‘Stone boy with Dolphin’ by Sylvia Plath

‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ is about the rather ugly statue of a winged little boy holding (or strangling, depending on your perspective) a big fish, supposedly a dolphin. The statue is currently in a corner of a square internal garden in Newnham, leading through the Sidgwick building to the new Library. Invisible in spring, hidden away by the thick foliage of the surrounding bushes, in the winter the boy stands out as the sole inhabitants of the stark, cold, empty garden. It is winter in Plath’s story; “the February air burned blue and cold”. As it follows its protagonist Dody through her day, ‘Stone Boy with Dolphin’ cracks through the shiny, icy surface of a student’s social life and reaches for her loneliness, one of Cambridge’s more ephemeral ghosts. I have a memory of looking for the statue in the main college garden (as per Plath’s instructions), then of finding it in its present location. I wished, like Dody, to develop a habit of “brushing the snow from the face of the winged, dolphin-carrying boy”, but it doesn’t snow in Cambridge like it used to in 1957. Anyway, as I said, the statue had been moved.

First published in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Faber 1977

‘Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom’ by Sylvia Plath

A strange short fiction written in 1952 when Plath was a student at Smith College. I read this in the Faber Stories edition, which was the first publication of the story in its original form. Plath steps outside the ordinary world in this story with Mary Ventura – who in her red coat is bundled unwillingly onto a train by her apparently loving parents for a journey to the far away and mysterious ‘ninth kingdom’. “You know how trains are” says her father. “They don’t wait.” The station clock “clipped off another minute”.

Plath gives details of the train interior, with reference to “red plush seats, the color of wine” and “the seams of the car, rivetted with bright brass nails”. Mary sits by the window, behind a pair of argumentative boys, whose mother is engrossed in a magazine, ignoring them. Mary is joined by an older woman out of breath from rushing to make the train. It seems fortuitous that there was a spare seat next to Mary’s. The train departs in clouds of smoke and cinders. The woman takes out her knitting. Mary admires the “leaf-green” wool. It turns out that the woman is knitting a dress “For a girl just about your size…”

Plath described the story as ‘a vague symbolic tale’. We can identify many ‘symbolic elements’ and make our own sense of it. The tone of the story, the sounds and rhythm of the text is compelling. We hear the train moving as machine and metaphor for something implacable. Unease and apprehension rise. The irrevocable passing of stops. Long, dark tunnels. Children crying, a mother with a baby in a soiled blanket. Men complaining about a crying baby. But the train will not stop until it arrives in the ninth kingdom. Outside, the terrain is gloomy and smoky. “It’s the forest fires” the woman explains. The scenery becomes post-apocalyptic in appearance. There is a scarecrow “crossed staves propped aslant and the corn husks rotting under it.” “Night comes on quickly.”

It seems that the strange has made this journey often, although no one else takes this journey more than once. There is no return. Mary asks questions about the journey and the ninth kingdom. “The last station, …Are you sure?” the woman asks.

Mary protests “It’s not my fault I took this train. It was my parents. They wanted me to go.” But the woman chides her for her lack of rebellion. Mary decides to pull the emergency cord. There are various ways we might interpret the story, which ends mystically. The publisher describes it as “a strange dark tale of independence over infanticide”.

First published by Faber Stories, 2019

‘Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit’ by Sylvia Plath

Childhood…

The year the war began I was in the fifth grade at the Annie F. Warren Grammar School in Winthrop, and that was the winter I won the prize for drawing the best Civil Defence signs…

More lost innocence and more feet of clay are dealt with in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit.’ A young girl growing up opposite an airport spends her nights dreaming that she can fly, like Superman “in his shiny blue suit with his cape whistling in the wind, looking remarkably like my Uncle Frank who was living with Mother and me.” But when she is blamed for something she didn’t do (pushing over her schoolmate Paula Brown and spoiling Paula’s brand new snowsuit) she is dismayed to discover that her inherent assumptions regarding ideals such as fairness and rightfulness are really quite useless when put up against the actual cruelty of other children and the fallibility of adult judgement:

The silver airplanes and the blue capes all dissolved and vanished, wiped away like the crude drawings of a child in colored chalk from the colossal blackboard of the dark.

First published in Smith Review, 1955. Collected in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writings, Faber & Faber 1977

‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ by Sylvia Plath

‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ is a delirious short story, about the nine to five job of “a dream connoisseur. Not a dream-stopper, a dream-explainer… but an unsordid collector of dreams,” a rogue secretary, who devotes her spare-time “to none other than Johnny Panic himself.” Set in a psychiatric clinic, this darkly comic, oneiric and well-pitched tale, delves into the secretary’s dream records, her capture by the Clinic director and concludes with a terrible finale, featuring Johnny Panic himself, “the air crackling with his blue-tongued lightning-haloed angels.”

Written 1958; first published posthumously in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, Faber and Faber, 1977

‘Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams’ by Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath’s work seems to attract those who interpret her poems and prose solely in terms of what they might reveal about her troubled life. She is rarely thought of as comedic. But what I like about ‘Johnny Panic’ is its edgy noir humour. The narrator – like all good authors? – is a collector of stories. She believes the fantastical dreams she transcribes in her hospital job are as true as any daytime narrative. In dreams Johnny Panic may speak freely.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 al. It’s the same Johnny Panic, awake or asleep.But unfortunately the heroine’s determination to consult the work of her predecessors lands her in a risky situation.

First published in Atlantic Monthly, 1968. Collected in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams and Other Prose Writing, Faber, 1977. Available online here