Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams

Sylvia Plath

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780061549472
• eBook ISBN: 9780062669469
• Subtopic: Classics

"What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. . . . 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 poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine." — Sylvia Plath, "Cambridge Notes" (From Notebooks, February 1956)

Renowned for her poetry, Sylvia Plath was also a brilliant writer of prose. This collection of short stories, essays, and diary excerpts highlights her fierce concentration on craft, the vitality of her intelligence, and the yearnings of her imagination. Featuring an introduction by Plath's husband, the late British poet Ted Hughes, these writings also reflect themes and images she would fully realize in her poetry. Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams truly showcases the talent and genius of Sylvia Plath.

STONE BOY WITH DOLPHIN

Story, 1957/58

Because Bamber banged into her bike in Market Hill, spilling oranges, figs, and a package of pink-frosted cakes, and gave her the invitation to make up for it all, Dody Ventura decided to go to the party. Under the striped canvas awnings of the fruit stall she balanced her rust-encrusted Raleigh and let Bamber scramble for the oranges. He wore his monkish red beard barbed and scraggy. Summer sandals buckled over his cotton socks, though the February air burned blue and cold.

“You’re coming, aren’t you?” Albino eyes fixed hers. Pale, bony hands rolled the bright tang-skinned oranges into her wicker bike basket. “Unfortunately,” Bamber restored the packet of cakes, “a bit mashed.”

Dody glanced, evasive, down Great St. Mary’s Passage, lined with its parked bikes, wheels upon wheels. The stone facade of King’s and the pinnacles of the chapel stood elaborate, frosty, against a thin watercolor-blue sky. On such hinges fate turned.

“Who’ll be there?” Dody parried. She felt her fingers crisped, empty in the cold. Fallen into disuse, into desuetude, I freeze.

Bamber spread his big hands into chalk webs covering the people universe. “Everybody. All the literary boys. You know them?”

“No.” But Dody read them. Mick. Leonard. Especially Leonard. She didn’t know him, but she knew him by heart. With him, when he was up from London, with Larson and the boys, Adele lunched. Only two American girls at Cambridge and Adele would have to nip Leonard in the bud. Hardly bud: bloom it was, full-bloom and mid-career. Not room for the two of us, Dody had told Adele the day Adele returned the books she had borrowed, all newly underlined and noted in the margins. “But you underline,” Adele justified sweetly, her face guileless in its cup of sheened blond hair. “I beat my own brats,” Dody said, “you wipe your hand marks off.” For some reason, at the game of queening, Adele won: adorably, all innocent surprise. Dody retreated with a taste of lemons into her green sanctum at Arden with her stone facsimile of Verrocchio’s boy. To dust, to worship: vocation enough.

“I’ll come,” Dody suddenly said.

“With whom?”

“Send Hamish along.”

Bamber sighed. “He’ll be there.”

Dody pedaled off toward Benet Street, red plaid scarf and black gown whipping back in the wind. Hamish: safe, slow. Like traveling by mule, minus mule kicks. Dody chose with care, with care and a curtsy to the stone figure in her garden. As long as it was someone who didn’t matter, it didn’t matter. Ever since the start of Lent term she had taken to brushing snow from the face of the winged, dolphin-carrying boy centered in the snow-filled college garden. Leaving the long tables of black-gowned girls chattering and clinking glasses of water over the sodden dinners of spaghetti, turnips and slick fried eggs, with purple raspberry fool for dessert, Dody would push back her chair, gliding, eyes lowered, obsequious, a false demure face on, past high table where Victorian-vintage dons dined on apples, chunks of cheese and dietetic biscuits. Out of the scrolled, white-painted hall with its gilt-framed portraits of Principals in high-necked gowns leaning altruistic and radiant from the walls, far from the drawn, wan blue-and-gold ferned draperies, she walked. Bare halls echoed to her heels.

In the vacant college garden, dark-needled pines made their sharp assaults of scent on her nostrils and the stone boy poised on one foot, wings of stone balancing like feathered fans on the wind, holding his waterless dolphin through the rude, clamorous weathers of an alien climate. Nightly after snows, with bare fingers, Dody scraped the caked snow from his stone-lidded eyes, and from his plump stone cherub foot. If not I, who then?

Tracking across the snow-sheeted tennis courts back to Arden, the foreign students’ house with its small, elect group of South Africans, Indians and Americans, she begged, wordless, of the orange bonfire glow of the town showing faint over the bare treetops, and of the distant jewel pricks of the stars: let something happen. Let something happen. Something terrible, something bloody. Something to end this endless flaking snowdrift of airmail letters, of blank pages turning in library books. How we go waste, how we go squandering ourselves on air. Let me walk into Phèdre and put on that red cloak of doom. Let me leave my mark.

But the days dawned and set, neatly, nicely, toward an Honors B.A., and Mrs. Guinea came round, regular as clockwork, every Saturday night, arms laden with freshly laundered sheets and pillowcases, a testimony to the resolute and eternally renewable whiteness of the world. Mrs. Guinea, the Scottish housekeeper, for whom beer and men were ugly words. When Mr. Guinea died his memory had been folded up forever like a scrapbook newspaper, labeled and stored, and Mrs. Guinea bloomed scentless, virgin again after all these years, resurrected somehow in miraculous maidenhood.

This Friday night, waiting for Hamish, Dody wore a black jersey and a black-and-white-checked wool skirt, clipped to her waist by a wide red belt. I will bear pain, she testified to the air, painting her fingernails Applecart Red. A paper on the imagery in Phèdre, half done, stuck up its seventh white sheet in her typewriter. Through suffering, wisdom. In her third-floor attic room she listened, catching the pitch of last shrieks: listened: to witches on the rack, to Joan of Are crackling at the stake, to anonymous ladies flaring like torches in the rending metal of Riviera roadsters, to Zelda enlightened, burning behind the bars of her madness. What visions were to be had came under thumbscrews, not in the mortal comfort of a hot-water-bottle-cozy cot. Unwincing, in her mind’s eye, she bared her flesh. Here. Strike home.

A knock beat on the blank white door. Dody finished lacquering the nail of her left little finger, capped the bottle of blood-bright enamel, holding Hamish off. And then, waving her hand to dry the polish, gingerly she opened the door.

Bland pink face and thin lips set ready for a wise-guy smile, Hamish wore the immaculate navy blue blazer with brass buttons which made him resemble a prep school boy, or an off-duty yachtsman.

“Hello,” Dody said.

“How,” Hamish walked in without her asking him, “are you?”

“I’ve got sinus.” She sniffed thickly. Her throat clotted, obliging, with an ugly frogging sound.

“Look,” Hamish laved her with water-blue eyes, “I figure you and I should quit giving each other such a hard time.”

“Sure.” Dody handed him her red wool coat and bunched up her academic gown into a black, funereal bundle. “Sure thing.” She slipped her arms into the red coat as Hamish held it flared. “Carry my gown, will you?”

She flicked off the light as they left the room and closed the cream-painted door behind them. Ahead of Hamish down the two flights of stairs, step by step, she descended. The lower hall stood empty, walled with numbered doors and dark wainscoting. No sound, except for the hollow ticking of the grandfather clock in the stairwell.

“I’ll just sign out.”

“No, you won’t,” said Hamish. “You’ll be late tonight. And you’ve got a key.”

“How do you know?”

“All the girls in this house have keys.”

“But,” Dody whispered protest as he swung the front door open, “Miss Minchell has such sharp ears.”

“Minchell?”

“Our college secretary. She sleeps with us, she keeps us.” Miss Minchell presided, tight-lipped and grim, over the Arden breakfast table. She’d stopped speaking, it was rumored, when the American girls started wearing pajamas to breakfast under their bathrobes. All British girls in the college came down fully dressed and starched for their morning hot tea, kippers and white bread. The Americans at Arden were fortunate beyond thought, Miss Minchell sniffed pointedly, in having a toaster. Ample quarter-pounds of butter were alloted each girl on Sunday morning to last through the week. Only gluttons bought extra butter at the Home and Colonial Stores and slathered it double-thick on toast while Miss Minchell dipped her dry toast with disapproval into her second cup of tea, indulging her nerves.

A black taxicab loomed in the ring of light from the porch lamp where moths beat their wings to powder on spring nights. No moths now, only the winter air like the great pinions of an arctic bird, fanning shivers up Dody’s spine. The rear door of the cab, open on its black hinges, showed a bare interior, a roomy cracked-leather seat. Hamish handed her in and followed her up. He slammed the door shut, and as at a signal, the taxi spun off down the drive, gravel spurting away under the wheels.

Sodium vapor lights from the Fen Causeway wove their weird orange glare among the leafless poplars on Sheep’s Green and the houses and storefronts of Newnham Village reflected the sallow glow as the cab bounced along the narrow pot-holed road, turning with a lurch up Silver Street.

Hamish hadn’t said a word to the driver. Dody laughed. “You’ve got it all set, haven’t you?”

“I always do.” In the sulfur light from the street lamps Hamish’s features assumed an oddly Oriental cast, his pale eyes like vacant slits above high cheekbones. Dody knew him for dead, a beer-sodden Canadian, his wax mask escorting her, for her own convenience, to the party of teatime poets and petty university D. H. Lawrences. Only Leonard’s words cut through the witty rot. She didn’t know him, but that she knew, that shaped her sword. Let what come, come.

“I always plan ahead,” Hamish said. “Like I’ve planned for us to drink for an hour. And then the party. Nobody’ll be there this early. Later they might even have a few dons.”

“Will Mick and Leonard be there?”

“You know them?”

“No. Just read them.”

“Oh, they’ll be there. If anybody is. But keep away from them.”

“Why? Why should I?” Worth keeping from is worth going to. Did she will such meetings, or did the stars dictate her days, Orion dragging her, shackled, at his spurred heel?

“Because they’re phonies. They are also the biggest seducers in Cambridge.”

“I can take care of myself.” Because when I give, I never really give at all. Always some shrewd miser Dody sits back, hugging the last, the most valuable crown jewel. Always safe, nun-tending her statue. Her winged stone statue with nobody’s face.

“Sure,” said Hamish. “Sure.”

The cab pulled up opposite the pinnacled stone façade of King’s, starched lace in the lamplight, masquerading as stone. Black-gowned boys strode in twos and threes out of the gate by the porter’s lodge.

“Don’t worry.” Hamish handed her down to the sidewalk, stopping to count his coppers into the palm of the featureless cab driver. “It’s all arranged.”

From the polished wooden bar of Miller’s, Dody looked to the far end of the carpeted room at the couples going up and down the plush-covered stair to the dining room: hungry going up, stuffed coming down. Greasy lip prints on the goblet edge, partridge fat congealing, ruby-set with semi-precious chunks of currant jelly. The whisky was starting to burn her sinus trouble away, but her voice was going along with it, as it always did. Very low and sawdusty.

“Hamish.” She tried it.

“Where have you been?” His warm hand under her elbow felt good as anybody’s warm hand. People swam past, undulant, with no feet, no faces. Outside the window, bordered with green-leaved rubber plants, face shapes bloomed toward the glass from the dark outside sea and drifted away again, wan underwater planets at the fringe of vision.

“Ready?”

“Ready. Have you got my gown?” Hamish showed the black patch of cloth draped over his arm, and started to shoulder a path through the crowds around the bar toward the swinging glass door. Dody walked after him with fastidious care, focusing her eyes on his broad navy blue back, and as he opened the door, ushering her ahead of him onto the sidewalk, she took his arm. Steady as he was, she felt safe, tethered like a balloon, giddy, dangerously buoyant, but still quite safe in the boisterous air. Step on a crack, break your mother’s back. With care, she square-walked.

“You’d better put your gown on,” Hamish said after they’d been walking a bit. “I don’t want any proctors to nab us. Especially tonight.”

“Why especially?”

“They’ll be looking for me tonight. Bulldogs and all.”

So at Peas Hill, under the green-lit marquee of the arts theater, Hamish helped her to slip her arms into the two holes of the black gown. “It’s ripped here on the shoulder.”

“I know. It always makes me feel as if I’m in a straitjacket. Keeps slipping down and pinning my arms to my sides.”

“They’re throwing gowns away now, if they catch you in a ripped one. They just come over and ask for it and tear it up on the spot.”

“I’d sew it up,” Dody said. Men. Mend the torn, the tattered. Salvage the raveled sleeve. “With black embroidery thread. So it wouldn’t show.”

“They’d love that.”

Through the cobbled open square of Market Hill they walked hand in hand. Stars showed faint above the blackened flank of Great St. Mary’s Church, which had housed, last week, penitent hordes hearing Billy Graham. Past the wooden posts of the empty market stalls. Then up Petty Cury, past the wine merchant’s with his windows of Chilean burgundy and South African sherry, past the shuttered butcher shops and the leaded panes of Heffer’s where the books on display spoke t...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Introduction by Ted Hughes
• Mothers (Story, 1962)
• Ocean 1212-W (Essay, 1962)
• Snow Blitz (Essay, 1963)
• The Smiths: George, Marjorie (50), Claire (16) (From Notebooks, Spring 1962)
• 5. America! America! (Essay, 1963)
• Charlie Pollard and the Beekeepers (From Notebooks, June 1962)
• A Comparison (Essay, 1962)
• “Context” (Essay, 1962)
• Rose and Percy B (From Notebooks, 1961/62)
• Day of Success (Story, 1960)
• The Fifteen-Dollar Eagle (Story, November 1959)
• The Fifty-Ninth Bear (Story, September 1959)
• The Daughters of Blossom Street (Story, 1959)
• Sweetie Pie and the Gutter Men (Story, May 1959)
• The Shadow (Story, January 1959)
• Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams (Story, December 1958)
• Above the Oxbow (Story, 1958)
• Stone Boy with Dolphin (Story, 1957/58)
• All the Dead Dears (Story, 1957/58)
• The Wishing Box (Story, 1956)
• The Day Mr. Prescott Died (Story, 1956)
• Widow Mangada (From Notebooks, Summer 1956)
• That Widow Mangada (Story, Autumn 1956)
• Cambridge Notes (From Notebooks, February 1956)
• Tongues of Stone (Story, 1955)
• Superman and Paula Brown’s New Snowsuit (Story, 1955)
• In the Mountains (Story, 1954)
• Initiation (Story, July 1952)
• Sunday at the Mintons’ (Story, Spring 1952)
• Among the Bumblebees (Story, Early 1950s)
• P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
• Also by Sylvia Plath
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher