by Sylvia Plath
Much love to you both –
Sylvia
TO Marion Freeman
c. Wednesday 12 December 1956*
ALS in greeting card,* Smith College
WITH ALL GOOD WISHES FOR CHRISTMAS / AND THE NEW YEAR / from
sylvia
Dearest aunt marion . . .
How Ted & I loved your beautiful letter which described with such lovely colors the airport & scenes of my childhood home (it made me see it all so vividly again, & be a bit homesick). And then your generous wedding gift! You may imagine, it is rather difficult to start housekeeping from scratch – (luckily our flat is furnished) so I’ll have to wait with most things till we come home next June – but Ted & I did go out & buy one of our favorite Braque reproductions – a still life, & had it framed to have over our mantel – I’m sure you would like it – all muted shades of rich browns, yellows & greens – it hangs in a place-of-honor above our mantel. I can’t wait to bring Ted home in June! We are so happy in our little flat, which we painted & decorated, building in a huge 6-foot bookcase and all. Ted is the dearest, kindest, handsomest husband ever. He is looking so forward to meeting you – I’ve told him so much about my home & friends. He’s teaching English here now at a boy’s school & writing a book of children’s animal stories – maybe Ruth’s baby* will be old enough to appreciate them when we come home –
Love from us both & warmest thanks for your dear card & gift –
sylvia
TO Peter Davison*
c. Wednesday 12 December 1956*
ALS in greeting card* (photocopy), Yale University
WITH ALL GOOD WISH FOR CHRISTMAS / AND THE NEW YEAR / from
sylvia
Dear Peter . . .
After a hectic term of papers & protocol Ted & I are now married & living in our own flat – writing furiously & applying for teaching jobs together – (Ted’s now teaching English & drama at a Cambridge boys school). Ann Hopkins* mentioned some jobs open for intermediate writing courses at Harvard for which Howard Mumford Jones* is judging. So Ted wrote him credentials on off chance. We sail for home on June 20 & hope to write solidly all summer before starting jobs where & whenever –
Best Christmas wishes from us both –
Sylvia
TO Elinor Friedman Klein*
Saturday 15 December 1956
TLS in greeting card,* Smith College
WITH ALL GOOD WISHES FOR CHRISTMAS / AND THE NEW YEAR / from
sylvia
Dearest Elly . . .
Forgive this delinquent. But it has taken me all this time to get through papers, protocol etc. & at last am married, with Fulbright, still at Newnham,& living in this first floor flat we scrubbed, painted & just finished building in a 6foot6 huge bookcase. We loved the Paddy Chayefsky book;* if Ted ever gets a TV play accepted it will be you sent inspiration. Life was very grim this term– us not knowing about if I could stay on, keep grant, get flat, or Ted find job. After interviews & much rain, one flat fell open, one job teaching English & drama to semi-cretin boys opened the day Ted applied. We work, we thrive. Ted keeps getting poems accepted by the Nation (3 so far), Poetry, & one to the Atlantic Mo. I told poetry mag to let you know when my 6 come out this winter;* look up somewhere & see if you like. Ted’s revising the children’s fables (the Atlantic Press liked, but wants much revision & waits till it’s done for verdict). No prose bought yet. Blood, sweat. Please write us. How you are. O 17. Such salad days. What is playing on Broadway? Etc.
With love & merry Christmas from us both . . .
sylvia
TO Marcia B. Stern*
Saturday 15 December 1956
TLS in greeting card,* Smith College
With all Good Wishes / for Christmas / and the Coming Year
much love, / sylvia → / (inside)
Saturday, December 15, ’56
Dearest Marty. . .
At last, at last! Believe it or not, I have been mentally writing you letter after letter all this past hectic term, but had to wait till this week & all papers, protocol and sundries were over. Your fine letter and the wonderful color shot came this morning & was like eating a Christmas plum-cake. My wanderlust (which I thought was inexhaustible) came to an end with a rapid bang after this summer of lugging pack on back to London, Paris, all through Madrid (bull-fights, roast pig) to an incredible lovely little Spanish resort fishing village a couple of hours down from Valencia where from the huge white house I lived in (with its own fig tree & grape arbor) I could see a minute corner of the blazing Mediterranean for the 5 weeks I lived, swam wrote & sunned there. I’m enclosing* a bad article with some drawings I did of the place; I’ve started drawing again, these queer blocky little sketches & it is a good feeling.
How I got through one paragraph without telling you my enormous news shows how disciplined I’ve become! I am, wonder of wonders, married! I have been so frantic with work, official interviews & moving out of Whitstead into the new apartment I haven’t had a chance to write a soul except mother. His name is Ted (Edward James) Hughes and he is the most magnificent man ever. I can’t wait for you to meet him. We’re coming home at the end of next June (he’s a roaring hulking Yorkshireman & this will be his first time in America; we’re both crossing our fingers that we can get teaching jobs together in New England). I can’t really describe how all this happened---I simply couldn’t imagine myself married, at least not to anybody I’d ever met. And then one blustery Saturday night last winter I walked into this wild literary party given for a new magazine---I’d read it, & was awestruck and admiring of one poet’s poems. I met all the other writers---little scrawny midgets, & saw this great looming ferocious man across the room. “Who’s he?” said I. Well, he is now my husband. Ironically, he’d read some of my poems before meeting me, & there was a sudden sound of hurricanes in my ears & I just knew. I went off on a horrid mad spring vacation---sketching in Paris, going to Rome with Gordon,* and Venice, & breaking off with everybody I knew. I flew back from Rome to London on a black Friday the 13th in April, & we haven’t been apart a day since. I found Ted living in a condemned London slum (where Dylan Thomas used to stay) & working as a reader for J. Arthur Rank, saving money to go to Australia. He was very simply the only man I’ve ever met whom I never could boss; he’d bash my head in. We had the most incredible spring in Cambridge---Ted is a crack shot & fisherman, discus thrower & can read horoscopes like a professional; he shoots rabbits & I stew them. Oh he is a lovely one. Both of us write like fury & are each others best critics. He started me writing & drawing again after a bad winter & I am his secretary & his American agent. He’s got enthusiastic acceptances of his poems (3) from the Nation, Poetry (Chicago) and we’ve both got a poem each accepted by the Atlantic Monthly; I’m getting 6, miracle of miracles published in Poetry magazine this January I think, so take a look & see if you like. We both will have books of poems, about 50 apiece, ready to try for publishing this year & Ted is revising a book of children’s animal fables the Atlantic Press is nicely interested in---it is all much work & more typing & huge postage, but we have our fingers crossed. It has been a grim, bleak semester---there was a time of Ted & me trudging desolately around in the rain not knowing if the Fulbright would keep on, or Victorian Newnham college keep me, after marriage, & hunting for a flat & job for Ted at this unlikely time of year; no money either & many bills. Well, it all ended with blessings: I’m the only married undergraduate, woman, in Cambridge (they don’t think you can cook & cogitate at the same time, generally) on my lovely grant, & we found a cheap flat right on the edge of the Granchester meadows, with river & cows & a job opened for Ted teaching English & drama to a secondary modern boys school of near cretins---a
bout 13 to 14 years (many borderline juvenile delinquents) & he is great at it---terrifies them into admiration, has them writing Audenesque ballads, reading Russian history, building bullrings in cardboard, etc. He & Mike* should have a lot of notes to compare!
Anyway, we got this old flat for about $11 per week because the old couple kept falling on their heads, poor things, and had to go to a home. It was an ungodly mess, filthy dirty (England’s history is literally written in dust) & painted the yellow shade of spoiled pears. Well, we scrubbed, while I was writing my last term papers, painted the livingroom (nice & big) pale blue, bought a huge comfortable 2nd hand dingy blue sofa, yellow lampshades & pillows, dark brown woodwork & furniture (it’s all furnished, luckily; we have nothing to our name but a wood coffee table, travel rug & very sharp steak knife). We painted myriads of fire bricks to match the walls & got good pine boards & built a 5-shelved bookcase 6 & ½ feet long, on which our growing book collection is stocked---very fine, our one wealth---I’ve got a $100 book allowance this year & will use every bit. Your place sounds like heaven. If only you could imagine how grim England is in winter! I am actually continually cramped in a shivering lump by the coal fire in the livingroom to keep warm. We have to heat hot water by coal fire if we want it in 2 hours, & even then, my breath comes out in great white puffs & tinkles in icicles to the floor when I take my weekly ordeal bath. Nothing ever gets dry or clean; no iceboxes (one really doesn’t need them) & everything falls apart in your hands---carpet sweepers, plumbing pipes, wiring. Oh God Bless America, land of the Cookiesheet, Central Heating & Frozen Orange Juice!
I can’t wait to get home. Ted is staunchly British, but I am hoping that he will see the enormous difference in America & want to settle there eventually. England is no place to bring up children---bad teeth, lousy dentists, careless overworked Mds. It is, really, a dead country. Ted has been lucky earning free-lance money (fabulous rates, about $3 a minute!) reading Yeats for the BBc 3rd program & some of his own poetry; as a result of the latter, a terrific bloody powerful poem on the martyrdom of a bishop he got a serious invitation to join some unpronounceable Baron’s geurilla forces fighting in the mountains in Hungary. Thank God he is going to keep on writing; he served two years in the RAf, so that’s over. He is incredibly exactly the sort of person I’ve always needed but never thought could exist all in one frame---a big, 6 foot 2 strong brute with dark hair, in great unwieldy amounts, & green-blue-brown eyes, depending on weather, & sings ballads, knows all Shakespeare by heart; we read aloud, hike, write & you know all about how magnificent it is to have someone, one someone who speaks the perfectly same language & learns all the time with you so each day there is more & more to share & look at & love. Well it is great & beautiful. We will always no doubt be very poor, but we had a Mediterranean summer on just nothing, vomiting back across the choppy channel without a shilling to stay with Ted’s dear parents in the Yorkshire moors, hiking to Wuthering Heights & eating rabbits, wild rabbits. It can sound idyllic, because the important part is, but materially I am a shivering housefrau waging a day to day battle against cold & dirt. O how I long to be home & walk from room to room without mufflers, snowboots & mittens, to bake cookies (my little oven has no regulator) & use frozen foods. I must say, I have lived in the most unlikely dumps & on so little it often stuns me. I would love it if you would give me a brief refresher course when I get home next June about prices, how to make economies and so on and so on. The cost of living there will probably turn me blue at first!
Ideally, ideally, we’d like to live in your Cambridge & work teaching in Cambridge or Boston, but God knows. I’m not so worried about my getting a job, because I’ve got American credentials, but Ted might be harder, because he only had 2 years of English at Cambridge (gets an automatic MA this year) and took Archaology & Anthropology his last year; he wants to teach college-age people, because the free hours for writing are better. We’ll see. It would be so wonderful if we could live in Cambridge, too. I am unbelievably hungry for home & news of everyone. I’m so happy about Carol* & your mother. My mother had a hard time last winter & spring with my dear grammy* dying very slowly and terribly & bravely of cancer. My grandfather is just lost without her, & my marriage is the main thing that keeps mother going alone in the little house; but she is a new woman! I feel I have suddenly found a mother. A friend left her a small sum in a will, & she came to Europe for the first time last summer---I showed her London & Cambridge & tried to get her rested after the ordeal of grammy’s funeral; Ted & I took her to Paris (she loves Ted dearly, it is wonderful) & she was like a young girl---taking pictures, drinking wine, etc. She then left us to go to Austria & pay a pilgrimage to all grammy’s relatives there & see the places where grammy lived when she was little. Mummy is suddenly become flexible & getting healthily self-concerned---entertaining, driving to work. I am so proud. Funny, how one ends up wanting to re-educate one’s parents. I was concerned so much at one time, & now she is making a life at the age of 50. I’ll be glad when Ted & I are in America, sharing some of our active life with her. Warren met Ted, too, in Paris (Warrie got an Experiment fellowship to Austria for the summer, & in his senior year at Harvard is president of the German club & almost, I gather, bi-lingual---his subject is fascinating, but incomprehensible to me---linguistics, with a combination of math & psychology---a really new field, & rare combination; most language majors can’t add a sum & vice versa). Warren & Ted get along fine too. I am convinced Ted is the only man in the world I could ever speak to with my whole self or love and day by day it gets better & richer. We work, & are generally by ourselves writing when we’re not studying, me, or teaching, he. He thought your picture was great & we’re both very eager to see you & Mike. Where will you be next summer?
Do write soon again. I love hearing from you, about you, & the little items of news about the people we know. Two years is a long time away; Ted & I plan to work hard in America a year or two, go back to Italy or Spain a year to write concentratedly, & probably then start an enormous family. You know, once you’re over here, the world looks so small! Cambridge boys went to Budapest during the riots; African trips, Israeli trips, etc. during the summer. Cambridge is full of foreigners--Scandinavians, Indians, Negroes of all sorts: the debates raging here since the ghastly bombing of Egypt by A. Eden were furious; we have our own Communist cell in Cambridge---most members breaking up over the hungarian crisis.
Well, we’ll be arriving in blessed NYC around the 25th of June, staying in Wellesley a couple of weeks---I want Ted to meet relatives & friends---we had a perfectly quiet private London wedding (I was going to try & wait till this June & home, but gave up the ceremony & circumstance because it seemed absurd to postpone our forces working together for such a crucial half-year of our lives). Ted is just 26, & I am convinced will be the best poet since Yeats & Dylan Thomas. Eventually. He has got raging power & violence combined with amazing discipline & a great sense of humor. Oh my. If I sound slightly ecstatic it is only because for 6 months I’ve nudged & heaved through about every material problem there could be---money, inlaws, uncertainty, English dirt, and now, at last, we are in our own place, with our own grubby stove, & are very happy; peace, peace. I hope we get jobs in Massachusetts. It would be heavenly to be near you. I miss woman-talk. The English women are pathetic. Either blue-stocking cows or butterflies with frivolous hectic accents. My greatest woman friend is my philosophy instructor---a blazing brilliant South African jewish woman, incandescent with brilliance and creative and lovely. She gives me an extra hour each week & has been my salvation among the grotesque female dons at Newnham.
If you have waded through all this you are amazing. Do write back soon. I can’t wait till June. Ted sends Christmas greetings & says hello too.
Much love to you both –
sylvia
TO Robert Gorham Davis*
Monday 17 December 1956*
TLS (aerogramme), Smith College Archives
55 Eltisley Avenue
Cambr
idge, England
Dear Mr. Davis,
Greetings from Cambridge. As I write, the British winds are turning my fingers blue and in spite of a blazing coal fire, my breath hangs in white puffs on the frigid air.* I’m at present studying for my final exams at Newnham College this coming June, when my two-year Fulbright grant is up. After many months spent in Paris, Spain and Italy, my wanderlust is, temporarily at least, cured, and I am most eager to return home.
I’ll be coming back to Wellesley at the end of June, 1957, with my husband, who is a young British poet (at present teaching English at a secondary modern boys’ school here). Both of us hope to apply for teaching positions close together, and I wondered if there might be a vacancy in the English 11 staff for the year 1957-8; if so, I would be interested in applying. Writing goes well---the Atlantic has just bought a long poem,* and a batch of six will be appearing in Poetry (Chicago) this January. My husband, Ted, is my best critic, very demanding, stimulating, but kind and most encouraging, too. Both of us are preparing books of about 50 poems each to send around to publishers this winter, and Ted is doing well in America, publishing in the Atlantic, the Nation, Poetry, and other magazines, and reading poetry free-lance for the BBC over here.
Do let me know if you think there would be a possibility of my applying to teach on the English 11 staff next year. Warmest Christmas wishes to you and your wife . . .
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath Hughes
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 20 December 1956
TLS in greeting card,* Indiana University
With all Good Wishes / for Christmas / and the Coming Year
much love – / sylvia and Ted / (see inside →)
December 20, 1956
Dearest mother . . .
Well, here are enclosed a few of the best of the grisly proofs;* Ted and I really don’t like them, considering ourselves much more beautiful---these are more like passport shots without imagination or sensitive lighting; in fact Ted hates them all. But I am sending them on to you until we have something better done, which we will do soon---this lady* was an expensive crook. Tell me which one or two numbers, if any, you want made up---it’s part of the sitting price, four pictures, so you might as well have something while waiting for the rest if we can get a good one. If you want one with hands, I should think we could have the knotted monstrosities cut off & the picture shortened to head & shoulders. *Choose four different ones, if you want that many; keep the proofs till we find out if we have to have them back.