jonkers rare books
“I have no desire, above my typewriter, to do anything except work for you” 3. “Tuesday morning” [9 October 1956]. An extraordinary letter from Sylvia Plath to Ted Hughes, covering suicide, her devo- tion for him, and two stories she is working on. Five sides of blue letter paper (three sheets, folded horizontally, approximately 1,600 words), with a three line autograph postscript signed “your loving wife sylvia”. Plath opens with news of Cambridge and how isolated she feels there, “How I live for your letters; such queer things are happening to me; I feel that in myself I am ob- serving the progress of a deadly disease never before recorded... I can’t stand anyone; especially men.” Her dependence on Ted is underlined, quite starkly, at the end of this passage, “I think if anything ever happened to you, I would really kill myself... I shall never leave your side a day in my life after exams.” The struggle of being apart from Ted is also having an impact on her writing. Despite having “a growing feeling, perhaps also delusive, of a new prowess in knowing what I want to say”, she feels that “away from you my own judgments are all out of kilter, or to cock, and I can’t tell if I’ve been typing over and over on the same line immortal folderol or what”. Plath goes on to describe in detail two recently completed stories, in which suicide and a dark humour both feature and foreshadow The Bell Jar. ‘The Wishing-Box’ is about a “dreamless woman” with a “complete escapist” husband, who kills herself with an overdose of sleeping pills, “It’s actually a very humorous terrible little story”. She con- fides later in the letter that her dreamless woman, “is certainly an aspect of one of my selves now”. In writing the second story ‘Invisible Man’, Plath finds “I best like doing completely realistic descriptions of psychological states, giving them symbolic form”. The protag- onist is a young man who suddenly becomes “invisible to himself, but to no one else”. As a result, his self-image is not based on what he can see, but on the reactions to him of everybody he meets, “it is as if he must seek his own true image, the proof of his corporeal existence, in the eyes and reflections around him.” She decides that this same fate will befall her character’s son, who will become invisible at college “but, of a more artistic nature, commit suicide by drowning. That Narcissistic leap. It must be funny, but terribly serious.” She asks Ted for suggestions on what it might feel like to be an invisible man, before, perhaps thinking she had taken up too much time on her own work, returning to his, “After I get this story done, and the 150 odd pages I have to type typed (between us we
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