The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath Read Free Book Online Page A

did everything well enough and got all A’s, and by the time I made it to college nobody could stop me.
    I was college correspondent for the town Gazette and editor of the literary magazine and secretary of Honor Board, which deals with academic and social offenses and punishments—a popular office—and I had a well-known woman poet and professor on the faculty championing me for graduate school at the biggest universities in the east, and promises of full scholarships all the way, and now I was apprenticed to the best editor on an intellectual fashion magazine, and what did I do but balk and balk like a dull cart horse?
    â€œI’m very interested in everything.” The words fell witha hollow flatness on to Jay Cee’s desk, like so many wooden nickels.
    â€œI’m glad of that,” Jay Cee said a bit waspishly. “You can learn a lot in this month on the magazine, you know, if you just roll up your shirtsleeves. The girl who was here before you didn’t bother with any of the fashion-show stuff. She went straight from this office on to Time. ”
    â€œMy!” I said, in the same sepulchral tone. “That was quick!”
    â€œOf course, you have another year at college yet,” Jay Cee went on a little more mildly. “What do you have in mind after you graduate?”
    What I always thought I had in mind was getting some big scholarship to graduate school or a grant to study all over Europe, and then I thought I’d be a professor and write books of poems or write books of poems and be an editor of some sort. Usually I had these plans on the tip of my tongue.
    â€œI don’t really know,” I heard myself say. I felt a deep shock, hearing myself say that, because the minute I said it, I knew it was true.
    It sounded true, and I recognized it, the way you recognize some nondescript person that’s been hanging around your door for ages and then suddenly comes up and introduces himself as your real father and looks exactly like you, so you know he really is your father, and the person you thought all your life was your father is a sham.
    â€œI don’t really know.”
    â€œYou’ll never get anywhere like that.” Jay Cee paused. “What languages do you have?”
    â€œOh, I can read a bit of French, I guess, and I’ve always wanted to learn German.” I’d been telling people I’d always wanted to learn German for about five years.
    My mother spoke German during her childhood in America and was stoned for it during the First World War by the children at school. My German-speaking father, dead since I was nine, came from some manic-depressive hamlet in the black heart of Prussia. My younger brother was at that moment on the Experiment in International Living in Berlin and speaking German like a native.
    What I didn’t say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
    â€œI’ve always thought I’d like to go into publishing.” I tried to recover a thread that might lead me back to my old, bright salesmanship. “I guess what I’ll do is apply at some publishing house.”
    â€œYou ought to read French and German,” Jay Cee said mercilessly, “and probably several other languages as well, Spanish and Italian—better still, Russian. Hundreds of girls flood into New York every June thinking they’ll be editors. You need to offer something more than the run-of-the-mill person. You better learn some languages.”
    I hadn’t the heart to tell Jay Cee there wasn’t one scrap of space on my senior year schedule to learn languages in. I was taking one of those honors programs that teach you to think independently, and except for a course in Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and a seminar in advanced poetry composition, I would spend my whole time writing on some obscure themein the