The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956-1963

1958

TO Warren Plath

Monday 6 January 1958

TLS (photocopy), Indiana University

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

January 6, 1958

Dearest Warren,

HAPPY NEW YEAR! Ted & I are so pleased with our lovely tablecloth which is gay and sunny with our pottery and stainless steel. Now that we’ve left Wellesley for 5 months, we won’t be able to read your wonderful letters to mother unless she sends them on, so do talk to us on paper now & then and I’ll try to reciprocate.

Our post-Christmas teaching is on me, and I have to slave today and tomorrow outlining discussion questions for 6 hours on Crime & Punishment, my present punishment for the crime of being out with pneumonia for the 3 past weeks. Most annoying, as I hadn’t even had a cold all term, but I missed the last week of classes and all my vacation during which I had meant, as we all do, to catch up. I still have a good deal of battle-fatigue and a cough which keeps me awake, but hope to start teaching the day after tomorrow with fingers crossed that the sunny clear weather we’ve been having keeps up for two more weeks. Then it can blizzard during the exam period of two weeks while I try to outline my program for the 2nd semester & correct midyears snug in our little apartment, which I am really becoming quite fond of.

I just told our department chairman^* this morning that I wasn’t planning to come back next year---I waited until I heard they’d voted unanimously for my reappointment---and he was very sorry & surprised but I practically skipped out. I’m dying for June 1st & my apprenticeship to writing for a whole year. Now that it’s 1958 it seems much nearer, as if I’ll actually live to it, and I can enjoy my teaching much more seeing light ahead.

Ted’s life has picked up surprisingly, too. He has just gotten, in the New Year, his 3rd poem accepted by the New Yorker,^* which will mean about $25 as it’s a very short one, his first acceptance of a prose short story (8 pages) from Jack and Jill^* which is a delightful fairy-tale for $50! We were amazed & joyous: it opened a really new market, a tough market, but means he has the encouragement to go on working on children’s stories & books!

Also, after spending a total of about $45 on lessons, & license, Ted got his driver’s license in Northampton today. Isn’t that fine! I feel much relieved, as I can share driving with him & not take it all on my own shoulders, and he is very pleased.

We’ve earned, between us, since September 1st, over $700 on writing! Not bad, especially since I haven’t written anything new or even tried. June 1st begins my all out effort! Even I am getting ideas for children’s stories.^* We are saving our writing money in a separate account & not touching it. Hope maybe to get a writing fellowship to help us to Italy the year after our Boston year, if we produce enough next year.

Ted also was offered out of the blue a part-time or full-time instructorship at the Univ. of Massachusetts in English this 2nd semester,^* which would enable us to save money, as my salary’s been barely enough to live on what with unexpected doctor’s expenses. He’s willing to take on full-time if he can get a small senior creative writing course, in addition to sophomore lit. & freshman comp., which would cut his paper-load. We’re waiting to hear which it will be. I feel much better, & so does he, about saving something to collect bank interest, as he should be able to save his whole term’s salary if we live spartanly. We look so forward to moving to Boston if we can find a good place & seeing much of you next year.

Love & write –

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Monday 13 January 1958

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Monday night

January 13, 1958

Dearest mother . . .

I suppose the two of us had rather rough weeks. I managed my full amount of classes and a faculty meeting last week, but it really took a lot of energy out of me, as I had no reserve of voltage to spare. Also, I had to prepare my work for the next day every night, so by the time Saturday came I was really beat. But we slept till noon on Sunday, which was a lovely icy blue day and went for a 5 mile walk which cheered us no end. I am still inclined to be rather depressed, a kind of backwash of convalescence, I guess, but should have a chance to rest up after this week while preparing for the 2nd semester before the exams come in.

Elly Friedman came over Saturday night with her latest boyfriend and I cooked a nice dinner for the four of us: white wine, clams & sour cream & potato chips for appetizer, roast beef, corn, mashed potatoes with onion, and salad, lemon meringue pie and coffee. I was pleased with myself, managing that after a full working week. Elly’s Leonard^* is a change from the usual mixed-up silly boys she’s known before. Both Ted & I were delighted with him: he seems to be a handsome Jew, with no vanity, very strong and silent. He taught English at Michigan last year & is now writing & living with his parents. Ironically, Elly doesn’t seem good enough for him: he is very intelligent and deep, but I suppose that is why they are attracted, she being so extroverted & actressy. We all saw a good movie^* by Orson Welles, starring him, “Citizen Kane”, with excellent photography, so it took my mind off weariness & my work.

I recently had a two hour and longer talk with one of my worst problem children, a girl who refused to talk in class & objected to being called on. She came in prepared to be very much on the defensive (she would whisper in class & make fun of other girls) but we got along immediately & I was very proud of my psychology & I think she left feeling excellently treated, although I told her several unpleasant things, such as that she had chosen to get an E in classwork, and that I’d like her to move into another section. Selfishly, I just wanted to get rid of her as she distracted the other girls, but I made a completely different point of it. We had also a good talk on religion & the course books, and I felt, ironically enough, that she was a kindred spirit of sorts. She wanted, ironically also, to stay in my class, but I managed to get around that, too. I do feel I am building up a pretty good relation with most of my students and am feeling some rather well-placed conceit as one of the more favored of the freshman English teachers. They are really good girls.

Did I tell you Ted has his driver’s license. He passed with flying colors and is very elated about it. He hasn’t heard whether he’ll be teaching full or half time at the University. They really went all out to get him an 11 hour full-time program, with 2 soph lit. courses, one freshman english, and one small creative senior writing course, a very rare program for a beginner, but it will be very tough work. In a way, it will be just as good if he gets the half-time program & feels some freedom, but the pay we’ll set aside for our projected year in Italy.

Do drop us a line when you can. Keep well & don’t take on any extra work too soon!

P.S. Ted loves his bathrobe, which is a lesson to me never to jump too hastily to conclusions. I knew he’d enjoy it once he started wearing it & now he’s always in it. Enclosed, the check for it. Do cash it right away, to help us keep accounts.

XXXXXX

sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Monday 20 January 1958

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Monday

January 20

Dearest mother,

Thanks so much for letting us share this letter of Warren’s. He does sound to be leading a rich, vital life. I’m enclosing his letters with your charge coins, the two heavy ones taped to a card.

My classes came to an end on Saturday, and I just woke up this noon with the sense of being knocked out cold for the weekend. I must have been really exhausted all this time, and rejoice at a week of no teaching and resting, even though I have to prepare rapidly for next semester.

Ted hasn’t heard yet whether he’ll be teaching half time or full time, we rather hope it’s full time now, and his classes begin in ten days, so I hope we’ll find out soon. One of his scheduled books is “Crime and Punishment”, and I’ve just finished two weeks of lectures on it, so he can use my notes. Very convenient.

Friday night we went to dinner at the faculty club as the guests of a young, rather sad nice woman, who once left teaching at Smith to try to write for a year, but who came back. Then to a wonderful suspense movie by Hitchcock, “The Lady Vanishes”,^* which had me jumping at shadows behind doors for a few days. Saturday night we drove over to meet some people on the U. of Mass. faculty. Very different people. Somehow pathetic, broken, wistful, or just pedantic and cranky. At least Ted was relieved, & the prospect of work doesn’t worry him now, as these people are hardly genii. But rather boring. Anyhow, he has some really good books to teach, & the recommendation will be very helpful in teaching jobs in Europe.

A week from today I have to give my midyear exam, & then correct 70 papers & make out midyear grades. But just not having to go out & teach is restful, and a pleasant change. Halfway through! And my whole attitude to teaching is changed. Simply knowing that I’m leaving in June has freed me to enjoy it & have a casual attitude which is evidently catching in a good way, as my 3 o’clock class in particular is more enjoyable, and I have a good feeling of general class sympathy, with the exception of course, of a few bored or stubborn ones. If I can just get ahead of myself in preparation things should ease up. But how I long to get at writing. To break into the pain of beginning again and get over the hump into something rich: my old life of poems and stories and articles, so once again I can look for the mails with some reason for eagerness.

Perhaps Monday March 31st and Tuesday April 1st Ted & I can come down to look at houses or apartments on Beacon Hill. We’d could move in on the 1st of June, I think. Or the 1st of July, if necessary. But I should think in June we’d find more people moving out. Have you heard of any rumors? We want to leave here on June 1st if we can. We want to know Boston like the back of our hand before we’re through.

Ted’s had two more short poems accepted by the Sewanee Review as of today, which with their last acceptance of 2 makes a total of 4 to come out and “introduce” him to their readers.

Don’t forget to drop us a line. Take care of yourself! Your winter commuting sounds ghastly, Can’t Marion cook for a while? Ted is concerned too. They’d make you lecture on your deathbed there! Do write.

Much love,

Sivvy

TO Edith & William Hughes

Sunday 2 February 1958

TLS, Family owned

Sunday afternoon

February 2nd

Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .

You have no idea how we love getting your letters: every time they come we drop what we’re doing and Ted sits down & reads them aloud to me. I like hearing about every little thing from the candy melting together in the candy jars at the little shop and what kind of weather is blowing over the moors---I loved our days up at the Beacon so much that I look on it as a real home & think of Ted’s big desk waiting for us to write on it. So you can imagine how I like every word about it.

Ted has probably told you that he has a very good job for the next four months as Instructor of English at the University of Massachusetts in the next town, about 15 miles away. He came through his driving license test with flying colors and now drives my brother’s solid little blue Plymouth car to work each day. He works from 8 am to 11 am on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and from 3-4 pm on Monday, Wednesday & Friday, but is going to try to get those afternoon classes on the other days so he’ll only have to drive over 3 days a week instead of 6. You can see how its a much easier schedule than his teaching boys at Cambridge. He has one course of freshmen, two of sophomores, & one creative writing class of seniors, which is very special for a first-year college teacher to get: all the members of the department who have been working there 10 years wish they had it. Ted just walked right in, with his book & good reviews, & they gave him this class, which sounds so interesting that I’d like one of that sort too: people who are really interested in writing are fun to teach.

It is very unusual for anyone without a Phd. (a doctor’s degree) to get college-teaching jobs in America, but Ted’s book is a strong recommendation. He could probably teach at either Amherst or Mount Holyoke: the first a boy’s college, the latter a girl’s college, much like Smith, if he wanted to next year, as they’ve both shown interest in him (they are 2 of the best colleges in America) but Ted wants not to teach but get some other kind of work (without homework or extra preparation) in Boston next year while I write for a change, and he’ll have time to write too. Then, in the fall of 1959 we hope to come back to Europe for a year & look forward to visiting you then. This is a dream, but if we save what Ted earns this semester I think we can manage it. I hope to have a book written by the end of next year in Boston, so if I do, it will help.

My week and new semester begins tomorrow. I have been resting as much as possible, as the pneumonia left me really exhausted, not sick, but just very easily tired, so Ted has been taking very good care of me. I have taken on an extra little job in addition to my regular teaching which is going to an advanced course in American literature^* which is taught by a world-famous critic,^* and helping him correct most of his exams throughout the semester: I’ll have to read all the books by Hawthorne, Melville^* and Henry James, but they are good, so I should enjoy it and a few hundred extra dollars will be very welcome. I’ve just finished correcting my own 70 blue-booklets of midyear exams & am resting my eyes on the scenery outside our window: red tile rooftops and two big gray squirrels chasing each other from branch to branch of the tall bare elm trees.

Mother came up to visit our apartment for the first time this last weekend & stayed overnight with the lady downstairs. She thought it was a very fine place, with plenty of room, light and airy, and we are pleased with it too. We count on our fingers: 4 months more of work & then Boston, more writing and easier if less challenging, jobs for our bread & butter.

Ted has written two good short stories which we’ve sent out to a magazine: he can be a very good prose writer, too, I am sure of it, so I am suggesting subjects for him to write on about his own background in the moors which will be of great interest to the Americans and hope someday he may collect a book of Yorkshire tales. When we come back to visit you we really must make up a whole notebook of all you know and all you remember.

Has Ted told you about the enormous snow sculptures made at the Winter Carnival at his University? He drove me over to see them yesterday and some were very impressive, several times taller than a man: one showed a drunkard leaning against a lamppost and looking at a huge pink elephant made out of snow (I have no idea how they colored it all) which reached up to the 2nd story of the building. Another showed two giants carving out a lacy snowflake, again, twice as high as human beings. There was a great prostrate dragon of snow with St. George standing by it, and a coach with six horses and Cinderella stepping out of it: very impressive: I wish you could have seen it.

Well, I must get back to work, so send much love to you both and will write soon . . .

love,

sylvia

TO Edith & William Hughes

Friday 7 February 1958^*

ALS, Emory University

Hello! You should see what a wonderful teacher Ted makes! He has got all his courses scheduled for Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday, so he only has to teach a 3-day week & doesn’t have too much outside correcting & preparation to do. I am feeling much stronger & although still a bit washed-out on energy from the pneumonia I am finishing my first week of 2nd term this week with a much greater feeling of ease & enjoyment than I’ve ever had – I really am very fond of my 70 girls & will enjoy teaching them plays & poetry for the rest of the year. It is snowing now – great lacy flakes. We are going to a movie of Dickens’ “Pickwick Papers” tonight.^*

Love to you & birthday greetings for the 13th!

Sylvia

TO Olwyn Hughes

Sunday 9 February 1958

TL (incomplete), British Library

Date February 9 To OH From SH In re shoes, ships, sealing wax.

Dear Olwyn,

I am in the process of stealing, or rather stocking up on, tablet upon tablet of this pink official paper which Ted is enamoured of, before I leave the land of supply closets, blue exam booklets and comma splices this June. We both love getting your letters, which are serving as a kind of magnetic chain linking us to Europe where, as Ted & I remind each other, we intend to be the year after next, preferably in Rome or environs, preferably on luxurious grants, preferably not having to work for our pizza. We plan to write like fiends for a whole year until the papers mount and mount ceilingward & then apply for money to do the same thing in Rome. However, grants are a kind of in-group league: once you get one, you get another, and so on: no fair equitable distribution: this glassy blue-eyed descendent of Heine^* Ted speaks of tried twice for a Guggenheim with glowing recommendations from ee cummings,^* William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, et. al. and alas failed. But then, he is a lousy poet. Novels are much more promising, so I’m going to start working on mine after I pack away the last bluebook. Not writing this year has been the worst of it, & I feel much better now that I have shocked the whole English department by saying out-loud I am not coming back: this is without doubt the best college to teach at anywhere in America for several reasons: a three to four day week, relative freedom in course books, wonderful bright eager throngs of polished American maidenhood who answer questions & love hearing about the customs of native tribes and the philosophy of Locke^* and symbolism in fairy tales, so it’s all actually much fun, also 9 hours of teaching time, as opposed to the usual 12, & a lively young faculty. Ironically, now that I feel casual and masterful about the whole thing (after a hellish fall spent confronting ghosts of my old student selves in every cranny & coffee shop & teaching from lecture platforms my own professors taught from) one part of me feels sad to leave. I love the power of having 70 girls to teach, & get what is surely a dangerous enjoyment from shocking them into awareness, laughter & even tears, the occasion of the latter being a snowy Saturday spent evoking the bloody & cruel history of the Irish whiteboys, potato famines, mass hangings, etc. But it’s only been since I decided officially to leave that I’ve enjoyed it: just as I’m sure the reason Ted is finding his teaching rather fun & a breeze (he’s now got a 3 day a week program & very little preparation & correcting---really half a week off on a full salary) is because he knows he only has 12 more actual weeks of it. Both of us are, peculiarly enough, natural teachers. Which may come in handy when we get famous & are offered plummy salaries to give a couple of lectures a year at universities and write on our own the rest of the time, but which is at present dangerous to our own writing. Ted is already so advanced that his inner pressure is equal to the outer pressure of Great Works, but I feel that if I taught DH Lawrence stories for one more year, every time I sat down at the typewriter I’d begin “There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck.”^* Oh, lost, lost.

Ted is writing some really fine things, recently. He’s done two long & rich poems, very different, “Acrobats”, all silver & dark and with that lovely dissolving of the abstract & philosophical idea into the forms of flesh and word sounds and rhythms. Also “Dick Straightup”, which I think is also terrific, colored and bodied out---I can’t stop reading it, and keep picking copies up off the floor: one of those apocalyptic characters, held to the earth in gianthood like Gulliver by the Lilliputian particulars. How does it feel to have a great and burgeoning poet for a brother? I have had such strange and luminous visions of his success & growth that I get the odd feeling now and then that this has all happened before, & will go on happening better and better. Ted put off trying prose until I told him how people would go wild with delight over the simplest of Mexborough & Heptonstall incidents, the way they love Dylan Thomas’s tales of his Welsh boyhood, so Ted wrote two stories, short, which I think are fine: one called “Rats” about the little man who bit rats’ heads for pints: a simple, understated story which gets terrific power from what isn’t said---no hollering or pointing stances, just a vivid account built to a terrific dramatic pitch, and another “Grand Songs, Great Songs” which gets the hushed waxed polished straight stiffness of parlors & the atmosphere & aroma of pubs & again, tragedy under the surface texture of life. We’ve sent them off^* & hope to hear from them soon: I’m sure they’ll be published somewhere. Also, he’s probably mentioned the 8-page children’s story “Billy Hook & the Three Souvenirs” which he got $50 for from The Children’s mag in America, a very tight & select market. Success is so cumulative: to him who has to him shall be given, etc., and if a Name is built up, one can live on it. But we keep away from the circles of dilletanti & academic gents and ladies, like hermits much of the time, working & mountain climbing and eating great winey stews & endless crackly green salads with french dressing and all sorts of cheeses. Yea, privacy in America is possible: you can make very much your own life & actually live quite frugally, without tv or motor cars. Last week we spent an ice-blue sunshot Sunday climbing a freshly-snowed-on mountain,^* alone: nobody in America climbs mountains in the winter if there aren’t ski trails. We tracked rabbit and fox prints in the snow, breathing rarer and rarer air, picking up great hanging stalactite icicles and javelining them over snowcliffs, arriving finally in the full icey wind of the top, with a rickety white house, once perhaps a hotel, a broken down funicular railway, and a vast god’s eye view of the ice-jammed Connecticut river, the Holyoke range of bare fir-bristling hills, and the distant glints of church steeples and haze of smoke spotting our far-off town. We are packing our heads full of heights & colored days. Our blue day fishing & browning last summer on the salt ocean, our walks in the queer pink light of the sunset moors, and the tinkling goat-footed mornings in Benidorm. Of all this, the world in our heads, we word-stitch and make fabrics.

Ted looks wonderful & already has 20 poems toward a second book, but I don’t think he should be in a hurry to publish (critics love to compare second & third books unfavorably with the first) since he should be able to get every poem accepted by magazines before he goes between hard covers. I’ve gotten a kind of odd commission from a New York art magazine for a poem or poems about Art Work, part of a new series and very good price $50 to $75, so am going to live in the Art Libe^* for the next few weeks & brood, maybe on Gauguin,^* even DeChirico.^* Strangely enough, I’ve been auditing a fine modern art course here^* (there’s a very good art department, real artists & a fine museum here)

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Sunday 16 February 1958

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Sunday night

February 16

Dearest mother,

Just a note in the middle of the blizzard which has been whirling outside all day to say how much we appreciated the lovely box of petit fours which arrived on Valentine’s day with the little card. Ted, particularly, enjoys them and keeps nibbling away at them. We just finished a fried chicken dinner this noon, with creamed spinach and mushrooms, potato cakes, and frozen apricot bombe for dessert with coffee and those molasses crinkles Ted likes so well. So you see we eat like king & queen.

We were originally planning to come down this weekend to look at the Merwins’ apartment in Boston which they have offered us to sublet, but we thought it over very carefully and decided against it. They are leaving at the end of March, so we’d have to pay almost 2 months’ rent before moving in, and although it is a light airy top floor flat overlooking the Charles river, it is very dirty and $75 a month unfurnished which isn’t much less than we’re paying now, & on a main trafficy Beacon Hill street, West Cedar Street. So we thought we’d wait to look till April 1st for a quiet top floor flat, still airy & perhaps cleaner. Do you think this a good idea? Could you be investigating any in the meantime?

I do hope you’re keeping well in this snowy & frigid windy weather. Have tea on coming home each afternoon. It works wonders.

Ted’s teaching (3 days a week) continues to go well & the students obviously love him. He has written a few very good poems recently too.

By the way, could you cancel our dentist appointment for Friday March 21 (or take it yourself at 1:30) and make one for either Monday March 31 or Tuesday April 1st, preferably in the morning? Ted won’t be free on the earlier date which we didn’t know when we made the appointment.

I am finishing teaching James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and this week beginning a 4 week course in tragic drama of important periods which I’ve introduced into the course myself, as a very miniature version of the course I took in tragedy at Cambridge last year: two plays by Sophocles,^* one each by Webster & Tourneur,^* and 3 each by Ibsen and Strindberg.^* Should be work, but fun. I guess this stretch until spring vacation, through sleet & snow, is the hardest.

Write soon & keep dry & rested.

Love,

Sivvy

TO Warren Plath

Sunday 16 February 1958

TLS (photocopy), Indiana University

Sunday night

February 16,

Dearest Warren . . .

I have just finished correcting a set of papers and in the interim between tea and renewing my work of preparation for next week I thought I’d write you a note and enclose some of our duplicate clippings of reviews of Ted’s book ranging from eulogy to venom. I may have quoted from some of these, but thought you’d like to see them: it keeps getting reviewed, not only in England and America, but in Ireland, Scotland and Australia.

I am getting much better at my teaching and actually got this whole last week prepared ahead of time so I only had to review my notes each night, a great improvement: we are finishing up Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and I must say that in teaching a book one learns it by heart, and gets a really amazing insight. However, this kind of organization and analysis is not the kind I’d use if I were reading the book in the light of my own writing: it is much too conscious and analytical. I have also gained great ease in the classroom & much more often enjoy myself thoroughly & feel I am a good & interesting if embryo teacher. But the work does leave me tired out, and my eyes tired from the eternal reading. So I look forward to a vacation: now is the hardest pull, the month through snow & sleet to spring vacation.

Since our Christmas ills, broken foot and pneumonia, Ted & I have kept well, knock on wood. Just now it is blizzarding and has been all day in great windy swoops, and outside it is all whiteness swirling in the greenish cones of light from the streetlamps.

Ted is finding his teaching at the U. of Mass. much easier & rewarding than he thought it would be. He has only 3 days of classes: TThSat and 11 teaching hours: one freshman comp, 2 sophomore great books (Milton,^* Moliere,^* Goethe,^* Dostoevsky, Eliot, etc.), and one small senior writing course which he enjoys and which, of course, his students love. He has been writing some good longer poems lately, one, “Dick Straightup”, about a Yorkshire character, which I think you would enjoy.

I manage to give about one dinner a week to people on the faculty, three or four, and am becoming a pretty good cook, at least one of my mainline specialties. Did I tell you I’ve taken on an extra job as “reader” for Newton Arvin’s course in Hawthorne, Melville & H. James? This means going to his classes (I took the course years ago) & marking about 50 of his exams a month for which I get paid. I am also going 3 hours a week to a wonderful course in Modern Art which is blessed to my eyes. I have received a letter from a New York magazine, Art News, offering me from $50 to $75 for a poem on a work of art, so I’m hoping to go to the Art Museum & meditate on Gauguin & Rousseau^* and produce something this week---it’s so tantalizing to have the outright assignment, I just hope I’m not all dried up.

I’m teaching plays till spring vacation: Sophocles, Webster & Tourneur, Ibsen & Strindberg, a capsule version of the tragic drama course I took at Cambridge & my own insertion into Eng 11. Should be fun.

We look so forward to seeing you this summer. Both Ted & I send much love. Write soon.

Love,

Sivvy

TO Jane Baltzell Kopp

Tuesday 18 February 1958

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Date February 18 To JB From SPH In re Cabbages & Kings

Dear Jane . . .

The most convoluted and purple-fruited academic grapevine has it that you’re now teaching at the University of New Mexico, which I gather isn’t far from Texas and home country for you. I’d be most glad to hear from you & what shapes forms & colors life has taken since those last hot black-gowned days in the exam rooms opposite Trinity. Have you become a completely converted denizen in the academic groves? Every time I walk by Paradise Pond on these whipping windy blue days I feel the blade of irony enter in, being a rather antique and fallen angel on campus, so to speak. Irony with a capital I in class of course. What do you teach? Do you have time to breathe? To work on your own at whatever you want to work at?

After the first few week of confronting and laying all the unlaid ghosts of former selves, teaching on platforms where my teachers taught, etc., I feel at last come of age, enough, at least, to begin another kind of growing up. Amazing how our old 2000 years of Tragedy course resurrects: I am just about to embark on 4 weeks of drama, a sort of stew-pot of Greek, Jacobean & Ibsen & Strindberg picking up some of the central themes to unify the course, this all in Freshman English, 11, at present a pleasantly free course with 3 classes totalling about 70 very intelligent & eager girls who are fun & stimulating to work with.

Let this be a pink unofficial prelude (I am unable to resist the stocks of supply closet paper, hence write everything from letters to grocery lists to class notes on this) that The Powers That Be At Smith, and they be very powerful, should be writing you soon & are very interested. As far as I can see, which isn’t too far, this is a wonderful place to teach, with many fine, brilliant & creative people---poets, artists, etc. It is with a double-self very regretful that I resigned, although there was this pressure, as in a high-grade aluminum cooker, for me to stay on. And on. But I don’t want to live all my life, however paradisical it is here, at Smith & found I wasn’t doing my own writing, but making up my courses & cooking & that was it. So I want to take off next year & write for a steady year or else I shall be senile & unable to type at all. Then, we hope to manage a year in Rome if we have produced enough literature to get some kind of grant.

Ted is wonderfully well, teaching full-time this semester (only 3 days a week) at the U. of Mass. where he does 2 great books courses, a freshman comp class & a senior creative writing class (much more versatile than my program) & does it easily as writing a poem, which he is also doing (being accepted by New Yorker at long last, 3 poems, & Sewanee Review & his book getting good reviews here, in England, Ireland, Scotland, and yes Australia where from the black bush anguished letters come begging for culture and more poems).

What’s university life like in New Mexico? More casual, spacious? Or just what? What kind of faculty comrades do you have? And what is Stephen^* (sp?) doing now.

For some reason I feel enormously fond of Cambridge, which blooms like a green Eden in my head continually and about which I long to write & remake legends. Was the graduation sumptuous? I feel much more partisan about Cambridge than I ever did about Smith: it seems one of those primitively mystic places, saturated with spirits of the past and whatever. All the gray sodden slovenly weather has vanished in my mind, leaving that delicate baby blue sky, and the ducks at the mill race and every detail bright and haunting as stained glass. How do you feel about it? Even though I remember much misery & weariness & confusion I still endow it with the light of gone, very gone youth, or whatever. Which is, I suppose, disastrous and maudlin.

Do you hear from Isabel? Margaret? My last word from Whitstead was from Jess,^* who moved into our old flat and sold our mammoth outrageous couch for a net total of a shilling (we paid almost 10 pounds for it) at an auction & conscientiously wrote and asked me what to do about it. I recommended she stand herself & John to a glass of sherry, but they’re probably teetotalers.

If you come East to home in RI or here to be interviewed, please let me know if you can come by for a visit. I’d love to see you again and meanwhile would very much like to hear about you, people, and whatever is going on, inside & out.

Do write.

All good wishes,

Sylvia Hughes

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Sunday 2 March 1958

TLS, Indiana University

Date March 2, 1958 To ASP From SPH In re Cabbages & Kings.

Dearest mother:

Ted & I have spent a peaceful and lazy saturday evening (seeing an excellent art film on Goya^* and a fine bull-fighting film, documentary^*) and sunday. We cooperated at cleaning the house this morning like a dual whirlwind & both felt purged and rested for the remainder of the day, enjoying our ritual tea. We are living off a good lamb leg I bought this week, with lots of green salads, and did I tell you we bought an absolutely beautiful wine decanter which holds almost a quart, round, with a round bubble of a top, as a present for the anniversary of our meeting two years ago for only $5 (an Italian decanter made of blown glass at Murano, an island off Venice, which perhaps is an omen of our going to Italy the year after next!) We are immensely pleased with the decanter & delight to look at its beautiful lines on our table. Ted just got his poem “Crow Hill” which you & Marion have read accepted^* in the “New Statesman and Nation.” He is giving a brief reading of his poems this Tuesday night^* at the University, along with three other English faculty university “poets” (who don’t publish much). Ted has 23 poems toward a second volume of an intended 50 and 11 of these poems are already accepted for publication! Isn’t that fine? I feel there is much greater strength, sonorous maturity and large scope in these poems than in most of the poems in his last book.

Now that I write “March” it seems close to real spring and liberation. I have had all sorts of suggestions & temptations to stay on here---teaching part-time, & it was even suggested to propose Ted for a position, but we both find the noise of route 9 & the closed-in community very tiresome & long to walk out into the little crook-streets of Boston and not onto a roaring highway, & to have the cultural advantages of Boston, too---museums, concerts, and libraries, with the pleasure of anonymity. I am itching to begin my novel and poems for my book, whose third and I hope final title---“The Earthenware Head”---will be my last, and auspicious title, leading to publication: I project a year from this June which is the date of the competition I want to send it to.

I am really writing, as much as anything, to ask you to do some investigating for us via Dean Graham, or whoever is suitable. Would there be any possibility of Ted’s getting a position as Instructor in English at BU next year?

He will have excellent qualifications: his MA from Cambridge he received this winter, excellent recommendations will be forthcoming from the University & he has varied experience with 3 different courses there. He likes the “unaffectedness” of the University students in contrast to the spoiled girls at Smith & finds what he calls the dowdiness of some of the University students refreshing. He teaches only 3 days, morning & afternoon of 2, and morning of the 3rd, and would like, if possible, a concentrated program, either all in the mornings, or on 3 days. Would there by anything at all available? He is, of course, publishing regularly.

We figured that teaching, IF he can get a good program at college-level, will be the best thing: vacations, free time during the week, and a full year’s salary. Ted is very good at it, and enjoying it, and as I will be free I can take on the full load of household chores, which he has been halving with me this year, and even help him with his papers.

Could you find out if any place will be open at BU, and, if so, what kind of program would be possible. If anything is open, perhaps we could see about it at the end of March & the beginning of April when we come down.

I suppose Tufts might be another possibility, but BU would be ideal. The students, I suppose, would be a cut above the University, if anything.

Do let us know as soon as you can about this.

I hope you are keeping rested & well. I look forward to my vacation which begins in 2½ weeks & am crossing my fingers that my good health keeps up so I can work on that art poem as well as prepare my final 8 weeks of teaching. We are living economically & trying to get our budget down from its alarming previous average of $300 a month (so high partly because of doctor’s & clothing bills) to $200, or, at least $250. Food, rent, and phone alone amount to about $200, with gas for the car. I’ll welcome any budget-saving recipes you can send me. Made a batch of molasses crinkles this morning, which Ted likes.

Goodbye for now. Write soon,

Love,

Sivvy

TO Gerald & Joan Hughes

Tuesday 4 March 1958^*

TLS, Indiana University

Date March 3, 1958 To Gerald and Joan From Sylvia In re Cabbages and Kings.

Hello, you two. It seems months, years, even, since we’ve written you, & I hope you don’t treat us as badly, but write back soon! I am about to walk a mile to the class in American Lit. which I’m “reading” for (this means correcting about 60 exams a month for the professor who is too august to do anything but lecture) and pick up a stack of blue books: my own teaching is going so well that I am doing this extra job for, obviously, extra money. I probably have told you that I am going to take this next year off to work full-time on a novel about an Americaine in Cambridge & on finishing a book of poems which I have about half done. I am having fun making up this month of my freshman course which I decided would be plays, and so the girls are having a very much condensed dramatic course drawn up from the year course I was examined on last June at Cambridge. I am rather amused thinking they are working on the same plays I was working on as a student last year: poetic justice and all that. I am also going three times a week to a lecture course with wonderful slides in Modern Art & loving it.

The lecturer in art, Mrs. Van der Poel, is very petite, dapper and exotico, who speaks about Picasso^* as if he were a good friend, and he probably is, as she goes to Europe every years and owns her own African primitive masks and statues, her Picasso ceramics, her original Dufy,^* etc. etc. I sit, letting the brightly colored Rousseaus, Gauguins, and Klees^* sink into my head and make their own little weird worlds---whether of leafy jungles and moon-eyed tigers, or of Tahitian medecine-men & starched basquebonneted ladies watching Jacob wrestle with his angel, or of little tipsy gilt spirits floating in a golden chaos, and ghosts like bundles of bedding waving adieu. Much fun & provocative. I keep wishing Ted could come to share it.

Ted, in case he is too modest to mention it, is writing wonderfully. Better than ever. He has 23 poems toward a second book (almost 24, as he is working on a fine Wolf-head poem^* now) and 11 of these are already published. Last minute bulletin! 13 already accepted – 2 bought today by Harpers!^* In a year from now, he should have about 50 & all of them as good or better, richer, stronger, than the best in “The Hawk In The Rain”. I am very proud of him, & his development.

He also has picked up a full-time teaching job, 3 different courses & 11 hours altogether, & is doing a professional job at the University of Massachusetts. Tonight I’m going over with him while he gives a reading of some of his poems to students along with 3 other faculty members who “write”, but don’t really publish. I say “full-time”, but Ted only teaches 3 days a week, Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday & gets full pay for half a year for teaching 14 weeks (in other words, he gets paid for a 12 week holiday in effect!) This kind of program is obviously much better for writing than any 5-day 9 to 5 job for him, especially with the long vacations, & it pays as well as a profession, which office jobs, or even editing jobs wouldn’t do, so he’s thinking of trying for a position in University teaching in Boston next year if he can get something as concentrated. If so, we will both spend the whole summer writing like mad.

Symbolically, last week, on the anniversary of the day we met (O fatal day) two years ago, we got a joint letter from Mademoiselle, a posh ladies literary magazine, accepting a poem from each of us.^* Ted also has got a very fine lyric “Crow Hill” (has he sent it to you) accepted from “The New Statesman and Nation” the same week. I prophesy that he will be England’s greatest poet in 10 years time: he is that now, of course, although everyone doesn’t know it yet.

We have good fun: eat fresh steaks & roasts & salads & make a daily ritual of tea, which is somehow most sustaining & relaxing after a day’s work.

Your house sounds amazing: how big is it, what colors is it inside? Did you design it: describe it to us as if we were walking in the front door with you. I wish you and the boys could take a vacation when we’re in Italy which we hope to be in 1959-60, so we could all have a grand reunion at the Beacon. Is that impossible to dream about?

Must trudge out in the sludgy slushy march snow, which is all melting in great wet puddles, grimy, gritty, under a dirty-dishwater sky.

Write soon & tell us your news.

Much love to you both,

sylvia

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Saturday 22 March 1958

TLS, Indiana University

Date March 22, 1958 To Mother From Sivvy In re

Just a note to say that I have at last burst into a spell of writing. I was rather stunned Thursday morning, my first real day off after a week of correcting 70 papers, averaging midterm grades and writing a report on another senior thesis, but I had about seven or eight paintings and etchings I wanted to write on as poem-subjects and bang! After the first one, “Virgin in a Tree”, after an early etching by Paul Klee,^* I ripped into another, probably the biggest and best poem I’ve ever written, on a magnificent etching by Klee titled “Perseus, or the Triumph of Wit over Suffering.”^* A total of about 90 lines written in one day.

Friday went just as well: with a little lyric fantasy on a lovely painting by Klee on the Comic Opera The Seafarer,^* a long and big one on his painting “The Departure of the Ghost”^* and a little lyric on a cat with a bird-stigma between its eyebrows,^* a really mammoth magic cat-head. These are easily the best poems I’ve written, and open up new material and a new voice. I’ve discovered my deepest source of inspiration which is art: the art of primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin and Paul Klee and DeChirico. I have got out piles of wonderful books from the Art Library (suggested by this fine Modern Art Course I’m auditing each week) and am overflowing with ideas and inspirations, as if I’ve been bottling up a geiser for a year. Once I start writing, it comes and comes.

I am enclosing two of the poems.^* I am sending the two poems on the etchings to the sumptuous illustrated magazine “Art News” which asked me to write one or several poems for their series of poems on art. This assignment sent me off on a rich vein, and I hope they take both my poems & illustrate them, as I’d dearly love to possess copies of those two rare and generally unavailable etchings.

Today I had a reaction, feeling miserable and exhausted with my period, and drugging myself to a stupor with aspirin for lack of anything stronger. But after chicken broth I revive and am looking forward to writing another 90 lines tomorrow. If I can write, I don’t care what happens. I feel like an idiot who has been obediently digging up pieces of coal in an immense mine and has just realized that there is no need to do this, but that one can fly all day and night on great wings in clear blue air through brightly colored magic and weird worlds. Even used the dregs of my inspiration to write about 6 of those Dole Pineapple Jingles! We could use a car, or 5, or $15000.

Hope you like these little poems.

Love,

Sivvy

“Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer”

(After Paul Klee)

It beguiles---

This little Odyssey

In pink and lavender

Over a surface of gently-

Graded turquoise tiles

That represent a sea

With chequered waves and gaily

Bear up the seafarer

Gaily, gaily

In his pink plume and armor.

A fairy tale

Gondola of paper

Ferries the fishpond Sinbad

Who poises his pastel spear

Toward three pinky-purple

Monsters which uprear

Off the ocean-floor

With fanged and dreadful head.

Beware, beware

The whale, the shark, the squid.

But fins and scales

Of each scrolled sea-beast

Troll no slime, no weed.

They are polished for the joust,

They gleam like easter-eggshells,

Rose and amethyst.

Ahab, fulfill your boast:

Bring home each storied head.

One thrust, one thrust,

One thrust: and they are dead.

So fables go.

And so all children sing

Their bathtub battles deep,

Hazardous and long,

But oh, sage grownups know

Sea-dragon for sofa, fang

for pasteboard, and siren-song

For fever in a sleep.

Laughing, laughing

Of greybeards wakes us up.

Sylvia Plath

Departure of the Ghost

(After Paul Klee)

Enter the chilly noman’s land of precisely

Five o’clock in the morning, the no-color void

Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot

Of sulphurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums

Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much,

Gets ready to face the ready-made creation^*

Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets.

This is the kingdom of the fading apparition,

The oracular ghost who dwindles on pin-legs

To a knot of laundry, with a classic bunch of sheets

Upraised, as a hand, emblematic of farewell.^*

At this joint between two worlds and two entirely

Incompatible modes of time, the raw material

Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus

Of ambrosial revelation. And so departs.

But as chair and bureau are the hieroglyphs

Of some godly utterance wakened heads ignore,

So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing,

Speak in a sign language of a lost otherworld,

A world we lose by merely waking up

Into sanity: the common ghost’s crowed out,

Worms riddling its tongue, or walks for Hamlet

All day on the printed page, or bodies itself

For dowagers in drafty castles at twelve,

Or inhabits the crystal of the sick man’s eye---^*

Trailing its telltale tatters only at the outermost

Fringe of mundane vision. But this ghost goes,

Hand aloft, goodbye, goodbye, not down

Into the rocky gizzard of the earth,

But toward the point where our thick atmosphere

Diminishes, and god knows what is there:

A point of exclamation marks that sky

In ringing orange like a stellar carrot;

Its round period, displaced and green,

Suspends beside it the first point, the starting

Point of Eden, next the new moon’s curve.

Go, ghost of our mother and father, ghost of us,

And ghost of our dreams’ children, in those sheets

Which signify our origin and end,

To the cloud-cuckoo land of color wheels

And pristine alphabets and cows that moo

And moo as they jump over moons as new

As that crisp cusp toward which you voyage now.

Hail and farewell. Hello, goodbye. O keeper

Of the profane grail, the dreaming skull.

Sylvia Plath

TO Peter Davison

Tuesday 25 March 1958

TLS (photocopy), Yale University

Date March 25th To Peter From Sylvia In re

this Sunday: Ted & I would both very much enjoy seeing you in Cambridge.^* Would four or four-thirtyish in the afternoon be agreeable to you? We’ll come then, if we don’t hear different.

Both of us are looking forward to being in Boston this next year. In the last week of vacation I struck a good vein of poem-writing and am perishing to be at it in earnest and through with making up reasons for why people should like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Perhaps I shall just toss out critical weapons and read poetry aloud hour after hour and if they are still deaf, they’re deaf. By this time next year I plan to have a poetry book ready (really my third, I’ve tossed a good two out in the past five years)^* and at least a close-to-final version of a novel. Vacation this week has shown me how it will be: very unsocial, but fishing deep and reveling: it exhausts, but not like teaching or other people’s work. Like my work, so that’s all right.

Looking forward to Sunday. Our best to you.

sylvia

TO Peter Davison

Tuesday 22 April 1958

TLS (photocopy) on Department of English, Smith College letterhead, Yale University

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

April 22, 1958

Mr. Peter Davison

The Atlantic Monthly Press

8 Arlington Street

Boston 16, Mass.

Dear Peter,

After this delay I don’t deserve to ask you to be so good as to whisk these under the august eye. But do use your good and acute eye on them. These are among my most recent poems,^* so I am prejudiced in their favor, but also consider some of them the best I’ve done yet in the direction I want to go in.

Ted will send a group along shortly, as he is just finishing one he likes & would like to include. By the way, do you know if the editors have taken any action on the two stories he sent them, yes, eons ago? I believe they were titled “Grand Songs, Great Songs” &, I think, “Rats.” We haven’t heard a thing.

You were noble & heroic to forge through that demonish sleet (was it 11 days ago already?) and come to the reading.^* Have you had anything as juicy as the Lana Turner-daughter murder^* in your justicing?

We appreciate the books.^* Ted snitched the Jung^* first, I the novel: you were most thoughtful. I admire much in the novel, as far as I’ve gone: very fine vibrations, no? A sensitive net he casts. I am particularly interested in Rome as a setting & in the way it can be created: but I guess I am much more concerned with lights, colors & the painter’s view of the world than the abstract philosopher’s view, although I find myself with keen interest in the possibility of a certain creative morality, which is, I guess, in some eyes, dangerous amorality. But this is all going to work out in prose. I must now be quiet about it.

Do you think any of these poems are possibilities for the Atlantic? Does Editor Weeks think so? I would like very much to meet him some day, & so would Ted. Perhaps when we move to Boston?

Tea that day at your place was very good. Let us have any news: of you (& how is Nora?^* have just finished her “Gift Horse”)^* the publishing world, & our writings,

Best wishes,

Sylvia

TO Warren Plath

Tuesday 22 April 1958

ALS in greeting card^* (photocopy), Indiana University

Salute! / Skoal! / cheerio! / prosit! / Here’s how! / in any language . . . / here’s a toast / to wish you / HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

With lots of / love – / Sivvy / & / Ted

April 22, 1958

Dearest Warren . . .

It seems a long time since my last writing, but I have been in a bit of a daze. A bad cold which sneezed & ran for a full week knocked me out before Ted’s reading, but I taught in spite of it so I could give my classes free cuts of grace on April 11th. Imagine – we drove into a horizontal blizzard of sleet all the way to Harvard! In spite of the appalling weather, Ted had a loyal audience – among them many old troupers – Marty & Mike Plumer, Gordon – his eyes glowing with dollar signs, his mouth tongued with million-dollar deals relating to his new project – a Framingham Music Circus – Mrs. Cantor, dear Mrs. Prouty (who said in loud, clear tones: “Isn’t Ted wonderful?!”). He was – a very good hour of poems, old & new & talk in between. I met the young poet Philip Booth (who just received a Guggenheim) & we had a lovely dinner at Felicia’s Café^* near Hanover (?) Street with Jack Sweeney (whom we dearly love – he remembers your A’s in some humanities course) & his lovely wierd Irish wife & (at last) Adrienne Cecile Rich & her husband^* (she’s the girl whose poetry I’ve followed from her first publication) The excitement tolled the end of my cold & I feel much better with the approaching spring – tulips, daffodils & magnolia now out in “our” park next-door. Were you joking about what Clem’s girlfriend said about a new Faber anthology? I thought de la Mare^* was dead. We take these things very seriously. Ted & I met a very strange & endearing poet of middle age – Lee Anderson^* – who called & asked us to come to Springfield so he could make recordings of us both for the files of the Library of Congress.^* He has a queer grey goatee, is shy & kindly & has an 80 acre farm in Pennsylvania.^* I drove Ted over & raced back for my 3’ oclock, rushed back to the Springfield hotel, & we recorded. I was especially glad that Anderson, who’d never heard or read any of my poetry, was immensely impressed with the six or seven new poems I wrote this spring vacation. I do hope to have a poetry book finished sometime this fall!

An amusing & lucrative note – sent some old sentimental poems written at Smith to the Ladies’ Home Journal – they promptly bought a sonnet^* for $140. That’s $10 a line! Very welcome. We love hearing about your adventures. Do try to look up Ted’s beautiful blonde sister in Paris – she is golden-eyed, golden-haired & very delicate & tall as I am – looks about 18, although 28. She works for Nato – c/o the English Pool, Palais de Chaillot – Paris 16eme. Very worth your while – if you get this too late, try to make a side trip. DO write about England. Did you have a suit made? or see Cambridge?

Write soon –

love,

Sivvy

TO John Sweeney

Sunday 27 April 1958

TLS, University College Dublin

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

April 27, 1958

Mr. John Sweeney

51 Beacon Street

Boston, Mass.

Dear Jack,

A small note to say how nice it was to see you again that evening with Adrienne at Holyoke,^* a very good postscript to the lovely time, amid all that fury and mire of April 11th, at the aptly named Felicia’s.

Our year has been much the finer for our knowing you and Maurya (I am never sure how to spell this & am sure there is an accent, and an e somewhere!)---and our meeting with the Merwins & the Conrads. We do look forward to the chance of seeing you once more before you set sail for Ireland.

I’m enclosing, as promised amid the turkey and rye-bread two weeks back, a few of the poems^* I read for Lee Anderson.^* Most of these---except “Black Rook . . .” and “The Earthenware Head”---were written quite recently, in the past month. I do hope you like some of them, parts of them. I am eager & more than eager to stop all other work, except sun-and-moon-gazing, while I work on finishing my book of poems which I hope to complete by next fall.

Our best to you and your wife,

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath Hughes

TO Lee Anderson

Sunday 27 April 1958

TLS, Washington University (St Louis)

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Massachusetts

April 27, 1958

Lee Anderson

Glen Rock

Pennsylvania

Dear Lee,

I am enclosing copies, as promised, of the poems I read for your tapes two weeks ago: some carbons which I hope are legible, making up, I’m afraid, a rather vulgar motley of type-faces, or smudges.

One of the nicest things that happened to us this spring was our meeting you: as I said, after the student reading that night, we feel, perhaps a bit presumptuously, that we know you with that knowing which makes us think of you as a friend, not just an acquaintance.

We imagine you on the farm: 80 acres? and the great barn with the roof stove in by the snow. When we are able to travel, and travel for us means any arrow however short pointing away from Northampton, we shall appear on the edge of your acreage asking to see a cow, a field of wheat, and to hear you, and some of the recordings.

Meanwhile, our thanks for the pleasant surprise of that fair Friday ending an April week.

With all good wishes,

Sylvia Plath Hughes

TO Edith & William Hughes

Monday 28 April 1958

ALS, Family owned

April 28th

Hello there!

It is a rainy puddly Monday after a lovely clear sunny month. I just learned that my American literature professor isn’t having class today, so I’m staying in bed cozily reading poems & Henry James – a novel called ‘The Bostonians’^* – very good & funny about the ‘blue-stocking’ women working for emancipation of women after the Civil War. Our house is cold – pleasantly reminiscent of England: Our landlady is most frugal & evidently turns off the heat for the year on the first warm day. Did you get the little ‘petits fours’ – or frosted tiny cakes we sent in the box? We want to be sure the grocer got the order right.

Ted has written some very good poems lately: he seems to be keeping up his gift in the midst of teaching – one about a pig, one about a cat & mouse, and one about the cat o’nine tails used in the British Navy.^* He eats a lot of steak & salad & is in fine health. He has a very loyal & increasing following of admirers here in America – his children’s story is coming out in Jack & Jill in July (and they are interested in more) so we’ll be sure to send you a copy. In three weeks we’ll celebrate our finishing teaching by a week’s trip to New York City where we’ll go to plays, art museums & up the Empire State Building & visit all the poets we can find. Then a whole summer of writing: what other job beside teaching pays for a 3-month summer vacation? I am hoping to finish a book of poems & start a novel by next fall.

We have borrowed the lovely green park^* next door as our private garden for daily walks. It is made up of grassy stretches, pink flowering trees, a little wood of elms & a tall wood of pines, and a formal garden. The red, pink & yellow tulips are up, and daffodils, bluets, grape hyacinths & phlox. We found a pheasant lives in the wood, & the grass is covered in big red robins & the trees full of squirrels. I hope to have more publishing news soon.

Meanwhile – much love to you both –

Sylvia

TO Oscar Williams^*

Tuesday 10 June 1958

TLS,^* Indiana University

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

June 10, 1958

Dear Oscar . . .

We packed up & left New York days earlier than we planned and are now back in the green glooms of Northampton with the parkful of rabbits and mange-tailed squirrels and no sun in sight, all rain, but a peaceable Smith-girl-less Smith and stacks of folk and fairy tales from the library.

Before leaving the city we managed a day at the Bronx zoo regarding with special pleasure the gorillas, chimpanzees, polar bears and pigheaded turtles. Your garden in the air over the bay revolves in mind with all the bright light blue of the interior sky and the multicolored portraits and animals. A fine afternoon, and we are entrenched here among the good anthologies.

I hope you like the poems.^* And we hope to see you again when we return. When does the new & Ted-ending anthology^* come out?

With good wishes,

sylvia plath

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Tuesday 10 June 1958

TLS with envelope on Department of English, Smith College letterhead, Indiana University

June 10: Tuesday

Dearest mother . . .

A note to announce our return from a week in New York city: the details must wait till we arrive home Thursday, the 12th, and we will barter them with you for news of Bermuda. We were very tired, but managed an amazing lot of fun, meetings and walkings for miles in our 5 days. We just caught Ted’s two publishers^* before they sailed & had a posh pink-table-clothed dinner with them at the Biltmore.^* Went to the tar-roofed top of a business building in Wall Street to the famous anthologist Oscar Williams’ little crow’s nest full of oil paintings & flowering plants made and grown by his dead poet-painter wife,^* & mementoes of their dearest friend Dylan Thomas. A fine afternoon overlooking the bay & sniffing mint leaves, and we went to two parties with him afterwards to strange people he’s published in his anthologies: one a rich 5th avenue party where we rode up in the elevator with Lionel & Diana Trilling:^* the place was full of publishers, editors & Columbia professors. The novelist Ralph Ellison,^* old Farrar^* of Farrar, Strauss, Cudahy, the editor of the Hudson Review^* & suchlike. Then a late & sumptuous bouffet at the home of Hy Sobiloff,^* owner of Sloane’s 5th Avenue Furniture store & very dull wealthy business people but a fine negro cook whose food & artistry in table arrangement of cakes & strawberries & melons & praised to her pleasure.

We spent a whole day at the Bronx zoo & happened by chance to sit on the train next to Clyde Beatty’s brother^* who works in a lion’s cage there & is very happy & a charming person, telling us much about the animals. A beautiful zoo, with wide open spaces for most of the animals, not jail cells.

We took Patsy out to a little candle-lit cave in Greenwich Village for dinner to equate rent for the apartment she generously let us use^* which of course saved us all living fees & made the trip possible. Then we went to a play by Garcia Lorca, “Blood Wedding.”^* I didn’t tell anybody, but I thought you’d be amused at the coincidence that dogs my steps: coming down in the subway afterwards I almost ran into Dick Wertz,^* Nancy Hunter’s old flame, who was at Cambridge when I was and is marrying a Smith girl^* from my class who is teaching with me this year. I was about to speak to him, as his back was turned to me, when talking to him I saw Richard Sassoon.^* I kept quiet & passed by & probably only I of all the 5 people knew about it. Of all the people in NYC!

We walked miles, lunched with our editor friend at World Publishing Company & they are still interested in seeing my poetry book as it is early this fall. We strolled through Central Park, Harlem, Fifth Avenue & took Ted up to the top of the Empire State Building & had my fortune told by a summy subway gypsy whose card, ironically enough, showed a picture of a mailman & said I’d get a wonderful letter soon that would change my life for the better. We saw the Bowery bums & the Harlem negroes and the Fifth Avenue tycoons & best of all, Marianne Moore who was lovely at her home in Brooklyn^* & admires Ted very much & served us strawberries, sesame seed biscuits & milk & talked a blue streak. Can we reserve tickets & take you to see her this Sunday?^* Our last night after Marianne Moore was lovely too: two experimental Ionesco plays^* & a good dinner in the Village.

We hope to come home for supper Thursday: my reading-recording is Friday afternoon^* & we’ll go to dinner with Jack Sweeney that night. Mrs. Prouty has asked us (Ted & me) for dinner Sunday noon, but I thought maybe you & grampy & Ted & me could have a special dinner Monday the 16th to celebrate our 2nd anniversary. How about it? And then we must return to Hamp & get to work. We also hope to look at Beacon Hill apartments while at home.

Much love,

Sivvy

PS – Many thanks for the magazines–

TO Warren Plath

Wednesday 11 June 1958

TLS (photocopy), Indiana University

June 11, 1958

Dearest Warren . . .

It was fine to get your good letter. I am so happy you are coming home in only two months. Life here for the past month has been such a holocaust that I lost all sense of timing and have been a frightful letter writer as my work began to go round faster & faster like a merrygoround. Which, at last, has stopped, & Ted and I are just beginning to recover, teaching over & done with for the present. I realize, as I start to write, how many letters I’ve written you in my head & how much I’ve missed you. There are so very few people in the world I really care about, & I guess you and Ted are the closest of all. Perhaps we can go for picnic & swim at the Cape to celebrate your return. I want so much, over the course of this next year, when I hope we’ll be very close & you coming over to dinner often (we’re going to look for a Boston apartment this weekend) and visiting us much, to hear, bit by bit, about your ideas and experiences in Europe and of your work at Harvard. You know I’ve always had a secret desire to go to Harvard, & the next best thing is your going. I have that horrid habit mothers get of being secretly determined all my sons will go to Harvard.

I finished teaching on May 22nd & felt honestly sorry to say goodbye to my girls. I was amused at my last day of classes to get applause in the exact volume of my own feelings toward every class: a spatter at 9, a thunderous ovation at 11 which saw me down two flights of stairs, and a medium burst at 3. Now that it is over, I can’t believe I’ve taught 20 stories, 2 novels, 10 plays, and countless poems including the Waste Land. But I have. And I’ve done more than I thought or hoped for those first black weeks of teaching which upset me very much: I think I have chosen excellent works, won over my most difficult pupils & taught them a good deal. But on the whole, my colleagues have depressed me: it is disillusioning to find the people you admired as a student are weak and jealous and petty and vain as people, which many of them are. And the faculty gossip, especially among the men, over morning coffee, afternoon tea, and evening cocktails is very boring: all about the latest gossip, possible apointments, firings, grants, students, literary criticism: all secondary, it seems: an airtight secure community, with those on tenure getting potbellies. Writers especially are suspect if they don’t place academic life first, & we have seen one or two of our writing acquaintances given very raw & nasty deals. Of course, we have been at an advantage, both having resigned in face of requests to stay. But it has been impossible for either of us to get any work done & we feel that if we drifted into this well-paid security we would curse ourselves in ten years time for what might have been.

I am sure, for example, that Ted has the makings of a great poet, and he already has some loyal supporters like Marianne Moore (whom we visited at her Brooklyn flat this week in NYC) and TS Eliot, whom we hope to see when we go to England: Ted is better than any poet I can think of ten years his senior & I feel as a wife the best I can do is demand nothing but that we find workable schemes whereby we both can write & live lives which are dictated by inner needs for creative expansion & experience.

Of course there are very few people who can understand this. There is something suspect, especially in America, about people who don’t have ten-year plans for a career or at least a regular job. We found this out when trying to establish credit at a local general store: we fitted, amusingly enough, into none of the form categories of “The Young American Couple”: I had a job, Ted didn’t; we owned no car, were buying no furniture on the installment plan, had no TV, had no charge accounts, came as if literally dropped from foreign parts. The poor secretary was very perplexed. Anyhow, I can talk to you freely about our plans, if not to mother: she worries so that the most we can do is put up an illusion of security: security to us is in ourselves, & no job, or even money, can give us what we have to develop: faith in our work, & hard hard work which is spartan in many ways. Ted is especially good for me because he doesn’t demand Immediate Success & Publication, and is training me not to. We feel the next five years are as important to our writing as medical school is to a prospective surgeon. Ted says simply to produce, work, produce, read not novels or poems only, but books on folk lore, fiddler crabs & meteorites: this is what the imagination thrives on. The horror of the academic writer is that he lives on air & other peoples’ second-hand accounts of other peoples’ writing.

We have a friend named Stanley Sultan who has published several stories^* & teaches writing here: he is very young & very academically inclined (wrote PhD. thesis on James Joyce)^* and he showed us a story he’d just finished & obviously liked. It was written in the person of the wife of a Coney Island dwarf who had been killed as a kind of game by being forced to drink a six-pack of beer in a crowd who were angered at his trying to hinder a cat’s killing a rat stuck in a drain-pipe. Well, the story seemed grey to us, & dull, but the point of view was good. What bothered us was the possibility of a cat killing a rat (rats being very strong, Ted having seen them kill cats & wound dogs seriously) by a few cuffs of the paw, and also the unlikelihood of a couple of young men being able to kill a dwarf by flooding his small stomach with six cans of beer on a main street in a crowd of people: simply to get down a sip of beer would be difficult enough, and all this wasn’t described. But the reality of the story seemed very questionable. Anyway, this writer wasn’t at all concerned with these problems, & surprised at our raising them: what mattered was: did we get the symbolism? the parallel between dwarf and rat? the rat stuck in the drainpipe and the round shape of beercans paralleling this. Well, you see what I mean: the writer is cut off from life & begins to think as he analyzes stories in class: very differently from the way a writer feels reality: which, according to many teachers, is too simple as such & needs symbols, irony, archetypal images & all that. Well, we will try to get along without such conscious & contrived machinery. We write, and wake up with symbols on our pages, but do not begin with them.

I had two ghastly weeks of correcting papers: 70 term papers of my own. 60 final exams in American Lit. course I correct for (which is very dull, as I know none of the students & have no reciprocal influence on them, but got $100 extra for this in the semester; yet realize I’d have been better off writing two poems for that price) & then all the senior exams in English which I learned the whole English faculty shares reading. My eyes got a queer stinging rash & I was glad to end it all on June 2nd.

Ted & I left for New York City immediately after my last papers & stayed with Patsy O’Neil & her roommate for 5 days which made our trip possible, as we had no rent extra & could cook food there. We lived, with the exception of a few meals, on frankfurts, hamburgs, bacon, eggs & coffee. I’m glad we went. It exorcised the academic year & we came back here to cool rainy green June weather renewed & ready to write. We saw much & walked prodigiously for our stay.

First off we met Charles Monteith & Peter Du Sautoy of Faber’s and lunched with them in a plush pink room at the Biltmore just before they sailed. We liked them immensely & they promised to introduce us to “Tom” Eliot when we came to England next. We’d met du Sautoy at a cocktail party at an amazing modern house overlooking all the green mountains in Amherst & met many Amherst professors, plus Reuben Brower (sp?)^* who I understand is master at Adams House & who was very nice. Then we went to the tip of Manhattan, by Wall Street overlooking the bay boats, and climbed six flights in an office building to the little tar-rooftop eyrie of Oscar Williams, the wellknown poet & anthologist who is putting 3 of Ted’s poems at the end of his revised Pocket Anthology of modern verse which begins with Whitman^* and ends with Hughes.

Oscar Williams was a queer, birdlike little man, obviously very at-odds since his best friend Dylan Thomas & his beloved poet-painter wife Gene Derwood died in the same year. He lives in a tiny rooftop studio painted light blue, with a skylight, covered with oil paintings by his wife, bright colored animals & portraits, photographs of his dead loves, brick homemade bookcases full of poetry books, tables, floors and bathtub covered and full of unwashed glasses, and a fine little tar roof porch overlooking the gulls & boats and ringed with potted rosebushes & mint plants. He served us drambuie & we got along well. He then took us to two parties, one on 5th avenue at the home of a wealthy man whose poetry he published, where we went up in the same elevator with Lionel & Diana Trilling: and all afternoon had that odd feeling of recognizing famous faces from photographs: the negro writer Ralph Ellison, old Farrar, publisher, of Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; the editor of the Hudson Review & endless boring professors from Columbia. The next party was given by the owner of a famous furniture store on 5th Avenue, Hy Sobiloff, who also publishes poetry with Oscar & occasionally give 10 thousand dollars to buy permissions for new anthologies: very dull & wealthy stupid floordecorators & all Jewish businessmen named Goldstone: we ate well from a lavish bouffet & went home to Patsy’s, very happy with our own lives.

We spent a whole day at the Bronx Zoo which was delightful: most of the animals were roaming in open places, none of the horrible prison-like cages at the Central Park Zoo where the lions can’t turn around and the gorillas are morbidly depressed. Here we saw magnificent gorillas, four enchanting chimpanzees, four white playful polar bears, endless boa-constrictors (how I would like to see them fed!) pig-headed turtles, great raucous rainbow colored birds, and over all the queer scream of the free wandering peacocks who kept spreading admirable tails.

By coincidence on the train to the Zoo we asked a smiling young man next to us where to get off & he turned out to be Clyde Beatty’s brother (the famous animal catcher & trainer) and was on his day off from work in the lion cage. He seemed one of the few people we’d met in NYC happy with his work.

We wandered through Harlem (Ted first thought all NYC was made up of negroes), through Central Park, Greenwich Village where we took Patsy to dinner & the Lorca play “Blood Wedding” and later went to see two most entertaining experimental plays by Ionesco by a fine little troupe in an off-broadway theater seating about 150 people. We walked through throngs of Bowery bums, stared in shop windows, got my fortune told for 5¢ by a mechanical gypsy in the 8th avenue subway; my card had the picture of a mailman on it & said that soon I will get a wonderful letter which will change my life! How’s that for hopeful? The lady with the glass eyes couldn’t have come closer to my heart.

We also visited Babette Deutsch,^* a small time poet & critic, who is married to the Russian scholar Avrahm Yarmolinsky^*---she’d written in admiration of Ted’s poems. And lunched with Dave Keightley, the friend of ours who was in the car accident & at the Holyoke hospital for several months. His publishing company editors, World Pub., are interested in seeing a ms. of my poetry book (now provisionally titled “Full Fathom Five”) this fall. They’ve never published poetry before, but are interested in “genuine fresh talent” which I hope I have. I’ve been changing, I think much for the better, in my writing style: ironically, of the 35 or so poems I’ve published in my career, I’ve rejected about 20 of these from my book manuscript as too romantic, sentimental & frivolous & immature: my main difficulty has been overcoming a clever, too brittle & glossy feminine tone, & I am gradually getting to speak “straight out” and of real experience, not just in metaphorical conceits. I’ll enclose a recent poem which I hope you may like.

I’ve two poems out in the June London Magazine, one in the obscure New Mexico Quarterly,^* one in the British “Guiness” anthology of verse^* published this May; Ted & I are each having a poem in the next annual British PEN anthology,^* his “Thrushes”, my “Sow”, and each of us have 2 poems coming out in the annual Borestone anthology^* in America: encouraging to be between hard covers, but not very lucrative as yet.

One thing which we haven’t told mother for obvious reasons is that Ted applied for a Saxton writing fellowship for this year & we were sure of getting it for him as Marianne Moore et. al. volunteered to write & he had a magnificent project for a poetry book: it was the only fellowship, as a Briton, he was eligible for. Ironically, we learned this week, that the fellowship is run by trustees from Harper’s and as he is published by them his project can’t be considered on merit: if it had been so considered he obviously would have got a grant. So, with supreme & rather distressing irony, the very qualification of his worth, publishing a book, is his one flaw, rendering him ineligible. So I shall apply for the same grant (don’t tell mother about this either) & Ted will apply for a Guggenheim for next year.

We have saved some money from our work this year & also earned about $1500 between us from writing (Ted’s book has sold 1,700 copies in America and about 1,600 in England: supremely good for a poetry book, as is the $1000 he’ll have earned out of it.) So this summer we will write “on salary” & hope for something to turn up in Boston: full-time jobs are obviously out, as our one wish is to write, & we don’t want to live on our savings as they must take us to Europe for our projected year in Italy. We have considered the McDowell Writing Colony^* as a last measure and also the possibility of living in someone’s summer house rent-free in return for caretaking. But we would both like to live in Boston near the library, anonymous people, with no need for a car & very near publishers & editors and all Boston & Cambridge have to offer. God feeds the ravens. I hope you understand this better than mother does. When we are both wealthy & famous our work will justify our lives, but now our lives & faith must justify themselves. We live very simply and happily & walk each day in Our Park, which is nextdoor & which noone else frequents. There are several brown rabbits, two magnificent black frogs who swim like suave purple-bellied Martians & return our stares for hours, innumerable squirrels, bright yellow birds, red-headed woodpeckers and fruit trees and a garden which is mysteriously replanted as the flowers die: first tulips and daffodils then hyacinths: then one day we came back to find these gone and beds of geraniums and white petunias in their place. The little rose garden is just coming out, and about once a week we make off with a red or yellow rose.

We met the mad and very nice poet Robert Lowell (the only one 40ish whom we both admire, who comes from the Boston Lowells & is periodically carted off as a manic depressive) when he came to give a reading at the U. of Mass.^* He is quiet, soft-spoken, and we liked him very much. I drove him around Northampton looking for relics of his ancestors, and to the Historical Society & the graveyard. We hope to see him in Boston when we move down.

We’ve become good friends with Jack Sweeney who’s head of the Lamont Poetry Library at Harvard & like him as much as anyone we’ve met here. I’m going to make a recording (did I tell you?) for the Lamont Library of my poems this Friday, so you can go up there & hear recordings of your sister & brother-in-law anytime!^*

Ted & I plan to celebrate our 2nd anniversary at home with mother this monday, june 16th. It seems impossible I’ve been married for two whole years, and much more impossible that I ever wasn’t married to Ted! Oh we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs & Ted with missing earlobes, but we feel so perfectly at one with our work & reactions to life & people that we make our own world to work in which isn’t dependent on anyone else’s love or admiration, but self-contained: our best pleasure is writing at home, eating & talking & walking in woods to look for animals & birds. Money would be very helpful, but we have everything except this: and Ted’s uncle is almost a millionaire (but very odd, with a mad daughter who will no doubt outlive us) and Mrs. Prouty who has adopted Ted (“he’s so handsome: couldn’t he get on Tv? etc.”) occasionally sends us a hundred $ check for christmas or anniversary & we both feel genuinely fond of her, & see her as often as we can.

Well, I must close now, or I will be typing into tomorrow & next week. Here is a poem I made about the fiddler crabs we found at Rock Harbor when we went to get mussels last summer for fish bait. I hope you like it. If you find anything inaccurate about the crabs do tell me about it. Read it aloud – for the sounds of it.

Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor

I came before the water-

colorists came to get the

good of the Cape light that scours

sand-grit to sided crystal

and buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls

of the three fishing smacks beached

on the bank of the river’s

back-tracking tail. I’d come for

free fish-bait: the blue mussels

clumped like bulbs at the grass-root

margin of the tidal pools.

Dawn tide stood dead low.

I smelt mud-stench, shell guts, gulls’ leavings;

heard a queer crusty scrabble

cease, and I neared the silenced

edge of a cratered pool-bed:

the mussels hung dull blue and

conspicuous, yet it seemed

a sly world’s hinges had swung

shut against me. All held still.

Though I counted scant seconds,

enough ages lapsed to win

confidence of safe-conduct

in the wary otherworld

eyeing me. Grass put forth claws;

small mud-knobs, nudged from under,

displaced their domes as tiny

knights might doff their casques. The crabs

inched from their pigmy burrows

and from the trench-dug mud, all

camouflaged in mottled mail

of browns and greens. Each wore one

claw swollen to a shield large

as itself---no fiddler’s arm

grown Gargantuan by trade

but grown grimly and grimly

borne for a use beyond my

guessing of it. Sibilant

mass-motived hordes, they sidled

out in a converging stream

toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to

meet the thin and sluggish thread

of sea retracing its tide-

way up the river-basin.

Or to avoid me. They moved

obliquely, with a dry-wet

sound, with a glittery wisp

and trickle. Could they feel mud

pleasurable under claws

as I could between bare toes?

That question ended it---I

stood shut out for once, for all,

puzzling the passage of their

absolutely alien

order as I might puzzle

at the clear tail of Halley’s

comet coolly giving my

orbit the go-by, made known

by a family name it

knew nothing of. So the crabs

went about their business which

wasn’t fiddling, and I filled

a big handkerchief with blue

mussels. From what the crabs saw,

if they could see, I was one

two-legged mussel-picker.

High on the airy thatching

of the dense grasses I found

the husk of a fiddler-crab,

intact, strangely strayed above

his world of mud---green color

and innards bleached and blown off

somewhere by much sun and wind:

there was no telling if he’d

died recluse or suicide

of headstrong Columbus crab.

The crab-face etched and set there

grimaced as skulls grimace: it

had an oriental look,

a samurai-deathmask done

on a tiger-tooth, less for

art’s sake than god’s. Far from sea---

where red-freckled crab-backs, claws

and whole crabs, dead, their soggy

bellies pallid and upturned,

perform their shambling waltzes

on the waves’ dissolving turn

and return, losing themselves

bit by bit to their friendly

element---this relic saved

face to face the bald-faced sun.

*********

This is written in what’s known as “syllabic verse”, measuring lines not by heavy & light stresses, but by the number of syllables, which here is 7: I find this form satisfactorily strict (a pattern varying the number of syllables in each line can be set up, as M. Moore does it) and yet it has a speaking illusion of freedom (which the measured stress doesn’t have) as stresses vary freely. Don’t follow my example: write soon! And I promise to answer.

Much love –

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Wednesday 25 June 1958

TLS, Indiana University

Date June 25 To You From Me In re odds & ends.

Remember, a year ago, we first set foot together on American soil? And the lovely party we had under the great awning in the back yard? Ted & I look back on our party with much pleasure.

Nothing of moment has happened since we came back. We’ve slept a lot, and I’ve been making banana bread of which we’re very fond for tea. Both of us have written several good poems, but heard nothing about our work at the tardy Atlantic which has kept it for the usual half year: they ought to reorganize: no other magazine in the world keeps submissions so long.

We climbed to the peak of Mount Holyoke^* & hoped to do it often, for there is a magnificent view, but I learned on reaching the top that there is a charge of 15 cents for each person who walks up: I can understand the parking fee, but got very angry that you couldn’t even walk in a State park for nothing. Our park if full of mountain laurel now, very lovely. And the rose garden is in full bloom. I have written another poem about the latter^* and about climbing the mountain.^*

The thought of our apartment waiting in Boston is very consoling: we are really too isolated here & look forward to walking out in the streets & watching the odd faces, learning odd corners, going to the library, museums & foreign films.

Will write again soon –

Love

Sivvy

PS: We loved our 2nd anniversary dinner last week. And the stay at home was such a rest for us!

PS: One hour later: VERY GOOD NEWS: In the mail I just got my FIRST acceptance from the NEW YORKER!^* And not of a short little poem but of two very fat & amazingly long ones! “MUssel*Hunter At Rock Harbor”^* and “Nocturne”,^* the first 91 lines, the last, 45 lines! In our materialistic way, Ted & I figured, amid much jumping up and down, this should mean close to $350, or 3 full months of Boston rent! For two poems! They wrote a glowing letter, very generous for the New Yorker. It began:

“MUSSEL*HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR seems to ma a marvelous poem, and I’m happy to say we’re taking it for The New Yorker, as well as NOCTURNE, which we also think extremely fine.”

How’s that for a good beginning to a summer of work! You see what happens the minute one worships one’s own god of vocation & doesn’t slight it for grubbing under the illusion of duty to Everybody’s-Way-Of-Life! This is well over 3 times as much money as I got for half a year of drudgery in that American lit course, correcting exams, and well over a month’s salary for a week’s work of pure joy. The Mussel Hunters may not come out till next summer, as they’re very crowded with summer poems, but I should get the check in a few days. What a nice anniversary gift for our coming to America!

xxx

Sivvy

You see – the gypsy-fortuneteller with her card depicting the mailman was very right!

TO Henry Rago

Wednesday 25 June 1958

TLS, University of Chicago

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

June 25, 1958

Mr. Henry Rago

POETRY

60 West Walton Street

Chicago 10, Illinois

Dear Mr. Rago,

I’m sending along a group of recent poems^*---the first poems after a year devoted almost completely to teaching. I hope you may like some of these well enough for publication in Poetry.

With all good wishes,

Sylvia Plath

TO Olive Higgins Prouty

Wednesday 25 June 1958

TLS on Department of English, Smith College letterhead, Indiana University

June 25, 1958

Dear Mrs. Prouty,

I’m writing a small note to say what a happy time Ted and I had with you last week! We count a visit with you one of our favorite treats when coming home and look forward to inviting you to mount the little elevator at 9 Willow Street in Boston, just off Louisberg Square, and come to sup with us in our small writer’s corner over-looking the rooftops and the river!

Today is just a year’s anniversary of our arrival in America, and I received some very good news: The New Yorker wrote me my first acceptance (after 10 years of rejections!) of two long poems---one, “Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor”, the one I sent you and read last week; the other, “Nocturne”, about a walk on the moor-tops in England. I am quite excited about these poems and the acceptance gives me great courage to go on working on my book of poems which I hope to complete in Boson this winter.

Ted is now working on a short story, “The Courting of Petty Quinnet”, a Yorkshire tale, and we’ll send along a copy of his fairytale in Jack and Jill as soon as it comes out next month: we hope you’ll have a good time reading it.

Both of us are plunged in work, relieved by long walks in our park and up the neighboring mountains, which give us needed perspectives & far vistas after much close writing. We live, as you have said yourself, for finding the right words, the one word, right for its place. We’ll write again soon.

Much love,

Sylvia Hughes

TO Warren Plath

Wednesday 25 June 1958

TLS (photocopy), Indiana University

Wednesday: June 25th

Dearest Warren . . .

It is pleasant to think that in just about two months from today you will be home. Today marks the anniversary of Ted’s & my landing in America, and I feel we have accomplished a great deal this year. The teaching has given us both confidence, a kind of intellectual discipline which, although it stopped us writing for the year, is bearing fruit now. We’ve just both been working on several poems which we think are quite an advance in our writing. We are extremely critical of each other, & won’t let poems pass without questioning every work, rhythm & image: it is this, I think, this mutual creative & strict criticism, which most writers don’t have who work alone. This way, the critics have less chance to point out weaknesses.

I got some very good news this morning: did I tell you in my last fat letter of about a week ago (I sent it airmail, have you got it yet?) about the fortune-telling card I got from the mechanical gypsy in the NYC subway that said soon I’d get a letter that changed my life? Well, maybe that’s still to come, but this morning my FIRST acceptance by the New Yorker arrived!

If you can understand what this means, you’ll see how pleased & encouraged I am. I’ve been sending poems to The New Yorker for 10 years & getting “please try us again” rejections. Well, this time it worked. And no tiny “filler” poems, either: they accepted two really long ones: “Mussel-Hunter At Rock Harbor” (didn’t I send you a copy of that in the last letter? read it over & hear the gold jingling in the lines!) and “Nocturne”, about a walk on the moor, the first poem 91 lines, the last 45! We quickly added up (the check’s still to come) and figured I should get about $350 for the two, which is 3 months of Boston-apartment rent, or well over a month’s teaching salary for about a week of work that was pure joy! This also gives me great courage for working on my poetry book this summer & will balance endless rejections. Instead of the usual New Yorker coolness I’d expect, Howard Moss, the poetry editor, opened his letter:

“MUSSEL-HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR seems to me a marvelous poem, and I’m happy to say we’re taking it for The New Yorker, as well as NOCTURNE, which we also think extremely fine.”

Please don’t think me a braggart to quote this, but I’ve been working really hard with hardly any recognition for over a year & is is delightful to think that some part of the world I love & have written about with hard work & words I love will be shared & appreciated by other people. The money also is pleasant, because It confirms what we’ve already decided: to live for our writing: if we can do so much (we’ve earned about $1,800 in writing since last June) on giving less than a month’s total time to writing, what mightn’t we do if we devoted a year, another & another to it? Anyway, we have saved enough from our salaries to pay for this year, even if I don’t get the Saxton grant which I’m applying for, & then Ted will apply for a Guggenheim & marshal TS Eliot et. al. behind him. I’m hoping to spend a few hours a day this year studying & reading German, & perhaps you can loan me some of your books: can you bring home any Kafka^* books in German? Id really appreciate that: also any other “literary” books you might get on your book-allowance. I’d like to read good works.

We just came from several days in Wellesley. We have an apartment in Boston on 9 Willow Street, Beacon Hill, & we love it & will move in September 1st. It has everything we planned to get except perhaps the two most practical things: low rent & a huge kitchen. The kitchen is pullman, pigmy facilities, against the living room wall, separated by a curtain, and the $115 a month rent, although it includes the utilities, seems also to include the view, which is magnificent: a 3-way view, two bay-windows facing over the river. The bedroom & livingroom are very small, but the bay-window in each offers two “writing corners” which have a fine view of river, roof & treetops. It is luminously light, on the 6th floor, and seems to be quiet & in walking distance of all stores. It’s just off Louisberg Square & we’ve signed up for a year. We hope you’ll come often to visit & to dinner: I look so forward to seeing you often. I feel we should get to know each other again, we’ve been abroad so much! And Ted & I hope to manage a year in Italy & Germany before we begin a family. Will you be looking for an apartment in Boston or Cambridge?

It has been a cold, wet rainy June, with hardly a day of sun, so very nice for working. We climbed Mount Holyoke for the fine view over all the Pioneer Valley & river & were outraged to find that the State charges 15¢ per person to walk up: we’d been planning to hike up every other day. I don’t know why I got so angry at this---I can see their charging a parking fee, but people who are energetic enough to sweat out the climb should get the state’s views for their taxes.

Our park nextdoor is all mountain laurel now, & I’ve written a few poems about it---the stones^* & the rose garden. I’m reading through Shakespeares plays & a Penguin book on the Aztecs, anthropology,^* very absorbing. Ted & I plan to educate ourselves in history, art, literature, language & philosophy this year, to begin a kind of Renaissance self-education.

Mother seems in good health, and was still tan & elated from her trip to Bermuda when we were home. She really must have something like that to treat herself with every year. And from what she says, Grampy had a magnificent time too.

Have you found any interesting German girls? Mother mentioned you’d been dating a law-studentess. Do write soon.

Much love,

Sivvy

TO Howard Moss

Thursday 26 June 1958

TLS, New York Public Library

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

June 26, 1958

Dear Mr. Moss:

I am pleased that you like MUSSEL-HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR and NOCTURNE.

I have made arrangements to have the book of poems I am completing this summer at the publisher’s by fall. So although I am sure the book won’t come out before Summer 1959, it may well come out then. Thus I would much appreciate it if you might manage to schedule MUSSEL-HUNTER this summer.

The last two lines of the poem are meant to be read “. . . this relic saved/face, to face the bald-faced sun.” The idiom is “to save face” here. The crabs in “mottled mail of browns and greens” are the fiddler-crabs. The dead crabs in the sea may be considered to represent all Crabdom.

I am willing to change the title of NOCTURNE. Would NIGHT WALK be all right? I like the conciseness of that.

With all good wishes, I am

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

Mr. Howard Moss

THE NEW YORKER

25 West 43rd Street

New York 36, New York

TO Olwyn Hughes

Monday 30 June 1958

ALS, Washington University (St Louis)

Monday, June 30

Dear Olwyn –

Ted and I are just back from climbing Mount Holyoke – one of our peaks of exercise, taking a good hour to get up, under a green network of leaves, but the view worth it from the porch of a hundred-year-old hotel which housed Abraham Lincoln once, and Jenny Lind^* who named the view ‘The Paradise of America”, although I suspect Jenny was over-ecstatic. She named our Smith frog-pool ‘Paradise Pond.’ From the top we can see north along the back of the broad winding Connecticut river, all the green patchwork of asparagus, strawberry & potato farms below. We’re right in the middle of a great river-rich farming valley & so get vegetables & fruits fresh from the fields. I do like your sending those recipes of delectable things & will try this pepper & tomato & onion & sausage one soon. Try to get more such from the Hungarians – do any of them make a good borsch? Maybe Luke remembers the heavenly borsch the three of us had^* at the restaurant with the bitchy old waitress whose daughter (probably chained to the stove) was a wonderful cook. Tell Luke for me to send ahead his favorite menus & I’ll cook them if he promises to visit us. We’d both love to see him this August & will be here till the end of the month.

Ted thrives, & so do I, with no jobs. Both of us are meant to be wealthy & have convinced our Boston landlord^* (dubious about our future rent-paying) that we are hourly having money pour in from magazines. As soon as I stopped work & started writing I sold my two longest poems to The New Yorker (my first acceptance from them) & we figure the check should total 3 months rent at least. This is very encouraging & especially so since I want to get a full first book of poems to the publishers this winter – I’m ditching old work at an amazing rate. Ted’s second book is already magnificent – richness, depth, color & a mature force & volume. Slowly, slowly we hope to sell the poems. I know he is the great poet of our generation & feel that the most important thing is to somehow clear these next five years for a tough & continuous apprenticeship to writing – his children’s story has just come out – delightfully & sprightly illustrations with it. We will try for grants, too. Our work should begin to speak for itself then. Our Boston apartment is minute, but aesthetically fine with its light, air, quiet & superb view. The city is a delight to walk in.

Do send on the Scorpio book. I’m extremely interested in seeing it. Ted & I both love getting your letters, especially long ones like the last, so do write soon again. Tell us more about deGaulle.

With love,

Sylvia

TO Edith & William Hughes

Tuesday 1 July 1958

ALS with envelope, Family owned

Monday, – no Tuesday, July 1st

Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .

Suddenly, with July, the heat of sultry summer has jumped on us & we go about the house barefoot, in bathing suits, drinking iced drinks. Now that we’re not teaching, we hardly know what day of the week it is, except that Sunday is the day the mailman doesn’t come. We are eating well & coolly – chicken salads, cold roast beef, banana teabread, lots of fresh fruit & vegetables from the nearby farms.

Ted & I both thrive while working at writing & nothing else. The checks keep coming in. I just got £7: 7: – for my two poems in the June issue of The London magazine and expect, as Ted has probably said, a check over $300 for the two poems The New Yorker just accepted. I am very happy cooking, writing, reading (Ted has given me a lot of those little penguin books about animals, the origin of man, the Aztecs & so on) & going for walks. A woman in our park who seems to do part-time gardening as a charity showed us a nest of tiny baby rabbits under a green bush that grew flattened to the ground & we’ve discovered several bird’s nests with babies in them. I am homesick for Wilfred’s farm & look so forward to seeing all his animals when we come back to visit. I’d especially like to see some little ones born, as I never have.

Ted is writing some more good poems – he has a fine one about a great black bull^* and a very brilliant one about the outlawing of the cat o’nine tails in the British navy. His story came out this month in Jack & Jill, the children’s magazine & the best in the whole issue by far – it has some wonderful lively illustrations with it. I am hoping Ted will write more such stories.

Mother loves getting your letters & it pleases her so much to have you to write to. She would like to visit ‘The Beacon’ someday. I’ve told her so much about it.

Our apartment in Boston is tiny – very little to clean – but has two wonderful window-views which will be ideal for us to write in. I hope to finish my book of poems this winter & Ted should finish his this next year. We have saved enough to live & write on this year, but I am trying for a grant & Ted will try for a Guggenheim for 1959 to see if we can keep our savings.

Yesterday we climbed Mount Holyoke again – that high tree-covered mountain overlooking the broad silvery Connecticut river & on the way up saw a strange little animal we’d glimpsed in the road while driving a few days ago. It was greyish-brown furred, with a short fat body, stumpy legs & tail & a sweet gentle mousish face. We got this one cornered for a good look – it just clattered its sharp yellow teeth in a scared way, & decided it was a groundhog (alias wood chuck). I wanted to pet it, but Ted said it would bite my arm off. So we let it lie.

Both of us are in excellent health & working well. Write soon –

Love to you both –

Sylvia

TO Howard Moss

Wednesday 2 July 1958

TLS, New York Public Library

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

July 2, 1958

Mr. Howard Moss

THE NEW YORKER

25 West 43rd Street

New York 36, New York

Dear Mr. Moss:

Here are the corrected proofs. I have checked and agreed on all your corrections (additions of commas and omissions of hyphens) except the problematic “backtrack” which I’d like to be one word,“backtracking”, made from the verb “backtrack”. Is that all right?

I also have inserted a comma after “save face” to eliminate what I don’t consider a desirable ambiguity in the last two lines of “Mussel Hunter”.

I also substituted the title “Night Walk” for “A Walk In The Night”.

I do hope these corrections are satisfactory.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Saturday 5 July 1958

TLS, Indiana University

Date July 5, 1958 To You From Me In re bits & pieces.

Dear mother,

It was lovely to have you call the other day, & I look forward to living in Boston where more frequent telephone chats won’t be a luxury but a common occurrence.

The blessed fourth, very quiet here, brought cool air (from Canada?) and last night and today brought a drenching rain. The catalpas in the park are in full bloom, the water-lilies in the pond a radiant pink, as if incandescent, and great red & yellow toadstools of odd shapes sprung up under the pines. Ted & I discovered a baby-bird fallen out of its nest two days ago, apparently in its death-throes, on its back, with piteous shudderings. So we brought it home & made a facsimile nest for it out of soft rags & bits of paper. We tried gingerly to feed it bread soaked in milk & milk from an eyedropper, but it sneezed & didn’t respond. Then by inspiration I got some fresh ground-hamburg & by that time it had gotten used to the nest and almost swallowed my finger with the meat: I feed it with my fingers which I guess it thinks are like it’s mother’s head. I am fond of the plucky little thing---the ouija-board says its a jay, because of its “pied-feathers”, but I can’t tell yet, its so tiny. I read recently that pigeons kept in tubes so that they can’t use their wings fly when freed as well as ordinary pigeons, (this was an experiment to prove they fly by instinct, not just by teaching) so I hope my bird when freed will be able to take care of himself. Can you think of anything else suitable to feed it. I can’t bring myself to feed it fresh-killed flies.

I am becoming more & more desirous of being an amateur naturalist. Do you remember if we have any little books on recognizing wild flowers, birds or animals in Northern America? I am reading some Penguin books about “Man & the Vertebrates”^* and “The Personality of Animals”^* & also the delightful book “The Sea Around Us”^* by Rachel Carson; Ted’s reading her “Under the Sea Wind”^* which he says is also fine. Do read these if you haven’t already: they’re poetically written, but magnificently informative. I am going back to the ocean as my poetic heritage & hope to revisit all the places I remember in Winthrop^* with Ted this summer: Johnson avenue, a certain meadow on it, our beach & grammy’s. Even run down as it is, the town has the exciting appeal of my childhood & I am writing some good poems about it, I think. I’ll enclose that poem “Night-Walk”,^* the other one the New Yorker accepted, which I think you’ve read: haven’t got the check yet, because of that delay about Britishness, but should get it soon. The London Magazine envelope had 7 guineas in it---about $20 for my two poems in the June issue, quite pleasant. In two years of our marriage, writing only a total of a few weeks, Ted & I have made about $2,000 (not counting the New Yorker money which we are beginning our 3rd year with.

We did our Ouija board for the first time in America & it was magnificent fun: responsive, humorous & very helpful. It seems to have grown up & claims it is quite happy in America, that it likes “life in freedom”, that it uses its freedom for “making poems”, that poetry is made better by “practise”. Thinking we might make use of it, we asked him (Pan, is his signature) for poem subjects (this is always the problem: a good poem needs a good “deep” subject). Pan told me to write about “Lorelei”. When asked “Why the lorelei, he said they were my “own kin”!^* I was quite amazed. This had never occurred to me consciously as a subject & it seemed a good one: the Germanic legend background, the water-images, the death-wish, and so on. So the next day I began a poem about them,^* & Pan was right, it is one of my favorites. What is that lovely song you used to play on the piano & sing to us about the Lorelei? I can’t spell the German, but it begins “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten . . .”^* or something to that effect. I hope Warren will be agreeable to exchanging a dinner at our place about once a week for an hour or two of German reading out loud. I am painfully beginning to review my German again by reading one by one the Grimm’s fairytales in that handsome book you gave me (which I just love)^* and making vocabulary lists from each tale, trying to review one grammar lesson a day. I suppose as one grows older one has a desire to learn all about one’s roots, family & country. I feel extremely moved my memories of my German background, & Austrian, and also my ocean-childhood, which is probably the foundation of my consciousness.

Do go to the newstands when you shop & pick up a copy of the July Jack & Jill---you might get the Aldriches a copy. Ted’s story “Billy Hook And The Three Souvenirs” is in this issue and, I think, charmingly illustrated.

The ouija-board also told Ted to write about “Otters”,^* so he is doing so, & the beginnings sound quite good. Pan claims his family god, “kolossus”, tells him much of his information.

Ted & I took a drive in the country last week & saw a strange grey clumpish animal snuffing in the road; it waddled into the brush before we could tell what it was, rather like a grey raccoon or some badgerish rodent. Then we climbed Mount Holyoke again this Monday & saw a duplicate of the same animal just ahead of us. We ran & cornered it so we could look at it closely & the poor thing was petrified & clattered its long yellow teeth from the ferns, apparently its one defence (Ted said it would bite). It was a dear grey whiskered animal & we’re convinced it was a groundhog (or woodchuck) as its stout waddly build, small round ears, clawed stumpy legs & rodent face look exactly like the dictionary picture of one. I wrote a little poem about it.^* My book of poems is progressing quite well. I am rejecting every poem I am dubious about & making it a strong collection, I think. I have over 30 I am sure of & want to get 50 for the total. Did I tell you I’ve called it “Full Fathom Five”. I do hope a publisher likes that title.

Well, that’s all the news for now. Try to get to the Aldriches next week & call again. I get up about 7 each morning now as it’s cooler & I must feed the little black bird.

Ted also sends love,

Sylvia

PS: How much did the cleaning of our woolens come to?

TO Warren Plath

Wednesday 9 July 1958

TLS (photocopy), Indiana University

Wednesday, July 9, 1958

Dear Warren,

It was good to get your letter. Ted & I would like very much to meet you on August 24th, Sunday, at your ship.^* Patsy has moved out of New York, so we won’t have anyone to stay with & would have to drive down & back the same day. Perhaps you can advise us about where to look for parking places, what time you’ll be coming in, what dock, ship, and whether it would be shorter to come to NYC from Northampton or Wellesley. We’ve never driven before down there.

Mother says youre going to Scandinavia: wonderful. When and where? Do the German girls compare with American? I am all for foreign relations: it is extremely pleasant to have extended my own affiliations & to feel I have also a permanent home in England, especially in such a beautiful moor-top place.

My New Yorker check came today for the two poems: even more than I expected at my most optimistic calculations: $377 ($239 for Mussel-Hunter and $138 for the other, Night Walk). Together with my sonnet for the LHJournal that makes a tidy sum of $517. For three poems, I feel this princely. In the last year, with royalties for Ted’s book included, we have earned over $2,000, by writing alone. Of course, such windfalls as these are rare, but there is a pleasant steady piling up in our poetry account: we have a special bank-account set aside for writing so we can see at a glance how much we’ve earned: it is “magic money” & we feel we don’t ever want to spend it. I am becoming extremely interested in money-managing, now that I have some to manage, & notice an amazingly radical change in me from my extravagant collegiate self. I’ve bought no new clothes since I’ve been married except some shoes & summer jerseys & feel most miserly: every small sum I think of in terms of a week’s food, or a month’s rent, & as we need to be frugal if we don’t happen to get a grant this year, this niggard quality is all good to me.

I look around me in horror when I think of moving: heaven knows how we accumulated all those objects & weights which surround us and must be transported. Luckily our 6th floor apartment has a little elevator. We are scheduled to move out of here August 31st and into there Sept. 1st, but must make many trips. I haven’t been out in the sun at all this summer---the first time in my life I’m not tan, but have been working hard at poems for my book: I’ve discarded all that I wrote before two years ago & am tempted to publish a book of juvenalia under a psuedonym as about 20 published poems have been ditched. I hope to get my poetry book together in early September or October & send it the round of publishers this winter. It should be a good collection. I feel I’ve got rid of most of my old rigidity & glassy glossiness & am well on the way to writing about the real world, its animals people & scenery.

Ted & I are recovering from a sad & traumatic experience. We picked up a baby bird that looked in its last death throes, fallen from a tree, & brought it home. We had it for a week, feeding it raw ground steak, worms, milk (probably a very bad diet) and got enormously fond of the plucky little thing which looked like a baby starling, with funny furry eyebrows. But when it ran, it fell, & looked to be badly injured. Its leg stiffened then (its pelvis must have been broken, or something) & it sickened, choking & pathetically chirping. We couldn’t sleep or write for days, nursing it & hunting vainly for worms, identifying with it until it became gruesome. Finally, we figured it would be mercy to put it out of its misery, so we gassed it in a little box. It went to sleep very quietly. But it was a shattering experience. Such a plucky little bit of bird. I can’t forget it.

I maybe mentioned this before, but I hope perhaps this year we can exchange dinner at our place for a bit of German reading aloud once every week or two: I am painstakingly beginning to review my grammar & working on translating my Grimm’s fairytales but would be most grateful for work in reading & pronunciation. Would you be willing? I’d like anything you could get of Kafka’s. I already have German-English editions of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus & Duino Elegies:^* is there anything else of his? I know little about German writers, & would be grateful for your advice. As for memories of Europe, if you could without convenience pick up a good bottle of brandy or something equivalent, we’d love it. Ted & I don’t drink cocktails but we do like a good after-dinner brandy. Or dinner wine. We are now drinking cold beer---I never used to like it but find it very refreshing.

Ted just sold 5 poems to The Spectator^* in England: won’t amount to more than $45, but good to get him read. Also, he’s had a very nice admiring letter form the Buffalo NY University library^* which has the best collection of poets’ work-sheets & manuscripts in the world asking Ted to contribute some of his (for charity, but they got Auden, Thomas, etc. this way). Ted’s second book is going to be magnificently better than the first. Already he has about 28 poem for it, 17 out of those already accepted for publication. He only needs about 15 more . . .

I have been slowly recovering from my long winter longeurs due to pneumonia and my flu in spring, plus a killing last two months of hard work. It is heavenly to think that just now, as I again feel stronger & rid of my pneumonia blues, I won’t have to stop writing & start a new school year but can keep on with what I really want to do & for the first time apprentice myself to my trade.

Do keep me posted about news, new addresses. Ted sends love.

So do I –

xxx

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Thursday 10 July 1958

TLS on Department of English, Smith College letterhead, Indiana University

Thursday: July 10

Dear mother,

I’m just enclosing a copy of the lease to our apartment before we sign it wondering if you’d mind looking it over & seeing if there are any hitches we mightn’t have run across. It seems very grim to me, all the rights on the side of the agents: is it true that we’d have to repair plumbing & wiring if it was defective? I want to write them & make sure the refrigerator & stove are in good working order. Also they told us utilities were included in rent, but it seems by this that we should have to pay light & gas, another point we will write them about. Maybe you could just look this over & see if it’s normal enough a lease, or suggest anything else we should write them about if you caught something.

I’ve told Warren we’ll probably come pick him up in NYC if his ship doesn’t come in at six in the morning. Maybe he’d be willing sometime to help us move some of our accumulated goods to Boston.

My New Yorker check came for the two poems: the handsome sum of $377. A good bit more than I expected. About 4½ months’ food or over 3 months’ Boston rent, however one looks at it. Ted just had 5 poems accepted in England by the Spectator: it won’t mean more than about $45, but pleasant also: now 16 poems are accepted in the 2nd book already. The money in our exclusive poetry bank account has risen from 0 last Sept. to a plump $1,800 or $2,000 if we count Ted’s British royalties. Ted has also been asked by an admiring curator of the Buffalo U. Poetry Collection for work sheets of his poems: no pay, but they have sheets from Auden, Thomas, etc. We climbed Mount Holyoke again today: strenuous but good exercise: a clear, cool sunny day.

Much love,

Sivvy

PS: I am delighted to hear about the Kokoschka:^* I’ve admired the slides of his work very much this year in my modern art course: he is certainly fine.

Do look up Ted’s Story in Jack & Jill.

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Saturday 19 July 1958

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Saturday, July 19

Dearest mother,

The fan arrived yesterday a few hours after your letter. A day, as you may imagine, of frosty cold air. Today also is cloudy and windy and not humid. Perhaps the fan will cow the summer into coolness. Ted immediately insisted that the room was stuffy, so we tried the fan this way and that, enjoying the breeze. It is quite wonderful and should annihilate any sluggishness due to heat here and in Boston. A welcome addition to our family: thank you so much. Only 2 screws and one bolt, or nut (hexagonal with a hole through the middle) came with it, and no directions. I have a feeling we should have more screws, though I don’t know what for. Should we? I imagine it works best in the window, but we have it propped now on the floor, where it stands of its own accord, & we can tilt it anyway we want. Highly satisfactory.

Could you, through your Boston University discount place, get me two books for Ted’s birthday? I wouldn’t want you to get them unless you could get them at a discount & tell me how much they are, otherwise I can get them here at regular cost. They are “The Sea Around Us” by Rachel Carson (we’ve read it, but Ted would like to own it) and the book of poems “Lord Weary’s Castle” by Robert Lowell,^* c. about 1946, Harcourt Brace. This last is the most important. If you are able to get them, could you have them sent here to me? I’ll write in them & birthday-wrap them.

Mail has been sparse & dull, for the most part. All the editors seem to be on vacation. Thank you specially for seeing about the apartment: this puts my mind much at ease. We seem to have collected an immense amount of luggage in our trips to and from home & maybe we can leave some things in our room at Wellesley: I’ll have to educate myself into a miniscule kitchen after this elegant one.

I won’t be able to call that woman, Mrs. Jacobs, from here before she goes, & would prefer not to use any more long-distance wire. Could you possible call her from Wellesley or BU & ask what she wants for the couch cover & the bedroom curtains? She bought the couch cover & curtains from the girls who live there before her, & I hope she doesn’t try to make any profit on them.

Your course of business machines sounds noble & time consuming. I hope it will indeed free you for this coming year & let you have extracurricular activities.

I am finding it rather difficult to adjust to this sudden having-nothingto-do. I realize that this is the first year of my life I haven’t “gone to school” & thus haven’t an imposed purpose to give direction to my days. My prose is quite painful & awkward to begin with, as my poetry is much more practised & advanced: I haven’t written a proper story for several years & work each morning a few hours on exercises in description. I have always expected immediate success & am gradually inuring myself to slow progress & careful practise. I think I will need a part-time job in Boston to give my life a kind of external solidity and balance. I hope I can slowly & painstakingly develop writing as a part-time vocation, because I think I need a sense of purpose beyond cooking and cleaning house, and there is no other career I can feel really useful in and drawn toward that would combine with children. I feel the change to Boston will do me good, as the only people I run into here are left-over teachers from Smith. I will enjoy walking about the streets with Ted, observing people, feeling anonymous, & learning the highroads and back alleys. Also, I hope to renew & extend friendships: with Patsy, Marcia, the Lowells^* etc. I miss having any girl-friends to talk to & exchange gossip & advice with. I guess already Im in that in-between state of emotionally moving, but not actually having moved yet.

Do write soon, or call.

Much love,

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Friday 1 August 1958

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Date August 1, 1958 To Mummy From Sivvy In re Odds & Ends

A beautiful day, our first back. Mail dull, on the whole, Editor Weeks still sitting out the half year on our manuscripts and not a word. I got a note this morning that Poetry (Chicago) are buying 3 of my poems: alas, they are 3 I have recently decided to leave out of my book, but I am not sorry to have them published for about $44---I added up the lines right away: two more weeks groceries. Ted has finally got the bank’s notary public to sign his December royalties from Faber’s, over $200 which he will leave in his British bank to welcome us when we return to England. It is so complicated, with all this dual tax business & exemptions. I have thought much, & wouldn’t have Ted change his citizenship for the world. It is part of his identity, I feel, and will always be so.

I hope we didn’t worry you about seeing Dr. Brownlee.^* We simply wanted to get a total physical check-up (including the X-ray at the Deaconness) to see if I’d weathered pneumonia all right & wasn’t anemic, as I’d been very tired & running a slight fever. I’m fine now, and all the tests show I’m in the best of health. Ironically, we didn’t want to concern you, & probably you were more concerned hearing we went to the doctor from the busybody dentist.

I’ve thought very carefully about that Stenotype folder. I wouldn’t want to learn just to get a job, as I don’t want to be a conventional regular secretary. If I could be sure there would be a chance of getting in on part-time work, or even more, in the Boston courts, which interests me in itself, I would be interested in learning. But, as you can see, I want to have the jobs ahead of me to work for by learning, not to get through learning & “then see about work.” I would also only be interested in learning how to Stenotype if I could learn very quickly & start work this winter so it would do me some good. Thus I’d be interested in hearing about the hours, practice time & span of learning needed for the daily course. Perhaps you could find out these things for me. I would enjoy having a practical skill that would take me into jobs “above average” or “queer”, not just business routine. My appearance & education should help me if I had the practical skill. But if I should get this Saxton grant for writing, I would have to give up the idea: I probably won’t get the grant (which would pay for 10 months writing), & thus would like to have the facts about Stenotyping lined up. How heavy is the machine? Is the roll of tape expensive? I particularly want to know if I could get into court reporting. That’s what I’d like to work for: would I need any other kind of experience? Would I be hired over people with shorthand? Could you investigate this? Those two main things: how long to learn the fastest way? Could I get into court reporting? and other jobs equivalently interesting?

We enjoyed our stay at home, & seeing Ruthie’s adorable babies.^* We both feel in the best of health and are looking so forward to the Cape in two weeks. We’ll probably drive down the 18th or 19th at the latest.

Much love,

Sivvy

TO Howard Moss

Friday 1 August 1958

TLS, New York Public Library

Apartment 3 rear

337 Elm Street

Northampton, Mass.

August 1, 1958

Mr. Howard Moss

THE NEW YORKER

25 West 43rd Street

New York, New York

Dear Mr. Moss:

I received your letter^* on my return from a brief vacation. I thought I’d just send along a note to say that I am satisfied with your suggestions for the three small changes in the poems.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

P.S: After September 1st, my address will be:

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Mass.

TO Gerald & Joan Hughes

c. Wednesday 13 August 1958^*

ALS,^* Indiana University

I shall add a small note to this, although the reporter above has covered everything from philosophy to pike. It is ‘early’ – 10 am: Ted sits in a rocker, writing & munching pieces of buttered banana bread – he is appearing, it seems, in print every week in England – 2 poems in London Mag,^* 2 in New Statesman,^* 5 accepted by Spectator: his children’s story in Jack & Jill was marvelously illustrated & only a few fingers of originality removed, not the whole thing butchered, as he’d have you believe. August has turned all at once crisp, blue, cool, what the Americans tenderly call “Million-dollar days”, perhaps because the leaves rustle crisp & green as new bills. I think your house sounds wonderful. Did you design any or all of it? How’s it furnished, etc? colors? Tell us all. We prepare to get some fishing tackle for our week at the Cape now. Ted’s writing better & funnier short stories & I’m trying to persuade him to do a book of “Yorkshire Tales.” Do write to us in much detail soon.

Love,

Sylvia

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Wednesday 13 August 1958

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Date August 13: Wed. To Mummy From Sivvy In re Cape trip, etc.

Ted & I are chafing more & more to be off to the Cape: we plan now, if it’s convenient with you, to move a load of belongings down to Wellesley Friday afternoon (thus we should be at home Friday evening, if for any reason you wanted to get in touch with us). Early in the morning Saturday, we’d like to leave for the Cape & should get there in time for lunch? Now would that be all right with you & Grampy? Where will you both sleep when we come? We don’t want to make anybody uncomfortable.

Ted is dying to rent a little row or motor-boat & go fishing, so we are going to get some rods for his birthday present & hope to go again to the place in Chatham as often as possible. His birthday is the 17th, Sunday, & I’d like him to be on the beach & swimming then, not stifling in Northampton, or driving down. We are having our phone removed Friday afternoon, since we plan to come back only for a few days at the end of the month to pick up the remainder of our things.

The Christian Science Monitor bought my little 3-page descriptive article about the countryside around hidden acres,^* the drawings of Mrs. Spaulding & her beach-plum barrel for $15, so I hope it comes out in time to show her. I want her to get ready to tell me about how she designs & builds those cottages, really practical details. The Sewanee Review has just accepted a poem of mine,^* which should bring about $20 when it’s published.

It’s a hot, muggy day, no mail, and about to rain. We’re reading Fabre’s books about the life of a spider and the life of the scorpion:^* fascinating and terrible.

Already I’m in that limbo between moves: half here, half there.

We are so grateful at the chance for a beach-week & look very forward to seeing you, Grampy & the Spauldings.

Until Saturday noon,

Much love,

Sivvy

TO Elinor Friedman Klein

Wednesday 3 September 1958

TLS, Smith College

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Mass.

September 3, 1958

Dear Ellie . . .

Your letter arrived between several moves, irate landlady, crazy telephone company uproars, and the general untidy chaos of our move from Northampton to Boston. Now that we are here, in our miniscule & marvelously aesthetic two-room furnished flat, I don’t know how I stood living in Northampton for a year. Nobody here has heard of Smith, or us, which is magnificent. I am sitting in my study-dining-room-livingroom-kitchen at the bay window over-looking a superb view of Back Bay: a sizeable hunk of the Charles river, MIT, sailboats, the Hatch Shell,^* And, to my Left, the Estimable John Hancock Building which flashes various weather signals in brilliant chromatics. I look over multitudinous chimney pots, tar roofs, tree tops. And can even see the ulmi americani of the Common from my desk. Oh yes, and the Hotel Statler.^* You must come see. We even had a whole fire department howl up the hill to greet us at six yesterday morning, with black slickers and axes: smoke began blowing by me in the bed at dawn, and this seemed odd. I jumped up & saw people in the street staring at our windows from which the smoke floated. The hall was full of it & I was getting ready to brave the hideously rickety sixth floor fire escape which involved crawling out a high kitchen window, when the landlord’s janitor said it was only rubbish caught in the incinerator shaft & he’d been dropping bricks on it to fix everything up.

I want to hear more about your job. It sounds fascinating. We’re planning to write here & maybe later in the year I’ll take a part-time job to pay for groceries, but we are investing our time & going to work like fury for the first year of our lives at nothing but writing. Did I tell you I at last made the New Yorker? With two huge poems & a lovely letter & even lovelier check from Howard Moss. One poem, 91 lines, was in the Aug. 9th issue. Do look it up & say if you like. Ted’s poems have just appeared in their first anthology: The pocket book of Modern Verse, ed. by Oscar Williams, the 1958 revised edition. The selections begin with Walt Whitman & end with Ted Hughes: 3 poems. I am very proud of this. We saw Oscar Williams while we were in NYC in June, & saw not the people we wanted to see most but left early, missing you & Alfred Kazin, after commuting hither & yon to see various literary ancients for Ted’s application for a grant^* this next year: Marianne Moore, Babette Deutsch etc. We thought we’d come again this fall, but have expended so much on this move that we are saying “next spring”: so when can you come to Boston?

We are at present nursing two goldfish, some mouldy green Anacharis, pale green aquarium gravel and a shell which does the fish as a castle: do you know about where oxygen comes from? The fish have only 50 cubic inches of air surface which is half of the requirement for one fish & they keep hanging on the surface as if longing to come out and have tea in the sweet Bostonian air with us. Ted claims they are suffering, almost dying: we sprinkle anti-chlorine grains in the water, change the water daily. They haven’t died yet, but are maturing under mysteriously adverse conditions, enriched by suffering. I have only a rudimentary & primitive tribal idea about oxygen: little specks, like invisible pepper.

Please write & tell us more about Mr. Crosby,^* his wives, mistresses, & your celebrities. And try to come for dinner soon. Bring Leonard, he is so nice. What is he writing now? We promise an exquisite night view of the lit-up John Hancock building which is topped by a flashing red light, over a white light over the now-blue weather signal.

Love to you,

sylvia

TO Lynne Lawner

Thursday 4 September 1958

Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Mass.

Wednesday, Thursday

September 4, 1958

Dear Lynne,

I have predictably lost your letter somewhere in our colossal & piecemeal move from Northampton via Wellesley, to Boston, where we are now ensconced in a miniscule & quite fine little furnished apartment at the above address on Beacon Hill. Two rooms, each with a big bay window overlooking rooftops, chimney pots, mosquito trees, and the blue of the Charles & the Harvard Bridge with elegant reflections at night & sailboats in the daytime. At my right, the pruned & plumed trees of Louisberg Square, at my left, the towering structure of the estimable John Hancock building which predicts the weather four hours ahead of time by means of colored lights. After Northampton, & the provincial rounds of professors at morning coffee, professors at tea, the same professors at cocktails and dinner and the Evening, and such, we are delighted with Boston. Having no car (a blessing on this hill) we tramp everywhere, to the docks to watch the deep sea crabs being unloaded, through little Italia on Hanover street, all pastry shops with gelati & spumoni and grocery stores carrying nothing in their windows but olive oil in monstrous cans & soap flakes, through the fabulous weekend open market on Blackstone Street which outdoes anything I’ve seen in England & Europe: cheaper than Paris: stalls of tomatoes, peppers, peaches, stacks of chickens & beefs, stalls undercutting each other, vociferous men tugging at one’s arm: “I just cut those pork chops, just brought em up, you want juicy chops for da weekend?” “Razors, buy a razor.” And so on. I renewed my childhood yesterday by riding on the swanboats with Ted. Boston is easily my favorite city in America. We plan to batten down & write here all year for the first time in our lives. We’ve saved enough from our teaching jobs so this is possible, if we only eat & pay rent. I have a very engaging dark-eyed dark-haired tall lean young Southern poet from Sewanee Tennessee here now, a friend of Ted’s, who has published here & there in Poetry & the Partisan Review & who is teaching in Paris this year. I’ve told him about you & wish you would see him when you’re in Paris. His name is E. (for Elvis!) Lucas Meyers, known as Luke, & his address in Paris is: 24 Rue Mouffetard, Paris V. Do look him up.

Tell me how you managed to switch your Fulbright to Florence & why. What happened in your winter & spring at Cambridge? How are KMP Burton, IV Morris tutor, et. al.? I wish you could come this way before you fly or sail over, to tell me about Cambridge at first hand. I’ll make a final huge effort to find your address.

What’s your novel about? What kind of style? I mean who are your mentors. I am ensconced between or among Henry James, Virginia Woolf (who palls, who never, I think, writes more than about tremulous party-dress emotions, except in the odd Mrs. Ramsey^* – & who is, amazingly often awkward & lumbering in her descriptions) and DH Lawrence; Have you read his 3 volume collected short stories:^* The Man Who Loved Islands etc.? Very fine, although many are, I think, pot-boilers. Where are you sending poems, where publishing: I believe I saw one in a NWWriting,^* edited by Philip Booth. Can you send me some copies of recent poems? I am continually rejecting my old ones & am on my third “first book” which is completely different from the one I had gathered at the end of my senior year in college &, except for about 4 poems, completely different from the one I had gathered at the end of my Cambridge year. I keep having about 30 poems in it: as I write more, I reject more. At this rate, I’ll publish when I’m 50. Tell me when your articles come out in Time & Tide. We hope, if we don’t stay a 2nd year in Boston, to aim for Rome for a year after this. Have you met any British (or American) literati over there? Who did you know at Cambridge? I want to hear more about Cambridge. I really quite fell in love with it, probably because Ted happened to be there. I feel completely weaned from Smith: I had idealized the place because of my haloed position there the last two years & thought of it as Elysia. Now it seems like a never-never land where nobody has to do anything but drink coffee, read books & gossip: men gossipers are a million times worse than women, without anything of female solidity.

What do you plan to do after the Fulbright? Go on to degrees? Work? Write? Hold salons? Do write soon.

Love,

Sylvia

TO Peter Davison

Sunday 7 September 1958

TLS (photocopy), Yale University

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

Sunday, September 7,

Dear Peter,

I wonder if you are witnessing the same rainstorm at the moment. Our two bay-windows (one for Ted to write in, one for me) overlook rain-slicked rooftops, chimneypots, mosquito trees, a grey flat Charles river, and, I think, the Atlantic offices themselves, to the left, under the immense bulwark of John Hancock. Our flat is very small, two little rooms, but quiet, scenic and 6th floor airy: we are both delighted with it.

Could you come by for tea sometime after work this Thursday or Friday? Name your day and hour. We’ll both be happy to see you. Our phone number is LAfayette 3-2843 & it should be working sometime early this week if they ever iron out the manifest, manifold confusions of lines, wires, missed appointments, & nonexistent repairmen. So give us a call & say when is best for you. We’re right off Louisburg Square.

I have been working on a new group of poems this summer & was happy to get two long ones accepted by the New Yorker, my first after years of trying them. Ted has written some very fine poems lately & his second book is filling out: three of his first-book poems have just appeared in the revised Oscar Williams Pocket Book of Modern Verse & we are very pleased about this, his first anthology piece. Ted’s written a half-hour verse dialogue (play practice) and a couple of good Yorkshire stories.^* He has got out stacks of children’s books from the Public Libe^* & wants to work on children’s stories intensely this year. His story in the July Jack & Jill came out delightfully illustrated.

Have you heard anything from Editor Weeks about the fate of our poems & Ted’s stories? We are, as you may imagine, most eager to hear his verdict.

Our best to you,

Sylvia

TO Edith & William Hughes

before Thursday 18 September 1958^*

ALS, Family owned

<drawing of a scroll on which is written:

‘September 18th / Happy Birthday / to you / From Sylvia’

decorated with flowers, candles, and a bird>

Dear Ted’s mother & dad –

By now you have read about Ted’s wonderful prize^* – don’t breathe a word of it till October 22nd, for it is to be kept strict secret till then! Isn’t it wonderful: the honor & all the money. Ted & I are both extremely happy here in Boston – it is all quaint hilly streets, brick & stone cobbles – and our view is an inspiration. Our apartment is small but extremely attractive – it seems all windows! The livingroom walls are deep green, with gathered white curtains at the windows, a light whitey-grey sofa cover & a white-flowered dark green curtain shutting off the kitchen wall & covering the chairs. The bedroom – which has an even better view, has pale-blue walls & grey & white patterned curtains. Ted got two 6-foot planks very cheap & made himself a wonderful huge desk in the bay window overlooking the rooftops & River & sailboats. Now all you need to do is win the pools, hop in a plane and fly over to see us! We had Ted’s friend Luke Meyers over for two nights & 3 days on his way back to Paris & had a lovely time walking about the city – having tea here, & raw quahogs (a kind of poor man’s oyster) there. We should write a great deal this year with such pleasant surroundings & all the time in the world.

Love to you both –

Sylvia

TO Alice Norma Davis^*

Wednesday 24 September 1958

TLS, Smith College Archives

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

September 24, 1958

Miss Alice Norma Davis

The Vocational Office

Smith College

Northampton, Massachusetts

Dear Miss Davis:

Two instructors from whom you may obtain references covering the courses I took at Newnham College are:

Miss. K. M. P. Burton		Mrs. Dorothea Krook
The Pightle		Lecturer in English
Newnham College	and	c/o Newnham College
Cambridge, England		Cambridge, England

Miss Burton was my Director of Studies, as well as my instructor in several courses, so she would be able to give you the fullest record of my work. Mrs. Krook was also my instructor for two years (for the Moralists paper), and I believe she has returned to her lecturing duties at the University after a year of absence. The head of the Fulbright Commission in London might also be of help in this regard. The address of the commission, when I left England, was:

The United States Educational Commission in the United Kingdom
71 South Audley Street, London W.1, England.

I’d like to expand a bit on my notes about vocational interests. In addition to jobs in downtown Boston, I can also consider jobs in the immediate vicinity of Harvard, as the subway service between Boston and Cambridge is excellent. I am not at all particular about the type of part time work I do, and am open to any suggestions you may offer.

While I am looking primarily for a part time job so that I can continue a writing project of my own this year, I would be happy to consider any full time job that involved newspaper, publishing, or editing work---anything, that is, of special interest in my field.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Hughes

TO Dorothea Krook

Thursday 25 September 1958

TLS, Central Zionist Archives

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

U.S.A.

September 25, 1958

Dearest Doris,

I was so happy and proud to see your review of James in the London Magazine.^* It made me most homesick for you, and your magnificent lectures, and the supervisions which, for me, were the major stimulus of my Cambridge experience. I do hope this letter finds you back at Cambridge and that you will forgive me for my long silence and write me a note soon, letting me know what you are doing, writing and thinking about. I have thought of you so frequently this past year of teaching at Smith that I imagine, I guess, that by some mystical intuition you may well be aware of this.

Last year I threw every moment of my time into teaching, and preparation for teaching. As an instructor of three classes in freshman English, each of which met three times a week, my job was to combine teaching of intelligent reading (stories, novels, plays and poems) with teaching of intelligent writing (including the details of source themes, sentence structure, the geography of the library, and so on). My students came from all over the United States with all varieties of preparation. Girls with bear-skin caps from public schools in the wilds of Minnesota (who confessed, with humble desire for improvement, to never reading a whole book) sat next to elegant blonde young ladies from the best New York City preparatory schools deep, at the moment, in Sartre,^* or Finnegans Wake. With a few exceptions, most of my students were glisteningly eager to work, think and talk. Our classes, inspected, at intervals, by professors in the department, were “discussion” classes. Instead of lecturing (I did continually, slip in five and ten minute lectures), I discussed. This means, usually, that the success of the class depends on a firm hand and, only too often, on the resources of a TV moderator. I felt a marked nostalgia for the inviolable voice of the lecturer in the upper class courses, and, often, the desire to take the girls on one at a time privately. Gradually, I became accustomed to preparing in rough question and answer outline the lecture I would have enjoyed giving, and getting the class to give me the half I left out, in a kind of cog-and-wheel cooperation. Since we are supposed to have everyone in the class speak at least once, and leave no “cold areas”, students who haven’t done their reading, or who are congenitally tongue-tied, are coaxed to speak up, even if what they say has little value. I am, by philosophy, I think, more dictatorial than is proper for an American. After I managed to work out a reasonably forceful discussion-maneuvering, I had an exciting time. Many of the girls will never need to take another English course; many of them would perhaps never read a poem again; I felt, now and then, like a missionary among the heathen. My texts were my salvation.

From a selected list, quite limited, of possibilities, I taught William James’s “Varieties of Religious Experience”, short stories by Hawthorne, Lawrence, James (“The Beast in the Jungle”, “The Pupil”) and Lawrence; “Crime and Punishment”; “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man”; “Oedipus Rex”, “Antigone”, “The Duchess of Malfi”, “Rosmersholm”, “The Master Builder”, “Miss Julie”; poems of Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot (especially enjoyed “The Wasteland”)^* and Auden and Thomas.^* I had many doubts about the contemporary emphasis of the course, but as you probably know, this is where the Americans begin. All stems from Joyce, and works back, through Shakespeare, to the Greeks. I had my own two-month tragedy course, minuscule, and wished I could teach it for a year. All during the year the girls wrote papers. Every two weeks I read seventy papers, which nearly put my eyes out. I felt to be reading a massive, incurably botched, redundant novel-essay after a few months of this. Much time was spent in office hours, talking over various problems with the girls. A teacher is very much a part of the “campus life” here: Ted and I were invited to dinner with the girls at various houses at least once a week and only with effort did we keep it down to this. I found myself with a complex of double feelings at the close of the year.

One part of me rejoiced in the teaching, while wishing for less paperwork and more actual lecturing. I felt the need, too, for much more study, possibly specialization through work for a PhD., none of which was feasible at the time. The other part of me longed to be writing freely on my own: I found teaching inimical to working at poems and stories: my critical faculties kept slyly pointing out the immense gap between me and the haloed writers for whom I was priestess. Ted went through approximately the same experience. He had a job offered him at the University of Massachusetts (a state university, and, in a state of excellent large private colleges, not full of the best pupils: some were earnest, but near-illiterate. I was reminded a bit of your rugger players and the intricacies of Plato!) Ted, with his usual ease, taught three different courses---freshman English (which in America usually means: how to write a clear sentence), a sophomore General Literature course which romped from Samson Agonistes^* to Moliere, to Thoreau, with breath-taking agility; and an advance course in writing, which he enjoyed. He, too, stopped writing, during this period. We decided, although both warmly invited to teach the same courses this year, to rashly break our ties with the groves of academe (a lassooing of tall tree arises to mind at this melded metaphor), and to write for a year.

I found life, too, in Northampton, left much to be desired. Gossip among the entrenched and unentrenched faculty members, jealousies, coup d’états, promotions and student popularity ratings is unavoidable, as, I suppose, it is in every such semi-enclosed community. But in America, privacy is suspect; isolation, perilous. Coffee-houses, tea-hours, dinners and evenings bring one constantly in communion with one’s colleague’s. Pleasant enough, but oddly narrowing in some ways. And the more one advances, the more administrative duties stand in the way of the actual teaching (which is my favorite work): directing course plans, serving on the innumerable faculty committees, and so on.

So we are in Boston this year, the city I was born in.^* We have a little two room apartment: I write in the livingroom-diningroom-kitchen (pullman, all in one wall, hostile to any elaborate housewifery, and that to the good) while Ted’s study is in the bedroom, a desk of two fine sturdy planks in a window niche. We are on the cobbled, tilty summit (almost) of Beacon Hill, which, I fear, is deserted by the old Brahmins and inhabited by students and elderly telephone operators and young doctors and lawyers now. Each of us, in our sixth floor flat, has a magnificent bay window to work in, overlooking a panorama of orange tiled rooftops, chimneypots, and mosquito trees to the dull silver flat of the river and grandiloquent sunsets. We take long walks to the wharfs to watch the gulls, ships, and crab-merchants; read aloud, read silently---I am beginning the Notebooks of Henry James,^* which I have never read, and finding surprising solace, encouragement, and challenge here. I find myself too, wishing furiously that the shade of James could somehow become aware of the intelligence, dedication, tact, and even love, which is devoted to his work today. Are you giving, still, your lectures on James? I remember these with the greatest pleasure, together with your lectures on the moralists and those on “Oedipus”, Shakespeare and Ibsen. Rereading my notes,^* I call up an image of the whole, your presence, your words balancing, tilting, with just the right emphasis, the precise revelation, in what I should like to call The Art of Lecturing. But I should like to have the original Platonic bed, and not a notetaker’s smudged copy. What are the prospects for your books---on the moralists and on James? I look forward to their appearance most eagerly.

Ted’s work is progressing admirably, and I feel in the presence of something particularly special---his dedication is complete, selfless and highly demanding. I am delighted that he enjoys Boston---he claims, everywhere, that the heavy stone buildings, the scraggly brick flats, the green park full of swans, remind him of England. His poems for his second book, which is about half-written, are far better, steadier, deeper, than anything in his first book. That, with its flaws in tone and maturity, which we see now, but did not, two years ago, has had, on the whole, an excellent critical reception in both England and America, and one of the poems in it has been chosen to receive the award for the best poem published in Great Britain for the past year, a bolt out of the blue, which, in practical terms, will see us fed for ten months. Ted is now working on a verse play. He has applied for a Guggenheim grant, and T. S. Eliot and others are strongly behind him, but we won’t hear about this till next spring, and his British citizenship may be against him. So we write and hope. If he received the grant, we would like to return to Europe for 1959-60, and spend some time in Cambridge. I would so much like to see you again, after the deep chagrin of having missed you this fall.^* Did you have the opportunity to see Gary Haupt^* at Yale on your visit here? I know he was a great admirer of yours and a fine student in his own right. How is he, and how is his career progressing?

I think also of dear Wendy Christie. I have not heard from her, but wish her well with much love. And your handsome, vital sister---I remember her with such pleasure. Is she studying at New Hall now? Please know that all this year your teaching, even the sense of your existence over the ocean, has been of the greatest help and encouragement. I would be so happy to have a note from you, but will understand if you are too much involved.

With warmest love,

Sylvia Hughes

TO Elinor Friedman Klein

Sunday 26 October 1958

TLS, Smith College

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Mass.

October 26, 1958

Dear Ellie,

Come ahead Friday November 7th with your orchid leis and all and even Russ, yea him. Tell me what time you’re coming. I got The Call when autumn began and wanted people wrought-up and around me, so I took a part-time job by going to an agency and demanding something with no responsibility or homework yet full of people. My first lead was what I am doing now, being a secretary for the Psychiatric Clinic at the Out-Patient Dept. at the Mass General Hospital.^* I belong to a city of welfare workers and feel pleasantly anonymous. I type fascinating records, meet troubled people who think they are going to give birth to puppies or that they have lived for three centuries or that they will go mad if they leave an ingredient out of a cake. People just like anybody on the subway or in the street: I meet them, and look them secretly up and down and secretly read their records which are delightfully particular. In and out of the office go 25-odd psychiatrists and students, from Norway, Persia, Iran, with weird accents, which I type up from an audograph.^* I shall work at it until I have paid my week’s salary to the agency and then maybe stop, for the part-time is almost full-time. Smith had asked me back for next year and offered even a writing course for me: for some reason, no doubt superficial as the two poems in the New Yorker, while others sweat for PhDs. I have nightmares about accepting, so must refuse. It’s all so cosy there. I want to hear details about your famous and infamous work. What made Leonard go back to teaching after all his writing nobility? Is there some reason for him to want to earn money? Let us know what time you will come. Ted has just won first prize---did I tell you? I believe it was in last Thursday’s Times^*---over 3000 poems in England, with his poem “The Thought-Fox”, in the Guinness competition. Have you seen Dave Keightley lately? How is the leg? Write & advise us.

Love,

Kitty & Levin^*

TO Esther^* & Leonard Baskin

Between Monday 17 November	TLS, British Library
& Wednesday 10 December 1958^*

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

The-night-before-

Dear Esther & Leonard,

It was quite wonderful to have your call. We felt you were in the room & wish you actually would be. We spent a good afternoon brooding in Mirski’s showrooms.^* The angel filled the air, and I feared for the ceiling and walls, he exerted such pressure. The feather-detail on the wings is magnificent. I had been wondering what the wings would do. He is an ikon to have in the head, and there he stands. I am particularly partial to the black-and-white “Death Among the Thistles”,^* am curiously deeply moved by it, those barbs and spurs and the bulbous deathlily-white head. “Tobias”,^* dog and fish, give our livingroom another room: I find myself going off into it.

I will work, Esther, on bullfrogs: I observed practically nothing else in Northampton and will dig up their gorier habits. Ted says you say they eat each other. I wish I could see this, but will do what I can with the slithering green (I saw some a purply-dark color too, I think) web-fingered monsters.

How is the blond Tobias? I miss him, he was such a good armful.

We are projecting a trip to Northampton so far in the spring, to maybe talk to a creative writing class, and will let you know when, because we would like to see you very much.

Love to you both, and Tobias

Sylvia

TO Gerald & Joan Hughes

c. mid-December 1958^*

ALS in greeting card,^* Indiana University

Best Wishes for Merry Christmases / “Best of wishes for your Merry Christmases and your happy New Years, your long lives and your true prosperities. Worth twenty pound good if they are delivered as sent them. Remember? Here’s a final prescription added, ‘To be taken for life’.” / Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions (1865)

We thrive. Ted has 4 poems accepted by Poetry (Chicago)^* & is writing a book of humorous poems about relatives for children.^* Merriest of Christmasses!

Love,

Sylvia & Ted

TO Margaret Wendy Christie

c. mid-December 1958^*

ALS (copy) on verso of bookmark, printed from Cambridge Review^*

Dearest Wendy –

Doris has the other half of Paradise. Are you here or in your new house – is it built? Ted & I, after both teaching English here last year, have retired to Beacon Hill, overlooking river and chimneypots, to write for a year – me finishing a first book of poems, Ted his second & a book of humorous poems for children. We think of you very often & would love to see you when we come back to England which we hope will be in a year or so. How are the lovely children? Ted joins me in sending love & warmest holiday wishes –

Sylvia Hughes –

TO Olwyn Hughes

c. mid-December 1958^*

ALS on verso of bookmark, Washington University (St Louis)

Dear Olwyn . . .

I’ve quit my amusing job at the City Hospital after two months & am battened down to writing. Weather here so frigid it hurts, Charles River Basin an evil-white-capped blue. Pitchblack at 5 pm. With the Parks lit up all red, green, yellow, full of live reindeer, black sheep, nativity scenes.^* In one big shop there’s a whole glassed-in window of motorized poodles baking Christmas cookies, in another a 3-window railroad train run by angels & white foxes: a blend of sublime & ridiculous. Do tell us which one of Luke’s stories the Sewanee’s taken^* as we can’t wring it out of him. And what was Thrushes in the Observer^* for? We get dim rumors, but still haven’t seen it ourselves. We miss you, wish we could summon you up like a genie out of smoke & incense – am beginning “Scorpion” – elegant & delightfully produced. Burn a candle for us.

With love –

Sylvia – Ted

TO John Lehmann

Wednesday 24 December 1958

TLS, University of Texas at Austin

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

USA

December 24, 1958

Mr. John Lehmann

THE LONDON MAGAZINE

36 Soho Square

London W.1, England

Dear Mr. Lehmann,

I was very happy to learn about your keeping my three poems^* for the London Magazine. I wonder if you would be so good as to alter the French line in “Lorelei” to its English equivalent: “Drunkenness of the great depths”.^* This keeps the syllabic count, and I have had enough afterthoughts about the line to want it in English.

Ted and I are spending the year in a small flat-with-a-view on Beacon Hill in Boston, overlooking a vista of orange chimneypots which reminds me nostalgically of my view in Cambridge. We both worked teaching English at college and university last year and had too little time to write, so are writing hard this year. Ted is doing some stories about Yorkshire, very solid little worlds they are, and well into his second book of poems, and I am working on stories and poems also.

We are hoping very much to return to England in a year or so. Ted joins me in sending our warmest good wishes.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Edith & William Hughes

Tuesday 30 December 1958

ALS, Family owned

Tuesday – December 30

Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .

One more day of the old year – Ted has just finished making himself a remarkable wolf-mask for the New Year’s Eve masquerade tomorrow night:^* I found a marvelous peice of sealskin fur, black, in the attic rooms full of century-old dresses of her grandmothers & grandmothers-in-law where Agatha let me browse to my heart’s content yesterday – with his two poems about wolves^* in his second book and actually one line about “making wolf-masks mouths Clamped well on to the world”.^* I find the mask quite frightening – it has slit eyes which Ted has filled with yellow – very realistic, with room for his mouth to show so he can speak. With the real fur it is incredibly lifelike. <drawing of an arrow pointing at Ted Hughes’s head and shoulders in wolf-mask> I am wearing an antique black dress & red cape for Red Riding Hood.

Ted has written two very funny children’s stories & we are hoping Jack & Jill may like them. The weather here is quite clear – only one real snowstorm so far and that melted now.

Ted is reading the novel by the Russian nobel prize winner, Pasternak,^* & I am in the middle of an autobiography of the French St. Theresa^* – all the photos of her in the book are terribly touched up to make her look as if she has holy tears in her eyes and a sprouting halo –

The present book by John Press^* arrived today & Ted is into it already – also the lovely flowered scarf & shaving soap from Hilda & Vicky – do say thanks to them for it – we’ll write, too.

We love every letter we get from you – we can just imagine the Beacon & all the life & country surrounding it.

I made a big pot of fish chowder today which Ted likes & eats bowls of – full of milk, onions, potatoes, fish stock & fish, very wholesome & convenient to dip out of the pot & warm up for the next few days.

Mother brought us a little bowl of three Christmas narcissus bulbs & the first one started to unfold its little white flowers today – dainty & star-shaped on top of a long green willowy stem.

Ted seems to have written all the news in his letter.

I just had three poems accepted by The London Magazine last week with a very nice letter from the editor – I don’t suppose they’ll be out for several months, but do keep a look-out for it. We’ll let you know if we find out when they’re appearing.

Keep well & have a happy new year –

with love,^*

Sylvia