by Sylvia Plath
Now Teddy has no summer clothes. Can Warren go or you & I go & get him a summer suit as soon as we get home? I don’t know what the men wear, but Warren will. & he needs a bunch of white shirts & a winter coat. How strange, my whole wardrobe interest has shifted & I’m as excited at Ted’s new purchases as mine: he literally had nothing but dungarees & a dress suit when we married & now at least has a fine charcoal grey wool suit & two casual jackets. We must get him fitted up in a nice wardrobe he likes, very subtly.
Ted & I just got the dearest letter imaginable from Do & Bill Cruikshank. Do tell them how we both loved hearing from them & it’s only my exams & packing that prevent me writing back in person right away, but we’ll make up for it when we see them in person. Tell Do especially that what she said about marriage is exactly true & she is a darling. By the way did you get your little pottery dish that I had sent off before your birthday? I don’t want to pay the bill till I’m sure you got it intact (It was insured for breakage).
We have my driver’s license here & will bring it with all our great official envelopes, visa, certificates etc. Ted is coming as an emigrant & we want to establish a homestead in America from which we can travel. Ted is sharinghis lovely little house on the moors with his sister for the rest of his life & we will want to travel about some always. We are both perishing to get writing in earnest again. One must really be anti-social for the bulk of the year to be a writer who also works & keeps house! But this summer should be heaven. In the first 2 or 3 years of our marriage we would like at least 2 books each accepted: one poetry book for each of us, a novel for me & a children’s book for Ted. Just wait.
Went for a walk yesterday just after a rain & saw eight baby swans, five baby ducks & the most amazing assortment of brightly colored iridescent snails by the roadside: pink with black stripes, yellow, pale green, etc. quite astonishing. Do write as much as you can these next weeks to keep my morale up. We so love to hear from you. Love to Warren & dear grampy.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 24 May 1957
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
May 24: Friday
Dearest mother . . .
How lovely it was to get your letter this cold gray morning: Ted & I read it aloud over breakfast & both of us send congratulations & much love to our new Associate Professor! Really, though, you have long deserved it, I should think. Does your salary improve much? I would appreciate it so much if you would have a long talk with us over finances in America because we have been living from hand to mouth literally with all our big expenses like shipfare, dentist, tailor etc. & at this point can’t imagine how people afford their own furniture, linen, clothes, kitchen iceboxes etc. Not to mention children. We want to start saving in America & I suppose it would be advisable for Ted to take out life insurance & both of us to have blue-cross or something. We would like to set up housekeeping in America & travel from there: in other words, leave our furniture etc. there when we go to Italy, say & travel only with our books, clothes & kitchen essentials. Ted is daily getting more of an America-lover. I tell him there is much there to disagree with but one can live one’s own life at one’s own speed & writers are welcome & can live well, which is impossible here. We both couldn’t bear living in England for myriad reasons & would never want to settle in Europe: just a year here & there. We’ll need your advice about saving, rent, etc. Both of us want to rent a house in Northampton, no more of this apartment living. Neither of us can stand having other people walking through our rooms, phoning outside our livingroom & surrounding us on all sides: the extra rent would be worth the house psychologically. We want a study just for writing & studying: not the livingroom or the bedroom but a real writing-room. We can’t wait to get out of this house with that stupid couple upstairs. I hate them coming through my kitchen when I’m cooking to empty garbage, or get coal out, etc.
Which brings me to say how happy I am that Aunt Marion* will be moving in with you next fall. Ted thinks it’s a good idea too. Both of us forbid you to ever let strangers rent the house under any circumstances: it would be intolerable. Psychologically super-sensitive as we are in our family (Ted is too) we feel like outlaws in our own home if some stranger is using things. Their presence is a constant nerve-racking abrasion. In one’s home one shouldn’t have to “prepare a face to meet the faces that one meets.”* And having Aunt Marion come will be a fine thing. You both have shared so much of life & can be frank & not “company” but just good friends that you will have the advantage of sharing your thoughts & experiences & understand when you want to be alone etc. I think you should do it on a year’s basis, depending on what happens when Warren comes back from Germany etc. He might want to live at home. Ted & I will naturally want to come down to be with you over Thanksgiving, Christmas & Easter at least & Marion will then of course want to be with her family so that will be fine. I am very happy about it & think you should enjoy each other immensely. How we envy you hearing Wilbur:* Ted & I will no doubt meet him sometime but he above all American poets is the one we’d like to ask hundreds of questions & get to know. Ted will be a real rival of his in a few years, I think! Perhaps I told you that in a review of Wilbur* here the critic said he was a superlative craftsman & workman & very elegant but had few if any “central truths about life.” Which Ted does have.
We were stunned this week to get the proofs of Ted’s book not from Harper’s but from Faber & Faber,* one week after they’d accepted it! We’ve gone through & through it with a little but incomplete handbook page on proof-marks & put in endless commas & Ted has made some alterations: which I’ve limited: he would rewrite a poem to eternity & stop the presses: I don’t mind retyping constantly but we realize we must be much more strict in checking the typed ms. we send. You need to review us on punctuation rules (have you a grammar book?) and ms. correcting. You must remember all this from daddy’s* book & we need you as a 3rd impartial proof-reader. What fun it should be though! I don’t count it as work at all: we’ll be always having something to proofread I hope. By the way, Ted got an awfully nice surprise letter from Russell Lynes,* editor of Harper’s magazine who was shown some of his poems, liked many very much & bought a short one “The Dove-Breeder”* for $25 to publish before the book is published (they have a long list of poems & won’t have time to publish more than one before August). Isn’t that fine! We’ll have the check sent to 26 Elmwood. In a fit of excitement I added up the money we’ve earned since our wedding day last year when the first acceptance came: each of us have had 15 poems accepted apiece since then & each of us have had one poem accepted twice, both in America & England. Ted has earned $243 (much of it yet to come) with 4 poems not yet priced, so it will be more, & I have earned $231 (much to come) with 5 poems accepted that are not yet priced. So we figure that by our wedding day anniversary we will have earned between us $500 in poems & neither of us have been working at working but forced to teach & study. We can’t wait till this summer! Me for my novel & stories & poems & Ted for his fables & children’s books & poems. We heard dear shrewd funny lovable Robert Frost read* yesterday afternoon to a packed enthusiastic hall: he’s getting an honorary degree from Cambridge this spring. Ted loved him & I feel the two of them have much in common. Well, I must gossip no longer but STUDY. I take exams at night in my dreams, alas, as well as next week. I’ll do my best, but as Ted says, I have my education & the marks can’t alter that.
We both send much love to you & Warren
In 32 days we’ll be with you –
xxx
Sivvy
ps – Has the pottery bowl I sent you insured early in April come yet?
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 29 May 1957
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Wednesday am: May 29th
Dearest mother:
I am taking time early this sunny morning to limber up my stiff fingers
in preparation for my Tragedy exam this afternoon and write you so you will know I’m still extant. Just. I have honestly never undergone such physical torture as writing furiously from 6 to 7 hours a day (for the last two days) with my unpracticed pen-hand: every night I come home and lie in a hot tub massaging it back to action. Ted says I’m a victim of evolution and have adapted to the higher stage of typing and am at disadvantage when forced to compete on a lower stage of handwriting! My exams Monday (another American girl & I went with knees shaking) were quite pleasant: French translation & notes fair & simple and the afternoon Essay topics varied and interesting, a marked change from papers of other years: I took “Stylization” and, I think, wrote a very clever essay ostensibly in praise of style in all its forms, as a religious devotee of style, defining it as that order, line, form & rhythm in everything from the sonnet to the whalebone corset which renders the unruly natural world of Becoming bearable: I made up a fable of God as the Supreme Stylizer & the fall, & an allegory of the history of man: a bloody pageant in search of the Ultimate Style of thought, ritual, etc. Bringing Yeats & Eliot in, etc. I wish I could have it back, but noone ever sees a paper again or knows what one gets on the separate papers. Anyway, I was elated Monday, but the exams yesterday were worse than anything I had imagined: Dating, that black terror of Americans who have no sense of the history of language, was compulsory, and it took half an hour simply to read the exam through. It seems so ridiculous to anaylize & compare the imagery thought, movement et. al of 3 poems in 10 minutes each, for there is no time to respond naturally & your opinion changes radically in that brief time. It was, aside from the dating & the impossible prose-passage analysis which I didn’t even bother reading or chosing, fair. But to dash home a mile on the bike for homemade coffee (the acrid store-bought stuff began to make me sick) and back again without even time to wash my face, for the hardest paper of all and find the nastiest exam imagineable. The 27 questions (of which we always write 4) were either appallingly & uselessly general: “Where, among the authors you studied for this paper, do you find something like a ‘philosophy of history’ and how much interest do you think it has for the student of literature?” or appalling limited (and often unfairly). For example, for DH Lawrence I had read most of the novels & memorized passages on moral theory only to be forbidden to speak of his novels & requested to analyze his life development (a favorite word) from either his short stories or non-fiction and verse. I was so furious at this that I got back by writing on his fable “The Man Who Died” about Jesus under a question on fable & moral. I’m sure the examiners didn’t think of this; all the questions bore no reference to the moral work of the writers, but were large general relations to politics, law, the “thought of the century”, etc. A mean, vague, fly-catching mind behind it all. As one person said to me on going out: It took me an hour to find how I could fit what I knew into the questions. Well, I wrote on Hobbes’,* Lawrence, Blake and Plato, with references to my reading which has certainly been wider than any of the other people’s. It’s disgusting to think that two years of work & excellent, articulate, thought-out papers should be judged on the basis of these exams and nothing else. I have been so wound up by the enormity of disgorging such amounts of knowledge morning and afternoon that I am just going to spend my time on the moors (after the colossal job of packing this weekend) lying in the sun, hiking & unwinding. I’ll deserve it!
Your two letters came, monday & today and cheered me up immensely. Glad you liked the blue bowl & the magazines. Ted’s book seems destined to good fortune: Harper’s and Faber agreed to publish it simultaneously on Sept. 18th: a much better date than mid-August, when noone is about the bookstores & all are in Europe or at the beach. Now, it will come out just as college begins & be featured & not pushed back as old stuff in the dusty shelves! It will also be eligible for Poetry Book Society Choice here (which won’t be decided till June) which would guarantee a sale of 800 copies to the Society, rare in England as a poetry sales chance. We are very happy about it: it’s getting “special priority” at Faber: they don’t even have time to add the 40th poem* which Ted sent to the Harper edition which will no doubt be the best production. Monday morning I also got a note from the Yale Press saying my book had been chosen among the finalists for the publication prize but Auden wouldn’t have judged them till some time in the early summer. My heart sank as I remember his judgments on my early Smith poems but I do hope my book (“Two Lovers & A Beachcomber”) shows change & would give anything to have it win: Auden would have to write a foreword to it then. At any rate, Ted & I were glad it came to encourage me through this week at least without worrying I’d get the book back every day. Ted has been a saint: making breakfast & heating water for a daily tub, meeting me at 4:30 after exams & last night (I was very exhausted & aching) served me with steak mushrooms & wine on a tray in bed, doing the dishes afterwards. He is just ideal & so encouraging & stands by through everything. I feel I can face everything life offers with him by my side. We’ll have to get his suit in America: time there will be relaxed compared to our jobs here. I want Warren to go with him or at least you & me. No time to tailor a suit here. Do ask Dorinda & Bill & the Aldriches over before the 29th – we’d love them.
Wish me luck: 2 more to go –
xxx
Sivvy
PS. Wednesday 6 pm – tragedy exam all over – very stimulating & fair to make up for yesterday’s two horrors – only one to go Friday am: blessed Chaucer & a whole day (!) to study for it. Luck & love to Warren
xxx
Siv
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 8 June 1957
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Saturday noon, June 8
Dearest mother . . .
How lovely it was to get your letter here, at what I feel is the beginning of my new life. I am sitting comfortably ensconced in one of the great armchairs in the little livingroom with big picture windows overlooking a rainy landscape of green moortops and fields of cows: toasting my toes in front of the coal fire, browsing in James’ short stories while Ted reads Chaucer nearby and his older sister, Olwyn, recovers by sleeping late from her trip up from Paris yesterday for a 10 day vacation. As for me, I am just beginning to feel reborn. We took the tiresome train trip up here Wednesday, and it took me till yesterday to get relaxed enough to sleep off my deep fatigue. I got up for coffee in the morning and went back to bed & slept all day, and am now gradually feeling a sort of “resonance” in myself, and not the desperate tenseness of the past month. The minute I finished my exams Friday (a week ago) & Ted his job, we began the colossal job of packing (we had most of our books crated in one crate and in two small trunks of Ted’s) and selling what we could of our things & settling with innumerable gas & electric meter men, baggage insurance, £ conversion to $, ad infinitum. We had not a moment of respite, and I felt as if a brand had been stamped on my head after exams (particularly the horrid moralist paper) which prevented me from absorbing anything, but only pessimistically rewriting the exams in my head. A very nasty young don took this opportune moment for making a devastating and absolutely destructive attack on one of my poems* by showing how “hollow” they were compared to---guess who---John Donne! Very typical of mean Cambridge criticism (all the other little “creative” writers* were similarly dismissed, but I was singled out for particularly vicious abuse) & this coming at a time of non-writing was especially trying.
Instead of bothering to stay around for the plethora of teas, dinners & sherries of lit. magazines & dons, we left the first day I could legally. I never parted from a house with more joy & feeling of good riddance: the deep-rooted filth of rugs, drawers (the landlady never cleaned out half of her parents’ stuff) & floors showed nakedly when we took out our books. We felt a cleansing process packing out things & knowing that we wouldn’t see them again for a month, but would go free to the moors. No more Sassoons upstairs or crowds of Granchester
tea-trippers passing our front window & gabbling: just endless green moortops & cows & pigs. We walk for miles & meet not a soul: just larks & swallows & green green hills and valleys. I never would have sensed the complete rest & freedom from “preparing a face to meet the faces” that one meets if I’d hung around Cambridge. Ted’s mother has fixed up our room & we read in bed & lounge about & by the time we come home should be rested & raring to write & work & happy to see people at home. Every step now is an advance: this has been in many ways the hardest drudging year of our lives: I can scarcely believe we’ve been married a year come June 16th! We counted days till now all through the long dingy winter & America looks like the promised land. Both of us are delighted to leave the mean mealy-mouthed literary world of England. The only person I shall miss is my dear moralist supervisor, Doris Krook, who is as close to a genius saint as I’ve ever met. Dear Wendy Christie, her widow-friend and a beautiful woman, had Ted & me to dinner with Dr. Krook our last night in Cambridge, all by ourselves for a last tribute to the shrine: Dr. Krook gave me a book of James’ stories about writers* in parting & a hug: I feel she loves me almost as much as I do her, and my work teaching will, in a special sense, be devoutly dedicated to her own particular light, a small spark of which I hope to carry to my pupils at Smith.