The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2

by Sylvia Plath

  We hope to be living in Boston next year, me writing & being a housewife (I miss cooking deserts & things which I have time to do only over the weekend: made a very tasty lemon meringue pie this Sunday!) and Ted getting a job and writing. We both feel the academic life is probably not for us, because we see how completely it devours time & energy: a 9 to 5 job would be nowhere near as time-consuming. As it is, I work every day from about 8 a.m. till 10 at night, including weekends, at my teaching and homework. Did Ted tell you I just won a $100 prize* from Poetry magazine for the 10 poems of mine they published there this year? It is very encouraging, & I can’t wait till June when I can start writing stories for the women’s magazines which should be very profitable & fun.

  Do give my best love to Hilda & Vicky and to Walter & Alice. I miss them & will try to write them soon.

  Lots & lots of love to you both,

  love,

  sylvia

  TO Warren Plath

  Thursday 28 November 1957

  TLS* (photocopy), Indiana University

  Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1957 9 A.M.

  HELLO! The same typewriter, but it is now Sivvy talking. I have been very wicked in not writing you, but am going to do so now. Ted & I had a fine drive down here monday, the hills all purple and smoky hazed and the air still as the inside of an iceberg. Just the change of scenery has been good for me: I have, alas, over 70 term papers to correct this weekend, plus class preparation, so will soon be blear-eyed again. But only 3 weeks till Christmas. Then the long winter stretch. We’ve been having “visitors” in class this last 3 weeks, & I did very nightmarishly in one class for two women professors, much better for the 2 men. I have heard unofficially that I will probably be asked back for next year and would have “good chances of promotion”, but have chosen to get out while the gettings good. I see too well the security and prestige of academic life, but it is Death to writing. Vacations, as I’m finding out, are an illusion, & you must spend summers preparing new courses, etc. Writing is obviously my Vocation, which I am finding out the hard way, but Ted & I are fermenting good plans for this June 1st, hoping to rent a little apartment on the slummy side of Beacon Hill, which we love & work, me part time, Ted full time, at unresponsible, unhomeworked jobs (for money, bread & experience with unacademic people) & write for a solid year, then try for a grant to Italy on the basis of a year’s manuscripts. Such a vision keeps me going. Had a fine time recording at Steven Fassett’s studios on Beacon Hill* where all the poets record for Harvard, listened to his rare recording of Joyce, V. Woolf, etc. & were awed by autographed photos of old opera stars all around the walls & the incredible equipment which cut a record from the tape made of Ted’s half hour reading in 5 minutes. A luxury dinner in JackSSweeney’s apartment on Beacon St.* overlooking the lights of Boston, very posh, & met W. S. Merwin, & his red-haired British wife,* he the most lucrative & machiavellianly-successful of young (30) American poets, rather unpleasant in many ways, but having plays produced in London & knowing all the producers, poets etc. of London & America by nicknames such as “Cal”(Caligula) for Robert Lowell,* etc. Ted & I devoured literary gossip & saw the same couple for lunch the next day in their rickety heavenly slummy Beacon hill apt* with a tar roof overlooking a panoramic view of the Charles River. I love that part of town & can’t wait to find a place there, become unacademic, anonymous, & Write. Neither Ted nor I can be tame campus poets, unfortunately, but perhaps fortunately. We need varied, unintellectualized life around us & not this continual responsibility to improve courses, accept administrative work, etc. So our life will be hard, but we hope, rewarding in our deepest selves. Writing first, jobs fitting around it. We hope to see a lot of you this next year, while in B.

  Hoping you can follow this! Had a fine morning at Lamont Library yesterday, with Jack Sweeney setting out a good stack of poets’ recordings, a whole conference room to ourselves & me in on a special permission (it’s ridiculous they don’t allow women, isn’t it?) Then the spaghetti lunch at Beacon Hill which confirmed our hunch that we’d look for a place there & walk the city into our sinews next year. O God, how I look forward to it: Boston’s edible, not like NYC. Cambridge near, for plays, poetry, books, etc., but not oppressive & surrounding us with Phds as prodigal as pastel potted orchids. Drove to Dot’s this noon for a marvelous dinner at which we toasted you & missed you much. A huge mammoth 20 pound turkey, nuts, cranberry jellies, creamed onions, squash & mince pies, wines, anchovies, do I make your mouth water? Ted never saw or ate such sumptuous foods. Grampy was dear, & loaned Ted a watch till Christmas as Ted’s trying to set up a radio station for a couple of hours in Amherst for the Whmp* station manager: just a gamble at a part-time job which might make him feel better: he needs to see people & work some, as I do, but Northampton isn’t a good place at all for the kind of queer offbeat interesting job he’d like, so we tried this, instead of selling in shoestores. If he can get sponsors, he will get a wage. Ted has, by the way, fractured his 5th metatarsal in his right foot to complicate matters---he did it by jumping out of an armchair while his foot was asleep!

  It was almost 2 weeks before we figured his limp must be due to more than a twisted muscle & took him to be xrayed. So it is a fracture, & we had the bone set by the man who tended my fractured fibula, the guy who took the spur off Dimaggios ankle.* As soon as he gets the cast off he’s going to take driving lessons, because he really feels the lack of knowing how to drive & I’ll be glad to have him spell me on any trips we take. We honestly appreciate the use of your car, as we’d never be able to get groceries or me go home for lunch between classes if we didn’t have the car. So blessings on your head. Next year, we figure we can walk everywhere, which is the blessing of city living as we simply won’t be able to afford a car for milenniums. I want to finish my poetry book this summer, write a series of short stories & begin a novel, without anything such as a teaching job & preparation hanging over my head. So mother will teach me to use a dictating machine & I’ll hire out at part-time jobs to give my life variety & contact with people, which every writer, or most, need, as a balance to complete solitude at the typewriter.

  Mother, Ted & I had a really hysterical evening and dinner with Mrs. Prouty last night: she’s obsessed with Ted, as she was with you, and really plays up to him, calling him handsome, trying to get him on Tv, etc. She has an “Ant Farm” which she watches constantly, & it’s very strange & absorbing. Must close now.

  Much love

  Sivvy

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Sunday 8 December 1957

  TLS with envelope, Indiana University

  Sunday afternoon

  December 8, 1957

  Dearest mother . . .

  This letter should by now greet you at Dotty’s* and how happy I am to know you’ll be out of the hospital today and on the road to recovery. It was wonderful getting your cheery letter and hearing about your rapid improvement. Our family must really be pretty tough and resilient: you’ve been through so much hospital-treatment and are coming out better than ever! Ted is so happy to hear you’re better too. We both are looking most forward to spending at least a week at home over Christmas vacation: probably driving down early Monday the 23rd and staying through till the next Monday: I’ll have to choose books & outline my program for the 2nd semester so will want to be back here & have time to work steadily at the library.

  Tell Dotty for me---I won’t write a separate letter---how much I appreciated her kind and thoughtful notes about your progress: they really relieved me. Also, Ted & I loved the anniversary card and the bright cheerful napkins. Thanks again from both of us! We also were much amused at the little smiling face you drew on the card: it was so expressive!

  I am sitting so cosily in my lovely black velvet toreador pants which I think are my favorite garment, my knee socks under them, and my little leopard slippers on, very warm & informal---I get weary of stockings, heels & chignon during the teaching week, so let my hair down literally & figurativel
y over the weekend.

  This week has been in many ways one of the toughest for me: I worked on correcting my term papers starting last Saturday evening, all Sunday and Monday, from 7 am till midnight without a break: 700 pages to correct, 70 long paragraphs of comment to write, grades to make out. By the time I got through I was really exhausted, blear-eyed & doped. Tuesday I slowly pulled out of my fatigue & tried to arrange the 70 for a two-hour reading & discussion in all 3 classes: meaning separate preparation for each class & so I was behind all week with my work for class: coming home each night after a full day & having to get the next day’s lesson prepared. Which I’ll never do again. But the end of this story of drudgery is a happy one. I didn’t miss a class & carried on till noon Saturday. My health has amazed me. I started with a sneezy mean cold driving up here on a week ago Saturday, really wet and impossible, but I took two of those amazing Coricidin tablets & my dear husband tucked me into bed for a day, feeding me hot milk and brandy and honey, which got rid of my cold & made it possible for me to do my correcting.

  This Saturday, the minute I got through with my work, I rushed home, flew about cleaning up the house, did the weekend marketing and began cooking, for we’d invited four people over for Saturday night dinner: the Bramwells (Joan & James),* a charming English couple, she the only woman on the English faculty besides me who’s married, her husband the author of a successful book on a conscientious objector’s experiences in the war which just came out this year; Sylvan Schendler,* a dark, plodding, rather pathetic fellow who is a great success in the English Dept. among the elder people & the students but who is divorced & seems rather alone, & Marie Boroff, a young woman Ted & I like who is also rather sad in her own way: she got one of Poetry Chicago’s prizes ten years ago,* left off teaching at Smith to “write in NYC and have fun”, and when that last failed, got her Phd. from Yale & is now teaching there half of the week, half of the week here. She seems very warm, kindly & lonely, in her early 30’s I guess. She has admitted she doesn’t have the talent to be a poet (she admires Ted’s book very much) and wants to turn to critical writing.

  Anyhow, I tossed off a sponge cake after the perfect recipe you sent me in England, made my little maple parfait with 6 egg yolks, maple syrup & 2 cups of heavy cream, frozen, mixed up a delicious spaghetti sauce, a French salad dressing, a salad of lettuce, romaine & chicory & scallions, garlic butter for French bread, and the clam-and-sour-cream dip I learned from Mrs. Graham* when Ted & I had cocktails with Dean Graham.* All this in the space of two hours. We served sherry & hot potato chips & this dip for beginning & then you should see how nice our round table looked, if a bit crowded, with my lovely West German linen cloth (pale nubbly yellow) from Esther & Paul,* my lovely pottery dishes & pewter & stainless steel gleaming by candlelight! Everybody talked & I slipped in & out with the dishes very easily. I’ve never made a meal for 6 before, just 4, and this was very successful I think.

  Ted & I went for a little midnight walk under the warm, wet blowy sky with a fuzzy blue moon overhead & then fell into bed as the clock struck twelve, utterly exhausted. We slept till noon this morning and woke feeling very refreshed. We cleared the mountains of dishes & glasses & the whole house in an hour by working together & had a nice little scrambled egg & onion lunch.

  I’ve been giving myself the simple treat of doing odds & ends since then: I only have a few questions on 70 quizzes to correct which wont’ take me more than an hour, & then two whole luxurious days to prepare the next two weeks work.

  Remember that lovely Christmas card lyric on the little white, red & black card: “I heard a bird sing in the dark of December: we’re nearer to spring than we were in September”?* Well, somehow, I’ve felt more philosophical this last week, in spite of my deep exhaustion: the year doesn’t look quite endless. I also got a rather grim satisfaction that those 700 pages of papers* didn’t floor me but that I got through them. Too, I am taking things which would earlier have floored me---occasional sassiness, poor preparation for class by some girls, difficult office hour conferences---more in my stride. I had a hard problem with a very nasty case of plagiarism in my last set of papers, so obvious as to be impossible as “a mistake”, and had to send the girl to honor board. She is a very shifty character & wavering between a D plus and C minus, not preparing for class discussion, and unfortunately just the sort who’d do something like this. She claimed it was all a mistake, she just “didn’t know how it happened,” & I probably got much sicker over it then she did. But I sent her to honor board.

  Although it is extremely painful for me not to write, knowing how even more painful it will be when I start to write in June, I’ve decided to make the best of a bad job & make them sorry to lose me. I have had several teachers say to me they’ve “heard” from students & visiting teachers (to my classes) that I’m a “brilliant teacher”, so in spite of my obvious faults I can’t be bad. One thing, I’m hardly ever dull, & since it’s my first year, I think I’m doing about all I could ask of my ignorant self. I’m getting a little more realistic about it. If I can just get my preparation done a week ahead, instead of this last minute rush, I’ll feel even more better.

  Ted, at last, is writing wonderful poems again. He’s gone through a dry spell & been unhappy with his bad luck about his leg, his missing driving lessons, his not being able to get a job (there’s no work there at all, really!) and his feeling of isolation. Now, after Thanksgiving vacation (which seemed to break the jinx of depression on us & get us rested & refreshed, thanks to your luxurious treatment) he’s just turned out 6 beautiful poems, which give me at least a vicarious pleasure, & a delightful short fairy-story.*

  I am so lucky to be married to Ted: we read poems aloud & discuss people & magic & everything, always interested and happy when not tired. If only we can get into our stride: our own writing life, then no weariness or worry will get at the deep part of us. I feel terribly vulnerable & “not-myself” when I’m not writing & know I can never combine teaching & writing, nor can Ted. So, only 6 more months!

  Evidently I’m not alone in feeling exhausted about teaching! It seems to take much more out of the women than out of the men: probably the men get a certain physical satisfaction out of teaching the opposite sex. Some of the old-maid women teachers treat the girls like daughters. But they all get tired. Marie Boroff, who looks like a wreck, said she felt “great psychic exhaustion” with her two jobs, and that there was absolutely not energy left after a teaching day for creative work. Old Miss Williams,* another teacher, told me the same thing yesterday about her exhaustion after office hours. These people, however, can bear the tiredness because teaching is their Vocation, but it’s not mine, even though I could be a good one if I had the scholarship & inclination to work with other writers’ work & not produce my own. But it relieves me to think that even the seasoned ones have the same problems I do, doubts, etc.

  Do look up, if you can, the Christmas book lists of this past week which have appeared in the Saturday Review* and the New York Times Book Section!* Ted’s book is listed in both under Poetry as one of the exceptional poetry books of the year! We are so pleased & happy about this! Only 250 to 300 books were listed out of over 10,000 and for his to be chosen in the poetry section, a slim section, is a wonderful honor, just what we’d hoped!

  I must close now, so want to say how happy we’ll be to see you in only two weeks! We are eating royally & are caught up on sleep. So don’t you worry.

  Much much love, love also to grampy, Dot & Joe, and Bobby & Nancy,*

  love,

  your own,

  Sivvy

  TO Warren Plath

  Monday 16 December 1957*

  ALS in greeting card (photocopy), Indiana University

 

  Merry Christmas / and a / Happy New Year

 

  Love from Sivvy / & / Ted.

  Dearest Warren . . .

  I am just convalescing from a 101° fever & flu & trying to get enough head fo
r making up 2 Dostoevsky classes this week before Christmas, so this will be a short note to be followed by a New Year’s letter accounting for our holidays with mother at home – We hear wonderful things about your speeches in German & the appreciative ‘knuckle-rapping’. Bravo. I am very wistful about German & want to revive my limited knowledge this summer day by day: I don’t have much surplus energy now. Maybe when you’re back you could help me with pronunciation! Ted’s reviews continue to be excellent: the ‘Book Review Digest’* this month gave his book 4 plusses & excerpts from 4 of the best: the “watch-Ted-Hughesfor-a-major-poet” kind. We are dreaming of living & writing in Boston next year & working for grants to Europe for the future, so we hope to see a lot of you from the time you get back. I am counting the days until June 1st – I understand “unofficially” they will want me to teach here next year, but I’ll be writing, thank goodness.

  xxx

  sivvy

  TO E. Lucas Myers

  Wednesday 18 December 1957*

  ALS in greeting card with envelope,* Emory University

 

  Merry Christmas

 

  from / sylvia

  Dear Luke –

  Very good to see your poems in Poetry this month.* The tessellated corn one has always been a favorite of mine. I am counting days till June 1st when I shall be free of this teaching & eye-socket searing over 70 papers every other week. Teaching is no job for a serious writer – uses the wrong kind of energy. We hope to set up shop on the slummy side of Beacon Hill next year. We both miss you. Will you ever come home?

  Best of luck.

  Sylvia

  TO Elinor Friedman Klein

  December 1957*

  ALS in greeting card, Smith College