by Sylvia Plath
I loved your story about dear Grampy: how I look forward to seeing him: the 2 lobsters remind me that a lobster dinner is one of Ted’s special wishes & also corn on the cob. I do hope we have a barbecue of chicken at Joe’s place: Ted & I would love that. I really want to learn cooking from you every minute I’m home. My chef d’oeuvres are few & simple compared to what I’ll want to produce in America. The first day up here I made one of my good stews: full of onion, potatoes, carrots, meat, garlic, bouillon cubes, dash of tomato sauce, & either white wine or cider. Quite matches the French, in a modest way. Also did a little chocolate cake with orange frosting, but all I make is, I tell Ted, like the earthly flawed facsimiles of the Platonic ideal of Essences which one may attain in America! We have lived so spartanly this last month that we will, we hope, bring over $150 back to America which, although paltry by living standards there, is a lot to save with our huge expenses of ship, visa and transportation bills. By the way, both Ted & I gave our bank as the Newton-Wellesley savings bank (is that right?) and should have from $50 (me) to $100 (Ted) sent or transferred there by the time we come home by our own banks. Could you go down & tell them to expect it & open an account for Ted? I went for a fitting of my lovely suit which is heavenly: black otterburn tweed with a faint white stripe (which hardly shows) in a kind of herringbone: very warm, classically cut according to my own orders. Should get it sent up here: only $56! Would be at least 3 times that in America: liked it so well I left a bolt of green corduroy, gift of Ted’s aunt, to have one made up exactly like it for more daily wear (will cost about $30). When I come back in 2 years I’ll have some more made in light tweeds: just what I want in style & material for reasonable prices. These two should be invaluable for teaching. Love to you & dear Warrie! Only 17 days! How incredible & wonderful it seems. We’ll call from NYC right away!
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 17 June 1957
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Monday morning, June 17
Dearest mother . . .
Well, your daughter has been married a year and a day, as the fairy stories say, and hopes to be married a hundred more. I can’t actually remember what it was like not being married to Ted: but, as our horoscopes read, when Leo & Scorpio marry, they feel they’ve known each other forever in a former life. We took yesterday off from relatives & spent it together on a shady hillside overlooking all the moors reminiscing about our wedding day & the tough times past & good times to come. I woke to see Ted lugging into the room a huge vase of pink roses; we packed chicken & steak & books and set off. The weather up here this past week has been exquisite: it is the one place in the world where I don’t miss the sea: the air is like clear seawater: thirst-quenching & cool, and the view of spaces, unlike anything I’ve seen in my life: you would love it, there are magnificent walks to take. I have now got my seasonal sunburn & am rid of the first stings: I always get so carried away with the sun I simply can’t expose myself coldly by 5 minute intervals. So will be protected by coat of tan on the ship & eager for Cape sea and sun. Teds book proofs from Harper’s,* which we corrected up here, were elegant, so much more professional than Faber’s, & their re-arranged order of the poems (which Faber is not following) infinitely better. I am thrilled that the book is dedicated to me! My first dedication! I am so proud of the poems; each time I read them I get shivers. Ted will leave even Wilbur far behind. I just got my first term syllabus for my English 11 course* this morning: fascinating. I can’t wait to prove myself teaching: I am ashamed I haven’t read half the novels on the list myself, but I’ll get the ones we don’t have & take them to the Cape this summer so I’ll have read them all, & naturally pick the ones I am best in: marvellous choice is given us.
I still can’t quite believe that in a week from tomorrow (!) we’ll be sailing into Manhattan & having dinner with you & Warren! It seems incredible that we change so much country in so little time. Very happy about the dinner with Mrs. Prouty. Do try not to arrange anything with the “little” people, though. I hope those can be all taken care of on the 29th. We look specially forward to the barbecue at Dot’s. I hope you & Ted & Warren & I can drive to Nahant with picnics now and then. Also, I will have to drive up to Northampton for a couple of days to see about a house, my teaching course & a job for Ted, so we must have a time free for that. We have been so busy seeing relatives here & just unwinding that we haven’t been able to get to work writing, & so will not want any visitors on the Cape at all: except you & Warren now & then. Perhaps you better keep our Cape address secret & say we can be reached through you. We will need to be completely antisocial this summer & write without stop to make up for this year & prove to ourselves that it is possible to write in America. Ted will love the country if he feels he can write there. Naturally the two weeks we are at home we won’t expect to work, because we will be glad to see people, but for every social month, we must spend 11 antisocial working ones. Ideally, when we are writing full-time, we can stop & fraternize in the evenings & for dinner, the way most people do, but while we have to have day-time jobs, we must write in our spare time & simply deny ourselves company. I want to get so well on in my novel that I can re-write it during the academic year & have it ready for publication in the spring. I think it will be called “Falcon Yard”: after many trials & errors in titles, this came to me & Ted at the same minute: it is the name of the yard where we met & thus the central episode of the book. There is a good chance Ted may get a teaching job at Amherst the 2nd year in America & if I am only asked back to Smith, it would be perfect. Then we would both apply for fellowships to write for a year in Italy. Me, I hope, on my 2nd novel, by that time. By which time I shall be 27 with enough books & money behind us to start having our projected 3 or 4 children: it is very important for us to have them later in life, in the late 20s, because both of us are slow late maturers & must get our writing personae established well before our personalities are challenged by new arrivals. Doesn’t it all sound heavenly & exciting? Work, work, that is the secret, with someone you love more than anything. We are both ideally suited temperamentally, with the same kind of life-rhythm, needing much sleep, solitude & living simply but with a few good clothes, many books, & my one extravagance is good cooking materials: lots of fine meat, cream, butter, eggs, etc. Also travel, as much as possible. I would somehow like to “see America” in our 2nd summer: New Orleans, via the east coast, Mexico, California, the Grand Canyon. To discover it with Ted. Always, when asked about my country, I have to qualify, saying I’m a New Englander & my information is only regional. By the way, do approach the Newton-Wellesley savings bank & open an account for Ted & say money is being transferred for both of us. We’ll need bikes on the Cape, I think, for the beach is too long to walk each day, isn’t it (at Nauset). Warren’s, & maybe I can borrow some girl’s bike. We loved your anniversary card which arrived Saturday. Had a lovely tea out here with Ted’s relatives & his amazing Dickensian-Falstaffian uncle (my favorite relative) who’s a millionaire, gave us £50, which is a big help. By the way, we’re having 3 trunks & a big crate of books (freight) arriving on the ship (dock 92) but can’t arrange railway express to home from here. Can you call them & ask them to pick them up on the 20th? It would help immensely & we could then unpack before going to the Cape & send stuff to cleaners & get the books we need. We don’t want to hang around NYC trying to find some office open. Will try to write from London. See you in a week!
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 20 June 1957
ALS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Thursday morning
June 20th!
Dearest mother –
At last! The big day is here! Ted & I are sitting in Waterloo Station on the Cunard boat-train to Northampton,* raring to be off. We officially set sail at 5 pm this afternoon, just a little after 6 hours from now. I can hardly believe it’s true! What a time we hav
e had! – managing visas, bus, boat & train tickets! We left the clear green moortops yesterday at 7 am. & took a delicious picnic down on a scenic bus ride, arriving in London last night. We rested up well & had breakfast in bed this morning, wandering about Trafalgar Square, saying goodbye. The weather has been heavenly. Ted has had £48 (or so) sent to the Newton-Wellesley Bank from Cambridge & £50 from Yorkshire. We should arrive with about $100 in cash & traveler’s checks. I will be glad to get all our funds added up at last. I hope we’ll have a good bit – we have about $200 to come, still, from poetry. Now the sun is in my eyes as we move slowly out of Waterloo into open air. Big Ben, to our right, says 10:45 a.m. I do hope our mail gets forwarded home all right – be sure to bring it all with you in the car to Route 128 when you pick us up Tuesday night (only 5 days from now)! We may not get in till late, what with our p.m. arrival in NYC, customs & train schedules, but we’ll call you from Grand Central. We had a lovely last few days on the moors & very good time with Ted’s parents, & aunt & uncle. Do write Mrs. Hughes often & describe our doings for she loves to hear from you & will miss Ted – I hope we can persuade dear Mrs. Cantor to take some color camera shots of us at home, She is better than a professional! I was just thrilled to hear of Warren’s summa degree & all the ceremonies – what a wonderful brother I have! London was full of carts of ripe strawberries as we left – I couldn’t get any in Yorkshire, so I hope we can make a strawberry chiffon pie at home. But don’t run about working & baking before we come! I was concerned to hear about Warren’s dumping his old stuff on you this last weekend – make him help with it, or let us do a good deal. Our deep Cambridge fatigue is all gone & we are healthy & fine.
Have you been able to get a railway express agency to pick up our 3 trunks & one box of books at the NYC piers? We’ll just leave them there to be taken care of. I am already longing for your cookies & our iced lemon & grape drink (no iceboxes anywhere here), all is lukewarm in summer – We are coming with nothing to our name but a few knives & tea cups! I trust we’ll get a house in Northampton early in July, & dig up a job for Ted. Coming home with Ted will be like discovering a new country & seeing it all through his eyes. But we want to relax & not rush about. What fun we’ll have this summer, each one of us having some special thing to look forward to – Warren his Fulbright, Ted his book & me my excellent job! You must relax & rejoice with all three of us. Warren can use my trunk, or Ted’s & benefit by our travel Experience! He must also take a supply of anticold medecine! I am counting the days. All from now on should be literally clear sailing!
We both send you, in advance, much love & More congratulations to Warren!
xxx
Sivvy & Ted
TO Edith & William Hughes
Thursday 20 June 1957*
ALS on RMS Queen Elizabeth letterhead, Family owned
Dear Ted’s mother & dad!
Here we are on the great ship at last after a steak lunch – we set sail in an hour or two – Customs let us go by without even taking a look at our smuggled drugs & diamonds. The chicken picnic yesterday was lovely & lasted us till London where we got a very nice hotel with bacon & egg breakfast in bed near the station. Will write more from America –
Best wishes to Walter & Hilda & love to you both –
Sylvia
TO Edith & William Hughes
Saturday 29 June 1957*
ALS,* Emory University
& Sylvia
(P.S. Isn’t he magnificent!!!)
TO Lynne Lawner
Monday 1 July 1957
Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
July 1, 1957
Dear Lynne,
We seem destined to swap theaters of operation, characters included, on the principle of the near miss. Cambridge for Cambridge, Wellesley for Wellesley, and even Robert Bagg* hoisting trunks on the dock. Ted & I arrived last week, me very purged & ascetic from violent mal der mer after martinis on board the next to docking day, and Ted heroically shouldering suitcases, trunks, crates totaling, god save us, 1000 pounds of effects. Mainly books. We walked into the arms quite literally of tall dark Russ Moro who knew Ted at Cambridge, violent brilliant Ellie Friedman (Smith graduate & working on TV) whom I knew at Smith, & Ted & I knew in Yorkshire, and also one blond, butterscotch dipped, enigmatically-blue-eyed Robert Bagg whom neither of us knew but who knew Russ at Amherst, and, you. I felt, and still feel a bit, shook in a space-time continuum like an ice-cream soda in the electric blender. Two years. Everything seemed immensely sparkling & shiny & fast-paced & loud after my bucolic existence on the Backs and the Bronte moors. The customs man, fat, sweating & suspicious, made us hack open our crate of 500 books, at which I melted into salt sobs, envisioning my treasures scattered from Harlem to Battery Park. Highly encouraged, with a nose for drugs & diamonds, the vile man reached in, flourished “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”: “Whereja buy all these books?” Wondering fleetingly about the latest bans, I firmly told him I was going to be a college teacher & thus read a bit. “Yeah,” he looks up & down, “you’re too young to get a job like that.” I wrinkle my face antiquely. He persists in opening it all, pocketbook & pockets. God shed his grace. We are here.
Business (it is late & I am verging on utter incoherence): Old Hall is “in” college: in one of the 4 red brick buildings making the 3-sided quad. The rooms are often quite nice, I think, the best overlooking the garden. Not quite as independent as Whitstead (a house for 10), more like dorm life. You’ll get to know the English girls better than I did, but I feel you will find it much more fascinating to get to know the men, which you will. For reference, a very nice moral sciences man (philosophy, to us), Nicholas Monck, of posh King’s college, editor of Granta, the Cambridge New Yorker. Look him up & give him poems. He visited Ted & me a bit & seems uniquely unaffected, penetratingly thoughtful & dear. Don’t know this Cook* person. But think she may be big-boned, blonde & young. I’ve glimpsed one like that: other alternatives: short, Chas. Addams-pallid, fungoid shape or shrunk withered & Robin-Goodfellow size. Ponder upon high table where the dons eat. Ours (Clough Hall) was a study in caricatures. And give my dearest love to Doris Krook (Mrs.), prof in philosophy & Henry James, who illumined my two years all by her own diamond-light.
Do you want a bike? Don’t pay to cart one over as I did. I left mine at Whitstead to be sold, but said I’d give you first option. It’s a 5-year-old English Raleigh, 3-speed, needs oiling but very reliable. Auction price or whatever I figure is either $18 or £6. 10. Let me know if you want it, & I’ll write them & it will be waiting for you. Bike is a must for classes, late dates, etc. Also, left my old but good-condition black gown for you as a welcoming gift at Whitstead: it will make you feel like Poe’s raven.* I put a paper with your name on it: demand it as your feudal inheritance from a former retainer. If you run across any reviews of Ted’s book in the local Cambridge mags in September (October, rather), you might clip & send us. The Cambridge Review, if it notices, is sure to concoct an extra special venomous one. London telegram* just announces it won Poetry Society choice for autumn there: guaranteeing a sale of 800 copies, close to miraculous in England.
Please write soon –
Love,
Sylvia
TO Elinor Friedman Klein
Friday 12 July 1957
TLS, Smith College
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
JULY 12
Dear Ellie . . .
On and on and on. Tomorrow we leave for the Cape at last and leave phones shopping loving neighbors infants cats dogs motor cars and all those ills suburbia is heir to. To write & read those hundred novels my freshmen will be dying to have expounded. We take our neccessities: typewriter & that enormous and magnificent American frying pan which we will be perching on the edge of and eating out of. You are the only person besides mother who knows our address, so keep it very secret, but if you can take a day off let us know &
come by for long beach & talk (we have no car, only bikes, so must needs walk places): it is c/o Spaulding, Box 153 Eastham, just off the main turnpike, a left turn, after the little Eastham P.O. Natives should know.
People at the party said: Who Is That Striking/Vital/Fascinating and/ or Electric Girl? It was you. You were wonderful to come, & I only wish you could have stayed. We hope you will keep your job a summer at least, because at the end there may be stories from the two of us. Got a nice letter from Editor Keightley.* Thank him for me, and at the end of the summer, if Auden doesn’t like me, he may hear more from me.
I am simultaneously writing a note to your mother explaining the Monday Events. And why we didn’t call to bother her. Ted & I walked into a providential situation. Got to hamp & Mrs. (Crook) Yates* & learned how dismal and horrid it is to get apartments in Hamp, not to mention houses. That very day, a woman in the 3rd floor flat next to her discovered she was enceinte or whatever & would have to move. We were sceptical, Elm Street, etc., just opposite high school. Took looks: very private, top floor, shiny kitchen, icebox, stove, small; tiny shiny bathroom; bigger bedroom, still shining, huge closets; small hall at top of stairs; big living room all furnished, painted & papered by hand, lots more closet room. All this, with the Elm Street traffic like a whisper, very cool in the sun-swelter. $85 per month, all utilities (except phone) included. It seemed steep at first, until we spent the rest of the day scouting about (the woman renting it* advised us to, to realize how nice her place was & be satisfied). We did. Ugh. Either $125 a month houses 8 miles out of town with all utilities to be paid, or hot horrid unfurnished Prospect St. apartments for $85 and Miss Corwin* & the retired dean of admission* etc. living overhead & underfoot & telling young couples not to leave their muddy shoes in the hall. College rentals, agencies, & newspaper tried with nothing but growing scorn. Mr. Bodden* in person advised us to grab the apt., as did blessed Dan Aaron* who is my boss & whom I really adore. We paid a downpayment on the apt. (337 Elm Street, Apt. 3, rear) & collapsed in Aaron’s living room for gin & quinine among all his Leonard Baskin* books & engravings & Anya Vierick* who keeps running over (or Veirick? no) and being very hot and Russian and tense. I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather live than Smith, oddly enough, now that I’m not in college: Aaron knows artists, Italians, editors & Ted likes him & we both felt we’d walked in on The Day, because houses are nonexistent & even the Great Nabobic people live in 3rd floor apts. generally with utilities not paid.