were weak, although my doubt would not let him have the chance to be strong. Unless I were very careful. I would like him to be strong, too. Only there is so little hope, it is so late.
The only perfect love I have is for my brother. Because I cannot love him physically, I shall always love him. And be jealous of his wife, too, a little. Strange, that having lived in such passion, such striking and tears, such fierce joy, I could turn so cold, so disgusted, at all the superfluous playings with others, those flash attractions that seem my doom, now, because each one brings me so much closer to Richard. And still I hope there will be some man in Europe whom I will meet and love and who will free me from this strong idol. Whom I accept even in the heart of his weakness, whom I can make strong, because he gives me a soul and mind to work with.
And now it grows late, late. And I have the old beginning-of-the-week panic, because I cannot read and think enough to meet my little academic obligations, and I have not written at all since the Vence story20 (which will be rejected with the New Yorker rejection of my poems, and even as I bravely say so, I hope I am lying, because my love for Richard is in the story, and my wit, a little bit, and I want to have it frozen in print, and not rejected: see, how dangerous, I again identify with rejections too much!). But how can I go on being quiet, without a soul to talk to wholly here, who is not somehow drastically involved, or near enough to at least be glad that I am unhappy. I want to cry to Richard, to all my friends at home, to come and rescue me. From my insecurity which I must fight through myself. Finishing the next year here, enjoying the pressure of reading, thinking, while at my back is always the mocking tick: A Life is Passing. My Life.
So it is. And I waste my youth and days of radiance on barren ground. How I cried that night I wanted to go to bed, and there was no one, only my dreams of Christmas, and the last year with Richard, whom I have so loved. And I drank the last of the bad sherry, and cracked a few nuts, which were all sour and withered to nothing inside, and the material, inert world mocked me. Tomorrow what? Always patching masks, making excuses for having read a bare half of what I purposed. Yet a life is passing?
I long to permeate the matter of this world: to become anchored to life by laundry and lilacs, daily bread and fried eggs, and a man, the dark-eyed stranger, who eats my food and my body and my love and goes around the world all day and comes back to find solace with me at night. Who will give me a child, that will bring me again to be a member of that race which throws snowballs at me, sensing perhaps the rot at which they strike?
Well: Elly21 is coming this summer (and mother and Mrs. Prouty) and Sue22 next fall. I love both girls, and for once, with them can be wholly woman, and we can talk and talk. I am lucky. That is not long to wait. Yet now, how much do I give? Nothing. I am selfish, scared, crying too much to save myself for my phantom writing. But at any rate it is better than last term, when I was going mad night after night being a screaming whore in a yellow dress.23 A mad poet. How clever of Dick Gilling;24 but he is very intuitive. I had not the heart, not the flexible heart, not the guts. /But I refused to go on, knowing I could not be big, refusing to be small. I retreated, to work. And it has been better: 15 plays a week instead of two. Number? Not only that, but a real feeling of mastery, of occasional insight. And that is what we wait for.
Will Richard ever need me again? Part of my bargain is that I will be silent until he does. Why is it that the man must so often take the lead? Women can do so much, but apart like this, I can do nothing, shut off from writing him as I am by a kind of honor and pride (I refuse to babble any more about how I love him) and I must wait until he needs me. If ever, in the next five years. And look, with love and faith, not turning sour and cold and bitter, to help others. That is salvation. To give of love inside. To keep love of life, no matter what, and give to others. Generously.
February 20: Monday
Dear Doctor: I am feeling very sick. I have a heart in my stomach which throbs and mocks. Suddenly the simple rituals of the day balk like a stubborn horse. It gets impossible to look people in the eye: corruption may break out again? Who knows. Small talk becomes desperate.
Hostility grows, too. That dangerous, deadly venom which comes from a sick heart. Sick mind, too. The image of identity we must daily fight to impress on the neutral, or hostile, world, collapses inward; we feel crushed. Standing in line in the hall, waiting for a lousy dinner of hard-boiled egg in cheese-cream sauce, mashed potatoes and sallow parsnips, we overheard one girl say to another: “Betsy is depressed today.” It seems almost an incredible relief to know that there is someone outside oneself who is not happy all the time. We must be at low ebb when we are this far into the black: that everyone else, merely because they are “other”, is invulnerable. That is a damn lie.
But I am foundering in relativity again. Unsure. And it is damn uncomfortable: with men (Richard gone, no one here to love), with writing (too nervous about rejections, too desperate and scared about bad poems; but do have ideas for stories; just try soon), with girls (house bristles with suspicion and frigidity; how much is paranoia transference? the damnable thing is that they can sense insecurity and meaness like animals smell blood), with academic life (have deserted french and feel temporarily very wicked and shirking, must atone; also, feel stupid in discussion; what the hell is tragedy? I am.)
So there. With bike at repair shop, gulped down coffee-with-milk, bacon and cabbage mixed with potato, and toast, read two letters from mother which cheered me quite a bit: she is so courageous, managing grammy and the house, and building up a new life, hoping for Europe. I want to make happy days for her here. She also was encouraging about teaching. Once I started doing it I wouldn’t feel so sick. That frozen inertia is my worst enemy; I get positively sick with doubt. I must break through limit after limit: learn to ski (with gordon & sue next year?) and perhaps teach at an army base this summer. It would do me a hell of a lot of good. If I went to Africa or Istanbul, I could do articles about the place on the side. Enough romance. Get to work.
Thank god the Christian Science Monitor bought the Cambridge article and drawing.25 They should write a letter, too, about my request to write more. New Yorker rejection of poems may smack me in the stomach any morning. God, it is pretty poor when a life depends on such ridiculous sitting ducks as those poems, ready for editors’ grape shot.
Tonight must think about O’Neill’s plays; sometimes, in panic, mind goes blank, world whooshes away in void, and I feel I have to run, or walk on into the night for miles till I drop exhausted. Trying to escape? Or be alone enough to unriddle the secret of the sphinx. Men forget. Said Laughing Lazarus. And I forget the moments of radiance. I must get them down in print. Make them up in print. Be honest.
Anyway, after breakfast, leaped into clothes and started off at a dog-tot to Redpath26 class at Grove Lodge27 through snow. Gray day, moment of joy as snow tangled with blowing hair and felt red-cheeked and healthy. Wished I’d started earlier so I could linger. Noticed rooks squatting black in snowwhite fen, gray skies, black trees, mallard-green water. Impressed.
Great crowd of cars and trucks at corner by Royal Hotel. Hurried to Grove Lodge, noticed gray pleasantness of stone; liked building. Went in, took off coat, and sat down among boys, none of whom spoke. Felt sick of staring industrially down at the desk like a female yogi. Blond boy rushes in to announce Redpath has flu. And we stayed up till two last night virtuously reading Macbeth. Which was fine. Went awestruck over old speeches: “tale of sound and fury,” especially. So ironic: I pick up poetic identities of characters who commit suicide, adultery, or get murdered, and I believe completely in them for a while. What they say is True.
Well, then, a walk to town, staring as ever at the towers of King’s chapel, feeling happy at Market Hill, but all stores closed, except Sayle’s where I bought an identical pair of red gloves to make up for the one I lost. Can’t be completely in mourning. Is it possible to love the neutral, objective world and be scared of people? Dangerous for long, but possible. I love people I don’t know. I smiled at a woman coming back over the fen path, and she said, with ironic understanding, “Wonderful weather.” I loved her. I didn’t read madness or superficiality in the image reflected in her eyes. For once.
It is the strangers that are easiest to love at this hard time. Because they do not demand and watch, always watch. I am sick of Mallory, Iko, John, even Chris. There is nothing there for me. I am dead to them, even though I once flowered. That is the latent terror, a symptom: it is suddenly either all or nothing: either you break the surface shell into the whistling void or you don’t. I want to get back to my more normal intermediate path where the substance of the world is permeated by my being: eating food, reading, writing, talking, shopping: so all is good in itself, and not just a hectic activity to cover up the fear that must face itself and duel itself to death, saying: A Life is Passing!
The horror is the sudden folding up and away of the phenomenal world, leaving nothing. Just rags. Human rooks which say: Fraud. Thank God I get tired and can sleep; if that is so, all is possible. And I like to eat. And I like to walk and love the countryside here. Only these eternal questions keep knocking at the gate of my daily reality, which I cling to like a mad lover, questions which bring the dark perilous world where all is the same, there are no distinctions, no discriminations, no space and no time: the whistling breath of eternity, not of god, but of the denying devil. So we will turn to a few thoughts on O’Neill, steel ourselves to meet accusations about French, a New Yorker rejection, and the hostility or, even worse, utter indifference, of the people we break bread with.
Wrote one Good Poem: “Winter Landscape with Rooks”: it moves, and is athletic: a psychic landscape. Began another big one, more abstract, written from the bathtub: take care it doesn’t get too general. Good-night, sweet princess. You are still on your own; be stoic; don’t panic; get through this hell to the generous sweet overflowing giving love of spring.
P.S.28 Winning or losing an argument, receiving an acceptance or rejection, is no proof of the validity or value of personal identity. One may be wrong, mistaken, a poor craftsman, or just ignorant – but this is no indication of the true worth of one’s total human identity: past, present & future!
February 21: Tuesday
Crash! I am psychic, only not quite drastically enough. My baby “The Matisse Chapel” which I have been spending the imaginary money from and discussing with modest egoism, was rejected by the New Yorker this morning with not so much as a pencil scratch on the black-and-white doom of the printed rejection. I hid it under a pile of papers like a stillborn illegitimate baby. I shuddered at the bathos in it. Especially after I read Pete DeVries recent scintillant “Afternoon of a Faun.” There are ways and ways to have a love affair. Above all, one must not be serious about it.
Still, the accommodating mind imagines that the poems, sent a week before, must be undergoing detailed scrutiny. I shall no doubt get them back tomorrow. Maybe even with a note.
February 25: Saturday
So we are scrubbed, hair washed fresh, feeling gutted and shaky; a crisis is passed. We reassemble forces, marshal a stiff squadron of optimism, and trek. On and on. Earlier in the week I started thinking about how stupid I was to have to make all those final declarations to all those boys last term. This is ridiculous; it should not be. Not that I can’t choose the people I want to spend my time with, but there must have been some reason for getting into a situation where there was nothing to do but be final and obvious.
Probably it was because I was too intense with one boy after another. That same horror came with them which comes when the paraphernalia of existence whooshes away and there is just light and dark, night and day, without all the little physical quirks and warts and knobby knuckles that make the fabric of existence: either they were all or nothing. No man is all, so, ipso facto, they were nothing. That should not be.
They were also very conspicuously not Richard; I eventually came to telling them this as if they had a fatal disease and I was oh, so sorry. Fool: be didactic, now: take boys named Iko and Hamish29 for what they are which may be coffee or rum and Troilus and Cressida or a sandwich on the mill race. These small particular things are good in themselves. I do not have to do them with the Only Soul in the world in the Only Body that is mine, my true one. There is a certain need of practical Machiavellian living: a casualness that must be cultivated. I was too serious for Peter, but that was mainly because he did not participate in the seriousness deeply enough to find out the gaiety beyond. Richard knows that joy, that tragic joy. And he is gone, and I should probably be glad. It would somehow be more embarassing to have him want to marry me now. I would, I think, probably say no. Why? Because both of us are moving toward security and somehow, accepting him, he might be drowned, squashed, by the simple bourgeois life I come from with its ideals for big men, conventional men: he is someone I could never live home with. Maybe someday he will want a home, but he is so damn far from it now. Our life would be so private: he would perhaps miss the blood background and social strata I don’t come from; I would miss the healthy physical bigness. How important is all this? I don’t know: it changes, like looking in different ends of a telescope.
Anyway, I am tired, and it is Saturday afternoon and I have all the academic reading and papers to do which I should have done two days ago, but for my misery. A lousy sinus cold that blunted up all my senses, bunged up nose, couldn’t smell taste see through rheumy eyes, or even hear, which was worst, almost. And atop of this, through the hellish sleepless night of feverish sniffling and tossing, the macabre cramps of my period (curse, yes) and the wet, messy spurt of blood.
Dawn came, black and white graying into a frozen hell. I couldn’t relax, nap, or anything. This was Friday, the worst, the very worst. Couldn’t even read, full of drugs which battled and banged in my veins. Everywhere I heard bells, telephones not for me, doorbells with roses for all the other girls in the world. Utter despair. Ugly, red nose, no force. When I was psychically saddest, crash, the sky falls in and my body betrays.
Now, despite the twitch of a drying cold, I am cleansed, and once again, stoic, humorous. Made a few criticisms of action and had a chance to prove points this week. Ran through lists of men I knew here, and was appalled: granted, the ones I’d told to take off were not worth seeing (well, it’s true), but how few I knew were! And how few I knew. So, again, I decided, again, it is time to accept the party, the tea. And Derek30 asked me to a wine-party Wednesday. I froze, like usual, but said probably and went. It was, after the first scare (I always feel I turn into a gargoyle when too long alone, and that people will point) it was good. There was a fire, five guitar players, nice guys, pretty girls, one Norwegian blonde named Gretta, who sang “On top of old Smoky” in Norwegian, and a divine hot wine and gin punch with lemon and nutmeg which was good to savor and relieved the tremors I’d been having prior to the breaking of the cold. Then, too, a boy named Hamish (who is probably another Ira31) asked me out next week, and, quite by chance, said he’d take me to the St. Botolph’s32 party (tonight).
This was enough. I had acted, and this Good Thing happened. I am a victim of prestige, too. I mean, prestige-consciousness. And the superficiality of what I have written, the glib, smug littleness, is evident. But it is not me. Not wholly. And I twinge when I see such magnificent stuff. Not because I believe I’m jealous, but because of the blonde one being In. Fear is the worst enemy. And does she fear? Assuming humanity, yes. But, like Hunter,33 the bone structure and coloring can take it. And hide it. If there is any.
And I have learned something from E. Lucas Meyers34 although he does not know me and will never know I’ve learned it. His poetry is great, big, moving through technique and discipline to master it and bend it supple to his will. There is a brilliant joy, there, too, almost of an athlete, running, using all the divine flexions of his muscles in the act. Luke writes alone, much. He is serious about it; he does not talk much about it. This is the way. A way, and I believe in not being Roget’s trollop, parading words and tossing off bravado for an audience.
Now, friend C. writes too, and a certain social and public view has been learned from him. But, as I remarked that frozen winter night to himself, his ego is like an unbroken puppy: scampering about spurting effusively over everything, especially if Everything is admiring. He flies socially, from girl to girl and party to party and tea to tea; God knows when he has time to write, but it is too accessible. Although, justly, some of his poems are quite fine; he misses the athletic force of Luke, though, except in one or two poems, and can’t sustain discipline in his less good ones, falling apart into facilities of speech which show up like a sagging hemline on a really good dress. Luke is all tight and packed and supple and blazing. He will be great, greater than anyone of my generation whom I’ve read yet.
So I am, however, not worth the really good boys; or is it me? If poems were really good, there might be some chance; but, until I make something tight and riding over the limits of sweet sestinas and sonnets, away from the reflection of myself in Richard’s eyes and the inevitable narrow bed, too small for a smashing act of love, until then, they can ingnore me and make up pretty jokes. The only cure for jealousy that I can see is the continual, firm positive forging of an identity and set of personal values which I believe in; in other words, if I believe it is right to go to France, it is absurd to feel pangs because Someone Else has gone to Italy. There is no compare.
The fear that my sensibility is dull, inferior, is probably justified; but I am not stupid, if I am ignorant in many ways. I will tighten up my program here, knowing as I do that it is important for me to do a small number of things well, rather than a wide number sketchily. That much of the perfectionist is still with me. In this daily game of choice and sacrifice, one needs a sure eye for the superfluous. It changes every day, too. Some days the moon is superfluous, some days, most emphatically not.
Last night, blunted as I was by agony, revolted at food and the distant bumbling noise of talk and laughter, I ran out of the dining room and walked alone back to the house. What word blue could get that dazzling drench of blue moonlight on the flat, luminous field of white snow, with the black trees against the sky, each with its particular configuration of branches? I felt shut in, imprisoned, aware that it was fine and shudderingly beautiful, but too gone with pain and aching to respond and become part of it.
The dialogue between my Writing and my Life is always in danger of becoming a slithering shifting of responsibility, of evasive rationalizing: in other words: I justified the mess I made of life by saying I’d give it order, form, beauty, writing about it; I justified my writing by saying it would be published, give me life (and prestige to life). Now, you have to begin somewhere, and it might as well be with life; a belief in me, with my limitations, and a strong punchy determination to fight to overcome one by one: like languages, to learn French, ignore Italian (asloppy knowledge of 3 languages is dilettantism) and revive German again, to build each solid. To build all solid.
Went to psychiatrist this morning and liked him: attractive, calm and considered, with that pleasant feeling of age and experience in a reservoir; felt: Father, why not? Wanted to burst out in tears and say father, father, comfort me. I told him about my break-up and found myself complaining mainly about not knowing mature people here: that’s it, too! There is not one person I know here whom I admire who is older than I! In a place like Cambridge, that is scandalous. It means that there are many fine people I have not met; probably many young dons and men are mature. I don’t know (and, I always ask, would they want to know me?). But at Newnham, there isn’t one don I admire personally. The men are probably better, but there is no chance of getting them for supervisors, and they are too brilliant to indulge in that friendly commerce which Mr. Fisher,35 Mr. Kazin36 and Mr. Gibian37 were so dear about.
Well, I shall look up Beuscher’s friend, and plan to see the Clarabuts at Easter. I can give them youth, enthusiasm and love to make up for the ignorances. Sometimes I feel so very stupid; yet, if I were, would I not be happy with some of the men I’ve met? Or is it because I’m stupid that I’m not; hardly. I long so for someone to blast over Richard; I deserve that, don’t I, some sort of blazing love that I can live with. My God, I’d love to cook and make a house, and surge force into a man’s dreams, and write, if he could talk and walk and work and passionately want to do his career. I can’t bear to think of this potential for loving and giving going brown and sere in me. Yet the choice is so important, it frighten me a little. A lot.
Today I bought rum and marketed for cloves, lemons, and nuts and got the recipe for buttered rum, which I should have had to take me through the beginning of my cold; but I will make it soon. Hamish is so bored, he drinks. How horrible. And I drink sherry and wine by myself because I like it and I get the sensuous feeling of indulgence I do when I eat salted nuts or cheese: luxury, bliss, erotic-tinged. I suppose if I gave myself the chance I could be an alcoholic.
What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that “shaping” force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poeverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine: it is that kind of madness which is worst: the kind with fancies and hallucinations would be a bosch-ish relief. I listen always for footsteps coming up the stairs and hate them if they are not for me. Why, why, can I not be an ascetic for a while, instead of always teetering on the edge of wanting complete solitude for work and reading, and, so much, so much, the gestures of hands and words of other human beings. Well, after this Racine paper, this Ronsard-purgatory, this Sophocles, I shall write: letters and prose and poetry, toward the end of the week; I must be stoic till then.
February 26: Sunday
A small note after a large orgy. It is morning, gray, most sober, with cold white puritanical eyes; looking at me. Last night I got drunk, very very beautifully drunk, and now I am shot, after six hours of warm sleep like a baby, with Racine to read, and not even the energy to type; I am getting the dts. Or something.
Hamish came in cab, and there was a tedious time standing slanted against the bar in Miller’s with some ugly gat-toothed squat grinning guy named Meeson trying to be devastatingly clever and making intense devastating remarks about nothing. Hamish pale, pink and light blue eyes. I drank steadily the goblets with the red-gold Whiskey Macs, one after the other, and by the time we left an hour later, I felt that strong, silted-up force that makes one move through air like swimming, with brave ease.
Falcon’s Yard,38 and the syncopated strut of a piano upstairs, and oh it was very Bohemian, with boys in turtle-neck sweaters and girls being blue-eye-lidded or elegant in black. Derrek was there, with guitar, and Bert39 was looking shining and proud as if he had just delivered five babies, said something obvious about having drunk alot, and began talking about how Luke was satanic after we had run through the poetry in St. Botolph’s and yelled about it: satanic Luke, very very drunk, with a stupid satanic smile on his pale face, dark sideburns and rumpled hair, black-and-white checked baggy pants and a loose swinging jacket, was doing that slow crazy english jive with a green-clad girl, quite black-haired and eyed and a good part pixie, and when they stopped dancing, Luke was chasing her around. Dan Huys40 being very pale, frightfully pale and freckled, and me at last saying my immortal line of introduction which has been with me ever since his clever precocious slanted review: “Is this the better or worse half?” and he looking incredibly young to even think hard yet. Than Minton,41 so small and dark one would have to sit down to talk to him, and Weissbort,42 small again and very curly. Ross,43 immaculate and dark. They were all dark.
By this time I had spilled one drink, partly into my mouth, partly over my hands and the floor, and the jazz was beginning to get under my skin, and I started dancing with Luke and knew I was very bad, having crossed the river and banged into the trees, yelling about the poems, and he only smiling with that far-off look of a cretin satan. He wrote those things, and he was slobbing around. Well, I was slobbing around, “blub, maundering” and I didn’t even have the excuse of having written those things; I suppose if you can write sestinas which bam crash through lines and rules after having raped them to the purpose, then you can be satanic and smile like a cretin beelzebub.
Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me, who had been hunching around over women, and whose name I had asked the minute I had come into the room, but no one told me, came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.44 I started yelling again about his poems and quoting: “most dear unscratch-able diamond” and he yelled back, colossal, in a voice that should have come from a Pole, “You like?” and asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room past the smug shining blub face of dear Bert, looking as if he had delivered at least nine or ten babies, and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.
We shouted as if in a high wind, about the review, and he saying Dan knew I was beautiful, he wouldn’t have written it about a cripple, and my yelling protest in which the words “sleep with the editor” occurred with startling frequency. And then it came to the fact that I was all there, wasn’t I, and I stamped and screamed yes, and he had obligations in the next room, and he was working in London, earning ten pounds a week so he could later earn twelve pounds a week, and I was stamping and he was stamping on the floor, and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love, and whose like I shall never again find, and my favorite silver earrings: hah, I shall keep, he barked. And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. His poem “I did it, I.” Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists. The one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words; his poems are strong and blasting like a high wind in steel girders. And I screamed in myself, thinking: oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you. The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.
And now I sit here, demure and tired in brown, slightly sick at heart. I shall go on. I shall write a detailed description of shock treatment, tight, blasting short descriptions with not one smudge of coy sentimentality, and when I get enough I shall send them to David Ross. There will be no hurry, because I am too desperately vengeful now. But I will pile them up. I thought about the shock treatment description last night: the deadly sleep of her madness, and the breakfast not coming, the little details, the flashback to the shock treatment that went wrong: electrocution brought in, and the inevitable going down the subterranean hall, waking to a new world, with no name, being born again, and not of woman.
I shall never see him again, and the thorny limitations of the day crowd in like the spikes on the gates at Queens last night: I could never sleep with him anyway, with all his friends here and his close relation to them, laughing, talking, I should be the world’s whore, as well as Roget’s strumpet. I shall never see him, he will never look for me. He said my name, Sylvia, and banged a black grinning look into my eyes, and I would like to try just this once, my force against his. But he will never come, and the blonde one, pure and smug and favored, looks, is it with projected pity and disgust? at this drunken amorphic slut.
But Hamish was very kind and would have fought for me. It gave him a kind of glory to take me away from them, those fiends, and I am worth fighting for, I had been nice, to him, he said.
We walked out as the blonde one was coming in, and Oswald said in his dry sarcasm something about “Tell us about bone structures” and that was the last party at Saint John’s where I lost the red glove, as tonight I lost the red bandeau which I loved with all the redness in my heart. Somehow these sluttish nights make me have a violent nunlike passion to write and sequester myself. I shall sequester. I don’t want to see anybody because they are not Ted Hughes and I never have been made a fool of by a man. They are phonies, Hamish said: He is the biggest seducer in Cambridge. Shall I write, and be different? Always, I grab it, the writing, hold it to me, defend, defend, against the flux, the sameness of faces. He said my name, Sylvia, in a blasting wind which shot off in the desert behind my eyes, behind his eyes, and his poems are clever and terrible and lovely.
Well, Hamish and I took an incredibly long time walking about the misty streets in the moonlight and all was blurred behind a theatrical scrim of fog, and vague boys in black gowns staggered and sang. We hid behind a car, and he said, the proctors are out after me, and I kept blithering on about having faith and being lucky, always, if you believe in something, because you can walk on water. Finally, after many strange streets which I did not know, being far far away in a land of whisky and merrydown, saying Ted to the lampposts and chiding myself with Hamish, Hamish, keeping saying it aloud, to him, because he took me away safely. We came to the gates of Queens, and I wanted like a baby to lie down and rest, just peace, peace, I kept whispering. Five boys, five late babies came up, and surrounded me, gently saying, what are you doing here, are you all right, my you smell nice, that perfume, and may we kiss you, and I just stood there huddled to the iron fence, smiling like a lost lamb and saying dear, dear, babies, and then Hamish was among them, and they climbed over and crossed the wooden bridge that Newton once put together without bolts.
Hamish helped me up on the wall, and in my tight skirt, I tried to step over the spikes; they pierced my skirt, my hands and I felt nothing, thinking from the great distance that I might at last lie on a bed of spikes and not feel it, like the yoga, like celia copplestone, crucified, near an anthill, at last, peace, and the nails went through my hands, and my legs were bare to the thigh, and I was over. The stigmata, I said, frozen, looking at those raw frigid hands that should have been bleeding. But they were not bleeding. I had gotten over in an act of sublime drunkenness and faith. And then we went to Hamish’s room and lay on the floor by the fire and I was just so damn grateful for his weight on me and his mouth which was nice, and begged that he scold me, and he just said I wasn’t a whore or a slut like I said but only a very silly girl and he kind of liked me and when would I learn my lesson. When? When? So it was suddenly two-thirty, and I couldn’t imagine being illegal, but I was, and we managed by the light of two matches to get downstairs, and he walked out, a dark lone figure against the pale white blur of snow in the dead quiet crescent court.
He beckoned, I came walking along the outer path, through the crust of snow, breaking, hearing the dry crunch and then crossing the snow field to him, waiting for the sudden flash of light, the: hey, there, you stop! and the crack of pistols. It was dead quiet, and the cold snow was in my shoes and I felt nothing. We went through the gap in the box hedge, and Hamish tested the ice on the river; he said the porter chopped it, but it was whole, and bore us, and we crossed, free, walking home. And I heard the clocks striking three in the deathly quiet of dreaming people, and climbed the stairs somehow and went somehow after hot milk to bed.
And now it is today, and I slept only six hours and am weary and waiting till next day and next to recover. I must write Racine paper, today, dinner with Mallory (can I live) and then Ronsard desperately tomorrow.
Perhaps at dinner they will be laughing at me. Well, they are hardly white, even though they are men. But I shall be sober, oh for so long. Why won’t I see him again? But I won’t. I dream of banging and crashing in a high wind in London. But I want to know him sober; I want to write to him, with that kind of discipline and blaze. So I shall shut up and get some sleep tonight and tomorrow, and do so.
February 27: Monday
Briefly, most briefly. Slept late this morning, woke in dark at 11:30 feeling worthless and slack, yet stubborn. Determined to jettison all obligations for two days and recuperate. This fatigue sucks leeching at my veins. It takes more effort to write excuses than to drag around, but I confronted Miss B. after lunch, and dressed in slacks and favorite paisley velvet jersey to make me feel better, and wrote a full-page poem about the dark forces of lust: “Pursuit”. It is not bad. It is dedicated to Ted Hughes.
Felt sloppy and lazy; awkward not to go out, for food, because of seeing people: there is such a difference from being able to trudge across the mucky snowfields to eat and being able to translate French and write a paper. It is as if I were hypnotized. The concentrated spurts of work I’ve done make me feel I’ve been here for eons. Yet I’ve let French go completely, and must do penance. I have such a damned puritanical conscience that it flays me like briars when I feel I’ve done wrong or haven’t demanded enough of myself: I feel I’ve cheated myself on languages: I haven’t really worked at learning it, and I must be tutored in German next year, instead of Italian. I must do a little reading of French (one hour) every day after this week. And two hours of writing (only, when I do poems, it eats up the whole day in a slow lust which I can’t resist).
New Year’s Rules: get only one supervision next term; enough time to write and read languages. Think up ideas for articles. My God, Cambridge is full of scientists, printing presses, theater groups, and all I need is guts to write about them. That’s why reporting on assignments is good, because it gives an excuse to overcome the initial shyness. Perhaps I’ll try out for Varsity45 next term. Also I must give a party or two: sherry, tea or even dinner for 4. We’ll see. Anything to give out.
Mother wrote today with a good letter of maxims; skeptical as always at first, I read what struck home: “If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter – – – for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.… Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” Those words spoke to my heart with peace, as if in comment, kindly, on my life, my days. That first, touched on that ricocheting judgment I’ve made: despairing of the inferior, disintegrated men I know (who I can’t consider for marriage) and blowing up the blonde one and the figure-heads all out of proportion. Envy and pride, and where’s the golden mean, the man who can be mine, I his. When I start getting jealous of the five editors of Mlle for being married (with a pang – – – this might be me, that sweet word: success) or Philip Booth46 for writing poems for the NY and having a wife and all that, it is time to build up some inner prowess; I am letting too much go vacant; I must build up a little series of sitting ducks, possible ambitions, to knock down, or I’ll find myself sitting at the beginning of Easter vacation, addled as an egg, twiddling my thumbs. We get well first, then we work. Meanwhile, read Hopkins for solace.
March 1:47 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 Běte” 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 běte 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.
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.
Tuesday afternoon: March 6, 1956
Break through the barriers; I am in great pain, and another shell of the so circumscribed understanding is shattered. All the neat tight desperate schedules are gone, and I got a letter from my Richard this afternoon which shot all to hell but my sudden looking in myself and finding what I feared and fought so hard not to find: I love that damn boy with all I’ve ever had in me and that’s a hell of a lot. Worse, I can’t stop; being human, even, it would take me a good two or three years to get to know anybody enough to like him enough to love him enough to marry him. So, I am in a nunnery, for all practical purposes. Worse, not in a nunnery, but surrounded by men who constantly remind me that they are not Richard; I hurt Mallory, and maybe a few others, in a fury of revulsion (and, looking at Mallory, however sorry I am for that ruthlessness of mine, I know it could be no other way now, so revolted am I).
I love him to hell and back and heaven and back, and have and do and will. Somehow, this letter killed finally all those niggling doubts: you’re as tall as he; you weigh more than he; you’re physically as strong & healthier; you’re more athletic; your home and background and friends are too placid and conventional to accept or understand him and will color your view in time: all this: Basta!
So, out of this hurt and sickness, this mad wish to just spend everything I have to go to Paris and calmly, quietly confront him, feeling my will and my love can melt doors: out of this, I re-type the letter I wrote in answer to his which he may never read, and will probably never answer, because he seems to want a break clean and scrupulous as the edge of a guillotine:
“Only listen to me this last once.48 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,49 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,50 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,51 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 life52 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 Wertz53 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 love 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.”
So I have, too, and cannot stop the crying, those flooding cathartic tears, that angle for life and hope even as my love is across that damn channel, telling me not to come. Why, why?
I am physically exhausted, and this comes, breaking my neat schedule of reading so I cannot go to bed. Unless I cut all my classes tomorrow. And Redpath, which my mind is not ready for. And yet I feel that sleep somehow now comes before all else: there is much to bear, and I must be strong and rested to be brave enough.
I read his letter and walked the wet pine-dark path tonight, with the warm rain dripping and shiny on the black leaves in the humid blurred starlight, crying and crying with this terrible pain; it hurts, father, it hurts, oh father I have never known; a father, even, they took from me.
It all sounds so simple and ridiculous: I found out today that I am deeply and for-god-knows-how-long in love with a boy who will not let me come to him out of a ferocious cold scrupulosity and not only will not let me come, when it is possible, but is going this spring away to where it will be for infinite years impossible. And he will not let me come.
And I think of that magnificent poem by James Joyce “I hear an army charging upon the land” … and the final irrevocable lines which after that dynamic thunder of horses and whirling laughter and long green hair coming out of the sea, there is the simple series of words with all the anguish in the world:
“My heart, have you no wisdom thus to despair?
My love, my love, my love, why have you left me alone?”
If I were a man, I could write a novel about this; being a woman, why must I only cry and freeze, cry and freeze?
Let me be strong, strong with sleep and strong with intelligence and strong with bone and fiber; let me learn, through this desperation, to spread myself out: to know where and to whom to give: to Nat, to Gary, to Chris even, to Iko, to dear Gordon in his way: to give the small moments and the casual talk that very special infusion of devotion and love which make our epiphanies. Not to be bitter. Save me from that, that final wry sour lemon acid in the veins of single clever lonely women.
Let me not be desperate and throw away my honor for want of solace; let me not hide in drinking and lacerating myself on strange men; let me not be weak and tell others how bleeding I am internally; how day by day it drips, and gathers, and congeals. I am still young. Even twenty-three and a half is not to late to live anew. I don’t think I’m a Celia Copplestone after all: I honestly hope that in five years I can make a new life if he is not coming; I certainly cannot just go on blindly thinking of ways in which to fill enough years so that he will come; I want somehow to live with him always: to wake and have him greet me, and bear children to him: such heavenly pride to carry his child. My god. I can’t bear bathos. Let there be none; get it out, and decide what to do, and do it.
Oh someone, I run through names, thinking someone: hear me, take me to your heart, be warm and let me cry and cry and cry. And help me be strong: oh Sue, oh Mr. Fisher, oh Ruth Beuscher,54 oh, mother. My god. I shall probably write Elly. That will help objectify this. She knows as much as Sue; it was her bed once.
I luxuriate in this; I have been so tight and rigid since two months. Two months alone. I luxuriate in suddenly letting go and crying my insides out. I am tired and have been very discouraged by having sinus for so long, and that helps: all the despair, coming at me when I am most weak. I will read Hopkins: and, when our lives crack, and the loveliest mirror cracks, is it not right to rest, to step aside and heal; why must I rush on, dragging myself to classes: I don’t really need that “escape” work offers: I need rest: I have enough, thank god, that I want to do, to read, to think about. I must have a sherry party next term, or tea, and ask Chris and Gary and Nat and Keith55 (who seems so sweet) and a girl or two. The right people and right number are terribly important: so everyone will talk and communicate, and not be chaotic, or too narrow.
It is 8:30 and I am terribly tired and want only to go to bed and wake without this clutter of things to do: re-read Ghosts, think about it, read all
Electras, read and translate Ronsard, leap into Webster & Tourneur and write paper. Then next week. Next week it all slows, rides easy under apple boughs. Is there ever enough time in the world?
Some day I shall be grateful for having had two years, two years paid for (we hope) by the government to read and read what I love and study French and German and travel the far countries. Some day when I am stumbling up to cook eggs and feed milk to the baby and prepare dinner for my husband’s friends, I shall pick up Bergson, or Kafka, or Joyce, and languish for the minds that are outleaping and outskipping mine.
But how so? Are these women, this Miss Burton,56 this old Miss Welsford57 (who is coming to the end of her vigor), better for their years reading and writing articles on “The Political Tragedies of Jonson and Chapman” or books on “The Fool” and fearing the bright brilliant young ones like Dr. Krook?58 I would like a life of conflict, of balancing children, sonnets, love and dirty dishes; and banging banging an affirmation of life out on pianos and ski slopes and in bed in bed in bed.
Someday. Today I lived through supervision: it is something even to live through hours of obligation now, without screaming: gently, gently, stoic one. Today, by the way, Miss Burton checked us when we impulsively said suicide was an escape (on defensive?) and she said it was a brave thing – if one could only live corruptly and miserably in this world, – to leave it. NB. So we thought. Once.
Also today, Mrs. Krook discussing redemptive power of love, which philosopher F.H. Bradley left out of his Ethical Studies (much to his weakening) and which we will hear about in DH Lawrence. Next week. And I got back my paper on “Passion as Destiny in Racine” with the comment that passion is only one aspect and not the fatal holocaust I made it: also mixed my metaphors re flames and cancers and appetites: well, not in that poem: which I wrote about Ted; only, like Lou Healy’s poem “Circus in Three Rings” was triggered by Lou,59 but written for Richard.
After Dr. Krook, had good lunch at Eagle with Gary.60 Was only woman in dark pub atmosphere of good solid food, beer, sane talk, all-male; and was I better for it! Gary is blond, blue-eyed, most Germanic in a gentle way: a fine, analytic, slow, deliberate way of thinking: has met all the best minds everywhere, it seems: Here, studies under Daiches, Krook, maybe Lewis: has all the finest minds: E.M. Forster: well, anyway, I felt better than at any of our previous run-ins because I communicated, while intensely, at least with more calm and felt I wasn’t just talking hectically at him, the way I have before, feeling he scorned my mind as female and illogical and slightly absurd.
Gary and I went on about scientific mysticism, probability in foreknowledge in cards, hypnotism, levitation, Blake (whom he admires immensely): I’ve read Wallace Stevens, and he’s just beginning: I find myself whittling sharper edges on my talk, thinking more before speaking: trying to prove points, not just flooding in gestures: learn more of this, it’s good. Gary can help, too, because, while essentially tinged with a romantic streak (almost laughable, in a nice way, he seems so pedestrian, the curse of a particular analytic temperament somehow) he is scrupulously accurate and logical; I’m having coffee with him this Thursday, tea with him & Keith next week. I must read. Read Bergson.
I was struck, even in a tedious session in a dark cubicle in Newnham with Miss Barrett61 lisping sweetly to those immature girls performing an autopsy on “Les Fleurs du Mal,” that I could translate Baudelaire by sight, almost immediately, except for the obvious vocabulary words I didn’t know: I felt the sensuous flow of the words and meanings, and plunged in them alone, longing to read him and live with him. Maybe someday French will actually be natural to me.
Shopped this afternoon after lunch, in fickle rain and sun for mackintosh I felt I must have: suitable for spring and travel, doesn’t get dirty: found ideal one, smart cut, brazen gold buttons, and bought oranges, apples, cheese, nuts and honey. Always feel happy shopping; gives me a sense of “things” somehow: taste color and touch, and a certain power and plentitude.
All this to stop crying. Also had marvelous cathartic blowup with Jane on Sunday. After she had underlined five of my new books in pencil with notes; evidently she felt that since I’d already underlined them in black, nothing further could harm them; well, I was furious, feeling my children had been raped, or beaten, by an alien. And this led to all the other things: To France (where I realize that I threw myself at Richard, making her feel superfluous: I was so desperate then! I wanted so to establish my identity across the Atlantic, and if he’d denied me then, and our love then, it would have been very bad.) At least I had the fruition of our best love yet over here.)
To St. Botolph’s Review: and the evidence that there is no league of all the two I admire: Luke and Ted, and she against poems; she felt reciprocal “immorality” about sending poems to Chequer with my Chris, etc. Also felt clumsy in my presence even as I felt obtuse in hers.
Turns out we’re too much alike, too much the same, ironically, to be friends closely here: One American girl who writes and is humorous and reasonably attractive & magnetic is enough in any group of Englishmen here. When we are together, it is a mutual grabbing for queenship; both of us must be unique, and we can only truly be so when apart: we overlap in too many places (especially being over here the only American girls doing our program and writing) to want to be together. So that at last is that. And the hydra is slain. Thank god. We will go on, openly, being agreeable, but not seeking each other out or writing the wrong footnotes on each other’s actions. The air is cleared.
And now that the hour is nine and I’ve been writing the better part of the day, in a coma, not being able to breathe for crying, I shall depart, read Ghosts, bed, then tomorrow morning cut all but Redpath and read classics; then Ronsard in spare afternoon & evening hours.
Why does that green guck still spawn itself endlessly out of my head, dripping and clinging in my throat, my lungs, blocking in glutinous hunks behind my eyes: I feel sometimes I am blowing out the putrescent remains of my own decayed brains.
But in the midst of this terrible sorrow, this sickness, this weariness, this fear, I spin still: there is still the blessing of the natural world and those simply loved ones and all to read and see.
Called another Fulbright from an ad. May drive to Paris with him (is he short, deformed, ugly, ancient, married? He has a Phd from Columbia and sounded young and pragmatic). I feel I somehow must just walk to Richard’s early one morning and stand there, strong and contained, and say: hello. Then I can just walk in Paris, and maybe find some people to look up, some plays to see, and then take the train to meet Gordon in Germany. Gordon will be dear and strong and heal me by his kindness, even if he knows nothing of all this aching. I refuse to be weak and tell anyone else.
We shall see. It would be a kind of final gesture to face him (Oh, yes, I still think I have power: he may be sleeping with his mistress, leaving orders for me not to be admitted, or not there, or if there, worse, refuse to see me, I am not desperate now. And that is why I feel I can honestly go. I do love him and do not see why I can’t be with him to enjoy life, knowing we must leave it. We shall see.)
Come my coach. Goodnight, goodnight.
Thursday night; March 8
A small, very small word before bed. I have drunk two glasses of sherry by myself tonight and am feeling clean and scrubbed from a bath with hair freshly washed and shaken dry and silky by the fire. Today was strange. Suddenly I have been seeing a great deal of Gary Haupt.
Now there is nothing miraculous in this, except that he seems to want to see me; perhaps it is one of those cases where he was put off by my emotional, irresponsible gushing at first and is finding that I can talk lucidly and with certain perception. At any rate, he is a most calming influence and as mentioned before, I like the logical solidity of his mind; he has a fine mind.
Well, this morning I arose, descended the stairs to find a check from the travel agency about a pound less than the sum Skyways said I was supposed to get, and so planned innumerable conversations in my head to get my shillings by confronting the agency with cool, devastating words. Tomorrow, maybe. Breakfast: gagged on fishcake, couldn’t manage stinking bony kipper, and so subsisted on strong acrid coffee diluted with much milk, and toast and butter and marmelade. Dressed just in time to bike off to Gary’s after translating a little more Ronsard.
I love Pembroke: ran across the cobbled court and up the circular stone staircase with the gothic-arched keyhole windows that make me fell I should be wearing Elizabethan silks, and Gary was ready with homeground coffee and news to tell me, mainly re Keith and Mrs. Krook (who might have me, Gary sounded optimistic). We talked on and on about Yale and Smith and various personalities (the professors he knows are phenomenal) and also Sassoon: it gave me such a peculiar surge of illicit pleasure to casually say: oh, yes, I knew him; tell me about him. And so Gary went on and gave me a very distant opinion of why they rejected Sassoon from the Manuscript club:62 he wasn’t a group man; dissatisfied with Yale; giving up all to write; influence of family name, etc. I chuckled inside, and thought: o, my god. How absurd. And I love him so!
Well, we talked through Willey63 (last lecture, which gave me a pang: I quite love that man) and ran to catch Krook who picked flaws in Arnold a bit, but said he began work on the consideration of Christ (humanist view) as unique man who preached gospel of redemptive power of love; went on to D.H. Lawrence & incredible fable: “Man Who Died.” She read sections, felt chilled, as in last paragraph of “The Dead”, as if angel had hauled me by the hair in a shiver of gooseflesh: about the temple of Isis bereaved, Isis in search. Lawrence died in Vence, where I had my mystic vision with Sassoon; I was the woman who died, and I came in touch through Sassoon that spring, that flaming of life, that resolute fury of existence. All seemed shudderingly relevant; I read in a good deal; I have lived much of this. It matters. Finished Lawrence before supper.
Well, then, after Krook, Gary asked me to Miller’s to dinner, which threw me, as I’d thought I might have invaded his male environment unwantedly at the Eagle yesterday. We had cold, thick tomato juice, chicken and mushrooms in red wine casserole, roast potatoes, carrots, red wine, and finished with an exotically cooling dish of pineapple-and-icecream with coffee, talking much of English and American temperaments, painting (we’d both wanted to go to art school at one time) and going on and on. How strange; he has evidently had a very unhappy love experience with an art-student fulbright girl for whom he stayed in London all Christmas vacation. Behind his apparently dry, analytical, Germanic imperturbable face, there is this Romantic self: he almost had tears in his eyes when he said, looking away: “She didn’t appreciate intelligence.” Well, he certainly has that. I feel so secure with him primarily because I am absolutely devoid of any physical attraction toward him. There is no battle of the sexes, really. His mind is fine, and I find myself developing by becoming articulate with him. But he is that kind which is my total opposite: what fires are there, and there must be some rather deep smouldering ones, are by no means evident in his being: his gestures, looks, syntax. He is the exact opposite of Richard. With him, I am utterly intellectual and platonic; as much so as I’ve ever been; and there is, paradoxically, a safety and relief about this. Tea on Sunday, with him at Keith’s, and Vienna choirboys at King’s chapel Wednesday; have borrowed two books: on 17th century metaphysicals & elizabethan lyrics.
Rushed home, to Barrett, more Ronsard, slow, painstaking, but I do like; and am learning. Foul supper of dry rice, kennel-ration curry, sallow parsnips, grayed mashed potato, and cloying melted icecream with burnt caramel suace. Mrs. Lameyer writes that grammy was taken back to hospital; can’t eat. Is she dying of cancer, even as I write? That dark vile mystery; I love that woman, I can’t believe she could go out of the world and me not there; I can’t believe home could be without her. It sickens me; afar off, I think of her, and cry. Those presences, those people loved and gone into the dark; I rail and rage against the taking of my father, whom I have never known; even his mind, his heart; his face, as a boy of 17 I love terribly. I would have loved him; and he is gone. I feel somehow much too old, with all the older ones dead before I have known them, and only the young ones, the babies, under me. I am so close to the dark. My villanelle was to my father; and the best one. I lust for the knowing of him; I looked at Redpath at that wonderful coffee session at the Anchor, and practically ripped him up to beg him to be my father; to live with the rich, chastened, wise mind of an older man. I must beware, beware, of marrying for that. Perhaps a young man with a brilliant father. I could wed both.
It grows late, and I tired, and there being cramming for Webster & Tourneur this weekend. I shall really rip about next term, being on my own, with Miss Burton Monday: fight for Krook, & plenty of free time, to write, read on my own, around criticism, metaphysicals, et. al. Am dropping, weary, but dogged; more happy for some reason. Am respecting self more.
March 9: Friday
A small something must be said about today, because as far as we’re concerned, it’s the first day of spring, and we can, really, breathe again and sleep through the night.
Woke up this morning after nine hours of sleep, missed Northam lecture and lingered over stale congealed egg, coffee and toast and marmelade. Felt like singing while cleaning up room: wrote a letter about how I’m forging a soul amidst great birth pangs and about how I felt concerning Sassoon to mother, included copies of two best poems: “Pursuit” and “Channel Crossing”.
Also wrote her re new inspiration: application for Eugene Saxton fellowship for young writers. My whole emphasis has swung again, to a realization that if I enter this academic, critical world, I’ll spend all my time reading and reading, and that I need a healthy overturning of the apple-cart, almost a refusal to read beyond a point, and to read more of what influences my writing, rather than paralyses it: contemporary work. I want to stress the living-writing life now; the academic-critical-teaching life can wait. If I write this term (having whittled my program to a bare minimum: moralists and French, perhaps German) and live in Spain a month with Elly, then return to write for a month, and take off again, I should amass enough, what with my various prizes, might make me able to write a novel (love and suicide being large part: also college environment, position of intelligent woman in world: think in chapters, stories, fight through to triumph) and poetry to keep me in discipline. I’d rather write a novel, and I could live in southern France (Vence? Grasse?) or Italy or Spain for a year and forge my soul and just read French and German and soak up art, all on my own. I’ve got to try that. Think of ways. All prizes: from Seventeen, to Mademoiselle, to recent poetry coups, will be invaluable; also, newspaper experience.
It’s a dream. We will work toward it. It would also help getting a job in the states if I’d a novel published. Begin it this summer. Outline: intelligent woman, fight, triumph: toleration of conflict, etc. Make complex and rich and vivid. Use letters to Sassoon, etc. I’m getting excited. Make it tense & tough, and for god’s sake, not sentimental.
Well, today: biked to laundromat singing and letting wind blow through hair: same chilled-champagne air as in Nice and Vence in January: clear brilliant cold light. Travel agency most nice about refund and information re trains from Paris to Munich. Bank, Heffer’s: bought lots of books by Huxley: the most recent about “HEaven and Hell”: of antipodes in mind: reached under hypnosis or mescalin. Post office; dropped laundry & baggage back home and went through fens where everyone was sitting out having sandwiches and ale in the sun on the mill race. Got the last 4 sandwiches at the sun-flooded Anchor and sat reading Huxley with espresso coffee. Back here now: New Yorker rejected poems, with a “sorry, please try again” at least. All these days of hope, it’s been coming back to me regular mail. But today, fortunately, I could write ten novels and vanquish the gods; outside, tennis balls ping, birds twirp and chirr, and I must read Marlowe and Tourneur to do my last paper for Burton. Cheers for spring; for life; for a growing soul.
Saturday morning: March 10
I cannot keep still; I am on the edge; the dream comes to taunt me in the morning sun. Last night’s whiskey with Hamish, glass after glass tossed down, at least five or six, is still strutting latent havoc in my veins, ready to betray me; the caffeine from the coffee this morning tenses fiber too, and I am appalled: Granta with bad poem by girl with same initials, ironically enough; bitterness about clique: they publish friends, always friends; must write some short sketches for them and Varsity after this next week: potent, witty, punch Y: something they can’t reject without being immoral.
What I want to say is: HE is here; in Cambridge. Smiling blub-faced Bert, all scrubbed and polished, met me in the street on the way to the College library: “Lucas and Ted threw stones at your window lastnight.” A huge joy galloped through me; they remembered my name; it was the wrong window and I was out drinking with Hamish, but they exist in this world; I talked on a minute, Ted it seems is assigned to write a synopsis of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” (!!!) and so on. I murmured something about: tell them to drop by, or something, and cycled off.
Now, tense, rebellious, with spring sprouting outside my window and playing merry hell with my blood, I have to cram for paper on Webster & Tourneur: why oh why didn’t I do it yesterday. I should have known; and today will be shot to hell because he is Here and he may not bother to come again, having dates with Puddefoots or something, and I wait here, quivering like polished barbwire. If only I weren’t so tired and full of feathers from that whiskey, I’d be able to cope. If he did or didn’t. Probably the blonde one is lunching with him even now. Thank god Bert is hers. But He. Oh he.
Spent last session with Dr. Davy64 this morning articulating: I fear oppressive and crushing forces, if I do not plot and manage and manipulate my path, joining: academic, creative & writing, and emotional & living & loving: writing makes me a small god: I re-create the flux and smash of the world through the small ordered word-patterns I make. I have powerful physical, intellectual and emotional forces which must have outlets, creative, or they turn to destruction and waste (e.g. drinking with Hamish, and making indescriminate love).
Please let him come; let me have him for this British spring. Please please.
Ran into Marain Frisch, very beautiful and fine, in French dept. of Heffer’s; planned supper Tuesday night just before she left. May see her in Switzerland; coincidence, but how lovely: with Gordon, maybe?
Please let him come, and give me the resilience & guts to make him respect me, be interested, and not to throw myself at him with loudness or hysterical yelling; calmly, gently, easy baby easy. He is probably strutting the backs among crocuses now with seven Scandinavian mistresses. And I sit, spider-like, waiting, here, home; Penelope weaving webs of Webster, turning spindles of Tourneur. Oh, he is here; my black marauder; oh hungry hungry. I am so hungry for a big smashing creative burgeoning burdened love: I am here; I wait; and he plays on the banks of the river Cam like a casual faun.
March 10: Postscript
Oh the fury, the fury. Why did I even know he was here. The panther wakes and stalks again, and every sound in the house is his tread on the stair; I wrote mad girl’s love song once in a mad mood like this when Mike didn’t come and didn’t come, and every time I am dressed in black, white and red: violent, fierce colors. All the steps coming up and running past I made into his step and cursed the usurpers that took his place. About Lou Healy I felt this smouldering desperate force that made, by persistent willing, certain situations take place.
Now I lay, burning, fevered with this disease, and the sun glared at me all at once, a lowering orange eye, blank and mocking; it set on time, I clocked it. And again the dark eats at me: the fear of being crushed in a huge dark machine, sucked dry by the grinding indifferent millstones of circumstance. He is at a party now, I know; with some girl. My face burns, and I am turning to ash, like the apples of sodom and gomorrah.
I lay and heard the steps on the stair and the knock at the door and I leapt up to welcome the fruit of my will. It was John, coming to ask me to the movies;
I wanted to see that movie, but wouldn’t let myself; it will be harder to stay here and watch the clock go from eight to ten, and read the Duchess of Malfi. How I hate him; how I hate Bert for feeding my fury which I had quelled by wrenching out that poem last week.
I writhed and angered and talked to John, bidding him goodbye and sending him off; imagine, he tried to persuade me to through Copenhagen instead of Paris!
I remember the dreams I’ve had the last two nights: the first: trying out for a play and being in a huge gymnasium where the clowns and actors were practising. Everywhere there was the heavy circumstance of menace: I ran, huge weights were dropping on my head; I crossed the slippery floor, and afar off, laughing hobos bowled large black balls at me to knock me down; it was a terrifying time of jeopardy: similar to those moments caught between traffic, lumbering trucks and busses and bicycles coming from all angles, when I can only stand fast and shut my eyes, or blunder into a tangle of traffic and hope for luck. Black balls, black weights, wheeled vehicles, and the slippery floor: all trying to crush me, moving in heavy blundering attempts, just missing.
Then I was in my black coat and beret: Isis bereaved, Isis in search, walking a dark barren street. Into a café, searching, searching, and in a chair, hiding his face behind a newspaper, sat the dark one, suave, grinning. I stood, appalled, and he uncurled, and came with me, dark and sweet. Another dark man with the face of a slavic cretin, or a yellowed spaniard, of some indeterminate race, accosted me and said in a thick, furry voice “It is night,” He thought I was a whore; I broke away, running after my Richard, who walked ahead, his back toward me.
Men’s voices downstairs. I am sick, sick. With this desperate fury. God knows what will happen to me in Paris. Love turns, lust turns, into the death urge. My love is gone, gone, and I would be raped. “It is night.”
March 11: Sunday morning:
Another day of hell. He is on the prowl, all the fiends are come to torment me: and I alone am escaped to tell thee. All of the eyes, the multitudes of eyes that report his being here. This morning, a male tread, a knock at the door; it is He? It was: mere Chris, after all this 10 days of absence. Only, a Chris gifted with instruments of torture: having just seen Luke and Ted down the street this very morning; they will not come. Not in the gray sober light of morning. They will not come.
But last night they came, at two in the morning, Phillipa said. Throwing mud on her window, saying my name, the two mixed: mud and my name; my name is mud. She came to look for me, but I was sleeping. Dreaming of being home in Winthrop65 on a lovely new spring day, walking in pajamas down the streets of melting tar to the sea, the salt freshness, and squatting in the sea in a tangle of green weeds were clam-diggers with osier baskets, rising, one after the other, to look at me in my pajamas, and I hid in spring shame in the trellised arbors of Day’s home.
Mail came through the sewer, and I got only bills. Mail and rice came through the sewer, that bubbling green mucky sewer we played in by the sea, transmuting what corruption, what slime-gilded periwinkles, into what radiant magic. They laughed and said they trusted the mail and rice coming through the sewer.
And all this while, those three boys in the dark were treating me like what whore, coming like the soldiers to Blanche DuBois and rolling in the gardens, drunk, and mixing her name with mud. Two reports today, to insert more needles in my skin. I must cram for my paper. Oh, god give me the guts to live through this week. Let me someday confront him, only confront him, to make him human, and not that black panther which struts on the forest fringes of hearsay. Such hell. They refuse to face me in daylight. I am not worth that. I must be, when if they ever come. They will not come. I don’t want to eat, to go to tea today. I want to rave out in the streets and confront that big panther, to make the daylight whittle him to lifesize.
[Appendix 7 contains Sylvia Plath’s 26 March 1956–5 April 1956 journal describing her spring vacation in Paris; Appendix 8 contains Sylvia Plath’s 1 April 1956 list describing ways to win friends and influence people; Appendix 9 contains Sylvia Plath’s 16 April 1956 journal fragment about Ted Hughes – ed.]
April 1866
now the forces are gathering still against me, and my dearest grandmother who took care of me all my life while mother worked is dying very very slowly and bravely of cancer, and she has not even been able to have intra-venous feeding for six weeks but is living on her body, which will be all sublimed away, and then only she may die. my mother is working, teaching, cooking, driving, shoveling snow from blizzards, growing thin in the terror of her slow sorrow. I had hoped to make her strong and healthy, and now she may be too weak herself after this slow death, like my father’s slow long death, to come to me. and I am here, futile, cut off from the ritual of family love and neighborhood and from giving strength and love to my dear brave grandmother’s dying whom I loved above thought. and my mother will go, and there is the terror of having no parents, no older seasoned beings, to advise and love me in this world.
something very terrifying too has happened to me, which started two months ago and which needed not to have happened, just as it needed not to have happened that you wrote that you did not want to see me in paris and would not go to italy with me. when I came back to london, there seemed only this one way of happening, and I am living now in a kind of present hell and god knows what ceremonies of life or love can patch the havoc wrought. I took care, such care, and even that was not enough, for my being deserted utterly. you said that when you returned to paris, you said that you told me “brutally” your vacation would be spent. well, mine is spent too, brutally, and I am spent, giving with both hands, daily, and the blight and terror has been made in the choice and the superfluous unnecessary and howling void of your long absence. your handwriting has gone so wild and racked not all the devils could burn a meaning out of it.
[Appendix 10 contains Sylvia Plath’s 26 June 1956–6 March 1961 journal, including drawings, descriptions, and poems written during her honeymoon in Spain and France with Ted Hughes – ed.]
