The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

by Sylvia Plath

Pray to yourself for the guts to make the summer work. One sale: that would help. Work for that.

NOTHING EVER REMAINS THE SAME–.

Read a story: Think. You can. You must, moreover, not continually run away while asleep – forget details – ignore problems – shut walls up between you & the world & all the gay bright girls –: please, think – snap out of this. Believe in some beneficent force beyond your own limited self. God, god, god: where are you? I want you, need you: the belief in you and love and mankind. You must not seek escape like this. You must think.

Laat entry bwfore first suicide attempt.

so sylvia burns yellow dahlias on her dark altar of the sun as the sun wanes to impotence and the world falls in winter.

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.…

die letzte brücke.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The other night we climbed our road, Tomas Ortunio,3 for the first time.

Wife, pretty, rounded chic French type, much bleached blonde hair, grown out dark at roots, pulled untidily back with several tortoise shell combs; narrow gold wedding band; browned with sun; arched plucked eyebrows and lively brown eyes; very merry and chichi.

And just now I pick up the blessed diary of Virginia Woolf which I bought with a battery of her novels saturday with Ted. And she works off her depression over rejections from Harper’s (no less! – – – and I hardly can believe that the Big Ones get rejected, too!) by cleaning out the kitchen. And cooks haddock & sausage. Bless her. I feel my life linked to her, somehow. I love her – – – from reading Mrs. Dalloway for Mr. Crockett – – – and I can still hear Elizabeth Drew’s voice sending a shiver down my back in the huge Smith class-room, reading from To The Lighthouse. But her suicide, I felt I was reduplicating in that black summer of 1953. Only I couldn’t drown. I suppose I’ll always be over-vulnerable, slightly paranoid. But I’m also so damn healthy & resilient. And apple-pie happy. Only I’ve got to write. I feel sick, this week, of having written nothing lately. The Novel got to be such a big idea, I got panicked.

Biked today, this morning, up Queen’s road: on left, hedged green playing field, red humped brick roofs of Newnham, bare trees with black clots of rookeries, pink blossoms like little sticky puffs of snow on black boughs. Purple and yellow crocuses in bloom by the long low red brick almshouse with its arched doorways, a face in stone carved at each corner of the lintel. The dangerous curve, blind, by the garage, a right turn, and over the while-railinged bridge, bumpy wood boards, past the Jolly Miller. Cocker-spaniel racing. Ducks whickering past my ear. Canoes and punts drawn up on the mud bank under the Granta’s grey stone. Poplars shooting up on the right.

I could write a terrific novel. The tone is the problem. I’d like it to be serious, tragic, yet gay & rich & creative. I need a master, several masters. Lawrence, except in Women in Love, is too bare, too journalistic in his style. Henry James too elaborate, too calm & well-mannered. Joyce Cary I like. I have that fresh, brazen, colloquial voice. Or J.D. Salinger. But that needs an “I” speaker, which is so limiting. Or Jack Burden. I have time. I must tell myself I have time.

I am wicked, sick: a week behind. But will do 5 pages a day until plodding I catch up. Use words as poet uses words. That is it! Gulley Jimson is an artist with words, too – – – or, rather Joyce Cary is. But I must be a word-artist. The heroine. Like Stephen Dedalus walking by the sea: ooo-ee-ooo-siss. Hising their petticoats.

Poems are bad to begin with: elaborate ones especially: they freeze me too soon on too little. Better, little exercise poems in description that don’t demand philosophic bear-traps of logical development. Like small poems about the skate, the cow by moonlight, a la the Sow. Very physical in the sense that the worlds are bodied forth in my words, not stated in abstractions, or denotative wit on three clear levels. Small descriptions where the words have an aura of mystic power: of Naming the name of a quality: spindly, prickling, sleek, splayed, wan, luminous, bellied. Say them aloud always. Make them irrefutable.

Yesterday was the first day of work: a bad day. Spent time on a very desperately elaborate psychological idea and wrote maybe one good image (the boy with the whole ocean bottled in his head) to a raft of brittle, stilted artificial stuff. Not touching on my deep self. This bad beginning depressed me inordinately. It made me not hungry nor want to cook, because of the bestialness of eating and cooking with out keen thought and creation. The beach: too late, after a hot walk along a gravelly, sunny, sidewalk on Route 6, the deathly pink, yellow and pistachio colored cars shooting by like killer instruments from the mehcanical tempo of another planet. Broken glass, then the scrub pine shadowing Bracket road, the whisk of bird and squirrel in underbrush, green berried shrubs, and the rough tar. A great blue span of Atlantic under the cliff at Nauset Light, and a swim in the warmish green seeweeded water, rising and falling with the tall waves at tide turn. Lay in sun far up beach, but the sun was cold, and the wind colder. The boom, boom of great guns throbbing in the throat, then the ride back, bad-tempered. Making mayonnaise, and it coming out well. Fine. Then, grubbing over supper, with the badly begun poem like an albatross round the neck of the day, nothing else. And the tables and chairs insulting the way they are when a human being tries to live their merely phenomenal life and miserably doesn’t succeed. They go smug, I-told-you-so.

Syl having a bad day of writing. lol.

Now it is near ten, and the morning yet untried, unbroken. The feeling one must get up earlier and earlier to get ahead of the day, which by one o’clock is determined. Last night: finished “The Waves”, which disturbed, almost angered by the endless sun, waves, birds, and the strange uneveness of description – – – a heavy, ungainly ugly sentence next to a fluent, pure running one.

Syl finishes The Waves...

The ground is orange-red with fallen pine needles, and the robins and chipmunks steal their color from this red earth.

A new era has begun: it is not yet seven thirty. I have my four hour morning ahead, whole as a pie.

How we cling to these days of July: August is a September month10 (there, I’ve got so used to writing “mother” in the last days that it nips out to usurp all words beginning with “m”).

Nauset Light and Coast Guard beach: we played: floating, my hands and feet bobbing like corks, my hair wet from my forehead, trailing to bait the fishes. A surge of glory and power.

Any idiot can waste the summer getting tan only to lose it.

Dream of flying. Of alphabet lands. Clean worlds, dream worlds –

Asleep on a frigid midnight, last codeine taken, I deserved it, the sure deep doped sleep.

Jealous one I am, green-eyed, spite-seething.

Perhaps the remedy for suppressed talent is to become queer: queer and isolate, yet somehow able to maintain one’s queerness while feeding food & words to all the world’s others.

I walk, blindered, eyes lowered. Life loses me.

Absolutely blind fuming sick. Anger, envy and humiliation. A green seethe of malice through the veins.

16 a month: I shall not go sick or nervous or over-effusive – I shall merely cook a damn good dinner & serve it & hope people talk well,

Trala.

I must meantime this June beginning, learn about planets & horoscopes to be in the proper starred house: I’ll wish I had learned if I don’t: tarot pack, too. Maybe I should stay alone, unparalysed, & work myself into mystic & clairvoyant trances, to get to know Beacon Hill, Boston, & get its fabric into words. I can. Will. Now to do what I must, then to do what I want: this book too becomes a litany of dreams, of directives & imperatives. I need not to be more with others, but to be more & more deeply, richly alone. Recreating worlds.

I am here: black velvet slacks stuck with lint, worn & threadbare slippers, dun-fuzzed with dark brown leopard spots on a pale tan ground, gilt bordered, then the polished blond-brown woodwork of the Whelans37 maple coffee table, the dull inner glow of white & silver highlights on the pewter sugar bowl with its domed lid & cupola peak, then the dented-red-skinned apples, mealy & synthetic tasting.

There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.

“J’ai oublié mon plan de Paris, ainsi je suis un peu perdue.”

I was grateful for a good dinner and tried to be nice to Sally who was very serious and deadpan and who never walked because her feet hurt (looking at my paper-thin red ballerinas, she said somewhat resentfully: “I could never wear shoes like yours”).

talked aloud to myself and cried a little crossing the Place, blazing with lights and arush with deadly streams of cars; I gave up all idea of stopping on the Boulevard St. Germain for a snack and hurried down the Rue de Lille which I discovered was completely deserted, full of some kind of public arsenal-type buildings; a policeman was pacing his beat ahead and I hurried to keep near him until I got into the lighted hotel section; I cried and cursed Sassoon for leaving me thus open to jeopardy and missed him most that night; the moon was far off and sad over the dark cruel buildings and in my room I cried in black velvet on the yellow bedspread and wondered at my not having one to love; outside the roof shingles and chimney pots were misted magic and haunting in a blue wash of moonlight.

One sentence!!!

August 9: Saturday: windy – speed boats on Connecticut white wakes cut blue lawn, water – bright blue, twinkling! Sun: glint – green banks – fence of trees Skiers in invisible tow lines – curve & scallop of white shearing aside – birds, swallows, martins ride & sun on the wind – sparse white cumulus – bleached heads of rye – rye stubble – wallop & gaze of boats. Waving grass-seeded heads – fountain heads of golden rod – lace plats of queen anne’s lace bright mustard fuzz – pollen – purple vetch bends nods inland from river wind – rasp, cicada buzz – golden rod against blue water – green band of trees, paler sky – crickets – dustcoated black sextons – yellow butterier than the sun – prickle of bleached stubble – whisk heads nip, shear, wallop, scallop wallop & jolt of the upkicking wave

The nurse asks me question & fills out a form. I want to answer more questions, I love questions. I feel a blissful slumping into boxes on forms.

Later – 10 am – now I’m really prepared for the slaughter – robed loosely in a pink & maroon striped surgical gown, a gauze turban & a strip of adhesive shuts off the sight of my wedding ring. The little nurse was snippy when I asked how long the operation took. Oblivion approaches. Now I’m close enough, I open my arms. I asked to have my flowered curtains left drawn – the privilege of a condemned prisoner – I don’t want the curious gossipy well-meaning ladies peering for signs of fear, stupor or whatever. Evidently a lady went out on a trolley a few minutes back “Was she asleep?” “She looked asleep, she just lay there.” Now they’ve given me the first injection – which will “dry my mouth, make me feel drunk & so I don’t care what happens.” A handsome lady anesthetist came in & told me about the details of that – my arm is swollen – right upper – a bee sting, red & hard to the touch. I feel a bubbly drowsiness take my heart & so shall only write in here after it’s over – a letter from Ted reached me – my dear dear love.

Night on ship – windowless cabin, dark – artificial light through slats in door – no sense of day or night. Gleaming endless corridors, red & green arrows – boat-drill – life-savers – shuffle-board players – ship Newspaper & daily events card – throbbing – coffin-like bunks – straight narrow, tightly made beds – compact, but crowding – if one person opens a suitcase lid, everybody else has to get in bed – sense of waking deep in a coffin – early morning light on deck – cold, windy, overcast rows of empty deck chairs – blue & orange zig-zag patterns – deep-black-green waves directly under ship –