by Sylvia Plath
so much I want to talk to you about. long & long. we’re so glad you’ll be nearby. I love to hear news about people. especially like carol p. I hear anthony eden is perishing in boston.* I quote from one of ted’s pupil’s themes on the subject: what would you do if you could: “I would then walk in a sweet shop & eat 10 lb. sweets. I would walk into a cigaret shop & smoke about 50 cigarets. Then I would go to Hallens a take a thousand c.c. scrambeler round the town at 90 mh and crash into a jewelers shop and put all gold watches on my arms. I would then rob a bank & buy myself a gold plated suit & shoes made out of unranium . . . Then I would tie A. Eden to a barbed wire fence then I would cut Him to ribbens with a razor . . . I would then go to bed with a dead chicken and eat it.” Hail, Britannia! To laugh or cry?
Do write. We’ll see you soon & send love . . .
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 13 April 1957
TLS, Indiana University
Saturday morning
April 13, 1957
Dearest darling adorable mother . . .
It has been so lovely to get your happy letters this week: so glad Warren’s thesis is done & am sure it is brilliant, although far over both our heads! Has he heard from any of his fellowship applications yet? It has been frigid cold here this past week with an icy pushing wind from the steppes of Siberia, so strong I had to walk to town, unable to bike against it.
We have had a rather taxing week, but with a nice climax today. Ted & I got four rejections between us on Tuesday (two each: our literary life is very symmetrical). Ted’s book of children’s fables (alas) which they ultimately decided was “too sophisticated” (I’m going to keep on trying the big companies like Macmillan: small ones don’t take risks: if the “Hobbit” wasn’t “sophisticated”, what is?), some of Ted’s poems from the SatRevLit (Ciardi is making a big mistake in rejecting us: he’s “overstocked”: I bet: with his own poems); some of my poems from the Paris Review, with a very nice letter asking me to send more & two stories from the posh Sewanee Review with a rather amazing letter from the editor* to the effect that my stories showed a “spectacular talent”, which from a conservative editor is rather encouraging. Well, we weathered this news, with typing & retyping sessions sending 5 or 6 more mss. out, & this morning got our reward, again, in a twin package, from guess where, John Lehmann at the London Magazine! Our first real professional “British” acceptance, & it is the Atlantic Monthly of England! They accepted two of my poems: “Spinster” (the one favorably reviewed in the Sunday Times) & “Black Rook In Rainy Weather” (about to be published also in The Antioch Review). They accepted a longish one of Ted’s, “Famous Poet”* & obviously felt they could not resist the pressure of such about-to-be-world-celebrated poets. At last! The halls of British conservatism have recognized us. Of my two, the impeccable Mr. Lehmann wrote: “Your outstanding gift seems to me a sharply focussed truth of feeling and observation, at its most effective in Spinster and Black Rook.”* We aren’t really bragging, but only childlikely happy our sweating & work-of-our-life is recognized. We still get on an average two rejections apiece to every acceptance, but no editors now dare to reject us without personal letters. Which is pleasant. Both of us feel that money grants & reputation (in particular, with British women poets, but also men) are going to undeserving & pernicious writers. Ted’s book has catapulted him over the heads of the poet-making editors here & they are, amusingly, almost forced to acknowledge him to keep up their own reputations! The joy is, in these rejections, of people saying we have a gift: that’s all we need to know, although we do know it deep in ourselves. All that a gift demands to be recognized is constant deep thinking & sweating continuous work: no public literary-lion life for us: although, on the occasion of a book-publishing we will modestly appear, gaunt-cheeked & prophet-eyed, to partake of free champagne and caviare!
I want to get a sumptuous scrapbook at home for Ted’s clippings & mine: also one for pics of us & for our children. Roughly we plan two years in America: then, both applying for writing fellowships: Guggenheims, Saxtons, etc. for a year in Italy (hoping you can visit us in the summer, free from any expenses incurred by your to-be-wealthy children) & then hundreds of children. Both of us feel very late maturers, only beginning our true lives now & need to devote the next two or three years to establishing the depths of our talent, & then having children, but not until they can’t undermine our work. Our own personalities are still squeaking new & wonderful to us.
I’m enclosing one of the pictures* we are sending off of Ted for publicity purposes: already, this Paul Roche,* some young Eng. Poet (of whom we’ve never heard) has offered us his house to rent for the summer in Northampton, but I can’t think of any place I’d rather stay less: that hot inland city! I dream of our Cape cottage. Blueberry muffins & fried chicken. We must have a lobster barbecue someday, with the Cantors, etc. Ted would love to go deep-sea fishing. Could we visit Frank & Louise a day or two in Pa. before we go to the Cape? We’d love to. Do ask them. & they could show Ted & me around. Nothing planned, just a simple visit. Ted would love the tough little boys. What fun we’ll have, clipping Ted’s reviews! I’m sure he’ll get a job at Amherst the 2nd year, if only I’m good enough to get my appointment renewed at Smith! We are going to catapult to fame, I predict. Simply because it means so little to us, & our writing & being Heard & Read is everything.
Here are some (all I can think of) of the people to invite to our June 29th party (what’ll we do if it rains? Have it at Aldriches? Do ask them.
All the Aldriches, Dot & Joe Benottis,(Miss Corcoran), the two Crocketts, all the Cantors, Peter Davison (43 Bowdoin Street, Cambridge), Mrs. Freeman, Dave,* Ruth & Art Geissler, Elinor Linda Friedman (Elly: 704 Laurel Street, Longmeadow, Mass: please forward to NYC); Mr. & Mrs. Dean Hildebrandt,* c/o 40 Columbia Place, Mt. Vernon, NY); Mrs. Lameyer & Gordon???;* Pat O’Neil,* 19 Kipling Road, Wellesley; Mrs. Prouty; Marcia & Mike Plumer, 74 Buckingham St., Cambridge; Frank & Louise; Alison Smith* (Apt. 9d, 1165 Park Ave., NYC). Maybe Louise & Eddie White* if you know their addresses. & then the neighbors, McGowans,* Pullings,* Cruikshanks* et. al. Mrs. Prouty will probably rather see us in quiet at her place, & the Lameyers it might be very tactful to leave out. So do what you want with the list. What are you having to drink? Sherry? It always helps. Let me know roughly who you’ll be having.
Am so glad you’ve gained weight. See that you keep it up so I’ll have a plump mother to hug when I come home!
I am, by the way sending a little something for your birthday to be put in our dining room, which probably won’t arrive for weeks. Do let me know the condition its in!
Bye for now, much love to you & Warrie,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 20 April 1957
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Saturday pm
April 20, 1957
Dearest mother,
Well, we are two days back from London already & just recovering from the tension, soot, noise, blare & general exhausting mess of that city. Ted has, praise be, got his visa at last, at an expense of over $30 and two days of tests, waiting about, interviews, & more waiting about at the American embassy.
Neither of us slept on Tuesday night, before we went down, out of sheer nervousness that some quirk of fate might put a hitch in our so-optimistic plans. Ted has a friend whom we just met before we left who has a magnificent job waiting for him at MIT but whose visa was refused because he didn’t report a $25 camera in customs & was honest enough to admit it. The case went to Washington & was rejected, so he wastes his time working in a Guiness brewery, with this job still open: England hasn’t got the equipment for his talent. We stayed overnight with one of Ted’s Yorkshire friends: a genial, young one-armed commercial artist who, hearing of our plans, says he hopes to go to America also: the business firms in London are so stodgy & conservative that there is little, if any, opportunity for an original mind. Ted had blood tests, X-ray
s etc. & was pronounced in excellent health. The Vice-consul welcomed him as a teacher. We went to the portrait gallery, lay out in the sun in Hyde park, ate again at Schmidt’s* (remember, the German place where we three shared our “wedding breakfast”), saw a magnificent movie, “The Lost Continent”,* in technicolor about the natives of Bali, Borneo, etc. So fine, we were all horrified to come out into the mechanical grating life of London. Ted & I long for the moors & the ocean.
We spent a fascinating hour browsing about in Liberty’s over rugs, etc. We both picked up Facette stainless steel & do like it very very much so will you please announce generally to anyone who wants to know that’s our pattern. I love brown, black & white for luncheon colors (saw a very effective set of napkins & mats of linen in these colors: plain or patterned): with either turquoise, aqua or forest green as a “color”: whatever’s easiest to get, but I do like a good strong aqua.
By now you must have got our letters about our acceptances in the London Magazine: the radio-ham got the numbers reversed: 2 poems for me, 1 for Ted. Also, Ted’s poem “Bishop Farrar” was broadcast twice this week over the BBC 3rd program “The Poet’s Voice”, Sunday & Tuesday. The last of a group of poets reading their own poems: Ted’s was far & away the finest, & we got letters from friends about the broadcast Sunday, so were able to get the radio-ham upstairs to tune us in on it Tuesday. Ted’s just got a note from Chris Levenson,* a Cambridge poet whom neither of us like, but who serves to offer literary gossip: he & a boy from Oxford* have been asked to do an anthology of about 8 young British poets who have been ignored by the recent cliquey anthologies & would like about 10 of Ted’s poems for it: we’ll have to wait & see what Ted’s British publisher (if we get one) will say, but it would be very good publicity.
Perfectly happy to have Elly meet us at the ship: we sail in exactly 2 months from today!!! I can at last see the light of my homecoming ahead: this house has been getting on my nerves, it is so dirty & gloomy, all except the front room: in an access of spring cleaning I just threw all her filthy old rugs under the stairs with the rest of her filthy old junk & Ted is varnishing the bare floors: much more sanitary. Beating only elicits more dust out of an infinite supply in the rug’s antique fabric. We got 2 rejections apiece this week & with the fatigue of tension from the visa trip, we’re a bit gloomy: my exams loom very near: the week of May 28th: 6 hours of solid writing a day!
Can I ask for a tentative recipe for our home coming dinner, seeing you’re not going to be meeting us at the dock? O, they all sound so good, I can’t choose: but maybe broiled chicken, bread-crumbed tomatoes & tossed salad with crispy potatoes? With a jarful of cookies: tollhouse, molasses, or oatmeal, & specially (it’s strawberry season, isn’t it?) that heavenly strawberry chiffon pie you make so angelically? You have no idea how your menus make me homesick: Grammy’s fish soup is Ted’s favorite dish & we have it about once a week. I have to stick to pies or 2-layer cakes: date-nut bars, gingerbread, etc. just stay soggy in the middle no matter what I do as the oven heat rises from back to front. It’s infuriating. Your piecrust mixes have been a godsend: I’m on my last one this week. Made a coconut cream pie, which Ted likes. In the 2½ weeks we’ll be home, you must give me a capsule cooking course & we’ll feast Ted & Warren daily!
Ted walks me to the Univ. Library at noon, where we have a delicious cheap lunch, & I go to study from 1 to 6:30 while he writes at home & calls for me. It is the only way I can work as at home butcher, baker, mailman etc. are continuous interruptions. Ted is so marvelously understanding about everything. We get along just perfectly & are only longing to get out of England to America. We’ll go up to the moors for a week’s recuperation after exams & Ted’s teaching finish on June 1st. Much love to you & Warrie. How’s dear Grampy? Let’s have one great lobster & corn-on-the-cob feast on the Cape some weekend in August. What fun!
Much love from us,
sivvy
TO D. S. Carne-Ross*
Sunday 21 April 1957
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre
55 Eltisley Avenue
Cambridge
April 21, 1957
Mr. D. S. Carne-Ross
Talks Department
THE BRITISH BROADCASTING CORPORATION
Broadcasting House
London, W.1
Dear Mr Carne-Ross:
I should be interested to know whether there would be any possibility at this time of my coming to London to try out for a reading of my own poems over the “Poets Voice.”
I am enclosing four recent poems for your perusal, two of which---“Spinster” and “Black Rook In Rainy Weather”---have been accepted for publication by The London Magazine; the former poem was also reviewed by Harold Hobson in the Theater section of the Sunday Times.
Apart from publishing regularly in the Cambridge and Oxford publications (Gemini, Granta, Chequer, Delta, Isis, etc.) I have also had work appear in The Antioch Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Lyric, Mademoiselle, The Nation, The New Orleans Poetry Journal, Poetry (Chicago) and other magazines.
I am enclosing a stamped self-addressed envelope for your convenience.
Hoping to hear from you in the near future, I am
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
c. Tuesday 23 April 1957*
TL (copy), printed from Letters Home
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO YOU!
There was an invincible mother
(I defy you to show me another!)
Who in some magic way
Grew younger each day
And never found birthdays a bother.
Her feats are too great to be reckoned:
One summer the continent beckoned:
She mastered a car,
Said: “Big Ben’s not so far!”
And whiz! she was there in a second.
Gay Paree and much vin did not wearia;
She thought Rembrandt’s exhibit* superia;
From bottom to top
Of the Alps she did hop---
Next year she’ll be conquering Siberia!
At the green age of fifty-one, this is
A health to our venturesome missis!
May her next fifty springs
Bring new joys and jauntings!
From S & T here is love, hugs and kisses!
TO Warren Plath
Tuesday 23 April 1957
TLS (photocopy), Indiana University
Tuesday, April 23rd
Dearest Warren,
It was so good to get your letter: we love hearing from you, and your job with Melpar* this summer sounds extraordinary. I’m sure you’ll walk through life picking your jobs & salaries like plums. To both of us unscientific cloud-headed poets you sound like the coming Einstein,* and your major most versatile & reassuringly human, with its psychological side. We long to have you explain at length about your work & look forward to our two and a half weeks at 26 Elmwood (maybe we could drive to Ipswich now and then) & hope to initiate Ted to American cooking & picnics.
Just now the weather is heavenly: mild, sunny & the evenings we spend walking out in Granchester Meadows watching water-rats & rabbits.* Once a little water-rat (looking much like Max, who, I gather, is a hamster) swam right up to our feet, chewed off a huge reed, and swam off dragging it to a little hole. We heard a lot of munching, then replete silence. Walking in the country does wonders to calm us: Ted has just finished his first week of 3 weeks vacation & gotten his visa in London, p
raise be. We were really anxious about it, & I was running through my various acting schemes suitable for any snags we ran into.
My exams are well piled together in the week of May 28th which is uncomfortably close, & I must work like a slow dog till then. I have to go to the University libe which is the one place I can concentrate: living in a two-family house, which is linked by their having to go by or through our rooms to go out, is a bother. Especially since we despise the Sassoon couple upstairs. They live like pigs, dropping cigarette butts, as it were, into nearby human eyesockets, & are so wealthy they will never have to do anything but destroy old ladies TV programs by their radio waves: on top of all this, the stupid boy, who is being forced by his father Siegfried, to go to Cambridge, is “hoping” to fail his exams. A rather infuriating couple: the girl openly admits “I am a perfect little cabbage. I don’t want to do anything but raise cabbages.” They are unbelievable & don’t deserve to live.
We both are dreaming of June 1st, when Ted’s job & my exams are over. Then, to the moors, to the sea, & home. Are you already working at Melpar when we get to NYC the 25th? I suppose they want to snap you up.
Do see that mother takes it easy & doesn’t tire herself fixing up the house for us. Teddy is so eager about coming that I can’t wait to see everything through his eyes. I look most forward to the family cookout at Joe’s: be sure to tell him that: Ted has never been to a proper cookout before. And I hope some weekend when you come to visit us at the Cape, the three of us can go deepsea fishing on one of those boats. Ted loves to fish.
What have you heard about your German applications? Did you apply for the Fulbright (I think you said you did) or get a kind of preliminary acceptance this winter? They usually like to give them to people who have never been abroad before & since they distribute them regionally, competition from the East coast colleges is very high. It would be a terrific experience for you though & you could travel about Europe in your vacations.