TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 12 January 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green, North Tawton
Devonshire, England
January 12, 1962
Dear mother,
Well, Nicholas-Megan was officially due yesterday, and no sign. So this baby will probably delay a few days like Frieda, and keep us all in suspense. I’ve so enjoyed your long, newsy letters! I’ve felt lazier and lazier and more & more cowlike. The doctor’s sleeping pills are very good---we’ve been sleeping about 10 hours a night, and Frieda just plays quietly however late we get up. I’ve given up all pretence of working in my study these last weeks, I am simply too ponderous! As far as I can tell by these weird English weights (in Stones) I weigh almost 170! With my clothes on, of course, and that accounts for a lot---layer after layer of sweaters & tights. As it is, I go to bed after lunch, for being up on my feet 4 hours is like a day’s work in the fields, and sleep about 2 hours then. Ted helps me with Frieda---lifting her in and out of bed & highchair and dressing her---she’s so funny, like a little worm, & delights in toddling off as I sit with her clothes, too weighty to chase after her. “Bye-bye”, she says gravely, waving & shutting the door of the bathroom closet, or popping behind the curtains of the closet in her bedroom. Then she giggles & peeps out. Her “Baby” & “Ahh-hee” (a white elephant from Olwyn) go everywhere with her, also the darling pony-tailed Baby you sent in the bath---Frieda is always combing her hair with a tiny brush. She insists they be fed, too, & shares her snacks with them. She is so pretty and loving, we just adore her. I hope this next baby is anywhere near as nice. Did Mrs. Magandantz* have any doctor’s explanation as to why one’s arms go all prickly & bloated-feeling? There seems to be no remedy for it. Right now I feel I am typing through a field of sandy needles, and I am always dropping things or running my finger through with pins when trying to sew---very inconvenient, but I persist.
All our rugs have come. The livingroom is lovely now, with my red cord curtains & red cord windowseat, and the all-wool Wilton, basically red, but with the usual border and center medallion and patterned all over with off-white, green and black leaves and flowers, so it should not show wear easily. We need it for company and evenings. Children are taboo. I’m sitting in it now with Ted, very cosy & bright.
Everyone around is so amiable. The shopkeepers inquire after me, & it seems all North Tawton is awaiting the baby! I like the bank manager’s wife (where we went for a cocktail party the Saturday before New Year’s) very much---she is about 50, but seems of-an-age to me, a spry, witty-tongued Irishwoman with a daughter of 15 at prep school. Her husband has had 2 heart-attacks & obviously lives under the shadow of this, but is very perky and pleasant. I have also met the Doctor’s Wife (at the party) & liked her a lot; she is my age, with 2 daughters. I hope she invites me over some time. I expect slowly we shall edge in to the Best Society---very amusing.
Ted & his poet-twin here, Thom Gunn (who actually lives & teaches in Berkeley) are bringing out an anthology by half-a-dozen American poets* for Faber. Faber are also bringing out a paperback edition of their own selected poems. My little shilling anthology of American poets I edited for the Critical Quarterly here has got very good reviews & seems to be selling well. Each day I bake something to hide away for Ted & Frieda when I’m recovering from the new baby. I have a box of sand tarts cut in shapes with cherries & almonds (F. calls them “moon-cookies”), a box of tollhouse cookies & a fruitcake. Tomorrow I’ll try an apple pie with the very last of our apples.
I hope Warren takes all I write you for himself too. I love hearing about Aunt Maggie. We’d so like to see them here. Don’t worry about money, for them! Ted & I had nothing when we got married, & no prospects. And in 5 years all our most far-fetched dreams have come true. We look so forward to your visit this summer! It does my heart good to hear you have knitting in your hands again (and not just from my own greedy motives!) and that you are seeing friends. You must do more & more of this---you owe it to yourself. I hope you will find life here easy & relaxing: I am having the baby in the guestroom, where you’ll be, & we have fixed it up quite comfortably, although the old rug is shabby. We’ve painted the floor & I’ve made curtains. You must bring a bathingsuit, too! I hope we can go to some nice beaches together. Of course Frieda will remember you! Deep down, if not obviously. You’ll have more lovely times together. Do tell me Betsy Powley’s address & I’ll write her. I’ll write Dot* & everybody as soon as the baby comes.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thurs.–Sat. 18–20 January 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
January 18, 1962
5 p.m.
Dear mother,
By now I hope you have received the telegram Ted sent this morning with the good news of the arrival of our first son Nicholas Farrar Hughes* (I almost wrote Nicholas-Megan!) last night at 5 minutes to midnight, making another 17th date in our family, after Ted’s August 17th. I am sitting up in bed, feeling fine and refreshed after an afternoon’s nap, Nicholas in a carrycot at my side getting pinker and pinker. He looked very swarthy to me when he arrived, like a wrinkled, cross old boxer, and still is a Farrar type, although Ted suggests his head-shape resembles Daddy’s. Now he has turned quite pink and translucent, though. All during the delivery I felt it would be a boy---my notions that he was a much bigger & heavier baby proved true, and no illusion---he weighed in at 9 pounds 11 ounces, compared to Frieda’s ladylike 7 pounds 4 oz., and I had a lot more work with him than with her. Woke at 4 a.m. the morning of the 17th with niggly contractions that came & went all day while I did as much cooking as I could, till 5 p.m., just after Frieda went to bed, when they started to get very strong. I had a visit from both midwife & doctor during the day---both very kindly and encouraging. Then at 8:30, when the contractions were established at every 5 minutes, Ted called the midwife. She brought a cylinder of gas & air & she sat on one side of the bed & Ted on the other, gossiping pleasantly together all 3, while I breathed in my mask whenever I had a strong contraction & joined in the conversation. I had used up the cylinder & was just beginning to push down when the baby stuck & the membrane didn’t break. Then at 5 to 12, as the doctor was on his way over, this great bluish glistening boy shot out onto the bed in a tidal wave of water that drenched all 4 of us to the skin, howling lustily. It was an amazing sight. I immediately sat up & felt wonderful---no tears, nothing. It is heavenly to be in my own house---I’m in the guest room which is ideal. Beautiful clear dawn & full moon tonight in our huge elm. Everybody in North Tawton turned to stare at Ted when he came into town---Rose Key, our cottage neighbor, brought a little knitted suit & the banker’s wife sent a card & towel. I gave the midwife my traditional carrot cake. She is a wonderful woman. You should see her with Frieda---(we showed Frieda the baby this morning & she was terribly excited)---the midwife has Frieda come in and “help” as she fixes the baby, advising me to share the tasks, even if it takes longer. I didn’t even know Frieda could understand, but she did everything the midwife said---held the safety pins, kissed the baby, helped wrap him up & then sat & held him all by herself! She was just bursting with pride. Having the baby at home is so restful. Nancy came today & did the downstairs & will be glad to come extra time for ironing or washing up. Ted spent the afternoon with the BBC producer* of his new radio play*---or poem for voices, who came down from London to see him about details. Coincidentally, this man’s birthday was yesterday, too. Now everything is quiet and peaceful & Ted is heating the vichysoisse & apple pie I made to tide us over.
Later: Saturday, January 20th. I have today marked as a red letter day because your exams will be over, & all that extra work for your courses. I’m sure I’ve been as concerned for you about this as you’ve been about me & the baby! Hope all went well, & that you have a lovely dinner at Dot’s. Loved the newsclipping of Margaret.* I look so forward to an amiable sister-in-law! She certainly has nothing to fear from me! I only wish I could share in the fun & plans for the wedding. Would you think me crazy to ask you a favor? Could you possibly get me 2 size 34C Maidenform white cotton bras & 2 pairs of white size 6 six briefs (elasticized not open round the leg rim) at Filene’s* & airmail them? Would it be stupidly expensive if you just wrapped them in paper? I have no underwear, everything has just fallen to shreds & no notion of when I’ll feel like driving for a day in Exeter to shop again, & I know just what American things fit me. If this is too extravagant, don’t bother. I’m slightly dazed & have no notion of common sense at the moment. Everyone is very sweet in town & Rose Key will bring us Sunday dinner in a covered dish. Isn’t that thoughtful.
After both Ted’s & my first shock at having a boy, we think he is marvelous. He did look grim & cross at first, his head all dented where he had caught high up & had to really push to get out, but overnight his head & features altered. Already I can sense a very different temperament from Frieda’s---where she was & is almost hysterically impatient, he is calm & steady, with big dark eyes & a ruddy complexion. Very restful & dear.
Well, Ted’s going to post befor the weekend so I’ll say goodbye for now. Do write me lots of newsy letters now you are more free.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wed.–Sat. 24–27 January 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Wednesday: Jan. 24
Dear mother,
Well, Nicholas is a week old, and I have spent my first whole day up. Things have calmed down considerably, and by next week I think we will be placidly back to schedule. I’ve had a rather tiring week as the first night the baby was born I couldn’t sleep for the excitement, & the nights after that the baby cried all night (I suppose this is the one advantage of a hospital or home nurse!), but now he is settling down to more of a schedule & the doctor gave me a couple of relaxing pills to get me to sleep till I get rested up again. It is wonderful having all this room. While the baby was up nights, I slept with him in the guest room so Ted could have an unbroken night in our room & be ready to cope with Frieda & the cooking & washing up the next day. Now I am back to cooking again, sitting on my stool. I will go on having my nap every afternoon & sitting in my study in the morning. This morning I took a hot bath first thing, put on proper clothes & felt very fresh. I simply wore through the seams of all the underwear & maternity skirts & tights I wore in the last months & looked like a great patchy monster at the end. It is heavenly to have a whole wardrobe to choose from again.
Your red sweater arrived just in time for me to christen it today. It is wonderful! Ted & I just gaped at it. The cuffs and yoke neck are so becoming & the color a tonic after my funereal maternity blacks. I shall probably wear this sweater out before you come! It is ideal for nursing because it is a cardigan & I have no cardigans, so I can wear it over all my button-down-the-front blouses, & it is so deliciously warm! Did it take you ages? I’d like to order another some day. In dusty rose or wedgewood blue. The self-covered buttons are very handsome. I’m so relieved you’re done with your courses. Was the exam Saturday very hard? Will you have time now for more visiting with people & friends?
My favorite midwife, who delivered the baby, was only with us for one day alas. Her 80 year old father who lives in a neighboring town, was very ill with pneumonia so she took a “holiday” to nurse him. The 2nd midwife was Irish & had been a “society” midwife at one point---even worked with Grantly Dick-Read, the natural childbirth man, for a while. She’s been pleasant, but not with the immense moral force and calm of Mrs. Davies---I was so lucky to have her! I have all sorts of little neighborly attentions---the bankers wife brought oranges yesterday & a custard today. The bank manager himself dropped in to collect her---poor man has had 2 heart attacks already, very sweet person. I do enjoy Marjorie Tyrer, his wife. She seems to be a bit of a lone wolf---she is Irish, with a very funny, sharp tongue, full of gossip & evidently not loved much in the town, & I am a good listener. She has a pretty daughter of 15 at private school in Oxford. They found Ted’s picture in Vogue* in a dentist’s office, & a poem of mine in this week’s Sunday Observer,* so we are more or less discovered, & have a kind of pleasant status. Rose Key brought a lovely roast beef dinner for us all Sunday. I think we’re incredibly lucky to have fallen in a place that isn’t all “locals”---these are all “foreigners”, like us. But the local people are awfully nice too. I’ll make up plates of Xmas cookies next year as my kind of hospitality, after your custom.
One bit of practical advice I’d like to ask. Ted wrote a life insurance broker firm after an ad in the paper. We know nothing about rates or kinds of insurance, but this sounded very good to us. What do you think of it? “£6,500 immediate family protection, which includes a with-profits endowment estimated to produce £2,500 payable to you at age 65 with an annuity alternative of £280 at an annual premium of £47. 3. 11. Assuming incoming tax allowance at the standard rate, this works out at 15/5 (just over $2) a week.” This is the sort of policy we would like, with choice of a lump sum or annual “pension” at the end, as of course our job is not pensionable. Multiply by 3 or $2.80 for a rough or specific American translation. Of course we’d need a lot of savings as well, by that time! Let me know what you think.
Saturday: Interrupted by a nasty bout with milk fever, a temperature of over 103 for 2 nights, much worse than that I had with Frieda.* I’d have sweated myself back to normal by morning when the nurse came, very annoying. They are shocked if you take your own temp here. Finally the doctor came across with some shots of penicillin---I’m sure if I’d had them immediately I’d not have got so burnt out, but this is not London. Now at last I am cool again, if a bit spent. Believe me, I shed some tears for our “grammy”. Ted’s been a saint, minding Frieda all day, making me mushrooms on toast, fresh green salads & chicken broth. I hope when you come we can give him a 6 week holiday from any babycare. He needs it---and we both need a few day excursions off on our own, fishing or boating. Margaret’s exquisite sweater set arrived. I think its the sweetest I’ve seen. If Warren makes her anywhere near as happy as Ted has made me, she will be the 2nd happiest girl in the world.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Mary Louise Vincent Black*
Tuesday 30 January 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Collection of Sarah Funke Butler |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
January 30, 1962
Miss Mary Louise Vincent
Assistant to the Director, Meridian Books
119 West 57 Street
New York 19, New York
USA
Dear Miss Vincent,
Thank you very much for your letter of January 25th. I am forwarding it, as you suggested, to Heinemann, who I think probably control “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”---I can’t think who else would control it---and asking them to write you about it.
Here are the items you asked for meanwhile:
1. Date and place of birth: October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts.
2. Occupation: Housewife & mother of two small children.
3. Titles of books and names of magazines where published:
THE COLOSSUS (Poems), Knopf, 1962.
The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, The Partisan Review, The Sewanee Review, The Nation, The London Magazine, Encounter, The Observer, The Spectator, The Times Literary Supplement, etc.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 31 January 1962 |
TLS with envelope, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
January 31, 1962
Dearest mother,
Enclosed is the precious negative of Frieda in her red nightie in the black chair for you to have made up for as many of your friends as want them. I wonder if you have it made up large for yourself, if you’d have a big one made for us too. I am already getting so much to miss the lovely little stages Frieda goes through and wish I could simply keep her little toddling baby-self as well as the growing girl. She seems enormous to me now that I have Nicholas. Let us have the negative if you will, when you’re done with it.
The two enclosed checks are part of this incredible yearly contract I have with the New Yorker, not for any special poem. The smaller is the “cost of living adjustment” for the last quarter, & the larger the adjustment of the cost of living adjustment for the whole year (for which I’ve already had some checks). I think this must be some marvelous scheme on their part to avoid income tax. If I get all this for the few odd poems I send, I imagine the fiction writers must be able to buy penthouses! I just hope I can get back to writing poems soon again.
I now feel fully recovered from my milk fever. The penicillin did it. I still take long naps in the afternoon. Had my first night’s sleep last night unaided by pills---Nicholas still wakes an extra time besides his 2 o’clock feed, but is working from a 3 to a 4 hour schedule slowly.
After 2 years suffering from that radio that was no radio, utterly unable to get the Third Program here or in London, we treated ourselves to a gorgeous radio. Like all good things, it turned out to come from North Tawton. Just as in desperation Ted was going to Exeter to buy one, George Tyrer, the bank manager came over & told us about this wonderful electrician here, who called & said he had two fine VHF radios. He brought them over, & it was a treat to hear music pouring out of them without a touch of static. We chose the best model which just gets the 3 British stations, not all these foreign stations, which I’d never listen to really. He installed it & rigged up a huge permanent ariel on the roof. The cabinet is handsome, small, of mat-finished walnut, no great garish chrome or knobs. We listened to a new translation of the Agamemnon by Aeschylus last night,* almost in tears of joy. It came clear and resonant. Now I will be able to hear all sorts of music & plays & language lessons. The real reason for my hurry was that Ted’s next play “The Wound” has its first broadcast tomorrow night & after my heartache at hearing his last through impossible static & interference, I wanted to enjoy this one. He is brimming with ideas for plays, books, etc. And getting interesting books to review from his friend at the New Statesman---one on the 6 great snakes of the world,* for instance.
Please give me some notion of what Maggie & Warren would like for a wedding present. I’d like to set aside about $50 for them. I’m only afraid my taste isn’t traditional enough for them & would love your guidance. Could I get something here in Exeter they’d like in the way of silver, or send you a check & have you get something? I’d like it to be something really special.
I have got awfully homesick for you since the last baby---and for the Cape & deep snow & such American things. Can’t wait for your visit.
Love to all,
Sivvy
PS: Thank you so much for the bras & pants which came today! A lifesaver. Nicholas looks darling in your pink sweaters. Have written Margaret about her lovely white sweater-set. Do you think you could teach me to knit this summer.
<on page 1 of letter>
PS: My book should be coming out from Knopf on April 23rd in time for your birthday. And I should have 6 poems in a paperback anthology* there in May by Meridian Books – NEW POETS OF ENGLAND & AND AMERICA: 2nd selection. Ted’s in it too.
TO Dorothy Benotti
Wednesday 31 January 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green, North Tawton
Devonshire, England
January 31, 1962
Dear Dotty,
I’ve been meaning to write you for ages, but after Christmas I thought ‘I’ll just wait till the baby comes’, and then the last two weeks have just flown, midwives in and out, the usual sleepless nights until the baby settles down to a feeding schedule, with Ted minding Frieda and cooking meals till I was up and about again. Now at last things have settled down and I begin to feel my old self. We were overwhelmed with your wonderful Christmas package, Dotty! You’ve got the knack of picking out just what I would myself---I love my dark blouse, so refreshing to have something new & special after months of the same old maternity clothes! And the sweaters for Frieda were just the thing---we all go around buttoned up into sweaters till spring here. And Ted is wearing his lovely socks, & baby Nicholas enjoying his towel and the other very convenient things. We had such a nice Christmas, although it was our first alone---we felt we wanted to start our own little traditions. I made a 10 pound turkey, my first, and it came out fine. And your carrot cake, which has become a part of our holidays. We had a little evergreen which we decorated, partly with cookies, which Frieda could pick off and eat. Her big moment was discovering the baby doll mother sent, and a white elephant from Ted’s sister. She still won’t be parted from either---they go with her everywhere. Ted had made her a cradle out of wood which I painted white & enameled with hearts & flowers, so now she can “play baby” with me.
Mother sounded to have such a wonderful time with you all at Christmas. Her letter about it just glowed. I am so relieved she is done with all that awful course work. Now maybe she will relax, and knit, and visit more. We look so forward to having her with us---she will find it a vacation, I think, not like London, sitting out in our garden in a deck chair with her grandchildren, discovering the local beaches with us, and picnicking on Dartmoor. I adore our house. We do have a job keeping it warm---a big coal stove heats the large kitchen-diningroom, where I dry all my clothes. Small electric fan heaters heat the rooms we use most. We have wood fires in the livingroom in the evenings, very cheery. Everybody says our place is gorgeous when the daffodils and cherry and apple trees are in bloom. I can’t wait. It will be so nice to get the children out of doors & out of heavy woolens. I miss the snow---we never have any here, just grey rain which gets boring after 6 months of it.
I was very lucky to have the head midwife of the 3 covering our district deliver Nicholas before she went on a 2 week “holiday” to nurse her very sick old father of 80. She was wonderful, very comforting. I had a cylinder of gas-and-air to breathe when I wanted it, & in between she & Ted & I gossiped happily about the local people & affairs. The neighbors have been so sweet---I hardly know many of them, & they brought flowers, a knitted suit for the baby, fruit, & one woman made a roast beef dinner for us the Sunday after Nicholas was born. I felt so touched by all this kindness, especially as we’re so new here.
I have a very vigorous red-cheeked country-woman come in 2 or 3 mornings a week to do the heavy cleaning---one morning she does the bedrooms & bathroom & stair, vacuuming, changing beds, washing the tub & floor etc. The other day she washes my acres of kitchen floor & does the rest of the downstairs. Now the baby is here, I have her in an hour or two extra to help with the mountains of ironing. My Bendix is a real blessing now. She only costs about 35 cents an hour! Even as it is, I have my hands full, with cooking & two little babies---I don’t know what I would do without her.
How much fun your New Year’s party sounds! You are all so lucky to have such a big, close-knit family. That’s what I miss most about being in England---not having the reunions with all my relatives and friends every year. Thank goodness mother is able to get over; I hope Warren gets a job or position that enables him to come over, too. We are dying to see Margaret. I’m so glad you like her. She certainly does sound devoted and a fine girl for Warren. I do hope we get the chance to meet her!
Frieda seems so big to me, now I have the little baby. She is very heavy to lift. I find myself missing already all the little cute stages she has outgrown and looking forward to them in little Nicholas---I can’t believe Nancy and Bob have grown up so fast. I remember Bob as a darling little dark-eyed baby in diapers.
Well, give my love to the family. Every time I write you, Ted starts remembering those wonderful barbecues in your back yard and the horse & buggy rides. Maybe someday we’ll fill our own stable with a pony!
Lots of love to all,
Sylvia
TO James Michie
Wednesday 31 January 1962 |
TLS, Random House Group Archive & Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
January 31, 1962
Dear James,
I wonder if you’d be so good as to pass the enclosed letter on to your person in charge of permissions.
Meridian Books want to print my poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” (not in the Knopf edition) in an anthology and want to know if you control permissions rights and, if so, what is your fee and what credit should be used.
They sound in rather a hurry about this, and as I imagine Heinemann does control the permission rights to the poems in my book, I’m passing their letter on as they request.
All good wishes,
Sylvia
TO Marion Freeman
Wednesday 31 January 1962 |
ALS (aerogramme), Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
January 31, 1962
Dear Aunt Marion,
Happy New Year to you! I hope this letter finds you well on the mend from pneumonia, which mother says got you into hospital. Do take care and don’t do too much even though you feel lots better---I learned this when I had pneumonia while teaching at Smith.
By now you have probably heard about the birth of Nicholas Farrar Hughes on January 17th. I had him at home, delivered by a local midwife, and he’s just a darling. I think it is wonderful that Ruthie manages 4. Right now, a new baby, and Frieda at the age where she can just reach another stage of shelves and tables, I feel to have my hands full. Do tell Ruthie how I loved the pictures of her family---they are such handsome children, every one so bright and pretty. We did like the cute boy & girl pictures she sent---they will decorate the babies room.
I want to say thank you so much for the lovely engagement calendar---I so enjoy keeping my days recorded with pictures to remind me of America. I wish it were possible to fly back for visits with the speed of thought! You have no idea what a hit the Woman’s Days made here! There simply are no magazines like this in England. They came just as Ted & I were puzzling how to make a cradle for Frieda’s christmas present. On the off chance I opened to the How-To section, and sure enough, there was a pattern for a lovely wood cradle, which Ted proceeded to cut out. I got ideas from the wonderful colored section on quilting patterns & enameled the cradle with hearts and flowers.* So you are indirectly responsible for what we think, and Frieda thinks, is a very nice cradle!
I am so relieved mother is through her courses, and hope she finds time now for relaxing and visiting and knitting. We are dying to have her come over here this summer. I get really homesick for her---it must be so nice to be able to drop in on your children and grandchildren whenever you feel like it.
Ted joins me in sending best wishes for your health. Pass on my love to Ruthie.
Lots of love,
Sylvia
TO Olive Clifford Eaton*
Thursday 1 February 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Thursday: February 1st
Dear Mrs. Eaton,
Mother tells me you are responsible for making the absolutely beautiful blue blanket with the pink embroidery and the handsome potholders which we received in our wonderful Christmas package from America. I did want to tell you how much I am enjoying both of these things. Our new baby, a boy---Nicholas Farrar Hughes---was born on January 17th, at home, delivered by the local midwife, and is now sleeping cosily upstairs wrapped in the blue blanket. I’m so glad to have “something blue” for him. And the potholders came just as I was about to throw away an old pair of pot-holding gloves that were all worn out, so fitted in beautifully and cheered up my country kitchen.
Mother says the delicious carrot cake recipe I got from Aunt Dot came originally from your files, through grammy. I like the cake so much I make it as a Christmas cake, and gave the midwife one after she had delivered the baby.
The weather here is very grim and English---grey and rainy, none of the white American snow I love so much. But Ted has found our first snowdrops and primroses, so we look forward to spring not too far off, when our acre of daffodils and our 70 apple trees and several cherry trees will be in bloom---a lovely sight we have not yet seen, we are so new to the house.
I hope this letter finds you well. Ted joins me in sending best wishes and in admiring the lovely blanket and potholders.
A very happy New Year,
Sylvia Plath Hughes
TO Judith Jones
Friday 2 February 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), University of Texas at Austin |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
February 2, 1962
Mrs. Judith B. Jones
ALFRED A. KNOPF INC.
501 Madison Avenue
New York 22, New York
USA
Dear Mrs. Jones,
Thanks very much for your letter,* and for the proofs of THE COLOSSUS* which arrived today. There are just three minor corrections I have to make.
1. In “A Note About the Author” it should say that I taught at Smith after the Fulbright to Cambridge (not before).
2. In “A Winter Ship” (p. 44) the first line should read “At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of.” (instead of “no grand lands”).
3. In “Man in Black” the two lines beginning “Snuff-colored sand cliffs . . .” should be lined up with the rest of the lines and not set to the left.
I thought the proofs looked very fine. Our daughter Frieda, by the way, was joined by our first son Nicholas two weeks ago. Now all is peaceful again, I am back at my novel.
With best wishes,
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 7 February 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
February 7: Wednesday
Dear mother,
Thank you so much for sending the bras & briefs---you got just what I wanted, & I suppose it seems silly to ask for you to go downtown for me as it were, on another continent, but you have no idea how much it meant---I won’t be able to shop for weeks yet, when the baby is on a more fixed schedule, and small things still loom very large. I get so impatient with myself, chafing to do a hundred things that have piled up, and barely managing one or two. Nicholas is very good during the night at last, waking like clockwork at 2 a.m. and 6 am with no crying in between. If he cries, it is in the afternoon or evening. Tell Warren to get a big house with a soundproof bedroom before he has a baby---I’m sure the night waking & crying would knock him out. I am lucky and have got in the rhythm of just dropping right back to sleep after I feed him, but I look very forward to when I can sleep 8 hours in a row. I don’t know what I would do without Nancy---she is coming about two hours a week extra now to help with my mountains of ironing. I have fallen newly in love with my Bendix. Right now I am doing about 3 full loads a week, what with all the sheets, towels and an astounding assembly line of nappies from Nicholas. We use disposable ones for Frieda, otherwise things just wouldn’t go round. It is heavenly to lie down upstairs and come down and find the kitchen floors washed, or to bake a cake and go upstairs and find all the rugs clean. Even so, I find my hands full. Did you have any household help when we were little? I seem to remember a succession of Annies and young women with red fingernails, I suppose when I am caught up on sleep everything will get done faster. I have a lot to catch up on, like clothes to be mended & cleaned & Frieda’s woolens keep me doing a daily handwash. Perhaps at the end of the month I shall be back in my study again. Ted is still taking the brunt of Frieda---she needs watching every minute. Her favorite trick is peeling our poor wallpaper off the wall, there are so many cracks she can get her fingernails in, and then running and pointing & saying “Bah Poo” in outraged tones, as if somebody else has done it. She has, all since I was down & out with the baby, discovered how to throw things down the toilet, tear up minute bits of paper or cotton & sprinkle them over the red hall carpet, uproot bulbs from flower pots, draw on the walls with coal, and today discovered a cache of candy wellmeaning people had given me for her over a longish period, which I was saving to distribute among visiting children, and had half-sucked most of it & stuck it all over her and in her own little hiding places before Ted found her out. Now that the baby is getting toward a 4 rather than a 3 hour schedule I should be freer to keep an eye on her. I am still delighted with my forsight at getting all the quarterly assignments for my grant done & packaged ahead. I do hope to get back to writing soon, though. I am taking all those bottles of pills you sent, and wonder if it isn’t the combination of them, especially the Vitamin C, which has kept me without a cold so far this winter (knock on wood). Oh, how I look forward to your visit! How I envy girls whose mothers can just drop in on them. I long to have a day or two on jaunts with just Ted---we can hardly see each other over the mountains of diapers & demands of babies. Nicholas is so cute---he weighed over 10 lbs. 2 oz.---had gained back his birthweight & more.
Ted’s play was beautifully produced & he is so full of ideas for others. He is also reviewing animal books fairly regularly for the New Statesman & going on with his broadcasts for children which have been very enthusiastically received. I am so longing for spring. I miss the American snow, which at least makes a new clean exciting season out of winter, instead of this 6 months cooping-up of damp & rain & blackness we get here. Like the 6 months Persephone had to spend with Pluto. I get such pleasure hearing what lovely surprises your friends are planning with you. You deserve every bit of it & more, & it makes my spirit much lighter to think of you having outings instead of that deadly double-grind---that really depressed me. Do tell Dotty how much it means to me to keep in touch with her. She writes such nice newsy letters now. I do miss not having relatives to share my children with. Or my closest friends. You & Warren will just have to come over here often enough to keep me from getting too homesick, & get to know the babies as they grow up. Oh, the wonderful springerle pin & nut grinder (it is a nut grinder isnt it?) arrived today. I will try it out on a batch of springerle first thing. I find baking all my home recipes is very cheering---made Dotty’s 6-egg sponge this week, banana bread & lemon cake pudding. My regret is that I’ve found nowhere in all England that sells refined molasses! Just crude black---and my favorite cookies & breads are made with molasses. By the way, could I ask you to slip a tube of cocoabutter into your next packet? Resolved to try England, we asked the chemist for cocoabutter. He said it didn’t seem to come commercially, but he’d get some. The result: a packet of infinitesimal splinters. Ted & I melted it in the oven, & got a cake of the stuff, but with* a ghastly rancid smell. My first Ladies’ Home Journal came & I read it from cover to cover. Have written Mrs. Eaton, Dotty, Mrs. Freeman, Margaret & Mrs. Prouty. Everybody over there is so good to us, & you the most. Do keep telling me all about the wedding plans. How I’d adore to come.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 13 February 1962 |
TLS with envelope, Indiana University |
Tuesday: February 13
Dear mother,
This letter has hung around so long I am just enclosing it* in this one or it will never get off. I don’t know where the time has gone! I seem to need to sleep all the time, so drop back after feeding Nicholas at 6 and don’t get up till after 9, then the day is a whirlwind of baths, laundry, meals feedings & bang it is time for bed. Both Ted & I seem to need twice as much sleep as normal people, and are unable to function efficiently if we have a bad night. I wish I liked black coffee---it might wake me up, but I am living on bowls of eggnog and hot milk and ovaltine for beverages.
Nicholas is absolutely darling. He seems so far advanced as a baby---I keep him on his stomach as I did Frieda, for she did pushups & developed her muscles early this way & I saw a 7 month baby who had lain on his back absolutely helpless when put on his stomach. Now Nicholas lifts his head and turns it from side to side when lying down. He has great very dark blue eyes which focus and follow your face or the light, unlike Frieda, whose eyes crossed alarmingly for a long time. He has a real little boy look, & his fuzz of brown babyhair looks like a crewcut. His eyebrows are strange---a quite black curved line over each eye, very handsome. I imagine he will have a rather dark handsome craggy face, although now he is soft as a peach. You’ll enjoy seeing him still at a real baby stage when you come. I have washed both your pink sweater & Margaret’s & they both came out beautifully. I don’t know whether it is the wool or whether I am just a better washer. I did rub Frieda’s at the wrists & elbows a little---she gets so black even in a day, with food snacks & coal & all the muck of our farmy place it seemed impossible to get out the dirt just by squeezing. But now I squeeze.
The darling valentine for Frieda arrived---it seemed just made for her, and she has been carrying her handkerchief around in her pocket, she is especially delighted because there is an elephant on it. She is always running into me & lifting a finger & saying “O, baby cry” (without the r) or “Shh, beddie-bye”. Of course the baby usually isn’t crying at all. She is going through a very pretty amusing stage now---she will point to the patch she tore off her wallpaper & cluck her tongue and I say* “Who did that” and she shakes her head chidingly and says “Bah Poo” (bad girl), and I say “Who’s the bad girl” & she points to herself and says “ME” and burst into uproarious laughter. She is such a sunshiney thing. I can’t wait till she gets interested in reading. She looks at magazines & pictures a lot, picking out with great pride the mummies and daddies and bawpees and cars and shoes and spoons and things she can recognize. She is unerring---and knows the tiny bird on the New Yorker masthead is an “Ow”.
I was fascinated to hear about Dick Norton’s* starting a practise---how perfectly Dickensian! I would love to know details about David. Why does he find his parents difficult??? How is it Perry didn’t save any money? O I love hearing all these bits of personal detail about the people I used to know. New people are never as interesting as the ones one grew up with. Local news in North Tawton---the rector is being moved down from his hill house to the empty lot directly opposite us---they are knocking down the wall across the way much to our sorrow & Ted is going to invest in a screen of trees. A man fell from his window in the town square last night (this Nancy told me in answer to my query if anything more blew down in the town in the high wind) & the wall was theatrically splashed with blood when I went to market---he was 80, & evidently suffered only head injury & shock. The bank manager & his wife dropped over this afternoon after half a week in London. Rose Key’s old husband Percy is in hospital for a fortnight checkup---he has been losing weight & feeling depressed. I came on her in tears today & will have her for a hot dinner this week.
I hope it is not cancer or anything awful. She’s awfully sweet, with 3 daughters in London. Took Nicholas for his first visit to the redoubtable Mrs. Hamilton, the midwifes aunt, a fine old woman.
We have gorgeous big double snowdrops in bloom, a scattering of primroses & countless daffodil sprouts. When the apple trees bloom I am just going to take Frieda & Nicholas & lie in the orchard all day!*
Much love to all –
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 24 February 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Saturday: February 24
Dear mother,
The bitter cold of winter has descended upon us again, after a longish lull. Next fall I think we will invest in even two more little Pifco electric heaters---they are wonderfully satisfactory, and we really need one in each room: it’s a bore to lug them from room to room, and I am getting expert in snapping them on half an hour or so before I want to use a room, so it is cosy. I keep one on in the baby’s room all day, and we are sleeping there till the cold lets up as it is the warmest room in the house. We are looking so forward to spring. Snowdrops are blooming all over our place in shady nooks, and our first daffodil of all the multitudes of plants sprung up bloomed this week---we keep puffing out to look at it and admire it. Ted has planted several nut, plum, pear and peach trees he ordered this week, and yesterday Frieda and I went out for a brisk hour to pull up the dead annual shoots in the garden & I look so forward to sowing the brightly colored seed packets of seeds I’ve bought & seeing what comes up. I find being outdoors gardening an immense relaxation & hope we have some successes with our fruit, vegetables & flowers.
I am feeling in fine shape again---having made a much more rapid recovery than when I had Frieda. Partly because Nicholas is so little trouble. He only cries when he is hungry and loves being sat up and talked to---he smiled a few times at me this week and is so sweet, a little sweet-smelling peach. I feel I really enjoy him---none of the harrassment & worry of Frieda’s colic and my inexperience. I love playing with him. I also am rested enough to find energy to play with Frieda in the 2nd half of the day, and concentrate my attention on her then. She is very squirmy & active, will hardly sit quiet a minute. We are teaching her to build blocks and she is getting more & more interested in picture books. Luckily when I am busiest with the baby---bathing & nursing him, Ted is downstairs with her, so her life is really very little changed, although she would cuff him if she could & gets fussy & babyish if Ted is away in the morning & she has to watch me tend to him. But this is perfectly natural. She is very radiant now---I dressed her in that very handsome openwork blue sweater you knit some time ago and her pale blue cord pants & she looked like a forget-me-not.
All the older people here seem ill---George Tyrer, the bank manager had a mild heart attack again this week, preventing him & his wife & daughter from coming to dinner with us,* and Percy Key had some part of his lung taken out at a Chest Hospital, for what his wife still doesn’t know---TB or cancer, I wonder. It is amazing the way simple people accept medicine as a kind of miracle they never question. Ted’s radio play was repeated* this week, very nice, as it doubles the money for it, making a total of about $730 for the 2 performances. A selection of his poems is being translated into Swedish* & published there, & 2 selections are coming out in various paperback anthologies here.
I am immensely grateful for the BBC Third Program & have sent for 2 booklets for 2 language courses that begin this week, one in German & one in French.* They have exercises & pronunciation & I find them excellent. Oh, I have thought of a lovely wedding present for Warren & Margaret if they would like it---how about the most beautiful blanket in the world? A Moderna Sorrento blanket. They come in exquisite single shades, or in double shades (rose & deep rose, or pale yellow & daffodil, or light green & deep green etc.) one color on each side, and are the lightest, warmest fluffiest handsomest things I’ve ever seen, guaranteed for 10 years, moth proofed etc. I got a pale rose/carnation one for our double bed & am mad about it (about $35 for this 100 x 100 inch one) and they are made, interestingly enough, in the town of Ted’s birth---Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire. I’ll get a list of colors, & if they would like one maybe they could pick a shade & tell me the best size, & whether 2 singles or a double. Do you think that is a good idea?
I hope they aren’t piling extra duties on you in college in revenge. From now till April 1st is the most treacherous season, so take care. We have all 3 been in fine health (knock on wood) miraculously all winter, much due, I think, to those ascorbic acid Vitamin C pills you sent which I take every day, & to our bowl of orange juice every morning. We like our Court Green more & more & more. I am dying to get it all fixed up as we want. It will take years of course, especially the grounds. Do thank Aunt Marion for me for the check for the baby & the Woman’s Days. And I’ll write Dotty soon with Frieda’s size. I am looking so forward to your coming. I have Nancy a 3rd morning a week now for 2 hours of ironing, so I am free of most drudgery except that of cooking & washing up & babytending, all of which I more or less enjoy – so we should be free to sit & the garden & play with the babies most of the time.
Love to all
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 4 March 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Sunday: March 4
Dear mother,
Honestly, you are a marvel of intuition! We have been having our worst cold spell yet here, and I was huddled over the fire with Ted, looking so blue he like Sir Walter Raleigh* took off the Jaeger sweater I gave him for Christmas and put it round my shoulders. Then the doorbell rang. It was the mailman with your latest package. I opened it, and there in the middle of the lovely babyclothes was The Jacket! Surely you never told me it was coming---it was a complete surprise. I put it on right away and gave Ted back his sweater. It is ideal for everything. First, it is beautifully warm, with that furry lining. Next, it is stylish, so I don’t feel like an old bundle of oddly assorted knitting. I can wear it in the house and be both warm and neat looking. In spring and fall I can wear it outside as well. I just love the color and cut. It fits perfectly. It is the nicest thing you could have thought of to see me through the rest of the winter and years to come! I have just got fed up of winter. We are going to see about weatherstripping our outside doors which have rather large gaps around the edges letting in the cold air and wind, and also are investigating builders for putting in the cement foundation under our front two rooms, which can then have lino put down, and we will be sealed and cheered against the onslaught of next winter. We did have a lovely snow a few days ago---my first snow in England. For a few hours every twig was all thick with white and you couldn’t see a thing beyond our land, but then the sun came out and by noon the whole vision had melted.
I received a lovely blue corduroy romper-and-jersey set from Aunt Elizabeth, whom I shall thank.* I loved the baby things for Nicholas you sent---they will be so nice when he is crawling in the sun on a blanket this summer. I am managing to get about two and a bit more hours in my study in the mornings and hope to make it four when I can face getting up at six, which I hope will be as soon as Nicholas stops waking for a night feeding. The day seems to just fly by after noon, though, and I am lucky if I get a fraction of the baking or letterwriting or reading or studying done that I want to. When the good weather comes it should be a lot easier. The winter is a grubby time with little children, indoor washing, and no snow to play in. In six more weeks the time will change, and we’ll have the lovely long days again.
I so enjoyed hearing about Margaret’s wedding dress. It sounds gorgeous. I do wish I could share in all the plans---it would be fun to be so close to a formal wedding. How nice that is what Warren wants, too. Let me know what you and they think about a blanket as a present and I’ll get a list or sampling of colors in Exeter---I hope I’ll be ready to go there in a week or two. Ted has found a good dentist, recommended by our midwife, and I’ll start going as soon as Ted’s finished his own series of sessions.
I have got sent some autobiographies and biographies from the New Statesman for review (where my review of children’s books appeared) and am enjoying the book on Josephine,* Napoleon’s wife, very much. I expect another batch of books this week, from which I’ll choose some, and will try to do a review so they’ll ask me again. It’s fun getting all the free books.
Frieda is getting better and better at imitating what we say, and talks to herself ceaselessly over her picture books in her own brand of prattle. “Oh boy-baby. Bear gone. Moo-cow” and so on. She says “snow” and pronounces the Ws” very carefully. She was very amused by the snow---we took her for little walks in her boots. Oh, a letter came from the London toy store saying you’ve given us 5 pounds credit (a thousand thanks), no toy catalogue though. Honestly, you must go slow, mother! You have been so generous with things for Frieda and Nicholas I am concerned about your budgeting!
I am hoping the next installments of my grant in May and August carry us over the first year’s hump of major expense for furnishings and repairs; it couldn’t have come at a better time. I am getting very excited about the possibilities of our garden, and hope we can conquer our nightly enemies, the snails. By the way, if you know anybody who has ever kept a couple of chickens for eggs, let us know hints about it. I know Dot & Joe keep theirs in battery. Well, we are thinking of simply getting half a dozen & letting them run around loose in an enclosure. I’d adore to have our own fresh eggs!
You would so enjoy Frieda now. She is a good walker and full of tricks to make us laugh. She is always stuffing things in her pockets, nails, nuts, keys, and has mastered the art of saying “Please” (without the l) and the possessive---“Mummy’s poppy” (pocket), “Daddy’s keys” and “Baby’s bath”. I am beginning work on something amusing which I hope turns into a book (novel), but may be just happy piddling. I find long things much easier on my nature than poems---not so intensely demanding or depressing if not brought off. Luckily the English will publish almost anything in the way of a novel, so I have hope. It’s almost April! Take care.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Ruth Fainlight
Sunday 4 March 1962 |
TLS, Ruth Fainlight |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
March 4, 1962
Dear Ruth,
I’ve been writing to you in my head for weeks but as a result of post-baby lethargy have been absolutely mum. We have a boy baby (his sex a great surprise to us both) named Nicholas Farrar Hughes, born on January 17th at 5 minutes to midnight. I am appalled to see how long ago that is, but my pregnancy cowishness seems to last for some time after I have got back to my pleasant old skimpy-stomached self. Nicholas was a very different experience from Frieda, who arrived bang-bang in under 5 hours with no dawdling. I confidently expected to be in danger of dropping Nicholas in the garden or something. But he took a whole day nagging, in which I sat on a stool & baked great amounts of stuff for us to live on for days afterwards. Then the pains got serious the minute Frieda was in bed & we called the midwife who brought her gas & air. This was great fun---we sat, Ted on one side of the bed, & the midwife, who is a very noble and fine woman, on the other, & I retired behind my mask at intervals & felt very sociable and delighted with the conversation all about the town, our house, its history, past tenants, etc. I was beginning to push, very pleased with my control, when the gas gave out & the baby stuck. There we were. What they call “nature’s anesthesia” kept me from more than a dumb crossness at the delay, but the midwife (not given to alarm) said “I nearly thought we had an emergency” after it was over. The baby flew into the room in a wall of water, very blue, cross and male. I thought I must be torn to bits, but not a scratch. He weighed 9 pounds 11 ounces, compared to Frieda’s ladylike 7 pounds 4 ounces---details which never interested me before my own immediate experience of them. His head had evidently stuck & he looked fearfully low-browed and tough until his skull-plates shaped up. Ted & I had been expecting a girl---thinking, I suppose, that Frieda would be less jealous of a girl, and both having got so fond of her we couldn’t recapture our original desire for a son. It took us overnight to come round. Then a rather wicked 10 days of Ted cooking & minding Frieda & me coping with a succession of strange midwives (mine was on “holiday” tending a father of 80 with pneumonia) and nightly milk fevers with a temperature of over 103 which left me bang, in a sweat, just before the doctor arrived every morning & which nobody but myself believed. Great consternation at me taking my own temperature. All this passed as a dream. Now it seems preposterous & rather funny.
I am so eager to hear your news. Please be better than me & drop one little note about your baby---sex, name, date, poundage, oh you know. Or get Alan to do. We are both hoping you won’t give up the idea of visiting us this spring . . . only 4 hours from Waterloo by carrycot. Do come. We are a baby-farm with every convenience. I am very happy with Court Green, my study, the babies, but mad for someone to talk to & woefully self-pitying about our just discovering you & Alan & then moving off. The women here are much worse than the men, who at least have their work. It’s like a cattery. I never knew what “provincial” meant before. Ted joins in sending love. Please say you may come – Mayish?
Lots of love & good luck. Do write me – it’s so good to get your letters.
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 12 March 1962 |
TLS with envelope, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Monday, March 12
Dear mother,
It was so nice to get your letter saying Margaret & Warren would like a blanket. I’m going to Exeter to the dentist this week so I shall see about ordering the two-tone rose one and having it sent. I was so touched to think I shall pass on your lovely Bavarian china---that’s the set with the dark-green background to the border, isn’t it? One feels a girl is the one to appreciate the domestic things, for she is the one who uses them---I know I shall reserve my treasures for Frieda. I am getting very sentimental about family things. For instance, someday I hope to be well-off enough to send for grammy’s desk. I’d like it to be Frieda’s little desk. I have such happy memories of it, and could never find anything with such associations---it’s close to priceless.
I look very forward to shopping around Exeter with you---I know very little about it, my visits were so soon curtailed. I think the idea of tweed skirts and matching sweaters a handsome one. I’m sure we’ll find something. I hope Dotty’s got my letter with Frieda’s measurements & thanking her for the lovely package. I’m astounded at all the people you say are sending packages!! I look so forward to your visit this summer I can hardly sit still. It is a red-letter occasion for me because for the first time I shall be sharing my house. Which you were so instrumental in enabling us to find last summer, & to buy! I just adore the place. I picked our very first bouquet of daffodils yesterday & put them in a glass & brought them up to Ted’s study with his tea.
I’m sure you’ll find us very rough, still---although we are wonderfully civilized compared to when Warren was here. We have arranged to have the playroom & hall floors filled in with cement & bitumen & lino tiles put down---something I hope’s got over with within a month, this being the last “big” immediate thing. The playroom (where I am typing) is a fun room. I look forward to filling it with handpainted furniture, chests for toys & the like---I want to paint them white, with a design of hearts & flowers, have an old piano and so on. A real rumpus room. Now it’s just bare boards & deck chairs & a welter of Frieda’s toys.
Frieda is christening the wonderful dungaree set you sent today---digging all morning in the garden with Ted. She is beautiful. She has just struck the most perfect stage, pink cheeks, clear blue eyes and her feathery brown hair. She is picking up words very fast now, and phrases---too cold, too hot, a bit hot, boobarb for rhubarb, open nut, daddy’s screw, more tea, and so on. She’s so funny. We’re arranging to have the children baptized on Sunday afternoon, March 25th, by the way. Although I honestly dislike, or rather, scorn the rector. I told you about his ghastly H-bomb sermon, didn’t I, where he said this was the happy prospect of the Second Coming & how lucky we Christians were compared to the stupid pacifists & humanists & “educated pagans” who feared being incinerated etc. etc. I’ve not been to church since. I felt it was a sin to support such insanity even by my presence. But I think I shall let the children go to Sunday School. Marcia Plumer sent me a copy of a wonderful sermon by her local Unitarian minister which made me weep, on fallout shelters. I’d really be a church-goer if I was back in Wellesley or America---the Unitarian church is my church. How I miss it!!! There is just no choice here. It’s this church or nothing. If only there were no sermon, I could justify going to the ceremony with my own reservations. Oh well.
As I say, we are still rough---very creaky floors, leaky faucets, peeling paper & plaster & so on. But the house has a real, generous, warm soul to it. And responds so beautifully to any care we take. I so enjoy sitting here, watching the sun set behind the church. I think I will go just wild when our trees start blooming---there are fat buds on the lilac. I think the most exciting thing to me is owning flowers and trees!
Nicholas is immensely strong. He holds his head up for ages, like a Sphinx, looking round---the result of my keeping him on his stomach. I think his eyes may be hazel, like Ted’s---they are a deep slateblue now. I love him so dearly. I think having babies is really the happiest experience of my life. I would just like to go on and on.
I’m enclosing a check for some poems in the March issue of Poetry Chicago* for deposit in our account. Wasn’t Ted’s Atlantic poem nice!
I am enjoying my slender foothold in my study in the morning again. It makes all the difference in my day. I still get tired by teatime, and have spells of impatience for not doing all I want in the way of study and reading. But my mornings are as peaceful as churchgoing---the red plush rug and all, and the feeling that nothing else but writing and thinking is done there, no sleeping, eating or mundane stuff.
I have the queerest feeling of having been reborn with Frieda---it’s as if my real rich happy life only started just about then. I suppose it’s a case of knowing what one wants. I never really knew before. I hope I shall always be a “young” mother, like you. I think working or having any sort of career keeps one young longer. I feel I’m just beginning at writing, too. Doing prose is much easier on me, the concentration spreads out over a large area & doesn’t stand or fall on one day’s work, like a poem.
Ted has just made another stand for integrity & privacy by refusing to do a TV program on the Poet in the Process of Composing a Poem from Start to Finish. Did I tell you he’s being translated into Swedish? The Swedish language looks wonderful, with the craggy character of German & none of the pedantry. A drawing of Ted, from a photograph, was in the copy of the Swedish magazine that came. Frieda came running in with it, pointing to the drawing and saying “Daddy, Daddy”. Then she pointed to the line that hung in midair at the back of his neck and said “Oh, broken.”
I hope you are going on being very careful about driving in all that snow. There were pictures in our paper yesterday about the wreckage on Fire Island, New York.* Did you weather that storm all right?
Is there any chance of our getting any American corn seed with directions, do you think? Ted is starting to plant things & we are loaded with seed packets & fertilizer, and Slug Death.
Well, I must get supper for my family. Lots of love from us all,
Sivvy
TO Paul & Clarissa Roche
Monday 12 March 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton, Devon.
March 12, 1962
Dear Paul & Clarissa . . .
It was wonderful to hear from you. Perhaps (I hope for you) you are by now in Greece. The thought of going alone (or going anywhere alone) must be heaven. What sort of a friend do you have who would look after three children??? I wish we could find one like that. But my own ties to the babies, nursing and so on, are so strong, I don’t think I could stop---we dream of a few months in a place like Corsica, but would have to take babies with, which puts dreams off.
Isn’t there any chance of you two coming down overnight or something? I am particularly desperate that Clarissa does not disappear back to America without my seeing her!! We do have an extra double bed & would so love to see you. Our house is 1 mile from the North Tawton station, which is an easy 4 hours by direct express from Waterloo. How about a flying visit??? We are so stuck, with this new infant, and very broke with piles of necessary house repairs, plus investment in what Ted hopes will be a sort of lucrative garden, but hopeful as I am, I am oppressed by the large nocturnal armies of invisible slugs which devour everything local. We are armed with lethal pellets of SLUGIT and SLUGDEATH. Wish us success.
The all-to-brief heaven of our moving in last fall to halcyon weather and our own (very small) apple harvest was neutralized by this awful winter. I thought I was bearing up fine, ho-hoing when the midwife told me that a temperature of 38 was really too chill for a new baby and so on in the bedroom. We all lasted the winter with no colds or illness, then I was diagnosed in the last week to have Chilblains. I had though I’d merely been victim to a horde of migrant fleas or floating stinging nettle pollen, but the word Chilblains undid me. It suggested that all the time I was thinking myself nobly above the cold, the cold was meanly nipping my ankles & leering. I got very grim. Especially as our electric bill rocketed to almost 25 pounds for 3 months and I was still cold. But then a day of sheer sun last week had me & the babies out in the garden, me weeding our antique cobbles with love & pruning roses, and if only the weather would relent, I would be ecstatic, bucolic and so on. Our acre of daffodils is brightly beginning to show. The sparrows hold on our thatch with their communal spirit. Do come and say hello to us. At least write. I am nearly done with a quite grossly amateur novel the small grant for which is enabling us to live with less desperation than usual this year, and to do repairs we could never manage on our uncertain dribbles from poems, reviews etc.
How lovely it would be to see you! Do give us hopes. Ted joins in sending love,
Sylvia
TO Elizabeth Schober
Friday 23 March 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 23, 1962
Dear Aunt Elizabeth,
I have been meaning to write for ages to thank you for the darling blue corduroy baby suit you sent for Nicholas, but ever since the baby’s arrival in January I have done hardly anything, it seems, but take care of the children. It has been very, very cold here, and our primitive heating by electric fires a bit too primitive to keep all the cold out, but miraculously the babies seem to thrive anyway, and have had no colds all winter, nor have we.
Ted is busy planning a large vegetable garden, and I took advantage of the first warm sunny day in about half a year last week to put the babies out and weed our antique cobbles in the front and prune some rose bushes. We have a lot of work ahead of us, with our 2½ acres, but I adore gardening (although I am just a raw beginner) and it is so easy to work at it with the babies nearby.
Frieda has turned into a wonderfully pretty little girl, amazing both Ted & me---we hardly feel to deserve her. She is very lively and excitable, with big blue eyes. Nicholas is quite different. Even at 2 months, he seems much more peaceful, quiet and dark. It is hard to tell what color his eyes will be---they are a dark slate-blue now. Ted thinks they will be hazel, like his. That would be very nice.
We have a lot of dreams about fixing the place up---getting the old tennis court into shape, growing luxury items like asparagus, strawberries & mushrooms, plus all sorts of flowers, but just now I will be delighted if we manage to produce a few onions!
You are an angel to think so generously of us. You have such exquisite taste. I am looking forward someday to another baby girl who will inherit the lovely blue party dress you sent Frieda when she was little. This blue cord suit will be perfect for Nicholas---blue is really our family color!
Lots of love,
Sylvia
TO Marvin Kane
Friday 23 March 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
March 23, 1962
Dear Marvin,
Many thanks for your good letter. We are really rooting ourselves in Devon, having bought an ancient thatched farmhouse complete with cobbled courtyard, thatched barn & cottage, stables & 2½ acres including 70 apple trees & millions of daffodils. Both of us are rather stunned---we did it, or rather, discovered the place, in one fell swoop last summer, goaded to it by the prospects of a second infant, now two months old, and the morbid leakage of rent. We were, without quite knowing it, very lucky---this “ugly ancient decayed market town” (as the guidebooks have it) has all the practical things which I as a loyal American housewife demand---butchers, grocers, banks, & a good chemists & fine midwife. People are surprisingly friendly & the country peace is very good for writing.
Both of us, out of the blue, have become very excited about the possibilities of our land---and Ted is laying out an ambitious vegetable garden. Eventually I hope to try my hand at raising the bits of Americana I most miss---Country Gentlemen corn, Kentucky wonder beans, pumpkins---the lot. As we are plagued by large, insatiable & invisible nocturnal slugs, we may not have all the luck we need. But we are armed with pellets of SLUGDEATH and SLUGIT. Wish us success!
The program* sounds an exciting one. I hope it is destined to be broadcast in England & not just on the overseas services, so we can hear it. I’d love to be on it. The only problem, as you can guess, is that I never get up to London, with this baby, even for a day (I miss London a lot more than Ted does!) Is there any possibility of the BBC (or somebody) loaning you a tape recorder? In any case, we’d very much enjoy seeing both you & your wife Kathy* down here. It is right on the way to Cornwall, hardly a detour at all. If you let us know the day, let’s plan on you having lunch or supper with us.
North Tawton is between Exeter & Okehampton, just to the north of the A30, & about 7 miles before Okehampton. Our phone number, by the way, is NORTH TAWTON 370. If the operators claim there is no North Tawton just tell them to connect up through Okehampton, which is big enough to be known, & which knows of our existence.
Do let us know if you can stop by. The weather should be gentler & our place showing a few signs of the idyll we hope it will 10 years hence be! And try to wangle a tape-recorder. Won’t the BBC consider you as a traveling correspondent?
All good wishes,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 27 March 1962 |
TLS with envelope, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Tuesday: March 27, 1962
Dearest mother,
So nice to get your happy springy letter! I have been suffering from the March megrims---we seem to have had nothing but a horrid raw damp east wind (which blows around our antique back door & straight through the house) for the last month. March is the worst month when it is mean, it seems one has used up all one’s resistance to winter, & is left vulnerable. Just when I was most dismal we had one glorious sunny day when I had the babies out & and ate out & gardened from sunrise till sunset. We all got little sunburns & felt wonderful. Then the cold & grey closed in again. I am becoming a devout gardener---knowing nothing about it. It is so soothing & kindly to work in the earth, pruning, digging, cutting grass. Ted is doing wonders with the back which will be our vegetable garden, digging & fertilizing it. I hope we have some luck, though I expect this year we’ll be mostly learning. Do make Frieda a “corn-bag”. We eventually hope to get our little greenhouse working, too. I have so many ideas for flowers: I love the outdoor exercise. Frieda has a little imitation lawnmower with a bell & she follows me around with mine, which she calls “Mummy’s Oodle-Ooo”, after noise it makes. She says “daffdee” for our daffodils, which are coming out in their heavenly startling way, like stars. I am going to be practical and sell bunches of a dozen a week via the local greengrocers who have offered to buy any of our surplus flowers and vegetables. Eventually we’d like the garden to pay for itself.
I think your chance to buy Margaret’s Syward’s car shouldn’t be missed: when you want & need to buy a new car again, you’ll be uneasy if you don’t have one you can rely on, & this is that sort. So I am refunding with great thanks your loan which helped us get the house so you can get the car for your birthday. I am so glad we are in a position to do this. I love the idea of not being indebted in any way. That seems a marvelous thing to me at our age! I’m enclosing a letter to the bank so they can make you out a check from our account. Now you won’t need to think of cashing in any securities. Please do buy the car right away.
I am sitting in our “red room”, the babies in bed, and Ted in London for the day doing a BBC broadcast* on his children’s poems; I’m enjoying some Haydn* piano sonatas over the BBC---you can almost listen to good music continually on one or the other of the two good stations. I long for a 2nd hand piano! That is the next thing we’ll save for, after the playroom floors are done: the man should do them (or start to) any day now. It will be an upheaval for about 10 days, but very much worth it! I am so grateful for my Saxton grant---modest as it is, it has enabled us to buy rugs & make the most needed alterations in the house. I have a great yearning to practise piano again---when we get the piano I’ll ask for some of my old music! I have such a nice children’s songbook from my reviewing I long to play the songs to Frieda.
My poems should be in the March issue of Poetry. I got the dearest handsomest little cocoa or rather café-au-lait colored corduroy suit for Nicholas from the Aldriches & the sweetest long letter from Do Cruickshank saying a parcel was on the way---shall write them both soon.
The christening Sunday went very well. I had said I wanted it in midafternoon when the rector had some other babies saved up. Originally Margery Tyrer was going with us, but she came down with bad bronchitis, so I asked Rose Key instead. Margery had loaned me the sweetest christening dress which her 15-year-old daughter Nicola was christened & which is made of Limerick lace from her grandmother’s wedding-gown. Of course you could hardly see this under all the sweaters & blankets & bonnet I swaddled Nicholas in against the cold, but I liked the idea of it. Frieda looked a doll in the little blue French coat & white & blue embroidered pinafore we got to match it last summer. She carried her minute “dodie”, a little plastic dog Ted got her, which I am sure made her behave. Both children were angelic, & someone else’s baby, bless it, squalled through the service. So they are christened.
The Exeter dentist* seems very good---the nicest thing I can say is that he reminds me of Dr. Gulbrandsen. I get free care for a year on the National Health after a baby; Ted’s course of treatment---several weekly appointments, was only the token pound ($2.80), so I have at last got a good dentist without having to pay steep private prices. He is very attractive & genial with two children under 10, so I hope he lives a long time & stays in the district! He has very good ideas about children---I felt him out about this, & he said to bring Frieda along when I come next time for a few rides in the chair so she’ll get used to him & the office before she ever needs any work done. And he also seems to believe in saving, not pulling, teeth & regular half-year checkups, so I am very relieved with him.
I ordered the two-tone rose blanket at the store in Exeter---they have to order it from the Yorkshire factory because it is a specially large size, so they’ll let me know when it’s sent off to Margaret. I do hope they like it! I want to know when it arrives safely!
I think that when the good weather comes I shan’t set foot in the house! I really haven’t had a proper summer since I’ve been in England; in London summer doesn’t count. After I’ve soaked up six months outdoors I may be more eager to spend the winter six writing & studying & turning pale. I am thinking of learning to ride horseback at one of the local riding schools about here---I anticipate Frieda & Nicholas learning to ride, or wanting to, and would like to be practically grounded myself. But this is as yet a notion. I mean straight riding---no jumping or hopping or skipping. Life begins at 30!
Keep me posted on all the wedding plans. Is there any chance of Warren & Maggie ever getting over here???
Lots of love to all,
Sivvy
PS: Do you have grammy’s recipe for bread? Does it kill yeast to mix it with a too-hot liquid? I’ve been trying to make my own bread, but for some reason it won’t rise---I use dried yeast & think I may have scalded it. The loaves are flat & dark & primitive but taste good & Ted loves them. However, I’d like to make a proper loaf!
xxx
s.
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Tuesday 27 March 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College |
Court Green, North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 27, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
It was wonderful to get your letter. I’ve thought of you so often & am so glad you are still there to talk to! We, too, have moved since I last wrote, & bought a house.* I am still overwhelmed & very proud---it is not only big, it is huge, rooms we haven’t even used yet, plus two studies, a dusky attic one up a flight of stairs all to itself for Ted under the thatch (we have a thatch) & a big light sunny one on the 2nd floor for me with a lush red carpet & six foot elm plank table Ted sanded to velvet for me. Our finding Court Green was a fantastic stroke of luck. We almost went mad, or were mad, last summer when mother came over---in our narrow 2 rooms 2 steep flights up in London, with Frieda having learned to walk & bouncing from wall to wall & another baby due & rent flowing out morbidly with no returns. So we left mother with Frieda & took a weekend off to drive to Devon (Ted’s always wanted to live there; I’d never seen it) to find a house. In two days. We had a list we’d weeded out & our first night was hysterical---funny, but unhopeful. The places were something out of Charles Adams---a dying Great Dane met us at one door (the houses of our size are invariably ancient decayed rectories) & there were no lights, except via an engine loud as souls in Hades, the “ornamental lily pond” a sort of baby-trap sump & one of the “two capacious garages” was a pile of rotted boards. At the other house, hung on a cliff over the sea with nothing to do but fall off the porch into it, a desperate woman kept pouring us more & more tea & telling us what a fearsome place it was (but very nice when sunny); one place, uninhabited, had so many palpable spooks (the “oak paneling” in the diningroom peeled off like paper) Ted & I banged into each other in a panic to get out. The modern places (1930ish) were worst, mean, cramped, hideous British-respectable. Then we found Court Green. We had laughed about it, because it had a thatch (something we resolved never to touch) & was owned by a Sir, but it knocked us over. Very cheap, too, compared to the rest of the awful lot, because no-one wanted it---too big for a retired couple, too far from Exeter, the nearest main city, for commuting. It is white, with a storybook peaked thatch riddled with birds, an ancient cobbled courtyard surrounded on 3 sides by a thatched cottage, thatched barn (our garage) stables etc, with 2½ acres, one of solid daffodils just now leaping to life, 70 apple trees, a large vegetable garden which we hope eventually to make pay for itself, laburnum, lilacs, cherry trees, all of which we’ve not seen in bloom & are dying for. We had them treat the place for woodworm (which it had) before buying it, with the aid of loans from both our parents. It even has an overgrown tennis court I hope to be rich enough to reclaim when the children are old enough. I have never felt the power of land before. I love owning bulbs & trees & all the happiness of my 17th summer on a farm* comes back when I dig & prune & potter, very amateur. The town (we are in the middle of it, though when leaves are out it can’t be seen---our house is the Manor!) is described as an “ugly decayed market town” but it looks beautiful to me: a good young doctor, a fine midwife, chemist, banks, butchers & all sorts of odd colonials & kind, open locals whose Devon accent sounds indistinguishable to me from American. The winter has been grim---we heat by coal, & mushroom shaped electric fires in every room, & I got what I thought was a Dickensian disease---chilblains. Sir Robert was born here, his ancestors all rectors (he is a Made Sir, Governor (ex) of the Bahamas, I think). We love it. 4 hours from London by express, so we later hope to makes stays there. Nicholas Farrar Hughes was born January 17th, at home, a day-long labor, with the midwife coming in the evening to hold my hand on one side & Ted on the other, all 3 of us gossiping happily about the town, previous tenants of our house, etc. I had lost the baby that was supposed to be born on Ted’s birthday this summer* at 4 months, which would have been more traumatic than it was if I hadn’t had Frieda to console & reassure me. No apparant reason to miscarry, but I had my appendix out 3 weeks after, so tend to relate the two. Nicholas is very different from Frieda---who is lively, hectic, & a comic. He is dark, quiet, smily & very much a Hughes. I love him & nursing him & have never got such fun out of anything as my babies. We have names for at least 2 more. I have a very nice ruddy Devon woman in 3 mornings a week (she’s cared for the house 11 years) to do all the work I hate---ironing, floor-scrubbing. She likes it & costs about 35¢ an hour. So I can spend my time doing what I like best---gardening, cooking (I am trying to do my own bread, but it won’t rise & is like a primitive black loaf, but Ted loves it) & playing with the babies. I write in my study mornings, which is all I need to make me feel professional & creative. I have actually done my first novel (after 10 years of wishful thinking): wrote it in under 2 months & it will come out here next year under a pseudonym, because I want to feel free to play around before I do something I really think seriously competent. Could I dedicate it to R. B.?* It is a serio-comic (if that’s possible) book about my New York summer at Mademoiselle & breakdown, fictionalized, but not so much that doing it & coming back to life is due so much to you that you are the only person I could dedicate it to. It is an immense relief to me to feel I can write you every so often; it heartens me no end to feel you are there, whether I talk to you or not.
Very much love,
Sylvia
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman & Leo Goodman
Wednesday 28 March 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 28, 1962
Dear Ann & Leo,
The lovely big card & costumed children arrived to our present & Frieda’s future delight. Here is my favorite-yet picture* of your goddaughter (I don’t think I’ve sent you a color one of her have I?) She is sitting in the only upholstered chair in our house---an auction triumph we got for 75¢. The nightgown is one of my primitive sewing efforts. See, her eyes are still blue. The villagers can’t seem to get over them.
We have been enduring the winter. Bit by bit making room by room habitable. With coal, wood & electric fires: still a freezing temperature in the drafty halls. Horrible weather: grey tombstone skies, sleet, a mean wind set perpetually in the east. Every nice day or sunny hour we rush for hoes, spades, pruning shears & attack the garden, Ted preparing the large vegetable beds at the back & me among the roses at the front. We are very excited, gardening being such a miraculous and pacifiying pastime. Hope eventually to have all our own vegetable needs & a surplus for the local greengrocer. We dream of a few laying hens, hives, mushrooms. But if we bring a vegetable edible to the pot through the barrage of bugs the books say await each green sprout, I shall be utterly satisfied. I am to the end of my patience with the weather. The doctor’s diagnosing what I thought were stinging nettle bites as Chilblains almost demoralized me. I thought I’d been vanquishing our 38° interior temperature with noble spirit, then to learn the cold had been so secretly and nastily getting at me---well!
Nicholas Farrar Hughes arrived on January 17th. I had him at home with our admirable local midwife who breeds Pekinese puppies in her spare time. A fine lady. She sat on one side of the bed & Ted on the other, all 3 of us gossiping about the locals, with the cold dark night outside. Very cosy & nice. Nicholas is a true Hughes---craggy, dark, quiet & smiley, unlike the lively & almost hysterically active Frieda. I am emerging slowly from the inarticulate cow-state I go into before & after each baby & getting morning hours in my study again, slowly flexing my fingers and telling myself life begins at 30.
You sound very happy & wise to be back in Chicago. The bits you wrote about sit-ins* was fascinating & surprising, Ann. I’d always though the U. of Chicago was the most progressive of places racially. Has anything else happened? Do you really have a shelter craze over there---it sounds very grim in the papers: reverends saying it’s ethical to shoot your neighbors at the shelter door & so on. Say it’s not so grim.
When are you going to take another European holiday, or sabbatical??? We’d so love to see you over here. Only 4 hours from express by Waterloo we are---so you see it’s easy. But I imagine Leo would prefer to cruise up in his own Daimler. Ted joins me in sending much, much love and telling you to come visit us soon.
Keep writing!
Love,
Sylvia
TO Marion Freeman
Wednesday 28 March 1962 |
ALS (aerogramme), Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 28, 1962
Dear Aunt Marion,
I don’t think I ever wrote to thank you for the lovely card and baby gift you sent---I have been mum as a cow these last two months & hardly written a word. We have been having terribly, typically English weather: dark, cold and wet. Both of us seize every nice day or hour to work out in the garden. We are very amateur, but very enthusiastic, and hope eventually to supply all our own vegetables plus a surplus for the local green grocer. But this first summer I expect we will be mostly learning from our mistakes. They say it is the coldest March since 1909 and I believe it!
The children are so much fun. Frieda is putting together little sentences and can say “daff-dee” for daffodil, and our daffodils are about the only sign of spring. We have an acre of them & I can see the early ones now, blowing & yellow as stars in the grey rain. Very cheering.
Nicholas is a very good baby, only crying when he is hungry, & smiley and patient. Frieda is at a really pretty stage and a good companion when I am baking or gardening, playing happily & imitating everything I do.
I hope you have got well over the pneumonia mother said you had---I learned from my own experience with it that the drugs make you feel so fine you want to be to work in a minute, when you really need to take it easy for a bit longer. I feel if the spring just sets in, and I can get the babies out in the sun, everything will be wonderful. Ted just came back from a day in London last night to do some children’s broadcasts for the BBC educational radio programs. They like his work, & it gets to a lot more children than regular teaching plus being no strain: no discipline or any such problems.
We are looking very forward to seeing mother over here this summer. It should be a real vacation for her this time, just sitting in the garden & playing with the two babies. I have a local woman in to clean 3 mornings a week, or I don’t know how I’d cope with our big house, grounds, two babies & my work & Ted’s secretarial work. Life is very busy & lots of fun. I so enjoy the Woman’s Days. They make me quite homesick, with all the lovely American recipes & how-to-do things!
Pass on my love to Ruthie & her brood.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Helga Huws
Thursday 29 March 1962* |
TLS with envelope, Helga and Daniel Huws |
Dear Helga,
The green sheet is me. Somehow these bilious colored lettersheets of Ted’s multiply rather than diminish. I have mentally written you half a dozen letters since Christmas, but am only just now surfacing from the cowlike stupor I seem to enjoy immediately before and after a baby. I am delighted with our Nicholas; Ted is cooler. I think he secretly desires a harem of adoring daughters. Nicholas is very much a Hughes: oddly like photographs of Ted’s brother Gerald, dark, quiet, smily. Our house is so big now that he doesn’t live with us, or on us, as Frieda did in London, so he perhaps seems thereby more of a stranger & relatively no trouble. Frieda would tear him to bits if she could get her hands on him; she’ll say “ear” and try to pull it off like an anatomy student. I had a lot longer & harder labor with Nicholas---he took all day & just emerged five minutes before midnight. Luckily I had said I wanted gas & air, so was very sociable & chatted with Ted & the midwife with none of the blind mindless gripes, but the gas & air ran out just as the baby stuck when the pushing part began. My old luck. His head stuck & the midwife afterwards said she thought it would be an emergency, but I was too dumb to worry. The doctor was called, but minutes before he came, Nicholas flew into the room in a wall of water which soaked everyone present, blue, frowning, with a low dark brow. Ted & I were stunned at his being a boy: it took us twenty-four hours to adjust. Luckily his low brow was only a temporary phenomenon, a result of his fight to get out, & the skullplates shaped up very nicely overnight. He is angelic, no colic, no tantrums, as with Frieda. 9 pounds 11 ounces at birth. Or have I told you? I am so blank I’m not sure if I’ve written about him really, or just in my head.
We love the song books. We are waiting any day for a builder to rip up our damp wood floors, lay a cement & bitumen foundation & lino tiles in the playroom & hall, so there will be a washable rugless passage from front to back of the downstairs, childproof. Then I shall agitate for a second hand piano. The song book has all my own childhood favorites & I long to play to Frieda.
I wish we could see you. This winter is very grim. I feel cheated of all my summers since we came to England---London summers don’t, somehow, count. And now we are chafing at rain & sleet & a fixed east wind which slices malevolently all round our ancient back door straight back through the house. I got very morbid when the doctor told me I had CHILBLAINS. Have you ever had them? I thought they were a Dickensian disease & had been so proud I was stoic against the cold, that I was utterly demoralized not so much by the stingy itchy sores themselves but by the idea the cold had secretly got at me when I thought I was winning out. When will you have your kitchen & bathroom wing built on? It sounds marvelous. I think we will become devout gardeners if we can ever bring a vegetable or flower through all the plagues and blights the books say awaits them. Then we think of hens, hives, mushrooms. In the one or two nice days I’ve been happily scratching myself up in ignorant pruning of rosebushes & brambles. No leaf in sight. Only daffodils, startling & foolhardy in this graveyard weather.
No real friends here, only nice neighbors, a pleasantly gossipy if catty Irish banker’s wife; we must look awfully queer to the locals. Do write. About you, the children, anything.
Love,
Sylvia
TO R. B. Silvers*
Sunday 1 April 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Library of Congress |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
April 1, 1962
Mr. R. B. Silvers, Editor
HARPER’S MAGAZINE
49 East 33rd Street
New York 16, New York
USA
Dear Mr. Silvers,
Thanks very much for your letter.* I’m happy to hear you like Leaving Early and Private Ground.* I am having a first book of poems come out in America this spring, but these poems are both too recent to be in it, and probably won’t get between hard covers for years.
With all good wishes,
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO George MacBeth
Wednesday 4 April 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
April 4, 1962
Dear George,
I am sending along this batch of recent, unpublished poems* for your perusal.
Did you see the excerpt from the report of the police commissioner in a recent Time magazine?* I particularly enjoy “Afterlife”. “Mother Superior” and “Ash”* make my hair stand on end: I think they are fine.
All good wishes from Ted and myself. We are very grim in this blustery lead extension of March & up to our ears in unset onion sets & unseeded seed potatoes.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
George MacBeth, Esq.
Talks Department
THE BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
TO Marvin Kane
Saturday 7 April 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
April 7, 1962
Dear Marvin,
It was so good to have your letter and hear you are coming down this week. I have duly booked you a double room for Tuesday night at our local North Tawton manor, the Burton Hall Arms, about 5 minutes from us. It manages to squeak in the AA* book so shouldn’t be too fearsome.
I shall meet you at the station Tuesday at 2:49. Look for somebody covered with straw and red mud. The weather has been so horrid I only hope something better turns up by the time you do. Gale winds have carried off our lettuces & large spiders are appearing everywhere, most frequently in my coffee cup, before breakfast.
We are looking so forward to seeing you!
Till Tuesday, then
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 8 April 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Sunday: April 8
Dear mother,
Honestly, the reason I have been so slow in writing is that I have said to myself: I will write tomorrow, then it is sure to be a sunny day & how cheerful I will be. Believe it or not, we havent seen the sun for three weeks. I realize now I must have geared myself to last till April 1st, when I thought spring must by the law of averages appear. Well, it has just gone on with black days, rain, howling gusts from the north and east without relief. I’ve only had the children out one day, three weeks ago. I am simply fed up with winter. At least it is supposed to have been the coldest March in over 70 years. We are also having our floors done---all last week & all this next, workmen are hacking about. They have cemented the playroom & this week will cement the floors in the downstairs hall. I just learned that it will take two weeks for the cement to dry properly before the lino can be put down. So by your birthday, I expect things will be settled. I have been painting odd bits of grubby wood furniture---a table, a chair---white, with designs, very primitive, of hearts & flowers, which cheers me up & should look gay in the playroom.
We have been heartened immensely by all the marvelous packages which arrived this past week from you & Dot. It is better than Christmas. I don’t know how you do it!! I am resplendent in my new blue sweater & black jerkin (which will be marvelous in spring over all my smashing blouses), and Frieda hasn’t taken off the little red knitted hat bandeau since she got it. She has been riding her Gee-gee rocker, which I got her for her birthday from you & she loves it. She is just big enough to manage it, so it will last her for ages. We have had a pleasant birthday with her---last Sunday. Taught her to say “Birt-dee” & “Me two”. She blew out her candles & was delighted by colored soapbubbles we blew. We gave her a set of wooden American alphabet blocks. She got piles of cards & carried them all about. Loved the little cow-jumped-over-the-moon card. Honestly, how did you find time to do all that knitting! I think F’s dark blue sweater with the silver buttons is the nicest style yet on her; I love the collar. And the slippers! One small suggestion---I wouldn’t send toothpaste with clothes, the tube always squashes; luckily it congeals & doesn’t get over anything, but it’s a bit of a risk.
The store in Exeter informed me they have sent off the rose blanket to Margaret’s address in New York. Do let me know when it arrives and if it is in perfect condition---I’ve had it insured. Hope they like it. I am so sorry to miss their wedding. Imagine, Ted has the chance to go to anywhere in the world for 10 days at the expense of the Alitalia jet lines. It sounds very queer, but one of their public relations men is a poet & offered the trip to Eliot & Auden who I think declined & Ted was next on the list. We have a great aversion to flying separately, if at all, & I think Ted is so involved in his garden that he won’t go after all. I know where I would go---straight to Egypt & sun all week under a pyramid.
We have been very grieved by the news that George Tyrer, the bank manager, was retired after his last heart attack. They move to the outskirts of London in 5 weeks. I feel very sorry for myself, as Marjorie has been my best & only friend here so far & I liked her pretty 16 year old daughter Nicola who was at school in Oxford. They have sold us some beautiful things which just complete our livingroom---a brass coal scuttle like an embossed helmet, a round brass engraved table & an antique Elizabethan dropleaf table which goes perfectly under the French window in no space at all & opens out generously for writing on.
Now that the weather is going to be supposedly more springlike we shall have some friends down from London, so I shall have some company. A young American boy & his wife are coming Tuesday, he to do a BBC interview with me for a series on why Americans stay in England. It better be sunny by the time he comes, or I won’t have so many reasons! I am glad to hear you have had your moles off: I did see a doctor about mine, but he said they were healthy. He gave me the address of a very fine London surgeon so I can have them off when I want---the one on my chin I’ll be gladdest to get rid of. Maybe I’ll treat myself to it the summer after this, when I can leave the babies for a few days. I look so forward to you coming! I have just got winter-tired these last days---don’t want to see another dish or cook another meal. My poetry book is officially due out May 14th.* It is very handsome, as I think you’ll think when you see it--no errors in this one. Knopf seem very enthusiastic about it. Ted’s children’s programs are so wonderfully received he has a running request for as many as he can provide. Frieda is prettier every day. I was so distressed to hear little Pell is diabetic.* However did they find that out? I am enjoying my Bendix so much! I don’t know how I ever did without it. It is so nice to hear it rumbling & think it is doing all my work for me. I washed Frieda’s blue snowsuit in it & it came out lovely.
Well, I hope by the time I write again I may have all my seeds planted & be out with my babies. Our daffodils & jonquils are wonderful: I’ve picked about 300 these last 2 weeks & they’re only beginning. Once a week I pick for <frie>nds & myself, & once a week to sell at the <market.>*
Lots of love to you & Warren.
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 16 April 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Monday: April 16
Dearest mother,
I am sitting at the lovely oval dropleaf oak table we bought from the Tyrers, looking out hopefully over my acre of shivering daffodils & the lilac buds on this black, frigid day as if it would make spring come in earnest. It is colder than Scotland, colder than for 70 years, which is little consolation. Even the local people are very gloomy. I am in the red room, our most cherished & comfortable spot, which is completed beautifully by the handsome brass coal scuttle & brass round table, so its all dark reds, dark polished woods & gleaming brass, with these beautiful French windows looking over the front garden. I have just put both babies in bed---an energetic two-hours work: Nicholas now eats a bowl of runny cereal every night with beams and chuckles. He is so handsome. I put Frieda in her blue sweater with the silver buttons & she spent the afternoon on her Geegee rocker, also giving her bears & babies rides. I am now awaiting Ted’s return from a day-trip in London where he is making a BBC broadcast, a recording* & seeing Leonard Baskins show of engravings for which he has been asked to write the foreword,* an honor we think. I have a nice big Irish stew ready, with cheese dumplings, which he likes. We still have our bare concrete floors, & I am agitating to have them tiled before Easter---Ted’s mother & father & Aunt Hilda & Vicky were planning to drive down for the weekend. But probably or maybe they can’t be done till next week, in which case we shall ask them to delay a week, as it is very grim with just concrete & we don’t want them to see the house at anything but its best, since they’ll have that memory of it for a year.
I loved your big fat letter. Honestly mother, you should know me well enough & that I know you well enough not to think you connected the loan with the car! We had previously gone over our finances & discovered with joy that we thought we could pay both our parents loans back within a year from our purchase of the house, so I was only delighted to hear you had something as nice to buy as that car which you must buy at $800. We would have sent the authorization anyway & independently. We have been so grateful at the help you & Ted’s parents have given us which enabled us to get away without paying any interest to speak of, & as soon as you both have your checks, it will mean we own the house, so you may imagine how eager we are to be on our own completely. We love the place so much our mutual nightmares have been about being forced for some reason to give up Court Green. Now we have the floors done, we shall rest with repairs for a year or so. Several rooms need replastering & repapering, but aside from this the place is in solid good shape. I am so excited about your coming. You will adore Frieda: she is just lovely. Very excitable however: she bursts into tears if you raise your voice & I look forward to her having playmates when the good weather starts, so she’ll get used to not being the only one. Nicholas is a darling, full of little responsive smiles & a talky coo. I never dreamed it was possible to get such joy out of babies. I do think mine are special. We had a young American I know, & his British wife, down last week, he to do an interview with me for the BBC on why I stayed here, & they brought an acquaintance with two of the most ghastly children I’ve ever seen---two girls of 5 & 6. They had no inner life, no notion of obedience, & descended shrieking on Frieda’s toys, running up & down through the house with mucky boots & jabbering. Their mother was a tearful, ineffectual character. They almost knocked us out. I felt I could kick them. They kept sneaking up to peer in the rooms & at the baby though they’d been told repeatedly not to. How I believe in firm loving discipline! But they were Australians, not English. Now we are planning to have several couples we like down in the next month. Honestly, I wish you knew how much I miss Warren & Margaret! I already love Maggie sight unseen from what I’ve heard of her, & think of what lovely times we could all have together. I have such lovely children & such a lovely home now, I only long to share them with loving relatives! That is the hardest thing about being over here---not having my own admiring relatives to appreciate my babies! Got a sweet letter from Mr. Crockett today---evidently inspired by my New Yorker poem (which I haven’t yet seen, the magazines are late) about the appendectomy. How sad about Steve’s retreat home. I must say I thought it odd he hadn’t applied anywhere in advance! As for the baby pictures of Nicholas, I quote a similar authority: ISN’T APRIL COMING SOON? The 26thish part. Be patient! There is also a little package of something you’ve seen already, but not in its present handsome form, which may arrive a bit later. So glad you liked the poems in Poetry. I don’t feel they’re my best, but it’s nice to get the “exercises” published, too. The “News from home”* is of course your letters, which I look forward to above all. I was so distressed to hear about the Ladies Home Journal!* I do hope they survive---I’ve always had an ambition to get a story in there! How I wish you could see us now with all the daffodils. I pick about 600 a week for market & friends & notice no diminishing. They are so heavenly. We even had an antiquarian come to visit our Ancient Mound last Sunday! If only this blasted cold black weather would clear up, I would feel like a new person. You must send pictures & a word by word account of Warren’s wedding. Tell me when the blanket gets to Margaret
xxx
Sivvy
TO Leonard Baskin
Monday 16 April 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), British Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
April 16, 1962
Dear Leonard,
I am sitting at our mammoth recently-acquired heavy oak reputedly-Elizabethan table overlooking our acre of shivering daffodils under the churchyard wall on this black & frigid day & thinking very hard of you & Esther. Ted is in London for the day, seeing your show at the Hon Erskine’s* so he may do something as nearly worthy as possible. Both of us were thrilled at your thinking of Ted to do the introduction. I am newly involved with our new Nicholas Farrar, a wintry Capricorn, which Ted says serves him right for studying astrology & casting aspersions. O Leonard I have so many times thought of writing & written in thought: it incredible what wounds & damages a few silly hours can do. I can only say, not in explanation or apology, but simply in fact, that when you came Ted & I were as near to desperate as possible, only he shows such things less & is of a more open & unfrantic nature. Anyhow, I was very much worried at being in the middle of a first novel & living in that tiny hole with no place or time to finish it & having to forgo the art galleries & green breathing space & time to write which is my life blood & makes it possible for me to be domestic & motherly, which latter is my nature only some of the time, & only when I have the other consolations & reprieves. As Ted has told you, almost immediately after, we made a radical break with our frenzies & sunk everything into Court Green.* An ancient, loving, amiable white farmhouse with 70 apple trees, miraculous daffodils of which I pick 500 a week with no sign of diminishment, and enough land to, we hope, eventually support us on vegetables when we learn enough, and flowers for the spirit. I have a study all my own, where I retire mornings; Ted has a study under the thatch, very dark & secret. There is ample room. We are, at last, in a place which does not cramp & confine us & bleed nonreturning rent monies, and are expanding with the blessedness of it. Our one wish is that you visit us when you come over for the show & enjoy a slice of the Devon spring & erase those sour memories which grieve us both. We are very lucky, this year, that I have a relatively small Saxton grant to finish the novel which enables us not to worry about the rather awesome expenses in this first year of making the house livable & babyproof. I had put your name as a character reference for this ages ago, & if you could possibly have been this after last summer I can only think you had more faith in my fearsome nature than I had myself. Frieda has responded miraculously to our space & greenness; she is very luminous & blue-eyed, with a language all her own & a very tremulous quick spirit. Nicholas is dark, Farrarlike, like Ted, quiet & smiley & utterly lovable. We are only 4 hours by express from Waterloo & could meet you at the North Tawton station whenever you could come. Do say you will, & when. I would mean an immense lot to both of us. Please let us know of Esther, to whom much, much love, and of Tobias, whom I imagine as a great blond & leonine giant.
I shall leave some space for Ted, when he returns.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Fainlight & Alan Sillitoe
Monday 16 April 1962 |
TLS, Ruth Fainlight |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
April 16, 1962
Dear Ruth & Alan,
We are so so delighted to hear about the arrival of David!* Baby boys are wonderful beings & he and Nicholas should be able to coo & gurgle at each other companionably when you come down. We’re glad to hear you have a car (that must mean you passed the stiff & military British tests, Alan!) because it is so easy to travel with a little baby when you have a car. Just sit yourselves on the A30, will you!
The weather here is horrid. Black, with Siberian east winds. Our daffodils are out in force, shivering wildly, & very wonderful among the taciturn black twigs. I pick over 600 a week for market & friends & twice as many pop open right away. Do let us know when you think you can come. We would so love to see the three of you & could give you a quiet place to work, Alan, if you felt like it. We are lousy with studies!
How I loved Ruth’s poem in Encounter!* It is a real White Goddess poem,* and a voice on its weird fearsome own. I think it is a rare thing. O please do say you can come, & when. May should be a beautiful month, simply because this blasted April glowering can’t hold out that long.
Ted joins me in sending love & healthful wishes to all 3,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 21 April 1962* |
TLS in greeting card* with envelope, Indiana University |
<printed greeting>
Happy Birthday / If it comes true – / This wish for you, / There’ll always be a share / Of each good thing / That life can bring / For you – and some to spare. / Best Wishes / and Many Happy Returns / of your Birthday
<signed>
with love / from / Sivvy & Ted & / Frieda & Nicholas
Dear mother:
These pictures* do not, of course, do Nicholas justice, but we think they are very nice. I wish you could be spirited here now. Our daffodils are in full bloom and they are the most beautiful flowers in the world---big hothouse blooms, the starry jonquil sort, some with vivid orange centers, some with white petals & yellow trumpets. They are massed in circles and swatches from our front gate to the house side; there is a big patch in the vegetable garden, but my favorites are those strewn on the hill at the back under the apple trees. Ted and I picked 40 dozen in a beautiful pink twilight yesterday for market today, & you simply couldn’t tell where we’d picked them. The birds were singing, and a big yellow moon was coming up in our great elm tree. It is like a fairytale here. More beautiful than the Cambridge backs. If I have any luck with planting, I should have heavenly cut flowers all summer. I pick daffodils for anyone who comes at a shilling a dozen & love it. As Ted says, you really get acquainted with the plants, picking them. We’ll try to get some color pictures this week. It is still raining, but lovely silvery rains. I wish I could send you a cartload of these daffodils for your birthday, knowing how you love them! We are so pleased, the New Statesman must have liked our children’s book reviews last fall, for they have asked us to do the same for the spring supplement. As they only review children’s books twice a year, we get stacks---and I am about to pick up my lot of pictures books at the post office. Did you see “Tulips” in the April 7 New Yorker? It was fascinating to also see the odd & revealing lyric by W. S. Merwin*---we think he must be parting from poor Dido, whose facelift was a last, desperate measure. We are immensely happy in North Tawton. In five years it should be a bower of flowers.
Lots of love,
Sivvy, Ted, Frieda & Nicholas
TO Warren Plath
Saturday 21 April 1962* |
ALS in greeting card* (photocopy), Indiana University |
Dear Warren –
We think so often of you & Maggie & only hope you will let us know you will soon come to visit us. I hope you get your great carnation blanket soon. Take it easy & send us pictures of the wedding.
xxx
Ted, Sivvy
Freda & Nicholas
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 25 April 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Wednesday: April 25
Dearest mother,
How I wish you could see us now! I am sitting out in a deck chair in shorts in heavenly hot sun, smelling the pungent box bushes at our door & the freshly mown & plowed tennis court, Baby Nick (as Frieda & therefore we now call him) asleep among the daisies in his pram, Frieda so excited she can hardly nap, and Ted out back beaming among the few strawberry plants that survived the late frosts. On Easter Sunday the world relented & spring arrived. Our daffodils are in full bloom. We picked about 1000 this week and I look out over a literal sea of several thousand more. I keep finding new treasures: little yellow & pink primroses & grape hyacinths opening in a grassy tangle by the lilac hedge, the spikes of lily of the valley poking through a heap of dead brambles. I think I would like nothing better than to grow flowers & vegetables. I have such spring fever I can hardly think straight. I am dying for you to come & to see it all through your eyes. I got your room all fixed up & cleaned yesterday. Two months seems such a long way away!
Hilda & Vicky stayed with us over Easter. We were very surprised they did not bring Ted’s parents, but hope Uncle Walter may bring them later. Evidently the long winter, arthritis & the prospect of the day’s trip put Edith off. I am so glad you aren’t a stayathome like that! Hilda & Vicky pitched right in with dishes & cleaning, so were no extra work. They are both very lively & nice. But then we made the mistake of letting a young Swedish lady journalist* invite herself the day they left---I had found out the time of the last train back to London that day so we would not be stuck with her, but she was after the personal, & hinted around about staying. At the same point the Tyrers called & wanted to know if they could “read in our garden”. We were very glad to have the excuse of company. The Tyrers are really, on the eve of their departure, becoming impossible---pushing their very silly, snobby 16 year old daughter on us to the point of suggesting we have her come & stay with us (!) all because, I think, they have seen Ted & me in the Sunday papers lately.* They have really been “friends” out of a necessity, not out of any kindred spirit (Marjorie & Nicola are so malicious about everybody & everything here I can’t help wondering what they say about us the minute our backs are turned). As Ted said, it is so beautiful here we have to be careful people don’t use us as a public promenade. We moved here for privacy, and are just learning the lessons of having possessions. I am so glad you are coming for I can simply say we have you with us all summer. We are also getting used to having people fit in with our schedules. I work in the morning & let guests get their own breakfasts when they wake up, so I don’t hang around all morning waiting. Then I come down for lunch, & Ted goes up & works in the afternoon. I think you will find us very peaceful. You can sit out in the garden all morning, with Frieda & Nicholas, reading or knitting or sunning. The house is so big there is really no crowding. Do bring any recipes, or advice for preserving things you can---I’m hope to learn to bottle all our garden surplus, like our famous rhubarb. Also any advice & figures about life insurance: I do want Ted to take out a policy this summer & we know nothing about it. O it is so heavenly here I can hardly speak. Little Frieda is always picking daffodils & arranging them in bowls of water. “Pick daffdees” & “Out with Baby Nick oodleoo (lawnmower) she says.
My book should be out in America May 14th. Do send any clippings of reviews, however bad. How I would love Mrs. Prouty to come. We have a very fine pompous hotel in town on the hill she could stay overnight at. Do tell her! I got Do’s wonderful package the day before Easter. I’ll write to thank her today. She is a positive darling. I am delighted with everything in it. You must help me hem & shorten my winter skirts! I look so out of date with them down to my shins! Nancy’s mother-in-law died of a heart attack last week & the funeral is today. I sent an armload of daffodils via the little hunchback friend of Nancy’s who lives at the bottom of our lane. How I’ve missed her this last week! I am glad if the old woman had to go she went quickly, as I simply couldn’t do without Nancy now. A 10-room house, acres of garden, writing & two babies is work enough for three people! Did I tell you the New Statesman must have liked our children’s reviews last fall, for they have asked us both again this spring, They only review twice a year, so I have the half-year’s accumulation of children’s picture books---27, free! I just love doing this. And Ted has as many again of animal books. He has just finished another children’s broadcast. He is the star writer for the children’s programs (educational) now, & gets loads of fanmail. You must be full of plans for Warren’s wedding. How soon could they think of coming? I wish somebody could come around Easter next year to admire the daffodils. Of course, early September is lovely, with apple pie every day for breakfast! I think I was meant to be a gardener. I wouldn’t leave this place for a billion dollars. It is a miracle we found it, & you were instrumental in minding Frieda & freeing us at that time. When I met that Swedish girl at the station, how I wished it was you! The train ride is through such beautiful countryside. Frieda loves her Geegee rocker.“Getup pony” she says.
Lots & lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Alan Sillitoe
Saturday 28 April 1962 |
TLS, Ruth Fainlight |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Saturday: April 28
Dear Alan,
It was wonderful to get your letter and hear you are coming. May 2nd couldn’t be better---you should just catch the last marvel of our daffodils which have been astounding us since Easter. I pick about 40 dozen a week for market, but it doesn’t show.
We’ll have supper waiting* for you any time you arrive. Our phone number is North Tawton 370 in case you need it. The only things I suggest you bring from London are the Royal Court and the Hampstead Everyman.
Ted joins me in sending love to all,
Sylvia
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
Monday 30 April 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
The Eve of Mayday
Dear, dear, dear Marvin & Kathy!
No no we are not dead, nor furious at air motes nor any such thing. Only exhausted. It is the sudden spring weather which has been with us since Easter Sunday, and our mad attempt to plant in one sweet week all we should have been planting since Christmas. We have been rendered absolutely inarticulate, a sort of laborer’s dopiness takes us immediately after eating uspper (you see) and we fall like great stones into bed to wake like mutes at dawn & stagger out with minute black particles which we stick into the soil. I have literally put my nose to the earth every day for the last week & am at last rewarded by a multitude of infinitesimal green shoots which I do not think are dandelions. Ted has pairs of leaves he thinks may be radishes, and little spikes of shrunken onions. We are very hopeful.
How we loved seeing you! It is incredible how we immediately feel fond & possessive of you as if we had known you years. The Cornwall trip sounds mean---Horrid. Ted says everybody down there has their eye on the summer trade, ergo money. Come in early September, he says, when the tourists are gone & the long winter stretches. We know, just recently, of a couple* with a cottage near Bideford for 25s. a week. With no electricity, of course, but a garden. Come in early September & visit us again, but bringing just pure sweet sugar Kanes, no Roses!*
I am so so glad about the BBC program. I felt very nervous that you would ask to extend it on the basis of those tapes & kept wishing I was a negro ballet artist* or something really interesting, but I had fun jabbering & I hope you can cut it into something that is fun. I am sure you will.
We had Ted’s aunt & cousin descend on us over Easter, but they are the mucking-in-with-the-dishes sort, so not much trouble. It is these long days that are so disastrous. You think you have an evening, so work in the garden till sunset & bango, time for bed, the mind lying silent like a big cabbage.
I am really looking forward to my mother coming in June! I am so scatty from my char deserting me for two weeks (her mother-in-law died) and ironing & such mountaining, floors growing lichens, & Frieda discovering worms which she calls “Oos” & drops in my coffee at dull moments that I would welcome a soul, even a maternal one, who would like to cook a meal, bath a baby & dry a dish.
Ted joins me in sending love. Write us. We love your letters. & will both write again when we have recovered somewhat from this back-breaking & mouth-shutting land reclaim.
With love to both,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 4 May 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
Friday, May 4, 1962
Dear mother,
These cards* (I mean photographs---Frieda calls them cards) are meant for a late birthday surprise. We took them Easter Sunday, the first day of real spring. I think you can see some of the reasons I am so happy. This is just the very smallest corner of our daffodils. Frieda is an expert at picking handsome bouquets---you simply mention the word daffodil and she is off. You will love the children. Nicholas smiles & laughs & is wonderfully responsive to attentions & kind words. Frieda thirsts for knowledge & laps up every word you tell her. We understand her, but strangers don’t.
I am enclosing a little card for Dotty’s birthday book. I’ve got a nice big birthday card I’m sending her separately. I am glad you remind me of these things. I was touched to hear Mrs. Prouty would like to see us. I shall write & beg her to come. It is only 4 hours by train. There is a nice big Inn five minutes away which serves bed & breakfast & dinner & is manorial, if she would rather stay there than overnight with us. I do wish she would consider it.
Got a dear sweet letter from Margaret which I will answer very soon. I have been dashing round so madly with spring planting, mowing, babies & letters & projects & reviews that I seem to fly. Blessed Nancy is back, after burying her mother-in-law last week & I am so grateful. It was awful without her. Now it is spring, it is just heaven here. I never dreamed it was possible to be so happy.
I am also enclosing two checks to deposit. Did you get the two checks in your birthday letter to deposit? Or was it one check? Anyway, the last two I sent were one for my poems from Harper’s & one of about $12 for Ted from Harper’s* (mine was about $136). I enclose two Texas checks now, any way, totaling $135. The New Yorker just accepted a short poem* about the old man Percy Key walking on our hill among the narcissi & the poetry editor wrote “I have heard nothing but the most extravagant praise of TULIPS. Everyone I know thought it extraordinary. So do I.”* This sort of thing is immensely warming & encouraging.
We have the Sillitoes here now---Alan, his American writer-wife Ruth & their month-old son David. They are marvelous guests---Ruth helps cook, Alan washes up, they take walks on their own & our life proceeds as usual. I don’t feel a drudge because they chip in & I work in my study as usual in the mornings. I don’t know if I mentioned how I appreciate the Bendix each time I use it! It makes washing just no chore at all.
Our daffodils are waning, but our cherry trees are coming into bloom---better than Washington! Bright red leaves, and fluffy round pink blossom. It is like a little garden of Eden. I hope Do & Betty Aldrich both got my notes of thanks for their presents. Betty’s little-boy suit is just darling, & Do’s package was crammed with kind & wonderful things, everyone just right.
Lots of love to everybody.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Judith Jones
Friday Saturday 5 May 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), University of Texas at Austin |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
May 5, 1962
Mrs. Judith B. Jones
ALFRED A. KNOPF
501 Madison Avenue
New York 22, New York
USA
Dear Mrs. Jones:
I am appalled to see a month has passed since I got your letter* & THE COLOSSUS. All I can say is that the sudden arrival of our very very late English spring had Ted & me almost flattened (quite pleasantly) by our first ambitious spring planting (optimistically intended to supply us with vegetables for the rest of the year) and we are only now surfacing from our mute weeks of sticking little black specks into the earth and scattering Slugdeath and Slugit to annihilate that vast subterranean population of night-eaters.
I am perfectly delighted with THE COLOSSUS. I think the production is wonderful, love the colors of the cover & jacket & the splendid size of the print (Ted & I have a horror of tiny print). To my mind it is the “final” first book. The English one being a trial run. I am so happy with what you have done with it. A long, long time ago when I had my first story published in Mademoiselle, Alfred Knopf wrote* & said he hoped Knopf could publish a book of mine someday, & I have always wished to have a book right for Knopf & am so delighted with this one.
I’d be immensely grateful if you’d send on any or all clippings, as I never see such things here, & thrive on criticism of all sorts, especially the adverse sort. I find it very helpful & stimulating to get fresh slants.
Do give my regards to Marybeth Weston* & say I’d be happy to send her any information she needs if she does an article.
It is like a little Eden here now, with our thousands of daffodils, narcissi, six very pink fluffy cherry trees and 70 apple trees about to break into bloom. Gardening is a wonderfully pacifying alternate to writing, which is also going beautifully, Nicholas being an extremely agreeable individual.
All good wishes,
Sylvia Plath
TO Gerald & Joan Hughes
Wednesday 9 May 1962* |
ALS,* Indiana University |
Dear Gerald & Joan & everybody –
I am sitting in my plushy little study overlooking a corner of our beautiful fluffy pink cherry blossom & eating one (or more likely two) of Ted’s trout. It is wonderful: I open one eye about 4:30 a.m. & see this shadowy figure rise up & vanish. Then when I wake up in earnest & go down to make breakfast at 8 there is Ted beaming over a plate of bright gleaming red-spotted trout. I can’t wait till my mother comes this summer so I can have the babies safely with her & go off with Ted to fish. I adore fishing & have a sort of perpetual beginner’s luck because I guess I am always a nitwit beginner. We both just finished reviewing some children’s books* for the New Statesman. It is such fun – they only review children’s stuff twice a year so we get a great accumulation of stuff (which we can keep or sell). Ted gets animal books & I get picture books. I get so excited to see all these brightly-colored stacks of free books. I pretend Frieda can understand them, but of course she can’t yet. It is really me I await them for. I must have a child mind. Nicholas is gorgeous. Very well-behaved & full of smiles & dark, handsome & Farrar-looking – everybody says he looks like you Gerald, when you were an infant. He is certainly a Hughes & a relief I must say it is to see his calm little face after one of Frieda’s passions. She is beautiful but of a rapid, hysterical temperament. We are thrilled at the possibility of your coming over & as near as Wales. We hardly dare talk of it, but walk with crossed fingers.
Love to all,
Sylvia.
TO Ruth Fainlight
Saturday 12 May 1962 |
TLS, Ruth Fainlight |
Court Green
North Tawton
Saturday: May 12
Dear Ruth,
Thanks very much for your letter. It was heavenly having you and Alan and David here, and like a vacation for me. Ted who usually claims I am killing him by offering him a potato now daily urges me to make scalloped potatoes just like yours because that is the way he loves them best. I have sent off for the Brer Rabbit bottles* & await their arrival armed with all my molasses recipes.
Could I dedicate my elm tree poem* to Ruth Fainlight? (Or would you prefer your maternal & wifely self, Ruth Sillitoe? I had thought of the poet-self first). I’d like to very much. I feel very involved & admiring of your imagery.
We ate our first miniscule radish this week, in a ceremony, with butter. If Ted is as eager to pull our stuff up as with this, we shall be living like midgets on infantine vegetables. You must make your coming down a ritual too, like the Rites of Spring.
Lots of love from all of us,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 14 May 1962 |
TLS with envelope, Indiana University |
Enc: 2 checks for $27 & $45
Court Green
Monday: May 14
Dear mother,
I hope by now you have received the color photos & have some idea of our lovely daffodils that have now vanished. We earned about $17 or so by selling them, very small in amount, but we are proud of it because it makes it seem as if the place is “earning.” If we have a good apple harvest we should earn some more. The cherry petals are just beginning to blow down like pink snow, & the laburnum & lilac are just opening a few buds, and a few apple trees are blooming in the orchard. There are bluebells everywhere, a lovely thundery purple, and a few beautiful “pheasant’s eye” white narcissi are opening on the back hill, alone among the daffodils in being delicately scented, with a short, bright yellow trumpet ringed with red. I prowl about the place daily for little bouquets of this and that.
Did Dotty get her birthday card all right? My book officially comes out in America today. Do clip & send any reviews you see, however bad. Criticism encourages me as much as praise.
I know you have drastic luggage restrictions, but I thought I would mention a few items we would love to have, in case Warren & Margaret might bring something too sometime. We would adore our victrola, as we now have room & money for any needed transformer. Also, would it be at all feasible to take apart our fishing rods (especially my little spry one) & wrap them in paper & send or carry them?* Maybe they could be sent.
I would also love a little bottle of aniseed flavoring for springerle which I can’t find anywhere here. I have luckily, courtesy of Ruth Sillitoe, found a London store which will send on Brer Rabbit molasses & mazola is everywhere, so I am set pleasantly on these things. We have a nice young Canadian poet & his very attractive, intelligent wife coming down for this weekend---they’re the ones who took over our lease for the London flat. Then Ted’s parents will probably be driven down by his Uncle Walter for the next weekend. I shall be glad to get them over. I honestly think Edith is terribly lazy---she stays in bed till noon & has nothing to do but worry about her arthritic knee & eats such a stupid diet---all starches & sweets. And of course she’s no help at all with babies (they exhaust her) or cooking or anything. Well, she has a good heart, I guess. I’m just glad I have the mother I have!
Nicholas has for some reason been crying at night, so I am rather weary. I think, my firm resistance to the long hard winter has hit me now that it is nicer & I can relax. I just don’t want to do a thing, or rather, I want to, but don’t feel like it---I have had mending stacked up for months & am tired of my own cooking with no energy to try any of the exotic recipes I get in my beloved Journal. O pooh. We have huge amounts of wonderful legendary rhubarb which we inherited. Have you any canning advice? Maybe you will supervise some of my canning this summer. We have a fine dark “winecellar” which asks to be crammed with bright glass jars full of good things.* How did you & grammy can? When did you sterilze the stuff? My cookbook is very confusing about this. Did I tell you the lino was down by Easter & is ideal? Has Maggie got the blanket yet? How big is their new bed? Will it fit?
xxx to all, Love,
Sivvy
<on verso of envelope>
PS: Did you get any refund for my broken pottery? The British postmaster checked up in person here ages ago.
TO Howard Moss
Monday 21 May 1962 |
TLS, New York Public Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
May 21, 1962
Mr. Howard Moss
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York 36, New York USA
Dear Mr. Moss:
Just to be on the safe side, I am enclosing THREE WOMEN, a poem for three voices which the B.B.C. Third Programme is producing, in case you think any of the lyrics, perhaps towards the end of it, might be suitable for publication on their own. I am also sending along three* other new poems with it.
I was very happy indeed to hear that people liked TULIPS.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 7 June 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
Thursday, June 7
Dear mother,
Forgive me, forgive me for what must seem a huge silence. The days slide by so fast here that we seem to be living out of Time in a kind of country eternity. I have reached, I think, the last of my “guests” with 6 days of Ted’s mother, father & Uncle Walt. That is partly why I have been so quiet. They were the end of a long string, and the only people who really were no strain but a great help were the wonderful Sillitoes & their month-old baby. But that’s partly because Ruth is a poetess herself & Alan a writer like Ted---pitching in & not needing to be formally “entertained”. Ted’s mother stayed with us & the men stayed up at the Burton Hall hotel much to my relief. I made a few big meals for everyone & we ate at least half of our dinners out. Mrs. Hughes is very sweet & did a whole pile of darning on Ted’s socks (!) which I have no patience for. As she sends him these big wool things, she is an expert at doing it, & I felt it was a good way for her to feel useful with no real strain. They went on car-jaunts with Walt & were immensely impressed & proud of our place. I am glad they, like you, have had a part in helping us get it.
This is the fourth day in a row of absolutely halcyon blue clear hot weather. I took off from my study the last 3 days & had a little Lookout Farm. I weeded all our onions & spinach & lettuce, out in the garden from sunrise to sunset, immensely happy, with Frieda digging in a little space “helping” & Nicholas in the pram sunbathing. This is the richest & happiest time of my life. The babies are so beautiful. Yesterday afternoon went to the local playground* with Sylvia Crawford, a very lovely-looking dark-haired girl twin in age to Warren, with 3 little girls, one named Rebecca just a little older than Frieda. The playground is set high up with a lovely view of Dartmoor. Just now the two laburnum trees are in full bloom & sit right in front of my study window. Isn’t it odd that I’ve written about Golden Rain Trees in my book* & now have six---2 out front & on at the side of my study & the rest about! I am praying some apple bloom hangs on till you come! We are enjoying our own lettuce & radishes. Two weeks from today you come! I can’t wait to see the place through your eyes. Work inside the house has come to a standstill with the demands of the big gardens, so I hope you’ll overlook minor cracks & peelings!
I hope when you come to really work mornings every day in my study---I look so forward to your playing with Frieda. She’ll love you. She’s at such a wonderful teachable stage now. I’d like to get into a long work which I’ve been unable to do with all the spring interruptions of other people. O it is so beautiful here. Bring Bermuda shorts for wear about the garden---we’re pretty private. Of course no one wears them in town! And one warm outfit. Thanks a million for the molasses! I’ve made mountains of gingerbread. I’m learning to do gros point tapestry* for cushion & seat covers. Wonderfully calming.*
I hope Warren & Margaret got our little telegram of good wishes which I sent to the New York address. Ted found we had one word extra & put in Frieda. I was very cross when I found he hadn’t put Nicholas as well, but tell them we meant to. I felt very very sorry for myself at not being at the wedding & look forward to a full account from you in the next day or so. Even to the last minute I considered squandering our savings & flying over by jet! Tell me all about it!
We’ve been doing quite well although we don’t seem to be working. I’ve had a long poem (about 378 lines!) for 3 voices accepted by the BBC Third* (three women in a maternity ward, inspired by a Bergman film)* which will be produced by the same man who does Ted’s plays & who’ll be down here* to discuss production with me! Ted did a beautiful program* on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas,* killed in the last war, saying how shocking it was no book of his was in print. In the next mail he got grateful letters & inscribed books from the poet’s 75 year-old impoverished mother* & a suggestion from a publisher that Ted write the forward to a new edition of the book! Both of us mourn this poet immensely & feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us. His death is really a terrible blow & we are trying to resurrect his image & poems in this way. I have been asked to do a short talk for a program called “The World of Books”* & Ted’s children’s programs are classics---he gets fan letters from all over the place. His radio play “The Wound” will be broadcast a third time* this summer, which means another blessed $300 out of the blue. We are trying to save a bit now while I still have one more installment of my grant. Perhaps in a couple of years we’ll do a poetry reading tour in America & earn a great pot. They pay one to two hundred a night!
Love to All the Plaths,
Sivvy
<on the return address side of letter>
PS. Got the wedding letter today. Sounds heavenly!
S
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
Saturday 9 June 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
Saturday: June 9
Dear, dear Marvin & Kathy . . .
Please interpret our silences as Spinach. Honestly, they are as innocuous! We are living here in a kind of country Eternity where time has no meaning. I measure it by the length of shadows, & the spinach-silence is a real thing. I shut my eyes and see spinach. Ted, I have discovered, is a wonderful planter but does not see weeds. I see weeds. We are thus an ideal couple. The past weeks, especially with the good weather (after a huge flood of Ted’s relatives, among whom one uncle counts for three in size & appetite), I have been out in the garden from morning till night digging & hacking the huge weeds from square after square of vegetables. By evening, when I have all my pleasant hobbies lined up before me---photos to paste in album, friendly letters, gros point of gross roses etc. etc.---I am so stupid-cow-tired I just put it all off & fall into bed. Hence the silence. Please please understand our brutish ways. We are too simple to have undertones.
I really love doing the vegetable garden much more than flowers, though I do love picking & arranging flowers. Anyhow, after I saw Ted through the worst of the immediate weeding I went out front hopefully to look at my labeled flower beds. To my surprise, where I had planted neat little rows of seeds, there was nothing to be seen but a complete carpet of one particular kind of plant. I could not understand it. I felt very badly. I had planted nothing so universally. It seemed, O God, to be a Weed. On looking very close, I did spy one or two rather feeble other things. They may be the plants. Or of course they may be a rather weaker kind of weed. I wish you were here, Kathy! We could sit & talk & do a lovely Zennish plucking in rhythm of the minute ubiquitous weeds (symbolising the foul world of minutes or something). Now I have to do it all alone. It should take about a year.
We loved you in THE DAY THE MONEY STOPPED,* Marvin. Ted & I kept poking each other: That’s Marvin. You did a terrific job. That’s what I call Drama. I only pray you get the grant. Ted will do all he can, but feels a bit shy of his own power as he applied and didn’t get it. But then he had nothing like the professional experience & works you have.
Suddenly we have an antique beehive, given us free by one of the many local beekeepers. O you would have laughed. We went to the North Tawton beekeepers demonstration this week. The rector was there, & the midwife. All donned those funny screen hats. Then we went out & stood while one Charlie Pollard* made 3 hives out of one & Ted & I stood like dummies trying not to get stung, feeling agonizing sting-like itches as billions of bees zinged against our veils. Now we have this old hive which Ted will scrub & I paint white & green with maybe a few pink roses on to hearten the bees. When you see us this fall we may well have home-made honey to offer you with apples. Provided the Queen doesn’t scorn our ignorance & Swarm.
Please keep us posted on all your BBC things, Marvin, & things with you in them. We love hearing them. Much love to you both, & forgive our farmhandish manners. We are lousy correspondents & keep a kind of inner monologue going in our heads which we count as sort of phantom letters!
Love,
Sylvia
TO Gerald & Joan Hughes
Sunday 10 June 1962 |
ALS* (aerogramme), Indiana University |
June 10: A week of hot blue days has arrived & I can hardly uncrook my back. Ted is a marvellous planter but does not see weeds. I see weeds. I have been happily browning in the dirt of our lovely vegetable garden uprooting gigantic nettles, dock, dandelions etc. etc. from pathetic thread-thin leeks, spinach, lettuce & so on. The babies are very brown & juicy. Six laburnum trees drip gold everywhere: my favorite tree. We still manage to work hard turning out BBC stuff. I’ve just had a long dramatic poem accepted which is three women thinking to themselves in a maternity ward. One has a son & lives in the country, one has a little illegitimate daughter & one has a miscarriage – all very emotional, but fun to do & a sort of wage that is nice. After a long string of spring guests, my blessed mother is coming now for 6 weeks to babysit, help & generally free us for a few jaunts. We are both getting piles of exercise, impossible in the city, & working & wrestling with our land. Our latest acquisition is an old bee-hive we are cleaning & painting in hopes of supplying our own daffodil-apple blossom honey. We keep discovering odd gems of people buried here – tea today with a retired Major* & C.I.D* man from British Guiana.
Love to all,
Sylvia
TO Alfred Young Fisher
Monday 11 June 1962 |
TLS, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
June 11, 1962
Dear Alfred,
After all these years, finally, a Book. I hope you will like some of it. I got to remembering those fine afternoons in my senior year at Smith under your office gable. The book is your due. Those afternoons are at the deep root of it.
We are committed to the country---only in England could two poets & a line of infants enjoy such worrilessness as we do on our ancient smallholding---thatch, acres of apple trees, daffodils, laburnum, owls, bees. We write in shifts, balancing babies in between, & the great vegetable garden on which we live. I do a lot for the BBC, am on a 2nd book of poems, much freer than this, & have had a first novel accepted over here. It is wonderful to discover one’s destiny.
I have a crazy favor to ask. Ignore it if it seems unusually crazy. I got so used, at Smith, to scribbling poems on the back of those big pink Smith College Memorandum sheets I have a fetish for them. Do you think I could send a check to someone & buy about a dozen of those pink pads???* My Muse is mad for them!
Seven year’s-worth of gratitude for helping to make these poems possible.
Affectionately,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 15 June 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
Friday: June 15
Dear mother,
Well, this is the last letter I will be writing before you come! I hope you get it before you go: I don’t even know when you’re leaving home! I have been working so hard physically out in the garden that I am inarticulate and ready for bed by evening, hence my long silences. I don’t know when I’ve been so happy or felt so well. These last few days I have been weeding our strawberry patch & setting the runners, just as I did on Lookout Farm, and at night I shut my eyes & see the beautiful little plants with the starry flowers & beginning berries. I love this outdoor work and feel I am really getting in condition. The amount of weeding this place needs is phenomenal. I have completely neglected my flowerbeds at the front for the pressing needs of the vegetables. How huge the back garden seems from weed-level! And now Ted is spreading his planting onto the plowed tennis court. I get such pride in eating our produce! The strawberries are very few---I figure if all ripen we (you too!) should have a saucer of about 20 each! But next year I should have trebled our plant supply from my set runners. We had the first cuttings of spinach tonight---absolutely delectable. And rhubarb & radishes. Every day we walk out together and take in the progress of our rows.
Today, guess what, we became bee-keepers! We went to the local meeting last week (attended by the rector, the midwife & assorted bee-keeping people from neighboring villages) to watch a Mr. Pollard make three hives out of one (by transferring his queen cells) under the supervision of the official Government bee-man. We all wore masks & it was thrilling. It is expensive to start bee-keeping (over $50 outlay), but Mr. Pollard let us have an old hive for nothing, which we painted white & green, & today he brought over the swarm of docile Italian hybrid bees we ordered and installed them. We placed the hive in a sheltered out-of-the-way spot in the orchard---the bees were furious from being in a box. Ted had only put a handkerchief over his head where the hat should go in the bee-mask & the bees crawled into his hair & he flew off with half-a-dozen stings. I didn’t get stung at all, & when I went back to the hive later, I was delighted to see bees entering with pollen sacs full & leaving with them empty---at least I think that’s what they were doing.* I feel very ignorant, but shall try to read up & learn all I can. If we’re lucky, we’ll have our own honey too! Lots of people are really big keepers in town, with a dozen to 20 hives, so we shall not be short of advice. When we have our first honey, I think we shall get half a dozen hens.
Luckily I have lots & lots of work to do like painting furniture & weeding, because I am so excited about your coming I can’t sit still! I wish now you had seen the house in its raw state so you would see how much we have done! Of course there is still an immense deal to do, and my eyes are full of five-year-plans.
Got an absolutely enchanting letter from Warren in Bermuda on an anniversary card---the first I’ve ever got from him full of vivid color & discriptions of things---Margaret must be a real tonic for him! You must tell me their address when you come & I’ll write a long over due letter. I can’t wait to see the two of them here---Warren will really appreciate all the improvements since his time!
We went to tea in a neighboring town with a marvelously doughty woman we met at the bee-meeting. Her husband is a Major, a retired C.I.D. inspector from British Guiana, and her amazing 89-year-old father* a retired police inspector too. She has 12 hives, a huge hennery & vegetable garden & a giant grapevine filling her greenhouse. Showed me all her albums---of her shooting jaguars & making a locomotive & railway in the wilderness. We’re going to tea this week to see the estate of a friend of the midwife’s whose husband is in TV.*
Frieda & Nicholas are getting brown & are so wonderful I can’t believe it. They are such happy healthy babies, I adore every minute of them. Ted & I are arranging a day in London about a week after you come to do a broadcast* see an art exhibit & maybe a foreign movie. It’s exciting as a safari to Africa to me to think of a day away!
Did I tell you I’ve just had a long (378 line) dramatic poem for 3 voices accepted for the BBC THird Program---three women in a maternity ward, each soliloquizing in poems. When you come I really must sit in my study in the mornings! Six weeks seems such a short time. I realize how terribly much I have missed you (and Warren too!) now that the time draws close to see you again.
Lots of love, & a smooth trip!
Fond wishes from us all,
Sivvy
TO Philippa Pearce*
Friday 15 June 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
June 15, 1962
Miss Philippa Pearce
Producer – The World of Books
THE BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear Miss Pearce,
I am enclosing a copy of my talk.* As you can see, it is a comparison of some few aspects of the poem and the novel from a poet’s point-of-view. I hope it is all right, and the right length.
It appears that I shall now be able to be in London on Tuesday morning, June 26th. Would it be at all possible for me to record with you some time that morning? My train gets into Waterloo by 10:30 a.m. Perhaps you could let me know by telephone whether I should plan on recording then.
With all good wishes,
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Olwyn Hughes
c. Monday 18 June 1962* |
ALS, Washington University (St Louis) |
Dear Olwyn –
I am enclosing a picture* of Nicholas Farrar Hughes on his christening day (March 25) in a gown of antique Limerick lace borrowed from the Bank Manger’s wife & cut from her grandmaw’s wedding dress. I hope it is not filched by French censors, plastiquéd, or seized as a representation of Salon in disguise. Nicholas is marvellous – calm, dark, wise, full of trills at the back of the throat & a Buddha-look I find infinitely endearing. Frieda a weird tornado with large angel-inhuman pale-blue orbs; refers to self as “Fee-fah” & pees on the floor so she can demand a mop although I have painted her potty seat with pink daises to beguile her into it. I just feel to be lifting a nose & a finger from the last 3 years cow-push of carrying, bearing, nursing & nappy-squeezing. My study is my poultice, my balm, my absinthe. I’ve just done a very long dramatic poem for 3 voices (3 women in a maternity ward, miscarriages, illegitimacies & such, after Bergman) which Douglas Cleverdon, Ted’s producer, will produce. Very excited about the chance to do longer stuff. We’re having our first day in London together next week – our train fares (fantastically high now) paid by the B.B.C., each of us to do a program, Ted for the Children’s School hour on air – birds & me a guest spot on “The World of Books.” We are lucky to have such bread & butter stuff & it is a diversion – as money bleeds away so fast here – the house just devours it: everything from slug killer to thatch insurance to fire extinguishers, & as we still owe over £400 we are working like mad. How I sympathize with your electric bill! Ours is over £25 a quarter & I somehow never count on it & am always floored. The sinus business sounds ghastly. Sinus has always been my own worst illness & the only relief I ever got was with a cocaine spray which worked wonders & lifted the manic depression I usually got. Then it got so bad I had it operated on, or rather drained, with a local, day after day for a summer & it has never been so bad. You don’t want France or England with that, you want Arizona.
I agree with you about “My Sad Captains”.* I’m getting very fond of Gunn & you named some of my favorites. It’s partly, I think, because I’ve since met & very much liked him. In the same way I’m very sympathetic to Alvarez’s poems, some of them, because I like him & know something about how his wife’s knocked him about & gone off.
I am working like a black now weeding, mowing, & scything. And painting a great lot of ugly wood furniture in black gloss or white gloss with hearts & flowers all over it to make “sets” for this room or that. My mother arrives this week for the summer, a heavenly blessing, a sort of free mother’s help, babysitter & part-time cook all of which I am desperate for with this William Morris* making & designing of things, babies & incipient books. We are slowly being absorbed – tea-partied by ret’d. Majors & active midwives.
Get well fast.
Love from us 4,
Sylvia
TO George MacBeth
Tuesday 19 June 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
June 19, 1962
Dear George,
I am delighted you are taking “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.”* and would be very happy to read a Carolyn Kizer.* Could you get her poem to me before I come up? I’d like to brood on it.
I wonder if I could come up the week after the one ending Friday June 29th and record some morning of just about any day? I have a very crammed day at the BBC Tuesday 26th and can’t really manage to arrange the infinite complications of babysitters, wipers & minders twice in the same week. The earliest train from here gets into Waterloo about 10:30 a.m., so I could be at your place about 10:45-11:00. Let me know if that next week would be all right with you, & if so, what morning.
Sincerely,
Sylvia
(Sylvia Plath)
George MacBeth, Esq.
Producer, Talks Department
The BBC
London W.1
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 21 June 1962* |
ALS,* Indiana University |
for mother
~ welcome to Court Green ~
from Sivvy & Ted
<enclosed with a Liberty of London scarf>
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
c. Friday 22 June 1962 |
Dear, dear Marvin & Kathy –
If you think we are trying to plan your lives for you, you are right. This Kathleen Macnamara is a minute, fiery white-haired woman with black eyes, two pekinese, a cat, a rose garden, a gardener, the most gorgeous old re-made 19-room rectory in the heart of green stillness. Of course you may not want to save money all this much – but the arrangement sounded so oddly like you – a 3rd floor sanctum under the eaves up an antique stair – 2 big rooms & a central boxroom (twin beds & bedding there), a small boxroom & possible study. Mrs. Macnamara is delighted at the idea Marvin would just write – she simply wants a woman to “do what she would do” – cook (in a fabulous red-brick-floored kitchen with aga, also a second modern stove), keep the 19 rooms in order & help entertain. A big, wandering house where you would need maps to find each other. This would amount to free room & board & a wage for Kathy’s services around the house. If you dug in for say a year & wanted a change, you’d be in the heart of cottage country, have saved all your takings & be able to pick your spot. Of course Kathy may be horrified at us putting her to work about at a house, but I remember, I think, she said she liked this sort of thing. If you did get on with this Kathleen it should be marvelous fun. I thought neither of you drove – izzat so? The big town* is about 10 miles away. We’d visit you often. We’re mad for the place. In case all this is around the bend, just say so, & we & Mrs. M. will keep on keeping our eyes out for cottages. We thought the plays* were terrific, Marvin! I never heard Ted belly laugh so. We don’t get anything but the Observer so please copy out the Times review verbatim for us.*
Our phone number is North Tawton 370 in case you want to question or confirm anything in a a hurry. Rest assured that we will keep looking for cottages if you can’t stand the notion of this business. As Ted says – if you’re interested the husband Terence could interview you in London. He works for ITV I think & is due to retire in a couple of years – goes down on weekends to Devon.
My mother is here now for the summer. She couldn’t open the train door (who could, those diabolical things) in time & jumped off the moving train with all her belongings. At that moment we all arrived. I felt of course that it was all my fault for not arriving in time to see her knocking on the window to be let out! A bad night (Is the ankle broken? Sprained? Strained?) smoothed out. The swelling went down. All is calm. Now I shall try to manipulate mornings of writing & become an articulate beast again.
Let us know what you think –
Lots of love
Sylvia
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
Saturday 30 June 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
Saturday: June 30
Dear Marvin & Kathy,
I enclose the clipping* (aren’t I scrupulous?) which is very fine & right. Could you give us some very practical idea about what sort of place you would like---I mean, this Macnamara woman has news of a semi-detatched cottage in the beautiful country near her place with a garden, but, I gather, unfurnished & you would need a car to get to the shops. S O what are you prepared to do? It seems there is electricity there, but you would have to get it connected up or something. There is also another place we are following up, through friends. Do you require anything? I mean, like shops. And furniture. And for roughly how long are you prepared to stick it out? If we know a few details like these we can probably be of more use. At least we can make encouraging gestures after these two places.
My mother is a blessing. We are writing again, both of us, and she gets on beautifully with the babies, minds them, bakes cookies. O it is lovely. We are writing a few poems.* And manage a mad morning at the BBC (working for train fare & a flight back so I can feed the baby) once in a great while.
Love to both & let us know,
Sylvia
TO Clarissa Roche
Wednesday 11 July 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
Wednesday: July 11
Dear Clarissa,
Pardon my long silence, but my mother has arrived out of the blue to stay with us till mid-August, and things are hectic as you may imagine. I think you would probably not want to invest in our local Inn (but let us know if you would), and wonder if you could postpone your babysitter till after mother has left? Then the spare room would be free again, and the visit possible at our house.
We have been consumed by this long drought, lifting anxiously the lolling heads of our otherworldly plants and begging them to hang on. Cars with loudspeakers have announced it is an offense to water the garden by hose from the tap. You have to cart it out in buckets and pretend it is your used bath-water. I get homesick for you just writing to you. If you could afford the hotel now you could have all the meals here so it wouldn’t be too bad, and I’m sure you’d get on with mother. If this is not feasible, how about some time in August?
Ted too sends love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Wednesday 11 July 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
July 11, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I honestly hope you feel you can answer this letter by return, as I am suddenly, after all that happy stuff I wrote you some while ago, at sea, and a word from you I could carry around with me would sustain me like the Bible sustains others. I didn’t say in my last letter how ghastly that sounded to have gone through, about your father.* It sounded so close in its way to my own trouble that I was astounded. I still credit you, I think, with some vestige of supernatural powers which can transcend the factual lumps of experience and make them harmless, or at least, not seriously or permanently wounding. What I wanted to say, without knowing quite how, is that I am very very sorry.
What I need some good wise word on is the situation between Ted & me.* As you can tell from my last letter, I thought I had at last stepped into the life that would be the growing-pot for us both---the alternation of outdoor work in the garden & fishing for Ted, with each of us writing more and better than ever in our separate studies, and the two beautiful babies and nothing to worry about but fallout, I felt Life Begins at 30. Then everything went queer. Ted began to leap up in the morning & intercept the mail. He began to talk, utterly unlike him, of how he could write & direct film scripts, how he was going to win the Nobel Prize, how he had been asleep all the time we were married, recoiling, as the French say, so he could jump the better. How he wanted to experience everybody & everything, there was a monster in him, a dictator. Und so weiter. He would come out with these things after spurts of lovemaking as in our honeymoon days, asking me like a technician, did I like this, did I like that. Then round on me for holding hands & being jealous of other women.
I just felt sick, as if I were the practise board for somebody else. I get these semi-clairvoyant states, which I suppose are just diabolic intuition. I picked up the phone & a nasty man’s voice asked if Ted could take a call from London.* Ted always wants me to find out who it is, so I asked, & the man said he was sorry, the person didn’t want to say. I felt thick with my own dumbness & called Ted. It was a woman, saying “Can I see you?” He said she didn’t say her name & he had no idea who it was. I was pretty sure who it was. A girl who works in an ad agency in London, very sophisticated, and who, with her second poet-husband,* took over the lease on our London flat. We’d had them down for a weekend, and I’d walked in on them (Ted & she) Tête-a-tête in the kitchen & Ted had shot me a look of pure hate. She smiled & stared at me curiously the rest of the weekend. She is very destructive---had so many abortions when she was young she only miscarries now, wants to die before she gets old, tried to kill her first husband with a knife when he married another woman, after she herself had deceived him; now she thinks her second husband is ‘Past his best, poor thing’. Calls her first husband on the phone (getting a man to ask for him, to get round the wife) and meets him for lunch. She kept calling a while, for no apparent reason, seeming almost speechless when she got me. Then, it seems reasonable to believe, she repeated her usual trick to get through to Ted. And when I got up to his study, to clean up as I do, empty envelopes in her hand were lying round, dated during all the time he’d been leaping up for mail. Ted said “No,” she couldn’t see him, over the phone. But I was standing there, stunned. Then the next day, after a night of no sleep & horrid talk (me asking him for god’s sake to say who it was so it would stop being Everybody), he took the train to London for a “holiday.” He assured me, in a flash of his old self, that me & the children were what he really loved & would come back to & he was not going to London to lie about & had not touched another woman since we were married. I have discontinued the phone, for I can’t stand waiting, every minute, to hear that girl breathing at the end of it, my voice at her fingertips, my life & happiness on her plate.
I suppose this all sounds very naive to you. It is, after all, what seems to happen to everybody. Only I am not, as Ted says, blasé enough. I care to a frenzy. I could never satisfy myself by “getting even” with other men: other men mean nothing to me---they are repulsive. This is one thing I want you to see: Ted is so fantastically unique---beautiful, physically wonderful, brilliant, loving, eager for me to do my own work, without (as I thought) a lie or deceit in his body. It is the lying that kills me. I can face nasty truths, unpleasant facts. I am sure a possessive wife would have driven most men mad before this. But I just don’t have the ability to care nothing about other women chasing Ted. He is very famous over here, and a real catch. Women are always writing him, drooling about his poems etc., begging him to tell them about his life, etc. As you may imagine, movie stars have nothing on a handsome male poet. He seemed to want to flee all big publicity---TV & so on, & was furious when I let any cameramen into the house. But now it is different: I have been a jinx, a chain.
Well, if he would tell me the truth about the letters & phonecalls & his flying off, I would be in some way purged. But now it balloons up before me like a great fantasy which I sense, but cannot limit to reality. I am not generous. His being with another woman, especially a woman who spites me & is dying to stop my creative work, like this one, makes me retch. I cannot sleep. I cannot eat. It is because I feel I can never trust him again, and have been perhaps a fool to be so happy and trusting in the past.
If I could carry on normally, I might be more rational. But I keep having to run off to cry and be dry-sick as each image of that girl assaults me, and her pleasure at hearing me nonplussed on the phone, of taking my life and joy. I can’t imagine a life without Ted. But I am not like other wives who tolerate all---marriage to me is a kind of sanctity, faithfulness in every part, and I will not ever be able to love or make love again in happiness, with this looming in front of me. It is his wanting to deceive me that is so like this girl & unlike him.
What can I do? I would never in my life think of divorce, because I married till death and am his wife till death. He can have tarty women & bastards, but only one wife and her children. And that’s me. I am simply not cool & sophisticated. My marriage is the center of my being, I have given everything to it without reserve. Worst, my writing is killed by this mess. I write, not in compensation, out of sorrow, but from an overflow, a surplus, of joy, & my ability to criticize my work & do it well is my objectivity, which stems from happiness, not sorrow. The day after Ted left, I got the proofs of my first novel.* It saved the day for me: I roared and roared, it was so funny and good. But then there is the big empty bed & I am like a desperado, & take the baby in with me. Then all night it is visions of that woman with Ted, her delight. I imagine idiocies---her coming to live here, me breaking her nose & knocking her teeth out. I think if she killed, or tried to knife, her first husband, she would quite like to kill me. And she is so outwardly sophisticated, so mocking. I have never learned the art & never will. I break up in pieces, cry, rave.* I am proud. I will not be made a fool of. Let me learn the true things, not be diddled & betrayed. I think I am not good in the part of wronged wife. A wronged wife is at such a disadvantage because she feels so right, and this is my desperation. I hate the thing in Ted that can jeopardize and ruin everything like this and expect to have a wife-secretary-mother-dishwasher-housekeeper waiting to take him back, refreshed. Until the next letter, the next come on. I have nothing to refresh me. I am left here, with the evidence of the phonecall, the evidence of the oddly coincidental departure, the evidence of my each sense. I can never forget or forgive this. I suppose people would tell me I am lucky---he seems to want us as homebase still. Well, I can’t be any sort of sweet homebase for stuff that makes me gag. I feel ugly and a fool, when I have so long felt beautiful & capable of being a wonderful happy mother and wife and writing novels for fun & money. I am just sick. What can I do?
To make things worse---or better---my mother is here for six weeks. She has taken over some of the meals & babyminding & freed us both to do our work & go off on day-jaunts. I was so happy. I get on pretty well with mother now, because I keep off the great controversies, and she is a real help & I make her feel this. But you can imagine how images repeat themselves---here I am, alone with my mother & the children! I am so numb I am only glad she looks after Frieda, because I am hollow as a zombie inside & without motion. My milk has soured or something, because the baby has been having diarrhea day and night since this bloody phonecall.
I have a feeling, when I try to look at what is I am sure my unique predicament (unique because I am unable to swallow this behavior as if it never was, unable to accept clean breaks, like divorce, because I am in spirit and body married forever to this one person, unable to forget), that people or you or anybody would say---let him go, let him get It out of his system. Well, what about my system? How do I get this other It out? This jealous retch, this body that comes, laughing, between my body & his body.* If he would only say who & what it was. Then It would have limits. But this intangible, invisible, infinitely possible thing is killing me. How can I live without him? I mean, if I could write & garden & be happy with my babies, I could survive. But I am so sick & sleepless & jumpy all is a mess. I suppose it might be good if mother could go---she has just over 3 more weeks. I tell her nothing: ‘Ted is on a holiday in London, to do some radio programs.’ She is good, doesn’t pry, makes herself scarce. She said the other day “I am so glad to see you so happy,” Well, that was the death knell. I have been trying to start a 2nd novel & said laughingly to Ted: Now if I can just keep happy & peaceful for 6 weeks I can do it. Later he flew at me “Why should I limit myself by your happiness or unhappiness?”
Well, that’s it. I feel you, having been once divorced and being a psychiatrist, not an Anglican rector, will feel I am a dog-in-the-manger about divorce (which has not, by the way, really entered our talk, except that Ted says it would be a good thing if his older brother,* whom he idolized, should get divorced---a stand-in for his own wish?). I simply would never do it. I honestly do believe I am wedded to Ted till death. Other men seem ants compared to him. I am physically attracted to no-one else. All the complexities of my soul & mind are involved inextricably with him. And I do feel I lead an independent life---I work, write, have my own art & reputation, my babies. Yet this is dirt in my mouth if I can’t trust and love him.
O I would be so grateful if you would sit down and send me some word. I can talk to no-one about this---mother, of course, least of all. She does not even know I have written a novel. She is in almost utter bliss. Please, please, do write me. I have got nothing but the bloody empty envelopes secreted by Ted in stupid places, and would like some word of my own. What can I do about the bloody lying? his refusal to come out & say: this is the way it is---I have seen so-and-so, it is she, not everybody, and you can bloody-well lump it. That would be salutary as a slap in the face. And then, how can I be, if he comes back? When I am full of hate, resentment, a wish to kill this bloody girl to whom my misery is just sauce. And how can I stop being miserable? I hate myself like this. I do need word!
Please write, right away, if you can.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
Sunday 15 July 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
July 15, 1962
Dear, dear Marvin & Kathie,
It was great to get your letter. We have been up in a heaval with my mother here (she stays way into August) as with no matter what good will & fortitude mater’s turn to witches after a certain amount of days if left in the sun. And I have a ghastly suspicion I have broken my toe. Which I shall see about tomorrow.
Our whole search for cottages ended up in only the two we said---both without bits & pieces or electricity (could you use a battery wireless?). Anyhow, we keep reading the ads. The cottage of the dead man’s* next to us is up for sale furnished for 2,500 pounds (ha!!) any takers?
I am excited about being on a program all to myself Marvin, you are very good. Will it mean money? We are very broke now having sunk all into the house repairs & payment. Ted told me he had sent back “We’re just not practical”* before I read it, but that was not true as I found it this week in the midst of huge angst & dolor & laughed like crazy. If it could make me laugh then, in the grave of a great deal, it is genuine grand comedy. The grant people sound hopeful. I think the poetry-popularanthology reading is a great idea and much fun and would love to do it some time latish fall when I’ve weaned Nicholas which should be about then.
Ted says he will drive up definitely to move you down or what if you want. Wish me mother-fortitude!! And a not badly broken toe.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Friday 20 July 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Friday: July 20
Dear, dear Dr. Beuscher,
First of all, please charge me some money. I feel a fraud and a heel to be cadging time and advice out of you for nothing. If I were in America, I would be asking you for a few sessions for which I’d want to pay, and right now, a few airletters back and forth could do me a powerful lot of good. You are a professional woman whose services I would greatly appreciate, and as a professional woman, I can pay for them what anyone else would. No need for cut rates or student’s fees. My last New Yorker poem earned me $270,* so I can afford the luxury of a good psychiatrist which is you. Let me know what would be best. Maybe a letter from me & an answer from you we could count as a session. Bill me, huh? Right now, I need some good talk to carry me on.
I wrote you in the middle of my agony-week, when I hadn’t come to the climax of it & been freed to see what I had to see, & so was half begging you to reassure me that at least my old dream-idyll was a right one even if it worked out wrong. The virginity, as it were, of our marriage ended Friday the 13th (O we are very superstitious in our house) & I went to a friend’s* with the baby leaving mother here with Frieda & went through the whole bloody thing minute by minute, surrounded by 4 cats (one of which produced 3 kittens), a dog, and many hens and pigs. At first I thought, why couldn’t Ted just go away & find freedom this way? Why did he have to fuck this woman in this nasty way, almost killing me & her husband & Frieda etc. by the upset of the shock. Then, after I had got over the nausea, got the doctor to knock me out for 8 hours after a week of no eating or sleeping, I thought: Thank God. I am free of so much. And this was probably the most economical way to do it, although at the time of my misery I thought it the cruellest.
I think you could do me some more good now, because I think I am willing to see a lot more than I could or would when I last saw you. I remember you almost made me hysterical when you asked me, or suggested, that Ted might want to go off on his own. This was heresy to me then, the Worst. How could a true-love ever ever want to leave his truly-beloved for one second? We would experience Everything together. I began to worry about the purity & strength of my love when I found myself thinking: Why doesn’t the bastard leave the house & let me put my hair up & dust & sing. I think obviously both of us must have been pretty weird to live as we have done for so long. Of course I suppose any husband of mine would have a large flow of my feeling for my father to complicate our relationship. And Ted has as I think you will admit, a rather large dose of mother-sister worship in him. And hate of course.
I was always having nightmares about Ted dying or being in accidents & for this reason could hardly bear to let him out of my sight. For fear he would desert me forever, like my father, if I didn’t watch him closely enough. And he must have had enough desire for womb-comfort to stick it out. Well, we are 30. We grow up slowly, but, it appears, with a bang.
Anyhow, Ted came back. It occurred to me almost immediately that he felt a lot worse than I did. Not sorry-worse. He just wasn’t purged, because he hadn’t had my particular wild agony. And the bloody girl wasn’t very sensual. She complained a lot about her abortions & what a bad hostess I was, going off on my own to my study etc. etc. Well you bet I went off. All she wanted was for me to sit on the bed while they fucked. No thanks. Yes, she is the Sister. This occurred to me on the train down from London where I did a job yesterday.* She is the barren & frigid symbol of sex. (I honestly think Ted’s sister may be a virgin. She is beautiful, smart, but absolutely uncreative & cold.) When I was at my lowest, thinking grimly: What has this Weavy Asshole (her name is actually Assia Wevill) got that I haven’t, I thought: she can’t make a baby (and really isn’t so sorry), can’t make a book or a poem, just ads about bad bakery bread, wants to die before she gets old & loses her beauty, and is bored. Bored, bored, bored. With herself & her life. She literally moved into our London flat (after we left!). She came down here & wanted to move into my life. Well, the old girl has done me a big favor. The funny thing is, I don’t think she must really enjoy sex, except in her head. One of her many odd gimmicks is that she calls up her old first husband and goes ga-ga because “It sounds as if we were in bed together.” That is another difference between us. Believe me, I would have the bloody man in bed. I am that shameless. I hate mental titillations that don’t come off in reality.
One thing about sex. I hate comfortable rituals. I like all sorts of positions at a lot of odd times of day, & really feel terrific and made new from every cell when I am done. I actually wondered at one point if Ted was sick. Well, of course, how can one keep up that intensity & variety every day & night for over 6 years. A biological & psychological impossibility I would think. And I have my pride. I mean, I was not schooled with love for 2 years by my French lover for nothing. I have in me a good tart, as distinct from a bad tart: I feel all I feel, which is a lot, & which I think men like to feel they can do, and I do not need to pretend I feel, or to feel only in my head. Well I want this tart to have a good life again. I’m damned if I am going to be a Wife-mother every minute of the day. And as I am a pretty faithful type, and have no desire left for malice or revenge on Ted, to “get back at him”, I’d just as soon make love with Ted. But coming from a distance, from a space, a mutual independence.
Ironically, this great shock purged me of a lot of old fears. It was very like the old shock treatments I used to fear so: it broke a tight circuit wide open, a destructive circuit, a deadening circuit, & let in a lot of pain, air and real elation. I feel very elated. The little conventional girl-wife wanted Ted to come back & say: My God, how could I hurt you so, it will never happen again. But I knew I really couldn’t stand him to say that, & he didn’t. He told me the truth about the femme fatale, which freed my knowledge to sit about in the light of day, like an object, to be coped with, not hid like some hairy monster. And I didn’t die. I thought my capacity for conventional joy & trust & love was killed, but it wasn’t. It is all back. And I don’t think I’m a suicidal type any more, because I was really fascinated to see how, in the midst of genuine agony, it would all turn out & kept going. I really did believe it was the Worst Thing that could happen, Ted being Unfaithful; or next worst to his dying. Now I am actually grateful it happened, I feel new.
As I say, I have no desire for other men. Ted is one in a million. Sex is so involved with me in my admiration for male intelligence, power and beauty that he is simply the only man I lust for. I know men feel differently about sex, but I thought they too were capable of deep and faithful love. It is not very much consolation to me that Ted really deeply & faithfully loves me, while he follows any woman with bright hair, or an essay on Shakespeare in her pocket, or an ability for flamenco dancing. If he thinks they’re real, and they think they’re real, what good does my thinking they’re unreal do? They’re real enough to hurt me, and make me lose my pride and my joy in my mind and body and potential talents. The thought of Ted making physical love to them, registering them under my name in hotels, letting all the people we know see this, hurts and nauseates me horribly. I feel if he really loved me he would see how this hurt damages my whole being, makes it barren, & deprives me of joy in lovemaking with him.
All the stupid little things I did with love---baking bread, making pies, painting furniture, planting flowers, sewing baby things---seem silly and empty to me without faith in Ted’s love. And the children who so delighted me are like little miasmas, crying for daddy. Of course mother’s being here through all this hasn’t helped. She officially knows nothing---I don’t talk to her about it---but she has seen everything. I think in one way she hates me for having deprived her of her vicarious dream-idyll, and in one way she is viciously glad: “I knew men were like that,” I feel her thinking. “Horrid selfish bastards, just like my husband. And Sylvia thought hers was an exception!” It has been humiliating for me to have her here through this, gloating over my weaning the baby, wailing “O you looked so happy and beautiful when I came . . .” implying I am now a tired old hag. I had been getting on quite well with her before, but this has put a ghastly strain on our pleasant if distant relationship.
One or two practical questions: shall I refuse to tell our friends and relatives about this? I really have no desire to complain to anyone & I hate people maunching over my business. And shall I ever let Ted’s sister come down here? I honestly don’t want to feel her gloating, offering to provide Ted with nice Paris models & scolding me for being a dog-in-the-manger. Ted is free, why can’t he go see her on his own? Or would it be wiser to have her come, try to deflect her vileness (she is dying for Ted’s brother to get divorced---the Other Women in her family are intolerable to her) and weather a visit.
Ted has stopped doing any man’s work about the place. Should I take on the weeding, mowing, hoeing and go on figuring the income tax, paying the bills (he defiantly misads & botches the checkbook), without a murmur? He once said he hated me asking him to do jobs (I mean heavy work, not lady-work) around the house; I stopped; he doesn’t do any. I love this place and get on well with the people in the town, thank god. It is my first home. But I am ready to pack off on trips in a flash, anything. Do you have any advice about these other women. And how to maintain my own woman-morale from day to day. And toughen myself!
Love to you,
Sylvia
PS: I’d feel awfully relieved if you’d see fit to agree to a few paid airletter sessions! And can I dedicate my novel to R. B. or would this be unethical or a bother? It may not be High Art, but it is good & funny.
TO A. Alvarez
Saturday 21 July 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
July 21, 1962
Dear Al,
Let me know what you think of the 3 poems I sent.* I am, as you will gather, a bit of a clairvoyant. But that has nothing to do with poetical quality. I know “Elm” is too long & fat for the Observer but thought it might amuse you in one way or some other. And maybe the other two, though not so gigantesque, are too late, or you don’t like. Or both. I like your opinions. I don’t mean, agree. But like. And I am tough enough, so don’t be ginger.
I’d be grateful to have a whole No, or whatever, soon, because I need to flog round what I’ve got. Money money. You know. Please don’t be “nice”.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Richard Murphy*
Saturday 21 July 1962 |
TLS, University of Tulsa |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Saturday: July 21
Dear Richard,
I don’t know how fast the cogs of officialdom work, but I could not deny myself the pleasure of letting you know right away that “Years Later”, the Epilogue of the “Cleggan Disaster” has won first prize in the Cheltenham contest. I suppose you have already heard, or will soon hear this from Mr. Wilkinson, the chairman of the festival. The Epilogue, because we felt that touched heights perhaps greater than in the earlier part.
I now have a question to ask you. Is there any chance of Ted & me coming to Bofin* around the last week in August or first week in September? I don’t know how long you run your boat, or what your terms are, but for me at least, I desperately need a boat and the sea and no squalling babies. We are now trying to negotiate a family to come & mind Frieda (2 years) and Nicholas (6 months), and I should know Monday if and exactly when they can come. If they won’t, then I shall have simply to hire someone. But if you could let me know right away if any week in late August or early (first week) September would connect us with you & your blessed boat, it would be so nice.
It would also be lovely to see you again.* The center of my whole early life was ocean and boats, and because of this, your poems have been of especial interest to me, and I think you would be a very lovely person for us to visit just now. Is there any kind old soul on the island who would feed & bed us & would it be possible to bring the car there, or would we have to leave it on the mainland? I hope, while in Ireland, we may also collide with Jack & Maire Sweeney, of whom we are very fond. And maybe Dublin. I have never been before.
Do tell me I am not being an awful bother. And please do say we may come on your boat. I have always desired, above many things, a friend with a boat. Ted sends his best, and hopes you will take us on.
Again, congratulations, & warmest good wishes.
Sylvia Plath
P.S. Eric White said something about Faber & Eliot having accepted your poems.* I am so very glad. It is so deserved!
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Monday 30 July 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Monday: July 30th
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I do hope you will agree to a few paid letter-sessions. I have even been wildly thinking of saving my money to fly to America for some person-to-person sessions with you, if that were possible, but I have to do a few more novels to manage that, I think. This seems a violent change-point in my life, & I feel to need to work toward as much insight as possible to change with it & weather it in a creative way, not withdraw from it. I feel I could ruin everything now by persisting in blindness & ignorance.
I have been at a nadir, very grim, since my last letter to you. What I would like to do is isolate and purge the father-feelings from my relation with Ted. I see I’ve been a fool to indulge in these---I’ve been frantic if Ted came home later than he said, for fear he might be in an accident; I’ve not wanted to stay alone overnight in the country, because the darks of Dartmoor scared me; I’ve let him buy the meat (my father always brought home our groceries from work) & had Frieda play with him mornings while he worked in the garden & I wrote. We had reasoned that this last arrangement was “economical”---freed me for writing at my peak period to earn money & Ted had to do the chores around the place anyhow, so why not let Frieda play along. He’s always loved her & loved teaching her things. Well, I see my fear of accident & dark as repetitions of fears for the life of my father: they are gone from me. I shall do all the shopping & baby-minding (I am now just about successful enough to hire a local babyminder for 4 hours a morning) as these have turned from casual jobs into symbols of whose sex is what. What other practical things can I do?
And what, above all, does Ted think I am? His mother? A womb? What can I do to stop him seeing me as a puritannical warden? He says he doesn’t want any more children & wants to make over our cottage & hire a live-in nanny to free me (fine by me!); when Nicholas came, he said he felt the baby was a usurper. I don’t think he’d have felt this if it had been a girl---so does that make Ted my baby as well as me his? Ye Gods. I would like a couple more children---later, when I have this live-in nanny so I can take off.
Anyhow, Ted is on the rampage---writing letters and even radio broadcasts about the advantages of destruction, breaking one’s life into bits every ten years, and damn the pieces. His favorite poem of his own is pure ego-Fascist, about a hawk “I kill where I please because it is all mine.”* I realise now he considered I might kill myself over this (as did the wife of someone we know well), and what he did was worth it to him. I have always admired him for this inner pride and energy---most people just haven’t got the power in them. But I would like to break my life, & go ahead with him, not be relegated to the homefront: the suffering & pitied but very repugnant mother-wife.
The real crux to me now is what to do about the Other Woman business. Maybe a lot of my nausea & shortness of breath & sleeplessness is due to my second loss of a second father. Okay. I want to get rid of those little-girl desires & fears. But some of it is that I am horribly hurt in my morale as a wife. Ted had one girl after another till he met me. And I had enough inner pride in myself as a woman not to fear other attractive woman---I liked them as friends myself. Now Ted is looking everybody over. And with him, it’s not flirting, it’s bed. We went for a ghastly poetry reading together to Wales this week.* I had just weaned the baby in a hurry, my milk was going anyway, & I didn’t want to take the baby along. Well there was a very lovely 18 year old blonde secretary, just married. Ted eyed her, immediately made a date to read in her hometown and asked me what I thought of her, why didn’t she quite come off? Well he always criticizes a woman he’s after. To put me off. What am I to do? Ted says he hadn’t been infatuated with anybody for 6 years since me, till this ad-agency girl. Am I to cheer him off onto one infatuation after another now? I have too much pride to say: O please God, it kills me to think of all these other women knowing you and your body and laughing at me, doing the dishes & wiping noses in Devon. My other impulse is to say: O fuck off, grab them all. What seems civilised & sophisticated to the people we move among seems stupid and boring and selfish to me. Am I an idiot to think that there is some purpose in being bodily faithful to the person you love? In riding through infatuations without always indulging yourself, if you know it hurts someone? I mean, my pleasure in lovemaking is spoiled by thinking: is he comparing my hair to this one, my shape to that one, my talents to the other?
I am sick of being suspicious. I would rather know the truth about everything, than merely suspect it. And be told by all the other people who love to pass on nasty news---and when you’re famous as Ted is over here, they are legion. How can I have any self-respect? I hate the idea of living here in the country with the children & having Ted go off & sleep with various women & come back exhausted & refreshed to write, be fed etc. It humiliates me. I simply can’t laugh and blow smoke-rings. He hates me to be tearful, but my god, the prospect of this makes me cry. I don’t ask for “conventional” safety, but how can I make our relationship “fundamentally safe”, as you suggest it can be? When I think he wants to follow every infatuation into bed, shall I just let him? This is what freedom, it seems, means to him. And just about all. He is handsome & fantastically virile & attractive. I am not beautiful. When I am happy, I can glow & burn, but what have I in this to make me happy? I bear his name; I have born his children. He loves me in a way. Shall I just sit around waiting till some girl agitates him to get a divorce? I mean, I want to write, travel, etc. etc., but it is pretty hollow to me when my relation to my husband is such a lousy one. How can I have the guts to cheer him on to new women, wait & wait, wondering how long it will last, and then welcome him home, no tears, no bitchery, no nothing. How can I make these women unnecessary to him? And keep up my own sense of seductiveness and womanly power? I don’t want to be sorrowful or bitter, men hate that, but what can I do in face of these prospects?
What I need now is the guts not to be lugubrious or accusing when I am tired, or my morale is low. I want Ted to understand I am not a doll-wife who can be lied to & kept happy. I want the dignity of facing facts, & facing them before all my friends & relatives. There are a few things I do think important. I’m not French enough to enjoy entertaining people who sleep with my husband, & having the little bitches criticize my hostessery into the bargain. I’d like honestly to know roughly where Ted is, so I could get in touch with him at a GPO or something in case of emergency. If he is fucking about with someone, I’d rather know it straight out, than get suspicions, intimations, anonymous phonecalls & letters. Do you think I am still asking too much? I mean, I do think I am prepared to do an awful lot. I am a good cook, I mow the lawn, am getting to be a good gardener, I weed, afford a cleaner, earn half our income (this I feel is an advantage to both of us, for it frees Ted from a dull job to support us, & gives us travel money), make out the income tax, am a feeling & imaginative lay, & probably can write quite funny & good books.
What I see now I could not have stood, what would to me have been the real worst, was for Ted to come & say: I want this girl for my wife & to bear my children. But of course, he felt his problem was womb-engulfment & did not want a wife or children at all. I at one point told him: I am saving you from ever getting mucked up with a wife & children again: you can have tarts & bastards, but if any other woman gets refrigerators & nappies in her eyes, you can say you have a really good old wife at home who is saving you to be free & not get stuck in the wallow of domesticity again. And he does genuinely love us. He says now he dimly thought this would either kill me or make me, and I think it might make me. And him too.
What I also need is wisdom for him. He takes a lot of understanding. He is, I am sure, a genius. A really great writer, a handsome and great man. I have been so hurt this week I feel like upchucking at the thought of his laying about with other women just this minute. But I would like to be able to cope with this again, if it came up. If he needed to test his freedom, to test me. And believe me, women are dying to get their hands on him. And on me, too. I honestly don’t ever, by cowardice, boringness, accusation, limitedness, ever want to give Ted the chance to think he should trade us in for a better family model. I am sure there will be other pressure points, as he proves & proves his freedom to himself, & I would like to feel I could write to you for a talk at those times, & be billed, as for interviews.
What I am not is a Penelope type.* I have come to this country town because Ted said it was his dream---apples, fishing, peace, clean air, etc. etc. I had wanted to stay in London, because I liked all the social life, movies, art exhibits & rush. Well now I love it here, & this is the first home I’ve had, very beautiful, & with some fine people in the neighborhood. It is a good base. But I am damned if I want to sit here like a cow, milked by babies. I love my children, but want my own life. I want to write books, see people & travel. I want, eventually, to make over our separate cottage & hire a nanny. So I’ve got to work hard. I refuse the role of passive, suffering wife. I think your advice about not having any more children for years a good one. I think I’d like a couple more someday, but only when I’ve got a nanny to free me.
I am, by the way, not fat!! I have the gift God gives some skinny women, namely that having babies & nursing them have given me a better figure than I ever hoped for, & my waist is the same (with all this lugging of fertiliser pots, mowing lawns & weeding huge vegetable patches) & I can wear clothes with good style. My nose, I fear, is unalterable, but otherwise I might become vain & insufferable, so the good lord has seen fit, in his wisdom, to load me with it. My hair (I remember you once said: Either very short or very long, no shillyshally pageboys) is very long.* I sometimes walk about in it like a shawl, & have a good enough coronet effect which few women can attain, with braids in a kind of pillbox.
I would like some time to have you discuss what you suggest about being in my own womb & having babies & my “prehistoric cave”. I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being pregnant & nursing. But I must say, I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being light & slender & fucking as well.
Can you think of any other discontents of Ted’s I might forsee? I think he will need to prove conclusively & perhaps several times (soon), then maybe less often, that he is “free”. He says this means travel, not tarts, but I feel naturally now the two go together. What I don’t want to be is an unfucked wife. I get bitter then, & cross. And I feel wasted. And I don’t just mean the token American what-is-it twice a week, front to front, “thank you darling” either. It might simplify things if I could desire other men, but I need to admire them too, & find them attractive, & there are very few of these, & I’m not likely to meet them in cow country.
Practically, Ted needs a job of some sort that takes him away quite regularly. I think this might be managed with speaking engagements: he gets enough requests, & could thus travel throughout England, spacing them one or two a week. But I honestly don’t feel like sticking through the bloody country winter with no husband to come home & share experiences for weeks on indefinite weeks. I like to go on long holidays too.
Can you suggest a gracious procedure when you see some little (whoops, not little, big!) tart is after your husband at a party, or dinner or something? Do you leave them to it? Engage a hotel room? Smile & vanish? Smile & stand by? What I don’t want to be is stern & disapproving or teary. But I am only human. I have to feel I have some ground-rights. So far, I have only said I don’t want the bitches to sit around the house expecting me to cook them nice dinners. But I don’t find joy in the general sexual exchanges one finds in our world. I mean, Ted is unique to me. I would like to be unique to him. And wise. Yes, wiser than he is in some ways. By the time I am 50 I want to be very experienced & have purple hair & be very wise & have interesting children & piles of money.
Can you weed through this & tell me where you think I am fooling myself, near truth, downright stupid. What can I legitimately ask of Ted? And he of me? A funny footnote: all through this Ted’s been writing a radio play fittingly called “Difficulties of a Bridegroom”. It was accepted on the condition that he re-write the reality frame of the bridegroom’s encounter with a dream femme fatale so the audience would know what was real & what wasnt. A nice parable illustrating your point about the reality of this woman.
Thanks a million times for the letter. Do answer this. & bill me for the lot.
Love,
Sylvia Hughes
P.S. All day I have been planting out my seedlings from their greenhouse “growing pots” into open ground. “Hardening them off” is the horticultural expression.
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
Friday 10 August 1962* |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Friday: August?
Dear, dear Marvin & Kathy---
It is all set. Ted will pick you up at your place around about noon on Monday, deposit your boxes where you will and bring you back for a late dinner with us Monday night. We are both very happy about the prospect of you coming.
I came back* with marvelous train companions---an absolutely stunning blond pure Cockney girl and completely unspoiled working at Butlin’s holiday camp* (Ooo it’s a brothel) who told me all about everything including her love for her boss (He’s only 25 years older ’n’ me) and left me all her pork sandwiches at her stop, then a very swish English mother whose husband is a biologist and who descanted to me on the rareness of happy marriages (hers being one, she says, roundly thumping on wood).
There is a woman it seems eager to come 5 mornings a week to mind the babies, so I should be initiating her Monday I hope, and starting to write mornings again.* I just heard from my sometimes patroness that she is alighting in London this Wednesday* night midway between a trip from America to Russia & wants to see Ted & me for dinner that night in London. So maybe you can babysit for us that night??? She is very impulsive (with a huge lineage of great-grandchildren, alas) and I feel this is a very important meeting. I hope to sort of mention in a casual way my dreams of scrimping & making over the cottage.
Thank you thank you thank you for an absolutely saving day. I felt terrific coming back, renewed in every cell & slept the sleep of the deserving, sans pills. So you see what a fine influence you both are!
Much love,
Sylvia
TO George MacBeth
Wednesday 15 August 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
August 15, 1962
Dear George,
I think the Penguin book of Sick verse* is an inspired idea, and am delighted to hear you are doing it. I’ve been meaning to send off these two recent poems* to you for consideration for the BBC, and I thought I’d enclose them now, In case they strike you as being darker than my other darks, sicker than the old sicks.
Very best wishes.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
George MacBeth, Esq.
44 Sheen Road
Richmond
Surrey
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 17 August 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
August 17, 1962
Dear mother,
I am enclosing these pictures* for you, which I think came out very well. I took them to London on Wednesday to show Mrs. Prouty. I will have a couple made up and send them to Marcia Plumer. We did go to London, had cocktails, dinner & saw Agatha Christie’s “Mousetrap”, a play which has run for 10 years. She put us up at her hotel, the Connaught, and it is the loveliest hotel I’ve ever stayed in---very intimate, clean, yet antique-feeling. No great impersonal grandeur. We had hot baths & breakfast in bed. It was wonderful to see Mrs. Prouty again, and that nice Claire,* her rather dowdier sister-in-law companion. It is so sad---did you hear, Mrs. Prouty’s nasty cook (whom I never liked) deserted her to work in a bank, her maid had a heart attack & her gardener, or is it chauffeur, is demanding more money when she thinks he already gets too much. None of her children* want anything from the house. I can’t bear to think of her selling it. Evidently she undertook this strenuous trip to escape those painful worries. She was beautifully keen, although Claire says she suffers from aphasia, and forgets terribly. She asked Ted & me about our work with her usual insight. She means an immense deal to me. I hope you drop over to see her now and then. Her loneliness must be appalling.
Winifred has at last found me a nice shy woman with two children in school to come work for me 4 hours a morning 5 mornings a week. It would have been impossible for Nancy to mind babies & clean too, I should have seen that, but at least she will feel I thought of her first. Both Nancy & this woman are on holiday this week, so you can imagine what a mess the house is & how little peace I have.
But Monday I shall train the new woman, and Tuesday Nancy is back, so help is in sight. At least I should be able to count on them. A business arrangement, with money paid, is the only thing I can count on. I am very eager to get the cottage started this winter & try to finish it by next summer. Then get a full-time nanny.
We now have with us a young American writer who was evicted from his London flat, and his wife. They are fantastically neurotic, she has dozens of illnesses, all untreatable because she has decided she is allergic to any medicine that might help---for instance, she has ulcers, she says, yet can’t swallow, she says, milk. And migraine, but is allergic to codeine. And she is a fanatic about food. I just take all this calmly. They are living in the guest room---I said we would take them in rent-free for a month or 6 weeks until they got rested enough to look for another flat, if they would help pay for the food and help with the children. They took over the day we were in London and it nearly killed them. They have said they will stay while we go to Ireland, which would be wonderful, as the children get on beautifully with them, but I have grave doubts as to their staying power. I shall ask them to tell me now, so I can hire a nurse if necessary. I simply must go to Ireland and sail for a week. Mrs. Prouty is scheduled to come to dinner here September 9, Sunday, & we hope to leave the next day.
It was very kind of you & Warren & Margaret to remember Ted’s birthday. I have seen the doctor’s wife, whom I very much like, about riding lessons & she is going to ask the woman next week & we may take them together. She is going to get a pony, & someday I would like a pony for Frieda.
Lots of love to all,
Sivvy
PS: Thanks for F’s pretty pants. I’m enclosing a wellmeaning letter* from dear dumb Edith.
TO Richard Murphy
Friday 17 August 1962 |
TLS, University of Tulsa |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Friday: August 17
Dear Richard,
Your latest telegram arrived yesterday when we were away for the day in London and we have no phone, so I am writing. As things now stand, I am reasonably sure we can leave Devon on Monday, September 10. I don’t know how long it will take to get to you, but when we do we could stay about a week. Do you have life preservers! I don’t want you writing another prize-winning poem about our eyeballs boiling in the sea!*
Could you drop us a note with some advice about the best way to get to your place from wherever the boat to Ireland lands? We will be without a car & travel by train or bus or mule or whatever is most expeditious. Do let us know what to do about getting to your island! I don’t know when I’ve looked so forward to anything. I am sick of the bloody British sea with its toffee wrappers & trippers in pink plastic macs bobbing in the shallows, and caravans piled one on top of the other like enamel coffins.
Fond regards,
Sylvia
TO Anne Sexton
Tuesday 21 August 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), University of Texas at Austin |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
August 21, 1962
Dear Anne,
I was absolutely stunned and delighted with the new book.* It is superbly masterful, womanly in the greatest sense, and so blessedly unliterary. One of the rare original things in this world one comes upon. I had just said the day before “One book I will buy is Anne Sexton’s next,” & there it was, in the morning mail the next day. I have these small clairvoyances. But I don’t have to be clairvoyant to see the Pulitzer and National Book Award and the rest in your lap for it.
I think “The Black Art” comes in my top favorite dozen, with Northeaster Letter,* Flight, the Letter Crossing Long Island Sound,* Water, Woman with Girdle, Old, For God While Sleeping, Lament. Hell, they are all terrific.
Tell me what it is like to be a Lady Poet Laureate. How was the Radcliffe Grant,* did it really free you from the drudge of housework? And who is He? of the letters & Flight? Tell me how things are with you, with Maxine and George. Who do you see, know, now? I am bedded in the country with Frieda and a very fine 6 months son Nicholas, keeping bees and raising potatoes and doing broadcasts off and on for the BBC. I would love one of your newsy letters to stick on the wall.
Let me know when & where I can see the new stuff you must have done since the book. I loved the flies in their foul caves poem,* but see no magazines except the New Yorker, which is a free copy. More power to you, although you seem to need nothing---it is all there.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 27 August 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Monday: August 27
Dear mother,
Thank you very much for your letter, and the sweet little bunny cards for Frieda. She plays with the pop-beads all the time and the other day came into the room with her red sweater and said “Gammy make noo.” We have a young couple living with us now, the Kanes, he an American writer of plays & depressive, & she a big-boned kind Irish orphan and manic. After the usual jerks of a living-in relationship, we seem to have settled down. In return for free board & room Kathy helps me with the babies & cooks one meal a day. So I hope to have my “mornings” as long as they care to stay, and that they will at least stay through my hoped-for Ireland trip about September 10, to 20. Mrs. Prouty is scheduled to come for dinner Sunday the 9th, so hope she can make it. I am thinking seriously of closing the house up for the winter and taking the babies to winter in Spain. I have just recovered from a bad bout of flu, which the babies caught too, and my weight has dropped after this worrisome summer, and I do not think it wise to try to undergo another English winter just now. If plans work out, I should drive down in mid-November, get a villa and stay till early March. I do not know what I would have done without Kathy Kane to mind the babies while I was sick; they were evicted from their London flat and our mutual needs seem to coincide.
We have removed 3 combs from the beehive and used Winifred’s honey extractor & should have about 10 bottles. It is delectable stuff. The weather here has been ghastly---nothing but rain. Today is sunny & blowy & I hope it keeps up, for I have my first riding lesson this afternoon,* and after Ireland hope to share them with Joan Webb, the doctor’s pretty and very nice wife who has taken them for a year.
I hope you will not be too surprised or shocked when I say I am going to try to get a legal separation from Ted. I do not believe in divorce and would never think of this, but I simply cannot go on living the degraded and agonized life I have been living, which has stopped my writing and just about ruined my sleep and my health. I thought I would take almost anything to give the children an illusion of home life, but I feel a father who is a liar and an adulterer and utterly selfish and irresponsible is worse than the absence of a father, and I cannot spend the best years of my life waiting week after week for the chance returns of someone like this. What is saddest is that Ted has it in him to be kind and true and loving but has just chosen not to be. He spends most of each week in London, spending our joing savings on himself & his pleasures, and I feel I need a legal settlement so I can count on so much a week for groceries and bills and the freedom to build up the happy pleasant life I feel it in myself to make, and would but for him make. I have written Edith telling her I deeply love her & Willy & Walter & Hilda & Vicky, & told her the truth of Ted’s desertion during your stay & his utter faithlessness & irresponsibility. I just could not receive any more of her sweet dumb letters asking about the garden and saying what a fine, happy, restful time you must have had. I have too much at stake and am too rich a person to live as a martyr to such stupidity and heartlessness. I want a clean break, so I can breathe and laugh and enjoy myself again.
The woman Winifred got for me came one morning, then sent her husband to say it was too hard work. Well, I have Kathy for the time being and really couldn’t afford anyone now. The kindest & most helpful thing you could do is send some warm article of clothing for Frieda at Xmas. I have plenty for Nicholas. And a big bottle of Vitamin C tablets for me if you would! I can’t afford another cold like this one. I do hope Warren & dear Maggie will plan to come in spring, & that I can have Marty & Mike Plumer as well. I try to see the Comptons weekly & have met some nice couples with children there. I would, by the way, appreciate it if you would tell no-one but perhaps Margaret and Warren of this, and perhaps better not even them. It is a private matter and I do not want people who would never see me anyway to know of it. So do keep it to yourself!
I am actually doing some writing now Kathy is here,* so there is hope. And I feel if I can spend the winter in the sun in Spain I may regain the weight & health I have lost this last 6 months. I meant you to have such a lovely stay, I can never say how sorry I am you did not have the lovely reveling and rest I meant you to have. I am glad to hear that grampy is better off in the home and think that decision was the best & only one. Tell Dotty to go on writing me, she means a very great deal to me. I love you all very very much and am in need of nothing, and am desirous of nothing but staying in this friendly town & my beautiful home with my dear children. I am getting estimates about re-doing the cottage so I someday can install a nanny & lead a freer life.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Howard Moss
Friday 31 August 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), New York Public Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
August 31, 1962
Mr. Howard Moss
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York 36, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Mr. Moss:
I’m sending along ELM again, with some new poems.* I thought your comments* perfectly good and well taken.
There is absolutely no relation of the poem’s meaning to the girl I dedicated it to---she is simply someone I like who liked it, and when I print it in a book, I’ll dedicate it to her then. No need to in magazine printing.
The poem, without the dedication, I hope explains itself. The “she says” is the elm. The whole poem is the elm talking & might be in quotes. The elm is talking to the woman who contemplates her---they are intimately related in mood, and the various moods, I think, of anguish, are explored in the poem. Let me know if this makes any difference. I realize it is a rather wild & desperate piece. But, I hope: clear, clear.
All good wishes.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Eric Walter & Edith White
Monday 3 September 1962* |
ALS,* McMaster University |
P.S. Dear Eric & Dodo –
I am just through a week of influenza & about as strong as a dead codfish, but hope to be well enough in two weeks or so to really recover on Richard Murphy’s boat. Poetic justice I think. I am desolate not to see you & the Sweeneys, I had so been looking forward to the dinner! The Nolans* are a great consolation – visionary cartography. Love to you both & Jack & Mairé when they come.
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Tuesday 4 September 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
September 4, 1962
Dear Doctor Beuscher,
I’d be awfully grateful just to have a postcard from you saying you think any paid letter sessions between us are impractical or unhelpful or whatever, but something final. Believe me, that would be a relief. It is the feeling of writing into a void that never answers, or may at any moment answer, that is difficult. I’d rather just have you say “shut up” than feel my words dangling in space.
I thought for a time I would just give Ted his head, and could laugh at the lot of it and be my own woman. Any kind of caution or limit makes him murderous. But what he does is go each week to London, spend lots of money on himself, then come home (why does he come home?) and lay into us: this is a Prision, I am an Institution,* the children should never have been born. He may need a flogging post but I’m damned if I’m going to be it. I started having blackouts last week & made the mistake of asking him to put off his weekly spree a day and help me, as I also had two sick guests. He said I was blackmailing him with my health, so I quickly drove him to the train. When he came back I had galloping influenza, chills & fever of 103 nonstop for 3 days, a real experience, very British, which my doctor assured me there was no medical aid for. Why he had nursed families of 9 all with influenza, and they just lay about and died for a week until one of them could crawl up & brew tea. I see now I can’t convince Ted I can change or have changed. His lies are incredible & continuous---daily I find out his accounts of meeting people in London, dining, etc. are all made up. I think this may be because he unconsciously so resents my possessing any part of his life he cant bear to tell about even small things truly because I thus possess the knowledge of them. But I am so weak with this bloody influenza, and the prospect of being forbidden ever to go to a play, party, dinner, movie or anything with him is so mean, I think the only thing that may dent into his head I do not honestly want to eat him is for me to get a legal separation. The idea of no husband, 2 babies, a 15 room house & 2½ acres is a grim one, but I am no martyr & I want my health back & am sick of being called a possessive institution, e.g. an old womb. I have an awful lot to distract me, and a legal separation may just set Ted whirling into this wonderful wonderful world where there are only tarts and no wives and only abortions and no babies and only hotels and no homes. Well bless him. Your last letter was a big help, but I think Ted is trying to drive me by his behavior week by week to separate, he hasn’t quite got the guts to do it all by himself, so I shall have to get a lawyer & help him.
The whole influenza business made me furious. I got it from these bloody guests who were to help me with the babies in exchange for room & board, & of course it looked like blackmail. I begged the doctor to get me a home-help so Ted could go off freely, but instead he sonorously talked to him of manly responsibilities, the old red flag to the old bull. Now I am having Ted try & get a nanny down from London for a week or two. Then I shall try to get this cottage on our property made livable & try to get a full-time nanny. Then I shall write novels, learn to ride a horse, which I am just doing, and try to do more stuff for the radio & take a day a week in London for plays, movies, art shows & shopping. That’s half a year away, but it keeps me going. And I am a hell of a success with poppies, nasturtiums & sunflowers. I’ve got an absolute octopus of nasturtiums crawling across the court. And bees. I’ve just bottled 12 jars of my own honey: Next year it should be a hundred. Then maybe I’ll go into business.
I wish to hell I could have a few talks with you. Nobody else is any good to me, I’m sick of preamble. That’s why I thought if I paid for a couple of letters I might start going ahead instead of in circles. But please just say it won’t work or you’ve a full schedule or something. I would be glad of that definiteness.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Judith Jones
Wednesday 5 September 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), University of Texas at Austin |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
September 5, 1962
Mrs. Judith B. Jones
ALFRED A. KNOPF
501 Madison Avenue
New York 22, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Mrs. Jones,
Thank you for your letter* and all the contents. I am glad that you sent on the Marianne Moore letter,* I do like to see everything. I am sorry Miss Moore eschews the dark side of life to the extent that she feels neither good nor enjoyable poetry can be made out of it. She also, as I know, eschews the sexual side of life, and made my husband take out every poem in his first book with a sexual reference before she would put her name to endorse it. But she is a scrupulous letter writer, so bless her for that! I’d love to have a list of the poets you sent my book to, just to know who has seen it. A very full and favorable review appeared in the Sewanee Review this spring,* some time about then, but as it was of the English edition I suppose you wouldn’t have seen it.
The novel is as good as done. Heinemann will be publishing it over here. I’ll get on to them to send you a copy in a few weeks when it’s ready. I hope a few things in it will make you laugh.
Thanks very much for your kind concern.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
Wednesday 5 September 1962* |
ALS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Wednesday
Dear Marvin & Kathy,
Thank you for the lovely card. It must be heaven there.* Since you left I have had terrible influenza, fevers of over 103° & killing chills & have been able to swallow nothing but water, so am very weak, hence the shortness of this, I can hardly write. I am forwarding 2 letters separately.
Have you any idea where Frieda’s dolly pram is? Did she leave it at the playground? We can’t find it any where & she is desolate.
Good news, we have got a nanny to come while we are in Ireland so you need not worry about breaking your holiday. We would have had no rest worrying about your health & didn’t want to spoil your good time.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Elizabeth Sigmund
Saturday 8 September 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Saturday: Sept. 8
Dear Elizabeth,
Forgive me for not writing sooner. Since I saw you last,* I have had a ghastly week of influenza, nonstop fevers of over 103° alternating with killing chills and unable to swallow anything but water. I have never really been ill before, the time I had double pneumonia was nothing to this, and now I have lost a great deal of weight and am so stupidly weak I can do nothing. I have been wanting and wanting to write a note, but just fall back in bed after the smallest task. Now I am still very wobbly, but better.
After eating us out of house and home for over two weeks, and losing Frieda’s brand new doll’s pram our “guests”, who were to help with the children, left for a holiday in Cornwall. Luckily we were able to get an expensive but reliable nanny from an agency in London in the nick of time, so are planning to leave for a week in Ireland next Tuesday. It is now a health trip for me. I see now that no matter how awful anything is, if you have health, you are still blessed.
When I come back I shall bring over a load of potatoes and onions. I long to see you. Frieda talks so often of “Baby James” and has begged me to get her a “lil tiny piano” like the one she saw at your house.
Please send on my copy of David’s book.* I’m dying to read it, it looks just the thing to cheer me up, all about murder.
Love to all,
Sylvia
TO Richard Murphy
Saturday 8 September 1962 |
ALS, University of Tulsa |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
September 8
Dear Richard,
Thank you so much for your good letter. We have got a nanny for the babies so can leave here with easy heart. We plan to take the train to Holyhead Tuesday night, cross to Dublin by night, say hello to Jack Sweeney & come by rail to Galway Wednesday eveningish.* Shall call as soon as we arrive. We would love to stay in your cottage.* I don’t know when I have looked so forward to anything.
Warmest good wishes,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Fainlight
Saturday 8 September 1962 |
TLS, Ruth Fainlight |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Saturday: September 8
Dearest Ruth,
I have been wanting so long to write you and now I have your new good letter. The reason I haven’t written is because I’ve had a ghastly summer ending in a bout of influenza which just about did for me---I never had it before, nonstop fevers of over 103° alternating with killing chills and too weak to drink anything but water. The doctor told me something I didn’t know which is that there is nothing modern medicine can do to relieve or combat flu, but he is a bastard & maybe that is not true. Anyhow, I have lost a great deal of weight & am worried about my bloody lungs, as I had double pneumonia not too long ago. And I am weak as a dead cod. I wake, thinking, now I will jump up, feed Nicholas, bath & change him, feed Frieda, do a laundry, figure the income tax and whee, one bout of coughs and I am back on the pillow the color of a French bean with the sweats, the shakes, crap to it all. I hate sickness & being sick & this has been a great blow to me.
One good thing is that I think Ted will set us up for 3 months in Spain this winter, way down south around where Ben is.* For December, January & February presumably. He still has officially to take the Maugham grant, so this is an excuse to do it, plus the fact that I don’t think I could stand an English winter just yet. Now I beg you to give me any practical hints you can think of to make it easier traveling by car with kids. What route did you take, where stay, did you reserve ahead, etc. etc. Ted never will make a plan till the day ahead, but I would like to know what I can expect. Are there Paddipads* in Spain. Strained babyfoods? Is there a God? Where is Franco?* You are such a practical one, Ruth, and Alan too. Maybe you can tell me some things to expect & plan for.
Of course it is much easier with a nursing baby. Nicholas has, since I’ve been ill, been on bottles, although I hope to have weaned him to a cup by the time we leave. I suppose we should have a Primus* to boil milk & water. And make Farex* & heat tins. Maybe I can train him to crap out the window. He is gorgeous now. Big dark eyes, hair that looks as if it wants to curl & get light, and bouncey, creepy, fascinated by grass, which he eats madly if he can lay a finger on it. I adore him. Ted never touches him, nor has since he was born. Very curious. I would love to get Nick & David together now, like we did that time on the bed. They could probably Greek wrestle. Maybe we can meet, if we come to Spain in December. I hope to get a babyminder there. It is almost impossible here. I am going to fix the cottage so it is livable & try next spring to hire a nanny. Have a 2nd novel I’m dying to write and no time. Which I suppose is better than lots of time & no novel. I miss you so much, all 3. It was such fun having you here. Please say we can come visit,* or you come, when we are in Spain. And please write. I enclose a battered copy of your Elm poem, Ruth.
Love to all,
Sylvia
Sylvia Plath
Court Green
North Tawton, Devon.
Elm
(for Ruth Fainlight)
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it!
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is the rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me!
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?---
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
TO Kathy Kane
Friday 21 September 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Friday, September 21
Dear Kathy,
It was so cheering to have your letter when I came back. Actually the nanny had forwarded it to Ireland, so I had to wait till today for it to be forwarded back, and when I asked who the letter she had forwarded was from, in case it was urgent, she said it was from somebody in London. So you see you are safe, she & everybody thinks you are there.
I found the little pram, many thanks. The nanny* was wonderful, the children were thriving when I came home & everything spick and span. I am trying to get her back for another week now, as I have to go to London to see a solicitor.* I will wait till I see you to say anything, but the end has come. It is like amputating a gangrenous limb---horrible, but one feels it is the only thing to do to survive.*
I am very interested in the poetry tour. Would there be room for me & the babies to pay you a short visit? There is no question of Ted coming. Do you have a phone I could call you at? Or could you write & say. Perhaps Monday October 1st? I should have the business done by then I hope. Do write anyway.
Love to both,
Sylvia
TO Richard Murphy
Friday 21 September 1962 |
TLS, University of Tulsa |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
September 21
Dear Richard,
I am enclosing my unused ticket from Galway to Dublin, good for three months, in hopes that you or Seamus or Owen* may find it of use. I cannot thank you enough for your hospitality & the wonderful wonderful food of Mrs. Coyne.* The boats & the sea were like a great cure for me.
May I say two things? My health depends on leaving England & going to Ireland, & the health of the children. I am very reluctant to think that the help you gave with one hand you would want to take away with the other. I am in great need of a woman like Kitty Marriott* & if there is one thing my 30th year has brought it is understanding of what I am, and a sense of strength and independence to face what I have to. It may be difficult to believe, but I have not and never will have a desire to see or speak to you or anyone else. I have wintered in a lighthouse & that sort of life is balm to my soul. I do not expect you to understand this, or anything else, how could you, you know nothing of me. I do not want to think you were hypocritical when showing me the cottages, but it is difficult to think otherwise. Please let me think better of you than this.
Secondly, I was appalled to realize you did not understand we were joking when talking about my writing New Yorker poems about Connemara. I would not do that even if I were able, and as you know I have not written a poem for over a year & cannot write poems anyway when I am writing prose. So there is no question of your literary territory being invaded. My novel is set in Devon, and it is this I hope to finish at Glasthule.
I feel very sorry to have to retract my invitation to visit us at Court Green as it would have given me great pleasure to have you see it---I think you have a feeling for land, and this is very beautiful land & I imagine I feel about it the way you do about your hookers---proud of it, and of what I have made of it and hope to make of it, and eager to feel it is appreciated, not hated. But Ted will not be here, as I had thought when I asked you, and when he is not here I can see no-one. My town is as small & watchful as yours & a little cripple hunchback with a high black boot lives at the bottom of my lane & all day & all night watches who comes & goes. This is really very funny. There is nothing for the poor woman to see. So I am very sensible of your concerns. I shall try to bring a nanny with me in December & then maybe get someone to live in & help with the children, & you shall see neither hide nor hair of anybody. Other people only get in the way of my babies & my work & I am as dedicated to both as a nurse-nun. Please have the kindness, the largeness, to say you will not wish me ill nor keep me from what I clearly and calmly see as the one fate open. I would like to think your understanding could vault the barrier it was stuck at when I left.
Sincerely,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Saturday 22 September 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
September 22, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
Your letter* came today, at a most needed moment, and I feel the way I used to after our talks---cleared, altered and renewed. I am really asking your help as a woman, the wisest woman emotionally and intellectually, that I know. You are not my mother, but you have been the midwife to my spirit. There are breaking points and growing points; I had my last great bout ten years ago when I met you, and now that I am in the middle of another, in soul-labor and soul-pain as it were, I turn to you again, because you are the one person I know who will not advise me to numb or degrade or give up or diminish myself. If I could write you once a week for the next few weeks, & get a short answer, practical, a paragraph---your paragraphs are worth a ton of TNT---it would be the greatest and best thing in my life just now. My life at present is made up of amiable bank managers accountants, insurance salesmen, solicitors and the local doctor. The midwife is sensible and kind but totally without imagination or much intelligence. I value my life, what it can be in all its yet unworked veins of creativity and variety, so much that I would spend my savings in America to come over by jet on the chance of having an hour a day for a week talking to you, but if you were able to manage a paragraph or so, I think this would not be necessary. I want to be able to initiate my new life, my separate life, as soon as possible, and for this a live-in nanny is essential, and I had probably better save what I’ve got left for this. We lived off my $2,000 nanny-grant-to-write-a-novel all this year: as soon as the last payment stopped, Ted “got courage” and left me. So, no 2nd novel, yet, no nanny, no money. And no Ted.
The end---the end for me at least---just blew up this week. I have been very stupid, a bloody fool, but it only comes from my thinking Ted could grow, and grow up, not down, and my wanting to give us a new and better and wider start. I was prepared for almost anything---his having the odd affair, traveling, drinking (I mean getting drunk)---if we could be straight, good friends, share all the intellectual life that has been meat and drink to me, for he is a genius, a great man, a great writer. I was ready for this, to settle for something much different and freer than what I had thought marriage was, or what I wanted it to be. I changed. I have a rich inner life myself, much I want to learn & do, and this blessed gift made me feel capable of quite another life than the life I had felt at heart I really wanted. Even our professional marriage---the utterly creative and healthy crictical exchange of ideas and publication projects and completed work---meant enough to me to try to save it. But Ted, his attitudes and actions, have made even this impossible, and I am appalled. I am bloody, raw, nerves hanging out all over the place, because I have had six stormy but wonderful years, bringing both of us, from nothing, books, fame, money, lovely babies, wonderful loving, but I see now that the man I loved as father and husband is just dead. (Father means father to the children, but it is a slip, too; he fathered me through barren places & setbacks). I realize, stunned, that I do not like him. Although he is handsome, I can hardly look at him, I see such ugliness---I suppose it is not there for other people, he is a charmer, it is there in our relationship.
After the first blowup, when mother was here---and I think Ted secretly meant her to be here; when he wants to torment me, knowing my horror and fear of her life & the role she lived as a woman, he tells me I am going to be just like her---Ted came home and said it didn’t work, the affair was kaput. I believed this. He said he would be straight, now that I wouldn’t be tearful or try to stop him from anything---he only wanted to go up to London on drinking bouts with a few friends. He went up half the week every week. The minute he came home he would lay into me with fury---I looked tired, tense, cross, couldn’t he even have a drink, what sort of a wife had he married etc. I was dumbfounded---his fury seemed all out of proportion with what he said he’d been doing, & I was quite happy, if understandably apprehensive, getting on at home. Then I found out by accident that this little story & that about what he’d been doing weren’t true. Mrs. Prouty treated us to a night & a day at the fanciest hotel in London & I never had such good loving, felt it was the consecration of our new life. He went to have a bath & I next saw him coming in fully dressed with a funny pleased smile. He had called some friends to have a drink. Fine, said I, I’d love a drink. No, I was to go home on the next train. He didn’t come back for a couple of days and even then I thought he was doing what he said, I was trying so hard to believe he knew what straightness and reality meant to me. Now, of course, I see this saying the affair was over was just an elaborate hoax, & his furies equal to what he was really doing.
I had the flu, as I said, was terribly weakened by this & lost of a lot of weight suddenly. We had an invitation to go to Ireland to a poet’s house in the wilds of Connemara (I’d just given him a £75 poetry prize, so this was gratitude) & sail on the old Galway hookers he’d salvaged & ran in summer as fancy tourist fishing yachts. I got a flossy nanny for the babies. All I wanted was my health back---I had been on a liquid diet for weeks. Well it was wonderful in this way---an Irish woman cooked, got me to eat 2 eggs & half a loaf of her brown bread & her cows’ milk & hand churned butter for breakfast, the sea gave me my appetite back, and I love fishing. Ted lasted four days. He left while I was in bed one morning saying he was going grouse shooting with a friend.* I haven’t seen him since. He left me with all the baggage to carry back, and I got a telegram when I got home, addressed from London, to keep the nanny, he might be back in a week or two. I had let the nanny go by the time I got the telegram & made him dinner, & she had another job when I called her. Then I had all the fun of reading the real meaning into what I found so emotionally upsetting week after week after week. Ted is very faithful. He stopped sleeping with me. He kept groaning this other woman’s name in the night. I see now it is she he was being faithful to, but I was in agony, not know what was wrong. He did tell me that when we were courting the women with whom he boarded crawled over him all night but he refused them: I thought this was only a historical statement, but now I see this is how he is & why he has stopped sleeping with me. And the one or two times he did turn to me it was degrading, like going to the toilet, he made so sure I felt nothing, and was tossed aside after like a piece of dog sausage. Well I am neither my mother nor a masochist; I would sooner be a nun than this kind of fouled scratch rug. Ted is so stupid. He honestly is sure I would rather have this than nothing. He doesn’t see how I can get on without him.
I have got someone to take care of the children and am going to London this Tuesday to see a very kind-sounding solicitor recommended to me by my accountant in order to get a legal separation. Ted seems to need to come home every week to make my life miserable, kick me about & assure himself that he has a ghastly limiting wife, just like his friends do, three of whom have left their wives this year. He hates Nicholas. When I had the flu I told him to be sure Nick was strapped in his pram as otherwise he would fall out, was he strapped? Yes, Ted said. Later I heard a terrible scream. The baby had fallen out onto the concrete floor, Ted had never strapped him in, and did not even go to pick him up, the cleaning lady did that. He was unhurt. See, said Ted. He could have had concussion or broken his spine. He has never touched him since he was born, says he is ugly and a usurper. He is a handsome vigorous child. Ted beat me up physically a couple of days before my miscarriage: the baby I lost was due to be born on his birthday. I thought this an aberration, & felt I had given him some cause, I had torn some of his papers in half, so they could be taped together, not lost, in a fury that he made me a couple of hours late to work at one of the several jobs I’ve had to eke out our income when things got tight---he was to mind Frieda. But now I feel the role of father terrifies him. He tells me now it was weakness that made him unable to tell me he did not want children, and that his joyous planning with me of the names of our next two was out of cowardice as well. Well bloody hell, I’ve got twenty years to take the responsibility of this cowardice. I love the children, but they do make my plans for a life on my own quite difficult, now they are so small & need such tending. He has never bought them clothes, my mother has sent these, but now I hear she has lost her job, the department is closed, so he’ll just have to pay up.
Money is a great problem. We were doing fine, the house paid up, a car, starting to save a bit---now he is spending over $100 a week of our joint savings on his London life. He has never paid a bill---always misads & louses up the checkbook at the times I’ve asked him to take that over, so I’ll have to make it right---and has no idea of yearly rates, taxes, bills. I have the financial year always pretty well in hand, & know when to say we should work hard. He means well---says all he wants is to live his own life & send us 2/3 of what he earns. But unfortunately the kind of women he chooses do not mean well. I even think someday he might try to take Frieda from me. She flatters his vanity. “Kiss daddy”, he says when he comes home, making no move toward her. That is as far as fatherhood goes; she is very wild & lively and pretty. The woman I guess he’s now living with spent all her time here taking pictures of Frieda & buying her presents. I trust noone now. I dearly love Ted’s mother & father & aunt & cousin & uncle---but God help me when Olwyn his sister takes over. Ted has even told the doctor I thought I had “canine influenza” to “show I was unstable”; this was a joke on my part; our guests were called the Kanes & I got the germ from them. But I am upset about this---I honestly think they might try to make my life such a hell I would turn over Frieda as a sort of hostage to my sanity. I am so bloody sane. I am not disaster-proof after my years with you, but I am proof against all those deadly defences---retreat, freezing, madness, despair---that a fearful soul puts up when refusing to face pain & come through it. I am not mad; just fighting mad.
One good thing about Ireland, I found a fine woman, one of the old horse-and-whiskey-neat set, with a gorgeous cottage & views she would let me for the winter. She has a Connemara pony, her own TT tested cows (which I’d like to learn to milk) & butter churn & could show me all the wild walks & would welcome the children. I got on there so well, I think I will rent Court Green, if I can, for the three worst winter months & go to Ireland, coming back in spring with the daffodils & kinder weather. The children would love this, I would be safe from Ted, & get the first months of separation underway in a fresh setting. I can’t stand the feeling here now of my being left, passive. I need to act. To leave the place myself. When I come back it would be to something else, and I would have had time to fatten and blow myself clear with sea winds & wild walks. This is where my present instinct to salvation leads.
The worst thing is, as you say, psychologically, the fear and danger of being like my mother.* Even while she was here she began it: “Now you see how it is, why I never married again, self-sacrifice is the thing for your two little darlings etc. etc.” till it made me puke. From the outside, our situation is disconcertingly similar---two women “left” by their men with two small children, a boy & a girl & no money. Inside, I feel, it is very different. I want it to be. Mother has suggested I live with her, as she lived with her mother. I never could or would, & right now I never want to see her again. She was always a child while my grandmother was alive---cooked for, fed, her babies minded while she had a job. I hated this. Her notion of self-sacrifice is deadly---the lethal deluge of frustrated love which will lay down its life if it can live through the loved one, on the loved one, like a hideous parasite. Lucky for me, I love my writing, love horse-riding, which I’m learning, love bee-keeping and in general can expand the area of my real interests so that I think my children will have a whole mother who indeed loves them, with vigor and warmth, but has never “laid down her life” for them. Do you think I am getting to the right place here? Psychologically the children & my relation to them as a husband-less woman is my greatest worry. I don’t want Frieda to hate me as I hated my mother, nor Nicholas to live with me or about me as my brother lives about my mother, even though he is just married. I remember asking my mother why, if she discovered so early on she did not love my father, that her marriage was an agony, she did not leave him. She looked blank. Then she said half-heartedly that it was the depression* & she couldnt have gotten a job. Well. No thanks.
It is Ted’s plunge into infantilism that stuns me most. From a steady driver he has added 20 miles to his average speed, suicidal in our narrow lanes, and police summons for violations filter in week by week. He’s hated smoking as a habit, never smoked: now he is a chain smoker; I guess she smokes. I can stand a lot of things---if he were kind or wise or mature I would laugh at these things, but they are part of a syndrome. He has no idea of what he is losing in me; this hurts most of all. He is desperate to freeze me into a doggy sobby stereotype that he can with justice knock about. My sense of myself, my inner dignity and creative heart won’t have it. It is the uncertainty, the transition, the hard choices that tear at me now. I think when I am free of him my own sweet life will come back to me, bare and sad in a lot of places, but my own, and sweet enough. Do write. If only a paragraph. It is my great consolation just now, to speak & be heard, and spoken to.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 23 September 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University* |
Sunday: September 23
Dear mother,
Thank you for your letter. I was appalled to hear your department is closing. Is not the university obliged to fit you in elsewhere? I had thought you said that. What happens to your pension, and what year is your job officially ended. Please tell me all about this as you may imagine I am very concerned.
The children are fine. Nicholas has cut his first tooth and is the most energetic and bouncy child imaginable. He crawls all over the playroom, playing with Friedas blocks, much to her consternation. “Put in pen, put in pram,” she tells me to do with him, and gathers all the toys he seems to like in a little heap out of his reach. We all went to the playground yesterday afternoon & only that little blond boy Stephen* was there, the one I guess who attended Frieda at the birthday party. He showed off gallantly, climbing up the slide backwards & doing tricks on the swings, but unfortunately fell off & cracked his head on the concrete, so I had to rush over & comfort him, he was crying so hard. The nanny I had was wonderful, a whiz. She brought a little dog & Frieda still talks of “Miss Cartwright & the liddle doggie”. I came back unexpectedly a day before I said, and found everything in applepie order, the children fresh-washed & happy in bed---the true test.
Had a nice letter from Dotty. Will write her soon. Just now I am up to my neck in bank managers, insurance brokers, accountants and solicitors. I had a wonderful 4 days in Ireland, treated to oysters & Guinness & brown bread in Dublin by Jack & Maire Sweeney of the Lamont Library at Harvard, then 2 eggs, homemade butter & warm milk from the cows every breakfast in wild Connemara, about 50 miles from Galway. Ted was there, but had no part in my happiness, which was compounded of the sailing, the fishing, the sea and the kind people & wonderful cooking of an Irish woman from whom I bought a beautiful handknit sweater for $10 which would be $50 in America. I also was very lucky in finding a woman after my own heart, one of the sturdy independent horse-and-whisky set, with a beautiful cottage (turf fires---the most comfortable & savory fire imaginable), her own TT-tested cows & butter churn which she will rent to me for December through February, and show me all the sea walks. Spain is out of the question. Ted has spent all our savings to the tune of $100 a week & hasn’t worked for 4 months. I think this Irish woman & I speak the same language---she will live nextdoor in a cottage of hers, she loves children, and I have no desire to be in a country, alone, where I do not even speak the language. I will try to rent Court Green for these months. I would go mad alone here, I want to be where no possessions remind me of the past & by the sea, which is for me the great healer. Ted deserted me again in Ireland, saying he was going grouse-shooting for the day with a friend. I believed him, as he had said he would tell me the truth, however difficult. He left me to come home alone with all the heavy baggage & when I returned I found a telegram from London saying he might be back in a week or two. I realized every week the elaborate tissue of lies he had invented while I thought I was leading a real true life. I go Tuesday to a London solicitor to get a legal separation.
Your telling Winifred I had a nervous breakdown has had disastrous consequences for me. Any ordinary doctor treats a former “mental case” as a 50% exaggerater. So I have had no treatment. Winifred is nice, but utterly without imagination. She so much as said neither she nor Dr. Webb believe I had a 103 temperature because when they came two days later in the early morning it was normal. So I have no medication.* While I had the fever I begged Ted to strap Nicholas in his pram as he would fall out otherwise. I asked him if he had done this. He said yes. Then I heard a terrible scream. I rushed downstairs almost fainting to find the baby on the concrete floor. Ted did not even go to pick him up, Nancy did. Luckily he was not hurt. Dr. Webb laughed & said I was exaggerating, babies had soft bones. If Nick had a concussion or an injured spine Ted would be to blame. He tells me now he never had the courage to say he did not want children. He does like Frieda, she flatters his vanity, & as this woman he is living with has had so many abortions she can’t have children, I think he would try to get Frieda from me. He has been trying to convince Dr. Webb I am “unstable” by such devices as saying I thought I had “canine influenza”, a joke on my part as the people we had with us were the Kanes & gave me the bug. So you see how your blabbing has helped me.* You might mention to Mrs. Prouty that Ted has deserted us & I am getting a legal separation. I shall come back here in the spring. I do not want you to waste your money coming here, and I shall never come to America again. I imagine that legally I shall only just obtain enough money to live on while Ted squanders the rest on himself. I must at all costs make over the cottage & get a live-in nanny next spring so I can start trying to write & get my independence again. Ted lived off my novel grant (supposedly for a nanny) & when it was gone “got courage” to desert us.
Love to Warren & Maggie
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 24 September 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Monday: September 24
Dear mother,
I feel I owe you a happier letter than my last ones. Now that I have come to my decision to get a legal separation, and have an appointment with an immensely kind-sounding lawyer in London tomorrow (recommended to me by my equally kind accountant) I begin to see that life is not over for me. It is the uncertainty, week after week, that has been such a torture. And of course the desire to hang on to the last, to see if something, anything could be salvaged. I am just as glad the final blows have been delivered. Ted’s lying to me about Nick & having him strapped in the pram & letting him fall on the concrete, deserting me in Ireland & other foul stuff I won’t go into, and spending, I now find on checking our bank statements, checks he never entered in the book in addition to the large sums listed,* plus his insistence on coming home about once a week & making life utter hell & destroying my work, plus living off my novel grant till it was too late for me to do the cottage over & get a nanny with it, have just finished everything. He is not only infantile, but dangerously destructive, and I feel both the children & I need protection from him, for now & forever. The woman I gather he is with---I have no notion of where in London he is or when he will come home---has done charming things like attacking her first husband with a knife and slashing up the inside of his car & so on, and I think Ted’s desire to “show the doctor I was unstable” by telling him I thought I had canine influenza (!) is prompted by her---they would one day I think like to get Frieda. Well, I shall get the law on my side.
It is a beautiful day here---clear and blue. I got this nanny back for today & tomorrow, she is a whiz, and I see what a heaven my life could be if I had a good live-in nanny. I am eating my first warm meal since I’ve come back---having an impersonal person in the house is a great help. I went up to Winifred’s* for 3 hours the night I realized Ted wasn’t coming back, and she was a great help. She more or less confirmed my decision. And since I have made it, miraculously my own life, my wholeness, has been seeping back. I will try to rent Court Green for the winter & go to Ireland---this is a dream of mine---to purge myself of this awful experience by the wild beauty I found there, & the children would thrive. Quite practically, I have no money to go farther. I have put all my earnings this summer in a separate account, the checking account is at zero, and there is £300 I have taken from our joint savings just about the last of them! as Ted said at one point I could, as some recompense for my lost nanny-grant, to build over the cottage. This is a must. Also getting TV for a nanny. I can’t have one live in this house---or I could have no guests, & I do want to entertain what friends and relatives I have as often as I can. I dream of Warren & Maggie! I would love to go on a skiing holiday in the Tyrol with them someday. I just read about it in the paper.* And then if I do a novel or 2 I might apply for a Guggenheim to go to Rome---with nanny & children. Right now I have no money---but if I get the cottage done this winter while I’m away, I might sink all my savings in a nanny for a year. My writing should be able to get her the next year, and so on. If I hit it lucky, I might even be able to take a London flat & send the children to the fine free schools there & enjoy the London people (I would starve intellectually here), renting Court Green for the winter, & come down on holidays & in the spring, for the long summer holiday. I feel when the children are school-age I want to be able to afford this. Some lucky break---like writing a couple of New Yorker stories in Ireland, or a play for the BBC (I’ve got lots of fan mail* for the half hour interview I did on why I stayed in England---many advising me about special brands of corn to grow!)---could make this life a reality. But first the cottage, then the nanny. I’ll have to do this out of my own small pocket, as I imagine Ted will only have to pay for the children. It is incredible what resources & hope I find now I see I have got to get Ted legally out of my life. I have to pay the price for his “cowardice” in not telling me he didn’t want children etc. Oddly, though I loved him, what I saw he could be, I don’t like him now at all. I despise wantonness & destructiveness. He has chosen to be like this, and he has no notion of what he is losing in me & the children. Well he is a bloody fool. Took Frieda to the playground again today. She is talking wonderfully, says names. I’m getting her two kittens from Mrs. Macnamara next week & trying to go somewhere, on some visit, every afternoon with them, to keep very busy.
Lots of love to you, Warren & Maggie,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 26 September 1962 |
TLS with envelope, Indiana University |
Court Green
Wednesday, Sept. 26
Dear mother,
I went up to London to the solicitor yesterday. A very harrowing but necessary experience. No knowing where Ted is, except in London, I got a numb utterly dumb letter from him with no address. I think he is possessed. The solicitor said he was worthless & to get clear. They are trying to trace him. I hope he will have sense enough to settle out of court & agree to an allowance, but I think whoever it is is driving him to spend everything may well prevent this. He is utterly gutless. Lies, lies, lies.
The laws, of course, are awful---a wife is allowed 1/3 of her husband’s income, & if he doesn’t pay up, the suing is long & costly, if a wife earns anything, her income is included in his & she ends up paying for everything. The humiliation of being penniless & begging money from deaf ears is too much. I shall just have to invest everything with courage in the cottage & the nanny for a year, a nanny, & write like mad. Try to get clear. I’m sure the American laws aren’t like this. I hope Ted will have the decency to give us a fixed allowance & settle out of court. Together we earned about $7,000 this year, a fine salary, I earning one third. Now it is all gone. I am furious. I threw everything of mine into our life without question, all my earnings, & now he is well-off, with great potential earning power, I shall be penalized for earning, or if I don’t earn, have to beg. Well I choose the former. I am enclosing an authorization for you to draw $500 from our Boston account. Put it in your bank. Then write me a check for that amount so I can say it is a gift. I’m sick of trying to explain our savings on income tax. The solicitor told me to draw out everything I could from our joint accounts to pay bills. Ted has left me no alternative. He owes me my novel grant back. He can pay me what my nanny got---£10 a week plus board and room.
I have written Edith I am getting a legal separation & will take it to court if necessary, although I have less to gain, if he proves obstinate. He is a vampire on my life, killing and destroying all. We had all the world on tap, were even well off, now this insanity on his part will cost us everything.
Thank God the solicitor said I could take the children to Ireland. I am hoping to let this place, but must go even if I can’t. I despise Ted & the kind of creature he has made himself, & let him be made into. He had it in him to be the finest & kindest & best father & husband alive, & now thinks all feeling is sentimental & womanish.
Do mention if you can to Mrs. Prouty the situation. It is difficult, I feel, & not my place, for I want nothing from her, but I would like her to know the truth, that I am deserted, he wants no children, nor any marriage bonds & has left me incommunicado with a pile of police & library fines to pay, & a mountain of bills. I am sorry to be so worrying at this time when your own concerns are so pressing, but I must get control of my life, the little I have left.
With love,
Sivvy
<on verso of envelope>
PS: The playroom rug finally came. It i <damaged> Makes all the difference between a mausol<eum and a> warm cosy sittingroom. Nick’s eyes are a beautiful clear brown. He sits up all by himself. I am having tea in the playroom now with the children & Frieda is industriously moving all her toys out of Nick’s reach. She is great company now---spanks me & says “Naughty mummy”. Winifred has found me a woman for 3 mornings a week,* 3 hours each, 9 hours in all. Better than nothing. Came today & said she’d come tomorrow. Very pretty & dear to the children. The nanny a marvel, 30 but looks 18. But so used to royalty!---suggested she come to Ireland with us, for the trip. If she can’t come I’ll get another.
Love,
s.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 29 September 1962 |
TL (incomplete), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
September 29, 1962
Dearest mother,
It is going on 6:30 in the morning & I am warm in my study, Pifco going, with my first cup of morning coffee. Winifred, for all her lack of imagination, is full of good sense & I love her for it. She is very busy, so after my on 3 hour evening session with her when deciding what to do, I only will see her briefly, for social occasions & practical questions. It was she who suggested that when I wake up early & am unable to sleep I come in and work on my novel before the babies get up & go to bed shortly after they do. Well, of course just now my emotions are such that “working on my novel” is so difficult as to be almost impossible, but I actually did do 3 pages yesterday, & hope to work into it, first numbly, then with feeling. It is the evenings here, after the children are in bed, that are the worst, so I might as well get rid of them by going to bed. I feel pretty good in the morning, & my days are, thank goodness busy. I find that by eating my meals with Frieda in the kitchen it is easier to eat something, & every day I religiously make tea in the nursery at 4, try to invite someone or take them to see some one, so each day I have a time with other people who know nothing, or at least who are darling, like the Comptons.
I do have to take sleeping pills, but they are, just now, a necessary evil, and enable me to sleep deeply & then do some writing & feel energetic during the day if I drink lots of coffee right on waking, so I shall go on taking them as long as I have to.
Ted has, quite simply, deserted us. I have not seen him for almost two weeks, since Ireland, and he has given me no London address. It is difficult to manage the telegrams, the police summonses for his traffic offenses & refusals to answer them & the questions of Nancy, the bank manager & all, but I think most, or some of them realise what has happened & I just hold my head high. It is horribly humiliating to be deserted, especially in such a foul way, with no income, nothing, but now I have faced it I feel much better. I am not hiding it from myself. I have written about this to Edith. I earnestly love her & the relatives up there & feel for them like a 2nd family. I only hope they will let me visit them with the children when this has blown over. Ted is just not going to deprive me of them, and I think they honestly love the babies very much. Edith is dear & sweet & this must upset her terribly.
The solicitor says I am within my legal rights & certainly to draw all money out of our joint accounts & put them in accounts of my own since my husband has deserted me & left me with nothing else to pay for food & bills. So do send me that $500 “gift” and another $500 at Christmas, if I need it. I have to make an outlay for the cottage this winter, & get a nanny in spring. Having the nanny here from the agency made me realize what heaven it would be. & I don’t break down with someone else around,
<The rest of the letter is not present.
In Letters Home, the letter ends here with a closing ‘Love, Sivvy’.>
TO Kathy Kane
Saturday 29 September 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
Saturday: Sept. 29
Dearest Kathy,
Your letter was so sweet & cheering. I have been just about stunned & distracted. Quite simply, Ted has deserted us---I don’t mean gone on holiday, I mean just deserted. He left me in Ireland and I haven’t seen him since---two weeks now, and have just discovered that everything he told me about his doings in London was elaborate lies & he had been drawing out our small savings without listing them in the checkbook at the rate of £50 a week & then looking blank and saying he had spent it on a few cigarettes. I can’t tell you the terrible sadistic footnotes, they are too involved and elaborate and poetic. Of course it is this other woman, but it is also all his old drinking friends & new friends. Just now I do not see how we are going on, because of the money.
I went up to see a London solicitor on Tuesday & he is trying to trace Ted, who has left no address, to see if he will settle on a yearly sum out of court. He is berserk. He used up all my novel grant, then got courage to say he was through the marriage & never had courage to tell me he didn’t want children. I struggled all the lean years, now he is earning well, bang. Frieda lies on the floor all day & sucks her thumb & looks miserable.
I would have loved staying in London, but for Ted’s saying he hated it---there I could have friends, a job, babyminders. I am going potty with noone to talk to. I am going to try to rent the house in Ireland, where I found my health, if not my happiness, and try to heal by the wild sea there. It is very difficult to try to make a start of any sort with no job, no money & two infants. I don’t know whether I said Ted almost killed Nicholas while I had flu---I kept asking if he had him strapped in to the pram & he lied & said yes, then I heard a terrible scream & came down. He had not strapped him in, & the baby had fallen onto the concrete. Ted didn’t even bother to pick him up. He could have broken his head or hurt his little spine. Every day I try to go to tea with someone. The evenings are hell. I can’t sleep without pills. Well, if I can just live through this fall, & try to get my novel done somehow, then go to Ireland for the worst three months & come back with the daffodils, maybe the spring & summer will bring new life & new plans.
Was there any reply about the readings, Marvin? Even as late as next year I’d love to do it---maybe Kathy could mind the babes the afternoons we’re off---I could drive us. I just need something to think about. I would love to come down this next Friday* for the weekend but will wait to see what my solicitor says in the mail this next week---I’ve got to get Ted cleared up & some money in first. How do you get down by car? O, I’ll find out. I love you both. Do write, even if just a note. Frieda keeps saying “See Kathy & Marwin soon.”
Lots of love,
Sylvia
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Saturday 29 September 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
September 29, 1962
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
Thank you for your dear, dear letter. I am so glad you enjoyed your dinner & visit here---it meant the world for me to have you, for reasons I was unable to say at the time. I remembered the lovely dinners you used to have at your place and tried to have clear soup & roast as you had, hoping it would remind you of home. I so much needed someone else to see all the beauty of the place, and what it had been made and could be.
Nicholas loves his little soft man toy with the lovely sweater & pants, and Frieda adores her little “tiny dollies”. I am sitting now at tea in the playroom where we had lunch, watching the grey skies of autumn. I was out this morning trying to harvest some of our enormous crop of apples.
I do have some sad news. I did not want to tell you while you were here, and the worst had not yet come, but it is so on my mind I thought I would let you know, rather than pretend. Ted has deserted us. He lived all year off my novel grant, which was to have bought me a full-time nanny, and then he “got courage” to tell me he wanted no more of marriage, and had not had the courage to tell me he never wanted children. Of course there is another woman, who has had so many abortions she can’t have children & is beautiful and barren and hates all I have created here. Ted left me in Ireland and I have not seen him since nor do I know his address. I found he had drawn out all our savings, too, so I am having to take legal proceedings. I saw a good lawyer in London this week who is trying to trace Ted. I hope he will settle a yearly allowance on us out of court, but he has been so cruel & hurtful to me and the babies that I think I may have to go to court to get an allowance for them. He says all the kindness and sweetness I loved & married him for was mere sentimentality & he is through with living for anything but himself. I feel I am mourning a dead man, the most wonderful person I knew, and it is some stranger who has taken his name.
I suppose suffering is the source of understanding, and perhaps one day I shall be a better novelist because of this. It is the children I find hardest to face---I thought I was giving them the best father in the world. I write at my novel now from about 5 a.m. when my sleeping pill wears off, till they wake up, and hope to finish it by mid-winter. It is funny, I think. At least I hope so.
I write you, too, because I know you have had great sorrows in your life, and I have often thought that if I could be as intuitive and wise as you are when I am your age that I would be very proud. You listen to everything, and feel into people---all that time we spoke of unfaithful men that evening at the Connaught for instance it was as if you intuitively grasped what our situation was. That was the happiest night of my life for months, and I guess I will remember it as the last happy night with Ted, now happiness, the word, has ceased to have meaning for me.
I will stay in England, because I love it here. This winter I hope to rent the house for 3 months & go to a cottage I found in Ireland with the babies where I could take long walks by the wild sea, milk cows, churn butter & live by savory turf fires---I adored Ireland, it gave me back my health after the flu, if not my happiness. Then in spring I shall return here & try to write my way back to a flat in London in the fall & winter, so the children can go to good free schools, saving this place for the holidays & the summer. You can imagine what memories every handmade curtain and hand-painted table have for me now! The hard thing is realising that Ted has gone for good. I loved the man I have lived with 6 happy years with all my heart, but there is nothing of this left, there is only a cruel & indifferent stranger. Luckily Dr. Beuscher & my stay at McLean’s gave me the strength to face pain & difficulty. It will take time to mend, & more time to begin to feel there is any other life possible for me, but I am resolute and shall work hard. I am so glad you have seen the dream I have made---as far as it got. Do write me. I live for letters & value you as a kind of second, literary mother.
With much love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Saturday 29 September 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College |
Saturday night: Sept. 29
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I am sorry to write so much, but it is my one hope, I think I am dying. I am just desperate. Ted has deserted me, I have not seen him for 2 weeks, he is living in London without address. Tonight, utterly mad with this solitude, rain and wind hammering my hundred windows, I climbed to his study out of sheer homesickness to read his writing, lacking letters, and found them---sheafs of passionate love poems to this woman, this one woman to whom he has been growing more & more faithful, describing their orgasms, her ivory body, her smell, her beauty, saying in a world of beauties he married a hag, talking about “now I have hacked the octopus off my ring finger.” Many are fine poems.* Absolute impassioned love poems---and I am just dying. I could stand tarts. She is so beautiful, and I feel so haggish & my hair a mess & my nose huge & my brain brainwashed & God knows how I shall keep together. He has spent all the money, left me with nothing. I have almost the equal of my novel grant in our small savings, and the bit I’ve earned since then---nothing else. The solicitor has told me to draw out the money from our savings (joint) since he’s left me with nothing. I am just frantic.
If I had someone living with me, I would not break down & talk to myself, cry, or just stare for hours. But I have no-one---no friends, no relatives. I feel like begging my well-offish aunt to come---just till I rent the house for the winter, if I do, and go to Ireland. I hope the Ireland idea is a good one---it is all I can think of, I just can’t cope with a foreign language & can’t drive the babes to Spain all myself. I shall try to hire a nanny to make the Ireland trip. And there is no money, just my savings, but I feel I’ve got to invest in some move. I’ve got to keep the house, which is in both our names, for later, for when I’m human. It is our one security & such a fine place, it would fetch nothing, no-one but us would have liked it. By sleeping pills I sleep a few hours. I force an egg down with Frieda. I have a woman help 3 mornings a week & try as many days as I can to flog myself out to tea with my few neighbors & the babies. Then the terrible evenings settle in. The shock of this has almost killed my heart. I still love Ted, the old Ted, with everything in me & the knowledge that I am ugly and hateful to him now kills me. He has kept this affair a rabid secret, although seeing my intuitions. Once I asked if he wanted a divorce and he said no, just a separation, he might never see me for 50 years but might write once a week. I am drowning, just gasping for air. I have written Mrs. Prouty whom we entertained here about it, but the laws here horrify me---a woman is only allowed 1/3 her husband’s income, if I have the house it would be next to nothing, then if he doesn’t pay it is a long & costly suit to get it. If I earn anything I am penalized by having it counted as part of his income & in effect pay my own way! I think Ted will not now settle out of court, as I’d hope---for even to run the place (cheaper than living in a one-room flat in London) & eat, nothing for me, would cost £800---he made twice that this year. And will make more & more & I have nothing.
What kills me is that I would like so much to be friends with him, now I see all else is impossible. I mean my God my life with him has been a daily creation, new ideas, new thoughts, our mutual stimulation. Now he is active & passionately in love out in the world & I am stuck with two infants & not a soul, mother has lost her job, I have no-one. The part about keeping my personal one-ness a real help.* I must. But my god I can’t see to thinking straight. I’d ideally like to earn my way to a flat in London in fall, winter & spring & rent this place, then come here in summer. How can I tell the babies their father has left them. How do you put it? Death is so simple. Where shall I say daddy is? I had my life set as I wished---beautifully and happily domestic, with lots of intellectual stimulus & my part-time writing. I have no desire to teach, be a secretary---and god knows how I can write. I feel Ted hates us. Wants to kill us to be free to spend all his money on her, and English laws are so mean, I have no hope of even subsistence if I go to court. And small hope of earning my way out of it as I would like. I feel so trapped. Every view is blocked by a huge vision of their bodies entwined in passion across it, him writing immortal poems to her. And all the people of our circle are with them, for them. I have no friends left except maybe the Alan Sillitoes who are in Morocco for the year. How and where, O God do I begin? I can’t face the notion that he may want me to divorce him to marry her. I keep your letters like the Bible. How should I marshal my small money? For a nanny for a year, O God, for what. And how to stop my agony for his loved body and the thousand assaults each day of small things, memories from each cup, where we bought it, how he still loved me then, then when it was not too late. Frieda just lies wrapped in a blanket all day sucking her thumb. What can I do? I’m getting some kittens. I love you & need you.
Sylvia
PS:* Bless you for your advice about a divorce which arrived this morning – just in time as Ted arrives too, for the last time.* There is a dignity & rightness to it. I was clinging to dead associations. I do not want people to think I am a dog-in-the-manger – “poor man, she won’t let him marry.” I do know he’s a lousy husband & father – to me at least. And I may, at 50, find a better. I am writing from 5-8 a.m. daily.* An immense tonic. Before the babies wake.
P.S. Much better. The divorce like a clean knife. I am ripe for it now. Thank you, thank you.
TO Richard Murphy
Sunday 7 October 1962 |
TLS, University of Tulsa |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Sunday: October 7
Dear Richard,
The review* was lovely, it was fine to see it there in the middle of everything, and so spacious. Only Ted says they were jackdaws.* As far as I’m concerned every black bird is a rook. It was like a brilliant enamel, your account of the place, & made me homesick for it, the first pure clear place I have been for some time.
Please let me know you got my note & if the ticket was any use. I shall be coming to Moyard with Ted’s aunt as a companion & hope to get an Irish girl to live in & accompany me back, if I have the luck of the Irish. I shall try for a good Catholic, and maybe she can convert me, only I suppose I am damned already. Do they never forgive divorcées? I am getting a divorce, and you are right, it is freeing. I am writing for the first time in years,* a real self, long smothered. I get up at 4 a.m. when I wake, & it is black, & write till the babes wake. It is like writing in a train tunnel, or God’s intestine. Please make me happy & say you do not grudge me Moyard. I shall be well & eternally chaperoned & only the cows shall see me. It would hurt me terribly to think of you with clenched teeth in Cleggan.
And tell me about Cheltenham.
Regards,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 9 October 1962 |
TLS with envelope, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
October 9, 1962
Dear mother,
I don’t know where to begin. I just can’t take the $50. I don’t need it. I want to be sure you drew the $500 from my savings. For God’s sake, give me the feeling you are tamping down, taking care of yourself. Just sold a long New Yorker poem.* I’ll get by. Ted has agreed to give us £1,000 a year maintenance. This will just take care of rates, heat, light, food, with £200 for the children’s clothing & upkeep expenses. I want nothing for me. I’ll pay the upkeep & gas & taxes on the car, Ted’s life insurance, which is made out to me, & will be a kind of pension, if he doesn’t die, and for nannies. Right now I get up a couple of hours before the babies & write. I’ve got to. I want no loans, no mercies. If Mrs. Prouty feels like any concrete help, fine. She can afford it, you can’t.
What I am afraid of is that when Ted’s working class family & sister get hold of him they will tell him £1,000 is enough for me to go to Paris on. I have made out accounts, & it is a scrape. They take no account of the kid’s growing up, of us being three growing adults. I pray he will sign the maintenance before they get him to Jew us. The courts would give me nothing. They are bastards in England.
The reaction of Ted’s friends & relatives will be---she’s got everything, house, car, pay her nothing! The Yorkshire-Jew miserliness will try to screw me yet. I’m sitting here till the end of November when I go to Ireland. Every one in town knows, suspects. I had to call the police after a storm because I thought someone had broken in---a window was smashed. Ted was gone, & this husband actually did try to get him with a knife & I was scared he might come down here & do us in if Ted wasn’t found. But that’s over. Ted is in love, humming, packing, leaving this week. He’ll live with the woman, I think marry her, though he won’t admit it. To hell. Every time he wants to hurt me, or pay me back for having to pay maintenance, he can just not pay, or hurt through the children.
I am getting a divorce. It is the only thing. He wants absolute freedom, and I could not live out a life legally married to someone I now hate and despise. Ted is glad for a divorce, but I have to go to court, which I dread. The foulness I have lived, his wanting to kill all I have lived for six years by saying he was just waiting for a chance to get out, that he was bored & stifled by me, a hag in a world of beautiful women just waiting for him, is only part of it. I am sure there will be a lot of publicity. I’ll just have to take it; my one worry is that Dotty, being Catholic, will turn from me because of the divorce. Can she seethat I want to be free from his hate & grudge against me, that there is no honor or future for me, chained to him? If I am divorced, he can never be unfaithful to me again, I can start a new life. It is the hardest 30th birthday present I could envision. I am fighting on all fronts, I have to stand my ground.
I should say right away America is out for me. I want to make my life in England. If I start running now I will never stop. I shall hear of Ted all my life, of his success, his genius, his woman, his women. I must make a life as fast as I can, all my own. He has been brutal, cruel, bastardly, cowardly and the flesh has dropped from my bones. But I am stubborn. I am a fighter. Money is my only way to fight myself into a new life. I know pretty much what I want.
I have got to get a woman here for the next two months, which will be the worst. My old nanny is with the Astors, but I’ve written the agency for another. I hope Ted’s aunt Hilda will come down then, when she’s trained a secretary to take her place, and make the trip to Ireland with me. I shall try to get an Irish girl there to live in & come back, have her live in the guest room till the cottage is ready. Ted has put my life two years back. A year here hand-hemming my own grave, then a year to get out. I want to have a flat in London, where the cultural life is I am starved for, and use this place as a country-house for holidays & the long summer. Frieda & Nick need the stimulus of the fine free London schools, and the country in between. America is out. Also, as you can see, I haven’t the strength to see you for some time. The horror of what you saw & what I saw you see last summer is between us & I cannot face you again until I have a new life, it would be too great a strain. I would give heaven & earth to have a visit from Aunt Dot, or Warren & Margaret. Can the latter come in spring.
The shock to me is an enormity. Ted has lied to the end, and only on the last days has he had the courage to tell me what I believed was a delusion. I was very stupid, very happy. I found Ted has been building a secret London life all this summer*---a flat, a separate bank account, this woman, who I am sure will now leave her second husband & marry Ted. He gave me no time, no inkling, to make any plans of my own. As you may imagine, the court case is for me to appear in, not him. A necessary evil.
Please tell no one but the relatives of this divorce till it is final. I want it very much. I have to want it. I want Ted utterly out of my life. I have been so shamed and degraded it has almost killed me, and the agony I have had to get the truth is the last I will ever go through. He has been both mean and utterly brutal. He is very pleased with himself and whenever he wants to be very very pleased sort of hums & says “I think £1,000 is too much. You can economize, eat less roasts, etc., etc.” He goes Thursday. He doesn’t care about things. I have to behave carefully, so his relatives won’t turn on me. I think the divorce case may do this. I have got to have it for myself, my honor, my life. But he may pretend he doesn’t want it, just doesn’t want to live as father & husband & would pay for us out of court, the “gentleman” he has been. He is capable of anything, when after what he wants, and he says for a long time he has not wanted us.
Dot’s letter a great consolation. Reassure me she’ll accept the divorce & not stop her kindness for that. I have no-one. He has stuck me down here as into a sack, I fight for air & freedom & the culture & libraries of a city.
Got Frieda a red duffle coat, a blue wool bathrobe & two wool dresses in Exeter yesterday. The first clothes Ted has bought her. I am dying to go to Ireland. I need three months away to recover. Everybody in town leering and peering. In spring I’ll have strength to cope with the rest, the return, holding my head up. I can’t sleep without pills & my health has been bad, after the flu. I’ve had shock after shock, as Ted has fed me the truth, with leer after leer. I told him that was all I wanted of him, the truth at last, not to hear it bit by bit from others. He couldn’t even manage that. The husband chased him with a knife, then tried to commit suicide, etc. etc. No one will ever believe the Ted I know. I am sure now he is “absolutely free” he will be charming. He chose to live with this woman in the same street as the church in which we were married. Oh well, enough.
Do you suppose Warren & Margaret could go with me on a holiday to Austria & Germany next spring or summer? This may sound insane, but I have nothing, nothing to look forward to. It would be something. I would love them. And what a rest, to be among relatives. I never want to return to America, except maybe in the far future, for a Cape Cod visit. I hate teaching, hate jobs. All I want to do is write at home. And be with my kids, and see movies, plays, exhibits, meet people, make a new life.
I’ve got to do something for my morale. Ireland is the first thing. Tell me what Prouty says. Ted’s in his heaven, the world’s is oyster. He’s avenging himself for six year’s of faithfulness – “sentimentality.”
Love,
Sivvy
PS: Do you suppose either Warren or Aunt Dot could fly over to be with me for a few days when I have to face the court? I don’t know whether it will be this autumn (I doubt, alas) or next spring, but I will need protection. I look to Warren so now, that I have no man, no adviser. He was so good and sweet here. Ted is desperate for money to go off with this woman & as he has earned nothing all summer, tried by fantastic nastiness to wrench from me the last two installments of my novel grant I kept by me when I realized he was going to desert us, by saying if I had the money I could live on it, no nanny. I hope when he gets off with her he will not be so nasty. He laughs at me, insults me, says my luck is over, etc. He goes tomorrow.
Everything is breaking---my dinner set cracking in half, the health inspector says the cottage should be demolished, there is no hope for it, so I shall have to do over the long room instead. Even my beloved bees set upon me today when I numbly knocked aside their sugar feeder & I am all over stings. Ted just gloats. Perhaps when he is gone the air will clear. I long for Warren & Margaret. I must get to London next fall. I must face the hardest thing---Ted’s probable second marriage & his fame & meeting him & his triumphant model with her exotic looks & news of them everywhere. When I have done that, I will know I am not running when I move. The humiliation of having to wait on my husband’s whim to get money to keep the house & children going is my most difficult shame just now. Please tell Warren to write & say he & Maggie will come in spring. In Ireland I feel I may find my soul, & in London next fall, my brain, & maybe in heaven what was my heart.
Love,
Sivvy
<at top of page 5 of letter, above paragraph beginning
‘Got Frieda a red duffle coat . . .’>
P.S. What exactly is the 5¢ Savings Acct total now?
<on verso of envelope>
PS: Please send a sheet of 4¢ stamps & a glass measuring cup – mine broke!
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Tuesday 9 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 9, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I am a bore, but things are resolving. I see and see and see. Ted is home this week, packing for good. He would have left me with all the lies, but bit by bit, the truth has come out. Or what he thinks is the truth. He has been building up a secret life in London all summer---flat, separate bank account, this woman, another woman. He’s lied to the end. He is mad for this woman, afraid to tell me so I won’t go through with the divorce (I think). I guess her 2nd husband will either divorce her or commit suicide. I found he went after Ted with a knife at Waterloo Station & tried to commit suicide after.* Ted says he has been a hypocrite for at least the last 3 years of our marriage, I have been eating not real bread, but a delusion of love. He has nothing but shattering things to say of me, seems to want to kill me, as he kills all he does not want. He has “agreed” to pay £1,000 maintenance for the house-running & children a year. This is scrape pay, and I tried to show him, by accounts, there was nothing for me in it. Now he is utterly loveless for me & us, and triumphant in going, this week, to this woman, to take her off, I guess, to marry her, to tour Europe, he is turning into a terror, a miser, a Yorkshire Jew, as he says. I’m not to have sherry, to have roast beef, I’m to smoke the last quarter inch of my cigarette---“they’re expensive”. £1,000, he taunts me, seems too much. I have accounts to show it is heat, food, light, children’s clothes & repair bills. I am an unpaid nanny. But from his new mind he is leaving me the house, the car, why more? And of course the law here would be merciless, I would get nothing, 1/3 of his income when & if he chose to pay it, less if he left the house, which is in both our names. The minute he wants to show his power---and I feel this terrible hate, the desire to torture me of my last sense, as if to revenge himself for 6 years kindness & faithfulness (“sentimentality” he says) & for my having children, now a burden---he starts on the money, pretending he mightn’t want to earn much. He can sell a poem manuscript at $100 a throw, has radio plays in Germany, children’s books, he is on the brink of great wealth & this year alone earned £1,500 by hardly lifting a finger. He told me I could tell the children they were to “live like the people”. Ergo, the meanest of the mean English working class. Which he comes from. It is this working class Yorkshire mind he is trying to kill us from. How can I ever get free? My writing is my one hope, and that income is so small. And with these colossal worries & responsibilities & no-one, no friend or relative, to advise or help as things come up, I have got to have a working ethic. I can’t face suing for lack of support now, I have nothing to go on with, no reserves of cash. The humiliation of being dependent for my children’s support on a man I hate & despise is a torture. I want nothing for myself, but he switches on & off like an electrode. I face the worst (for me): he will live with this woman, marry her, they will have a wonderful life---wealthy, no children, travel, people, affairs, & every time they are bored, screw us by forgetting the money. Bloody hell. In three months I’ve got the full picture – the near worst. I long for the divorce, for my independence, like clear water. I have two months to go on here, then Ireland for Dec-Feb, which I hope will blow me clear. I am, in my good minutes, excited about my new life. I want to fight back to a London flat by next fall, keep this place for summers. Perhaps when his first kicking, killing passion is past, & he is free, & with this woman, Ted may be not such a bastard. Our marriage had to go, okay. But she makes the going foul. I am dying for new people, new places, a bloody holiday. In a year I hope to have enough guts to face them, they deliriously happy, wealthy, popular at whatever party or place I meet them at, in myself, my dignity, which is there, though Ted laughs, scoffs, kills. She is all that is desirable, ergo I am a hag, a fool. I want no more of him. I have to be nice, can’t afford the luxury of a fury even. Be good little doggy & you shall have a penny. It is the last degradation. Right now I hate men. I am stunned, bitter. I want to go back to London, read, see plays, exhibits, build back the mind this country has dulled, & the babes. Sex is easily dispensed with, I see. My dream is to fight for my writing so I can get into New Yorker stories, something, big money. Then keep him paying for the kids forever, sue if I have to, but not have to grovel for the kids as I would if I had no resource to go on with while having a court case. I have to stay here in England, to keep a grip, & to not run---Ted is everywhere in the literary world, like T. S. Eliot. He has junked me at the foulest time in the foulest way, living a lie & letting me live a happy one, till he got guts, i.e. passion, to break hotel sinks, burn curtains & go off without paying (as he did their first night) & say “ta, ta, tough about the kids, but you did want them, didn’t you.” I have the consolation of being no doubt the only woman who will know the early years of a charming genius. On my skin. Like a Belsen label. Do write.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Howard Moss
Wednesday 10 October 1962 |
TLS (draft), Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 10, 1962
Mr. Howard Moss
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Mr. Moss,
I am delighted to hear that you are taking ELM for THE NEW YORKER. I am happier to have you take this than about any of the other poems you have taken---I thought it might be a bit too wild and bloody, but I’m glad it’s not.
I think “Soliloquy of the Elm” would be my alternate to “The Elm Speaks”, but I think I like your title better. Yes, I think I do.
I am sending the latest batch.* I’m sorry about the length of “Bees”, but it would go on, and I’ll send it just for the record.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Howard Moss
Wednesday 10 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), New York Public Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 10, 1962
Mr. Howard Moss
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Mr. Moss,
I am delighted to hear* that you are taking ELM for The New Yorker. I’m happier about your taking this than about any of the other poems of mine you’ve taken---I was afraid it might be a bit too wild and bloody, but I’m glad it’s not.
I think SOLILOQUY OF THE ELM would be my alternate to THE ELM SPEAKS, but I think I like your title better. Yes, I think I do.
I am sending the latest batch. I’m sorry about the length of BEES, but it would go on, and I’ll send it just for the record.
I wonder if I could ask you a practical favor. Could you send the stuff back airmail? I’m sticking on as many stamps as I can, but I never know the return air rates, and as I’m a bit hard up I want to get these round as fast as possible. I’d be happy to have you dock my check for it.
With warmest good wishes,
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 12 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Friday, October 12
Dear mother,
Your fat nice letter received with many thanks. Do tear my last one up. It was written at what was probably my all-time low and I have an incredible change of spirit, I am joyous---happier than I have been for ages. Ted left yesterday, after a ghastly week, with all his stuff, clothes, books, papers. Instead of returning home to blueness & gloom, as I expected, I found myself singing, washing Frieda’s hair, rubbishing out junk, delighted. At last everything was definite, no more waiting, worrying, trying to decipher lies. It is over. My life can begin. Ted did see some money was in the bank & in his present state of mind is willing to pledge £1,000 for our support a year. He is going off, I gather, to live with this woman. When our divorce is final I am quite sure he will marry her, and have the distinction of being her 4th (!) husband. I don’t envy either of them. He has behaved like a bastard, a boor, a crook, & what has hurt most is his cowardice---evidently for years he has wanted to leave us & deceived us about his feelings, although this is the first (and last) time he has hurt us in any way. If only he had told the truth at the start, six months ago, for this summer, the flu, my weight loss, have really set me back. But I am full of fantastic energy, now it is released from the problem of him. I have a great appetite---when I came home from driving him to the station I ate a great plate of potatoes & lamb chops, my first good meal in months.
Got a darling letter from Warren today. It means more than I can say. Part of my hardship is being stuck down here in limbo with no real old friends or relatives. Saw Winifred today, & she says she’ll write you* how fine I am now he’s gone. This week is a bit of a drag. I have ordered a nice new nanny from this agency in London, & they say she’ll arrive next week sometime. I hope. So glad you & Warren are behind me in the nanny line. If I didn’t write I’d go mad with boredom. I never wanted to live in the country full-time & don’t intend to. I’ll keep this place as a summer house & try to rent in winter & get in a London flat by next fall. I am dying for London---the plays, art shows, people with brains, & the free lance jobs. Frieda & Nich can go to good London schools & have a heavenly country house & all the beaches for summer. I must have a nanny full-time. Now the cottage is out, I am having the long room made over, new floors & will furnish as a bed-sitter with TV. Guests can stay in the pink room & up in Ted’s attic. I hope to keep this (very expensive) nanny until Ted’s aunt Hilda comes, as she hopes to, at the end of November, to accompany me to Ireland. I like Hilda, she is spry, & was left to bring up Vicky alone, & is on my side. I must keep them on my side (never say I’m happy---as soon as they think I want the divorce, not Ted, their Yorkshire-Jew quality will say not to pay me a penny as I have the house. I’ve to be very careful. Ted does want the divorce, thank goodness, so shouldn’t be difficult). Ireland in my darling cottage from Dec. 1–Feb. 28. I should recover on the milk from TTtested cows (hope to learn to milk them myself), homechurned butter & homemade bread. And sea!
Every morning, when my sleeping pill wears off I am up about 5, in my study with coffee, writing like mad---have managed a poem a day before breakfast!* All book poems. Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me. As soon as the nanny comes & I know I’ve got a stretch of guaranteed time, I’ll finish the novel. I have 40 children’s picture books at my side to review, for the leftish weekly I’ve done them for before.---“Horton Hatches the Egg” among them! So send no children’s books. I’ve mountains. Nick has two teeth, stands, sits, is an angel. Ted cut F’s hair short & it looks marvellous, no mess, no straggle. She has 2 kittens from Mrs. Macnamara, Tiger-Pieker and Skunky-Bunks, the first a tiger, the second black & white. She adores them, croons “Rock a bye baby, when the bough breaks” at them. They’re very good for her now.
Did you see my poem “Blackberries” in the Sept. 15 New Yorker? Wrote that when Warren was here last year. Mrs. Prouty, bless her, came through with $300, so I am all right for nannies for a bit. Hope, when free, to write myself out of this hole. Do have Warren & Maggie let me know as soon as they know when they’re coming next spring. I would give the world if they’d take (I mean go with) me to Austria & Germany. I should have earned enough by then to deserve a holiday & leave the kids with their then (I hope) full-time nanny. I need a bloody holiday. Ireland is heaven, utterly unspoiled, emerald sea washing in fingers among green fields, white sand, wild coast, cows, friendly people, honey-tasting whisky, peat (turf) fires that smell like spiced bread---thank God I found it. Just in time. I go riding tomorrow, love it. Shall send F & N to church in London, not here! I miss brains, hate this cow life, am dying to surround myself with intelligent good people. Shall have a salon in London. I am a famous poetess here---mentioned this week in The Listener* as one of the half-dozen women who will last – including Marianne Moore & the Brontes!
xxx
Sivvy
<in left margin of page 1 of letter>
PS: Forget about the court case – I’ll manage that fine alone. Every experience is grist for a novelist.
<on page 1 of letter>
My solicitor is Mr. Charles Mazillius
Harris, Chetham & Co. Solicitors
23 Bentinck Street, London W.1
My bank: The National Provincial
The Square, North Tawton, Devon.
Am having a phone put in again, not listed, so I can call out & have friends call in.* Look forward to it.
TO Howard Moss
Friday 12 October 1962 |
TLS, New York Public Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 12, 1962
Dear Mr. Moss,
I’d be grateful if you’d consider this* with the last lot I sent and send it back with them.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Warren & Margaret Plath
Friday 12 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme, photocopy), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire England
Friday: October 12
Dearest Warren & Maggie,
Your lovely letter arrived today & cheered me immensely. How often I have thought of you both! I have been through the most incredible hell for six months, influenza, the lot, and amazingly enough, now that Ted has finally packed his bags & left for good (yesterday), I feel wonderful. As I told mother in the letter I am writing today, I am so relieved to have broken through all the endless lies and to have something definite, that the release in my energy is enormous. Ted is, I see, just reverting to type. The good, kind, domestic person he has been these six years was a terrible strain on him & I believe he has made this experience so awful & hurtful as a kind of revenge on me for having “reformed” him. I never thought I would ever in my life consider a divorce, but am now looking forward to it. I want in no way, not even legally, to be associated with the life Ted will now live. The one thing I retain is love for & admiration of his writing, I know he is a genius, and for a genius there are no bonds & no bounds. I feel I did discover him, worked to free him for writing for six years, & now suddenly on the brink of enormous riches (his manuscripts of one poem now fetch at least $100!) it is hurtful to be ditched and left to live on crumbs while he squires models & fashion plates etc. etc. But thank God I have my own work. If I did not have that I do not know what I would do. I have a considerable reputation over here, and am writing from dawn to when the babes wake, a poem a day, and they are terrific. Have just sold another fat one to the New Yorker. Did you see “Blackberrying” in the Sept. 15th NY, Warren? I wrote that about the time we went when you were here.
So glad you are behind me on the nanny, Warren. I am & have been an intelligent woman, & this year of country life has been, for me, a cultural death. No plays, films, art shows, books, people! All for Ted’s “dream”, & now I am stuck. But not for long. I plan to go to Ireland to a lovely cottage by the sea for Dec-Feb to recover my health & my heart, then return here for spring & summer, see you & Maggie I hope & pray, my good friends the Alan Sillitoes, now alas in Tangier for a year, & Marty & Mike Plumer if they come. The loneliness here now is appalling. Then I shall fight for a London flat by next fall. Frieda & Nick can go to the good free London schools & have a lovely summer place here. I shall try to rent this in winter. I shall be able to do free-lance broadcasting, reviewing, & have a circle of intellectual friends in London. I loved living there & never wanted to leave. You can imagine how ironic it is to me that Ted is now living there, after he said it was “death” to him, & enjoying all the social & cultural life he has deprived me of. I am making the long room over & hope to be able to support a full-time nanny on my writing. I will try to finish my novel & a second book of poems by Christmas. I think I’ll be a pretty good novelist, very funny---my stuff makes me laugh & laugh, & if I can laugh now it must be hellishly funny stuff.
I wish you would both consider going on a holiday to Germany & Austria when you come. You should know some lovely places in the Tyrol & I would love to go with you! I just dread ever going on a holiday alone. I could leave the babies with the nanny for a couple of weeks, & you could begin & end your stay here. I would be very cheerful & entertaining by then, I promise you. Just now I am a bit of a wreck, bones literally sticking out all over & great black shadows under my eyes from sleeping pills, a smoker’s hack (I actually took up smoking the past month out of desperation---my solicitor started it by offering me a cigarette & I practically burned off all my eyebrows, I was so upset & forgot it was lit! But now I’ve stopped.) I do hope Dotty isn’t going to snub me because of the divorce, although I know Catholics think it’s a sin. Her support has been marvelous for me. I hope you can tactfully convey to mother, Warren, that we should not meet for at least a year or a year & a half, when I am happy in my new London life. After this summer, I just could not bear to see her, it would be too painful & recall too much. So you & dear Maggie, whom I already love, come instead. Tell me you’ll consider taking (I mean escorting! I’ll have money!) me to Austria with you, even if you don’t, so I’ll have that to look forward to. I’ve had nothing to look forward to for so long! The half year ahead seems like a lifetime, & the half behind an endless hell. Your letters are like glühwein to me. I must really learn German. I want above all to speak it. Do write me again. So proud of your Chicago speech, Warren! I want both you & Maggie henceforth to consider yourselves godparents to both Frieda & Nick. Lord knows, they need as many as they can have, & the best!
Lots of love to you both,
Sivvy
PS: We have two kittens – Tiger-Pieker & Skunky-Bunks.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 16 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green: Tuesday October 16
Dear mother,
I am writing with my old fever of 101° alternating with chills back. Two things: I must have someone with me for the next 2 months to mind the babies while I get my health back & try to write. I have got to get to Ireland by December 1st. Write nothing to any of the Hughes. I stupidly told Edith in a letter this morning that Ted had finally deserted & you would appreciate a word* that they care for me & the babies, although Ted does not. This noon I got, from Hilda, the “Family position”. The materialistic, appalling Yorkshire-Jew skinflint: “Forget Ted, count myself lucky to have a house, car, two babies & the ability to earn my whole living at home instead of having to go out & work for a boss!” When they hear that Ted has pledged, or was going to, £1,000 for heat, light, food & the children’s clothes---my rock-bottom expenses, I fear they will try to torture me to death. I have been advised to have nothing to do or say to Ted’s relatives till the custody of the children is decided & the divorce final. Nothing will matter to them. Words will only make them turn their full fury on me. They have utterly no imagination, no notion of our standard of living. I see clearly Ted will as soon as he goes home this fall, utterly justify to them his actions by saying he will “support us”. £1,000 is fantastic to them, insanity. Olwyn will return. I have got to get to Ireland. I need Dotty, or Margaret---just for 6 weeks, two months, to protect me. Ted & his woman (he will have the distinction of being her 4th husband, thank god I think she is barren) have already wistfully started wondering why I didn’t commit suicide, since I did before! Ted has said how convenient it would be if I were dead, then he could sell the house & take the children whom He likes. It is me he does not like. I need help very much just now. Home is impossible. I can go nowhere with the children, & I am ill, & it would be psychologically the worst thing to see you now or to go home. I have free doctor’s care here, cheap help possible though not now available, and a home I love & will want to return to in summer to get ready to leap to London. To make a new life. I am a writer. I hate teaching. I am a genius of a writer, I have it in me. I am up at 5 writing the best poems of my life, they will make my name.* I could finish the novel in six weeks of daylong work. I have a gift of an inspiration for another. Got a $100 “Birthday present” from Dotty today. $300 from Mrs. Prouty. Thank God. Very bad luck with nanny agency, a bitch of a woman is coming tomorrow* from them, doesn’t want to cook, do any breakfast or tea, wondered if there was a butler. £10 a week. If I had time to get a good nanny, possibly an Irish girl to come home with me, I could get on with my life. Ted is dead to me, I feel only a lust to study, write, get my brain back & practice my craft. I have, if you want to know, already had my 1st novel finished & accepted---it is a secret, & I am on my 2nd. My 3rd – the idea – came this week. After Ted left with all his clothes & things I piled the children & 2 cats in the car & drove to stay with a horrid couple I know in St. Ives Cornwall---the most heavenly gold sands by emerald sea. Discovered Cornwall, exhausted but happy, my first independent act! I have no desire but to build a new life. Must start here. When I have my 2nd book of poems done, my 3rd novel, & the children are of age, I may well try a year of creative writing lecturing in America & a Cape summer. But not just now. I must not go back to the womb or retreat. I must make steps out, like Cornwall, like Ireland.
Please share this letter with Dotty & Mrs. Prouty. I am all right. I know I sound insane, but could either Dot or Margaret spare me 6 weeks. I can get no good nanny sight unseen, I could pay board & room easily & travel expenses & Irish fares. I am as bereft now as ever. I am terrified of the Hughes family. Now is their most “sympathetic time”---wait till they hear about the money! I must have someone I love who is of course not you, to protect me, for I fear they will by more torture try to get me to the wall. When Ted left I felt a peace and joy I have not known for a year at bottom half a year on the surface. He has squelched me, I need no literary help from him. I am going to make my own way. Next fall I must get to London, & the children to London schools. Know my only problems now are practical: money health back, a good young girl or nanny willing to muck in & cook which I could afford once I got writing. The strain of facing suing Ted for support, with the cruel laws here, is something I need to put off just now. Could Margaret fly over, get a new job when she comes back? Or Dot? My flu with my weight loss & the daily assault of practical nastiness---this nanny sounds as if she will leave in a day or so & the fees are fantastic for over here---has made me need immediate help. I’m getting an unlisted phone put in as soon as possible so I can call out, you shall have the number. The babes are beautiful, though Frieda has regressed, the pussies help. I cannot come home. I need someone to cover my getting to Ireland. I can’t rely on any nanny at this short notice---I just can’t interview them. Do let me know what you all think. The life in Ireland is very healthful, the place a dream, the sea a blessing. I must get out of England. No word to the Hughes, no answer if Edith writes. I cannot see Hilda---it would be insanity. I am happy, full of plans but do need help for the next 2 months. I am fighting now against hard odds & alone.
xxx
Sivvy
<on the return address side of letter>
Please have a family powow & answer this as soon as possible!
Lots of love.
S.
Be “careful” on telegrams!
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 16 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
<SP wrote ‘2’ on address side of letter>
Court Green
October 16, 1962
Dear mother,
Mention has been made of my coming home for Christmas---which alas this year is impossible from every angle, psychological, health, babies, money. I gathered from Dot’s letter you might all chip in to do this. Do you suppose instead there is any possibility of your chipping in and sending me Maggie? By next spring I should have my health back, the prospect of visits from friends like the Sillitoes & Marty & Mike, good weather. Could she come now instead of then? I already love her, she would be such fun and love the babies. We could go to Ireland together & get me settled in & she could fly home from Dublin well before Christmas. Do I sound mad? Taking or wanting to take Warren’s new wife? Just for a few weeks! How I need a free sister! We could go on jaunts, eat together, I have all the cleaning done & someone who’ll mind the babies 9 hours a week.
I need someone from home. A defender. I am terrified of what will happen when Ted goes home this fall & they find out I need & expect some financial support. They are inhuman Jewy working-class bastards. There is no hope or help in them. I must have nothing ever to do with them. You see what I am up against from Hilda’s letter! I have a fever now, so I am a bit delirious. I live on sleeping pills, work from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. On the next few months depend my future and my health. I must get to Ireland, away from the Hughes malice. Ted almost killed me the 10 days he was home for not giving him the last installment of my novel grant “for a nanny” which we lived off all year to help his writing. If he had any honor, any soul, he would have told me he was planning to desert us & for God’s sake to take my novel grant & use it for a nanny. I hate & despise him so I can hardly speak.
I dread the nanny who is coming tonight, she sounded such a bitch over the phone, so snotty, wanting a “cook” etc. I simply can’t afford these high fees & a bad lazy nanny. It’s the worst thing for the children, these changes. If only Maggie could come for six weeks, then I could get settled in Ireland & look around for an Irish girl! I would have a blood ally. I fully expect Ted’s family will put me through the gruelling tedium of having to sue for any support at all, & then the courts will only allow a pittance & penalize me for anything I earn! Do see if Maggie & Warren could make this great & temporary sacrifice. I am fine in mind & spirit, but wasted & ill in flesh.
I love you all,
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 18 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green: Thursday
October 18
Dear mother,
Do ignore my last letters! I honestly must have been delirious to think I could uproot other people’s lives to poultice my own. It was the bloody fever that just finished me. I went to the doctor---no medication, of course---then to bed at 8 p.m. Yesterday I was much better. The Health Visitor came to see Nicholas & gaped at me: My, Mrs. Hughes, you’ve lost weight! I told her I was up at 4 a.m. every morning, writing till the babies woke & she looked concerned. I guess my predicament is an astounding one, a deserted wife knocked out by flu with 2 babies & a full-time job! Anyhow, Winifred, bless her, came round last night with some hopeful news---a young 22-year-old nurse* nearby would “love” to live in till mid-December, visit home one day a week etc. I could propose the Irish trip after she’d settled in, she thought she’d be game. She’d want to be home for Xmas & have to go back to London as staff nurse in January, but it’s this limbo through to Ireland I’ve got to settle. Evidently they’ll invite me round to tea to discuss business---about 5 guineas a week ($15) plus board & room should be okay, Winifred thinks. Half of the fee for the bastardly nanny who arrived last night. She’s an old snobby snoop & I can’t wait to get rid of her. It’s cost $10 just to hire her through this fancy agency which in desperation I’ve had to use---I just don’t have time to shop around. Nancy commiserated with me this morning on her, the young nanny was so nice. I shall work this one so hard for the next few days she’ll be glad to go, & I’ll tell her I’ve a “permanent” nanny who wants to cook, which she doesn’t. Hilda, Ted’s aunt, wrote today about coming down soon, so I shall sweetly & tactfully tell her I’ve been ordered to have a live-in nurse by my doctor (close to true) since I’ve been flattened by influenza. That will put the wind up them, & keep them away, with no hurt feelings. So this is the position. Get Maggie & Warren to promise a visit & trip with me next spring.
The weather has been heavenly. Fog mornings, but clear sunny blue days after. I have a bad cough & shall get my lungs Xrayed as soon as I can, & my teeth seen to. Up at 5 a.m. today. I am writing very good poems.* The BBC has just accepted a very long* one which I’ll go up to record. I have no feeling for Ted, except that he is an absolute bastard. No word from him. He promised to see my lawyer, agree to a yearly fee, provide a witness for the divorce (I think he’ll marry this woman & be her 4th husband) & he can’t even write to say if or whether he’s done it. I am myself, proud, and full of plans. Got a darling letter from Clem today, very fond of him, like a second brother, and his mother. Shall write his father & hope to see him in London,* just for human contact & advice, as I plan to be recording up there around then. As soon as I get this young nanny I shall junk this old hag. Ted’s nasty walkout---he coolly told me it was not living in London he hated, but living with me! too bad he didn’t tell me then!---has given me no time. I need time to breathe, sun, recover my flesh. I have enough ideas & subjects to last me a year or more! Must get a permanent girl or nanny after this young nurse whose father writes children’s books & whose mother* is the secretary of the local Bee-Keepers club. She sounds nice. Everybody here very good to me, as if they knew or guessed my problem.
If Ted doesn’t agree to a decent maintenance of £1,000 a year, which he can earn by snapping his fingers (he’s offered a semester lecture post in America for £2,000, plus a reading tour & has 2 more books* taken etc.) I’ll simply sue him & his family will rue the day of their skinflintery. Even if I only get a court-decreed pittance I shall do it. This bitch of Ted’s is barren from all her abortions & has been offered an ad agency job at £3,000 a year, a fortune here, so he can bloody well afford us. He’ll just have to learn he can’t kill what he’s through with, namely me & the babies. I shall live on here, & eventually in London, happy in my own life & career & babies. As Mrs. Prouty says, he must be kept aware of his responsibilities. I think he half-hopes they can drive me to America, to be supported by my family or something! Well, I love it here, even in the midst of this. I see it is imperative to have a faithful girl or woman living in with me so I can go off for a job or a visit at the drop of a hat & write full-time. Then I can enjoy the babies. It is lucky I don’t have to work out.
I just haven’t had energy to write to Warren again, or Mrs. Prouty or Dot. I hope you share my news with them & say I’ll write as soon as things simmer down. Now the nanny is here, I hope to get into my waiting novel. I shall write Clem, too. It is the voices of friends that I miss, in my little mausoleum in the country. Ted made sure I was utterly cut off from culture, plays, libraries, people, work, resources & my writing stopped & my grant gone before he got “courage” to kick me & the children over with a hate & venom & sadism I shall never forget & shall commemorate in my next novel. As if hating me for making him “nice” & “good”. I am fine. Just need a settled nanny & to rest & write & letters. I love & live for letters.
xxx
Sivvy
TO George MacBeth
Thursday 18 October 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
October 18, 1962
George MacBeth, Esq.
The British Broadcasting Corp.
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear George,
I am very happy to hear you are taking “Berck-Plage” for “The Poets Voice”. I sort of had you in mind when I wrote it and did hope you might like it. Monday 29th October would be fine for me to record it. Could you make it some time in the morning? My train gets into Waterloo well before 10.30, so I could make it to the BBC by 10.45, I should think.
Let me know if this is okay. Looking forward to seeing you,
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
<written at top of letter>
P.S. Ted’s story “Snow” appeared in Harper’s Bazaar in America & in the Faber edition of short stories by 6 young writers brought out some time back.*
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Thursday 18 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Thursday: October 18
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
Thank you a thousand times for your dear, intuitive letter and the wonderfully helpful check. What I have lived through these past three months seems like a dark dream from which I have only the desire to disassociate myself. Ted left us for good a week ago, taking all his things. He has evidently been secretly planning to desert us all along, withdrawing money from our joint account unknown to me, getting a London flat and mailing address, and leaving us with no access to him at all, and no explanation. I guess he thought we could just live here on potatoes and apples. His desertion, without a word, a week after I almost died from influenza, decided me on a divorce. On his return to get his things, after my solicitor’s agents unearthed him from London, he was furious I had not committed suicide---evidently he and his new flame had discussed this, in view of my old nervous breakdown. If I were dead, he said, he could sell the house, which we jointly own, and take Frieda---he never has loved or touched little Nicholas---as this woman has had so many abortions she can’t have children. Needless to say, my six years of absolute love and trust have been killed completely in three months. The poor 3rd husband of this woman, also a poet and a friend and a great admirer of Ted’s, tried to kill himself when he knew what Ted had done, but Ted only laughed.
I suppose it is something to have been the first wife of a genius. Ted is now on the brink of wealth, and wants us to have nothing. His family is behind him---the meanest, most materialistic of the English working class. I think I shall probably have to sue him to get any support of the children at all, but that is something I shall face later. Right now my one concern is to write and write and get back my lost weight and my health. My midwife has a temporary nurse up her sleeve who might live in with me for the next 6 weeks. I hope to winter in Ireland in a lovely cottage I found there, with the babies, free from the terrible memories and emptiness of this place, and to return in spring with the daffodils. Then I shall try to get a permanent live-in nanny, or an Irish girl, so I can write and go on day jobs to broadcast on the radio in London. For the time being, without help, I get up at 4 a.m. when my sleeping pill wears off and write till 8 a.m. when the babies wake, my only “free” time, and I am writing the best poems of my life. As soon as I get a live-in nanny I shall finish my novel. My dream is to get back to a London flat by next fall and use this place only as a summer house---the schools in Devon are terrible & the complete lack of cultural life---libraries, museums, theaters, films, intelligent people---is a sort of mental torture to me, a vacuum. It is ironic that Ted should have pretended that this was his dream, to get me to leave the London I loved, and then desert me to live in London himself before a year was out, but I feel I have a deeper sense of human nature now than ever in my life, and that out of grief a great strength and understanding is coming. I should be a compassionate novelist!
I feel happy and resolute now I am decided on a divorce---I have no wish to be the wife, even in name, of a person like Ted, who cannot just leave what he does not want, but wants to kill it. Like a true genius, he will live only for himself and his pleasures, and I wish him joy. I can even laugh when I think of him being the 4th husband of this woman. They are both so handsome & faithless they should be a perfect match. I am eager to begin my new life and impatient with all the legal and business tangles I have to solve. I want only to write, and feel that the children, having only one parent, need me at home most of the time, although Ted’s family would have me put them in an orphanage & work as a waitress rather than get any support from Ted, for in their eyes his fame is all, he can do no wrong.
I have just sold a long poem about our Elm tree to the New Yorker for $156, very encouraging. Since my contract with them, they buy a good many of my poems. I also am scheduled to record a long one for the BBC this month. Miraculously, and like some gift, my writing has leapt ahead and not deserted me in this hour of need. I have devotion to it---what else but my babies could get me up at 4 in the morning! I have, too, great joy in my work. I hope to have a second book of poems ready soon, and a second novel written by the end of the winter if I am lucky in finding a suitable woman or girl to help with the children and cooking. Do reassure mother about my state of mind. It is only my rather wasted physique that needs building up, & that is simple enough, given my optimism and happy spirit. I go horseback riding---learning---each week & it is a great pleasure. Do write. I love your letters.
Warmest love to you & Taupe,
Sylvia
TO Warren Plath
Thursday 18 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme, photocopy), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Thursday: October 18
Dear Warren,
Your welcome letter arrived today, together with a very sweet and moving letter from Clem. I am writing him in the same mail as this. I certainly want to see his father. As it happens, the BBC have just taken a long gruesome poem of mine, so I can go up to record it during his stay, expenses paid, & a good local temporary nanny is imminent, thanks to the efforts of blessed Winifred Davies, our midwife. I have a horror now (don’t tell mother) whom I shall fire tomorrow---she is a snobby snoopy old bitch & has upset my faithful cleaner Nancy & the babies & me & is terribly expensive. I got her from the same agency as my young dream-nanny who came while I was in Ireland & have resolved never to get someone sight unseen again. Ted’s fantastic thoughtlessness, almost diabolic---he keeps saying he can’t understand why I don’t kill myself, it would be so convenient, & has certainly tried to make life hell enough---has set me back a year or two in my own life. I know just what I need, what I want, what I must work for. Please convince mother of this. She identifies much too much with me, & you must help her see how starting my own life in the most difficult place---here, not running, is the only sane thing to do. I love England, love Court Green for summers, want to live in London in fall & winter so the children can go to the fine free schools & I can have the free lance jobs & cultural variety & stimulus which is food for my year-long culture-starved soul.
I fear I wrote two worrying letters to mother this week when I was desperate at hearing the “Hughes position”, which is that I am bloody lucky to have a house & car & to be able to “earn my own living” (I can just about earn the “extras”---a nanny, Ted’s high life insurance & the car insurance & gas), & of course not to expect a penny from Ted. This cheery letter came just as I had a recurrence of my old flu fever & chills & weakness, and I was terrified that as soon as they hear from Ted he has said he would pledge £1,000 a year (a fortune to them, although he can now earn twice & thrice that at the turn of a finger) to cover our very basic running expenses---taxes, heat, light, food, clothes for the children (nothing for me)---that they would descend, the charming Olwyn in advance, & literally try to do me in. The most sordid thing is Ted’s playing on my nervous breakdown, & telling me how convenient it would be if I were dead. I think he actually counted on my committing suicide. The poor husband---the 3rd---of this charming woman, did try to commit suicide, because he honestly loved & admired Ted, was a minor poet too, & to Ted this was only sauce. Do try to convince mother I am cured. I am only in danger physically, mentally I am sound, fine & writing the best ever, free from the long cow-sludge of domesticity from 4 a.m. to 8 a.m. each day. I did not tell mother that I almost died from influenza, that is why I begged to see Maggie. I thought a loving humane sister-in-law whom I already love dearly, would protect me from further assaults while I got back my weight, my health. But now I am better & if this local nanny comes through & covers my trip to Ireland I should be safe, for a while.
I shall certainly see Clem’s father. I am in a very difficult position as Ted can earn large & indefinite amounts & not report half of them---thousands of $ for ms. sales alone. Legally I am only entitled to 1/3 of his income, less if I have the house, & if I earn anything, I am penalized, for then it becomes 1/3 of our combined incomes. If he doesn’t pay, I have the long tedium of suing. He is, I now see, fully indulging the bastard & killer in him & his fantastic hatred & sadism toward me & Nick is probably the result of resentment at having led 6 years of good, kind faithful behavior. He evidently meant to secretly, suddenly & completely desert us without money or access to him, or support, thinking, it now appears, that we could live here on potatoes & apples. I want a clean, quick divorce. He says he will dock any legal expenses from the money he pledged us! I think when his family masses behind him, I shall have to face yearly suing. I am a writer & that is all I want to do. Over here I can earn quite a bit from the radio, live on little, get free medical care, & have had my 1st novel accepted (this is a secret, it is a pot-boiler & no-one must read it!) & am ready to finish a 2nd the minute I get a live-in nanny. I plan to have the “long” room done over this winter (the cottage has been ordered demolished by the health inspector!) as a bed-sitter with TV & invest in a “permanent nanny” when I return from Ireland in March. I must have someone live in, or otherwise I don’t eat & can go nowhere. By next fall I hope to have earned & written my way to a flat in London where my starved mind can thrive & grow. My God, Warren, imagine yourself on an endless potato farm forever deprived of your computers, friends, relatives & only potato people in sight. I am an intellectual at heart---this will be a fine summer house for the children, but the schools are awful, they must go to school in London. Do reassure mother. I hope my new nanny will want to manage Ireland.
xxx
sivvy
<on page 1 of letter>
PS: Please try to keep writing me too! I live on letters & have no other source of contact with relatives & friends just now! Even a paragraph from you is a great tonic!
TO Clarissa Roche
Friday 19 October 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
October 19: Friday
Dearest Clarissa,
You have no idea how much your sweet letter meant to me, which came today. I congratulate you on the new baby, and if she takes after the others & you she will be a blond lucky goddess. I’m so glad you heard the baby-borning program*---I’d never been in a maternity ward except to see someone’s else’s baby born, but a stay in hospital after I had my appendix out gave me the atmosphere.
What I say next may come as a bit of a shock. Since I last wrote you I am having to divorce Ted. He has, in effect, deserted me and the children, saying he never had courage to tell me he didn’t want them until we had two. I loved London life & did not want to leave---coming to the country was his idea, his “dream”, as he said. I guess he thought we could live on potatoes & apples. The fact that he left the week after I almost died of influenza last month, & that his family does not want him to support us in any way, is just one step, I guess, in the path of poetic genius. Needless to say, I would just adore to see you & Paul. I am at present totally without access to friend or relative and have been stupidly ill, lost a lot of weight & am running a flickery 103° fever, getting up each morning at 4 a.m. to write, my one quiet time.
My one main problem is to find a loyal live-in girl who can baby mind & cook breakfasts & teas while I write. I am having to get rid of a ghastly snoopy scabby senile agency nanny tomorrow who has almost scared the babes out their wits in 2 days, but hope next week to have the help by day of a pretty nurse for the six weeks before she goes up to London to be a staff nurse there. I have a double bedroom that will be free when she goes on a holiday for a week in mid-November. Could you come then? There’s a carry-cot here for the babe, a Bendix for nappies & a huge welcome for you both.
Perhaps you can imagine what it’s like for a sociable city intellectual like me, dying to write, read, see places, plays, people etc. to be stuck among cows, cow people, without an adult to speak to; and now that Ted is earning fabulous sums, without baby shoe money. I am hoping to go for a rest-cure to Ireland with the babes by the sea near Galway to get back my flesh & try to finish a novel in December through early March. Do you know anyone who would like to rent a big beautiful farmhouse with Wilton carpets, 2 double bedrooms, a babies room, a huge sunny playroom, a Bendix, fridge, all shops in 2 minutes, garden, seclusion, 4 hours from Waterloo by the town station at a low rent for 3 winter months? Or starting next fall? Next fall, I hope to write my way back to a London flat & keep this place for summers, but that is as yet a dream. My dream. But that’s the dream I want to live in. As soon as I know the nurse’s holiday week I’ll let you know, but please do write & say you’ll try to come then, mid-November. I love you both dearly & would be heartbroken to miss you!
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 21 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Sunday: October 21
Dear mother,
Will you please, for goodness sake, stop bothering poor Winifred Davies! You have absolutely no right or reason to do this, and it is an endless embarrassment to me. She is busier than either you or I, and is helping me as much as she can and knows and sees my situation much better than you do. It was incredibly foolish of you to send her a telegram---she came over this afternoon and said you sent her some wire to tell me to “keep the nanny” & “the salary would be paid from over there” etc.* Will you kindly leave her out of it? Why didn’t you wire me? And to imply that money is available from over in America is the worst thing you could do---it completely falsifies my hard-up predicament, everybody thinks Americans are rich and my problems are magnified. I can’t see how you could be so silly! Just like telling them I had a nervous breakdown when I have a fantastic job to get this stupid doctor to admit I have a fever even when he takes it on his office thermometer. This is one of the reasons I find your presence so difficult. These absolutely scatty things! My business in this town is my business, & for goodness sake learn to keep your mouth shut about it. Winifred knows the nanny I had was atrocious---an old bitch, the children were shrieking in terror the whole time she was here, & I had to take over poor Nicholas completely, she yelled at him so, & even my serene Nancy was almost hysterical after the woman was at her for a morning. I sent her back Saturday morning, after my fever went up to 103° again. You have no idea what you are saying when you blithely talk about “hiring nannies.” No nanny wants to live out here in the middle of nowhere, without Tv* or amusement. And I shall never again hire a woman without an interview. It is ridiculous. Winifred has got me a young nurse to come in days for about the next six weeks. I should be able to calm down & do some work & sit & think. I have got to get a flat in London by next fall, or I shall go stir crazy.
*I shall rent a set next spring when I get the room made over.
I cannot understand Ted’s insanity & irresponsibility, sticking me down here, in an unsellable, unrentable huge house with grounds needing a full-time gardener, no nannies available, no culture, no people, nothing, then congratulating himself on deserting us with “a house and car”. It is as if, out of revenge for my brain & creative power, he wanted to stick me where I would have no chance to use it. I think now my creating babies & a novel frightened him---for he wants barren women like his sister & this woman, who can write nothing, only adore his stuff. I love Court Green & will find it a wonderful summer retreat. I am even enjoying my rather frustrating (culturally & humanly) exile now. I am doing a poem a morning, great things,* and as soon as the nurse settles, shall try to draft this terrific second novel that I’m dying to do. Don’t talk to me about the world needing cheerful stuff! What the person out of Belsen---physical or psychological---wants is nobody saying the birdies still go tweet-tweet but the full knowledge that somebody else has been there & knows the worst, just what it is like. It is much more help for me, for example, to know that people are divorced & go through hell, that to hear about happy marriages. Let the Ladies’ Home Journal blither about those.
Please do understand that while I am very very grateful indeed for financial help from people who have money, like Mrs. Prouty & Dot, & while I should be glad for the odd Birthday & Xmas present from you, I want no monthly dole, especially not from you. You can help me best by saving your money for your own retirement. I am just furious at Ted, putting me in this intolerable position. If I had lots of money, I’d just buy my way out. I know just what I want & want to do. I made a roast beef potato & corn dinner, with apple cake today, had the bank manager’s* handsome 14 year-old son & a schoolfriend in---they’d had Ted’s poems in class. They were charming. I dearly love the people I know in town, but they are no life. I am itching for museums, language study, intellectual & artistic friends. I am well-liked here, in spite of my weirdness, I think, though of course everybody eventually comes round to “Where is Mr. Hughes.” I hate Ted with a passion. Years of my life wasted while he knew, even in London, what he was going to do! I am appalled. If only I could earn enough to buy myself into a London flat! I have so much writing in me, the children are a kind of torture when on my neck all day. If I get a good girl, a good nanny, permanent, I can have my own life too. I adore the babies & am glad to have them, even though now they make my life fantastically difficult. If I can just financially get through this year, I should have time to get a good nanny, & even a London flat. The worst difficulty is that Ted is at the peak of his fame & all his friends are the one’s who employ me. But I can manage that too. Had a lovely afternoon out with the children, mowing the lawn, Frieda playing with the cats & a stick & Nick laughing wildly at them all. He is a sunshine; Frieda gets awfully whiney, but that is because of the big changes. Let me know roughly when & for how long Warren & Maggie can come next spring, so I can start planning a rota of guests!
Love to all,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Sunday 21 October 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 21, 1962
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
Since I last wrote you, everything has blown up, blown apart, and settled in new and startling places. I wrote you in a state of crisis---when Ted’s poems told me what he hadn’t the guts to tell me and had lied blue to keep me from knowing, that he was madly in love with another woman & will probably become her 4th husband. What has astounded me is my reaction to his departure---for good, last week, and to my decision to get a divorce as fast as I can. I felt the most fantastic exhilaration & relief. I understand now what you meant about being in my own womb, my own primal cave. I was so far gone in I was cow-dumb. In the last 3 years I have produced & nursed for 10 & 6 months respectively, two children, had a miscarriage, and been so intrigued & delighted by my bodily processes & infants I have been out for the count. Also, my relation to Ted was in many, many ways, gravely regressed, more & more I was calling on him to be a father & hating myself for it. After I drove him to the station with his things, I returned to the empty house expecting to be morbid and huge with gloom. I was ecstatic. My life, my sense of identity, seemed to be flying back to me from all quarters, buried hidden places. I knew what I wanted to do, pretty much who I was, where I wanted to go, who I wanted see, even just how, when I get to a good London haircutter, I wanted to do my weird hair. I was my own woman.
My sex confidence suffered a hard blow---it is not easy to face a gossipy professional world in which my husband’s best friends are my employers and know they all know I have been deserted and for whom and under what conditions. But I go up to record a long poem for the BBC next week & will start announcing the divorce. I am happy about it, very very happy & this will come through. I have enough energy to manage fallout, escaped Dartmoor convicts,* etc. for a lifetime. All during my 6 years of marriage I wondered what to write about, my poems seemed to me like fantastical stuffed birds under bell jars.* Now I get up at 4 a.m. every morning when my sleeping pill wears off & write like fury till 8, stuffing the babes with rusks & juice. I am doing a poem a day, all marvelous, free, full songs. Every thing I read about, hear, see, experience or have experienced is on tap, like a wonderful drink. I can use everything. I think my marriage, though it had much good, was a pretty sick one.
Ted has reverted to pretty much what he was when I met him---“the greatest seducer in Cambridge”,* only now it is “the world”, he wants to be an “international catalyst”. Even in love with this barren ad agency writer who commands a huge salary & puts it all on her back, he picks up Finns in coffee bars & takes them to hotels---he & this Assia are such a perfect match I laugh in my guts when I think of them married. They look exactly alike: the same color, shape, everything. She is his twin sister, & like his sister, barren, uncreative, a real vamp. All sophistication. They smoke (Ted, a nonsmoker, has been desperately practising) & drop names of the opposite sex, to titillate each other. They will be elaborately unfaithful to each other, very rich, & have no children, I presume, if her 2 abortions & 4 miscarriages can let me have this satisfaction.
I suppose it will be hell for me to meet them together at my first party or literary affair. But I will. Oddly, I think some day she & I may be friends, not friends, but speaking. Ted says she has got my book out of the library, adores my work, etc. etc., & although both of them behaved like bitch & bastard in this, she at least had the guts to tell her husband at the end how serious things were. Ted had planned to simply desert me, without address, without money & without explanation. His stay here before the final departure almost killed me. I have never felt such hate. He told me openly he wished me dead, it would be convenient, he could sell the house, take all the money & Frieda, told me I was brainless, hideous, had all sorts of flaws in making love he had never told me, and even two years ago he had not wanted to live with me. I was aghast at this last---why then, stick me in Devon (his “dream”) in a huge house with grounds needing a full-time gardener, away from all culture, movies, plays, art shows, museums, libraries, brainy & smart people, with two babies, then desert and cut off the money! Why in God’s name should the killing of me be so elaborate, and the torture so prolonged! It will be at least a year before I can muster a flat in London---I love living there, all the good free schools & the best doctors are there, and the people, the events I want. He told me in London it was death to him, got me down here hand-hemming curtains & painting furniture for a year hoping to see him radiant with what he wanted, & he seemed to be, then pouf! Two years of hypocrisy, just waiting for the right bed to fall in? I can’t believe it. It just seems insane to me.
Ted is on the brink of real wealth. His mss. sell for $100 a poem, just the handwriting. He is at the peak of fame. I was scrimping 6 years for this, balancing check books, dying for first nights, trips, dresses & a nanny. His family wants him to give us nothing. He has left me no address, I have no word, & no sign he means to live up to his pledge of £1,000 a year. I hope time may mellow him toward the children, but I doubt it. His ethic is that of the hawk in one of his most famous poems, being taught to all British schoolchildren: I kill where I please, it is all mine. He was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!
Just tell me where all this hate comes from? He says he thinks I am “dangerous” toward him now. Well, I should think so!
I see, too, that domesticity was a fake cloak for me. My trouble is that I can do an awful lot of stuff well. I can give a floor a beautiful scrub, cook a fine pie, deliver a baby with ease, and stitch up a nightgown. I also love hanging out a clean laundry in the apple orchard. But I hate doing housework all, or much of the time. I have been running a 103 fever out of sheer mad excitement with my own writing. I am ravenous for study, experience, travel. I love learning how to manage things---I have kept bees this year, my own hive, & am very proud of my bottled honey, & my stings. I am learning to ride horseback & the riding mistress is delighted, I am a natural. My mind is dying of starvation here. And I am tied by nothing but money. And the sense my husband wants to kill me by cutting it off altogether, so I am hogtied & can’t work. It’s enough to make any woman sail to Lesbos!*
What I don’t want is a nice, safe, dull, sweet reliable husband to take Ted’s place. He has to marry again---who’ll cook? And what a showpiece for looks he’s got! But me. My independence, my self, is so dear to me I shall never bind it to anyone again. Most men who are domestic are dull---I hate routine jobs, and most men who are creative or scientific miracles are bastards. I don’t mind knowing a bastard, or having an affair with a bastard, I just don’t want to be married to a bastard. I suppose it sounds as if I think all men are bastards, I don’t, but the interesting ones I would rather have as either friends, lovers or both, than husbands. Faithfulness, the ethic of faithfulness, is essentially boring. I see that. Ted made much better love while he was having these other affairs, & the tart in me appreciated this. But I also just haven’t the time to be married to a philanderer. That bores me too. There is so much else besides sex. I want my career, my children, and a free supple life. I hate this growing-pot as much as Ted did.
I guess I haven’t really been “cured”. I seem to have acted, in a different key, my mother’s relation with my father---and my joy in “getting rid” of Ted is a dangerous one. I don’t think I could bear living forever with one man, or even for long with one. I like being alone too much, being my own boss. I am not attracted to women physically, although I do admire beauty---I say that is the novelist in me & maybe it is. By brains and variety & I hope a slowly learned subtlety, I have to make up for the looks I haven’t got, but I am so happy, everything intrigues me, I have become a verb, instead of an adjective. It is as if this divorce were the key to free all my repressed energy, which is fierce from six years of boiling in a vacuum. I still am very interested in other men, or rather, after 6 years of having only one man attract me as much as Ted---what I wouldn’t give to see him now!---I am again interested in other men, but few men are both beautiful physically, tremendous lovers & creative geniuses as Ted is. I can’t even imagine anybody ever making me feel passionate enough to have an affair, after him. And I am so bloody proud & particular. Well anyway, if I can only crawl back to a niche in London I should have enough men friends & enjoy dinners, plays, the peripherals.
One thing this has intensified is my dislike of my mother. She has identified so completely with me or what she thinks is me, which is really herself, that she can’t eat, sleep etc. What I see now I despise about my mother is her cravenness. Her wincing fear, her martyr’s smile. Never has she taken a bold move, she has always stuck quietly in one place, hoping noone would notice. Her letters to me are full of “one can’t afford one enemy”, “the world needs happy writing”. Basta! If I couldn’t afford an enemy, I couldn’t afford to live, & what the person from Belsen wants to hear is that someone else has been there, and knows the worst, too, that he is not a freak, not alone. Not that the birdies still go tweet-tweet.
When I get a good nanny my life will be possible. When I get back to London, & maybe some money, it will be heaven. I love you for listening. Each of your letters is so rich, they last like parables. Shall get the Fromm book.*
With love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Fainlight
Monday 22 October 1962 |
TLS, Ruth Fainlight |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 22, 1962
Dearest Ruth,
I have been meaning for so long to answer your lovely, long fat letter. My riding mistress (I am learning to ride!) has been spinning me the most marvelous tales of her wartime life in Algeria & North Africa so that, with your description of your heaven, I would give my good thumbs, or whatever, to fly to you this winter, even for a week. If I should have a stroke of luck, meaning selling a very long poem or something, would you consider it mad---just me?
The Elm poem has had a kindly fate. The New Yorker just took it. I thought it astoundingly bloody & morbid for them, but they took it, only they made me leave off the dedication---for them---because they said it looked as if you & I had a secret & they didn’t want their readers to feel left out! So I shall have to postpone our secret to my 2nd book, in which your name will be blazed. It is your poem.
My next news may make you sit down. I am getting a divorce from Ted. I write you in confidence, and as a sister-mother-muse-friend. I know you & Alan must have all sorts of wonderful and famous friends, but to me you are the dearest couple I knew in England. You can imagine, Ruth, after our talk about less-famous, or even infamous wives of famous husbands, how I automatically assume that all “our” friends will now of course be just Ted’s friends. I hope that with us it is not so. I am very happy about the divorce, it is as if life were being restored to me. The details, however, are very unsavoury.
A week after I almost died of influenza this summer Ted took the opportunity of telling me he had never had the courage to say he didn’t want children, that the house in the country (his “dream”, for which he got me to leave the life in London I loved) was a sort of hoax, and bye-bye. His family wrote how lucky I was to be able to earn my whole (!) living at home instead of having to put the children in an orphanage & go out to work for a boss. Ted told me I could economize by not drinking sherry, smoking, eating expensive meat & that the children could learn to “live like the people”. I guess you and Alan know what that is like. And also just how much the odd poem brings in. I guess this is just one step in the path of poetic genius, but being temporarily stuck in deep country with a running fever of 103°, two babies, no help, and the threat of no money---and none of the cultural life, movies, plays, art shows, museums, libraries, people which I so loved in London, & Ted in London, spending his very considerable income on himself, is enough to drive me up the wall. It will be probably a year before I can work myself & the babes back to a London flat where I can get a live-in nanny (so I can work!), none want to live here in cow land, and right now, after this year of hand-hemming curtains for Ted’s dream house & producing a son he never bothered to tell me he would promptly desert, a year seems one long, unending limbo.
Well, so much for this mother in me. The writer is delighted. I am up at 4 a.m. every morning when my sleeping pill wears off, madly writing a poem a day before breakfast and the babies wake. I am engaging a local nurse, home from London hospital, for about six weeks, after two agency “nannies” came & went, to help me in the day so I can try to finish the second novel. There is not enough money, of course, for me to move very far. I have provisionally let a cottage on the wild sea of Galway in Ireland where I am thinking of wintering with the babies. I’d have to milk cows, draw well water, burn & cook on the lovely peaty turves, but I think I might get back my health. I have to have a chest Xray, with these fevers & rather shocking loss of weight. I feel you & Alan will be able to imagine pretty much what sort of a life it is. In London, I could have a nanny, free lance work, writing time, good free schools, & all the people & events I could wish. You can imagine how I feel about Ted watching us invest everything in this place, he writing glowing letters about it, and then quite coolly saying plenty of children get along without fathers and are poor etc. and walking out for good.
If you know anyone among your friends who might like to rent this very comfortable place for three months this winter or, more important, for half a year or more starting next fall, do let me know. Maybe when you are back in London yourselves you could keep an eye out for me for a furnished London flat in your area that would hold me, the babes & a nanny or au pair girl. I know flats are fantastically hard to get, & from outside London an impossibility, but I must get back. Maybe you will have a friend who wants to sub-let. Anyway, do promise to come for a visit, all of you, and lovely David, who will probably be having wrestling matches with Nick, who is a real bruiser now, as soon as you can on your return next spring. I shall probably return with the daffodils & stay the summer, when the great cold & emptiness of my beautiful Malmaison is not so noticeable.
Psychologically, Ruth, I am fascinated by the polarities of muse-poet and mother-housewife. When I was “happy” domestically I felt a gag down my throat. Now that my domestic life, until I get a permanent live-in girl, is chaos, I am living like a spartan, writing through huge fevers & producing free stuff I had locked in me for years. I feel astounded & very lucky. I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart, but that is not so, the muse has come to live, now Ted is gone, and my God! what a sweeter companion.
Please do write. My one communication with the outer world at the moment is by mail, and your letters so dear. Tell me what you are thinking, doing, looking at. What is Alan writing? When will you come home, and will it be to the London flat? I am dying to see you, & if any of the financial grimness of my life lets up before you return, would so love to fly out for a short visit. But that, I guess, is just a dream right now.
Love to you, Alan & David,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 23 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
Tuesday: October 23
Dear mother,
Please forgive my grumpy sick letters of last week. The return of my fever, the hideous nanny from whom I expected help, and my awareness of the “Hughes position” combined to make me feel the nadir had been reached. Now everything is, by comparison, almost miraculous. I hardly dare breathe. Winifred found me the prettiest, sweetest local children’s nurse, age 22, who lives in the most gorgeous house at Belstone, just overlooking Dartmoor, who is coming in days until she goes back in December to be staff nurse at a famous children’s hospital in central London. She has been here two days, from 8:30-6, and the difference in my life is a wonder. I think she will go to Ireland & see me settled in. With her it would be a lark. I see now just what I need---not a professional nanny (who are snotty & expensive) but an adventurous young cheerful girl (to whom my life & travel would be fun) to take complete care of the children, eat with me, at midday---an “au pair” girl, as they say here. “One of the family”. I shall try to get an Irish one when I am in Ireland, then maybe a foreign one (preferably German so she can teach me the language!) if I get back to London next fall. This girl is the daughter of the local secretary of the Bee Keeper’s Society, a lovely woman with a gorgeous home, and her step-father is a writer of children’s books! How’s that for luck! I love Susan O’Neill-Roe, she is a dear with the children. I come down & cook us a big hot lunch and we & Frieda eat together in the playroom. Then I lie down for an hour’s nap. I make a pot of tea in midafternoon & chat over a cup. O it is ideal. And Nancy does the cleaning. I am so happy & doing so much work, just in these two days,* I can hardly believe it. My study is the warmest, brightest room in the house. After Susan goes in the evening, I come up with a tray of supper & work again, surrounded by books, photos, cartoons & poems pinned to the wall.
I have put my house deeds in our local bank, under my name, with Ted’s life insurance policy & the fire insurance policy. The bank managers beautiful 14-year old son, a friend & the b-m’s little daughter came Sunday to see Ted’s works, helped me translate a Latin children’s book I had on Ferdinand the Bull,* to review, and utterly delighted me over apple cake & milk. I am having a heater put in the car, & shall now start all my arrangements for the formidable trip to Galway through the AA.
Susan is coming up overnight while I go to London for a few days next week---to record a poem for the BBC, to see Mr. Moore I hope (I’ve written him), and, hopefully, the head of the British Arts Council who has just put an exciting job in my way. There is to be another big Poetry Festival* in London this July at the Royal Court Theater (a big famous adventurous theatre) for a week. I’ve been asked to organise, present and take part in the American night! It means I’d have to be an actress-hostess of sorts. A fantastic challenge---me, on the professional stage, in London. But I think I shall undertake it. By next spring I should have managed to come up with a live-in girl, & this Arts Council man I think will help throw a few jobs my way when he knows my predicament & sees I am willing to tackle everything. Don’t you think I should do it?
O the package came today, too! How wonderful. I am mad for Nick’s fuzzy red pants. And the blue sweater set! Thank Dot a billion times. And the pastels, both sorts. O mother, I shall find time to use them too. I must be one of the most creative people in the world. I must keep a live-in girl so I can get myself back to the live, lively, always learning & developing person I was! I want to study, learn history, politics, languages, travel. I want to be the most loving & fascinating mother in the world. London, a flat, is my aim, and I shall, in spite of all the obstacles that rear, have that, and Frieda & Nick shall have the intelligences of the day as their visitors, and I the Salon that I will deserve. I am glad this happened and happened now. I shall be a rich active woman, not a servant-shadow as I have been. I am so glad to have SHIP OF FOOLS.* I have been dying to read it. I shall bring it for wild, wet nights in Ireland.
Now do write Winifred and thank her a thousand times for obtaining this girl for me at the most difficult & necessary period of my life! I feel this London trip will do me a power of good---I shall cram in every film & play I can! To think that bastard Ted has been secretly doing this all summer & spending everything, & me stuck home, scrimping! It just makes me boil. I should love to use your birthday check on a Chagford dress.* I want some of those hair-grips---copper, or wood, a curved oval, with a kind of pike through it, for the back of my hair, & to get the front cut in a professional fringe, so the front looks short & fashionable & I can have a crown of braid or chignon at the back. I shall have to take all my hems up. Almost all my clothes are 10 years old! Just wait till I hit London. Ted may be a genius, but I’m an intelligence. He’s not going to stop that. I’ve taken my first lot of the vitamins---a thousand thanks.
Love to Dot, Warren & Maggie too
sivvy.
TO Eric Walter White
Tuesday 23 October 1962 |
TLS, University of Texas at Austin |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
October 23, 1962
Dear Eric,
I am writing you in the same post that I am writing Patric Dickinson* to say how interested I am in the American evening at the Royal Court this July and proposing to see him to discuss the organizing, which I am on the fence about, but certainly interested in.
What I wonder, Eric, is if you and dear Dodo could possibly put me up on the night of Monday, October 29th. I know you mentioned you might do this when the Sweeneys were here, which is why I ask. I’m recording a long poem at the BBC Monday, and having to stay over on business, and just have no place to sleep. Please do say if you have guests, or children in residence! I’d probably try to take in a movie or a play, as I am starved for these things, after a year of enforced exile from my beloved city, and would just sleep quietly if you had the odd corner.
In any case, I would dearly love to see you & Dodo again. I may have to stay till Wednesday. I have no phone, though I’m having one put in, but a letter reaching me by Saturday should do it. I’ll be in London by Monday at 10:30 am & recording till noon.
Fondest regards to you both.
Sylvia
TO Michael Carey*
Tuesday 23 October 1962 |
TLS, Assumption College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
October 23, 1962
Dear Reverend Carey,
Please do forgive me for not answering your letter sooner, but I have been laid low by influenza on my small farm with two very small children, so my correspondence has suffered as a result.
I should be very happy to have a look at your poems. The one thing I can’t promise is to tell you whether or not to go on writing! If you enjoy it, do it, and fine! “Success” or publishing should be no guide as to whether you should write or not, your own feelings must tell you that. I shall certainly tell you frankly what I think is good and less good in your work. But do go on drinking with the gods and goddesses at Pieria in any case!
And if you ever care for lesser fare, in the form of a cup of tea, while in England, do feel welcome at the above address (half an hour from Exeter by train) until December at least, after which date I shall be trying to finish a novel in the wilds of Western Ireland.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 25 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Thursday: October 25
Dear mother,
Thank you for your last letter. This time I shall accept the much-traveled $50 as a birthday present! I shall buy a dress, have my “fringe” cut & get a copper hair thong instead of my elastic!* I shall try & do this in London next week, so you can imagine me having fun. I have a lovely 2 days planned---recording at the BBC in the morning Monday, an afternoon reading all my new poems to the famous critic & Observer (big Sunday paper) poetry editor,* probably an evening party at a Literary Society to celebrate an anthology I’m in* & of which Ted was one of the 3 editors. I have to get used to seeing him---and whoever is with him---at literary affairs, so may as well start now. The next morning, a meeting about the Royal Court Theatre American Poetry Night next summer, then lunch & a recording* for the Harvard Poetry Library, then home. Susan O’Neill-Roe will be staying over those nights, the children love her. Since she has come, my life has been a joy.
For goodness sake, stop being so frightened of everything, Mother! Almost every other word in your letter is “frightened”! One thing I want my children to have is a bold sense of adventure, not the fear of trying something new. I have a beautifully furnished, cosy cottage in Ireland, near the sea, but very secluded, & the woman is a friend of the poet we visited this summer. Too, I have a young couple with 2 children within driving distance, he a painter & she a lovely American. So I shall be as well off as here. The winter couldn’t be any worse than here, & if I chained myself to my Bendix I would never see the world. So do forget all your nervous worries. I hope to get an Irish girl to help me days over there, and, if I like one, to take her back with me. Susan will make the trip over with me, so that will be fun. So do stop dreading everything. I am having a wonderful time. You better get some sleeping pills if you’re up at 2 a.m. Now Susan comes, I get up at 7. I eat an egg for breakfast every day, or bacon & bread, a big hot meal at lunch, and nourishing soup & sandwich at night. Probably a lot more than you do!
My health, with this young girl here, is rapidly returning. I have no cough at all, and no fever. I hope, when I am in London next fall, to get a German “au pair” girl from an agency recommended by that sweet Catherine Frankfort---do you remember her? I had a letter from her today, telling me about her German au pair girls, and she asked to be remembered to you, she says she remembers you so vividly. I look very forward to trying, through various friends, to get a London furnished flat next fall & taking up old friends & making new. I could get all sorts of free lance jobs if I lived in London during the school year & vacationed here in summer. I have quite a reputation over here, my whole professional life is here. The nice local woman I had in 9 hours a week before Susan, comes now on Susan’s day off---very convenient.* On my birthday, if it’s nice, I’ll be at my horseback riding lesson---I’m “rising to the trot” very well now, tell Dotty & Nancy, they’ll know what I mean! My riding mistress thinks I’m very good.
Forget about the novel & tell no-one of it. It’s a pot-boiler & just practice.
I am immensely moved by Warren & Maggie being willing to uproot themselves to help, and so glad this won’t in any way be necessary! They are just darling, & I hope they’ll come for a holiday next spring. Do let me know as soon as possible when & how long I can plan on it!
Now stop trying to get me to write about “decent courageous people”---read the Ladies Home Journal for those! It’s too bad my poems frighten you---but you’ve always been afraid of reading or seeing the world’s hardest things---like Hiroshima, the Inquisition or Belsen. I believe in going through & facing the worst, not hiding from it. That is why I am going to London this week, partly, to face all the people we know & tell them happily & squarely I am divorcing Ted, so they won’t picture me as a poor, deceived country wife. I am not going to steer clear of these professional acquaintances just because they know I am deserted, or because I may meet Ted with someone else. I am now so glad to get rid of him I shall just laugh.
Mr. Moore wired that he is leaving London before I come, but my life is working out so well, & my solicitor is helpful, so I really don’t need him now. I look forward to the directions of the Taroc pack. Frieda wore the new little plaid skirt today with a red sweater & red tights---she looked adorable! She loves her crayon book & scribbles in it happily. “Grammy send crayons,” she says.
Now don’t you all feel helpless any more. I am helped very much by letters, the birthday checks. If Ted gives me £1,000 I shall manage very well, with just an “au pair”, the car & his insurance to pay. And my holidays. The insurance, if I pay, will come to me at the end, like a pension, so I think it’s wise, if high. About 25 thousand $ I think at the end of 30 years counting the interest! & 15 thousand $ if Ted dies before this.
Love to all,
Sivvy
TO Clarissa Roche
Thursday 25 October 1962 |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
October 25, 1962
Dearest Clarissa,
Your sweet letter arrived today, & this is just a note to say things are calming down here, with a temporary darling children’s nurse coming in days to help with the babes, & life has been heaven since she started coming. She’ll be with me through my trip to Western Ireland in early December, where I am wintering with the children. She is going on holiday from November 15-20, so could you & Paul come for a couple of days in about then? Looking forward to your company is a great treat. I am in fine spirits, if understandably furious to be left in the lurch with the little babes just after I almost died of flu. I think you’re quite right about ego, Clarissa. Ever since I wrote my novel for example (which Ted never read) Ted has been running down the novel as a form---something “he would never bother to write”. It seems so stupid to me, because he is undeniably a poetic genius. I am delighted to hear about Paul’s novel!* Furious criticism is just the thing to make it sell. Please bring a copy! And of the poems!* And any Sappho* you’ve got in trans. I must read her---a fellow lady poet! You are an angel, Clarissa, just write & say when you can come! We’re (North Tawton Station*) 4 hours from Waterloo & I’ll meet you in the car at our station.
Love to all,
Sylvia
*It’s half an hour beyond Exeter.
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Thursday 25 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 25, 1962
Dear, dear Mrs. Prouty!
How I appreciate your great kindness and concern! And your letters, they are best of all. I only hope mother did not worry you too much. I was at what I truly believe was a nadir when I wrote her---with a fever, a terrible agency nanny, an old snoopy grumbly woman who scared the children into screaming fits by her crossness & whom I had to dismiss almost immediately, and then the news that Ted’s family is all behind him & considers me & the babies a bother! Since I wrote, my blessed local midwife has found me the dearest local girl, a 22-year-old children’s nurse, who is coming in from 8:30 a.m to 6 p.m. daytimes and taking complete charge of the children, who love her, and going to Ireland with us before she returns to be staff nurse at a famous children’s hospital in London in mid-December. This is a godsend to me, I have been working hard & happily since her coming, cooking a big, hearty dinner at noon which she & little Frieda & I eat in the playroom . . . you remember, where we ate when you were here.
I do so appreciate your generous offer to take care of her salary, but she is only $15 a week, and I can easily manage that from my latest New Yorker poem. If Ted gives us the £1,000 a year he promised, my own earnings should take good care of the rest. I am going to London for two days this next week to do some work, while this young nurse stays overnight with the babies. I have some very exciting projects, I’ll tell you what they are.
Monday morning I am recording a long poem for the BBC (they will pay my expenses going & coming). That afternoon A. Alvarez, the top poetry critic in England and poetry editor for the Observer (the big Sunday paper here, twin to the Times) will hear me read all my new poems aloud at his home! He is a great opinion-maker & says I am the first woman poet he has taken seriously since Emily Dickinson! That evening I shall go to a literary party to celebrate a poetry anthology I am in, & which Ted was one of the 3 editors of. He will probably be there, and with someone else, but I must get used to meeting him at these literary gatherings & braving it out, or I shall lose all sorts of professional opportunities. Luckily my love for him has been completely killed by his actions this last year, so it will only be hard “socially”, not emotionally. Tuesday I shall meet an official on the British Arts Council who has invited me to organize & produce an American Poetry Night next summer at the Royal Court Theatre, one of the biggest theatres in London. I would have to be “produced” like a professional actress, but think I should take up the challenge. Then I make a recording of poems for the Harvard Lamont Library. Then Home!
I shall let you know as soon as my phone is in! I would love to hear the voices of my dear ones & feel a bit closer a bit faster than on these air letter forms! I see now I need not a nanny---they are very snobby & status-seeking here, always after Majors & Royalty---but a “mother’s help”, a cheerful, intelligent girl who isn’t above doing dishes & who will be like a lively younger sister for me. I am feeling so much better since this young nurse has been coming---eating with appetite, managing all the mountains of business letters, organizing my coming London trip. My cough and fever are quite gone. I feel, with health, I can face anything, and am in excellent spirits. This nurse is so capable & sweet!
My study has become a haven, a real sanctuary for me! I have late poppies, bright red, & blue-purple cornflowers on my desk now, & plan to make curtains of a kind of rich red-purply stained glass pattern to match the rug. Here is my hearth, my life, my real self. I have never been so happy anywhere in my life as writing at my huge desk in the blue dawns, all to myself, secret and quiet.* I know you will understand this---this quiet center at the middle of the storm. If I have this, the rest of my life will settle into pleasant lines. Now I have 40 children’s picture books to review! I shall forge my writing out of these difficult experiences---to have known the bottom, whether mental or emotional is a great trial, but also a great gift. That is why I feel that when writing to you, I am writing to a sort of literary godmother, a person who will really, deeply understand. I know you will feel as proud of my independence as I am. Do keep writing! I love your letters.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Warren & Margaret Plath
Thursday 25 October 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme, photocopy), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
October 25: Thursday
Dearest Warren & Maggie,
Just a short letter to say how immensely grateful I was to feel you both so thoroughly behind me that you would consider uprooting your lives for our sake! Thank goodness it won’t in any way be advisable or necessary! My main setback was having this awful shock---of Ted’s desertion---come the week after my influenza with no time or energy to do all I had to do to keep going on a day-to-day basis, let alone cope with the endless practical ruins that ass left behind him. Ever since the 22-year-old children’s nurse Susan O’Neill-Roe has been coming days from 8:30 to 6, my life has been heaven. I get up about 7 a.m., have an egg for breakfast, then go up and work, coming down at noon to make a big hot meal for Susan, Frieda & me, which we eat sitting in the cheery playroom. Then work, after an hour’s rest, a cup of tea with Susan, and before I know it the babies are in bed & I feel wonderful. I see now what I need is known as an “au pair” girl over here, they are very cheap---and a London friend of mine recommends Germans as, she says, they are usually plain, fat (thus on a diet!) and studious, thus in a their rooms a lot! I want to apply for one so I can also speak, or practise, German with her. Nannies are out. They are snob-status-seekers of the worst sort here, very expensive, & won’t touch “domestic” work, i.e. dishes etc. My trouble, of course, is living in the country. I’m sure summer in the country might appeal, but young girls want London, education etc. So do I! I would like an educated girl---they charge so little because they want to be “one of the family”, & my life should be exciting enough, if I could get a furnished flat for the school year in London, to keep such a girl happy. So at least I know what I want (I didn’t, before) and at what agency I can get it! I would never hire a girl without a careful extensive interview. This last sight-unseen nanny was the end, my Lord, of almost all of us, including my faithful Nancy Axworthy! And the one before her, good as she was, found the post “unsuitable” because of no cook, butler, TV etc. etc. & went from me to the Astors, so you can imagine what sort of a house she wanted!
This coming two-day London trip has set me up like a tonic. I’ve not had a treat to myself for over a year! As I’ve written mother today, I’m recording for the BBC Monday & Harvard Lamont Library Tuesday, have an interview about this American Poetry Night at a London theatre next summer, which I’m considering organising & presenting---a terrific challenge, I’d have to be “produced” like an actress, but I don’t think I should let such chances slip, & then the critic of the Observer is giving me an afternoon at his home to hear me read all my new poems! He is the opinion-maker in poetry over here, A. Alvarez, & says I’m the first woman poet he’s taken seriously since Emily Dickinson! Needless to say, I’m delighted.
Now can you possibly get mother to stop worrying so much? Her letters are full of worries, & to hear she can’t sleep after 2 a.m. etc. etc. is no help to me, only an additional worry. I do think I have adjusted to very unpleasant circumstances very fast, considering I was ten down with flu, & am now very busy, but fine, knowing just where I want to go. I have a gorgeous plush house hired in Ireland, much cosier, smaller & easier to manage than this, sheltered, with a lovely woman, the owner, in a cottage next door & willing to babysit & help shop etc. She is a long acquaintance of this poet we sailed with. And also a couple with 2 babies within driving distance whom I like very much, the wife an American, the husband a successful painter & friend of Jack Sweeney, who took us out for oysters & Guinness in Dublin. Mother is so anxious about new steps she is always after me to stay put & be safe. It is very important for me to make new discoveries now, & I am very stable & practical & cautious & thoroughly investigated this house & surroundings before hiring it. I need to get away from here for a change, after the hell of this summer, and am lucky to have such a delightful place fall into my lap. As I said to mother, winter can’t at the North Pole be worse than here! Do let me know roughly when & for how long you both can come next spring. I’d so love to leave the babies with a girl, if I’ve got one, & go to Austria or somewhere with you. I’ve not had a holiday on my own for two years, & as you may imagine, after these events, the court trial ahead heaven knows when, & Ted able to be sticky or “forget” about money whenever he feels like it, I shall need a holiday on my own, preferably with two lovely people like you! I adore you both, have the gorgeous wedding picture on my desk where I can see it as I work. Do write.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
<on page 1 of letter>
PS: Hope my letters to you at “Bauks” Street arrived! It sounded like a sort of odd squawky place to live! Is Banks right?*
TO Eric Walter White
Friday 26 October 1962 |
TLS, University of Texas at Austin |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
October 26, 1962
Dear Eric,
You and Dodo are perfectly wonderful to take me on Monday night. I am so eager and excited about coming up to my beloved London after my more or less enforced purdah in the West Country, and very much intrigued by your new move.* I love Islington, and I think it must be heaven to live there. I know I would greatly wish to live there.
I am jamming all sorts of literary business into Monday and Tuesday, so should not be bothering you till probably early Monday evening. I will call you Monday afternoon to make sure all is well. I’m hoping to do a BBC recording, a recording for the Harvard Library at Albion House,* and to see Patric Dickinson.
All my best to you and Dodo, and I’ll be ringing you Monday afternoon.
With much gratitude,
Sylvia
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Friday 2 November 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
November 2, 1962
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
Thank you for your wonderful letter which arrived today. Your letters are a wonderful life-line. My phone is in: the number is NORTH TAWTON 447. I faced the most difficult time this week in London---did my recordings, then went to a literary party and faced everybody, all the malicious questions, the gloating nastiness that is part of the gossip world. Everybody is delighted at what Ted has done---he is so famous, and all I can do is face the spotlight with dignity, not hide. I felt it was best to get it over with at once---as many people as I could. Being the wife of the most famous poet in England is not easy, but I felt I did best to see the lot of people at once. I simply say I am very happy about the divorce because it frees me for a life of writing in peace. They are disappointed, because they expect me to be full of revenge & frustration. Slowly, I hope, the furore will die away. You are absolutely right about the need for me to strike London now. Ireland was an evasion. I am now in the process of trying to get a furnished flat in London big enough for me, the babies & and au pair girl for the winter months. After this dear nurse goes, I shall not be able to get live-in help here, so I must go to London for this. I go up again this week to flat-hunt. I don’t care how awkward it is, as long as I have a girl to mind the babes so I can just sit and meditate, & write.* In spring, I would like to return to my beautiful home---with an au pair girl---for the summer. What I hope to do this winter is get an unfurnished London flat on a long lease for next year, one I really like, in Hampstead. As a London home so the children can go to the fine free schools there (the schools here are awful), saving Court Green for holidays & summers. I would slowly furnish the London flat out of 2nd hand things, then let it at high weekly rates for the summer. There is no trouble renting a furnished flat out in London. I hope to work on writing all this winter so I can amass a sum to buy the lease---they do things on leases a lot here, long leases, not just buying outright. You are a guardian angel to send a check for a mother’s help. I have such difficult things to face this year it will be my salvation to just sit at my desk in peace, gathering the force of my soul, beginning all anew, all over.
I must have Nicholas’ eye operated on some time,* it is a bit skew, or crossed, they tell me, so want to be in London for this too. I also badly cut my thumb and the country doctor here, fool that he is, botched it, so the top is dead, did not mend, & it is septic, so I have an appointment with my old London doctors next week, to see if I will need anything drastic like cutting or plastic surgery. This young nurse I love with all my heart. She knows everything, & has stood by me like an angel, & will move to London with me, instead of Ireland if I can get a flat, till early December.
I am so delighted with this nurse: I went to a movie with her & her nice mother last night, a foreign movie, as their guest. I realized I had not seen a movie or a play (except for that lovely night with you) for over a year! How wise you are to talk about postponing the Ireland trip! I shall only go now as a last resort, if I can’t find a London flat. It seems there is a kind of telepathy between us, for I had just decided that I must have the courage to return to London now, when it is most difficult, or I will find it harder & harder, & be more & more outside the literary business circle. If I face a return now, I can face anything. And nothing could be harder, so it must, of necessity, get easier.
The Observer critic thought my poems were marvellous & took two on the spot.* I feel I am writing in the blitz, bombs exploding all round. I have seen the man about the American Poetry night at the Theatre in London & will do it. I don’t care how hard it is, I shall do it. I am very excited. I want to shirk nothing. To flee nothing. I have bad times, of course, when I feel grim, but have all sorts of ways to cheer myself. Don’t tell mother, but I smoke now. It is a great relief, very comforting. I was up till 3 a.m. last night doing a book review of the Diary of Opal Whiteley,* an Oregon child of the backwoods, written at 6 & published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1920 as “The Journal of an Understanding Heart”*---do you remember it? She had a crude, cruel mother & claimed to be descended from French royalty. A beautiful book, all about her animals & country life. I’ll send you a copy of the review when it comes out---it’s like being back at Smith, working for deadlines! I need hard work & love it. I love you too. Writing & my babies are my life, & you understand both with the heart of a kindred spirit.
With much love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 7 November 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
London: November 7
Dear mother,
I am writing from London, so happy I can hardly speak. I think I have found a place. I had resigned myself to paying high sums for a furnished place for the winter while I looked for an unfurnished one with a longish lease that I could then furnish & let for fabulous rates in spring & summer while I was at Court Green. By an absolute fluke I walked by the street & the house (with Primrose Hill at the end) where I’ve always wanted to live. The house had builders in & a sign “Flats to Let”; I flew upstairs---Just right (unfurnished), on 2 floors with 3 bedrooms upstairs, & lounge, kitchen & bath downstairs and a balcony garden! Flew to the agents---hundreds of people ahead of me, I thought, as always. It seems I have a chance! And guess what, it is W. B. Yeats’ house. With a blue plaque* over the door saying he lived there! And in the district of my old doctors, & in the street I would want to buy a house if I ever had a smash-hit novel. I am now waiting for the tedious approval of the owner & for my references to go through. Ted is behind me in this, he took me round looking at places. Now he sees he has nothing to fear from me---no scenes or vengefulness---he is more human. His life is nothing to me & I am now staying with a wonderful Portuguese couple, the girl a best friend of Ted’s girl friend, & they see how I am, full of interest in my own life, & are amazed, as everyone is, at my complete lack of jealousy or sorrow. I amaze myself. It is my work that does it, my sense of myself as a writer,* which Mrs. Prouty above all understands. My hours of solitude in my study are my most precious, those, & the hours I spend with my darling babies. I am, I think, & will be when I get this London flat (I hope) arranged, the happiest of women. Now I am free from Ted everybody loves me---I mean everyone I deal with. I am so happy & full of fun & ideas & love. I shall be a marvelous mother & regret nothing. I have two beautiful children & the chance, after this hard, tight year, of a fine career---schools & London in winter, Court Green, daffodils, horse-riding & the beautiful beaches for the children in summer. Pray for this flat coming thru. I would try to get a 5 year lease. Then in 5 years I hope to be rich enough to buy a house in London, rent flats at the bottom & live at the top, rent my furnished part in summers---so easy here it is a sure income. I have real business sense. I am just short of capital right now. I would be right round the corner from Catherine Frankfort etc., whom I’m so fond of, on the Hill, by the Zoo---minutes from BBC! And in the house of a famous poet, so my work should be blessed. Even if I don’t get this place I should be able to get one like it near it sooner or later. It’s about time my native luck returned! And I have, on the advice of Catherine Frankfort, applied for an au pair girl, preferably German. They get only £2 (about 5 dollars) a week plus board & room, & are students, wanting to be part of the family. They would mind the babies mornings & study at classes afternoons & babysit nights, with one day off! Just what I want---for I want to devote myself to the babies afternoons myself, take them to teas & visits & walks. Mrs. Prouty called me. I was thrilled. I am dedicating my 2nd book of poems (almost done) to Frieda & Nicholas in England. Maybe I’ll dedicate it to her in America, if it gets taken there.
I have found a fabulous hairdresser in a town next to North Tawton*---Doctor Webb’s wife, of whom I’m very fond, told me of them. I had my fringe cut just before I came up to London in the most fashionable style---high on top, curling down round the ears---and kept my long coronet in back. It looks fabulous and the cut, shampoo & set was only a dollar-fifty. From the front I look to have short hair, & from the back, a coronet. I am going to get some fancy combs & clips for the back & do away with the elastic. Ted didn’t even recognize me at the train station! My morale is so much improved---I did it on your cheque. Men stare at me in the street now, I look very weird & fashionable. Now I shall get an Xmas dress for myself with the rest of the money. I hope to be able to move up here before Xmas. I shall get toys for Frieda & Nick with your money, at Hamleys. When I appear at the Royal Court this summer I shall be a knockout. My haircut gives me such new confidence, truck drivers whistle & so on, it’s amazing. I am so happy back in London, and when I came to my beloved Primrose Hill, with the golden leaves, I was full of such joy. That is my other home, the place I am happiest in the world beside my beloved Court Green. If I get the lease now, I should be able to write for 5 years & save up to buy a house there, & then the children would have the best of both worlds. Living apart from Ted is wonderful---I am no longer in his shadow, & it is heaven to be liked for myself alone, knowing what I want. I may even borrow a table for my flat from Ted’s girl---I could be gracious to her now, & kindly. She has only her high-paid ad agency job, her vanity & no chance of children & everybody wants to be a writer, like me. I may be poor in bank funds, but I am so much richer in every other way I envy them nothing. My babies & my writing are my life & let them have affairs & parties, poof! What a bore. Love to Warren & Maggie.
Wish me luck.
Sivvy
TO W. S. Merwin
Thursday 8 November 1962 |
TLS, Pierpont Morgan Library |
Court Green
November 8, 1962
Dear Bill,
Your letter* was waiting for me tonight when I got back from London from flat-hunting & thank you so for writing. I will talk to you straight out as I always did. I want simply to say that I have loved both you & Dido dearly, with immense fondness & sensibility for our close relation in London. When I came to this August, after almost dying of influenza & being left with a high fever, no help, the 2 babies in the country to which I’d come because Ted said it was his life, & faced the practical problems, which were many, my first thought was to turn to friends who might give me a cup of coffee & some practical advice. I’d heard Frieda was a latent schizophrenic, after her shock at Ted’s disappearance & she had upsetting fits, & also the baby needed to see an eye specialist. My one thought was to get back to London where I could get free-lance jobs, good medical care & a flat. I was fantastically relieved when Ted wrote Dido was in London, for I have always admired & loved her, & my first act, after a long seige of illness & on getting to London, was to call her & ask to talk to her, because I had some worries about the babies. I called her as Frieda’s godmother & as a woman I thought would meet me, independently, in my new independence. I don’t know if you can imagine how I felt when I realized Dido was home & refused to speak to me. I was simply stunned. Ted has since told me that Dido is no friend of mine & to forget her. My one thought was---was it an illusion, an hypocrisy, all that love & friendship I thought was for me as well as Ted?
I wrote you after this, in something of horror, wanting to think that perhaps my real admiration for you & your work & just the good times we all had in London were real, that just because Dido would not speak to or see me when I was desperate for a talk from someone wise & whom I’d loved, it didn’t mean you too would simply pack your tent & walk off. Naturally you can’t see from where you are, but there are no sides to be taken. All our mutual friends, the best ones, I have re-established happy relations with for I loved them & they really loved me & I have nothing to say but that I wish Ted well & have loved him so that as long as he is happy & writing it is all I wish. What has been very sad & very hard is to feel that you & Dido alone have turned your backs & evidently feel it impossible to be friends independently. I took you so seriously as godparents for Frieda, & to be refused Dido’s voice when I was desperate to get to London & have her seen by a good child psychiatrist is something I still can hardly believe.* I now believe it, & accept it. What I cannot do is understand it. It did seem incredibly inhuman & hurtful to me. I also feel awful to think that you & Dido are of such a oneness that I must accept her act as yours, too. You ask if you could do anything to help.* The one great good thing you could do is confirm that there was a reality in our friendship & that it might independently continue. You are the only friends that our divorce has cost me, & the hardest for me to lose. Having felt so keenly, last week in London, the loss of Dido, I wanted some sign I might not have lost you. Naturally I wouldn’t think you’d hide anything from each other! I just thought you might not be the same.
As soon as I get back to London, a flat, & can start writing myself to a mother’s help & seeing friends, my life will be what I want. Domesticity always bored me, & I will simply buy myself a foreign girl, as Dido once advised, to free me for what I want to do, which is write. All I want is my own life---not to be anybody’s wife, but to be free to travel, move, work, be without check. I thought you of all people would understand this. I can’t imagine you thinking I’d want you to alter your fondness & respect for Ted when what he’s done hasn’t altered mine! I think he is a genius & the best living poet & I wish him joy. Just at the moment I’ve a lot of practical bothers, but who wouldn’t---they are slowly melting, & I may have a very lucky break about London at any moment. The stereotype of two divorced people being in two camps, & everybody having to take sides, just doesn’t work here. Ted is getting me writing jobs, I am delighted to be free of the need to crop my life to his will or that of any man, & now a London flat looms as possible after my year of intellectual purdah here in Devon, I am intensely happy.
The one mar on my happiness is my very keen sense that you & Dido, alone of all our dearest friends, have taken sides, & such extreme sides, & apparently such irrevocable ones. It just makes me feel I was an idiot to think either of you ever cared for me or my work at all. I meant to give you a poem like a loaf of bread---I don’t have anything else I can give. Ted has told me to give Dido up. Must I give you up too? Ted told me, as the friend of mine he still is, to expect nothing from her. OK. Was I wrong in thinking you were real as well? Please just say straight out. The worst is better said than left silent.
Sylvia
Please send copies of the poems when you’ve got them. My poetic judgment is still pure!
TO Eric Walter White
Wednesday 14 November 1962 |
TLS, University of Texas at Austin |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 14, 1962
Dear Eric,
Thanks so much for forwarding the letter.* You and Dodo were angels to put me up, hot bath and all. I am working very hard to have a place in London in the New Year, which would be sixth heaven in itself, and, if I get the marvelous place I’ve applied for, seventh heaven at the least. It was lovely, seeing you both so beautifully installed in your new place.
Yes, I’ll be in Devon, till I have the London address I’ve always wanted. I look very forward to planning the American Poetry night for next July, and hope I’ll have the pleasure of seeing you both again when I’m living in my blessed London once more.
Warmest regards,
Sylvia Plath
TO Howard Moss
Thursday 15 November 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), New York Public Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
November 15, 1962
Dear Mr. Moss,
Thanks very much for your letter.* I’m sending back the second section of AMNESIAC as you suggest. It really is quite independent from the first section, I think---being about the amnesiac, where the first part* is simply about the town forgotten, the Lyonnesse.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
Mr. Howard Moss
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York 36, New York
U.S.A.
P.S. Now I’ve typed it I like it much better without the first half! Thank you.
sp
TO Peter Davison
Friday 16 November 1962 |
TLS, Yale University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
November 16, 1962
Mr. Peter Davison
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
8 Arlington Street
Boston 16, Mass.
USA
Dear Peter,
I’m sending on this rather alarming wad of new stuff* and eager to have your opinion about it. As I’m rather hard up at the moment, I’d be awfully grateful if you could get a rapid hearing for these!
Best of love to you, Jane and Angus (Is it Angus?).
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 19 November 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
Monday: November 19
Dear mother,
Thanks so for your good letter. I haven’t written sooner because I have been fantastically busy. My correspondence alone would keep a full-time secretary going---I’ve had letters from physiotherapists asking for a copy of a poem about living in a Plaster Cast to read to her patients and just now a fan letter from an Australian gynecologist who heard from a “colleague in London” about my maternity ward poem for 3 voices on the BBC & wanted a copy as he’d done a lifelong study in miscarriages.* I am thrilled. The medical profession has always intrigued me most of all, & the hospital & doctors & nurses are central in all my work. I’m hoping to get my dear Susan O’Neill-Roe to take me into her Children’s Hospital when we’re both in London. Just now is “one of those weeks”---Susan has a week off in London, my local babysitter is out with flu, Nancy is moving from one house to one nextdoor & all 3 of us have colds. In spite of it, I am happier than ever before in my life. I realize now that all my married life I have sacrificed everything to Ted & his work, putting his work first, going to get part-time jobs, with great faith in his future wealth & fame. I never even got a new dress or went to a hairdresser! Now he goes out with fashion models. Well, I have finished a 2nd book of poems in this last month, 30 new poems,* & the minute I get a mother’s help in London I will do novel after novel. Even in the greatest worry & adversity, I find I have simply neglected all my own talent, & thank God I have discovered it in time to make something of it! I took Mrs. Prouty’s first check, as she said to, & went to the Jaeger shop in Exeter. It is my shop. I got an absolutely gorgeous camel suit (out of Vogue) & matching camel sweater, a black sweater, black & heavenly blue tweed skirt, duck-green cardigan, red wool skirt & in St. Ives got a big pewter bracelet, pewter hair clasp, pewter earrings & blue enameled necklace.* All my clothes dated from Smith and were yards too long & bored me to death. I am going to get a new black leather bag & gloves & shoes & just take my new things to London. I feel like a new woman in them, and go each week to have my hair shampooed & set in neighboring Winkleigh for under $1! My new independence delights me. I have learned, from Nancy, how to keep the big coal stove going in the kitchen, & it is heaven, heats all the water, dries all the clothes immediately & is like the heart of the house---even Ted couldn’t keep it going overnight, & I can keep it going for a week. I love Court Green & am going to see that gradually my dream of it comes true.
Am going to dinner with Winifred Wednesday & bringing the Taroc cards as she is having friends. Had Clarissa Roche, the American wife of a British poet teaching at Smith when I was, for the weekend with her newborn, 4th baby. Went Saturday for lunch with Susan’s parents at their gorgeous home in Belstone with Frieda and met Mark Bonham-Carter,* the handsome Liberal candidate down here (married to an American) & also director of a London publishing house. Liked him immensely. Frieda, I wish you could have seen her! In a new blue wool dress I got. Absolutely marvelous manners, sat up & ate all through the long dinner like an angel. Very polite. I love going out with her. Already she is saying “Go to London. See Zoo. See lions and baby owls.” She will love it there.
I am in an agony of suspense about the flat. I was first on the list of applicants! Already I have met an offer for £50 more a year, now they have sent out for my “references”, in other words, to solicitor, banker, accountant, to see if I can afford it. I had the uncanny feeling I had got in touch with Yeats’ spirit (He was a sort of medium himself) when I went to his tower in Ireland---I opened a book of his plays in front of Susan as a joke for a “Message” & read “Get wine & food to give you strength & courage & I will get the house ready.”* Isn’t that fantastic? I would have to get a stove, new furnishings. Then I could rent it out by the week at fantastic rates in the summer when I was at Court Green and almost cover the year’s rent! I am a real businesswoman, & if I only had capital would make a bid for the house from the owner, rent the bottom (bsement) flat, keep 3 floors for myself & rent those furnished for the half year I wasn’t there. Then I would have an income! It is so frustrating not to be able to do this! I will die if my references say I’m too poor! Living in Yeats House would be an incredibly moving thing for me. I didn’t tell you of my thumb*---it’s now healed---because Dr. Webb made an assy botch of it, it is now deformed, because he did not put a proper bandage on it or even a tape to hold the top in place, nor look at it for 10 days, just left the black smelly bottom part of the bandage & put a clean outside on. I went back to my darling Regent Street* doctor who fixed it properly, as much as he could & saved the top, although the side is gone. They say one of Nick’s eyes is slightly crossed (!) so I’m seeing an eye specialist this week. And my dentist. Am riding twice a week now. Have some fascinating historical biographies from the N. Statesman to review; am sending the almost full-page children’s book review to Mrs. Prouty. Got $50 from Dot. Bless her. Will write her.
Love to all,
Sivvy
TO Douglas Cleverdon
Monday 19 November 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 19, 1962
Dear Douglas,
I wonder if you could have a copy of the script of “Three Women” sent to an Australian gynecologist who is very interested in it. His name & address are:
W. J. Rawlings FRCOG*
12 Collins Street
Melbourne, Australia.
I also wonder if you could send me about half a dozen mimeographed copies, as I’ve had several requests for it.
So sorry to have missed you & Nest* the night I was in London, but I was flat out after travelling from 5 a.m. I hope, with luck, to be installed with the babies in London in the New Year, finishing a second novel and free lancing, & would so enjoy seeing you & Nest again then. Love to Nest and that marvelous pre-Raphaelite boy* whose name I always forget.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Stevie Smith*
Monday 19 November 1962 |
TLS, University of Tulsa |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
Monday: November 19
Dear Stevie Smith,
I have been having a lovely time this week listening to some recordings of you reading your poems for the British Council,* and Peter Orr has been kind enough to give me your address.* I better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith-addict. I have wanted for ages to get hold of “A Novel on Yellow Paper”* (I am jealous of that title, it is beautiful, I’ve just finished my first, on pink,* but that’s no help to the title I fear) and rooted as I have been in Devon for the last year beekeeping and apple growing I never see a book or bookseller. Could you tell me where I could write to get a copy?
Also, I am hoping, by a work of magic, to get myself and the babies to a flat in London by the New Year and would be very grateful in advance to hear if you might be able to come to tea or coffee when I manage to move---to cheer me on a bit. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO W. Roger Smith
Monday 19 November 1962 |
TLS, Random House Group Archive & Library |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 19, 1962
Roger Smith, Esq.
Agreements & Rights Department
William Heinemann Ltd.
15-16 Queen Street
London W.1
Dear Mr. Smith,
Thanks very much for your letter of November 5th. I’m glad to hear they want “Mushrooms”* for a spoken recording, and certainly grant permission. I must say 2 guineas seems a tiny sum. How about 5 guineas? Or am I just sounding like an American capitalist. Maybe you could sound them out about it. I’d rather have 2 gns. than nothing, but would rather have 5 than 2. See what you can do and let me know.
Best wishes.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Leonie Cohn*
Tuesday 20 November 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 20, 1962
Miss Leonie Cohn
The BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear Miss Cohn,
My husband has written telling me that you would like a few sentences of outline for the programme “Landscape on Childhood”.* I enclose* a paragraph. I’d be grateful to hear from you* direct what sort of emphasis you precisely want, as my husband has given me only the most general of notions.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Tuesday 20 November 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire England
Tuesday: November 20
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
I have been meaning to write you as soon as my state of almost unbearable excitement and suspense is over, but as it still continues, I decided I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. What has happened is that by a kind of magic fate I saw the flat (unfurnished) in London and am now waiting to see if the client approves of my references. Let me tell you a little of the background. When I was in Ireland in August* after my long seige of flu, I went to visit the tower of the famous Irish poet W. B. Yeats. What I found there was a magic, untouched spot, no sign of people, only a poem on the walls, wild rhubarb, an apple orchard gone wild and a soft grey donkey with kind eyes. Although at that time I felt dead and ill in body, I felt my soul respond to that peace and felt somehow in tune with Yeats who must have loved it. Then, when I was last in London, rather depressed with all the ugly furnished hideously expensive flats Ted had taken me to look at, I felt compelled to walk down my dear streets by Primrose Hill and Regents Park where I’d had Frieda. I felt compelled to walk down Fitzroy Road, and there to my amaze was Yeats’ old house (with a blue plaque “Yeats Lived Here”) with builders in and a signboard up “Flats to Let”. I was astounded---I’d walked by that house time and again and wished it were for let or for sale. I flew to the agents. By an absolute miracle (in London where people are cutting each others throats for flats) I was first on the list to apply! It is a very complicated process---they write your banker, accountant & solicitor & ask if you can meet payments etc. then you get your solicitor to draw up a lease. I am in agony. It is just what I want, right round the corner from my old panel of wonderful doctors & the park & minutes by bus from the BBC. My dream is selling a novel to the movies and eventually buying the house from the present owner. I am applying for a 5 year lease, the longest I can get.
The strange part is that when I came back to Devon I said laughingly to my young nurse “I will shut my eyes and open my book of Yeats poetic plays & get a message from him.” I did this, and the words I put my finger on were “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage and I will get the house ready.” I was amazed. I knew Yeats was a sort of medium and believed in spirits, and although I am very sceptical, I certainly think it would be symbolic for me to live in the house of a great poet I love, which happens to be on the street I would love to live on most in London! But probably the owner won’t approve of writers! If I could get it I would try to be in by Christmas.
I am a very good businesswoman, and what I would plan to do with this unfurnished flat on 2 floors---3 bedrooms upstairs, a large lounge-dining room, kitchen & bath downstairs---would be slowly furnish it, poem by poem, in beautiful taste from second hand shops, living on straw mats & pillows in the meantime, then rent it at very high rates by the week in the spring and summer which would cover a large part of what I pay for it unfurnished. The weekly rents for furnished flats in London is astronomical, and I could make this quite economical by letting it out when I want to be at Court Green with the babies in spring and summer, when London is flooded with tourists. Eventually I hope to write a novel that will sell, really sell (I have novels in me, one after the other, just crying to be written) and buy a house in this road and furnish it---3 floors for myself, a mother’s help & the children (there are only about 2 rooms to a floor), a garden, & a basement flat let out. When I went to Court Green I would have no trouble letting my flat, and my rent income should cover my expenses. I am amazed at my practicality & business sense. Having to handle this large place, taxes, insurance, repairs, has made my hardheaded streak define itself. Now winter has come, I lug great buckets of coal and keep the Rayburn stove going in the kitchen day and night. I am very proud of being able to run it (Ted never could), my cleaning woman taught me how, and it keeps the water boiling hot, dries the wet clothes overnight and is really “the heart of the house.” I also carry dustbins, mow lawns and next spring will try to learn to dig so I can have some garden. I would like to live in London for the school year, so the children can go to the good free schools (the schools in Devon are awful), so I can have a mother’s help & write (no mother’s help wants to live in the country) and fill myself with art exhibits, interesting people, books and cultural life. The utter lack of cultural life of any sort this last year and a half has been a great trial to me. When I was back in London I literally wept to see paintings, I had missed them so. I was so happy there, and faced all the people including Ted and now have nothing to fear, only work to look forward to.
I must tell you that I took your advice and went shopping with part of that first check you sent! I looked in my wardrobe & was astounded. In the 7 years of my marriage I have never bought a new dress or had a hairdo! All my clothes dated from Smith and were too long and o so familiar. I had always thought I would never cost Ted anything, so he could write & not have a job, and now he is going out with fashion models after telling me he thought clothes were superficial! Well, I got the front of my hair cut & set and kept the long coronet of braid at the back. Then I bought a gorgeous camel-colored suit at Jaeger’s, with a matching sweater, and a pewter hairclasp and bracelet, and a black sweater & blue-and-black tweed skirt and new shoes & I felt like a new woman. When I met Ted at the train in London he didn’t even recognize me. I am going to leave all my old Smith clothes in Devon & just take these new ones to London. I want my life to begin over from the skin out.
I am enclosing a copy of my review* of children’s books which came out last week in the New Statesman, as I thought you might enjoy it, especially the part about the Opal Whitely book, which fascinated me. My children’s reviews are beginning to “take”---Faber & Faber quoted one in an advertisement* & I opened one book to find a former review of mine of an earlier one in the series on the back jacket.* Needless to say I love doing children’s picture books as the art & production interest me most & I have piles of free review copies for the children. They liked my review at the New Statesman & have just sent me 5 historical biographies from which I am to choose one to review. If I were living in London I’d simply see these editors, tell them what I’d like to try, and get lots more work. I would also have no trouble getting a mother’s help as they all want to live in London.
I hadn’t told mother about my cut thumb as I thought it would worry her, but I guess the midwife wrote her. My country doctor made a shocking botch of it---he didn’t even affix the cut top with a tape or stitch and when the time came to look at it a few days later just left the dirty black bandage & put something clean on top. As a result, in 10 days, I had a deformed & very stinky thumb---my nurse thought it might be septic. So I went back to my dear London doctor who bandaged it properly & saved most of the top, although the side has a bad scar. He said it could have healed perfectly if it had been taken care of properly in time. So you can imagine how eager I am to get back to my old doctors! This one is a fool and is spoiled by only having ignorant country folk as patients who never question him. I am all right now, thank goodness, although for a while I thought I might lose my thumb.
I saw the producer of the poetry week at the Royal Court Theatre & am definitely doing the American Night in July. I am very excited about this.
The children are blooming, although we all have had colds this week---my nurse’s week off. They tell me Nick has a slightly crossed eye, which I, doting mother that I am, never noticed. So I’ll have it seen to by a specialist when I get to London. I bless the welfare services in medicine time & again. I took Frieda to lunch with the parents of my nurse & the Liberal party candidate Mark Bonham Carter (son of Lady Violet Bonham Carter)* and a director of Collins publishing house. He was charming, and Frieda ate with the grownups & behaved enchantingly. I am very proud of her. She keeps saying “Go to London and see the zoo!”
I hope to really get into my second novel this winter & finish it as soon as I get to London & can count on a mother’s help. It is to be called “Doubletake”, meaning that the second look you take at something reveals a deeper, double meaning. This is what was going to be the “Interminable Loaf”---it is semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful & perfect. I would like very much, if the book is good enough, to dedicate this novel to you. It seems appropriate that this be “your” novel, since you know against what odds I am writing it and what the subject means to me. I hope to finish it in the New year. Do let me know if you’d let me dedicate it to you. Of course I’d want you to approve of it first!
With love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Fainlight
Tuesday 20 November 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Ruth Fainlight |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
Tuesday: November 20
Dear Ruth,
Thank you so for the wonderful long letter & the poem. I think Mist* has a beautiful pace to it, the way it rises & crests, I most especially like “Layered like receding planes of a Japanese print” & “Mind’s heedless gliding to the final sea./The trees were more than noble vegetables/More than convenient gallows.”* It is lovely. I have been up to my neck in pragmatics. You can imagine how easy it is hunting for a flat in London from down here! By great luck my midwife cornered a lovely 22-year-old on holiday at home from the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital where she is a nurse and she is with me till mid-December. Just now she’s got a week off, my local babysitter is sick & my char is moving from one house to another & all 3 of us have colds, plus me with 5 historical biogs to weed out for the New Statesman, so basta! I did manage two visits to London in the last month, with the young nurse living in, & was astounded at my reaction. I almost wept to see paintings, I could not stop talking with people---I have been literally culture-less, movie-less etc. for well over a year, and totally incommunicado with intelligent adults since Ted left, now 4 months ago. My one drive is to a flat in London, and if my fantastic experience comes true I shall think I am a medium.
What happened was, I went to Yeats’ tower in Ireland in August, near dead from flu & the prospect of bringing the children up alone on next to nothing, & felt there that although I was dead in body, my soul began to wake. It was very weird, feeling this timelessness of the untouched place, its beauty, the immanence of Yeats. Then, in London, utterly desolate with unsuccessful flat-hunting, I felt compelled to walk down Fitzroy Road---remember, where you were considering a house---where I’d always wanted to live. There were builders in Yeats’ house & a sign out Flats to Let. I flew to the agent & by a miracle was first to apply for the unfurnished maisonette. But I am still waiting for my bloody references to be approved---I’m sure they’ll say I don’t have a steady income, being a writer, etc. etc. Anyhow, I came back to Devon & jokingly said to my nurse “I’ll open Yeats’ plays & get a message from him.” I shut my eyes & pointed, then read from “The Unicorn from the Stars”: “Get wine & food to give you strength & courage & I will get the house ready.” I was scared to death, but very excited. I felt oddly in touch with the old boy, who believed in spirits too. If he is really serious, he’ll inspire me to do a novel & sell it to the movies & then I shall buy the bloody house from the owner. I covet it beyond belief, with that blue plaque! O hell, the client won’t like writers. Wish me luck, though. I would have to furnish it with straw mats & pillows & live on squid stew, but I actually cried in London I was so happy to be seeing people, talking, eating out, and went to movie after movie after movie. The country is fine for holidays, but Ted’s getting me here where I can’t get help so I can write & making it so hard for me to get where I can write & be human has been hard to take. If I do a good enough novel can I dedicate it to you & Alan? David too. My life seems to be spent furnishing a new place every year! I pray, if this Yeats flat comes through, to be in by the New Year & return here with the daffodils & clement weather (& go back to it next fall.)
Which brings me to my invitation---you must come down to Devon with David while Alan is in Russia & I wish he could come too. I think I will want to return here then---for my bees & my riding & my flowers. But God knows I am so starved for London I can hardly sit still. I have, alas, no money to move farther, & it is impossible to travel in the car now with Nick able to waltz about, for I can’t drive & tend to both children. I will apply for a mother’s help, foreign, the minute I hit London, so I can write full-time. I hope to furnish an unfurnished flat for the school-year in London, then rent it by the week, furnished, at fabulous prices in spring & summer. If only I could write a selling novel & get capital I’d get a house. In Fitzroy Road. Hoho. Once I get to London, a mother’s help, & day after day to write, my life will be utter heaven.
I miss you & Alan & David very much. Agreeing where to live is a real problem. My being stuck here is a result of following Ted’s cry that London was killing him, and of course I now carry coal & ashbuckets & shovels of muck like a navvy. But I get a terrific pride out of keeping the huge old Rayburn going (my char gave me lessons), it is the heart of the house, dries everything overnight, keeps the water boiling hot. I am learning to rise to the trot & it is heaven riding under the tors of Dartmoor. To keep this as a holiday place & establish myself in London while the children are at school is my dream. I’m hoping to make over the wreck of a room Alan used as study into a bed sitter so I can entertain more in spring & summer. Dartmoor convicts* keep escaping on these black nights & I keep an apple parer ready & the door bolted. Do write again when you get this & let me know your plans. Let’s spend April as neighbors, whether in London or here---it would be fun with you here & wonderful for the babies.
Love to all,
Sylvia
TO Michael Carey
Wednesday 21 November 1962 |
TLS, Assumption College |
I send the book under separate cover.
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
Wednesday: November 21
Dear Fr. Michael,
Do forgive me for being so long in writing, but I have been juggling two infants, 70 apple trees, syrup-eating bees and all sorts of negotiations which may get me a flat in London for the winter---hopefully the house of W. B. Yeats, plaque and all. Now for being frank. First let me say I love your pseudonym, Michael of the Six Dreams. How many languages do you know? Your epigraphs come from several.
I see two poets in you. The first is what I would call lyrical-traditional, a bit too much given to whimsy and the fey. The second, the much more interesting one, to my mind, is the one who produces meticulously-observed phrases like “wrapped in a mouse-colored twilight”, “geraniums drenched in blood”, “corrugated sands”, “relax their boa’s hold”, “petroleum frenzy”, “black macadam altars” and passages in The Shetlands like
Day and night the ocean speaks
And rage in his breath.
Eternal: the wedlock of wave to seacrag.
These are phrases and lines of the 20th century---they have a power and vitality you must develop. How much poetry do you read, and by read I mean study. Read Thomas Wyatt* for lyrics, but tense & special ones. Read, of course, Gerard Manley Hopkins. I think you have learned much from the Anglo-Saxons, that your May Morning poem has lots of exciting things in it & shows a real development. Beware, for Heaven’s sake, the fey, the pretty, the “cute”---you know what I mean---the “butterscotch curls & marshmallow ears”. This is fun, but only fun. It is “verse”, entertainment. I think you should let the world blow in more roughly. Read Eliot, Pound* (you do dedicate a poem to him), study the assonances & consonances in Emily Dickinson (beloved of me) for a subtlety far beyond exact rhyme. And sweep out the archaicisms---“Tis”, “Opes”, “Alway”. Modern poetry has blown these out. Do read Hopkins. Have you read his notebooks? I believe Penguin has a paper edition.* Rhymes, exact rhymes, and especially feminine rhymes tend to “jingle” too much. Try more free things like Fragment XXXVIII* which I love. Speak straight out. You should give yourself exercises in roughness, not lyrical neatness. Say blue, instead of sapphire, red instead of crimson. Forget witches and elves for a bit.
I am myself, ironically, an atheist. And like a certain sort of atheist, my poems are God-obsessed, priest-obsessed. Full of Marys, Christs and nuns. Theology & philosophy fascinate me, and my next book will have a long bit about a priest in a cassock. Did you ever live in Boston? That is my birth-city. I think I will send you a poem of my own, very rough, but about the Christ-ness in all martyrs, and written by a mother of a son.
Warmest good wishes,
Sylvia Plath
PS: What does Fr. stand for? Frère? Friar? Do say God bless. I need it, God Knows!
Mary’s Song
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat,
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity---
A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fire
Melting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls float
Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.
Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the high
Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heaven, incandescent.
It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 22 November 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University* |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Thanksgiving Day
Dear mother,
It is perfect Thanksgiving Weather---how I miss that holiday! I’ll have chicken fricasee today. Susan comes back tonight after a week off, Thank God. It has been absolute hell---my local babysitter out with flu, Nancy moving to another house & having hemhorrages, me with a bad cold unimproved by having to lug coal buckets & ash bins. I hope you haven’t written the Hughes. I want no more communication with them whatsoever---I told them you had been ill as a result of this last summer, & were faced with losing your job. I have had a big juicy book from the New Statesman today called “Lord Byron’s Wife” which they want me to do,* along with one of the lot they sent last week & I haven’t a minute to sit down and read. It is enough to drive me up the wall.
I am desperate to get this flat. I called up today & found they were boggling over my “recent” references---only good for the last 18 months. So I gave your name (Professor A. S. Plath) as a guarantor and security. And offered to pay the year’s rent in advance out of sheer impatience. I hope you don’t mind & will put on a good front for the agents if they write you. I have so much against me---being a writer, the ex-wife of a successful writer, being an American, young, etc. etc. This was my one lucky break---finding this flat, & I’ve got to get it. I simply can’t get help here in the country, & the minute they sense they are really needed, like this week, they desert. Besides, they are lazy bastards. I work like a navvy day-in day-out without rest or holiday, & they sit & watch telly. I am dying to be able to work at writing, & now I am just up to my ears with this coming move & haven’t time to write at all. I have written Mrs. Prouty yesterday enclosing a copy of my children’s book review, telling her about the lovely Jaeger clothes I bought with her first cheque, and asking if I may dedicate this second novel I am desperate to finish this winter to her, as she has been such a great help and knows what I am working against.
Now f<or business?>. If I am to pay the year’s rent in advance, I must <. . . m/an>y American banks and <move/some?> here, so would you please close both the 5 cent account and the Wellesley account & <illegible text> check which I can list on tax as a “gift” from you and send the total balance to me immediately.* This year will be the hardest financially in my life (I hope), as I have to make bold and considered investments, as in this flat, in order to enable me to work toward a future. Ted’s sticking me here, helpless & with all these difficulties & blithely walking out, I shall never forget or forgive. I despise him. I think he is a coward & a bastard & want him to have nothing to do with me or the children. He is a gigolo now, vain & despicable.
I don’t care how much of a poetic genius he is, as a father he is a louse & as a husband a no-good, utterly vain, utterly irresponsible. Granted, he tried for six years & pretty much succeeded in being kind, faithful & loving, but the strain was too much & it didn’t work. He had absolutely no right to have children. All the women who surround him now, including his sister & Dido Merwin, are barren, either because of abortions or choice. This is the “smart” way with them, utter devotion to self. I despise this sort of life & want the children to have nothing to do with it. Ted is now seeing Clem Moore’s ex-wife* among others & evidently she wants to meet me, but that is a pleasure she’ll have to forgo.
It is so frustrating to feel that with time to study & work lovingly at my books I could do something considerable, while now I have my back to the wall & not even time to read a book. So anything I may turn out just now is merely potboiling. Boy, when I get to be 50 & if I’m famous, there will be no tributes to “The loving husband without whose help I would never have succeeded etc. etc.” Everything I have done I have done in spite of Ted. And against the malicious obstacles he has, wittingly or unwittingly, put in the path of my writing.
I’ll send some authorizations to close my accounts at the banks.* Love to Warren & Maggie. How are they? O, I forgot, the absolutely marvelous dress for Frieda came---it will just go with my Jaeger red skirt & black sweater! It is adorable. The kitty balloons lasted 2 days & were marvelous fun, Frieda kicked them all about. She is always picking up something & saying “Grammy sent it.” I am taking the vitamins. Do send your “Gift” cheque as soon as may be. Shouldn’t it be just about $900 ($706.95 plus $193.10).*
Love,
Sivvy
TO Clarissa Roche
c. Wednesday 28 November 1962* |
TLS, Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
cWednesday
Dearest Clarissa,
It was heavenly having you & the babe to cheer me in the midst of that howling weather. Frieda still says “See little baby on toot toot”. The hedgehog sounds a dear. After rattling my American mother & offering madly to pay a year’s rent in advance, I seem to have the owner’s ‘approval’ & hope to get my solicitor to drum through the bloody contract so I can have a London Christmas. Keep up those pagan prayers!
Lots of love to all,
Sylvia
Will call Paul Wednesday, though that’s the day I probably go home!
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 29 November 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Court Green
Thursday: November 29
Dear mother,
I was so glad to have your letter saying you got my last letter. I think I will get the flat & hope to move in about December 17. They are at the “draft contract” stage: it is all so slow & Dickensian. The owner’s solicitor sends a draft to my solicitor, who checks with me, then back to the other, then back to mine! They were sticky, the estate agents, about my “recent” references & lack of a steady job. So I offered you as “guarantor” (don’t worry, I shan’t need you!) & stressed your long job with BU. If they write, sign yourself Professor! I also offered to pay a year’s rent in advance. The chance at this place (I’ll take a 5 year lease) is fantastic. It is like a weird dream come true. My dream is to sell a novel to the movies & bribe the owner to sell me the house; I want that house. I am sending back your Lombard Bank book; I shall have no need for it, & no need to use it as security for the flat. You can imagine how silly it is to have something like that around which Ted might see if he comes to visit the children, etc. And for goodness sake don’t say “unless you are safe & reasonably happy, I can’t live anyway”! One’s life should never depend on another’s in that way. Why do you identify so with me? That sort of statement only makes one chary of confiding any difficulties in you whatsoever, as I am sure you will see if you think of it.
My thumb is fine now. I shall have Nick’s eye seen to in London when I am back with my panel of blessed, excellent doctors. I can’t wait. I have been culture-starved so long, utterly alone, that these last weeks are a torture of impatience. Winifred has been wonderful. I had her & Garnett over for a very special dinner last night, Sue here as well.* Everybody had a lovely time---my chicken with orange, honey & wine sauce, rice, corn, fried bananas, apple cake, date-nut bars & coffee. I had Susan’s parents over for dinner Saturday night, & a nice Irishman & his wife & 3 children for tea Sunday.* When I get safely into this flat I shall be the happiest person in the world. I shall apply immediately for a live-in mother’s help & get cracking on my novel---I hope to finish it by the date of that contest you sent information of, even if I don’t win, which I won’t, it will be an incentive. This experience I think will prove all for the best---I have grown up amazingly. Did I say I was taking out the policy on Ted’s life because if I pay, I get about 10 thousand pounds at the end of 30 years if he lives. I’ll need a pension of some sort, & this is the only way I can think of doing it. It is a “with profits” policy. 5 thousand pounds on his death only, but about twice that, with accrued interest if it matures. Winifred advised me to see a local truck man about moving, very nice, & he will take all my stuff up on the Day for under $50! I am only taking the babies’ stuff & will furnish slowly so I can rent it at high rates, furnished, in the summers. Stunned to get a check for about $700 from Aunt Dot today. I will write her. I just burst into tears at her sweet letter, I was so moved, by that & the story of the check. Shall put it to the flat rent. This year is of course the hardest, but once I am in London falls & winters, working, I expect to be self-sufficient. Frieda & Nick are crawling happily about the study as I write. They are so cute together.
I was amused to find out both Susan & her mother were going to my hairdresser on Sue’s afternoon off! Well, imitation is sincerest flattery. I am up to London again this week to arrange a stove, straw mats, phone etc. for the flat & see a man for lunch* about a reading at an Arts Centre in Stevenage---the man I am working with for the Royal Court Theatre Night put him onto me. Once I get started, I should be able to get lots of speaking engagements. It will be lovely to have both Susan & Garnett in London & coming to tea! Susan’s boyfriend,* a free-lance journalist, lives right round the corner from me & Garnett’s police beat* is within five minutes! I am so fond of both.
My solicitor is gathering the evidence necessary for a Divorce Petition. I think there should be no trouble, as Ted is very cooperative. I hope to go to a local seamstress in London & get her to take up all my old skirts etc. I have sent Mrs. Prouty a copy of my big children’s book review & asked her to show it you (I am sure you will understand my sending it her first!) I am very smug at a review of the most fascinating book I’ve just done! LORD BYRON’S WIFE! I am very lucky to get it, it costs $6.50, a fortune here, & all the big papers have already given it full-page treatment.* I’ve been asked to do it for the New Statesman by a friend of ours who is literary editor* & who knew I’d love to get my hands on it! Incredibly, the portrait of Augusta, Byron’s sister, is the dead spit of Olwyn! Only she sounds immensely nicer & had lots of children. Shall send this to Mrs. Prouty too. Thought it a good way to please. Have asked if I can dedicate my 2nd novel to her---the one I hope to finish this winter. Hope she agrees. Don’t worry about my paying bills. I pay them immediately, always have.
Love to all,
Sylvia
TO Harriet Cooke
Thursday 29 November 1962 |
TLS, Private owner |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 29
Dear Harriet,
Your letters are so dear & I was looking so forward to seeing you & Barrie & the babes that I am cast down to say I shan’t be able to come after all. I loved Connemara above any place I’ve ever been, but luck, rather fantastic luck, will get me to a London flat before Christmas, I hope. I have to go anyhow to see an eye specialist about Nick’s slightly skew eye (which I don’t think is skew but the midwife insists), & have been alone in this desolate place with the babes for almost 4 months now, so am mad for the sight of humans who can read, talk, movies, plays, galleries & all the things Ted’s “notion” of country life has kept me from. Ironically he got me down here, saying London was killing him, then packed off after I had flu. I guess he didn’t mention to Barrie I’m divorcing him for desertion & all the rest of it. My coming to Devon on Ted’s account has stopped my writing because no-one will come to be mother’s help in this desolation & the locals are all too lazy to work! So of force I must live in London to get a mother’s help so I can finish my second novel---a pot-boiler, I fear, due to my need for dough. I pray I can manage a holiday in Ireland (West) next fall again. I loved it so there I never want to go anywhere else!
The story of this flat around the corner from where we used to live is very odd. I visited Yeats tower at Ballylea* when in Ireland this August & felt weirdly at peace. Then, utterly desperate & despairing of a flat, I was stalking my old haunts in London & happened to pass by Yeats’ house in Fitzroy Road, which I’d often looked at longingly. There were builders in & a signboard out. By some miracle, London being London, I was first to apply for the maisonette & am now at draft contract stage. When I got home I said jokingly to my nurse “I’ll open a book of Yeats’ plays & get a message from him about the flat.” When I opened my eyes I was pointing to the words “Get food & wine to give you strength & courage & I will get the house ready.” How’s that. I am starting to read my Tarot cards in earnest now.
Do keep in touch with me---I so long to see you again, I remember you so vividly from that brief visit. The hero of my present novel is a painter, so I’d like to see some of Barrie’s stuff. Can I see it anywhere in London? Now I have the prospect of living where I want to, I am very happy about the divorce, freed from some very nasty people & the sort of women who live from abortion to abortion & facelift to facelift---not my sort at all. I am just dying to get to London & a mother’s help so I can finish my next novel & 2nd book of poems! Ted & I are friends as much as can be at times like this, so do you go on writing me as well! I’ll let you know my address when this (bless it!) contract is safely through & you both, & babes have a standing invitation for tea! Or squid stew! My ‘economy’ meal.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Karl Miller
Thursday 29 November 1962 |
TLS (draft),* Smith College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 29, 1962
Karl Miller, Esq.
NEW STATESMAN
Great Turnstile
London WC 1
Dear Karl,
I found LORD BYRON’S WIFE far and away the finest of that bunch you sent, so stole the 300 words or so you allotted one of the others for Annabella for it as well.*
After Christmas I should be living at 23 Fitzroy Road, N.W.1---Yeats’ house no less, plaque and all.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Michael Carey
Thursday 29 November 1962 |
TLS, Assumption College |
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 29, 1962
Dear Fr. Michael,
The blessing was lovely & I do feel better for it. I know why you had the ‘horrible sinking feeling’ that you called me Edith---Edith is the name of my mother-in-law. How odd of you.
I didn’t mean dissect by study, which is the process you describe as study. I meant learn by heart. The same thing happened to me with Milton; I hate him too, although by myself I did not. It was a horrid dull studious teacher did it!*
I would answer the autobiographical questions if I knew what you meant by what. Dear Father Michael, I meant above. I like it better written out, why not, it is a fine word.
Sincerely,
Sylvia
Now what is “A. A.”? Please could you bless Yeats’ house as well! I think it is coming through, & Lord knows I need it!
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 14 December 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Friday: December 14
Dear mother,
Well, here I am! Safely in Yeats’ house! I can just about allow myself time for a cup of tea & a bit of letter writing after the immensity of the move---closing up Court Green & opening this place. And I can truly say I have never been so happy in my life. I just sit thinking Whew! I have done it, and beaming---shall I write a poem, shall I paint a floor, shall I hug a baby? Everything is such fun, such an adventure, & if I feel this way now, with everything bare & to be painted & curtains to be made etc., what will I feel when I get the flat as I dream it to be! Blessed Susan stayed with me through the move up & a day after,* so I could make innumerable dashes into town ordering & buying the most necessary things. Now I have to fix the place up so I can get babyminders in off & on & then a mother’s help to live in. We had a lovely drive up---a clear, crisp blue day. I had spent the week before in London in the terrible & fascinating smog---so thick you couldn’t see a hand ahead, which lasted the whole time I was up signing the lease & arranging innumerable details.* I arrived here to find no gas stove in & no electricity connected! As I dashed out, Susan nobly holding the babies in the car, to drive to the gas board, I left my keys in the open flat & the door blew shut! Well, it was a comedy of errors. The obliging gas boys climbed on the roof & jimmied a window & installed the stove, the Devon mover did it all by candlelight (which I had foresight to bring!) & by getting laryngitis I persuaded the electricity people to connect us up---the agents hadn’t sent them the right keys. The minute this was over, everything went swimmingly. I was dumbfounded at the people who remembered me---you too. The laundromat couple rushed up, they had been in Boston since we last met, they wanted to be remembered to you. The people at the little dairy-grocery shook hands & remembered me by name, & the nappy service man I called up remembered me & welcomed me back! Well, it was like coming home to a small loving village. I haven’t had a second to see Catherine Frankfort or Lorna Secker-Walker yet, both of whom have had new babies,* I’ve been so busy on my own with Frieda & Nick I can only work evenings at the house & writing. So the next five years of my life look heavenly---school terms in London, summer in Devon. I only pray I earn enough by then to offer the widow who owns this place so much she’ll sell it me! I feel Yeats’ spirit blessing me. Imagine, a Roman Catholic priest at Oxford, also a poet, is writing me & blessing me too! He is an American teacher-priest who likes my poems & sent me his for criticism. I thought this would please Dot!
The first letter through my door was from my publishers.* I spent last night writing a long broadcast* of all my new poems to submit to an interested man at the BBC* & have a commission to do a program on the influence of my childhood landscape---the sea. Oslo, Norway, radio* wants to translate & do my “Three Women” program set in the maternity ward & A. Alvarez the best poetry critic here thinks my second book, which I’ve just finished, should win the Pulitzer Prize. Of course it won’t, but it’s encouraging to have somebody so brilliant think so. As soon as I get my mother’s help---I hope early in Jan., I’ll finish my 2nd novel. I am writing these ‘potboilers’ under a pseudonym!
Please for God’s sake don’t waste another minute worrying about me. Now I’ve got rid of Ted, to whom I’ve dedicated such time & energy & for such reward, I feel my life & career can really begin. He’s taken with him the harem of barren bitches who bore me only envy & now everyone I know is good & loving. I took F & N to the Zoo Wednesday & had a heavenly time. N slept, but Frieda was thrilled. Then I took them to the Primrose Hill playground Thurs. & had fun on the swings etc. They are so happy & laughing, we have such fun. F. does her puzzle in 5 seconds, reads books with me & loves coloring. I’m going to make their bedroom---the biggest, a playroom too. I brought the Geegee horse & the favorite toys. My bedroom will be my study---it faces the rising sun, as does the kitchen. Viewed the full moon from my little ‘balcony’ in sheer joy. It is so light here. The only real job is painting the floors---I’ve ordered rugs & mats. I adore planning the furnishing. You were very wise about a double bed---I’ll get one.* I have a single on loan from Portuguese friends. The cats are being fed by friends in Devon.* I strung all my own onions & brought them, a bag of potatoes & my own apples. And a big bouquet of my own beautiful green & white holly with red berries is in my newly polished pewter set. I am so happy I just skip round. Please tell darling Dotty her blessed ‘investment’ is enabling me to furnish the flat straight out instead of poem by poem, as I’d thought. I had to pay a year’s rent in advance to get it, so was immensely grateful. You won’t be needed as a reference. I had the darlingest young solicitor at my firm do the lease business for me---we were exchanging advice about kinds of paint at the end. Everybody--Frank, Dot, Mrs. P. says you worry if I don’t write. For goodness sake, remember no news is good news & my work is so constant I barely have a second to fry a steak. Don’t make me worry about you.
Lots & lots of love to all, your happy
Sivvy
<on the return address side of letter>
Have told Mrs. P. I would like to dedicate my 2nd novel to her. She wanted to be sure I was dedicating something to you, so I said I was dedicating my 3rd book of poems* to you---I’m dedicating the 2nd one I’ve just finished to Frieda & Nick, as many poems in it are to them, & I’m sure you approve! Don’t want Mrs. P. to feel I’m ‘expecting’ anything, though!
TO Dorothy Benotti
Friday 14 December 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
Friday: December 14
Dear Dotty,
It was so wonderful to hear your voice over the phone, sounding just as if you were next door! I was so excited about getting the flat---everybody says it was a miracle, including my solicitor---and here I am, in my favorite house in my favorite neighborhood, happy as a clam! The children are thrilled, too. Frieda has been dying to go to the Zoo, two minutes away, & I took her & Nick Wednesday---she was fascinated by the owls that “had bottoms just like Frieda”, the lions, the new baby elephant & the penguins swimming round. She is such fun, such company, & Nick is the sturdiest handsomest little boy imagineable, he just laughs & chuckles all the time. They are so good. I put them into the same cot in the morning & all I hear is laughs, till I’ve got breakfast. I am dying to take them round to all my old friends here, all of whom have had new babies. It is like a village---so many shop people remembered me & welcomed me back! It is heaven to be surrounded by people & to know as soon as I get my phone I’ll have all sorts of friends dropping round & be able to go out. Imagine, I’ve not seen a movie for 2 years! I am just starved for fun & chat. The country is lovely in spring & summer, but my work & dearest friends are in London. Already I have two BBC broadcasts to do & a poetry reading & then this big American poetry night to produce at one of the most famous theatres here this spring, a real great job. I am delighted you think I have an English accent, Dotty. Everybody over here thinks I come from the Deep South, they think my American accent is so broad!
I am now in the little limbo between mother’s helps. My dear nurse saw me through to a day after my move, & then went on deserved holiday before she starts work as an operating theatre nurse at a children’s hospital near here this January, & as her boyfriend lives very near me, I hope to see a lot of her---I love her like a younger sister for what she’s been through with me. I was in London all through the smog making the final arrangements for a gas stove,* electricity to be connected, a phone (which takes ages here) & signing the lease. It was incredible, thick white for 5 days, you couldn’t see your hand before your face & you can imagine what it was to get round! All the busses were stopped at one point. But I did it. And then I came home & in four days did all the packing & closing up of Court Green---you can imagine what that involved! I spent a day stringing all my onions & brought a load up with a load of my own potatoes, apples, honey & holly. I am very proud of my gardening & hope to plant a lot of stuff next spring down there too & keep my bees going. I got off the leading rein on my horse just before I left & have had some heavenly rides under the moors. I hope Frieda & Nick learn to ride very young. I seem to get on with the horse I must say, & my riding mistress is very pleased. You can imagine what a relief riding has been through all this trouble & having to take on all a man’s responsibilities as well as a woman’s. Well, <after I g>et this lovely flat all fixed up---and your ‘investment’, b<less it, is> making that possible right away---I shall know what I’m <doing for the> next 5 years & can maybe take a little rest! Right no<w I hardly have> time for a cup of tea, I have so many irons in the fire!*
I got your dear letter today & went out & bought steak & lamb chops. Now I’ve finally got here after half a year of being stuck & not knowing if I ever could manage it, I am so happy I am ravenous & eat like a horse. I hope to get off sleeping pills as soon as I get through the first week or so fixing this place up, I must say they have kept me going, otherwise I’d have been awake all night, & one is just no good without sleep. I wish you’d talk mother out of worrying! Hard work never killed anybody, & I think hardship can be a good thing. It has certainly taught me to be self-reliant, & I’m a lot happier because of it! What in heaven’s name has mother to worry about! I am fine & happy & so are the babies. It only adds to my worries to think she is worrying. Do try to set her right, Dotty. And say no news is good news. If she had any idea how hard I work, taking care of the babies, writing billions of business letters, doing writing jobs etc. she would understand I can’t be writing letters every second much as I’d like to. Now I’m settling in I shall write once a week. I am with the babies all the time & they are angels. It is good this blew up while they are so little, for while Frieda sometimes mentions daddy, Nick has never known him, & I am so happy with my new life it is contagious. The kind of people I know are good & honest & love me & the children, I am glad to get rid of the rest. I hope by the New Year to have got this place pretty well furnished & cosy & get a mother’s help to live in by then. And then I should be able to really get on with my career---it is lucky I can write at home, because then I don’t miss any of the babies’ antics. I just adore them. The navy-hooded sweat shirt sounds marvelous! I must say there is nothing like American clothes. Everybody here envies my American babies clothes. You have no notion how much your cheery letters mean! My nurse has taken some color shots of me & the babes I hope will come out – I’ll send them on as soon as they do.
Love to all –
Sivvy
TO R. G. Walford*
Friday 14 December 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
December 14, 1962
R. G. Walford, Esq.
The BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear Mr Walford,
I should be glad to have you send the Norsk Rikskringkasting, Oslo, a copy of my script THREE WOMEN. You have my general permission to send my works abroad on the above conditions without further reference to me.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Frieda Plath Heinrichs
c. mid-December 1962* |
ALS in greeting card,* Private Owner |
<printed greeting>
SEASON’S GREETINGS / MEILLEURS VOEUX / FELIZ AÑO NUEVO
<Signed>
Lots & lots of love / from Sylvia, / Frieda & Nicholas
Have just moved into a lovely London flat for the winter.
Letter later!
S.
TO Douglas Cleverdon
Saturday 15 December 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
December 15, 1962
Dear Douglas,
Thanks so much for the copies of “Three Women”.* It was lovely to have a letter from you* waiting in my new flat---did Ted tell you it is Yeats’ house, plaque and all, & that I’ve been dying to live here ever since I saw it three years ago? A fantastic series of luckinesses saw me into it, including my getting a “message” from Willy himself. The babies adore it, especially the immediate Zoo.
I’ve written up a broadcast of a selection of my new poems, with commentary, which I enclose. I do hope you like them. They are so new, none have yet been printed, although THE LONDON MAGAZINE has accepted ‘The Applicant’* and the OBSERVER has accepted ‘Ariel’.
We will be camping out a bit till I get my ancient Yeatsy floors painted & a mother’s help lured to live in and a phone, all of which I hope to accomplish by the New Year. Very warmest good wishes for now & Christmas too to you and Nest.
Sincerely,
Sylvia
(Sylvia Plath)
Douglas Cleverdon, Esq.
Features
The BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
*Could you have the BBC send a copy to that Australian gynecologist whose address I sent you? Thanks very much.
TO Gilbert & Marian Foster
Saturday 15 December 1962 |
TLS, Private owner |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
December 15, 1962
Dear Gilbert & Marion,
Well, I am here safely in Yeats’ place at last, surrounded by acres of floors which I shall slowly & I am afraid lazily start to paint. Our moving in was a comedy of errors---I arrived to find no gas stove, no electricity connected up & as I ran out to see the gas people leaving the keys in the open flat, the door blew shut. Luckily the gas boys were experts at jimmying windows & we moved in by candlelight: Very Dickensian.
I hope by now Bennett* has come round for the key to let out the water in the cistern & the pipes (and brought the key back!) so I’ll have no worry of water freezing or pipes bursting.
Do get the potato sack out of the hall closet, use all the onions & the apples. I took the babies to the Zoo the other day, it’s right across the street, & Frieda was thrilled by the owls & lions & a new baby elephant. Nick just slept. I hope the enclosed cheque* will see Skunky-Bunks & Tiger-Pieker through some Topcat & Christmas milk & that they are not too much trouble. If one or both are female, Gilbert, could you have her or the Shee fixed by the vet? Let me know & I’ll pay the bill, so I won’t return to thousands of kits.
Happy Christmas to you all, & many thanks for everything!
Sylvia
TO Mary Coyne
Saturday 15 December 1962 |
TLS, University of Tulsa |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
December 15, 1962
Dear Mrs. Coyne,
I have had to move to London for the winter to have my little boy’s eye seen to by a specialist & operated on, so I would be very grateful if you would send on my sweater & the little girl’s sweater suit to me at the above London address, if you have not already sent them to Court Green. If you have already sent them there, they will be forwarded to me.
Do tell Mr. Murphy I am living in Yeats’ house in London---with the blue plaque and all. It will amuse him, as Yeats’ was a famous Irish poet & I am very lucky to be living in his house, it is a real inspiration to my writing.
Best wishes for the Christmas season,
Sincerely,
Sylvia Hughes
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Saturday 15 December 1962 |
TLS, Indiana University |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
December 15, 1962
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
The miracle has happened. I am writing from Yeats’ house in Fitzroy Road & I don’t think I have ever been so happy in my life. Even the young solicitor of my firm who got the lease through so I could move in Monday says it is a miracle of will power & persistence. All during that thick smog which stuffed every crack of London with white cotton wool I was up here, pushing through the 5-year lease, arranging about gas & electricity & a thousand other things. Moving in was a comedy of errors---I arrived with the babies & my nurse to find no electricity connected, no gas stove, & as I rushed out to see the stove people I left the keys in the open flat & the door blew shut! Well the gas stove boys forced a window & loaned me a candle & my nice Devon mover did all the moving in by candlelight, so it was very Dickensian. After that, everything went swimmingly. My nurse stayed just a day before going on holiday so I could make numberless safaris to town ordering what was needed. Now I am alone with the babies until I get floors painted & the room fixed up so I can lure in a mother’s help. I just sit beaming, looking at my bare boards, I am so happy. The children are happy, too. They are singing in their little cots like birds, & laughing.
The windows are low enough for them to see out, & even Nick is fascinated by the goings on in the street---the dogs, cats & passing pony carts. It is heaven for me to be among people. To be anonymous, in myself. Last night I wrote out the script of a long broadcast of my new poems for a BBC producer who is very interested in them, & I also have a commission to do a program called “Landscape on Childhood”, about how my childhood environment influenced me. The Norway radio wants to translate the program of mine about 3 women in a maternity ward & the critic A. Alvarez, the best here, says he thinks my second book of poems which I have just finished should win a Pulitzer prize! Of course it won’t, but it’s nice he thinks so. As soon as I get my mother’s help, which I hope will be early in the new year, I shall finish my second novel. I shall rent the flat out furnished in summer to, I hope, Americans, & make back much of what I have invested in it. I spent a Sunday stringing my onions & brought them up with a load of my Court Green potatoes, apples, honey & beautiful holly. I am very proud of my garden produce & hope to keep it going summers. Having to close up that big house & open this flat has given me an immense pleasure in businesslike dealings, I feel to have grown up a great deal in the process.
I enclose my review of LORD BYRON’S WIFE, which appeared in the New Statesman* & which I thought would amuse you---so much is relevant, even Ted’s attachment to his sister who never wanted him to marry & who is, alas, nowhere near as nice as Augusta! It is a big book here & I was lucky to get to review it, it was one of the lead reviews. Do pass it on to mother when you see her!
Now to answer your last good letter* & the questions about Ted. I was appalled to hear from my solicitor about what the courts allow a woman here. One-third of her husband’s income at most, less if she keeps the house, and if she works it is one-third of their combined incomes, so if I earn 1,000 $ & Ted earns 2 thousand, he need pay nothing! I am penalized for earning. Also, as he is a writer & his income is only what he makes it & he can conceal much of it, from odd sources which do not report income, I am ‘lucky’ to have him agree to a thousand pounds a year, which is I think much more than a court would allow. Whatever his income, I need a constant & regular sum, for my bills are constant. Now he is well-off he wants to keep it all to himself & has actually told me to buy my clothes in the British equivalent of Filene’s basement, while his married girlfriend spends on herself alone twice what he allows me for myself & the children a week. Well, I have my lovely Jaeger clothes & I feel like a new woman in them. As soon as I get my mother’s help & the flat fixed, I shall have lots of jobs. This woman, who is still dangling her 3rd husband, has brutalized Ted beyond belief---taught him it is “clever” & “sophisticated” to lie & deceive people and so on. Ted can always revenge himself on us for existing by simply refusing to work or to pay us, & then it would take ages to go through court to get anything, as my lawyer says, so I would be silly to put pressure on Ted, it just makes him more beastly. If he gives me the £1,000 I shall work hard to make up the rest myself & be glad to be rid of him. I shall, if the chance arises, see what Ted thinks about making Court Green & the car over in my name. But I have to go gently.
How understanding you are about my needing time! I sometimes think that if I ever get enough time I may write something really worth while! As it is, by writing from 4 am to 8 am I have finished my second book of poems. The New Yorker has just renewed* my yearly ‘first reading’ contract & accepted a lyric called ‘Amnesiac’* about a man who forgets his wife & children & lives in the river of Lethe. Guess who! I am dedicating this book of poems to Frieda & Nicholas & shall dedicate the 3rd book of poems which I have already begun to my mother. That is why I asked if you would let me dedicate my 2nd novel DOUBLETAKE to you---if you thought it good enough, for I thought mother would like a book of poems best & you as a novelist would like the novel best!
I took both babies to the Zoo this week---Nick slept, but Frieda was absolutely fascinated by the lions and owls, the new baby elephant and the penguins swimming in their “bath”. It is such fun to take Frieda about, she remembers & notices everything, it is like have a fresh expanded consciousness. The thing she was most impressed about was that the monkeys “couldn’t get out”. I thought that a very advanced notion for a girl of 2½! Do try to persuade my mother, if you can, that she has nothing to worry about. I have been so crushingly busy with this move I’ve hardly had time for a cup of tea & now I am settled I shall write every week, but it only adds to my worries to hear she is worried. I am very happy & delighted to be back in my element in London. Hard work never hurt anybody & I think these new responsibilities have made me grow up a lot & certainly given me very rich material for writing!
Best love to you,
Sylvia
TO Douglas Cleverdon
Sunday 16 December 1962 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
December 16, 1962
Dear Douglas,
Just a little note to say, in case Ted’s forgotten to call you about it, that I’ve used your name as a reference for applying for a priority phone, as I can’t get one for months otherwise & need it rather fiercely for my freelancing. All I guess they’ll want, if they contact you, is confirmation that I need a phone right away for journalistic work & that I do & have done programs for the BBC.
I hope this isn’t too much of a bother! Very many thanks anyhow.
Sincerely,
(Sylvia Plath)
Douglas Cleverdon, Esq.
Features, The BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
TO Michael Carey
Sunday 16 December 1962 |
TLS, Assumption College |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
Sunday: December 16
Dear Father Michael,
The various blessings have triumphed & the babies & I installed over the Yeats plaque. We moved in by candlelight, as the Electricity Board hadn’t bothered to connect it, in spite of my smog-muffled arrangements the previous week, so it was very Dickensian. We will be camping out more or less until I get several acres of ancient floorboards painted by hand, rather a trial as I would, in the evenings, much rather write poems. Do drop by for the cup of tea I couldn’t give you in North Tawton anytime you happen to be up around Primrose Hill. It’s my very favorite district in London, for when I was reading English on a Fulbright at Cambridge I was first installed in the middle of Regents’ Park to be ‘initiated’. And we spend a great deal of time at the Zoo!
My answer to the ‘what’ question is the Troll King’s answer out of Peer Gynt---‘Myself’.* Very much so, thank God. Now you will surely think I am unredeemable, but do go on blessing me nonetheless!
All best Christmas wishes,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 21 December 1962* |
TLS with envelope in greeting card,* Indiana University |
Dear mother,
I do hope these pictures* convince you of the health & happiness of us three! Susan took them, & for Xmas blew up 4 big ones for me. Frieda & I are having a December picnic in St. Ives, Cornwall!* I have never been so happy in my life. By some miracle everybody has delivered & done everything for me before Xmas---their usual “after Xmas” excuses melting miraculously away: I have fresh white walls in the lounge, pine bookcases, rush matting which looks very fine with my straw Hong Kong chairs & the little glasstopped table, also straw & black iron,* in which I can put flowerpots & currently have a lilac hyacinth. I have found the most fantastic store---Dickens & Jones,* which knocks Harrods out the window. I spent the rest of Mrs. P’s clothes money & feel & look like a million---got a Florence-Italy blue & white velvet overblouse, a deep brown velvet Italian shirt, black fake-fur toreador pants, a straight black velvet skirt & metallic blue-and-black French top. One or two other outfits made me drool, notably some Irish weave shirts--I love everything Irish, as you may imagine! But I stopped at a Viennese black leather jerkin! I haven’t had a new wardrobe for over 7 years & it’s done wonders for my morale. You should see me nipping round London in the car! I’m a real Londoner at heart, I love Fitzroy Road & this house above all. A lovely tea with Catherine Frankfort, her husband & 3 boys yesterday. Their new baby is named Nicholas. Got a lovely Scots woman babysitter from the Baby Agency while I went shopping, she had my dinner warm when I returned, & got in my old Doris, who loves the children, so I could see a marvelous new Ingmar Bergman movie* that night. Will have Xmas dinner with this lovely Portuguese couple who’ve been putting me up on my London visits & who’ve loaned me a bed. Just had two long bee poems accepted by the Atlantic,* & have been asked to judge the Cheltenham poetry contest again this year. I am in 7th heaven. Now I am out of Ted’s shadow everybody tells me their life story & warms up to me & the babies right away. Life is such fun.
Katherine is finding out about a little nursery school* round the corner where I might send Frieda mornings. The weather has been blue & springlike & I out every day with the babies. Still have the babies floors to paint, the au pair’s floors, the hall floors & 3 unpainted wood bureaus. Blue is my new color, royal, midnight (not aqua!). Ted never liked blue, & I am a really blue-period person now. With lilac & apple green accents. If you ever want to make another hit, send some more kitty balloons! I read a picture book with Frieda every night. My bedroom has yellow,& white wallpaper, straw mat, black floor borders & gold lampshade---bee colors, & the sun rises over an 18th century engraving London each day. I’d like to live in this flat forever. Mrs. P. sent me $100 for Xmas. Sent her the Byron review---do ask to see it.
Lots of love to you, Warren & Maggie,
Sivvy
PS: Tell everyone of my move, hence no cards this year. I’ve not had a second.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 26 December 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
Wednesday: December 26
Dear mother,
I wish you could see me sitting here in my gorgeous front room. Even though the day is grey & white with frost the rooms white walls flood it with light & there is a very strong oriental feeling to it with the Hongkong cane chairs, rush mats & Tokyo & Arabic glasses in lovely clear colors. I do hope you explain my move prevented me from thinking of sending any American Christmas cards this year. I did rush off about 2 dozen over here & hope you will be mollified by some color photos which I am waiting to get from Susan. I am wild for the exquisite Japanese hair ornament Warren & Maggie sent, am wearing it now at the end of a long braid, it just goes with my decor. Dear Dotty sent a $20 bill & I shall treat myself to a green velvet set of Oriental toreador pants & top at that marvelous Dickens & Jones shop in Regent Street right after this Boxing Day holiday. It is amazing how much my new hairdo & new clothes have done for my rather shattered morale. I had a lovely tea with the Frankforts, with the two beautiful blond Secker-Walker children & their parents (they lived two houses down from our Chalcot Square place) & with Susan’s Kentish Town journalist who invited a charming architect & his wife & their little girl, just Nick’s age, & some others. Garnett, Winifred’s son, dropped by & is coming for dinner Sunday. I plan to throw myself into painting the rest of the upstairs floors & 3 whitewood bureaus this week so I can give myself the treat of applying for an au pair first thing in the new year. I have been resting a bit the last few days. We went for Christmas dinner with a very nice Portuguese couple in Hampstead---they made a goose which they lit with cognac & gave Frieda a tiny toy piano that plays simple songs & Nick a rubber rabbit. I thought the outfits for Nick & Frieda Warren & Maggie sent just lovely, do thank them for me. I have been so preoccupied I have barely had time to cook. Catherine has told me of a little nursery school just round the corner which takes children from 9:30 to 12:30 & I shall try Frieda at it next week. She seems to blossom on outside experiences with other children & I think she needs this. Marty Plumer sent me a marvelous apron & the babies ‘Make Way for the Ducklings’.* I’ve not written her or anyone, but shall do as soon as I get my au pair & work started. I am hoping the BBC accepts my 20 minute program of new poetry---the producer thinks they are wonderful, but the Board still has to approve.* Then I have the commission for a program on my childhood landscape, or in my case, sea scape. Did I say Mrs. P. sent $100? And bless you for your $50. I have double expenses just now---the closing expenses at North Tawton & the rather large opening ones here, but once I am settled here it will be 5 years blessed security & peace & no more floor painting! Which is a lot to look forward to & in which time I should have produced a lot of work. How lucky I am to have two beautiful babies & work! Both of them have colds, which makes them fussy, but I keep them warmly dressed & they take long naps. Did Maggie knit that gorgeous blue sweater for Frieda? Their color pictures are lovely---Frieda has claimed them. She says of every sweater “Grammy made that.”
Frieda loves the little mouse that came in Warren’s parcel. She came in holding a rusk in her hands just as the mouse is holding the corn & said ‘Like mouse.’ She is unique in seeing resemblances to things. Just now I held her up to see a fine snow falling & she said ‘Like Tomten book’,* which is about a little Scandinavian dwarf on a farm in the snow. I took the very favorite picture books to london & we ‘read” one each day. I am enjoying just sitting about with the children & making tea & breathing a little. I don’t feel to have had a holiday for years! Nick is wonderfully happy & strong. I do notice now that his left eye is slightly turned in, although for the longest time I just couldn’t see it, so I am going to my local doctors this week to ask what they think about it.*
Well, I hope to drop over to the Frankforts a bit later this evening for a “Boxing Day” supper with them & his mother.* Ted is spending the Christmas up in Yorkshire, & I naturally do get a bit homesick for relatives & was grateful to have Christmas dinner out with these friends. Frieda did very much enjoy opening presents, but is much too young to grasp more than that “Santa brought it for Frieda.” She is very encouraging about my painting floors, getting up & praising me in her little treble each day ‘Good mummy, paint floors all clean for Frieda.” She is such a joy to take out & I like having her play with the very charming children in the neighborhood.
It is now snowing very prettily, crisp & dry, like an engraving out of Dickens.
Lots of love to all,
Sylvia
TO Daniel & Helga Huws
Wednesday 26 December 1962 |
TLS, Helga and Daniel Huws |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
Boxing Day
Dear Danny & Helga,
You have no idea how your two good letters cheered me, & how Frieda loves the little toy village you sent---she keeps pointing to the church & then to a church steeple she can see in the distance & saying “Go in there some day soon.” I hope it simply means she may be very spiritually inclined!
By a very wierd combination of luck & hard work I am sitting in an unfurnished flat in Yeats’ house (plaque & all!) in Fitzroy Road around the corner from our old place, the babies playing with snuffly Xmas colds, & a fine white snow falling on the 18th-century-engraving houses opposite. I have a 5 year lease. It happened like a miracle, Danny, shortly after I saw you---I had been looking at fantastically expensive furnished places & in utter despair decided to walk my dear, old haunts round Primrose Hill. A board advertising flats to let in Yeats’ house---which I’d always looked at longingly---was out. I flew in a taxi to the agents & was first to apply for the maisonette on the first & top floor---3 beds, lounge, kit & bath. When I got back to Court Green I told my nurse I’d get a “message” from Yeats, shut my eyes & opened to the quote “Get wine & food to give you strength & courage & I will get the house ready.” And you can imagine how hard it was, with my utter lack of references & a steady job! In the end I had to bluster about being an American & offer the year’s rent in advance, going quietly into debt for that amount on the side. In the next week I hope to paint the rest of the floors upstairs & lure in an au pair so I can write mornings & try to earn some money. It is the luckiest thing that has happened in a bad very bad year. Oddly enough, out of the blue, all sorts of people have decided I need praying for, or that they want to pray for me---from a Roman Catholic priest-poet at Oxford to an Evangelist from Sweet Home, Oregon, who saw a picture of me at 19 in some magazine or other & has since been sending me Guitar records of spirituals! I just accept the prayers with thanks.
I am so relieved to get out of North Tawton I just sit back & breathe heavily---it seemed so impossible for the last half year, left alone there as I was without help with the babies after I almost died of flu this summer. It was only this darling young nurse home on vacation from a London children’s hospital who worked for me about 6 weeks & made me eat etc. who enabled me to come up & scout out a place. I am going to the doctor this week to see if he can help me get off these sleeping pills I’ve been taking every night & am now addicted to. I think I’ll keep on smoking a little while longer, I’m actually alas beginning to like it! You can imagine how the small town gossip went---I actually had to stop going to some shops to escape the leering questions about where my husband was, wasn’t it lonely all alone in such a big house, etc. The fouler gossip was that I wasn’t married anyway as I got mail under my maiden name!
I am so happy to be back among Frieda’s old playmates---most mothers have babies Nick’s age now, as she is slowly coming out of the awful regression she went into after Ted’s desertion---she was always his little pet. I try to take her out to tea with other children almost every afternoon & hope to start her at a little nursery school here next week, if she likes it. She keeps saying in a delighted treble “Look at all these people.” You ask about divorce, Helga---Ted wants one, & since marriage gave him no sense of obligation to the babies it will make no difference what he has. It was inconceivable to me at one point & very hard to come to, as I never believed in it myself, but it is better to be free of him. Your letter moved me very much, Danny---it helped me a lot to hear your feelings of Ted, & I think you are right about him. His guilt alas makes him very hard & cross & hurtful, and you can imagine the public humiliations one has to face, being in the same work & Ted being so famous. But I think he will come round about once a week & take the children to the Zoo. Probably you know the woman he is with is on her third husband & has had so many abortions she can’t have children. She is part of this set of barren women, which includes Dido Merwin, that I am so glad to get rid of. I guess I am just not like that. I had a terrible experience calling Dido Merwin as Frieda’s godmother when I was in London---as Frieda had been diagnosed as a latent schizophrenic as a result of this, & she was the only person I thought could advise me about doctors & a flat. She knew I was calling on her as a godmother, but because she was so glad she at last had Ted living at her place* she made it clear she was home but refused to speak to me.
Both Ted & I have agreed to write off the Merwins as Frieda’s godparents & wonder if you would be her godparents instead. I take this as a very serious thing, & it almost killed me for Frieda’s sake, to think of the heartlessness & hypocrisy behind Mrs. Merwin’s refusal to answer when she knew I was worried about the babies going into hospital. But then, she has always disliked children & devoted her life to herself. I find now that this breakup has occurred I am free of many such people who courted Ted for his fame, & of course it has hurt me deeply that he has more or less sold out to them. But now I am here the desperate mother in me, which is so saddened at losing the children a father, can see Ted as a great poet & wish him his own brand of happiness & that he write well. It is also hard to have undergone, all summer, his new practise in lying which this woman has taught him, as she has enjoyed lying & being faithless to all 3 of her husbands & came into my house & wanted all I had & took it. Ted has always seemed so straight to me, brutal if he wanted, but not lying, so that I can hardly believe he thinks it sophisticated & grownup & crafty. But I guess I’m just simple-minded.
It is heaven to have people to talk to after 6 months of solitary confinement in the country. I hope to rent this place furnished by the week to wealthy Americans or something in the summer & return summers to Court Green. Please say you will all come for a visit with me next summer! I miss you very much & would give anything if you would drop by if & whenever you are in London. I have, as you may imagine, more or less ignored Christmas this year, but send my dearest love to you both & the beautiful babies! Do write.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Fainlight
Wednesday 26 December 1962 |
TLS (aerogramme), Ruth Fainlight |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
Boxing Day
Dear Ruth,
Your good letter about your flat was waiting for me the night I got back to Court Green after signing the 5 year lease for Yeats’ place in the brain-stopping smog, & I am sure it helped me get it. I am now sitting in the first floor lounge with the snuffly babies, who both have Xmas colds, watching a beautiful frosty snow fall on the 18th-century-engraving housefronts opposite & thanking God & Yeats & whoever that I got out of the Devon pig fields before the real cold set in. How I look forward to your return at the end of February! It is my plan to return to Court Green in spring, Aprilish, for the summer & try to let out this place by the week furnished at fabulous rents to American tourists to recoup on the debt I got in by offering sanguinely to pay the year’s rent in advance---my last card in overcoming objections to my lack of references, steady job etc. Please plan on coming back to Devon with me! It would be such fun to open the place up in spring there with you, and after my experience alone there this fall & winter, with all the villagers coyly asking where my husband was & wasn’t it lonely living all alone in such a big house, etc., with Dartmoor convicts escaping* etc., I want lots of company & lots of babies around when I get back! I adore Fitzroy Road & would like by hook or crook to write such an obscene or merely good novel that I made some money & could tempt the widow who owns this very house. The Yeats “aura” is very calm & benevolent---everybody looked mesmerized & delivered all my straw mats & Hong Kong furniture before Xmas. I am slowly getting the floors painted, & hope to make one final push & get the upstairs ones & 3 whitewood bureaus done before New Years. Then five guaranteed years of no more floor painting! I’ve done it every year it seems, usually 7 months pregnant, now not so, & what a relief it will be to stop. I have been out round Regents Park & Primrose Hill each day with the babies, drinking in the old scenery which I love so, & taking the babes to tea with the very charming children who live round & are Frieda’s old playmates---Frieda has regressed terribly after Ted’s departure, she was his little pet, & I became very worried, as she had shrieking tantrums and so on & it was difficult not to be furious, as she was obviously trying me, but then she was also so obviously miserable. Now I am going to send her to a little nursery school mornings around the corner, as seeing other children seems to do her a lot of good & bring her out of herself.
I hope to get the au pair’s room ready by the New Year & lure in one then so I can try to finish my 2nd novel. My first comes out next month under a psuedonym & I’ve finished a 2nd book of poems which I’ll slowly sell one by one & then try to get printed. Do hurry back & then maybe I can persuade you to go to some movies & plays with me & to get Nick & David wrestling again. Christmas was a bit of a large gap & I very glad to get rid of it & eager to get an au pair & to work, which does all sorts of salutary things for one!
Love to all & very eager for your return!
Sylvia