"I am I": Sylvia Plath and E. M. Forster

Sylvia Plath's copy of Howards End by E. M. Forster is held by the Lilly Library. It is the Vintage 1954 edition printed with green wrappers as is seen here and "borrowed" from a random online source. On the cover are two white trees and a black tree which form a single, combined canopy of leaves. It was labeled V-7 and the price was $1.45. When not reading or proofing The Letters of Sylvia Plath last year, I have been making my way through a list of older books that for one reason or another I was always too afraid to read; or simply never thought of reading. I read Forster's A Room With a View and liked it well enough to continue on to Howards End.

Plath mentioned Howards End in a letter to her mother written from Cape Cod in August 1957. Plath's copy of the book is annotated with her usual bold, black ink pen. But also in the copy are markings in red pen, which is typical of Aurelia Schober Plath's annotation tendencies.

In Chapter 27 of the novel I was struck-dumb but a particular paragraph, and so I wrote to the Lilly Library to see if by chance Plath had made any annotations to it because, I think you will agree, it screams of Plath.

The paragraph reads,

If we lived for ever, what you say would be true. But we have to die, we have to leave life presently. Injustice and greed would be the real thing if we lived for ever. As it is, we must hold to other things, because Death is coming. I love Death—not morbidly, but because He explains. He shows me the emptiness of Money. Death and Money are the eternal foes. Not Death and Life. Never mind what lies behind Death, Mr. Bast, but be sure that the poet and the musician and the tramp will be happier in it than the man who has never learnt to say, 'I am I.'

It was, in particular, the "I am I" that got me unreasonably excited. The very excellent Sarah Mitchell of the Lilly wrote back confirming that Plath did mark up the passage. Likely one needs the context of the entire novel to this point to fully get the significance of the passage, but generally the "I am I" that caught my eye clearly caught Plath's, too. Years before she read the novel she famously wrote in her 13 November 1949 diary entry:

I think I would like to call myself "the girl that wanted to be God." Yet it I were not in this body, where would I be – perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But oh! I cry out against it … I am I …I am powerful – but to what extent? I am I.

She later returned to the phrase "I am" in her poetry, "Suicide Off Egg Rock" (19 February 1959), and in her novel The Bell Jar (1961). And Plath considers the concept of "I am I" several times in her published journals (entries 31, 38, 49, 78, and 188).

I think Plath was channelling Forster and Howards End, too, in a short story she endeavored to write and which was mentioned in a 24 December 1960 letter to her mother and brother. She wrote that she was "beginning a longer more ambitious one today about a girl who falls in love with a beautiful old house & manages finally to possess it: a kind of parable for my loving this house with a bay tree in Chalcot Crescent" (The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2: 555). The story, if it was ever drafted or even completed, does not appear to have survived.