by Sylvia Plath
We’ve just heard that Macmillan Co. has received the manuscript of Ted’s animal fables & hope that a larger firm might be more adventurous than the tiny children’s department at the Atlantic Monthly Press who finally rejected it. We have no more news of acceptances since our London magazine one, but this very nice ex-Cambridge grad in London who works for an agency (I haven’t signed up or anything, because their american agent is that horrid New York gin-drinking painted lady, once a fiction editor at McCall’s whom I met at the Cape just before I left, mother of that imbecile life-guard) says my story “The Smoky Blue Piano”* (which I sent to every magazine in America) is “quite excellent” & they will send it about here for me: I changed the background to London, cosmopolitan as I am getting to be. I hope to break into the woman’s slicks this summer. I just haven’t had the time to rewrite. The Ladies’ Home Journal liked my laundromat story (two people meet at a laundromat via a very funny 13-year old girl quiz-kid type & fall in love finally) and said they’d look at it again if I rewrote the ending: no promises. Well, I sent it to Good Housekeeping & when it comes back will rewrite it: I think I should sell it somewhere, the setting is quite “original”: their motto is: LOVE LOVE LOVE: but not, please, in the same old setting: Love in jet-planes, Love on water-skis, Love in Sumner Tunnel* (traffic jam, etc.) but never Love plain. So I put mustard, pepper & curry powder on it. O the sun is so lovely, & I must bury my bleared eyes in 2000 years of Tragedy. My life is just balancing till the end of the month. Then, whoopee! novels, stories, poems. I can feel them battering to get out. DO WRITE. We both send love & congratulations & an invisible rabbit’s foot for your exams.
Love,
Sivvy
TO Henry Rago
Tuesday 7 May 1957
TLS (aerogramme), University of Chicago
55 Eltisley Avenue
Cambridge, England
May 7, 1957
Dear Mr. Rago:
I was very pleased to hear you’d accepted my four poems for publication in Poetry and am just now jotting down the few relevant items that might be appropriate for your Notes on Contributors column.
Since last writing you, I’ve had poems accepted for the first time by Accent, The Antioch Review and the London Magazine. After my tripos exams in English lit. this month, I’ll proceed home with my British husband to write on the Cape all summer and then to Northampton, Mass., where I begin teaching freshman English at Smith College this fall.
My address after June 5th, by the way, will be:
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
With all good wishes,
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 10 May 1957
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Friday am, May 10
Dearest mother . . .
Couldn’t resist sitting down & writing some more good news about my wonderful Ted which came this morning before burying myself in the library for the day. FABER & FABER, The British publishing house, has just written to accept Ted’s poetry book for publication in England! Not only that, Mr. T. S. Eliot (who is on their staff) read the book & the publisher writes:
“Mr. Eliot has asked me to tell you how much he personally enjoyed the poems and to pass on to you his congratulations on them.”*
We were concerned about getting a British publisher as this was left up to us by Harper’s & Faber & Faber was the 1st we sent the book to (after my re-typing the whole thing) & it publishes people like WH Auden, Spender, Marianne Moore &, yes, Richard Wilbur (Ted & I have just bought his collected volume* which came out here this spring). The only snag now is whether Harper’s will be willing to wait a month till September with publication as Faber wants to submit the book for British Poetry Book Society choice & it has to come out here first for that: the book would thus be guaranteed a sale of 800 copies plus very wide publicity. Otherwise, Faber wouldn’t be able to publish it till next spring. I do hope Harper’s sees the light & waits that extra month. Ted gets 15% royalties from them, 10% from Faber: so little but I suppose the publishers publish poetry as a favor & make most poets pay their own printing costs. But with TS Eliot added to the list of notables endorsing Ted, I don’t see how he can lose! I am so proud.
I want to buy a super scrapbook for Ted & paste up his letters & poems for him & our posterity. I am living in my head already at home. Eating cookies, eating breakfast with you & Warren on our little greened-in porch, driving for a picnic at Ipswich. O how lovely it will be to immerse myself in Family. You & Warren must drive down to the Cape every weekend to stay with us. There are plenty of beds & what fun we’ll have. I dont want to miss a minute with you two: Ted & I will work all week & take part of the weekend off to go to the beach with you. Warren can drive, because I wouldn’t want you driving down & back alone. Ted & I will write enough I’m sure to pay for our summer. Also, we’ll be bringing from 1 to 2 hundred dollars home as we are saving like fury, now that the ship fare is off our necks.
Smaller items: I got two poems accepted this week by ACCENT, an avant-garde literary quarterly that accepted two of Ted’s poems only about a month ago. And Ted got one poem (not in this book, but beginning his 2nd) accepted by the New Statesman & Nation,* a weekly like the Nation in America, very good & left labor, to which we subscribe. He has already a folder labeled: “2nd book” which has about 5 or 10 good poems in it already. Do tell our mailman you’re going to start getting letters addressed to Hughes. We’re putting our return envelopes in with the Wellesley address now. Since last June Ted has sold 14 poems, a broadcast poem & a book to two countries: I guaranteed 15 poems sold in a year if he let me be his agent when I first met him & he’s written his best since we’ve been working together. Even as I have: I’ve had 16 sales since August (just twice as many as I’d sold in the 5 years before meeting Ted) and many of these, like Ella Mason & her 11 Cats,* were assignments Ted gave me last spring! If only I can get my book accepted in the next few months it will be perfect.
My two main ambitions this summer (apart from preparing my course at Smith & writing poems, naturally) are my novel* & breaking into the women’s slicks finally: I feel years older than I was the summer I left & my stories which I wrote this year, particularly the one set in a laundromat, are really much much improved. If I devote my whole self & intelligence to it, I know I can make it & 5 stories would be a year’s salary. Ted wants to make children’s books his other field. Also, my novel is The Thing & I want to get the whole damn thing written this summer & get Peter Davison to look at it, suggest re-writing, & then submit it to one of the novel contests. Novels are a cinch to get published compared to poetry. We are so devoted to work & only long for this month to be over to get into it. I am planning to try an article on Cambridge for Harper’s & a story on Cambridge for the Atlantic: both editors said they would be interested in seeing my results as such. The doors are open: one only has to slave & work & live for the art of writing as well as living with the utmost integrity & emotional sympathy.
Do you think Mrs. Moore might come on the 29th if you asked her? I do admire her so & thought she might be up that way for Clem.
I glow with pride every time I think of Warren’s Fulbright. I should think it would sustain him through exams. Mine begin in two weeks from this Monday & I won’t know my schedule till next week: even that will be a relief, in planning my work. Do take care & don’t do any work for us: let us fix up the garden etc. we’ll be rested from the moors. What fun to have you in Italy with us in two years. You must plan on at least a summer there: all the art & sun. Maybe we’ll have a grandchild for you by then, even, if we can afford it & have our writing well advanced.
much love,
Sivvy
Do write as often as you can: Ted & I love to get your letters!
S.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 12 May 1957
TLS, Indiana University
&nbs
p; Sunday afternoon
May 12, 1957
Dear mother . . .
I’m enclosing a little assortment of the Cambridge magazines. Gemini is rather impressive with its 100 pages & guest contributors & the Granta art & layout is exceptional, I think.
You’ll find two of my poems in the 1st Gemini: “Spinster” is the one accepted by the London Magazine & reviewed in the Sunday Times. The 2nd Gemini includes a rather tedious ghost-story by me & a book-review of some Oxford dons poems plus three fine poems by Ted: “Wind” appeared in the Nation, & the “Famous Poet” is accepted also by the London mag. Granta has one old, one new poem by me & an old fable of Ted’s: nowhere near as good as his new ones.
In two weeks exams begin; then in 3 weeks they’re over. We are eating well. I am just dying to come to America. & write. We are so happy Ted’s book is accepted by Faber & Faber & that T. S. Eliot likes it! I have been living on that news while studying all week. It seems the greatest living poets think Ted is wonderful & under these auspices, his book might even make a little money!
xxx
sivvy
TO Lynne Lawner*
Thursday 16 May 1957
Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978
Thursday, May 16, 1957
Dear Lynne,
Your letter caught me just as I biked home for lunch between my daily intellectual safaris at the Univ. Libe where I am crystallizing my opinions on 2000 years of tragic drama (that started to be trauma) and 2000 years of moral philosophy from Socrates to DH Lawrence not to mention French, Med. English and all sorts of other lovely things. Exams start in 10 days & the prospect of writing solidly from 9 am to 4:30 pm with an hour off for lunch for 3 days strikes me as preposterous yet, after my halcyon days typing exams at Smith: I should be practising penmanship even now, because my pen-hand is as functionless as the vermiform appendix.
It was good hearing from you: so good, in fact, that I consider it a treat to sit down & write a letter before biking back to my purgatory. Which I actually like, in its own way: poems & stories seethe to be written when I have to discipline writing for a month like this & again I say: Wait Till This Summer.
Speaking of which, I hope I can see you before you go to Cambridge & hundreds of congratulations on the Henry. You must know the novelist Nat LaMar from Harvard (mustn’t you? I am so sure everyone must know everyone, because all the loose ends get tied up eventually & you find that the two friends of yours you are introducing for the first time to each other have been married for seven years) – he had a Henry to Cambridge last year & I hear he has finished the first draft of his first novel via the old international grape-vine. Do let me know what you hear of him & if you see him say I hope Ted & I might see him when we come home this summer.
Ted being my husband for almost a year now: a poet, like they say, but Yorkshire, not Welsh & unlike Dylan in much more than poetry. It would be too impossible to go into the vision clairvoyance etc. involved in our life & the amazing way it’s worked out: suffice it to say I can’t remember a time I wasn’t married to him. He will daze them all: even Wilbur who (shh!) seems to avoid the really jolting experiences like birth, sex, war, etc. in favor of such elegantly modulated nature & philosophy pieces. However: we have got his anthology (published in Eng.) & admire him immensely & long to meet him. Ted who has been hitherto ignored in England (poetically speaking) for various reasons of deadness, sterility & incredible intellectual corruption (cf. Lawrence on this) suddenly leapt over their heads & won the New York Poetry Center First Publication Prize for his first book which should be published this fall by Harper’s: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender & dear familiar Marianne Moore (who objected to 3 “bawdy” poems which weren’t really) judged this Anglo-American affair. Faber & Faber has just accepted the book for publication here with the express personal congratulations & approval of Mr. T. S. Eliot. So we sail for America & should arrive in Wellesley around June 26th. Will be at 26 Elmwood Road until July 12th: is there a chance you could drop over? I’d much rather have a person-to-person talk of Cambridge than try to write about it. Never met Leavis or Daiches* personally but went to their lectures. Dr. Doris Krook is the most magnificent woman lecturer going whose pet love is Henry James* (she gives a fine series of lectures on him) & also philosophy. An Admirable woman. No blue-stocking don. The gospel of the redemptive power of love in a religious humanist framework. Get her for your supervision in something (James or phil.) supervision like “honors unit”. Ask to go to Leavis’ supervisions in criticism: you have to have a will, which the Br. girls don’t have, to manage these plums. You will invariably feel like Isabel Archer in Gardencourt* before starting on the voyage to a soul through the various overcivilized corruptions of Europe. British men are very lovely to look at, but except for a rare few, scared of intelligent women who are pretty too: a fashionable lawyer expounded to me the system of double-morality which I think you probably have agreed with me on & vice versa in our Holyoke talk: there are very few men who can take a woman who is vital & creative plus intelligent. Such as one Oxford chap: happy to adore you as the eternal feminine over candles & partridge, but damned if he’s going to discuss philosophy, religion, politics or anything else that matters: get to know Nicholas Monck, the Granta editor (about the only magazine). You’ll become known as a poetess: I’ve had about a fourth of all the stuff I’ve written in 2 years published here & even reviewed in the London Sunday Times. Much is dead here (you’ll probably take a much more laudatory view of writing in America) but it’s a magnificent experience & it is possible to discover yourself in ways not really easy at home by giving yourself greater challenges. Please tell me what you meant by Best Poetry 1955: is it the Borestone annual & if so I haven’t seen it & what in heavens name have I got in it? I got a strange note about an antique sonnet I wrote at college, accepting it for some such, but do tell me. Have you a book ready yet? Loved your account of the Holyoke reading.* Saw Don Lemkuhl* arrive here last year with a peroxide blonde matron whom he claimed was his aunt, but didn’t follow him up. Insist on Whitstead as the place for “digs”: lovely old house for 10 girls, green garden, etc. In college is like a reformatory: flats generally dirty & grubby with shrew landladies. Do write very soon & describe Wilbur. He certainly has catapulted to fame. Is he staying at Wellesley? Also, news of you: poems, thoughts, etc.
best wishes –
Sylvia
PS: If you want to see about 6 poems written in Cambridge look up Poetry (Chicago): for January 1957.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 19 May 1957
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Sunday noon: May 19th
Dearest mother . . .
I have the feeling I haven’t written for quite a few days but have had no special news & been working doggedly at the library. Got your red-ink letter with the happy smiley face & just think! In a month from tomorrow we’ll be sailing on our blessed way home! I can’t imagine it, it seems such a dream. I was so interested to hear your views on Wilbur: his collected poems (which we’ve bought) were well reviewed here this week as “workmanship” but the reviewer said something which I believe: that Wilbur had nothing really centrally interesting to say about life.* He is magnificent writing on potatoes, toads, similes for her smile & roman fountains & philosophical witticisms but he completely misses writing about war, birth, love, etc. I am sure Ted is potentially a much richer & powerful poet! Something about Wilbur smacks of milk & honey instead of blood.
Anyhow, Ted will win the Pulitzer* some day too. & we will get Saxtons & Guggenheims, just watch. I am delighted at the way Ted looks forward to America: more & more in every way. He just can’t wait to get out of England. & neither can I. Glad you are happy about Faber & Faber. If only Harper’s will approve their scheme to bring the book out here first, so the Poetry Society might select it! We would like very much to meet Wilbur & his wife* and I feel someday they’ll want to meet us. Let us know right away if any rejected manuscripts come
home to you, for we’ve sent some with that address. After June 4th our address will be care of Ted’s folks. New England certainly seems to be the center of holocausts! That terrible fire* & just before I left the hurricane.* Maybe it’s the stupid H-bombs. Hope the paint comes out all right: what a bother to have it done again! Don’t work at home though. Just rest & rest. & remember we are counting on helping you fix up things for the party, so just wait till we get there. How lovely to have another man in the family, and such a man! This has, alas, been a very trying week for us: a stream of rejections & nothing very cheerful, just work, with exams beginning for me a week from tomorrow. I have a very heavy schedule, but it is over at noon on Friday May 31st which is the day Ted gets finished teaching. I Have two exams each on Monday & Tuesday which means I’ll be writing from 9 am to 4:30 both days with an hour off for lunch. French & 3-hour essay Monday, Criticism & Moralists (the heaviest paper) Tuesday; then 2000 years of Tragedy Wednesday afternoon & a blessed holiday & Chaucer friday morning. Be wishing me luck. I’d actually rather have it hardest the first two days & taper off. But the mere feat of writing for a whole day is rather exhausting. The minute I stop exams I’ll be doing the herculean labor of packing our 300 books & clothes etc. We are going to try to sell our beloved coffee table, the one bit of furniture I like, & our rusty bikes & couch & get some money that way. It is amazing to me how we have paid all these huge bills for tailor, dentist, ship, visa, etc. Really colossal for our budget, but we have done it. The house rent at only $12 a week has helped.