by Sylvia Plath
Ted just got two poems accepted by the posh intellectual, and at least fat Sewanee Review.* He is filling out myriad biographical forms. Do you like coffee with or without cream? Have you got any angles or friends on Vogue or Harper’s Bazaar? How about a real dark Heathcliffe picture of Ted in “People Are Talking About”* with all his book prizes??? His poetry center businessman wanted to do a movie (he has great ambitions for his own name) showing Ted’s “mind & sensibility working” or “the workings of Ted’s m & s” against the background of the Empire State. But Ted wants no personal circus, only poem readings & whatever magazine notes will help the book. Peace & Cape Cod.
Do write us. And if you can get off come for a day for beach & talk. We’ve still got shirt---what to do, send or wait to see you?
Love from us,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 14 July 1957*
TLS, Indiana University
Dearest mother . . .
We are just now sending Warren off after a very filling Sunday dinner: menu: cold chicken, rice, corn niblets, bread, wine, two kinds of delicious cake, thanks to you, and a bowl of chocolate pudding I whipped up this morning. It is absolute heaven here: peace, quiet, and Space to put our things: no clamor of neighbors & odds & ends to do. We will take a siesta after Warren leaves & begin work tomorrow after catching up on sleep & buying a store of food provisions in Orleans. We look so forward to seeing you & Warren on the weekend of the 27th: could you bring our electric eggbeater (mixmaster), towels & facecloths (we have none of the latter), a good big nailnipper & our coffee mugs which we miss. If the borestone anthology comes to Hathaway (they should let me know by postcard (would you send it on or bring it too?* Let us know if you’ll be coming Friday night the 26th & we’ll be waiting eagerly.
Much love from both of us.
Sivvy
To Mummy
26, Elmwood Road,
Wellesley, Mass.
July 8th .57
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 18 July 1957*
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Thursday evening
Dearest mother . . .
I have just finished the dishes and am sitting down to write the last few of my thank-you notes before turning to Virginia Woolf’s next novel.* I miss hearing from you, except for that brief pink note & hope you will write us little things gossip and all. Now that I am home, and you are so near, I miss you more than I did in England, where I stoically knew you and Warren were far beyond easy commuting distance. We look forward to seeing you here a week from tomorrow: do let us know roughly what time. And don’t bring a scrap of food, cooky or even a pinch of salt: I’ll have fun cooking up a few little dishes for you for a change, in my own kitchen, so count on resting. I just tried out Mrs. Spaudling’s oven this afternoon when we came back from swimming & made a beautiful little two-layer 8 inch cake, yellow with 3 egg-yolks, and tried out a maple syrup frosting with walnuts which Ted likes very much. The enormous frying pan Elly gave me works beautifully, but takes up a great deal of room: it makes heavenly fried eggs, hamburgs, griddle cakes: very flat & perfectly even heat, set right on the proper degree. I do like it enormously, enormous as it is, and will get more adventurous with it as I go on. Perhaps I’ll leave the pressure cooker to learn on when you come: I am a bit more wary of it.
The weather here has been beautiful. Ted & I are just getting into a routine and the beginning writing is, as usual, awkward & painful. We will never get in this rusty state again, for writing is the prime condition of both our lives & our happiness: if that goes well, the sky can fall in. It is heavenly to write here: quiet, with no distractions or social duties. We try to get 4 hours of writing done by noon, bike to Nauset Light beach for the afternoon of swimming & running and readbooks in the evening. I shall only have to go shopping once a week, which is fine. We drove down with Mrs. Spaulding Monday & loaded up on myriad supplies & stores: $25 worth, rather staggering, but the first week is the most costly. We figure on $15 a week at most from now on, fingers crossed.
Mail has been rather dull: Ted’s bank is, praise be, sending on his money: it should be about $270, so I’d appreciate it very much if you’d check with our bank on this & get a deposit slip.
Mrs. Prouty sent a lovely letter with a check for $150 (which staggered us both & will help relieve us wonderfully about the September bills). She didn’t want it to be a “check in the bank” but to have us get something we loved: furniture, or such. I thought I’d write and tell her we’re getting the pottery dinner set with it, as it is an exquisite one, and say we’re going to buy our first furniture, a big writing desk, with the rest of it when we get to Northampton. Which we really are. Do you think that’s all right?
I keep trying to think of what to tell you to bring: towels, facecloths, the electric mixer, & the one thing Mrs. S. doesn’t seem to have: a grater, for carrots, cheese, etc. Also cookie sheets. That’s it.
Also have Warren bring or send the key to his bike lock which he neglected to leave with us. I am a bit grumpy about not hearing from that poetry manuscript. By the time you get this it will probably have come back & you will have sent it down here. It would actually be a relief to stop wavering between hope & despair and learn its fate definitely. Do send it right on if it comes, And call up, of course, if it should be accepted.
We also could use pillowcases.
Both of us are getting deeply rested at last and losing the exhausting Cambridge scars. You could have done nothing more wonderful than giving us these seven weeks.
Will write more later. Love to Warren and you. Tell Dot we’re enjoying her radio-clock.
Much love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath
Sunday 21 July 1957
TLS, Indiana University
Sunday evening
July 21, 1957
Dearest mother & Warren . . .
It was lovely getting the long letter yesterday. I am feeling very happy and complete now, because today, at last, at last, I began making progress writing a story* I’m really deeply fascinated by, with “real” characters, a good problem-plot and deft description. After bumbling about on the first 5 pages of it Friday, I really got back most of my old fluency, and have much richer thoughts & experience to work with. My mind (my creative mind) had been completely crammed by hour by hour exam-reading & endless practical details and concerns for the last 6 months. And within a week, I am in the middle of a story, with two more* acting themselves out in my head, and knowing that the more I write, the better, much better, I’ll be. So my dull gloom and rusty fingers and head are all gone, and all the rest of life: meals, beach, reading, becomes utter delight.
Ted has some more wonderful news: good fortune really draws more good fortune like a magnet: imagine: the slick austere New Yorker has just accepted one of his poems, “The Thought Fox”* for publication in early september!!! We heard via the Harper grapevine (several of his letters have been mis-addressed to Easthampton!) that they’d shown the New Yorker his poems & we should be hearing from them. Ironically enough, a year ago, we sent the same poem to the New Yorker & it was rejected. What reputation does! In the same mail he got the proofs of two poems* & simultaneous acceptance, from the Spectator,* a witty London weekly. Sp we should have a steady income of small checks for the next few months: 15 of his poems are scheduled to come out in August & September, no less! He is writing on some Yorkshire tales now & has done a lovely bull-frog poem* and is looking tan, wonderfully rested, and enjoying my meals. We are really unfolding & getting into our stride. I suppose a week is very little time to get adjusted in, after a year of slavery, to freedom writing, but it’s seemed an age to us & now we’re happy as chipmunks, our cheeks chockful of ideas.
About next Friday, now. I ABSOLUTELY FORBID YOU TO BRING ANY CAKES, CHICKENS OR PREPARED FOOD. I am in my own little house now & want you & Warre
n to be our guests, which means I’ll do the cooking. You might, however, bring the CORN which we’d love. And perhaps show me how to use the pressure cooker. I have made your mayonnaise already & it is delicious & can do the cooking of most things before you come. Will you have had supper Friday? And roughly what time will you be arriving: 8ish, 10ish?
More things to bring:
The proofs of Ted’s poetry book (Faber)
A roasting pan
Cookie sheets
Carrot grater (not scraper)
Large nail nipper (you can take it back then)
Towels & facecloths
Pillowcases
Mixmaster
Fishing tackle
Virginia Woolf’s Writer’s Diary (a white book)
A good grammar book
And I think that should be all. I do hope the weather is as good then as it has been this week. Today was our best: we found a fine sand bar halfway between Nauset Light Beach and Coast Guard beach which had clear level water & long rollers, wonderful for swimming, as the rest of the choppy sharply-dropping coast isnt. I hope to get two stories off to the Saturday Evening Post* by the time you come & begin on my novel after warming up. Have read 3 Virginia Woolf novels this week & find them excellent stimulation for my own writing. Bless you a thousand times for making this possible for us: perfect place for reestablishing our writing. Who knows, we may earn next summer here all by ourselves this summer if we work hard enough. Mrs. Spaulding is very dear & brought over a little quahog pie & blueberry muffins. Ted & I get along fine with them & she looks very forward to seeing you. And so do we! Do write more, we love to get your letters. My suits should be a black wool tweed & green corduroy, in separate boxes, one from Cambridge (green), one Yorkshire.
xxx Sivvy
TO Marcia B. Stern
Sunday, 21 July 1957*
TLS, Smith College
c/o Spaulding
Box 153
Eastham, Massachusetts
Sunday night
Dear Marty . . .
Here I am with sandy toes and a peeling nose in our small gray cabin hidden in the pines, after promising myself to see you before going, and planning to be industrious about writing letters and things. Well, we drove up to Hamp the week after our lovely supper with you & Mike and were completely knocked out by our treking about there and our return to packing for the cape that we literally haven’t come to till this minute, after a week of easy living, no phones, simple meals, and the painful process of getting writing again after nine months enforced rusty absence from the typewriter.
I wish I could see you, so the two of us could simply sit and talk and talk, and hope we can do this in early September before I go up to Hamp for the year---I’ll be driving back & forth with Ted a bit to get all our paraphernalia up.
We had miraculous luck about getting a place to stay: after an inauspicious beginning, the lady at college hall being sick whom I was supposed to see, and Mrs. Yates, the capitalist rental agent being very practical, hard-headed & depressing (most every house & apartment gone by May, very expensive apts. unfurnished $85 a month without utilities, houses 10 miles out $125 a month without utilities, etc. etc.), she mentioned idly that a 3rd floor apartment had just come open that very weekend: nextdoor to her on Elm Street, just opposite the high school. A woman had providentially got pregnant & was having to move out. We looked: and I recognized it as our place immediately: furnished modernly, spic and span, freshly redecorated by our landlords (the man is a policeman no less), with refrigerator & stove in the tiny new kitchen (very tiny), a bathroom, bedroom, sort of stair-hallway half-room and large livingroom with enormous closets everywhere. It was amazingly cool, even on that most sultry day, being insulated and the Elm Street traffic was a mere whisper. You couldn’t hear a word from the landlady’s children on the first floor & the whole thing among the treetops was blissfully private. The price was $85, utilities included, which, a month ago, would have staggered me out of my eyes, but compared to the rest of Hamp prices, left me very calm. The young woman insisted that we look around at other places, just so we’d realize what a gem hers was. So we did: depressing in the extreme: agencies had nothing but houses with antiques out in the country at fabulous prices, apartments were stuffy, unfurnished, noisy, ugly, with retired Deans of Administration and Miss Corwin of the religious dept. etc. etc. above & below. The newspaper offerings were even worse: we got Mr. Bodden’s advice (in person) and Dan Aaron’s advice (also in person): they said jump at it, so we did, and flew back to come to practical terms. I do hope you & Mike will drive up sometime during the year when we are well settled & I accustomed to facing dungareed hordes & expounding the pragmatic syntax of William James:* in fact you must come. For dinner & much talk.
One of the finest things that happened while we were up there was our accidentally & luckily bearding Dan Aaron in his den where he was in khaki pants, straddling a typewriter, grinning crookedly the way he does & very reassuring about teaching. I’ve never known him, or had him for a course, which is good, as I don’t have a student-professor relation with him. Ted & he got along famously & we went to his house for drinks, found he was a best friend of Leonard Baskin (that brilliant young engraver, painter & sculptor who teaches at Smith & has his own printing press), knew Ben Shahn,* and was deeply involved in the recent court case between Peter Viereck & his wife (I don’t know if you heard, but at Holyoke Viereck had policemen surprise her in the house & drag her off to a mental hospital, with various professors from Smith chasing the policecar). Anyhow, Anya Viereck, very small, dark, Russian & extravagant, drifted in with a feather boa while we talked. The young faculty sounds like much fun, and I feel, whatever the problems that come up, we’ll have a fine time there. Lots of writers & artists & so on.
Ted’s book, even before printing, is drawing him more & more luck. We almost dropped yesterday to hear from Harper’s that the New Yorker (after all these years of our banging at their door) had seen his poems & accepted one for publication in early September. He’s now scheduled to have about 15 poems appearing in magazines between now & September, when the book comes out: in Harper’s, The Nation,* The New Yorker, the Sewanee Review, The New Statesman & Nation, The Times Lit. Sup.,* The Spectator, The London Magazine, Encounter.* I knew this would happen from the minute I read his first poems, but it is blissful to have it come so soon. And he just sits, unshaved, his hair every which way, munching raw steaks & writing more. Very wonderful.
Both of us are having the time of our life here, as we are basically hermits, happiest in the same pair of dungarees day in day out if we are only turning out writing. We write all morning, bike a couple of miles to the beach for the afternoon, and read in the evening. I am, after a week of biting my nails over tripe and awkward sentences and such, at last fluently writing a short story, with another spinning itself in my head. I shall myself bang on the doors of the Saturday Evening Post and the beginnings of a novel, which I won’t know about writing till I’ve written the first draft of it. The problem this year will be as ever, Time. At least I have the job I’d have chosen for myself: I need very badly to work: to feel I can, and can teach. The daily pragmatic feel of the thing. And I’ll be teaching my favorite writers, who stimulate my own writing: Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,* Henry James, Dostoevski,* etc.* I will be blue with awe the first day, but look most forward to being in medias res.
Please do write, Marty. I’d love to hear from you on paper, until we can get together in September: what you think, puzzle or dream about & do. Let’s have a good talk, some night or Saturday. Both Ted & I adore the magnificent teak tray and dear curved knife: it will be displayed as a work of art in the livingroom between hours of social use. Best to Mike,
Much love,
Sylvia
TO Edith & William Hughes
c. Monday 22 July 1957*
TLS, Family owned
Monday morning
Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .
Just
thought I’d snatch a minute to slip in this little note while Ted was writing the last of his business letters (it’s like a real swift business office here this morning, me typing, Ted dictating, proofing, signing, etc.) I’ve never seen Ted looking so well: rested, tan and twice as handsome as ever. The sea air here, the privacy in the pine grove, the peace, the good food & shiny little cabin are working wonders on both of us. We’ll be writing like fury the next six weeks, and it is heavenly not having to teach, or study, or pack and unpack trunks for a while.