TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 2 January 1963 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1, England
January 2, 1963
Dear mother,
I am so glad you got the pictures safely. I got a nice letter from Marty & am so glad she & Mike plan to come briefly alone early this spring. For goodness sake do tell people I am separated from Ted &, if you feel like it, divorcing him! It is odd to get cards from people like the Aldriches to us both, there’s no point in you keeping up any pretence. I see they’re expecting a 9th baby! Do congratulate Betty for me & send my love. The babies & I have just got over very nasty Xmas colds & are now fine. Probably you have heard we’ve had fantastic snow here---my first in all my years in England. I heard Devon was completely cut off by 20 foot drifts & they were dropping bread & milk by helicopter!* Well, I just got out in time! The English, being very English, have of course no snow plows, because this only happens once every five years, or ten. So the streets are great mills of sludge which freezes & melts & freezes. One could cheerfully use a dog sled, & I wish I had a sled for Frieda for they are sledding on Primrose Hill, it looks so pretty! I am trying her at the little nursery school around the corner where Catherine Frankfort sends her boys, 3 hours a morning 5 days a week for just over $4. They drink cocoa & play. Some mornings she is more tearful than others, but she does need to be free of mummy for some time, & I need desperately to have time to work---I put Nick down for a nap which he’s ready for by then, having been up & playing & shaking his cot since 6! I have a BBC assignment to do ‘live’ next Thursday night, reviewing a book of American poems on a weekly New Comment program,* so my being back is already getting round. It takes months to get a phone here, but once I get all these things done I’ll be set for 5 years & one can do a lot in that time! Garnett came for a dinner & a lunch & did help paint the border of one floor in the children’s room, which I will make into their playroom when the mother’s help comes---the rug for that has come & it is now very cosy up there. I have to finish the floors in the mother’s help’s room & in the upstairs & downstairs halls, give 3 bureaus 2 coats of paint each, & then I should be able to take a rest---except for sewing some curtains! The car is really snowed up. I don’t want to use it until some of this Arctic is thawed.
The wonderful package from Dot & you came the day after Boxing Day which is the holiday the day after Christmas. Much better then! I was astounded at all the toys & beautiful clothes! Nick loves the baby doll which he seems to think is another of his own sort, & chews the little mouse Warren sent as a cat would! All I had to pay was about 60 cents for the package being forwarded from North Tawton. Margaret’s package arrived before Xmas & the sweater was lovely---is the hood for Frieda or me! It is very large, I think it must be me! I am so glad Grampy could spend Christmas Day with you, and do give my love to Frank & Louise---I believe I wrote them thanking them for their $25 cheque but thank them again for me anyway.
It is such a relief to be back with my wonderful and understanding Doctor Horder. He has given me a very good tonic to help me eat more, is checking my weight---I lost about 20 pounds this summer---& has sent me to have a chest xray after hearing of my 103° fevers,* so I am in the best of hands. He will tend to the business of Nick’s eye as soon has he has got me straightened out. You talk about ‘the problems at BU’. What are they? What is your position there and what will it be in the future? Tell me. I want to know these.things. Also, could you give me some idea when Warren & Maggie are coming over? I probably won’t go to Court Green till about Mayday this year, as I have had such a fore-shortened stay in London & part of it taken up by much manual labor.
Now here is something you could help me on---ask the Nortons etc. I want to send a blurb to the big universities advertising this maisonette to let from roughly May--Sept at about $75 a week and Court Green from Oct---April at about $35 a week (plus some care-taking) for people on sabbatical leave who have families (better no families in London, or only grown children!). I thought this would be a good way of making my rent as having to pay this year in advance has been a large whack. Also, people like places arranged ahead of time, & this is ideal for Parks, the West End, Universities, etc., while Court Green, very convenient to London, would be fine for a professor’s family & he finishing a book. I’ll make up a blurb & send you it, if you think you could post it at BU and maybe Warren at Harvard. I would take lets for years ahead, too, as I plan to stay here for the school year & be in Devon for the summers. See if the Nortons have any advice! Or customers! Do pass on love to Warren & Maggie & Dot & Joe.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Marcia B. Stern
Wednesday 2 January 1963 |
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
January 2, 1963
Dearest Marty,
I have been wanting & wanting & wanting to write you & have been so snowed by circumstance, outrageous fortune* & the lot that I haven’t had time to sit much less send one Xmas card this year! What has happened has been that Ted’s suddenly decided he doesn’t want any children, home, responsibility etc. & left me with the lot, after I almost died of flu this summer at Court Green. So I was alone on the small farm, too weak to even hold the baby & utterly incommunicado for some time. Then my wonderful Devon midwife got a lovely 22-year-old children’s nurse who was on holiday to come work as a mother’s help for 7 weeks (no au pair or mother’s help from any agency would come or stay with me, as it’s deep country with no TV etc. etc. & fine in spring & summer but primeval in fall & winter). I flogged myself up to London every other week, doing odd jobs on the BBC etc. & facing all the uproar that occurs when somebody as famous as Ted starts acting scandalous---especially hard as in our work we meet all the same people. At first I had thought of burying myself & the babies in Western Ireland for the winter---where I had discovered a wonderful town on the sea with an Irish poet sailing the old Galway Hookers & cooking on turf, drinking John Jameson whisky & bog water & milking cows, to avoid the inevitable small town gossip in Devon & just get the hell away from it all. But then a small miracle happened---I’d been to Yeats’ tower at Ballylea while in Ireland & thought it the most beautiful & peaceful place in the world; then, walking desolately round my beloved Primrose Hill in London & brooding on the hopelessness of ever finding a flat single-handed, furnished ones being outrageously priced & unfurnished just beyond my strength, I passed Yeats’ house, with its blue plaque “Yeats lived here” which I’d often passed & longed to live in. A signboard was up---flats to let. I flew to the agent. By a miracle you can only know if you’ve ever tried to flat-hunt in London, I was first to apply, & got rid of all the stickiness about my not having a job, references etc. by saying poo I was an American & would they like the year’s rent in advance, & going quietly into debt on the side. Well, I am here on a 5-year lease & it is utter heaven. I have to be in London to get a live-in mother’s help, which I desperately need, jobs on the BBC & reviewing etc. & good free schooling for the children. I shall try to rent this place furnished to well-heeled Americans for about 5 months in the summer---they go at about $75 a week, and try to rent my gorgeous country house with Bendix et. al. in fall & winter, at much less. Maybe you could give me some advice about this---I thought I’d send blurbs to Smith, Harvard, etc., for it’s ideal for sabbatical year people, finishing books or with families. This flat is on two floors on a road off Primrose Hill, the Zoo & Regents Park (with playgrounds, etc.) with 3 bedrooms, a big handsome lounge, kitchen (where I eat at a counter on bar-stools) & even has a little balcony I hope to sit out on with you in spring! And Its Yeats’ house, which right now means a lot to me. I guess you can imagine what it’s like coping with two infants, free lance jobs, painting & decorating acres of floors & haunting sales for curtaining etc. Toute seule!
I am, thank God, on the panel of my old, free, wonderful doctors, who have been sending me for chest xrays (I lost 20 lbs. this summer, which I can ill afford & had these 103° fevers) & giving me tonics to make me eat, pills to sleep etc. The last 6 months have been a unique hell, but that’s finished & I am fine now. Very glad to be rid of all the bitches & bastards that dog social lions. Oddly enough, all the phonies came loose with Ted & everybody I know now is normal & nice. I think your idea of coming alone with Mike is wonderful---I have been so utterly flattened by having to be a businesswoman, farmer---harvesting 70 apple trees, stringing all my onions, digging & scrubbing all my potatoes, extracting & bottling my honey etc.---mother, writer & all-round desperado that I’d give anything for a brief week in which somebody, some dear friends, went places, ate, talked, with just me. How I understand & sympathize with your visit to your father! I feel like a very efficient tool or weapon, used & in demand from moment to moment by the babes. And Ted’s clearing off after 6 years of utter scrimp with all the money, living on brandy & not a worry in the world, as soon as real fame & money pour in, is enough to cure anyone of self-sacrifice. His manuscripts sell for over $100 for a couple of handwritten pages. Since he’s never paid a bill or figured inc. tax or mowed the lawn etc. he’s no notion of what it takes & if I’m lucky we’ll get about $2,800 a year. I’m in the process of a divorce suit now & will be very glad when that’s finished---I somehow never imagined myself as the sort! I hope to be finished with painting floors & sewing curtains etc. in a week & then lure in one of these foreign students to mind the babes mornings so I can write. Nights are no good, I’m so flat by then that all I can cope with is music & brandy & water! I am thrilled you’ll come in March or early April. Then we can go to plays, on park walks etc. here. I’d love you to see Court Green too, but am not sure when I’ll get back – around Mayday. Do write!
Love,
Syl
<on page 1 of letter>
PS: A thousand thanks for the lovely Xmas parcel! I have read & read the Duck Book to F & worn the apron (veddy English & very me!) every minute since I got it---instead of the ghastly old rags I’d been wrapping round!
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Wednesday 2 January 1963 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1, England
January 2, 1963
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
At last I find myself with a moment to sit down with a cup of coffee & wish you a Happy New Year and thank you for the lovely Christmas card, which reminded me so of my beloved Boston Common under snow, and the generous enclosure! I am absolutely in love with my flat & quite amazed when I look round after having been here only a little over 3 weeks, to see what I have done single-handed! I have painted all the floors (2 coats!) except the halls & stair & laid down rush matting---very cheap & beautifully Oriental looking. My colors in the lounge are midnight blue, apple green & lilac, a refreshing change from my scheme at Court Green & I have some little handblown Arabic glasses I love, to carry it out, & plan to get bit by bit second hand pieces of pleasing lines & lacquer them in black & handpaint designs on some. I am trying Frieda at a little nursery school for 3 hours in the morning, which will give me a bit of time to work until I finish sewing all the curtains for the mother’s help room, paint her bureau & go to the agency to find a good one! Then I should really be able to work. What I hope to do is rent this charming place out furnished by the week from about May 1 through September to visiting Americans---I shall send notices to the various universities, as it is ideal for a sabbatical year, & rent my lovely Court Green in fall & winter at much less if I can find someone! I do hope I can thus make a business proposition out of it!
Already I find my being in London is getting round---I have a job on the BBC this next week to broadcast “live” my opinions on an Anthology of American poetry on a weekly New Comment program so have to study these next evenings instead of painting bureaus! If I am lucky in getting a mother’s help I should be able to finish my novel this winter and try my hand at a few short stories. The BBC is considering a 20 minute broadcast of my new poems with comment & explanation & I do hope they take it. I have also to do this program about the influence of my childhood landscape which I look very forward to. I am enjoying living off my own potatoes, hand-strung onions, apples & honey & the doctor’s wife’s strawberry jam! The midwife’s son who is a policeman in London stopped by for dinner this week & to help me paint one floor.
We have had the first real snowfall I’ve seen in all my years in England! The street looks like a frosty 18th century engraving. Of course the English, being English, have no snowplows, so to get from shop to shop one climbs mountains of sludge. The children & I have all had flu over Christmas, it has been very cold, but I am back with my old, wonderful doctors, & he is giving me tonic to help me eat more & gain back the 20 lbs. I lost this summer & sending me for chest xrays, so I am in fine hands & glad to be away from the Devon doctor who improperly bandaged my badly cut thumb last month so it went septic & was unnecessarily deformed! Luckily this London doctor helped save the top, though I did lose the side. It is so beautiful here, & I so love living in Yeats’ house. Do write soon! Did I say I had two long bee-keeping poems taken by the Atlantic Monthly?
Love,
Sylvia
TO George MacBeth
c. Fri.–Tues. 4–8 January 1963* |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
Dear George,
Sorry this is late, but I’ve been down with the flu & so have the children. If there’s any ghastly message or changes or such maybe you could call Ted & he could get a message to me before Thursday night when I’ll see you at the BBC at 7. I won’t be getting a phone for a couple of weeks yet & the md’s put me pretty much incommunicado.
Best wishes,
Sylvia
TO Charles Osborne
Wednesday 9 January 1963 |
TLS, University of Texas at Austin |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
January 9, 1963
Dear Charles,
Here is the cheque back, with some more poems.* I am at present writing by candlelight with cold fingers, a sinister return to Dickensian conditions thanks to the Electricity Board, from Yeats’ house off Primrose Hill where I’ve just moved into a flat with the two babies. If you are not a childphobe & ever happen to be in the district, I’d be happy to have you drop round for a cup of coffee or tea.
All good wishes,
Sylvia Plath
PS ‘Berck-Plage’ has been read on the 3rd Programme but not published
TO Gilbert & Marian Foster
Wednesday 9 January 1963 |
TLS, Private owner |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
January 9: Wednesday
Dear Gilbert & Marion,
Happy New Year to you. I am just crawling to consciousness after 10 days of influenza which the babies had too, all of us flat out with a day-nurse through this ghastly weather. I hope you are all right & that Court Green has not collapsed under a great weight of snow.
Nurse D. tells me the town opinion is that I should give Nancy the opportunity to ‘look after’ the place since she’s done it for 11 years etc. & so since I do want her back very much as house-help next spring I’m writing in the same mail to her to say if she feels strong enough (she had been ill), would she get the key from you, keep an eye on it & take over the feeding of the cats. I rely on Nurse D. to keep me informed of the general cess-drift of town furies. Did I tell you there’s a big potato ‘pie’ in the back garden, to the right as you enter the gate at the end of the court? You are welcome to this, & if they are not rotted (Ted packed it), could you sometime send me up a bag? I’ve got plenty of apples & onions but we’ve been living on potatoes. Let me know if Nancy takes up her option to do the cats---if she does maybe you could give her the remnants of that cheque, if any? How are they? And you & our Friend & Rector! Do write.*
Fondest good wishes,
Sylvia
TO Paul & Clarissa Roche
c. Wednesday 9 January 1963* |
TLS, Smith College |
23 Fitzroy Road
London NW1
Wednesday
Dear, dear Paul & Clarissa,
I am writing you from bed where the doctor has put me to say how wonderful it was to see you & the beautiful children that day.* I shall never forget the dear tea you left me with – I really thought I was dying & began having blackouts that night while the two babies later ran scalding fevers. My very wise and kind doctor got me a private day-nurse for 10 days or I don’t know what I would have done. Your wonderful perceptive letter about the novel* –you are the first to read it – came at a most needed moment & I think you see just what I meant it to be. One day when there is a good enough one it shall be dedicated to you both. I am slowly getting able to breathe & see & hope a darling little 18 year old ‘au pair’ I interviewed while more or less in a coma may move in at the end of next week, if she wasn’t too frightened by the hospital atmosphere!
Much love to all,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 16 January 1963 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1, England
Wednesday: January 16
Dear mother,
Thanks very much for your letter & the cheque. I am slowly pulling out of the flu, but the weakness & tiredness following it makes me cross. I had a day nurse for a week when I was worst & the children had high fevers (little Frieda got a ghastly rash which turned out to be an allergy to penicillin which she can’t have) but then she got a cold & went home, just as well, for she used up that $50 cheque, they are very expensive! The children are themselves again, thank goodness. I took Frieda to nursery school again yesterday & she seemed to really enjoy it, the mistress said she was much more at home. Catherine Frankfort has been so sweet, coming round with her boys & doing some shopping for me. The weather has been filthy, with all the heaped snow freezing so the roads are narrow ruts & I have been very gloomy with the long wait for a phone which I hope to get by the end of the month after 2 months wait! which makes one feel cut off, and the lack as yet of an “au pair”. I did interview a very nice German girl of 18 from Berlin whom I wanted & engaged, but her employer is making difficulties for her leaving & I hope to goodness I hear this week that she is coming. Then I should feel cheered to cook a bit more---I’ve been so weak I’ve just wanted boiled eggs & chicken broth. I did get out for a small BBC job the other night, very pleasant, reviewing a book of American poetry & entertained with drinks & sandwiches, & I have a commission for a funny article* which I just haven’t had time or energy to think of. I still need to sew the bedroom curtains, have some made for the big front room windows & get a stair carpet & oddments---it is so hard to get out to shop with the babies, but I’ve decided to use the agency babyminders who are very good though expensive for a few nights out this week---a very sweet couple have invited me to dinner tomorrow & me & the babies to dinner Sunday & I think I may go to a play with this Portuguese girl. I just haven’t felt to have any identity under the steamroller of decisions & responsibilities of this last half year, with the babies a constant demand. Once I have an au pair, the flat finished---after all, it is furnishing for at least 5 years done, and should always be my “London furniture”, so it is an investment---and a phone & routine I should be better I think. Ted comes about once a week to see Frieda & sometimes is nice & sometimes awful. It is very hard for me to think of him living in an expensive flat,* being wined & dined, taking his girlfriend to Spain without a care in the world when I have worked so hard all these years & looked so forward to what I saw was to be our good fortune. But I get strength from hearing about other people having similar problems & hope I can earn enough by writing to pay about half the expenses. It is the starting from scratch that is so hard---this first year. And then if I keep thinking, if only I could have some windfall, like doing a really successful novel & buy this house, this ghastly vision of rent bleeding away year after year would vanish, I could almost be self-supporting with rent from the other two flats---that is my dream. How I would like to be self-supporting on my writing! But I need time.
I guess I just need somebody to cheer me up by saying I’ve done all right so far. Ironically there have been electric strikes & every so often all the lights & heaters go out for hours, children freeze, dinners are stopped, there are mad rushes for candles. Sue & her sweet boyfriend Corin took me out to a movie the other night, & I realized what I have missed most, apart from peace to write, is company---doing things with other people. Thank goodness I got out of Devon in time, I would have been buried for ever under this record 20 foot snowfall with no way to dig myself out. Nancy is feeding the cats, I sent her a $15 check. I hope to be able to rent this place furnished from about Mayday through September & go to Court Green then. I was very lucky in calling the Home Help Service* which sends out cleaners to sick or old people & got a wonderful vigorous woman, named Mrs. Vigors (!)* who works at about twice Nancy’s pace & had the place gleaming in about 2 hours. I got a terrific lift from it & hope I can persuade her to come to me on her own Saturdays after I no longer qualify as a person in need. It is very hard to get good cleaners here & she has two young girls & is very good with the babies.
Do give my best love to Dot & Joe and Warren & Margaret & I hope to write in a week or so saying I have got this au pair---she left some of her stuff & seemed a very nice cheerful girl whom the children liked.
Love to all,
Sivvy
TO Leonie Cohn
Tuesday 22 January 1963 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
January 22, 1963
Miss Leonie Cohn
Talks Department
THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORP.
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear Miss Cohn,
Thanks very much for your extremely helpful letter of January 17th.* It does give me a much clearer idea of what you want and I think 20 minutes would be fine, with incidents. I have been slowed up a bit by a move from the country to London and nursing my two infants through the flu, but hope to have the script to you in a week or two.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Tuesday 22 January 1963 |
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University |
January 22, 1963
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
How good to get your letters! They are like soul letters to me. I have not answered sooner for since Christmas the babies and I have been very ill with high fevers & flu and had to have a day nurse. And as you have no doubt heard, the weather has been fierce. It is a miracle I got out of Devon in time---it is buried under mountains of snow. In London they have no snow-removal equipment, so one climbs treacherous mountains to shop, & it is months before they let you have a phone. I am still waiting. My doctor here---my old doctor---has been a source of great help to me (I am still on sleeping pills & tonics to help me eat), but I do occasionally miss that wonderful Doctor Ruth Beuscher I had at McLean’s who I feel could help me so much now. She did write me a letter or two, very helpful, but it’s not the same as those hours of talk. I have, miraculously, an 18-year-old German girl I am trying to train, living in as of this week.* In return for food, a room & about $5 a week she will take care of the children for 6 mornings and babysit an occasional evening. I have not been alone with myself for over two months, when I had my dear young nurse in Devon, and this has been the keenest torture, this lack of a centre, a quietness, to brood in and grow from. I suppose, to the writer, it is like communing with God.
I am hoping now to get back into shape with this article for the BBC on my childhood landscape---the literal seascape, with incidents and perhaps a story or two, then the novel I have not dared to touch, as you say, until I saw ahead I could sit to it every morning and fear no interruption. You were so wise to advise me to wait till I could have some more hours daily without break.
I think when my health comes back a bit more strongly, I shall paint the remaining floors and bureaus and fight spartanly with words all morning, being wholly a mother in the afternoon with my two darlings, taking them to tea and the park. Frieda makes me so sad. Ted comes once a week to see her, she hangs on him dotingly, then cries “Daddy come soon” for the rest of the week, waking in the night, tearful and obsessed with him. It is like a kind of mirror, utterly innocent, to my own sense of loss. Ted is, for the time, allowing me $280 a month which pays for food, gas, light and taxes in Devon, but not the rent or furnishings for the flat. I spent all I had to put down on the year’s rent in advance, which I had to do to get it, & hope to get it furnished nicely enough to rent it this summer when I go back to Devon. How often I feel the need of business advice, now I have all this on my shoulders! I was just feeling, after 6 years of spartan work & living, that our lives were moving into a wider phase of ease, Ted was getting so successful & I loved my mornings at my desk, which helped, my home, my babies. Now this awful woman who is still deceiving her 3rd husband & has abortion instead of babies is dangling him, it is all very public & I face this, and he lives in an expensive flat in Soho, showers everything on her, takes her on flights to Spanish holidays & so on. I think my salvation will be to plunge into my work---I simply can’t afford to think whether is is any good or will be good—that is a luxury. I must just write.
The rent is my one worry---five years of rent would be a deposit on the house, and at the end of 5 years I will have nothing. So I dream of writing a novel that could earn me the right to go down to Surrey & make the owner an offer for the house---I could just about live off the income from the bottom two flats & would not have this awful sense of hurling blood-money into an abyss. The schools in London are good, the jobs are here, the mother’s helps are here: Devon is blessed in the summers and holidays and wonderful for the children. I must just resolutely write mornings for the next years, through cyclones, water freezeups, children’s illnesses & the aloneness. Having been so deeply and spiritually and physically happy with my dear, beautiful husband makes this harder than if I had never known love at all. Now he is famous, beautiful, the whole world wants him and now has him. He has changed so that the old life is impossible---I could never live under the same roof with him again, but I hope for the children’s sake that each week he visits I can be brave and merry, without sorrow or accusation, and forge my life anew. My Xrays, thank goodness, are clear. I hardly glimpse my young children’s nurse at all, now she is back at work, but went to a movie with her last week. Ted has---together with the dear, kind man you & I both saw & knew---some of the inhumanity of the true genius that must kill to get what it wants. Now he has utter freedom, to live, adored & the center of gossiping women who collect social lions, to have affairs, holidays. It is hard, his casting off me and the children at this moment and after all these years of love & work, but I desperately want to make an inner strength in myself, an independence that can face bringing up the children alone & in face of great uncertainties. Do write me again! Your letters are like balm, you understand the writer in me, & that is where I must live.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Leonie Cohn
Monday 28 January 1963 |
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
January 28, 1963
Miss Leonie Cohn
Talks Department
THE BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear Miss Cohn,
Here, as I promised, is the script for my talk on the landscape of childhood. I hope it is the proper size; do let me know* if you think it is all right.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 4 February 1963 |
TLS* (aerogramme), Indiana University |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dear mother,
Thanks so much for your letters. I got a sweet letter from Dotty & a lovely hood & mittens for Nick from Warren & Margaret. I just haven’t written anybody because I have been feeling a bit grim---the upheaval over, I am seeing the finality of it all, and being catapulted from the cowlike happiness of maternity into loneliness & grim problems is no fun. I got a sweet letter from the Nortons* & an absolutely wonderful understanding one from Betty Aldrich. Marty Plumer is coming over at the end of March which should be cheering. Mrs. Prouty has sent another check & dear letter.* I have absolutely no desire ever to return to America. Not now, anyway. I have my beautiful country house, the car, and London is the one city of the world I’d like to live in---with its fine doctors, nice neighbors, parks & theaters & the BBC. There is nothing like the BBC in America---over there they do not publish my stuff as they do here, my poems & novel. I have done a commissioned article for Punch on my schooldays & have a chance for 3 weeks in May to be on the BBC Critics program* at about $150 a week, a fantastic break I hope I can make good on. Each critic sees the same play, art show, book, radio broadcast each week & discusses it. I am hoping it will finish furnishing this place & I can go to Court Green right after. As Marty for a copy of the details of the two places & the rent & maybe you could circulate them among your professor friends, too.
I appreciate your desire to see Frieda, but if you can imagine the emotional upset she has been through in losing her father & moving, you will see what an incredible idea it is to take her away by jet to America! I am her one security & to uproot her would be thoughtless & cruel, however sweetly you treated her at the other end. I could never afford to live in America---I get the best of doctor’s care here perfectly free & with children this is a great blessing. Also, Ted sees the children once a week & this makes him more responsible about our allowance. I have no desire ever to live in Wellesley, it always stifled me, & I think living with relatives is a very bad policy. I shall simply have to fight it out on my own over here. Maybe someday I can manage holidays in Europe with the children & so on. The children need me most right now & so I shall try to go on for the next few years writing mornings, being with them afternoons & seeing friends or studying & reading evenings.
My German au pair is food-fussy & boy-gaga, but I am d<oing my> best to discipline her, she does give me some peace mor<nings & a few> free evenings, but I’ll have to think up something new <for the country> as these girls don’t want to be so long away from Lond<on. I am going to> start seeing a woman doctor free on the National Hea<lth, to whom I’ve> been referred by my very good local doctor which sh<ould help me> weather this difficult time. Give my love to all.
<Sivvy>
TO Marcia B. Stern
Monday 4 February 1963 |
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dearest marty,
Your letter was like a shot of brandy or a shot in the arm, I’m not sure which, but wonderful. You are so blessedly understanding about everything, flu included. Everything has blown & bubbled & warped & split---accentuated by the light & heat suddenly going off for hours at unannounced intervals, frozen pipes, people getting drinking water in buckets & such stuff---that I am in a limbo between the old world & the very uncertain & rather grim new.* The best news of all is you & Mike coming. It is the nicest thing I’ve had to look forward to for an age---being cut off from my dearest friends & relatives has been very hard, but how wonderful that you will come! I long to have somebody really play with & love the babies---it is still a fantastic shock to me that they are so beautiful & dear & will have, in effect, no father. Ted comes once a week like a kind of a apocalyptic Santa Claus & when I’m in the country I guess half years & years will go by without him seeing them at all. Otherwise, he lives just for himself without a care in the world in a Soho flat, flying to Spain on holiday & so on & universally adored. You have no notion how famous he is over here now. I fought my way back to London as fast as I could because I wanted to face all the publicity & get it over with, as everybody I work for free-lance also employs Ted, & I have to start making a life of my own, having been catapulted out of the cow-like bliss of nursing Nick & maternity. Thank God it is a wellfare state & I can get free doctoring. How I wish you could see my beautiful country house. Maybe somehow, if no one is renting it this spring, we could all drive down.
Do stay closer than Kensington! I’ve heard friends recommend the Ivanhoe Hotel, Bloomsbury Street WC1 as very pleasant & central, & it’s right on the bus route here. How about that?
Your being my agent for the house & flat would be the most wonderful thing you could do, Marty. I was getting very depressed about the responsibility of this, America seemed so far away. This year, the London flat would be available from about May 20th (earlier next year) into October. Here’s info: 2 floor maisonette in Yeats’ house with 3 bedrooms, kitchen-dinette, bath, lounge & balcony just off Primrose Hill, Regents Park & the Zoo & minutes by tube & bus from the West End. Electric heaters, furnished, hot water electrically heated. Fridge. $60 per week plus light, phone, heat, gas. (Do you think this is okay for price---it’s a high class district). Minutes from launderette & all shops.
COURT GREEN: $30 a week, plus expenses of fuel, phone etc. Beautiful big thatched Devon country house with 2½ acres of garden & flowering trees: October to April (exact dates to be arranged). Three beds, study, bath, kitchen, dining kitchen, big sunny lino-tiled playroom, living room, Bendix, big fridge, Wilton carpets, electric immersion hot water heater, choice of wood, coal or electric fires. 4 hours express to Waterloo. English country town 20 mile from Exeter.
It would be wonderful if anybody wanted to work a whole year’s exchange, but a long let of either place would be wonderful, too. I should think the Yeats place would appeal to English professors on sabbatical!
I would love to go out to supper with you both & to a few movies or plays. I have been very lax about cooking & eating while alone in Devon & the problem of getting somebody to live in & help with the babes mornings so I can write & to be company for me & free me a few evenings is a big one. I now have a rather boycrazy & food-fussy german au pair whom I have to lecture to about maternal responsibility---it is pretty easy to get these in London, but none of them will go to the country for 5 months as far as I can see & it is there I most need someone. I am turning over the possibility of an older mother’s help-housekeeper sort of person, although I do find young girls more cheering.
How I do look forward to seeing you both & how very much I do need a spring tonic! I am dying to see what you think of my little Frieda & Nick.
Lots of love,
Syl.
TO Michael Carey
Monday 4 February 1963 |
TLS,* Assumption College |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dear Father Michael,
Please don’t worry about critiques or harshness,* I enjoy both. I’ve been silenced by everybody’s having flu & fevers & am just now creeping enough out of my post-flu coma to start to cope with sewing curtains & writing dawn poems,* and minding babies.
I don’t think any good poet wishes to be obscure. I certainly don’t; I write, at the present, in blood, or at least with it. Any difficulty arises from compression, or the jaggedness of images thrusting up from one psychic ground root.
How about Yeats for the lyrical?
All best wishes,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Monday 4 February 1963* |
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College |
23 Fitzroy Road
London N.W.1
February 4, 1963
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I write from London where I have found a flat & an au pair and can see ahead financially for about a year. I thought I’d get an unfurnished flat, furnish it by poems & loans, & rent it out summers to tourists while I went back to Devon, to earn most of the rent for it & Ted says he’ll try to pay us about $280 a month while I try to make up the rest by writing. I have finally read the Fromm & think that I have been guilty of what he calls ‘Idolatrous love’,* that I lost myself in Ted instead of finding myself, and this was why deeply underneath the marvelous loving, the writing, the babies I feared his loss, his leaving me & depended on him more & more, making him both idol & father. There was enough identity left to me in Devon to make me feel immense relief at his departure & at the prospect of divorce---now I shall grow out of his shadow, I thought, I shall be me. While we were married we were never apart & all experience filtered through each other. On a grownup level, I don’t think I could have endured a marriage of infidelities. I had a beautiful, virile, brilliant man & he still is, whatever immaturities there may be in his throwing over everything in such a violent way. He has said he is sorry for the lying, and shows concern that we get on on our own.
What appals me is the return of my madness, my paralysis, my fear & vision of the worst---cowardly withdrawal, a mental hospital, lobotomies. Perhaps this is accentuated by my seeing Ted once a week when he comes to see Frieda---seeing how happy & whole & independent he is now, how much more I admire him like this, & what good friends we could be if I could manage to grow up too. He is gaga over this ad-agency girl who has gone back to live with her 3rd husband to keep the passion hot, although she did live for 3 weeks with Ted & flew to Spain for a holiday with him. If I were simply jealous about this it would be okay. But I know Spain and lovemaking would do me no good now, not until I find myself again. I feel I need a ritual for survival from day to day until I begin to grow out of this death & found Fromm’s recommendation for concentration, patience & faith gave me a kind of peace,* but that I keep slipping into this pit of panic & deepfreeze, with my mother’s horrible example of fearful anxiety & “unselfishness” on one side & the beauties of my two little children on the other. I am living on sleeping pills & nerve tonic & have managed a few commissions for a magazine & the BBC and poems very good but, I feel written on the edge of madness. The publicity of Ted’s leaving is universal & I was taking it all with dignity & verve at first---people were buying poems & putting BBC work in my way, & I am scared to death I shall just pull up the psychic shroud & give up. A poet, a writer, I am I think very narcissistic & the despair at being 30 & having let myself slide, studied nothing for years, having mastered no body of objective knowledge is on me like a cold, accusing wind. Just now it is torture to me to dress, plan meals, put one foot in front of the other. Ironically my novel about my first breakdown is getting rave reviews over here.* I feel a simple act of will would make the world steady & solidify. No-one can save me but myself, but I need help & my doctor is referring me to a woman psychiatrist. Living on my wits, my writing---even partially, is very hard at this time, it is so subjective & dependent on objectivity. I am, for the first time since my marriage, relating to people without Ted, but my own lack of center, of mature identity, is a great torment. I am aware of a cowardice in myself, a wanting to give up. If I could study, read, enjoy people on my own Ted’s leaving would be hard, but manageable. But there is this damned, self-induced freeze. I am suddenly in agony, desperate, thinking Yes, let him take over the house, the children, let me just die & be done with it. How can I get out of this ghastly defeatist cycle & grow up. I am only too aware that love and a husband are impossibles to me at this time, I am incapable of being myself & loving myself.
Now the babies are crying, I must take them out to tea.
With love,
Sylvia