Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams: And Other Prose Writings Read online

  Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

  and other prose writings

  SYLVIA PLATH

  Contents

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  INTRODUCTION by Ted Hughes

  Part I: The more successful short stories and prose pieces

  Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (1958)

  America! America! (1963)

  The Day Mr Prescott Died (1956)

  The Wishing Box (1956)

  A Comparison (1962)

  The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle (1959)

  The Daughters of Blossom Street (1959)

  ‘Context’ (1962)

  The Fifty-Ninth Bear (1959)

  Mothers (1962)

  Ocean 1212-W (1962)

  Snow Blitz (1963)

  Part II: Other stories

  Initiation (1952)

  Sunday at the Mintons (1952)

  Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit (1955)

  In the Mountains (1954)

  All the Dead Dears (1956/7)

  Day of Success (1960)

  Part III: Excerpts from Notebooks

  Cambridge Notes (February I 956)

  Widow Mangada (Summer 1956)

  Rose and Percy B (1961/162)

  Charlie Pollard and the Beekeepers (June I962)

  Part IV: Stories from the Lilly Library

  A Day in June (1949)

  The Green Rock (1949)

  Among the Bumblebees (Early 1950s)

  Tongues of Stone (1955)

  That Widow Mangada (Autumn 1956)

  Stone Boy with Dolphin (1957/58)

  Above the Oxbow (1958)

  The Shadow (January 1959)

  Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men (May 1959)

  About the Author

  Also by Sylvia Plath

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  Part I:

  ‘The Day Mr Prescott Died’ and ‘The Wishing Box’ first appeared in Granta (1956 and 1957). The ‘Fifteen-Dollar Eagle’ first appeared in the Sewanee Review in 1960, ‘The Daughters of Blossom Street’ and ‘The Fifty-Ninth Bear’ were published in the London Magazine (1960 and 1961). ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ was first published in Atlantic Monthly in September 1968 and ‘Mothers’ was published in October 1972 in McCall’s, who changed the title to ‘The Mothers’ Union’.

  ‘“Context”’ was commissioned by the London Magazine (1962). ‘A Comparison’ was written for a BBC Home Service programme, The World of Books, broadcast in July 1962 and published in The Listener in July 1977. ‘Ocean 1212-W’ was broadcast on the BBC in 1962 and published in The Listener in 1963. ‘America! America!’ was published in Punch in April 1963. ‘Snow Blitz’ is published here for the first time.

  Part II:

  ‘Initiation’—Seventeen, January 1953

  ‘Sunday at the Mintons’—Mademoiselle, August 1952

  ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit’—Smith Review, Spring 1955

  ‘In the Mountains’—Smith Review, Fall 1954

  ‘All the Dead Dears’—Gemini, Summer 1957 (Thanks are due to Richard Steuble for finding this story)

  ‘Day of Success’—Bananas, 1976

  Introduction

  Sylvia Plath wrote a considerable amount of prose. About seventy stories, mostly unpublished, are extant. She started several novels, but only one sizeable fragment—‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’—survives from anything before The Bell Jar. After The Bell Jar she typed some 130 pages of another novel, provisionally titled Double Exposure. That manuscript disappeared somewhere around 1970.

  Besides fiction, she wrote pretty consistently at some form of journal—sometimes in large hardback notebooks, occasionally on loose typed sheets, occasionally in small notebooks from which she tore the pages she wanted to save. (The rest of the notebook would be filled with drafts of poems, etc.) Her motive for keeping the journal varied. The handwritten notebook entries were generally negative self-castigation, or a means of rallying her determination to get through something or other. Among her papers at the time of her death were the manuscripts of about seventeen stories. These included those of her stories she wanted to keep, plus others written during her last two years in England.

  The first edition of this book, published in 1977, was made up of a selection from these seventeen stories, together with some pieces of her journalism and extracts from her journal. At that time, as Editor, I had to assume that she had either lost or destroyed as failures all the other stories I remembered her having written. Just as that collection was being published, however, a large quantity of Sylvia Plath’s papers emerged in the Lilly Library, at Indiana University, acquired by the library from Mrs Aurelia Plath, the writer’s mother, and among these were the typescripts of over fifty stories—dating from her first attempts at writing up to roughly 1960, though most of them very early work. Apart from duplicates of a few of those she had kept by her, these were all stories she had failed to publish and eventually rejected.

  This second edition contains the thirteen stories included in the first edition together with five of her more interesting pieces of journalism and a few fragments from her journal; and, in Part IV, a further nine stories selected from the Indiana Archive. All items are given approximate dates of composition in so far as that is known.

  Sylvia Plath herself had certainly rejected several of the stories here, so they are printed against her better judgment. That must be taken into account. But in spite of the obvious weaknesses, they seem interesting enough to keep, if only as notes towards her inner autobiography. Some of them demonstrate, even more baldly than the stronger stories, just how much the sheer objective presence of things and happenings immobilized her fantasy and invention. The still-life graphic artist in her was loyal to objects. Nothing refreshed her more than sitting for hours in front of some intricate pile of things laboriously delineating each one. But that was also a helplessness. The blunt fact killed any power or inclination to rearrange it or see it differently. This limitation to actual circumstances, which is the prison of so much of her prose, became part of the solidity and truth of her later poems.

  In 1960 she tried her hand at stories for the more sentimental English women’s magazines, and with these she managed a slightly freer range of invention. One of them, ‘Day of Success’, is included here as an example of her efforts at pastiche. But even here one can feel the rigidity of the objective situation elbowing the life out of the narrative.

  No doubt one of the weaknesses of these weaker stories is that she did not let herself be objective enough. When she wanted merely to record, with no thought of artful shaping or publication, she could produce some of her most effective writing—and that appears in her journals.

  Much of this journal either describes people still alive or is very private to her. How much of it ought to be published is not easy to decide. Her description of neighbours and friends and daily happenings is mostly too personal, her criticisms frequently unjust. A few of the more harmless pieces—by no means the best—from the later entries have been selected to illustrate, among other things, the close correspondence between the details she took possession of in those pages and the details she was able to use subsequently in her poems. The piece about Charlie Pollard is a loose prose draft of ‘The Bee Meeting’. The coolness and economy of her observation is something to note. But nearly all the poem’s essential details are there, the beginnings of her interpretation, and the mood, even the eerie movement of some of the phrases. ‘Rose and Percy B’ is in effect a draft for the death and fune
ral in ‘Berck Plage’, while ‘Among The Narcissi’ takes a phrase or two from it.

  Reading this collection, it should be remembered that her reputation rests on the poems of her last six months. Nearly all the prose brought together here was written before her first collection of poems, The Colossus, was completed, three years before her death.

  The only bits of prose written during the time of the Ariel poems are the three brief journalistic pieces, ‘America! America!’ ‘Snow Blitz’ and ‘Ocean 1212-W’. In other words, this collection does not represent the prose of the poet of Ariel, any more than the poems of The Colossus represent the poetry of the poet of Ariel. But it does give glimpses into early phases of the strange conflict between what was expected of her and what finally was exacted.

  Our thanks are due to the Lilly Library, Indiana University, for their generous help in our examination of the Sylvia Plath archive for the purpose of this collection.

  Ted Hughes

  Part I

  The more successful short stories and prose pieces

  Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

  Every day from nine to five I sit at my desk facing the door of the office and type up other people’s dreams. Not just dreams. That wouldn’t be practical enough for my bosses. I type up also people’s daytime complaints: trouble with mother, trouble with father, trouble with the bottle, the bed, the headache that bangs home and blacks out the sweet world for no known reason. Nobody comes to our office unless they have troubles. Troubles that can’t be pinpointed by Wassermanns or Wechsler-Bellvues alone.

  Maybe a mouse gets to thinking pretty early on how the whole world is run by these enormous feet. Well, from where I sit, I figure the world is run by one thing and this one thing only. Panic with a dog-face, devil-face, hag-face, whore-face, panic in capital letters with no face at all—it’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.

  When people ask me where I work, I tell them I’m Assistant to the Secretary in one of the Out-Patient Departments of the Clinics’ Building of the City Hospital. This sounds so be-all end-all they seldom get around to asking me more than what I do, and what I do is mainly type up records. On my own hook though, and completely under cover, I am pursuing a vocation that would set these doctors on their ears. In the privacy of my one-room apartment I call myself secretary to none other than Johnny Panic himself.

  Dream by dream I am educating myself to become that rare character, rarer, in truth, than any member of the Psychoanalytic Institute, a dream connoisseur. Not a dream-stopper, a dream-explainer, an exploiter of dreams for the crass practical ends of health and happiness, but an unsordid collector of dreams for themselves alone. A lover of dreams for Johnny Panic’s sake, the Maker of them all.

  There isn’t a dream I’ve typed up in our record books that I don’t know by heart. There isn’t a dream I haven’t copied out at home into Johnny Panic’s Bible of Dreams.

  This is my real calling.

  *

  Some nights I take the elevator up to the roof of my apartment building. Some nights, about three a.m. Over the trees at the far side of the park the United Fund torch flare flattens and recovers under some witchy invisible push and here and there in the hunks of stone and brick I see a light. Most of all, though, I feel the city sleeping. Sleeping from the river on the west to the ocean on the east, like some rootless island rockabying itself on nothing at all.

  I can be tight and nervy as the top string on a violin, and yet by the time the sky begins to blue I’m ready for sleep. It’s the thought of all those dreamers and what they’re dreaming wears me down till I sleep the sleep of fever. Monday to Friday what do I do but type up those same dreams. Sure, I don’t touch a fraction of them the city over, but page by page, dream by dream, my Intake books fatten and weigh down the bookshelves of the cabinet in the narrow passage running parallel to the main hall, off which passage the doors to all the doctors’ little interviewing cubicles open.

  I’ve got a funny habit of identifying the people who come in by their dreams. As far as I’m concerned, the dreams single them out more than any Christian name. This one guy, for example, who works for a ball-bearing company in town, dreams every night how he’s lying on his back with a grain of sand on his chest. Bit by bit this grain of sand grows bigger and bigger till it’s big as a fair-sized house and he can’t draw breath. Another fellow I know of has had a certain dream ever since they gave him ether and cut out his tonsils and adenoids when he was a kid. In this dream he’s caught in the rollers of a cotton mill, fighting for his life. Oh, he’s not alone, although he thinks he is. A lot of people these days dream they’re being run over or eaten by machines. They’re the cagey ones who won’t go on the subway or the elevators. Coming back from my lunch hour in the hospital cafeteria I often pass them, puffing up the unswept stone stairs to our office on the fourth floor. I wonder, now and then, what dreams people had before ball bearings and cotton mills were invented.

  I’ve a dream of my own. My one dream. A dream of dreams.

  In this dream there’s a great half-transparent lake stretching away in every direction, too big for me to see the shores of it, if there are any shores, and I’m hanging over it, looking down from the glass belly of some helicopter. At the bottom of the lake—so deep I can only guess at the dark masses moving and heaving—are the real dragons. The ones that were around before men started living in caves and cooking meat over fires and figuring out the wheel and the alphabet. Enormous isn’t the word for them; they’ve got more wrinkles than Johnny Panic himself. Dream about these long enough and your feet and hands shrivel away when you look at them too closely. The sun shrinks to the size of an orange, only chillier, and you’ve been living in Roxbury since the last ice age. No place for you but a room padded soft as the first room you knew of, where you can dream and float, float and dream, till at last you actually are back among those great originals and there’s no point in any dreams at all.

  It’s into this lake people’s minds run at night, brooks and gutter-trickles to one borderless common reservoir. It bears no resemblance to those pure sparkling-blue sources of drinking water the suburbs guard more jealously than the Hope diamond in the middle of pine woods and barbed fences.

  It’s the sewage farm of the ages, transparence aside.

  Now the water in this lake naturally stinks and smokes from what dreams have been left sogging around in it over the centuries. When you think how much room one night of dream props would take up for one person in one city, and that city a mere pinprick on a map of the world, and when you start multiplying this space by the population of the world, and that space by the number of nights there have been since the apes took to chipping axes out of stone and losing their hair, you have some idea what I mean. I’m not the mathematical type: my head starts splitting when I get only as far as the number of dreams going on during one night in the State of Massachusetts.

  By this time, I already see the surface of the lake swarming with snakes, dead bodies puffed as blowfish, human embryos bobbing around in laboratory bottles like so many unfinished messages from the great I Am. I see whole storehouses of hardware: knives, paper cutters, pistons and cogs and nutcrackers; the shiny fronts of cars looming up, glass-eyed and evil-toothed. Then there’s the spider-man and the webfooted man from Mars, and the simple, lugubrious vision of a human face turning aside forever, in spite of rings and vows, to the last lover of all.

  One of the most frequent shapes in this backwash is so commonplace it seems silly to mention it. It’s a grain of dirt. The water is thick with these grains. They seep in among everything else and revolve under some queer power of their own, opaque, ubiquitous. Call the water what you will, Lake Nightmare, Bog of Madness, it’s here the sleeping people lie and toss together among the props of their worst dreams, one great brotherhood, though each of them, waking, thinks himself singular, utterly apart.

  This is my dream. You won’t find it written up in any casebook. Now the routine in our office is ver
y different from the routine in Skin Clinic, for example, or in Tumor. The other Clinics have strong similarities to each other; none are like ours. In our Clinic, treatment doesn’t get prescribed. It is invisible. It goes right on in those little cubicles, each with its desk, its two chairs, its window and its door with the opaque glass rectangle set in the wood. There is a certain spiritual purity about this kind of doctoring. I can’t help feeling the special privilege of my position as Assistant Secretary in the Adult Psychiatric Clinic. My sense of pride is borne out by the rude invasions of other Clinics into our cubicles on certain days of the week for lack of space elsewhere: our building is a very old one, and the facilities have not expanded with the expanding needs of the time. On these days of overlap the contrast between us and the other Clinics is marked.

  On Tuesdays and Thursdays, for instance, we have lumbar punctures in one of our offices in the morning. If the practical nurse chances to leave the door of the cubicle open, as she usually does, I can glimpse the end of the white cot and the dirty yellow-soled bare feet of the patient sticking out from under the sheet. In spite of my distaste at this sight, I can’t keep my eyes away from the bare feet, and I find myself glancing back from my typing every few minutes to see if they are still there, if they have changed their position at all. You can understand what a distraction this is in the middle of my work. I often have to reread what I have typed several times, under the pretence of careful proofreading, in order to memorize the dreams I have copied down from the doctor’s voice over the audiograph.

  Nerve Clinic next door, which tends to the grosser, more unimaginative end of our business, also disturbs us in the mornings. We use their offices for therapy in the afternoon, as they are only a morning Clinic, but to have their people crying, or singing, or chattering loudly in Italian or Chinese, as they often do, without break for four hours at a stretch every morning, is distracting to say the least.