The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume 2: 1956-1963

1959

TO Edith & William Hughes

Saturday 17 January 1959

ALS with envelope, Family owned

Saturday

January 17

Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .

I’ll write on a pink sheet^* to make this letter more colorful. Our apartment house has fallen into new hands with the new years & electricians are hammering, lugging great coils of wire & shouting at all hours. We are supposed to be getting new electric stove & icebox (ours is now gas) but they have not arrived yet. For a whole day the heat & hot water was off: “We turned off the switch & forgot it,” the boy explained this morning as I greeted him sniffling with the makings of a cold & a stern, watering eye. And now the heat’s on, but the lights are off. Our poor landlord has evidently left his phone off the hook, complaints must be pouring in & his phone is steadily ‘busy’ through the day. But all this is amusing – we feel greatly relieved that it is not our place. I make great cauldrons of fish chowder & chicken stew which Ted likes – very hot & nourishing in the cold weather. He has been so healthy this winter it does my heart good to see him. His poems are being bought as soon as he writes them & his second book should be finished in a couple of months. He has also written some very good stories which I shall try to type out as soon as he gives me clear copies. Ted is so modest about his own work – I dropped a little note^* to the editor of the London Magazine to the effect that Ted was writing some stories about Yorkshire & of course the editor wrote back by return mail^* he’d love to look at them. But it’s a wife’s privilege to praise her husband to others!

<drawing of Winthrop, Massachusetts, with arrows pointing to

‘My house’, ‘My grandmother’s house’ and ‘Prison on Deer Island’.

SP drew in waves and wrote ‘ATLANTIC OCEAN’>

We took a trip by train & bus to Winthrop, the town of my childhood – just half an hour’s trip & walked for miles – by the house where I spent my first ten years, the bay I swam in, all barge tar & airplane oil, & out to my grandmother’s house on a road running to a once-island, now joined to the land – the town, once an old fishing port, is gone to rack & ruin – but I love it better than any place I’ve ever been, although I wouldn’t want to bring up a family there. We had one of our pleasantest days & I am now writing some poems^* commemorating the place – probably I’m the only poet born there who’s ever wanted to write about the old cinder heap, but there’s nothing as unreasonable as childhood memories.

Have you seen the enclosed clipping^* about Ted’s prize? The NY Times Book Review is a very special place to appear.

Ted has got set on living in England & we hope to be able to tour America if he gets either one or the other of his grants before we come back to Europe. I look forward to having a place of our own & not drifting about the globe like a pair of world-circling whales, & I am as fond of England as any place, which is lucky. I wish you could appear at our apartment – win on the pools & fly over for dinner!

Love,

Sylvia

PS – Have you got the Mademoiselle magazine article & poems of ours mother sent?

TO Esther Baskin

Saturday 17 January 1959^*

TLS, British Library

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

Saturday^*

Dear Esther,

This is a small note to say I was highly relieved to have your letter and spent a pleasant rainy yesterday at the Public Library reading about the Nightjar, Goatsucker, Churn-Owl, Evejar, Fern-Owl, Night-hawk, Puckeridge and Wheel-Bird. Our library is magnificent on birds and death on frogs; all you can learn about frogs here is which nerve twitches when you drop acid on their left nostril, no thank you. Also, I was in a mild state of paralysis between Ted’s poem on Bullfrog (a jolly and humorous little NYorker piece) and Shakespeare. Between us all we will immortalize the animal kingdom: I lie in bed chanting Dog, Cat, Hog, Rat and on and on. I am enamoured of the Goatsucker and give me two weeks, one for the necks and ifrits, one for the poem.

We have The Seven Deadly Sins^* and are delighted. I particularly love the brustly-pig-straddling Gluttoness and the old January on the breasted peacock. And Christ is magnificent. Ted, of course, has Lennie’s proof of the wolf-skinned supplicant behind glass and salaams and prays under it. Did he tell you he made a wolf-mask? We had to go to a costume party New Year’s eve and our Hungarian hostess let me raid her attic of Budapest ball gowns and Beacon Hill pomps. I came away with a red cape, for me, and a black mouldering sealskin scarf for Ted. You wolf, I said, and he went into the bedroom with scissors and thread and the fur, and came out with a long black snout and black pricking ears and the evil eye. It was a religious act, and the mask is awesomely comfortable to wear. One day it will stick, and his nails will grow.

He is drawing, at last, on Pikes. Many pikes. The best drawing he will send.

In Yorkshire there is a goose known as the Gabble-Ratchet.

Ted joins me in sending our best to you, Lennie and the gold Tobias,

sylvia

TO Esther Baskin

Wednesday 21 January 1959

TLS, British Library

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

Wednesday, January 21

Dear Esther,

I enclose the goatsucker poem, hoping some of it will please you. I’ve had a wonderful time working on it and it is, as you see, a sort of Goatsucker Sonnet, although the rhymes are half. All the details are borne out by the books, I think, and you probably know them: the Bird’s also called the Puckbird, or Puckeridge after a disease it’s supposed to give cows & weanling calves in England, so it’s a double threat, in superstition, to cows as well as goats. And it’s called the Devil-bird in Ceylon (evidently they call a lot of birds Devils there) and in Paraguay a Goatsucker-hunter, hunting by headlamp, says the bird’s eye reflects light with a red shine, like a coal glowing, or an intense, deep ruby. I wish I could have got in the part about its perching lengthwise on a tree and looking like a warty knot, but there just wasn’t place. Do feel free to not like it, or want this or that other than it is.

Did Ted or I tell you we are owners of a kitling? Granddaughter on one side of a cat belonging to Thomas Mann and, on the other, fruit of a pedigreed line of Mooncats and Honey Owls, Persian cats who move in a nimbus. Sappho, by name. The minute she walked into our apartment she went straight to a book of poems lying flat on the lowest bookshelf and possessed it. The book was a mere anthology, so Ted has substituted Eliot and Sappho approves.

Ted has drawn myriad pike and is sending his final iron-eyed head to you. With the block could he have wise advice? I can’t wait to see the broadsheet.^* Robert Lowell has seen the poem and has a good opinion of it, has sent it to IA Richards,^* he says.

All Boston is blurred out today in a pale charcoal scrim of rain, sludge, slop, and no snow, only a wet, Old English bit by lamplight last evening, a little close white fur, and today everything in runnels and drips.

I am so eager to hear about the book.^* You say it’s about all done. Has Leonard finished the drawings? Do you know the Robert Graves^* poem “Outlaws” which begins:

Owls---they whinny down the night;

Bats go zigzag by.

Ambushed in shadow beyond sight

The outlaws lie.

Old gods, tamed to silence, there

In the wet woods they lurk,

Greedy of human stuff to snare

In nets of murk.

Look up, else your eye will drown

In a moving sea of black;

Between the tree-tops, upside down,

Goes the sky-track.

Look up, else your feet will stray

Toward that dim ambuscade

Where spider-like they trap their prey

In webs of shade.

And on it goes. How pale are doves and lambs by comparison!

Our love to you, Leonard and Tobias

Sylvia

Sylvia Plath

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Mass.

The Goatsucker^*

Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear

The warning whirr and burring of the bird

Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard

Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder.

Moon full, moon dark, the chary dairy farmer

Dreams that his fattest cattle dwindle, fevered

By claw-cuts of the Goatsucker, alias Devil-bird,

Its eye, flashlit, a chip of ruby fire.

So fables say the Goatsucker moves, masked from men’s sight

In an ebony air, on wings of witch cloth,

Well-named, ill-famed a knavish fly-by-night.

Yet it never milked any goat, nor dealt cow death:

It shadows only---cave-mouth bristle beset---

Cockchafers and the wan, green Luna moth.

TO Elizabeth Ames^*

Wednesday 11 February 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

February 11, 1959

Mrs. Elizabeth Ames

Executive Director of Yaddo

Saratoga Springs

New York

Dear Mrs. Ames:

My husband and I have just received your letter^* about Yaddo and both of us would be extremely interested in applying for a visit there. We would appreciate it very much if you would be so good as to send us the necessary applications.

I notice from the brochure that the season at Yaddo runs from May to October, although most of the guests are said to come for May-June or July-August. Is there, then, a September-October period also? If there were, we would be most interested in the possibility for applying for this time of the season.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Lee Anderson

Wednesday 18 February 1959

TLS, Washington University (St Louis)

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

February 18, 1959

Dear Lee Anderson:

Thank you for your good letter. I am sending a manuscript---The Bull of Bendylaw And Other Poems---to the Yale Series competition this week. Your letter confirmed a wavering and subversive urge to do so.

Ted and I are living in a little two-room apartment at the above address with a sixth floor view of Back Bay, the Charles River Basin and gulls and sailboats. We would be delighted to see you here any time you chanced to come to Boston.

Ted is completing his second book and within five poems of the close. I am battling a sterner and less bucolic muse. We have a fine wild little cat, a tiger with a green stare.

Ted joins me in sending our best,

Sylvia Plath

TO Elizabeth Ames

Sunday 22 February 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

February 22, 1959

Mrs. Elizabeth Ames

Executive Director of Yaddo

Saratoga Springs

New York

Dear Mrs. Ames:

Thank you for your letter^* and the application blanks. We are enclosing the four sets of filled-in applications^* together with clippings from our work.

I would like to note here that of the thirty-two or so published poems I have listed on my sheet over two-thirds were written while I was an undergraduate and do not form part of my projected book as, in one way or another, I do not consider them sufficiently mature work.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Edith & William Hughes

Thursday 26 February 1959

TLS with envelope, Family owned

Thursday

February 26, 1959

Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .

Snow has fallen here at last. We had a lovely teatime the other day, sitting high in our sixth floor eagle’s lookout and the room bright with the white light of the falling snow, which fell down past us in large flakes to pile up on ground floor level where somebody else would have to worry about shoveling, and we could simply enjoy the landscape of peaked white rooftops and the white river behind the dark steeples and gables of the buildings. The air is clear crisp blue now and very invigorating.

Last night we went to the Blue Ship Tearoom^* which is at the end of a perilously sagging wharf which looks about to cave in at any moment. The Tearoom is of old vintage, as my mother & father went there when they were courting, I believe, and on the third floor of the wharf with a fine view of the bay and ships and gulls. Inside it is very low ceilinged, all painted light blue with fishnets and Chinese crabs shells and lobstershells decorating the room, and gay blue tablecloths covered with a pattern of Moby Dick the white whale from Melville’s book, and the fisherment hunting him down. We went to celebrate the third anniversary of our meeting at the party for the St. Botolph’s Review, where I first saw Ted’s poems. Ted had two delicious mountain trout after a fresh fruit cup, and I had a little fat duck, and we brought a bottle of French wine as the place didn’t serve drinks, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. There was an oddly homespun quality about the evening as there were only about three other tables of diners beside ourselves (the place has just opened again after the owners spending the worst of the winter in Florida) and the waitress kept forgetting essential things like spoons which I would slip over and get when she’d gone out of the room, so as not to hurt her feelings. There was also a greyhaired pianist who evidently is installed there for life, who has been in France and plays Chopin, Debussy and Moonlight-Sonata Beethoven for the diners. Drunk with the idea of an audience (he seemed to be afraid we’d boo him and drive him out of the room with a pelting of T-bone steaks) he came in before every piece to ask us if “we’d like to hear the story behind it”. One could hardly say no to the poor man, so he told us about the perfumes of the flowers of the French gardens that blew through this Nocturne, or the odd harp quaverings that inspired another. He even had a little contest, the reward being a rupee from someplace in India (worth, he said about thirty cents) for someone who could divide the distance to the moon by the distance around the world. I was so stunned at the simplicity of the question, and Ted was so chivalrous, that we didn’t open our mouths, and a little lady from a country town a hundred miles away won the rupee.

I have been having fun braiding on a rug^* which has light blue and red bands in it: I get the wool remnants from a Mill End shop out near mothers, cut the strips to the right size, and go to work. I have also been learning to use the sewing machine at the house of Marcia Plumer,^* a friend of mine from college, and am making my first simple pattern, a black and white print overblouse, very straight and not fitted, so the work is easy. You must smile at this, because you probably can sew blindfold & Walt’s factory must make immensely complicated trousers and so on. Anyhow, I hope to finish the blouse this week and will draw the style of it.

Another book has come out with some of our poems in it---mine are old ones and much changed, or left out of the book I am working on. You might like to get a copy, I think it’s 8/6. The title is POETRY FROM CAMBRIDGE, 1958, edited by Christopher Levenson and published by The Fortune Press, 15 Belgrave Road, London, S.W.1.^* Ted has five poems in it (Thrushes, The Good Life, Historian, Dick Straightup, and Crow Hill) and I have four. Levenson, with his usual waywardness, has let several misprints get by in my things, as, on the contents page,^* I am quoted as having gone to Brown University. and in the poem “Epitaph for Fire and Flower” on page 45 it should be “every weather-cock kiss hang (not hand) fire” in the fourth stanza, and “star’s spent wick” (not wink) in the fifth.

Tell Vicky I think her nit-spotted Bug-gobbler is superb---very witty and sensitive with a colorful personality of its own, much better than the blue winged creature which I don’t think a child would relate to, its so abstract. Also liked her drawing of her head and of you, very expressive lines. I have had a child’s poem on a Goatsucker, in rough sonnet form, which I wrote for Esther Baskins book on Night Creatures (which Ted wrote “Tomcat” for) accepted by Hornbook, a monthly magazine that reviews children’s books. On second thought, it wasn’t the Goatsucker one, but one called The Bull of Bendylaw.^* I sent the two, and willfully reversed them.

We are counting on you to win the Pools. One of the great rewards of living in England, in fact one of the great morale builders, must be the half-hopeful feeling one might just as well as not happen to win 75,000 Untaxable Pounds on the Pools & be set up for life. Keep making out those sheets. And when the great day comes, wire us, and we’ll all set off for a trip round the world---you come pick us up here and we’ll all sail on a luxury liner to Australia and from there to the Riviera and the Rhine and home again. Ted keeps telling me to realize all the odds against winning, and I probably do, but keep on dreaming.

We’re just leaving now for a little walk in the snow.

Love to all,

Sylvia

TO Lynne Lawner

Wednesday 11 March 1959

Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978

March 11, 1959

Dear Lynne,

I am seizing a few moments after having typed my afternoon stint and while waiting for my very part-time boss^* to come in and dictate me more letters to Poona etc. I work here in the shadowy stacks of Widener two or three afternoons a week: I should have shorthand, but by dint of furious made-up abbreviations, manage pretty well. Your Italian vignettes^* are delightful, wonderfully colored and full of a special gilded light. Why don’t you set a novel in Rome? The damnable thing is that Henry James has done it all, with his endowed and innocent Isabel Archer. The main interest about an American girl abroad is her slow mellowing into corruption, what else? I am envious. We dream of large sumptuous grants on which we will spend a year in Rome.

Ironically, I find that although I have always considered myself aware of the modern novel, my main awareness is of Henry James, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence. Formidable models and idols when confronting a blank page. So of late I have been cautiously ripping through a more recent vintage of work. Have you come across William Golding,^* the British novelist? He has one terrifying and highly colored novel “Pincher Martin”, or “The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin”, the whole book being the blockishly real visions of a drowning man, who dreams in drowning of his struggle to survive on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Hardly the sort of book to reassure a beginner at the trade, but magnificently original and strong. I have also finished the last of the Tolkien^* trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and have been immensely moved by it. I read the children’s book, The Hobbit, which started off the cast of characters that moves, enlarges and immensifies in these books: I confess it moves me more than the Odyssey, or, for that matter, any epic I can think of at the moment. Let me know what you are reading, doing, thinking, writing. Please send me a poem, or any poem, you have done. The last I saw was Wedding Night of Nun, which was awarded the Borestone prize^* in their book.

I am now back home. Ted is taking our small tiger cat with an impressive, if not evident, pedigree, to the vet’s with Rosalind Wilson (one of Edmund Wilson’s many offspring by his even more numerous wives)^* and the cat (Sappho, of course)’s brothers & sisters, to be vaccinated against distemper. The kitten loves the typewriter and is now curled in my lap in a kind of literary hypnosis, watching the keys go up and down like dancing snakes. In her more energetic moods she tries to cuff them just before they hit the paper.

We have been having fun at the theater here. Got free tickets to a horrible play concocted by Faulkner,^* about whom I have great reservations, for his one-time mistress Ruth Ford,^* now wife of Zachary Scott,^* I think, “Requiem for a Nun”: except for one scene, a flashback, it is all nontheater, verbal rant about the novel “Sanctuary”, from which Temple Drake emerges, twenty years later, even more of a bitch. The plot ambles about the central horror that her negro maid and babytender, a onetime whorehouse confidante, smothers Temple’s baby in order to make Temple stay home from running off with the romeo brother of the guy she loved at the whorehouse (who got shot to death climbing up her drainpipe) and as a result is tried for murder & convicted. I never could quite accept the baby-smothering as a convincing gimmick to get Temple to stay home & be a good mother to her children (she only had one other). This was Theater Guild. This week we saw a new company, the Boston Repertory, do a very fine performance of “Six Characters in Search . . .” at the Wilbur.^* Steve Aaron,^* of Harvard, & some other Harvard guys are directing the company & it is wonderful to see good otherwiseunseeable modern plays, and old plays, performed by something more than an earnest undergraduate cast. Also saw at MIT a performance on DThomas’ “Doctor & the Devils”,^* all about where med students get their cadavers from: written in movie scenes, so a lot of rushing about and reposing, but fun.

We have seen a little of Philip Booth, who is now trying to write at home on his Guggenheim with his wife and beautiful daughters^* & sounding as if it were starvation pay. Also have seen a good bit of Robert Lowell whom I admire immensely as a poet, and his wife, who writes stories for the New Yorker. I have been auditing a poetry course he gives at BU with some bright young visiting poets, George Starbuck,^* who is an editor at Houghton Mifflin, & has published everywhere, and Anne Sexton,^* another mental hospital graduate, who Lowell thinks is marvelous. She is having about 300 lines coming out in the Hudson,^* published in the Partisan,^* New Yorker,^* etc., without ever having gone to college. I like one of her long poems, about a very female subject: grandmother, mother, daughter, hag trilogy,^* and some of her shorter ones. She has the marvelous enviable casualness of the person who is suddenly writing and never thought or dreamed of herself as a born writer: no inhibitions. Perhaps our best friends are these Fassetts around the corner: Agatha’s book on Bartok’s American Years^* is magnificent. I have never heard her play the piano, but evidently she is accomplished as only a Hungarian can be; or something of the sort.

Please send me a page or more of Guiliani (in your translation).^* How is your book coming.^* You never told me about the way you got rid of your first grant (wasn’t it a 2-year affair?) and onto the Fulbright. What happened to the Spectator (or was it another?) articles: did you publish there, and when? I really would love to read something of what you are doing.

How is your novel? I felt I had one, or the stuff of one; but encountered a huge block in trying to have the material take off from what actually did happen. I have been doing some poems this month, as always happens when spring nears, but they are grim, antipoetic (compared to the florid metaphorical things I had in Poetry, Chicago) & I hope, transitional.

The Lamont Poetry Prize is now the Thing to get, what Booth got. Dudley Fitts^* is editing the Yale Series this year, a fall, I suppose, from Auden. But then, Auden never liked what I wrote. I hate the idea of trying to publish a book of poems without having got some sort of excuse for it which will get it reviewed. It is bad enough to go through the trauma of selecting and rejecting (I have done an immense amount of the latter, and have a ghost-book larger, and more-published than my present slim volume) without thinking nobody will even notice it: better scathing reviews than a dead silence. Or so I tell myself now. Actually, I think one stands a much better chance of having a book published in England, a book of poems – they have many companies, small, idiosyncratic (unlike Faber’s & its classic list) and seem to publish vast amounts of unknowns: in America, an unknown without a reputable publisher is lost, lost. And most publishers are like the Atlantic Press (Little, Brown) & only publish one volume a year & that done by one who has already paid his way in novels or children’s books. Enough.

What happened to your leg? It suddenly came onstage limping & not saying what was wrong. How, by the way, are the hospitals in Rome? Is there an “American” hospital? I don’t know where, but I think I’ve heard of it.

Have you by now invaded the Obscure Avenue^* and seen the jeweled hand behind the trilingual annual yet? I understand her poetry editor (his face always altering in the altering lights) floats here and there picking up poems like lint, a huge bundle at his side, which he uses for obscure and unliterary purposes. Why don’t you send them a bundle of stuff? I am deterred simply by trying to figure out return postage. Also I don’t have anything long enough. I grind out little very minor poems. I had 3 of a longer sort in the latest, March I think, London magazine, which I wrote last Spring after a year’s silence. I am leaving the rather florid over-metaphorical style that encrusted me in college. The “Feminine” (horrors) lavish coyness. The poems I have written in this last year are, if anything, “ugly”. I have done many in syllabic verse which gives freedom of another sort & excited me for a good while, but they are pretty bare. The ones in the London magazine are the last of the lyric florid picture-poems.

It was spring yesterday, but now the snow is whitening around the three windows of my bay-desk. You say you have “Some truly strange poems”. Please send me a couple. I may enclose something if only to lure you to do likewise. I read the gaga review on Vassar Miller,^* thought her quoted poem boring and the ones in New Poets of England & America^* not much better. May Swenson has a couple I like, one about V. Woolf,^* among others. Except for M. Moore & Elizabeth Bishop what women are there to look to? A few eccentrics like Edith Sitwell,^* Amy Lowell.^* And the perennial Emily,^* I suppose. Again, I say send me something. I shall send you mimeos of one or two I think and demand an exchange. Yes, I shall.

I have been having second thoughts about graduate school, such as “what fun to get a Phd”. “What fun to have to learn German and relearn French and Latin.” “How jolly to be a professional and have a big thesis on something publishable.” The horror comes when I think, OK, so I have this Phd, so where do I teach? I could only, I think, now consider a place in a city, like Columbia or Chicago or whatever big city it is they have in California, where my life could be as private as possible. Places, of course, where one has to be Diana Trilling to get a job. And the other places all exude for me the kind of stuffed intricate calm I experienced among the golden groves of Smith last year. I envision being fifty, haggard, stamping about, advancing to teach the Joyce Yeats Eliot course, and so? And the girls younger and more similar year by year. The little voyeuse in me, or whatever it is, says, oh, go live in England & no matter how poor you are, there will be France and Italy and Germany and Spain and Greece and you can study languages there, etc. etc. From this side of the Atlantic I again experience the weight of water between me and Europe that I am sure convinces some people Europe is a figment of a cracked brain.

Please tell me honestly what you think of these poems. Mad Maudlin is the earliest, written two winters ago, Green Rock, Winthrop Bay, written last spring, and Suicide off Egg Rock this spring (winter, rather). In the latter, I didn’t choose the garbagey details to prove I wasn’t going to blench, but wanted the energy of the waves and dog and child to be equally as terrifying to the man in despair. As you will see, I try for certain absolutely “plain” lines in it, pure statement, but of course the words twist in and try to color it up.

We don’t know at present what next year will bring after September 1st when our lease here runs out. I have come to think we may start our first house in England, in the country outside London & expand from there: Ted is very homesick, and I am in many many ways more akin to the English temper than the American, but not in so many as to make me deny that I will feel a good bit in exile. Before we go, we would like to see New Orleans, Mexico, the canyon on the way to California, but that is also in question. An amusing note, I have been asked to be one of the judges of the Holyoke Glascock contest this year, along with John Crowe Ransom.^* I don’t know whether to laugh or be silent.

Tell me about you, your bothers as well as your pleasures. I feel an odd sisterly bond, partly because I feel, as I think and suspect you may, a dim doppelganger relationship with the few women I know who are very much physically & psychically akin to me. It would be great fun to see you again, and if you would only stay in Rome another year maybe we would. At any rate, write me faster than I’ve written you and Send Poems.

With Love,

Sylvia

TO Edith & William Hughes

Tuesday 31 March 1959

TLS, Family owned

Tuesday

31 March 1959

Dear Ted’s mother & dad,

As I sit here at my high desk I look out into a grey hazy day, a suitable weather for the last of March, trying to be mild and warmish, but making me long only to limber my fingers around a cup of hot tea. It has been a raw, windy month, with a great load of snow dumped on us last week which is by now melted and gone.

I was very cross with the judges of the Maugham contest,^* but after my first anger at the much-traveled Thom Gunn^* I reflected that the judges probably figured Ted had enough with his 300 pound first prize this autumn & shouldn’t be made fabulously wealthy with 500 pounds on top of it. I am sure he will win the prize with his next book which is almost done. His last five poems are the most colorful and exciting he has done yet. He will have 5 poems^* coming out in a handsome magazine here, Audience, which has a lot of money behind it and prints drawings and photographs: Vicky would enjoy these. Do look up the last two London magazines, my poems are in the March, Ted’s in the April issue;^* I had 3 poems about the sea in this spring’s Audience^* & Ted will come out in the summer issue: isn’t that nice: we always miss by a month in coming out together, but maybe the chivalrous editors think: Ladies first. I am enclosing a page^* from the international newspaper I am publishing a few poems in a poem I wrote about riding a runway horse^* in Cambridge, England. I thought the article on the Yorkshire moors^* might also interest you.

We had Easter dinner with my brother at mother’s house Sunday, and it was a nice feast. My brother is relaxing more in his work at Harvard and going to work on a project translating scientific Russian this summer on the way to his PhD. Ted is accompanying me twice a week to Cambridge, via subway, where I work two afternoons in the Harvard library as secretary to the Head of the Sanskrit Department, which is fun: he is a poetic soul at heart & has given me two articles of his^* on Sanskrit poetry of the Village and Field which Ted enjoyed. Ted is getting books from a Buddhist lady each week (it is almost impossible for a non-Harvard person to get at their great Library without paying large fees) and collecting fox stories which he will write up for a children’s book.

Tonight we are going again to the Fassetts around the corner. They have just had their cat Scylla have another kitten & we will see it. But their cats are so inbred that they never litter like ordinary cats: they have two cats in great pain and one is always born dead, while the other has to be fed milk from the hand to live. Very sad.

This week, for some reason, things are at a standstill. Partly the season, I guess. We should have more news next week. Keep warm & keep working the pools.

With love,

Sylvia

TO Elizabeth Ames

Wednesday 8 April 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

April 8, 1959

Mrs. Elizabeth Ames

Executive Director

Yaddo

Saratoga Springs, New York

Dear Mrs. Ames:

We are both pleased and honored to receive your invitation^* to arrive at Yaddo on September 9th and remain until November 9th.

We are happy to accept the invitation for the full period and look forward to spending those two months at Yaddo.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes

TO Mary Stetson Clarke^*

Friday 10 April 1959

TLS, Smith College

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

April 10, 1959

Dear Mary,

I was so happy to get your kind letter! Right now I am sitting at my desk overlooking the ruddy-brick rooftops of the Hill and the grey waters of Back Bay with the misty spring sky above it, which often puts me in such a rapt mood I am in danger of not getting to work, and spending hours staring at the white sails already visible on the water.

You have been often in our thoughts. I am so glad that our visit with you and Susan^* at Smith was a prelude to Susan’s becoming a Smith Girl. It is a wonderful, wonderful place.

I have been having Ted dictate to me from the beginning lessons in the speedwriting book which was a godsend, and you so kind to be involved in the obtaining of it! It is just what I need, although my boss is understanding and dictates at the pace of a turtle.

We have both of us had an excellent and productive year in Boston, Ted just finishing a second book of poems, and me my first. Now I shall start looking about for a publisher, a much more difficult job for a poetry-writer than a novelist or a children’s book writer, although we would like to do the latter very much, too. How magnificent your friend Betty George Speare^* received the Newbury Medal: we saw a whole window of her books set out on Park Street & it looking charming.

After a brief trip to Smith and Holyoke this next week we shall be back in Boston till September 1st and wish you would give us a call any afternoon you are in town & drop by for tea threeish or fourish. We work from 7 to 12 in the morning very hard and then are delighted to indulge in recreation of another sort. We hope to spend two months at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, this fall as guests with nothing to do but write. It sounds like a dream just now.

Our best to you and the family,

Sylvia Hughes

TO Monroe K. Spears^*

Friday 10 April 1959

TLS, Sewanee: The University of the South

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

April 10, 1959

Mr. Monroe K. Spears

Editor

THE SEWANEE REVIEW

The University of the South

Sewanee, Tennessee

Dear Mr. Spears:

I am happy to hear^* that you are keeping “Point Shirley” for publication with “The Ghost’s Leavetaking”.

One or two minor changes I have made since in the poem I wonder if you would be so good as to alter on the copy you have: I should like “Revisited” dropped from the title so it reads simply “Point Shirley”. Also I should like to leave out the word “dying” in the last line of the second stanza so it reads “Shark littered in the geranium bed.” And then change the word “wring” in the first line of the last stanza to “get” (“I would get from these dry-papped stones”).

I do hope these slight alterations will not be of any inconvenience.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Ann Davidow-Goodman^*

Tuesday 14 April 1959

TLS with envelope, Smith College

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

April 14, 1959

Dear Ann,

Sometimes I think I am a sleepwalker. I had your letter, with the wonderful happy-making cavorters on it around Christmas and started saving up things to tell you in a letter, and added this and that, and meanwhile the snows melted and with the green leaves coming out in Boston Public Gardens and white sails on the Charles River, which I can see from our window, realize with a pang that a quarter of a year has slipped by. Well, here is the letter and I hope you are not now living in Turkey or Poona or some other place.

What are you doing and what have you done these last five years? Persons, places, words. I look back with a kind of exhaustion at the voyagings and shifting of scenery and wonder where to begin. Much better would be seeing you in person. I have an aversion to reunions and wish very much you could manage a stop-over in Boston. We have, alas, no place to put anybody up in our two very small rooms – with a view, but you could get a room nearby & come for meals, swan-boat rides, and it would be such fun. We’ll probably be here up till the end of August, and there is an arts festival, open-air exhibits etc., sometime in June for about a week. Couldn’t you come for that, or any time?

As you can see, we have left Northampton. Ted was bothered by the extreme provincial nature of the town, seeing only one’s colleagues for morning coffee, lunch, cocktails, dinner and the evening, and the gossip over students, who supply the main course of conversation, and the petty politicking for positions, promotions, etc. I was asked back, and also for this year to teach writing, which I would much less like to teach than freshman English (I managed to fit in Dostoevsky and Sophocles along with DH Lawrence and James Joyce). However, although I loved teaching, the great conflict was with writing. I wore my eyes out on 70 student themes every other week and had no energy for writing a thing. Ironically, I could have gone on teaching without a PhD because of my writing. But we made the break, both of us turning down teaching jobs to live on a shoestring for a year in Boston writing to see what we could do, and Ted has just finished his second book of poems and I my first, which I will start sending the rounds to publishers some time this summer. Unfortunately there is no money in the poetry books, although Ted’s first book, being a prize-winner in America and a Book Society choice in England, sold more than many first novels. We have a steady trickle of little checks for magazine publications but not enough to bank on. So Ted is working on a play^* and both of us plan to try our hand at children’s books this spring. I hear from reputable sources that children’s books are pleasantly lucrative, sell better and longer than most novels.

Which makes me wonder, have you tried illustrating children’s books? Your drawings are so full of verve I should think you could make a wonderful thing of it. If I ever did get a book done would you think of doing pictures for it? What fun that would be. Please do write very concrete details about who you work for, and how and all else. O do come to Boston for a visit.

We have just been “invited” to an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, from September 9th to November 9th, a kind of great estate which feeds you and gives you a studio to finish creative work, no-talking to a soul from 9 to 4, and no organized activities, which lifts some of my suspicion of writers’ colonies. And gardens, woods and bass-ponds. After that, Ted has just got word of a Guggenheim^* grant which will keep us in Boston for six months and then take us to Rome for six months. Ted is so homesick for the moortops of Yorkshire that I think we may settle in England eventually.

All the more reason for you to come visit us before we go!

Please forgive my tardy letter and chalk it up to a horrible habit of procrastination. Do write, even just a note, as soon as you can, and please say you can come to Boston for a while!

Love,

Syl

PS It was very wholesome being reminded of my five-year-ago words about the New Yorker. It gave me a healthy perspective. Now you can record me as saying it is my lifelong ambition to get a story in the darn magazine!

sph

TO Howard Moss

Thursday 23 April 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

April 23, 1959

Mr. Howard Moss

THE NEW YORKER

25 West 43rd Street

New York 36, New York

Dear Mr. Moss:

I am glad to hear^* you are taking WATERCOLOR OF GRANCHESTER MEADOWS^* and MAN IN BLACK^* for The New Yorker and in agreement with your using the sub-title Cambridge, England under WATERCOLOR.

I am dubious about altering the last line of stanza 1 in WATERCOLOR. I mean “of good color” as an adverbial phrase parallel with “nimble-winged”, the gist being “flits nimble-winged and colorful thickets”. Is this grammatically possible and understandable? I am bothered by adding “is” after “and” because it alters my meaning and, I think, holds up the movement of the line, which I hope can be read “flits nimble-winged . . . and (flits) of good color”. I very much hope it may be possible to do without adding “is”.

With all good wishes,

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Alice Norma Davis

Tuesday 28 April 1959

TLS, Smith College Archives

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

April 28, 1959

Miss Alice Norma Davis

Director

The Vocational Office

Smith College Northampton, Massachusetts

Dear Miss Davis:

Since your last letter of September 23rd I have had no word from you about jobs in Boston and Cambridge.

Now that summer is coming round I wonder whether any full-time or part-time jobs in Boston or Cambridge will be available, through your office, for the summer months. I should very much appreciate your letting me know roughly how much chance I stand of finding summer work^* through the Vocational Office, if that is possible.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath Hughes, 1955

TO Esther & Leonard Baskin

Tuesday 28 April 1959

TLS, British Library

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

April 28, 1959

Dear Esther & Leonard,

It was very good seeing you both, the Man With Owl,^* and the lovely Tobias, and the Fire too, a week ago Friday.^* We came back weary from our trip, mammoth stay-at-homes as we are, and are just now recovering, having slept 12 hours a night for the last week. It is so good to get back to work with no people no phonecalls no nothing.

What do you hear about the Night Animals. We are eager to get a copy of the book in our hands: tell the estimable Miss McLeod to get out her printed contracts and bind herself to something that will surpass Reid,^* Shahn & Co. Ted is working on a children’s book himself tentatively called Meet My Folks, poems about various mad relatives. Also a collection of Oriental fox stories (he thinks he may put a badger or two in as he likes them immensely, but I say just foxes, and then a whole book for badgers, they’re fat enough). He is delighted with the prospect of four months more here ever since he discovered (last week) that an old red fox had made its abode under the Boston State House, tunnelling mysteriously about until unearthed by somebody from the Animal Rescue League.

Leonard, I want to ask you would you let me dedicate my poem “Sculptor” (which should be on that mimeographed sheet^* we left with you) to you? It was written for you, but I felt you might not like the poem. I have not any poems dedicated to anyone, but would like to say: To Leonard Baskin under the title. Ted has given “Esther’s Tomcat” to the world & this is what I would like to do with “Sculptor”. I know parts of it are rank falsehood, for you claim to have no dreams, but let me know if you are willing, it would mean a very great deal. Rather like some lady from the Botteghe Oscure asking Michelange if she might dedicate a canzone to him, but then.

We will drive up again to see you before or after our two months at Yaddo.

Love to you both, & Tobias,

Sylvia & Ted

TO Emilie McLeod

Saturday 2 May 1959

TLS (photocopy), Yale University

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

May 2, 1959

Mrs. Emilie W. McLeod

Editor, Children’s Books

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

8 Arlington Street

Boston 16, Massachusetts

Dear Mrs. McLeod,

I’m sending along The Bed Book.^* I hope you may have as much fun reading it as I had writing it. I wrote verses about 10 beds in detail, as a kind of dialogue between Wide-Awake Will and Stay-Uppity Sue.^* I think an illustrator would have a good time with it, and I tried to make it very pictorial, a few lines, or at most, a verse or so, for each possible picture.

At any rate, let me know what you think of it, and I’ll be grateful for any criticism you may have---too many beds, too few, too what-ever-it-is. I’d be happy to do more work on it if you think it might help.

Ted is in the middle of “Meet My Folks”, the book of rhymes about weird relatives, and doing research on Fox Tales of the Orient, which goes more slowly. He should have both of these done some time this summer.

With all good wishes,

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Edward Weeks

Thursday 7 May 1959

TLS (photocopy), Yale University

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

May 7, 1959

Mr. Edward Weeks

Editor

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

8 Arlington Street

Boston 16, Massachusetts

Dear Mr. Weeks:

I am enclosing a selection of recent poems,^* set variously in Massachusetts, England and Spain, in hopes that you may like something among them enough for publication in the Atlantic. Perhaps “Alicante Lullaby” might be considered under Light Verse in the “Accent on Living.”

With all good wishes, I am

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO William Maxwell^*

Friday 22 May 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

May 22, 1959

Mr. William Maxwell

THE NEW YORKER

25 West 43rd Street

New York 36, New York

Dear Mr. Maxwell:

I am sending along to you, at the suggestion of Alfred Kazin, two stories---“Sweetie Pie And The Gutter Men” and “The Shadow”---in hopes that you may consider them for publication in The New Yorker.

Although I have had poems published in The New Yorker, I have not previously sent in any fiction. Other stories of mine have appeared in Seventeen and Mademoiselle.

With all good wishes, I am

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Edith & William Hughes

Sunday 24 May 1959

TLS, Family owned

Sunday

May 24, 1959

Dear Ted’s mother & dad,

Well, it is at last cool again, after a record heat spell which had Ted & me sitting sweltering in front of our fan drinking bottles of iced beer. It is a pleasant grey Sunday and very quiet and peaceful, and from where I sit I can see the green leaves of the Public Gardens across the roofs of the red brick buildings. We have just put $1,250 in the bank, the first quarter of Ted’s Guggenheim money, and are feeling that pleasant sense of well-being which comes from knowing there is money coming in for the whole next year and nothing to worry about.

We had Herbert Hitchen^* here yesterday, the Unitarian minister from Northampton, born in Yorkshire, who reminds us in many ways of Uncle Walt. He is full of stories and good humor and has done all sorts of things, farming, visiting the concentration camps on a relief mission after the war, and knows, or did know, all the poets in England & America and has an amazing collection of poetry & Irish books.^* We are going to the annual New England Poetry Society “Golden Rose” meeting tomorrow as his guest at the Harvard Faculty Club---that is where Ted read the other week and was so enthusiastically received.

The prospect of driving to California and Mexico---if we can only get our apartment sublet for those two summer months---is making us work harder than ever. We have both finished books of verse-stories for children & are waiting to hear about them, both about finished a book of poems, and Ted is finishing his play, and I several stories which are better than any I have written yet. I have had a second article accepted^* by the Christian Science Monitor, that international newspaper, called “A Walk To Withens” and it is about Ted & me going to Wuthering Heights. I’ll send you a clipping when it comes out.

I am finishing up my part-time job as secretary to the Chairman of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard, very interesting work, as he is also the head of a wealthy family Hotel Spa in Virginia, and I write his lecture notes up about India, and letters to monks and Buddhists, and letters about ski lodges and snow-making machines. I just work two or three afternoons a week which is about right.

Did I tell you I am braiding a rug of strips of colored wool I get from Mill End Shops? It is very bright and cheerful & Ted likes it. He is fine, and I just got him a red & black wool sweater which looks wonderful on him.

Love to all,

Sylvia

TO Gerald & Joan Hughes

Sunday 24 May 1959

TLS, Indiana University

Sunday May 24

Dear Gerald & Joan,

It was so good to hear from you. We are both very relieved that the jet airport will not take your house---the thought that they might made me curse every jet I heard breaking the sound barrier overhead ‘Maybe that is one of Gerald & Joan’s jets,” thought I, “Blast them.” We are thinking at present of getting a big house in the country outside London. As if we could afford it. But this Guggenheim money will pay our fares back to England and a year’s writing, which will earn us heaven knows how much. Ideally, we’d like a house both in England & America, but we’ll start with England---and enjoy staying close to Europe, as it seems as far as the moon from here.

We plan to take a camping trip this summer, borrowing my mother’s car, to California and Mexico, through all the big national parks. I am very excited about this, and so is Ted, as we’ve never seen anything west of New York. Then we will go for September & October to this castle Artists’ Colony in New York State where we have both been invited to spend two free months writing. I won’t have to shop or cook, which will be a wonderful change, although I’ll probably be dying for a homemade cheese cake or fish chowder after a week. We plan to write up all our summer experiences there, then sail for England sometime in the winter.

Ted & I have both finished writing books of verse for children & are hoping to sell them here. His is called “Meet My Folks”, 8 very funny rhymes about a zany family. Mine is called “The Bed Book”, about ten fantastic beds this little brother & sister dream up so going to bed would be interesting: they are terrible children and would stay up till midnight if their parents didn’t give them opium or something. Ted’s finishing his play, and I am finishing a couple of short stories. My ambition at this point is to get a story in the New Yorker. They have taken two more poems, so this year I have earned over $500 from them, for only 4 poems, which is rare pay. I’ve also got a second free-lance article accepted by The Christian Science Monitor, that international newspaper, and as they pay up to $50 an article, I hope to capitalize by writing our experiences up this summer.

Ted is thriving. He is handsomer than ever. I just got him a red & black-weave wool sweater which looks marvelous on him. And a couple of hopsacking neckties. If he has any faults they are not shutting the icebox (a kind of subconscious revenge on American appliances) and knotting his clothes up in unknottable balls and hurling them about the floor of the room every evening before retiring. Oh yes, and the occasional black Moods when he pretends the cat’s ear is broken or that the air is full of Strontium 90. Other than these minor foibles he is extremely good-natured, thoughtful and almost normal. He eats well, too, although he complains that I am trying to kill him with protein diet (after he has come home from a friend’s house this is, and eaten a 7 course dinner topped off by a layer cake saturated with brandy) and also that I hide things and secretly destroy them: i.e., mislaid papers, certain books, old coats, letters from the British tax authorities. I bear up as well as I am able.

I wish we could see you. If I ever get a Guggenheim we will come by packet boat to Australia for a visit. Couldn’t you ever ever fly to England? For a visit? I hope we won’t all be white-haired by the time we meet.

Do write us again soon. Send pictures of you & the children.

With love to all,

Sylvia

TO Olwyn Hughes

c. Monday 25 May 1959^*

TLS (incomplete), British Library

I have done four stories^* this year which I am very pleased with, and am working on a fifth, and hope to get some response from them eventually as I send them around. I’ve been publishing a good bit in the Christian Science Monitor & they’ve accepted a second article from me about Withens, so I should get up to $50 for each article I do them, and plan to write a ream during our trip this summer. My big ambition at this point, besides, of course, getting a book published, is to have a story accepted by the New Yorker. They pay fabulously, and have much work, especially the long biographical articles and articles by AJ Liebling,^* which I admire immensely. Well, in 10 years of hard work at the trade, that may come. And suddenly my typewriter will turn to solid gold and the keys play the Eroica^* or something equivalent.

In my teatimes I am braiding a rug of brightly colored wool remnants which I get from a Mill End Place and cut to size, and Ted is delighted with it. I find a great peace in working on it, as if all my worries and bothers flowed away in to the fabric and turned into bright-colored patterns, and Ted reads me Shakespeare while I work, so it is much fun.

I’m finishing my job as secretary to the head of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard, and I’ll miss my boss---I only go 3 afternoons a week, so that is just enough to be fun, and I do his lecture notes up and letters to Buddhist monks and ad men and night watchmen and Governors of Virginia etc., as he is not only a teacher, professor, rather, an editor, writer, and father and speaker of Sanskrit, but the President of a Corporation and head of a fabulously wealthy Virginia Spa which is now making itself a ski-lodge and hiring a snow-maker to boot in the far south. The letters I do are much fun and I feel that, incognito, I have much insight into his family matters. He has an aunt who is a Lady in London, and earns, on the income tax forms I typed up for him, over $30,000 a year, and is always getting me to write the stock markets, selling hundreds of shares of National Can and buying Sheraton this or that. Well, enough. A rather special man for a professor.

Here is a heavenly sponge cake recipe which you should make in a high cake pan with a funnel in the center so the cake has a hole in the middle:

6 eggs (separate)

1½ cups sugar (sifted)

1⅓ cups cake flour

1½ teaspoons baking powder

¼ teaspoon salt

6 tablespoons water

½ teaspoon lemon extract

1 teaspoon vanilla

Directions for sponge cake: Beat yolks till lemon colored. Add sugar gradually. Add water & flavoring. Beat. Add flour gradually, beating.

Beat egg whites to froth; add baking powder and salt to frothy egg whites. Beat until very stiff. Fold gently, but thoroly into egg yolk mixture. Sprinkle granulated sugar lightly over top of cake before putting it in the oven.

Bake for one hour at 325°. Do not remove cake from pan till cake is cold.

Happy eating,

love

Sylvia

TO Seymour Lawrence^*

Saturday 30 May 1959

TLS (photocopy), Yale University

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

May 30, 1959

Mr. Seymour Lawrence

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY

8 Arlington Street

Boston, Massachusetts

Dear Sam:

I am sending along two stories---THIS EARTH OUR HOSPITAL and ABOVE THE OXBOW---which I hope may interest you for possible publication in The Atlantic Monthly.

With the last manuscript I sent in, I waited over half a year for a No, and I wonder if I could get a faster verdict this time.

All good wishes to you and your wife,^*

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Frederick Morgan

Monday 1 June 1959

TLS, Princeton University

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

June 1, 1959

Mr. Frederick Morgan

THE HUDSON REVIEW

65 East 55th Street

New York 22, New York

Dear Mr. Morgan:

I am happy to hear you are taking four of my poems^* for THE HUDSON REVIEW, and particularly happy you have chosen the ones you did.

Here are some biographical notes: Born in Boston, 1932. B.A. from Smith College, 1955, and Cambridge University, 1957 (Fulbright Grant to England from 1955-1957). Instructor of English at Smith College, 1957-58. Secretary, Adult Psychiatric Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, 1958. Secretary to Chairman of Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard, 1959.

Poems of mine have appeared in Accent, The Antioch Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Audience, Harper’s, The London Magazine, Mademoiselle, The Nation, The New Orleans Poetry Journal, The New Mexico Quarterly, The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago) and The Spectator.^* Other poems are scheduled to appear shortly in Arts in Society,^* The Partisan Review,^* The Sewanee Review.

After July 1st, my address will be: 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Emilie McLeod

Thursday 11 June 1959

TLS (photocopy), Yale University

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

June 11, 1959

Mrs. Emilie W. McLeod

Editor of Children’s Books

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS

8 Arlington Street

Boston 16, Massachusetts

Dear Mrs. McLeod:

I was so happy to get your good letter^* today. After a month away from Sue and Will I find them bothersome and your ideas for alteration stimulating and right. I have already begun revising along the lines you suggested, dropping the two children out, and the narrative line, and adding a verse or two for a loose (very loose) continuity.

It is exciting to see how much brisker and more fluid the book becomes by doing this. At this rate, I should have a revised version ready for you to look at next week. I hope you think the changes make for a better book. Ted wonders if there should be more beds, but I think you can judge from the Ten here, and those I mention at the beginning, whether you think the ms. stands as is.

I think what I may do is hold the ms. and give it to you when I see you. I’ve left a message today at your office for you to call me, and Ted and I would like so much to see you before you go to Palo Alto. The secretary said you come in Tuesdays and/or Wednesdays, and we’d be around any time after two Tuesday, & on Wednesday (Ted would be in all day, if you called). Other days are pretty free also, as we are working like fury on finishing our projects, hoping to start a camping trip to California and Mexico by about July 1st.

I may, if I get through to my satisfaction, send along the book to your office anyway at the beginning of the week and so perhaps it will be on your desk when you come in. In any case, do call during your day up here and let’s try to get together.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Ann Davidow-Goodman

Friday 12 June 1959

TLS with envelope, Smith College

Suite 61

9 Willow Street

Boston 8, Massachusetts

June 12, 1959

Dear Ann,

It was wonderful to get your letter. I have withered to one of my silent centers where I feel very untalkative and so will simply say please come to Boston at the end of June. We are trying to sublet our place (as is everybody else in Boston) for July and August and if we are lucky enough to sell our view, height, light, air, peace and “Isn’t-it-just-like-the-rooftopsof-Paris” aura we will be taking a camping trip to California and Mexico via National Parks and Pacific Ocean for those 8 weeks. But we’ll be sure to be around upto the end of June. As I probably told you, our two rooms are so small we are constantly sitting on the cat, or I would ask you to stay here nights. But you would probably be happier in a Room of Your Own anyway nearby and we’d count on you here for meals, and I personally would count on talks on Public Garden Benches, etc. Funny, how little time we ever spent together, and yet how I feel you are one of Those Few People I really can talk to.

I wish you would bring samples of Let’s Draw.^* I’m amazed myself you don’t rival Rosalind Welcher and her intellectual greeting cards, after that marvelous Christmas piece you sent.

I have finished my 9 page single- (I mean, double, but I am trying to pad it) spaced first book for Children, as I may have told you, about 10 fantastic and exotic beds. I think it would be highly amusing to have the first book I published (if ever) called the Bed Book, which this one is. Based on the fiction that children’s beds, by nature of their age, are dull, merely for sleeping or resting, I rhyme, very simply, 200 two-beat lines about these queer beds. I have got the ms. back from the first place I sent it, a Press across the Public Garden^* that produces only 4 children’s books a year, so is a backwater of sorts, but also choosy, and the editor asked me to leave out the narrative frame & the brother & sister I had talking about the beds, so I’ve done this, and it seems better, and they asked to see it afterwards. The only trouble with this place is that their illustrators are generally completely without color and verve, to put it clearly, lousy. IF they accepted it (I’d actually, ideally, want a live place like Knopf or Macmillan or such) I’d try to beg them to line up Maurice Sendak^* or Joseph Low^* or Roger Duvoisin^* or whichever one of the Will & Nicholas^* duo does the drawings, but for a first book I suppose I would eat crow just to get it published. Only pictures mean so much for a children’s book; make or break it.

I am currently quite gloomy about this poetry book of about 46 poems, 37 of them published (and all written since college, which means leaving out lots of published juvenalia). I just got word from the annual Yale Contest that I “missed by a whisper”, and it so happened that a louse of a guy^* I know personally, who writes very glib light verse with no stomach to them, won, and he lives around the corner & is an Editor at a good publishing house here, and I have that very annoying feeling which it is tempting to write off as sour grapes that my book was deeper, if more grim, and all those other feelings of thwart. I don’t want to try a novel until I feel I am writing good salable short stories for the simple reason that the time, sweat and tears involved in a 300 page book which is rejected all round is too large to cope with while I have the book of Poems kicking about. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don’t have pure motives (oh-it’s-suchfun-I-just-can’t-stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used it solely as a love-and admiration-getting mechanism (bless my psychiatrist). But I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.

Slowly, slowly, I write poems and they are about cadavers, suicides, Electra complexes, ouija boards, hermits, fat spinsters, thin spinsters, ghosts, old men of the sea, and, yes, fiddler crabs and mammoth pigs. They sell to magazines, I have broken in to the Partisan, the Hudson, the Sewanee Reviews this year and how nice. Only Poetry Books are a losing business: there are two annual award-and-publishing contests a year which assure the book reviews, purchase by book stores, notice. Other than that, there is the list of publishers, most of whom publish one book a year to prove they are furthering the unlucrative arts, and that usually by somebody who has done novels, or sellers already for them. Tra-la. I must stop this. I have a Little List of places where I must send the damn thing. It is called “The Devil Of The Stairs”.^* The 6th title.

Please let me know when you are coming. The earlier in June the better. If youda stayed in Chicago Ida come to you this summa.

With best love,

Syl

PS: our phone number is LAfayette 3-2843 & Willow Street is the bar of an “H” between Mt. Vernon St. & Chestnut St., overlooking the oh-soelegant Louisburg Square.

TO John Lehmann

Tuesday 16 June 1959

TLS, University of Texas at Austin

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Massachusetts

June 16, 1959

Mr. John Lehmann

LONDON MAGAZINE

36 Soho Square

London W.1, England

Dear Mr. Lehmann:

I am enclosing a group of recent poems^* in hopes you may like something among them enough for publication in THE LONDON MAGAZINE.

Ted and I are both working hard now on some stories and I think we may come up with something good enough to show you late this summer or in early fall. Ted’s stories are set in Yorkshire, and I find them quite exciting---a new departure for him---and I am hoping to get him to give me some of his re-revisions final enough for me to type up.

With all good wishes from both of us,

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

P.S. We may be reached at the above address for the next half year or so.

TO Critical Quarterly

Friday 19 June 1959

TLS, Private owner

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Mass.

June 19, 1959

Proofs^* corrected and enclosed.

Please note change of address to the above and send author’s copies of the issue in which these poems appear together with the check to me at the above address.

Thank you.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Ann Davidow-Goodman

Thursday 25 June 1959

TLS with envelope, Smith College

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Mass.

June 25, 1959

Dear Ann,

By now you must be about to leave. We’d probably be here on the 29th, but in a state of chaos, and probably you better stick by your friend. We are plugging our children’s books. I go see an editor at the Atlantic Press tomorrow, probably to get a rejection. Ever since an old jealous would-be-poet “friend” of mine, a very weak mixed-up male, got on their staff they’ve been rejecting my poems and publishing his (he publishes nowhere else)^* and I am sure he would die if I ever turned out a publishable novel. Ted has got one rejection for his kids’ book from his poetry publishers, Harper’s, which has a very lively children’s department, but practically the same day T. S. Eliot wrote from the publishers he works for in England and said he liked it but felt it needed final polishing which he was suggesting on the ms, more exact rhymes & rhythms in some places. We are framing the letter. I never trust anybody until there is a signed contract.

Am just back from buying sleeping bags, camp stove etc. All we need is a tent and twenty bush natives to carry corn niblets and beer.

Write us at the above address (my safe home address) from England and make Ted homesick.

We will take a large raincheck on seeing you.

Love,

Syl

TO Poetry Editor, Accent

c. Monday 29 June 1959^*

TLS, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

To Poetry Editor, ACCENT

I’m sending along a batch of recent poems^* in hopes you may like something well enough for publication in ACCENT. My new address is: 26 Elmwood Road Wellesley, Massachusetts

With all good wishes,

Sylvia Plath

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Thursday 9 July 1959^*

ALS (postcard), Indiana University

Thursday

July 9th

Dear mother –

Look at your map of the USA & Canada to the large green section of Algonquin Park in Ontario. I am writing this from a great rock facing the setting sun surrounded by nothing but soughing birches & pines overlooking Rock Lake one of the ‘wildest’ campsites here – 4 miles off a dirt road under the bend of Route 60. We arrived here about tea-time yesterday after crossing the St. Lawrence River & Customs & like it so much – we found a fine tent site right on the lake between two birches so the car is in the shade, rented a rowboat & last night rowed (the only people on the huge lake) under the stars & new moon on mirror-clear water. Our 1st night stop was in Whetstone Gulf in upstate New York between Boonville & Lowville on your map.^* We fished all day today in perfectly deserted & lovely waters under great cliffs but caught nothing though we had many bites & lost lots of worms. Our camp-to-camp route involves much 10 hour driving so we are going to try spending a day or two after long stretches as we are doing now. The car is doing fine & we are thriving – hoping for more fishing & nature-trail walks tomorrow – then on to Sault Ste Marie & the long haul to Yellowstone

Sivvy

TO Warren Plath

Thursday 9 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

Thursday – July 9

Dear Warren

Just wrote a USA-stamped card to mother & realized I can’t mail it in Canada. We are camped on Rock Lake, right at water’s edge with our own little beach; birch trees & rented rowboat – fished (caught nil, tho’ the man right next door’s wife caught 2 big lake trout) & had a fine time exploring our corner of this big lake – the park is full of lakes & very wild (Algonquin Park). We saw a baby raccoon where we stopped our 1st night in upstate New York. Picked wonderful wild blueberries at sunset over the lake. You & mother should try camping up here. Our equipment works fine – we have all we need of it.

With love,

sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Saturday 11 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

<Picture postcard caption: A view from the highway in Algonquin

Provincial Park: showing Lake of Two Rivers.>

Saturday

Dear Mother –

Ted & I are lunching in the sun in a meadow ten miles south of North Bay in Canada. Have had fine weather. Yesterday spent all day in our rowboat on Rock Lake under stone cliffs catching lots & lots of small lake perch – saved 11 of the largest & fried them for supper by the lakeside – desert being blueberries we picked on the high rock ledges. Today got up to the sound of loons at six – took a two mile ‘nature trail’ walk & fed lovely reddish deer from our hands with our leftover blueberries. One stuck its head in the car window & licked Ted’s face! We hope our pictures of this come out well – Now—on to Sault Ste Marie – follow us on your map! Will call Sunday

xxx

Sivvy

TO Joseph & Dorothy Benotti

Saturday 11 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

<Picture postcard caption: Oxtongue Lake Bridge on Highway #60,

near Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada.>

Saturday: July 11

Dear Dotty & Joe . . .

We’re driving west in Canada in the general direction of Yellowstone Park after two fine days tenting by Rock Lake at Algonquin Park – an unspoiled green wilderness where deer came down to the lake to drink & eat blueberries out of our hands. Spent 2 days rowing & fishing – caught enough small perch for a fish-fry supper. The weather & country are wonderful –

Love to all –

Sivvy & Ted

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Sunday 12 July 1959

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Near Sault Saint Marie, Michigan

Brimley State Park

July 12: Sunday

Dear mother,

It was so good to hear your voice today and get the news. I am especially happy to hear that my poem “The Thin People”---a long one---was accepted, and delighted about the acceptance from the Times Literary Supplement^*---my first from there, and a very good paper. I also like the poems they chose. It has just begun to rain---our first rain while actually with our tent up, but we had a wonderful morning here, heating big pots of water & giving ourselves thorough sponge baths and I managed to get a hand laundry hung up on my line (clothesline stretching from our porch tent poles to a tree) and am now sitting snug in the shelter of the porch flap out in front of the tent, facing directly out to Whitefish Bay, not 50 yards from my seat on the comfortable picnic-table-bench combination supplied by the Park. Ted is inside the tent curled up on the airmattresses (actually the very most comfortable bed we have ever slept in!) reading and writing.

Already we feel we have been put to several tests and passed them all. Today I feel really rested and we are staying here tonight and Monday night in preparation for the long drives to Yellowstone which we hope to reach Friday or Saturday. We find it better to drive long stretches---yesterday’s was the longest, I hope---about 400 miles from Algonquin Park up route 60 & 11 to North Bay and from there to Sault Ste. Marie, by ferry across the St. Mary River to Michigan’s Sault St. Marie and out along dirt roads by the light of the moon to Brimley, which looks right across to Canada and the Bay which opens up into Lake Superior: I can’t see the other shore! And it feels like the ocean. Freight boats passing through the Soo Locks (which we hope to visit tomorrow) hoo and whoo companionably out on the horizon line. We thought nothing could beat our setup at Algonquin Park, but this is even more scenic: it’s so exciting to cook & do dishes right in the open with a wonderful view. Tonight I have promised Ted some Aunt Jemima pancakes and bacon, blueberry pancakes, with what we have left over in the way of berries from what the deer ate yesterday. Today seagulls cry directly overhead, resting on various tent poles. The camp was full last night when we drove in late---something we will never do again on a Saturday! so we found a rather makeshift spot down the road, and drove in at 9 to find lots of empty space, and maneuvered for what I feel like the best view among the 100 or so odd sites. It is really pouring now, and I am warm in my navy sweater & Ted’s khaki jacket. I feel sorry for those people who are just trying to set up camp now. I had ample time to air out all our bedding and towels. We are as happy as we have ever been. We drive alternating 2 hour stretches at the beginning of the day, and 1 hour stretches at the end, having tea, coffee, and snacks to break the intervals, and this is marvelously reviving. So far we have had three long drives: the one to Whetstone Gulf, New York (between Boonville and Lowville), then to Rock Lake, Algonquin Park, Canada, and then from there to Brimley, Michigan. We have roughly outlined a trip now from here to Iron River, Abercrombie (south of Fargo), and the Theodore Roosevelt Park to Yellowstone, all involving long drives, then to Salt Lake City with a stop between there and San Francisco. We plan to drive long laps, and then rest for a few whole days, wash, write, boat, fish, sun, swim and see sights, every 5 or 7 days or so. This is much better than driving 6 hours every day (and camping sites don’t come up so often) and having only two hours everywhere. Yesterday we left our campsite in Canada at 8, having a lovely breakfast there, went on a 2-mile nature hike in the park, fed the deer, and really started driving about 10. We went through unbelievable stretches of country, unpeopled, green, with lakes and rivers everywhere. I am amazed at the terrible shoddiness of Canadian towns. They are literally all gas stations---a straight, flat pitted road down the center, with 10 to twenty gas stations, tar-paper shacks (I saw no real houses except in North Bay and Sault Ste. Marie, and those were ugly, if solid) and an amazing number of trailer camps. Ted and I counted 100 big aluminum trailers on the road in less than an hour. The only virtue of the place seems the country: the amazing three-dimensional skies with masses of sculptured cloud stretching away on all sides, mountains of conifers, fields of cows. And at every turn vistas of forest and water. The roads in a few places were under repair and a bit rough: the repaired ones were good: narrow but smooth, and often very straight, telephone poles diminishing toward the horizon. We felt the country was being invented before our eyes: a thin ribbon of gas stations and trailer camps and shacks flung up hastily in an immense and uncivilizable wilderness. I have never seen such masses of untouched land. An interesting thing was that everybody we spoke to in Algonquin Park had thick European accents: Germans, Dutch, Chinese too, all becoming “New Canadians”. The country certainly does need men to develop it. Off the main ribbon of road all roads were dirt! I would like to drive up into eastern Canada someday: Quebec and Montreal must have a kind of culture of their own. The peculiar mindlessness of the Canadian scene impressed me: no books, no theaters, no libraries to be seen.

We crossed with our car on the little ferry operating between the two Sault Ste. Maries, at sunset, a spectacular view, and crossed the timebelt. Luckily for us we gained an hour: now we are on Central Time.

What amazes me most is our perfect satisfaction with all our equipment: for people who never camped, and so extensively, we have everything we need right to hand: our labeled foodboxes are like drawers. We can stop by a roadside in midafternoon and have tea and biscuits and cheese in ten minutes on our excellent stove, a real jewel. We change ice every day & all keeps cool in our refrigerator. Our tent is sturdy, Ted puts it up in ten minutes, and the raindrops just roll off it. As I said, our mattresses are like great featherbeds, and our sleeping bags wonderfully warm and light. For some reason, every time we pack the car we have more room, and it is like a house on wheels. Both of us are in excellent health, eating well (we treated ourselves to a steak dinner on completion of our long trek to Sault Saint Marie at a dimly lit diner). Except for a few insect bites around the ankles and neck we got when blueberrying (which stop itching immediately when we apply Caladryl) we are unscathed by chiggers, snakes or vampires. My first aid kit has everything we need, all in my small grey traveling case. The wash ’n dris are a blessing enroute.^* Hot tea, a devilled egg and a face wash at 11 am or 4 pm can make one feel altogether freshened up. And the people who come to these camps are very quiet, keep to themselves, so even though there are tents to be seen in every direction, one is perfectly private. And the small children go to bed at sundown, so it is peaceful early.

Now we shall arrive in Yellowstone on either the 17th (Friday) or the 18th (Saturday) and I am going to see if we can pick up mail there. Tentatively we shall leave Wednesday morning July 22 for California and should be at Aunt Frieda’s (also tentatively) about Saturday July 25th, or a day or two later, as we plan to spend some time in California, seeing San Francisco, camping on the coast, visiting friends in Los Angeles overnight, and Disneyland, before we go on to the Grand Canyon.

It has stopped raining & the sun is shining, all fresh and cool. California looks so lovely, with so many parks, I hardly can choose between them. Maybe we’ll stay there and send the car back on it’s own!

Aunt Frieda’s address^* is the one you better send all our mail to, we’ll arrive there on the 25th or 26th as I said. Our next address will probably be Sewanee, Tennesee. Sundays I’ll call about 6 or 7 in the evening.

Do make a chart of all poems accepted, etc. & send a carbon of it to Frieda as far as you’ve got it done in about 10 days.

Much love to you & Warren,

and thanks so much for your

wonderful help in getting off on

our trip,

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Tuesday 14 July 1959^*

ALS (postcard), Indiana University

Tuesday: July 14th

Dear mother . . .

It is 5:30 pm & I am sitting in bright sun on a hayfield hilltop before our newly pitched tent looking through the branches of birch & appletrees into the glittering blue waters of Lake Superior which stretch to the horizon like a great sea. We decided to be adventurous & try asking for a tentsite at a farmhouse & chose the most beautiful we have seen – just north of Cornucopia, Wis. We got up at 4:30 am & left Brimley by 5 driving through farms & woods. We saw, at 7:40 am our first BEAR! standing up right at the roadside before a wooded area, ears pointed alertly, big & black – no park bear! It made our day. A deer bounded out at us a little later. We have fallen in love with Wisconsin – it is so uncommercialized – unlike Michigan – all bluegreen woods & lovely farms – We have driven all day and not left Lake Superior! Cornucopia is on a peninsula just above Rte 2 at Iron River & we took it as a side route hoping to be lucky & find just such a place as this, by the lake. We had the car oil changed yesterday & a new muffler installed. Do send any gas credit cards that you may get to Aunt Frieda’s. Could you send a carbon of our publishing acceptances & rejections (with titles of poems rejected to the Central Post Office, (To Be Held: on it) at Yellowstone to reach there by July 22? Three more laps to Yellowstone!

Siv

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Thursday 16 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

<Picture postcard caption: K-5 LOOKOUT POINT, DEVIL’S ISLAND

IN THE APOSTLE ISLAND GROUP LAKE SUPERIOR.>

Thursday: July 16 – en route through North Dakota:

Fargo to Bismarck

Dear mother & Warren

With regrets we left our friendly family^* at dawn in Cornucopia. I had spent a morning drawing boats^* in the lovely harbor: our tent (we camped free for 2 nights) overlooked a point like this. We spent the afternoon fishing with Marcia, the Nozals 12-year old daughter – the family – including dog, cat, & ducklings – sat out in the apple orchard talking in the moonlight – Mr. Nozal, a commercial fisherman, is a wonderful storyteller – We ate blueberries, wild strawberries, perch I caught for supper – saw two red foxes on the road today. N. Dakota is amazingly flat, straight & yellow-green.

xxx

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Friday 17 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

<Picture postcard caption: Theodore Roosevelt

National Memorial Park.>

Friday: July 17: Medora, North Dakota –

We camped overnight in a grove of trees in a minute town just west of Jamestown, N. Dakota & rose at dawn to drive under spectacular skies – half blue & clear & half black lit by sheet lightening – through marvelous endless prairies, rich with cows & unpeopled to this beautiful spot – the ‘Badlands’ literally lept at us out of the prairies – we have a tent site in a grove of cottonwoods looking over the Little Missouri River at a scene much like this one – have seen two antelope & a prairie dog – shall search for buffalo this pm. In fine health & spirits

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Saturday 18 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

<Picture postcard caption: Deer graze peacefully

in their natural habitat.>

Custer, Montana – Saturday, 7/18

Dear mother:

I am writing this from a ‘café’ in a tiny town just an hour or so short of Billings – they served us a magnificent T-bone steak dinner for $2.50 & the lightest flakiest homemade boysenberry pie I have ever imagined. After a few mistakes, we are learning how to enter a strange town, sniff out its best piemaker & get a free campsite – tonight’s will be on the grounds of the Congregational Church – ‘they haven’t got it grassed yet,’ our waitress says. Saw wild deer like this grazing at dawn this morning & an eagle at Roosevelt Park. Ted typed his essay under the cottonwoods & we drove through Montanas yellow wheat & black earth fields stretching in alternate ebony & gold bands to the purple mesas on the horizon. Tomorrow: Yellowstone!

xxx

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Monday 20 July 1959^*

ALS (postcard), Indiana University

YELLOWSTONE PARK: July 20

Dear mother –

It was good to hear your voice yesterday – We were weary from our long 2-stage drive from the N. Dakota badlands up here – Montana being the most beautiful state yet, cool, dry, sunny, with gold wheat fields, alternating with black plowed earth fields, stretching literally in wide bands to the horizon of purple mesas. We ate steak & delicious homemade boysenberry pie in Custer & slept in the churchyard! Now we are camped in a tentsite on Yellowstone Lake – lucky as ever – moved in after a trailer-family that left early this am. Slept late – we look right across at snowcapped mountains. Off the road 300 yards is Wilderness. A herd of antelope crossed our path at the entrance. We counted 19 bears & cubs & saw two big moose. Almost caught a big pink trout in the river rapids last night. Just finished cooking a good breakfast – grapefruit & honey, bacon & eggs & fried potatoes & coffee – in our cool sunny pine grove. Neither of us have seen such wonderful country anywhere in the world. Flowers everywhere, & animals & snow – Will call Monday night the 27th

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Friday 24 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

On the road: after Kemmerer, Wyoming

Friday July 24

Dear mother & Warren –

A bear this size woke us by smashing the locked rear window of the car to smithereens at 3 am Wednesday & spent the night within a few feet of us knocking cans open, devouring cookies & oranges. There is no way to escape bears as against-the-rules feeding makes them bold & they live on the trash cans. We wet the window hole with kerosene the next 2 nights & were left at peace – having thought cars bearproof. Fished from a rowboat in Yellowstone Lake for 2 days & caught our limit (6) of big lake trout each time & are still eating them. Saw all the wonderful geysers – left Yellowstone at dawn & hope to reach Salt Lake City today

Sivvy

This card has a real bear print on it!

TO Joseph, Dorothy, Robert, & Nancy Benotti & Frank Schober

Friday 24 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

En route to Salt Lake City –

Friday July 24

Dear Dotty & Joe & Bobby & Nancy & Grampy

We drove along past this lovely mountain range at dawn today – leaving Yellowstone after 5 exciting days camping on Yellowstone Lake, seeing the geysers & boiling pools & fighting off bears – we saw moose, elk, & 67 bears. Our ice chest is crammed full of bright pink fillets of 1½-2 lb. lake trout we caught in 2 days from our rented rowboat – Just drove over the state line into Utah. Can’t wait to see California –

Love –

Sivvy & Ted

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Saturday 25 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard),^* Indiana University

Salt Lake City – July 25

Dear Mother –

Here we are having an oil change – please send the ms. from Knopf^* (not the Yale ms.^* as it is different) after checking page order etc. to:

Editor,

HARCOURT BRACE & CO

750 Third Avenue

New York 17, New York

With a stamped, Self-addressed brown envelope enclosed, no letter – both big manila envelopes marked EDUCATIONAL MATTER each with a 9 cent stamp which is the right rate. Tell me the date you send it.

Love,

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Sunday 26 July 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

Sunday 6:30 pm – Lake Tahoe California

July 26

Drove through arid Nevada gladly today from a night sleeping under the shooting stars among Sagebrush & grazing bulls. Cooked our last Yellowstone trout for lunch in the shade of the one roadside tree in all Nevada. Salt Lake desert at sunset spectacular! Heard the free noon organ concert in this Mormon Tabernacle & had great fun swimming in Salt Lake. Passed thru’ Reno without knowing it – thought it was Sparks – awfully ugly place. Nevada our least favorite state. Detoured to a Camp on Lake Tahoe – to ’Frisco tomorrow –

Love,

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Tuesday 28 July 1959

TLS, Indiana University

Tuesday, July 28, 1959

Dear mother & Warren:

It was so good to hear your voices last night. We were on a nonstop combination of highway and toll bridges about the time I had planned to call, so that’s why we were late. We had come on from Yellowstone, leaving early Friday morning. After the Bear Incident, that Tuesday night, we moved to a site a little higher up the camp, on a rise in the open sun, at a place where there were no garbage cans within 20 yards or so. We had been at the edge of the wood between the camp and Yellowstone lake and right at one of the very frequent garbage cans. The attitude towards bears at Yellowstone is a strange one. There are danger warnings everywhere about feeding bears---this is strictly prohibited by the rangers. Over 100 people are wounded by bears every summer. Yet all along the roads, bears are being fed by hand, coaxed to approach little Jimmy and stand up and smile so daddy can get the snapshot of the year, and so on. They do indeed look harmless and Teddyish, mooching along. Only to those who have encountered bears without bothering the bears does the great furry animal look ominous. We had left bears alone when we came back late from a drive around the Grand Loop seeing the geysers and pools to see the large shadow of a black bear almost up to its waist in the garbage can by our tent area. Although the garbage cans are like ours at home---in the ground and with metal lids---the bears are expert lid-flippers and make several visits along the can-circuit each night. The bear lumbered off through the camp at our headlights, and we cooked supper and went peacefully to bed, taking care to lock all our food up in the car and the trunk of the car and wash down the table and benches. At the blue moonlit hour of quarter of three I was wakened from a dream where the car blew to pieces with a great rending crash by an exactly (or at least very) similar crash and falling jangle. My immediate thought was that a bear had with one cuff demolished the car and was eating the engine out. I woke Ted and we lay for a few moments listening to the unique sounds of a bear rooting through our belongings. Grunts, snuffles, clattering can lids. We thought he might have somehow broken off the trunk door and got into our tinned supplies, divining food by a seventh sense. Then there was a bumpity rolling noise as the bear bowled a tin past our tent and I sat up quaking to peer out the tent screen. There in the blue wierd light of the moon not ten feet away a huge dark bear-shape hunched, guzzling at a tin. I found in the morning that it was the black-and-gilt figured cookie tin we took the date-nut bars in: it had been in the back seat of the car in my red bag, shut, full of ritz crackers and Hydrox cookies, and some postcards. The bear must have lifted out the bag after smashing the window, rolled the can about till the lid came off, undone the wax paper and eaten every last crumb. I found the postcards the next day, lying among the rubble, the top card of moose antlers turned down and face-up the card of a large bear with an actual bear paw-print on it. We lay there for what seemed years, wondering if the bear would eat us since it found our crackers so interesting. Just as we were relaxing and felt the dawn starting to lighten, we heard a heavy shuffling tread.

The bear, back from its rounds, had returned to the car. Ted stood up to look out the back window---it was all I could do to keep him from going out before to check on the damage---and reported that the bear was at the back of the car, halfway in the left rear window. It had discovered our oranges. From then until sunup we lay listening to the bear squeeze the oranges open and slurp up the juice---it was interrupted only by a car which drove by and scared it to run toward the front door of our tent. It tripped on the guy ropes anchoring our porch and for a moment the whole tent shook so we thought it had decided to come in. Then there was a long silence. Then more orange-squeezing. We got up rather shaken. The car window had been shattered down to the root, and wiry brown bear hairs stuck all along the edge of it. Amazingly, the story got around camp. An old regular came up to advise us that bears hated kerosene and to smear all our window frames with that. Another said bears hated red pepper. Well, we felt we had the daylight hours to build a fortress against our enemy who would indubitably return. So we moved some sites up, which cheered us. Then we packed everything of value and all food in the trunk. We reported the accident to the ranger, who recorded it, so it’s there if the insurance people need it, and he was very noncommittal. I mentioned the incident to a woman up early in the lavatory, and she seemed very disquieted by my report of the broken window. It turned out she had just moved from West Thumb, another camp, where a woman had been killed by a bear Sunday, the night we came. The woman, hearing the bear at her food at night, had gone out with a flashlight to shoo it away and it turned on her and downed her with one vicious cuff. Naturally the story was hushed up by the rangers, but this woman who had been “sleeping under the stars” with her husband, felt concerned; especially since a bear growled them into flight when they hesitated about sharing their breakfast with it. Well, this story put proper concern into us too. By twilight we had the car kerosened, flung red pepper everywhere, sprayed Fly-Ded all about, drank ovaltine and took a tranquilizer each---which I had been saving for the Donner Pass, and went to bed at 9 pm to the usual shouts: “There it is”, “Up there, a bear!” That night everybody banged the bear away with pans, for they run at noise; our story had got around. We slept the sleep of the blessed and the bear did not touch our kerosene-soaked poncho sealing the broken window. The next night the population of the camp had changed with movings in and out, and there was the old casualness, people photographing the bear, etc. We stayed an extra day, Thursday, and fished from a rowboat, catching our limit of 6 fine trout in 5 hours, throwing all the little ones away that we would have been excited about in Canada. This rested us fine, and we left Yellowstone Friday, driving through the beautiful Teton range, stopping to take a few pictures. We drove through rolling prairies and open ranges, and at about 5 the scenery suddenly changed (this amazes us---the queer immediate way each state asserts its own individuality) and was green and fertile, and we were in Utah. We crossed the Wasatch range, coasted downhill 10 straight miles, and Salt Lake City lay under us like a dream, all one story, green-lawned little homes. Unluckily for our repair of the window we arrived on Pioneer Day, a holiday, when Brigham Young first entered the valley. So we took a long winding road up one of the canyons, Big Cottonwood Canyon, and camped at the last site left at “Spruces”. By then it was dark. Making sure from the ranger there were no bears about, (“Just some thieves”) we rearranged our car in order again after our emergency crowding of the trunk. A white kitten walked across to us, with orange and black splotches, as if it owned us. So we fed it milk and tuna, and it stayed with us until we left. Evidently someone had lost it there. We have got to be experts on camp facilities. Prefer places with a view, near water, out in the open, with good lavatories. This place was rather dank and had not been cleaned out over the holidays. Yellowstone, in our loop at Fishing Bridge Camp Ground, right on the lake, was most sumptuous: mirrors, flush toilets, and hot water: all washed out every day. We reveled in this, washed clothes, etc., and did a load at the laundromat. Hope to do the same in San Francisco.

We slept late after our long drive from Yellowstone, treated ourselves to the best Kentucky fried chicken, rolls & honey, potatoes and gravy, I have ever eaten. Then drove out to the Salt Lake, a great molten silver body of water 14 miles from city limits, with a blue horizon line. Although it was a Saturday, very few people were at the two beach “resorts”---piers perched close together with fresh water showers and beer and hotdog stands. We walked over the ill-smelling grey-crusted salt flats into the water which rolled in, but never crested to a whitecap. The water tasted fantastically salt, and stung badly if splashed in the eyes. We started to swim, and burst out laughing. Our feet flew into the air, our heads bobbed up. We lay on the water, half in, half out, and dozed. Sat up comfortably as in an armchair, holding our knees. Then we showered, had a cold beer---it was very hot. And started on. We drove into the sunset---saw it set twice---over the luminous white barrens of the Great Salt Lake desert. Lightning slashed out of the purple clouds to our left. The sun set behind a red grid of clouds at the right. We passed over the border of Nevada, ate a steak, drove on an hour to a stop called “Oasis”, a collection of gas tanks and a Cafe in the middle of nowhere. We got permission from the gas station attendant to sleep out on the prairies in back of his place, and woke once to see bulls grazing within feet of us. Up at dawn and on through the hottest barrenest scenery yet. We drank lots of water, got ice everywhere we could. Stopped just short of Lovelock by the roadside in the one tree we saw by the road in all Nevada. I cooked the last big orange fillets of our Yellowstone trout and had them with corn niblets, a tomato and lettuce salad and milk. This renewed us, and we drove through the brown, desolate slot-machine country, meeting our first real traffic since NYork at Reno, which we didn’t know was Reno till we’d come into California. Another immediate change. Rivers, green-conifered hills, lushness and grandeur. We camped near Lake Tahoe---much too resorty for us, but clear and blue and very lovely in the more residential parts. Drove easily over the equivalent of the Donner Pass which I thus cleverly avoided, and stopped in the lovely palm-tree shaded Capitol Park of Sacramento in heat of 114 degrees to make tomato, ham & lettuce sandwiches which we ate with relish in the dark green shade. Then the fertile valley of golden hills opened up: vineyards, orchards. We stopped at a “Giant Orange”^* for fresh-squeezed orange juice on cracked ice. Drove on over a network of bridges to San Francisco, all white buildings glittering like an alabaster island surrounded by blue water. We drove 24 miles straight on, hot and weary, to what was listed in our camp ground guide as the nearest campground, Stinson Beach State Park. The road wound along a cliff in hairpin turns into the sunset for most most of those miles, with spectacular views of the Pacific, and only cows in sight. It turned out when we arrived at the “camp” that the Guide was “out-of-date”, and the place had been converted to a parking lot. I was almost in tears, but Ted cheered me up, and we decided to try our luck in town. We had cold beer and wonderful fried chicken again, and the Cafe owner suggested we park behind his place and sleep on the beach down from the houses. Which we did, under the stars, and it was just wonderful. We entered the Park when it opened at 8 and took a lovely picnic table in a secluded grove where we had bacon and eggs and toast, and heated pots of water to wash in. We plan to stay here till sunset, sleep on the beach again, and go to San Francisco first thing tomorrow, get the window repaired, and see as much as we can of the city.

Then a beach camp half way to Los Angeles, then Aunt Frieda and our friends the Steins,^* and then Grand Canyon. We’ll probably get the AAA^* to shortcircuit our trip, avoiding Mexico and using those days around here.

When we come home we look most forward to hot tubs and home baking. The bread across america is awful. We’re going to try bakeries in San Francisco. I just don’t understand when meat etc. is so good why there can’t be more solid good bread on the market.

Well, we are fine, and both of us tanned, and having the experience of our lives. We hope to try some deep-sea fishing if we can here.

Love to you both, and Sappho –

Sivvy & Ted^*

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Sunday 2 August 1959

TLS, Indiana University

Sunday

August 2

Dear mother . . .

It was good to talk to you this morning. We had a lovely big breakfast here at the hotel and have moved to a cool quiet room with its own bath for $11 for tonight to renew ourselves for the trip back. Mail up to August 17th should be sent c/o Meyers, Bairnwick, Sewanee, Tennessee, where Luke’s mother^* (about 11 children in that family---ballet dancers, writers, etc) has written to extend us a warm welcome: we also shall probably meet the editor^* of the Sewanee review there, who has published poems by both of us. So we shall enjoy having them introduce us to the South.

PLEASE don’t worry about my poetry book but send it off. I know about summer editors, but want to send it to as many places as I can. I also have gone over it very carefully and am not going to try to change it to fit some vague abstract criticism. If an editor wants to accept it and make a few changes then, all right. You need to develop a little of our callousness and brazenness to be a proper sender-out of mss. I have a good list of publishers and haven’t begun to eat into it. The biggest places are often best because they can afford to publish a few new people each year.

Here are our checks. All to be sent by mail to the Boston 5 cent savings bank, with the deposit slip & bankbook & our 26 Elmwood address: Except Roland’s check, to be deposited in our Wellesley Savings account. Ask for interest to be recorded, too, in both places (no, the Boston one doesn’t come due till fall).

1-23 210	$15
1-1 210	200
5-20 110	10.50
5-20 110	10.
1-8 210	13.75
85-465 614	44. $293.25

To Boston Bank

Do save the Monitor clippings of my poems as they come out.^*

Aunt Frieda had a wonderful cold chicken lunch, string beans, potato salad, tomato and lettuce salad, hot rolls, fresh pineapple, coffee cake and tea ready for us yesterday when we came. Both she and Uncle Walter are handsome, fun, and so young in spirit. They have a little green eden of a house, surrounded by pink and red and white oleander bushes, with two avocado trees loaded down with (alas) not yet ripe fruit, a peach tree, a guava tree, a persimmon tree, a fig tree and others.

Aunt Frieda has had some wonderful adventures, and is a great story teller. Ted gets on magnificently with Walter. We simply love them both. It is amazing how Frieda resembles daddy---the same clear piercing intelligent bright eyes and face shape. Ted & I plan to be home about the 28th or maybe even before, if we have no setbacks.

Love to you, Warren, and Sappho,

Sivvy

enc

The $18.07 bill for the window & 7 checks, all signed

Record of bear damage on file at Yellowstone (Fishing Bridge was our camp) – company can write them for it.

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Monday 3 August 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

August 3 – Monday – Leaving California

Dear mother & Warren –

We’re driving in the cool of the afternoon out of Pasadena – more rested than ever yet from our luxurious 2 nights at a Pasadena Hotel – just wept to leave Aunt Frieda & Uncle Walter who are both so handsome – young-spirited. We love them both dearly. Frieda looks like a feminine version of Daddy. Tomorrow dawn – early – we’ll cross the desert to Grand Canyon – then through Alberquerque & Dallas to New Orleans. Had car tuned up, lubricated, & 3rd oil change & it’s running like velvet. Chevy man said it had been well cared for & in fine shape. Hope to be at Tennessee address by Aug. 15th –

xxx

Sivvy

TO Edith & William Hughes

Monday 3 August 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Family owned

August 3 – Monday

Dear Ted’s mother & dad –

We’re just leaving Los Angeles & had a wonderful stay with my Aunt Frieda & Uncle Walter (Frieda is my father’s sister – I’d never seen any Plath relatives before her) eating lots of strange fruits – they have their own avocado, peach, guava & persimmon trees. We loved San Francisco – a beautiful pastel-colored city on 7 hills surrounded by blue Pacific. We rode the old-fashioned cable cars up the very steep hills, explored the biggest Chinatown outside the Orient & ate at the fish pier – watched them unload huge salmon from the sailboats – On our way to the grand Canyon – Ted looks the best I’ve ever seen him!

Lots of love –

SYLVIA

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Thursday 6 August 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

Thursday – August 6 – en route thru Arizona

Greetings! I’m wearing with pleasure the trim, cool shorts & blouse you sent & Ted loves his shirt. This card commemorates the place just short of Needles where we sweltered among hordes of huge rubber-eating crickets. Ted has patched up all their holes, however. Grand Canyon was amazing – but we didn’t work up energy enough to hike down & up. We’re on our way to El Paso via Phoenix & Tuscon. Plan to park car there & walk across border for a visit of a few hours to Juarez – an easy & safe way of “seeing Mexico.” Then on to New Orleans via the Carlsbad Caverns –

xxx

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Saturday 8 August 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

August 8 – Saturday

en route to Carlsbad Caverns

We left El Paso after a morning exploring the tourist-trap streets of Juarez – bought nothing but two cold beers & left with no reluctance. Hope to arrive at Carlsbad in time to see the millions of bats leave their cave at dusk. Saw a wolf at the roadside in an Arizona wood. Have succumbed on occasion to $5 a night motels – after our tent blew in where we had camped among gigantic cactus outside Tuscon in a hot wind & electrical storm for example. We’re in the best of health, & so is the car

xxx

SIVVY & TED

Should be home by Friday, August 21 (!) if we keep to present schedule

xxx

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Sunday 9 August 1959^*

ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University

Sun. Aug. 9 – en route through Texas

Dear mother & Warren –

Ted & I had a fine afternoon in the cavern’s yesterday – managed to see half of them in the afternoon & sat among the cactus gardens to watch the millions of bats pour out of Bat Cave at dusk – lucky timing – for it started to pour after they all were out & they all dove back in again – a sight not usually seen till 4 am. Cooked steak, new potatoes & corn-niblets for supper. On our way through huge Texas to New Orleans

xxx

Sivvy & Ted^*

TO Elizabeth Ames

Monday 24 August 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Massachusetts

August 24, 1959

Mrs. Elizabeth Ames

Executive Director

Yaddo

Saratoga Springs

New York

Dear Mrs. Ames:

Thank you so much for your letter.^* Ted and I have just returned home from a trip, or we would have answered you sooner.

At present, my brother plans to drive us to Yaddo, so we should arrive shortly after 1 the afternoon of September 9th. We will let you know if there is any change in these plans.

If it becomes possible to arrange an extension for us we should be able to stay on until at least Thanksgiving, and perhaps into December.

Our home address, by the way, is now the Wellesley address above.

We both look forward to meeting you this fall.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO John Lehmann

Tuesday 1 September 1959

TLS, University of Texas at Austin

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Massachusetts

USA

September 1, 1959

Mr. John Lehmann

Editor

THE LONDON MAGAZINE

22 Charing Cross Road

London W.C.2, England

Dear Mr. Lehmann,

I am sending along to you a selection of stories---“The Wishing Box”, “The Shadow” and “This Earth Our Hospital”---in hopes that you may find something among them which pleases you.

With all good wishes, I am

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Elizabeth Ames

Saturday 5 September 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Mass.

September 5, 1959

Mrs. Elizabeth Ames

Yaddo

Saratoga Springs

New York

Dear Mrs. Ames:

My husband and I will be unable to come to Yaddo by car as we had hoped. As our plans stand now, we shall take a Peter Pan (Trailways) bus from Boston in the morning of the 9th, to Albany, make a bus connection there to Saratoga Springs and arrive about 5 pm. We’ll have dinner in town and arrive at Yaddo between 7:30 and 8 that evening.

With all good wishes,

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Thursday 10 September 1959

TLS, Indiana University

Date September 10 To Warren & Mother From Me In re Our arrival:

It is a beautiful clouded and cool morning, 9:30 to be exact. I am sitting in my “studio” on the third (top) floor of West House (where, on the first floor, we have our large bedroom, bathroom and closet, the combination about twice as big as our Boston apartment). The house is lovely, all nooks and angles, with several studios in it. The libraries and living rooms and music rooms are like those in a castle, all old plush, curios, leather bindings, oil paintings on the walls, dark woodwork, carvings on all the furniture. Very quiet and sumptuous. I am the only person on the top floor, and my study is low-ceilinged, painted white, with a cot, a rug, a huge heavy dark-wood table that I use as a typing and writing table with piles of room for papers and books. It has a skylight and four windows on the east side that open out onto a little porch looking over gables and into tall dense green pines. The only sound is the birds, and, at night, the distant dreamlike calling of the announcer at the Saratoga racetrack. I have never in my life felt so peaceful and as if I can read and think and write for about 7 hours a day.

Ted has a marvelous studio^* out in the woods, a regular little house to himself, all glassed in and surrounded by pines, with a wood stove for the winter, a cot, and huge desk. I am so happy we can work apart, for that is what we’ve really needed. The food so far seems to be very good. Two cups of fine coffee for breakfast, a coffee roll, eggs done to order, toast, jam, orange juice, and a great dining room---we can eat any time from 8-9. Then we pick up box lunches, two little thermoses with milk and coffee, for lunch, so we won’t be interrupted all day, and go off to work. Usually in the summer there are about 30 people here, but now there are only about 10 or 12,^* mostly artists and composers (who seem very nice) and a couple of poets^* we have never heard of. A magazine room has all the reviews we like, and the British magazines. There seem to be lakes full of bass, a famous rose garden, and long wood-walks, all of which we look forward to exploring.

The trip yesterday was really gruelling. There was a two-hour wait at Springfield. In Albany there was no bus running at the hour we were told it would in Boston, the station was not air-conditioned, and full of flies and tropically hot, and the Montreal bus we were to take at 4:30 only allowed passengers from New York to board, so we were put on a nonairconditioned bus and dawdled through Albany in rush hour to Saratoga Springs where we sweltered for an hour and a half waiting until we could go to Yaddo at 7:30. Once there, we were shown about the grounds and the mansion, which will close at the end of the month, but which is a magnificent castlelike affair, red carpets, fountains, plants, gilding, heavy antiques and so on.

My typewriter is marvelous. I love it. Do forward all our mail immediately to us c/o Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, New York. We should have all sorts of things arriving---bank books, passports and so on.^*

One thing: I would like some information about Austria, especially the Tyrol, for something I’m working on,^* and would love it if you’d write me a descriptive letter about those places you visited: materials of the houses, furnishings, how old fashioned are they? sort of stove, any animals? colors and sorts of scenery, occupations, how children help with chores---little colored details like that---the clothes they wear and so on.

Do write us.

Love,

Sivvy

PS: In our room, you will find a large open cardboard box by my desk and the little window, on the floor. In it is a black covered thesis book which holds my poems. In either end of this, loose, there should be a copy of a poem about Boston called “A Winter’s Tale” beginning “On Boston Common a red star”.^*

Could you please send it along?

xxx

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

c. Friday 18 September 1959^*

TLS, Indiana University

Date Sept. 9 Friday, To Mother & Warren From Sivvy & Ted In re odds and ends.

Dear Mother & Warren,

We’re delighted you found the film. I felt quiet sad to think the parts of our trip we did want to remember---mostly animals and fish in various combination with ourselves---might be lost for good. I wonder if it would be too much for me to ask you to send along my overshoes (grammy’s really---my pair has rips at the heel of each) as it is often very wet here, and that is the one thing I didn’t have room for in my suitcase. Ted will buy some new ones here, as he needs them.

I am sitting up in my third floor study, with the rain falling with a pleasant tattoo on the rooftops I overlook, and on my skylight. We are excellently fed here. For breakfast, orange juice (canned), eggs to order, comb-honey, jam, toast, coffee rolls, excellent coffee, bacon on Sundays. Lunches get a bit tedious, as all sandwich lunches do (except our homemade sandwiches), but there are two sandwiches, one meat, one cheese of a sort, cookies or cake, fruit and two thermoses. Dinners are of a magnificent grandeur. Roast beef, broiled chicken, ham and sweet potatoes, roast lamb, and lots of vegetables from the estate garden, a mammoth salad---cucumbers, tomatoes, fine dressings---delicious breads, cornbread, biscuits, garlic bread etc.---and peach cobbler or chocolate souffle or something marvelous for dessert. And until the mansion closes we are eating there, all carved, heavy woods, diamond-paned windows overlooking green gardens and marble statuary, golden, deep rugs and antique velvet cushions, heavily gilt-framed paintings, statues everywhere. I love the elegance and peace of the whole mansion & shall miss it when it is shut.

Ted read some of his poems last night, and a departing novelist^* read some chapters of a novel in progress---in our West House living room, which has an elegance of its own. All twelve Guests and the two hostesses^* were there, and the reading went off very well. They invited us to stay till December 15th, but we think we should come home the day before Thanksgiving, so we’ll have good time to be with you and to pack.

I wonder if our bankbook from the 5¢ Savings Bank has come yet? We had left it there with a British check that needed a few days to be collected, and really would like it, because we have over $70 floating around in odd checks to be deposited. By all means leave the passport there. I’m glad the ChScience check came---they should have their billing department notified of changes of address.

Please take it easy with teaching and have the doctor give you something so you can sleep.

Love to you, Warren & Sappho,

Sivvy

TO Rachel MacKenzie^*

Sunday 20 September 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

Yaddo

Saratoga Springs

New York

September 20, 1959

Miss Rachel Mackenzie

THE NEW YORKER

25 West 43rd Street

New York 36, New York

Dear Miss Mackenzie,

Howard Moss suggested^* that I revise a line in A WINTER’S TALE and resubmit it this fall. I have changed the line (stanza 3, line 3)^* and am sending you the poem along with two others.^*

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Wednesday 23 September 1959

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Yaddo

Saratoga Springs

New York

September 23, 1959

Dear mother,

Many thanks for your letter and for forwarding our mail, which has been arriving with pleasant frequency. We haven’t got our Boston 5¢ Savings Bank Book yet and are concerned about it; has it come yet? If not, do send it on right away when it does.

Where are you taking your German review course? In Wellesley or Boston?

I haven’t got the sponsor invitation yet.^* Both Ted and I feel very strongly about this: we are in no position to be sponsors, to pay $20 for an event we won’t even be able to hear, and we don’t want our names on the list. Ted’s relation to Eliot is poet-to-poet and publisher-to-author, and there would be nothing “politic” about paying to have our names on a list of sponsors. I don’t remember any Mrs. Dunn,^* and think there must be other people eager for the honor of sponsoring culture who have fat Wellesley purses and more desire to set themselves up as patrons. We can’t even keep our membership in the Poetry Society,^* a total of $15 a year, which is just too much for our budget. Both of us hope to meet Eliot in private in England, and appreciate your offer to reimburse us, but we just don’t want to work that way. So if you want to sponsor him yourself, do, but leave us out of it. I don’t feel it much of an honor to be asked for $20 in return for use of our names. It is ridiculous and pompous for us, who need to save everything we can, to set ourselves up in any such position, and anyone with sense should realize this. Well, enough of that. Eliot probably doesn’t give a damn who is on the list: he is a fool if he does.

I have written a note to Marcia, and shall write to Mrs. Prouty, too. I read some of my poems here the other night, with a professor from the University of Chicago^* who read from a novel-in-progress. Several people are leaving today, among them a very fine young Chinese composer we are very fond of, on his second Guggenheim this year. Women come here, I learned, who have families. They leave their children in camp or with relatives: a great rest for them. We get on well with the director and her secretary, and she wrote a little note that she hopes we come again before long for an even longer stay (they had invited us to stay till the 15th of December). So it is pleasant indeed to feel that this place will always be open to us. I imagine the MacDowell Colony will, too, since they sent us their application blanks, but this is obviously the finest of the three such institutions in America.^* I particularly love the scenic beauty of the estate: the rose gardens, goldfish pools, marble statuary everywhere, wood walks, little lakes. Ted & I took out the estate rowboat in a very weedy little lake and caught a bass apiece Sunday, about3/4 of a pound each: not really too big, but enough for a lunch. Yet we threw them back. The food here is so fine we had no real need of fish to eat.

We had severe cold here, with frosts, but now it is warm enough to walk coatless again. We miss Sappho. We feed some of our milk to a white-pawed tiger cat here that jumped out at us from the woods, but no cat can compare to Sappho’s delicacy and breeding.

Wish you might drive up here sometime to spend an afternoon with us.

With love to you and Warren,

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Wednesday 7 October 1959

TLS, Indiana University

Date October 7 To Mother & Warren From Sivvy In re

Thanks for your good letter. What is Andrew Sinclair^* doing in America, studying or writing? Is Clem going to get married soon to his girl,^* and has she found a job? How nice that Shirley’s^* baby looks like Perry^*---I thought the first one looked too much like David.^*

We really don’t have any news---our life here is so secluded. We simply eat breakfast, go to our respective studios with a picnic lunch and write, read and study, then have tea, chat a bit, have dinner and read before bed. Once in a while we go into town, which is reminiscent of Northampton, as the girls’ college Skidmore (a very dull looking place) is here. And the architecture is similar: that marvelously ugly red-brick and yellow-brick 1875 style.

Ted has finished his play^*---a symbolic drama based on the Euripides play The Bacchae, only set in a modern industrial community under a paternalistic ruler. I hope the Poets Theater will give it at least a reading. We have yet to type it.

I do rather miss Boston, and don’t think I could ever settle for living far from a big city full of museums and theaters. Now Mrs. Ames, the elderly Mother of Yaddo, has left for Europe, there are only her poetess secretary Polly,^* a very nice woman, two painters and a composer on a Guggenheim here. From what we hear, certain artists live on these colonies almost all year: spending four months in the winter at Yaddo, then moving on to the MacDowell colony. I could never do that myself: too much like living in a vacuum. But it is nice to know that practically any time we could invite ourselves back here. It might come in convenient some day. Ted loves it and is getting a lot of work done.

Do keep us posted on all the little neighborhood news and so on.

The bankbook, by the way, should arrive at home in about three weeks. I am glad I wrote the manager a letter: they had not sent the check to the British Revenue Service for collection yet! “A change in personnel” or some such. Got a nice letter from Mrs. Prouty in answer to mine, and look forward to a dinner with her sometime between Thanksgiving and our departure.

Lots of love to you both,

Sivvy

PS: congratulations to Warren on the reading of his paper. Where will the meeting be? Too bad it’s not in California: then he could see Aunt Frieda.

TO Edith & William Hughes

c. Thursday 8 October 1959^*

ALS,^* British Library

Greetings! I am spending a pleasant evening reading in our large white bedroom – everything’s white-walls, beds, couches, lampshades, bureauscarves. It is like living in a great countryhouse, a fine library, fine grounds, fine cooking. Ted’s getting a great amount of work done – I am deeply impressed by his play: I hope some Art Theaters will take it up – it should be exciting experimental drama. His proofs for the “Rain Horse” story^* have come – a real masterpiece, not a word that could be altered, with a wonderful sense of the physical countryside – better than DH Lawrence’s descriptive stories, I think. It’s tentatively scheduled for December. Ted had his usual luck with his first prose piece – got into one of the best magazines. We went rowing on the mirror-clear lake this afternoon, all the gold leaves & white birches reflecting in the black surface. Ted caught two little bass which we threw back. I’ve been working on some short stories, have sold a few poems & drawings to the Christian Science Monitor,^* which is handy money, and a longish “light” poem on Christmas in Boston to the New Yorker which pays very well. In two months, we’ll be with you! Seems hardly possible –

Love,

Sylvia

TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath

Tuesday 13 October 1959

TLS with envelope, Indiana University

Date Oct. 13 To Mummy & Warren From Sivvy In re

Greetings!

As usual our main news is that we are wellfed. Every dinner seems bound to outdo the last. Last night it was juicy ham, pineapple (baked), sweet potatoes, corn, spinach, salad, hot rolls, butter, and deep dish apple pie. That’s just a sampling. After a week of solid steamy rain, we are at last having crisp, clear weather--the Green Mountains blue in the distance, the newly-fallen pine needles a resilient carpet underfoot.

TED’s proofs for his Harper’s story have come---very exciting, and it reads marvelously. It will have black-and-white drawings with it, I gather. Tentatively, it is scheduled for the December issue. We are very proud of it. It is a fine story. I hope I can hypnotize him to finish up one or two others.

The New Yorker at last bought the poem you sent me A WINTER’S TALE for their December 26th issue,^* which is pleasant. There is a lot more competition for special seasonal occasions like that, and I wrote the poem as a light piece after that pleasant walk you and Warren and Ted and I took last Christmas time around Beacon Hill.

I also have had two little exercise poems accepted by the home forum page in the CSMonitor as well as two sets of two drawings (old ones) due to come out on the Family Features Page (they may have come out already) so keep on the lookout for them & clip them for me. A total of $46 from the paper this month: little things mount up.

Am very painstakingly studying German two hours a day: a few grammar lessons then translating a Goethe lyric or a page or two from the Kafka stories Warren brought me from Germany: listing all vocabulary and learning it. Hope to speed up after a few weeks at it.

Do write,

much love,

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Wednesday 21 October 1959

TLS, Indiana University

Wednesday morning, Oct. 21

Dear mother,

How nice to get your long newsy letters! I am so pleased to hear you sounding so well and happy. Just be careful and try to avoid colds this season. It is beautiful here now: very blue and frosty, all the pine cones fallen, and the new needles fresh and rosy underfoot. Ted & I are both in excellent health: I don’t know when we’ve been so rested, getting about 9 hours a night.

Have you seen my two sets of drawings on the Youth Page of the Monitor these last Mondays---the 12th and the 19th? Do save them, because I would like copies of the drawings which came out well. The paragraphs were only written to glue them together and give them more likelihood of being printed. Have either my Yaddo or Magnolia Shoals poem come out on the Home Forum Page yet?

I envy you your German lessons. I am very proud you are taking them. I find going so slow when I do it all myself, and then do not have the stimulus of having to be catechized. I look forward to studying the records again when I am home. I can’t speak at all, I am just trying to translate what I read. The records should help speaking. The box from Aunt Frieda was guavas. Weird. Evidently the California fires^* are raging right behind her house.

I do hope Warren’s rooming problem works out. It would be inconvenient for him to live at home all the time, but couldn’t he come on weekends, since that’s when the owners carouse? The people sound very unpleasant.

How is Sappho? I hope she gets over her wounds. Was it a squirrel that tore her mouth? Is she staying as small as ever?

Love,

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Wednesday 28 October 1959

TLS, Indiana University

October 28: Wednesday

Dear mother,

It was so good to hear your voice yesterday. I loved the gaily decorated birthday telegram. It’s so nice you have those few days around Thanksgiving off, it will be fun shopping and chatting together. I want Ted to feel he can work in Warren’s room while I do most of the minutiae about packing.

No package yet! The notice for a package which I thought might be mine turned out to be an ms. for Ted from his friend Luke. Could you tell me what day and from where you sent the package, (was it to Mrs. Ted Hughes, or Sylvia Hughes?) or perhaps put a tracer on it? Was it registered? I am dying to see it & furious with the American mails.

How did the Gulf Oil bill-slips add up? I hope you could find the envelope.

I’d love to have your advice about something. We have the remainder of our ship-fare, $312, to pay, and I want to get the money from our Wellesley Savings Bank. Now I know I don’t have a checking account there, but could I have them make out a withdrawal check from our acct. to the United States Lines^* for that amount, and endorse it? If so, could you send me my Wellesley bankbook and a withdrawal slip (which should also be in the letter file on my desk, if I remember rightly) so I could transact the withdrawal by mail? Don’t they have postpaid envelopes, too, by which I could do this? I didn’t think to bring that bankbook with me.

Today is a beautiful clear invigorating day after a week of steaminess and oppressive rain. Ted & I are so happy, and healthy---our life together seems to be the whole foundation of my being. Your birthday card & letter was wonderful. I do love to hear from Warren & treasure his rare letters. All this hard work now will give him an immense advantage in his professional life. I am so proud of that paper he has been asked to prepare.

I do hope you travel with the Nortons. They are so nice, especially Mildred, with her independent breeziness & adventurous soul. I am growing very pleased with the idea of living in England. The fastness & expense of America is just about 50 years ahead of me. I could be as fond of London as of any other city in the world---and plays, books and all these things are so much more within one’s means. Travel, too. You must never take a ship again, but fly over to visit us.

Last night Polly, the very sweet woman from Brookline (a cousin of Wallace Fowlie)^* who is assistant here, and who has had a book of her own poems published,^* had two bottles of vin rose for dinner and a birthday cake with candles in honor of my day, which touched me very much.

I want Ted to take me on a trip around England, especially to Wales, and little fishing villages. When you come we should go on a jaunt of some sort, staying at old inns & taking country walks.

Do tell us about the Eliot evening!

Much love,

Sivvy

TO John Lehmann

Thursday 12 November 1959

TLS, University of Texas at Austin

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Massachusetts

U.S.A.

November 12, 1959

Mr. John Lehmann

Editor

THE LONDON MAGAZINE

22 Charing Cross Road

London W.C.2, England

Dear Mr. Lehmann,

I am pleased indeed to hear^* you are taking my hospital story, particularly since I have come to agree with your opinions about the other two.^* I also agree with you about the title of the story which now seems to me pompous and out-of-place. I would much prefer the title THE DAUGHTERS OF BLOSSOM STREET.^* I feel this is simpler, more direct, and makes the point I want about the Secretaries being almost ritual, attendant figures in the euphemistic ceremonies softening the bare fact of death. I hope this title seems a better one.

Ted sent off two stories---THE RAIN HORSE and SUNDAY---a week or more ago by regular mail, I hope you have them by the time you receive this.

Both of us send our warmest good wishes.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Judith Reutlinger Anderson^*

Monday 23 November 1959

TLS, Private owner^*

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Massachusetts

November 23, 1959

Miss Reutlinger

601 Oak Street SE

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Dear Miss Reutlinger,

Thank you for your card.^* “Lament” was published several years ago by the New Orleans Poetry Journal,^* but I’ve lost track of both the date and number, and I think most libraries don’t carry such very little magazines. I have a copy of the poem to hand, being in the throes of moving and clearing house, so here it is.

LAMENT

The sting of bees took away my father

Who walked in a swarming shroud of wings

And scorned the tick of the falling weather.

Lightning licked in a yellow lather

But missed the mark with snaking fangs:

The sting of bees took away my father.

Trouncing the sea like a raging bather

He rode the flood in a pride of prongs

And scorned the tick of the falling weather.

A scowl of sun struck down my mother,

Tolling her grave with golden gongs,

But the sting of bees took away my father.

He counted the guns of god a bother,

Laughed at the ambush of angels’ tongues,

And scorned the tick of the falling weather.

O ransack the four winds and find another

Man who can mangle the grin of kings;

The sting of bees took away my father

Who scorned the tick of the falling weather.

*********************************************

No, I haven’t published a volume of poems yet, but I hope to manage this in a year or so if fates and editors are willing.

All good wishes,

Sylvia Plath

TO Rachel MacKenzie

Saturday 28 November 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Massachusetts

November 28, 1959

Miss Rachel MacKenzie

25 West 43rd Street

New York 36, New York

Dear Miss MacKenzie,

I’m happy to hear^* you are taking THE NET MENDERS.^*

Here are a few suggestions for placing the poem in the title or subtitle: THE SPANISH NET MENDERS, THE NET MENDERS OF BENIDORM, or THE NET MENDERS (Benidorm, Spain). Any of these would be fine with me, or any rearrangement of them.

With all good wishes.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

TO Rachel MacKenzie

Saturday 28 November 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Mass.

November 28, 1959

Dear Miss MacKenzie,

I hope it won’t lessen the chances of these poems^* to follow so soon on the heels of the last.^*

I did want you to have a look at them.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Robie Macauley^*

Saturday 28 November 1959

TLS, Kenyon College

26 Elmwood Road

Wellesley, Massachusetts

November 28, 1959

Mr. Robie Macauley

THE KENYON REVIEW

Gambier, Ohio

Dear Mr. Macauley:

I am happy to hear you are taking “The Colossus” and “The Bee-Keeper’s Daughter” for the Review.^*

Here are a few notes. I graduated from Smith College, and from Cambridge University (where I spent 1955-57 on a Fulbright grant). Poems of mine have appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The Hudson Review, The New Yorker, The Partisan Review, Poetry (Chicago), The Sewanee Review and elsewhere.

After December 9th my address will be:

c/o Hughes

The Beacon

Heptonstall Slack

Hebden Bridge, (near Halifax)

Yorkshire, England.

Sincerely,

Sylvia Plath

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Sunday 13 December 1959

ALS with envelope on SS United States stationery, Indiana University

Sunday

December 13

Dear mother,

Ted & I are sitting at desks in the writing alcove after lunch. A grey whitecapped sea is washing past the window & the rope are all spread out on the main deck ready for the stop in Le Havre some time tonight. We’re supposed to get to Southampton around 5 pm tomorrow & I hope all our baggage is there to greet us in good order – the baggage-man at New York told us our Hold baggage was luckily just one cubic foot under the limit, or we’d have had to pay the expensive excess space rates. We were amazed we had by chance come so close to our allotted total.

I have just finished reading Zivago,^* which took me the whole trip & proved a good travel-book as it is all written in such short episodes you can break off anywhere. I was, on the whole, disappointed in it – never really felt involved with any of the characters which I think is a fatal flaw in a novel. The poetic descriptive sections about weather & seasons I thought very good.

My last night of sleep & good food at home cured my cold, it seems, & I have been well ever since. Ship-space is rather confined without the decks open – we’ve been out & walking around whenever possible, but except for one blue day the weather’s been overcast – warmish, but wet.

Our cabin^* is comfortable enough – on a noisy deck, the same as the diningroom (which is convenient) which keeps it busy all day, & at night we are next to several roomsful of girls who dance & drink till 4 & 5 am & come home screaming & laughing up & down the halls: there’s always a bunch of these. So we take naps after breakfast & lunch which pieces out our sleep. It seems we spend most of our time eating & sleeping. There seem very few Americans on the trip. The ship goes in to Bremerhaven, so there are lots of Germans, master-builders, evangelists (one who by mistake thought she had our room put a sign up in front of a bottle of gin & an ash tray installed by a man who also thought he had our room – reading: ‘Bittè, rausch nicht und trink nicht’ – ‘These are deadly sins. Now she realizes her mistake, she continually greets us ‘God Bless You’ & ‘Isn’t Jesus wonderful?’) Lots of very pretty children about, people spending Christmas in Europe with parents & relatives. Our tablemates are two nice young Danish farmers who have been on a farm-exchange program in California.^*

The dramamine is a great help. I take about two pills a day, & feel no queasiness at all – I’m sure I would if I didn’t have the pills, for the boat rolls & pitches very noticeably even when the sea isn’t very rough & we are literally rolled from one side to another in bed. Ted is a wonderful comfort. He seems to need no dramamine at all & we walk out on deck whenever possible. Had one night of a fine moon & bright stars.

We’re extremely eager to hear in detail of your interview last Wednesday and hope a letter is waiting for us at Ted’s mother’s house, where we should arrive Tuesday, or Wednesday at the latest if we’re held up in London.

Do find out about forwarding our mail – I’m sure there must be some solution, for it would have to be forwarded even if we had no relatives to put on new stamps & I hope you can do it without charge.

The package for you (& Warren) from the Music Box^* should arrive by December^* 20th, or 21st the latest.

We are both in good health, eating wisely & modestly – lots of fresh & stewed fruit & milk. The food is so-so – Some things very good, too many steamed dishes which have waited too long on the counters. Last night, at the ‘Gala Dinner’ we had a nice rare steak, lobster newberg, dates & figs.

Well, we are off to find some fresh air & will write again as soon as we get to Ted’s parents house.

Love to you, Warren & Sappho –

Sivvy

TO Joseph, Dorothy, Robert, & Nancy Benotti

Sunday 13 December 1959^*

ALS in greeting card,^* Indiana University

Christmas Greetings / and Best Wishes / for a Happy / New Year

with love to / all the Benottis / Sylvia & Ted

Dear Dotty & Joe & Bobby & Nancy –

We’re writing this from the middle of the Atlantic, one day out of Southampton. Have spent most of our time eating & sleeping & me taking dramamine, as the ship rolls & pitches surprisingly although the seas don’t look too rough. We had one lovely clear night with moon & bright stars, but it’s been overcast since – warm enough to take brisk deck-walks.

Our evening with you was so happy & memorable – a real occasion, & we enjoyed every minute of it. We’ll spend Christmas with Ted’s parents in Yorkshire & then go apartment-hunting in London.

Love,

Sivvy

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Thursday 17 December 1959

ALS in greeting card,^* Indiana University

Merry / Christmas / Happy / New Year

with love / Sivvy & Ted

Thursday

December 17,

Dearest mother –

How lovely it was to come here & find the letters waiting – so thoughtful of you to send them on. But please don’t bother to send anything airmail except for your own letters & what may look like an important missive from the New Yorker – (I’m dying to see my NYorker poem^* – does it look well?) You mustn’t spend so much on stamps! See if you can forward sea-mail without adding anything.

Your Christmas package arrived the day after we came to the Beacon, looking very exciting – we’ll save it for Christmas eve or morning – whenever the family has its Christmas. We stayed overnight with friends of Ted’s in London – Danny Huws^* (the one whose poems we’ve sold)^* who is studying to be a curator of old Welsh & Celtic manuscripts, his very German wife Helga^* & their exquisite 2 year-old daughter Magdelen.^* The wife speaks German to the child & is, I think, very strict with her – the father speaks Celtic. Supposedly she will be trilingual. Myself, I think one other language is plenty. The child says ‘Auf’ & ‘Mehr’ but little else. She wears wonderful wooly smocks & amuses herself beautifully.

Both of us were exhausted when we got up here, having slept so little on the boat. Mercifully I was not at all seasick. We had tea at Ted’s Uncle Walt’s & he drove us up. We slept 12 hours the first night & a good long time last night. All our baggage & thinks have arrived & seem in good condition. It’s been raining & blowing out, black sky all day. So we are sitting in great armchairs by roaring coal fires, very cosily. Olwyn, Ted’s sister, is home from her theater job in Paris – her hair newly cut & curled looking handsome, chic, extremely nice. I like her a great deal.

Right after Christmas, before New Year’s, we’ll look for a comfortable apartment in London – in easy walking distance of one of the wonderful big London parks, quiet, sunny, with a good kitchen. And I’ll get a doctor & hospital arranged for. I doubt if we’ll go to Corsica at all. I had a feeling we wouldn’t. Ted’s as tired of traveling as I am.

I’m eager to set up our own place again. Ted’s mother is such an awful cook – heavy indigestible pastries, steamed vegetables, overdone meat. I’ll get my own kitchen shelf here & we’ll shop for supplies tomorrow so I can make a few decent cookies & meatloaf & so on. How I miss your kitchen & our family tradition of wonderful food lovingly prepared! There’s not even enough flour & sugar here for a cake! Everything very untidy, pots never quite clean, oven bubbling with old fat – a lot of bustle & nothing but burnt offerings. Olwyn – much more sophisticated & critical than even I – is a nice ally. We cook our own things. As soon as I’m in my own kitchen all will be serene, digestible & tidy again. Well, for a 10 day visit I can overlook such matters. The main thing is that the family is loving & closeknit.

I’m glad your talk with Kelly was positive in favoring your German. Hard work in it now will pay dividends in the end & I’m sure you’ll love it & be glad for the intensive reviewing & study later. Do work on planning your summer in Germany in 1961! Let us know the latest developments. Have you talked with Peebles yet? Or that young man who has the friendly wife?

Keep your spirits up & get more of those pills you gave me for nights when sleep is extra important. Treat yourself well – have naps & relaxings, hot milk & honey & don’t walk out in the rain. Don’t forget to mail my Christmas cards. I’m mailing the rest from here.

Love,

Sivvy

TO Rachel MacKenzie

Friday 18 December 1959

TLS, New York Public Library

c/o Hughes

The Beacon

Heptonstall Slack

Hebden Bridge

Yorkshire, England

December 18, 1959

Miss Rachel MacKenzie

THE NEW YORKER

25 West 43rd Street

New York 36, New York

Dear Miss MacKenzie,

Here are the proofs of “The Net Menders”. The suggestions for commas and hyphens are fine. I’d like “madonna” without a capital m, and would prefer “bride-lace” or “bridelace”, to “bride’s lace”, if that is all right.

I’m sorry not to be able to be any help about Tomas Ortunio, one of the main back streets in Benidorm. At the time, someone suggested the street might be named after a local hero, but I don’t have any Spanish histories handy and am quite curious to find out the origin of the street’s name myself.

With all good wishes.

Sincerely yours,

Sylvia Plath

P.S. For the next half year or so I shall be living at the Yorkshire address above.

TO Aurelia Schober Plath

Saturday 26 December 1959

TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University

Saturday night

December 26, 1959

Dearest mother,

I am sitting, about to go to bed, in the little second parlor downstairs by a roaring coal fire with the rain swatting against the triple window in front of me, very comfortable, after a light supper of creamed turkey and mushrooms on toast I made. Olwyn is out for dinner; Ted’s parents are dozing in the front parlor after admiring the lovely book on America you sent them (you couldn’t have chosen better), and Ted upstairs in our bedroom at his desk, copying out the manuscript version of his first book which he hopes to sell to a man in London who is scouting for an American University out West.

It scarcely seems possible we have been here two weeks. I have spent most of my time eating and sleeping, and typing some things for Ted and the new manuscript of my poetry book (about 86 pages). It has rained and blown almost constantly (reread Ted’s poem Wind, it’s perfect), but we have gone out for brief walks. Now we are pretty much rested up and in very good health. Next Sunday, right after new year’s, we go to London to stay a few days, as long as we need, to locate a good comfortable apartment within easy walking distance of a big park, shops, a laundromat, etc. in Central London. We look forward to the trip and hope to spend our evenings going to plays. We have had tea at each of Ted’s relatives: an Aunt Hilda and an Uncle Walter (the wealthy one), and taught Ted’s sister and Hilda’s daughter Vicky (21, an art-teacher in grammar school, and very nice) how to play Tarock, and we play a great deal. I would like a refresher course with you experts, however, as I am sure there are many conventions we do not know---various ways to reveal yourself to your partner, etc. Anyway, your Tarock pack is in good use.

We loved your big package: opened it Christmas Eve. Ted looks handsome in his shirt, it fits perfectly. Oddly enough, I was just going to write you and ask you to get the pink version of that wonderful blue nightgown the day before! It is the warmest, lightest gown I have & the front opens far enough for me to nurse the baby in it. Imagine my surprise to open my package and find you had answered my thoughts! You also couldn’t have gotten me anything more attractive and comfortable than those tights. I am wearing the black ones now. They look striking as stockings with my high heels, and of course go into my flat shoes and provide a much-needed warmth for my thighs, a real blessing. My wool knee socks didn’t do this, and were too clumsy for any dressup occasion. Also, the elastic waist and pants’ top fits me perfectly, even in my 6th month, and is a restful support on my legs. If you could possibly get me another black pair, just like these, I’d be most grateful. The red is lovely, for casual wear, but the black I can wear anywhere: it’s amazing how smart they are with my red & black heels. The scarf for Olwyn was lovely, very chic. No other packages or letters have come: just the last bundle of letters in your airmail envelope: DONT send anything airmail, unless its a thin New Yorker letter, because it’s outrageously expensive!

When Ted’s two stories (The Caning & Miss Mambrett And The Wet Cellar) come back from the NYorker, let us know, & send them on to the Atlantic in the envelopes I’ve left you. When my big poetry ms. comes back from Farrar, Straus (they must have sent it by now) just keep it for scrap-paper:^* I’ve typed up my large and new version of the book here.

So far, I’ve made fish soup, Dot’s meatloaf, oatmeal cookies, apple kuchen, your bread stuffing (for the Xmas turkey which Ted & I cooked: a 7½ lb. turkey for $6! Isn’t that an awful lot? Meat here is as expensive as at home, and cosmetics, too) . . . all of which makes me feel less homesick. Olwyn is very nice, a beautiful blond slim girl, my height & size, with yellow-green eyes and delicate graceful bone structure: looks 21, not 31. I get along with her much better now that she’s really accepted me as Ted’s wife & like her immensely. She has a long vacation from her job as sec./translator for a French theater agency in Paris, her most interesting job yet.

Dot’s present to “Junior Hughes” was a pair of exquisite green bootees all laced with white ribbon. Ted & I wore our twin shirts on Xmas day; they are handsome. I’ll write her tomorrow to thank her. Hope your record came, and that you like the pajamas, or get some you like in exchange! Do the gloves fit Warren? Ted’s mother got him some good English gloves. I forgot your size-slips, yours & Warren’s: do send them on. Olwyn gave me a marvelous pair of cinnamon-colored paris kid gloves which fit like a second skin: Vicky & Hilda gave me a perfume & talcum set; Ted’s mom, two baby sweaters & two prs. of nylons; Ted’s dad a 5 pound note. No tree, which I missed. But Ted & I will have a little one next year for our Nicholas/Katharine (do you like Katharine Frieda Hughes as a name?) DO WRITE. I miss you & Warren & Sappho immensely & look for letters.

Ted joins in sending love,

Sivvy

PS: Weren’t you the secretive one when we went running about looking for our big blue Turkish bath towel! Did you remember you had padded our presents with it?

TO Joseph & Dorothy Benotti

Sunday 27 December 1959

TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University

Sunday

December 27, 1959

Dear Dotty and Joe,

Ted & I are still up here in Yorkshire, and after New Year’s this week will go down to London to look for an apartment there within easy walking distance of the city’s big parks, shops and so on. Ever since we’ve come it’s poured rain and been wildly windy: Ted’s parents’ house is on top of a hill and gets all the rough weather going. No snow for Christmas, just about a foot of water. I wonder if you had snow: we read about blizzards in America, but the papers didn’t say just where.

We celebrated Christmas on the Eve, and were delighted with the beautiful presents. The warm slippers, Bobby and Nancy, are just the thing for this cold weather where there is no central heating (at least not in this house) and your breath stands out in white puffs when you’re a few feet away from the fireplace. Ted & I wore the handsome twin shirts all Christmas Day: we made the turkey and stuffing, as Ted’s mother’s not a good cook: she boils everything, including steak, and her pastries which she makes without any recipe, would sink like a battleship. I’ve made your meatloaf, Dot, which everybody ate as if it were roast beef, and am eager to get to my own kitchen again, where I can try out the carrot-fruit cake, the lemon sponge cake and all. I do love to cook & just can’t understand how anybody can be a bad cook when the recipes are so simple and easy to follow. Of course I try to make as much as I can, while I’m here, but it’s a battle in a tiny, messy kitchen with no supplies. We remember with joy the superlative feast you made for us before we left, & I must say I come from a family of wonderful cooks, a tradition which I hope to keep up as soon as we find a place in London. Ted will finish the next half-year on his grant and then look for a job in London.

I just loved the baby’s bootees! They are so delicate and pretty, really among the very “special” things I am getting together. I plan to get a doctor and hospital lined up in London the week after this, after investigating maternity plans on socialized medicine. Do call up mummy now & then & be optimistic and cheer her up---I know she’d love to be around when the baby’s born, and want to help: and of course there’s noone like your own mother. Mrs. Hughes is a very simple, but nervous woman, who can’t imagine that hospitals in the city are better than drunken country doctors & it will be a relief to get away from her worrying. Luckily Ted will be free to help me through all this & is very strong, sensible and kind, a real support.

A hundred thanks again for the perfectly lovely presents (I’ve never seen shirts I like so much, just the right color & pattern for us) & Ted joins me in sending our best love to you all.

Affectionately,

Sylvia