The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2

by Sylvia Plath

  Sylvia

  TO Olwyn Hughes

  Sunday 9 February 1958

  TL (incomplete), British Library

 

  Date February 9To OHFrom SHIn re shoes, ships, sealing wax.

  Dear Olwyn,

  I am in the process of stealing, or rather stocking up on, tablet upon tablet of this pink official paper which Ted is enamoured of, before I leave the land of supply closets, blue exam booklets and comma splices this June. We both love getting your letters, which are serving as a kind of magnetic chain linking us to Europe where, as Ted & I remind each other, we intend to be the year after next, preferably in Rome or environs, preferably on luxurious grants, preferably not having to work for our pizza. We plan to write like fiends for a whole year until the papers mount and mount ceilingward & then apply for money to do the same thing in Rome. However, grants are a kind of in-group league: once you get one, you get another, and so on: no fair equitable distribution: this glassy blue-eyed descendent of Heine* Ted speaks of tried twice for a Guggenheim with glowing recommendations from ee cummings,* William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, et. al. and alas failed. But then, he is a lousy poet. Novels are much more promising, so I’m going to start working on mine after I pack away the last bluebook. Not writing this year has been the worst of it, & I feel much better now that I have shocked the whole English department by saying out-loud I am not coming back: this is without doubt the best college to teach at anywhere in America for several reasons: a three to four day week, relative freedom in course books, wonderful bright eager throngs of polished American maidenhood who answer questions & love hearing about the customs of native tribes and the philosophy of Locke* and symbolism in fairy tales, so it’s all actually much fun, also 9 hours of teaching time, as opposed to the usual 12, & a lively young faculty. Ironically, now that I feel casual and masterful about the whole thing (after a hellish fall spent confronting ghosts of my old student selves in every cranny & coffee shop & teaching from lecture platforms my own professors taught from) one part of me feels sad to leave. I love the power of having 70 girls to teach, & get what is surely a dangerous enjoyment from shocking them into awareness, laughter & even tears, the occasion of the latter being a snowy Saturday spent evoking the bloody & cruel history of the Irish whiteboys, potato famines, mass hangings, etc. But it’s only been since I decided officially to leave that I’ve enjoyed it: just as I’m sure the reason Ted is finding his teaching rather fun & a breeze (he’s now got a 3 day a week program & very little preparation & correcting---really half a week off on a full salary) is because he knows he only has 12 more actual weeks of it. Both of us are, peculiarly enough, natural teachers. Which may come in handy when we get famous & are offered plummy salaries to give a couple of lectures a year at universities and write on our own the rest of the time, but which is at present dangerous to our own writing. Ted is already so advanced that his inner pressure is equal to the outer pressure of Great Works, but I feel that if I taught DH Lawrence stories for one more year, every time I sat down at the typewriter I’d begin “There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck.”* Oh, lost, lost.

  Ted is writing some really fine things, recently. He’s done two long & rich poems, very different, “Acrobats”, all silver & dark and with that lovely dissolving of the abstract & philosophical idea into the forms of flesh and word sounds and rhythms. Also “Dick Straightup”, which I think is also terrific, colored and bodied out---I can’t stop reading it, and keep picking copies up off the floor: one of those apocalyptic characters, held to the earth in gianthood like Gulliver by the Lilliputian particulars. How does it feel to have a great and burgeoning poet for a brother? I have had such strange and luminous visions of his success & growth that I get the odd feeling now and then that this has all happened before, & will go on happening better and better. Ted put off trying prose until I told him how people would go wild with delight over the simplest of Mexborough & Heptonstall incidents, the way they love Dylan Thomas’s tales of his Welsh boyhood, so Ted wrote two stories, short, which I think are fine: one called “Rats” about the little man who bit rats’ heads for pints: a simple, understated story which gets terrific power from what isn’t said---no hollering or pointing stances, just a vivid account built to a terrific dramatic pitch, and another “Grand Songs, Great Songs” which gets the hushed waxed polished straight stiffness of parlors & the atmosphere & aroma of pubs & again, tragedy under the surface texture of life. We’ve sent them off* & hope to hear from them soon: I’m sure they’ll be published somewhere. Also, he’s probably mentioned the 8-page children’s story “Billy Hook & the Three Souvenirs” which he got $50 for from The Children’s mag in America, a very tight & select market. Success is so cumulative: to him who has to him shall be given, etc., and if a Name is built up, one can live on it. But we keep away from the circles of dilletanti & academic gents and ladies, like hermits much of the time, working & mountain climbing and eating great winey stews & endless crackly green salads with french dressing and all sorts of cheeses. Yea, privacy in America is possible: you can make very much your own life & actually live quite frugally, without tv or motor cars. Last week we spent an ice-blue sunshot Sunday climbing a freshly-snowed-on mountain,* alone: nobody in America climbs mountains in the winter if there aren’t ski trails. We tracked rabbit and fox prints in the snow, breathing rarer and rarer air, picking up great hanging stalactite icicles and javelining them over snowcliffs, arriving finally in the full icey wind of the top, with a rickety white house, once perhaps a hotel, a broken down funicular railway, and a vast god’s eye view of the ice-jammed Connecticut river, the Holyoke range of bare fir-bristling hills, and the distant glints of church steeples and haze of smoke spotting our far-off town. We are packing our heads full of heights & colored days. Our blue day fishing & browning last summer on the salt ocean, our walks in the queer pink light of the sunset moors, and the tinkling goat-footed mornings in Benidorm. Of all this, the world in our heads, we word-stitch and make fabrics.

  Ted looks wonderful & already has 20 poems toward a second book, but I don’t think he should be in a hurry to publish (critics love to compare second & third books unfavorably with the first) since he should be able to get every poem accepted by magazines before he goes between hard covers. I’ve gotten a kind of odd commission from a New York art magazine for a poem or poems about Art Work, part of a new series and very good price $50 to $75, so am going to live in the Art Libe* for the next few weeks & brood, maybe on Gauguin,* even DeChirico.* Strangely enough, I’ve been auditing a fine modern art course here* (there’s a very good art department, real artists & a fine museum here)

 

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Sunday 16 February 1958

  TLS with envelope, Indiana University

  Sunday night

  February 16

  Dearest mother,

  Just a note in the middle of the blizzard which has been whirling outside all day to say how much we appreciated the lovely box of petit fours which arrived on Valentine’s day with the little card. Ted, particularly, enjoys them and keeps nibbling away at them. We just finished a fried chicken dinner this noon, with creamed spinach and mushrooms, potato cakes, and frozen apricot bombe for dessert with coffee and those molasses crinkles Ted likes so well. So you see we eat like king & queen.

  We were originally planning to come down this weekend to look at the Merwins’ apartment in Boston which they have offered us to sublet, but we thought it over very carefully and decided against it. They are leaving at the end of March, so we’d have to pay almost 2 months’ rent before moving in, and although it is a light airy top floor flat overlooking the Charles river, it is very dirty and $75 a month unfurnished which isn’t much less than we’re paying now, & on a main trafficy Beacon Hill street, West Cedar Street. So we thought we’d wait to look till April 1st
for a quiet top floor flat, still airy & perhaps cleaner. Do you think this a good idea? Could you be investigating any in the meantime?

  I do hope you’re keeping well in this snowy & frigid windy weather. Have tea on coming home each afternoon. It works wonders.

  Ted’s teaching (3 days a week) continues to go well & the students obviously love him. He has written a few very good poems recently too.

  By the way, could you cancel our dentist appointment for Friday March 21 (or take it yourself at 1:30) and make one for either Monday March 31 or Tuesday April 1st, preferably in the morning? Ted won’t be free on the earlier date which we didn’t know when we made the appointment.

  I am finishing teaching James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and this week beginning a 4 week course in tragic drama of important periods which I’ve introduced into the course myself, as a very miniature version of the course I took in tragedy at Cambridge last year: two plays by Sophocles,* one each by Webster & Tourneur,* and 3 each by Ibsen and Strindberg.* Should be work, but fun. I guess this stretch until spring vacation, through sleet & snow, is the hardest.

  Write soon & keep dry & rested.

  Love,

  Sivvy

  TO Warren Plath

  Sunday 16 February 1958

  TLS (photocopy), Indiana University

  Sunday night

  February 16,

  Dearest Warren . . .

  I have just finished correcting a set of papers and in the interim between tea and renewing my work of preparation for next week I thought I’d write you a note and enclose some of our duplicate clippings of reviews of Ted’s book ranging from eulogy to venom. I may have quoted from some of these, but thought you’d like to see them: it keeps getting reviewed, not only in England and America, but in Ireland, Scotland and Australia.

  I am getting much better at my teaching and actually got this whole last week prepared ahead of time so I only had to review my notes each night, a great improvement: we are finishing up Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man and I must say that in teaching a book one learns it by heart, and gets a really amazing insight. However, this kind of organization and analysis is not the kind I’d use if I were reading the book in the light of my own writing: it is much too conscious and analytical. I have also gained great ease in the classroom & much more often enjoy myself thoroughly & feel I am a good & interesting if embryo teacher. But the work does leave me tired out, and my eyes tired from the eternal reading. So I look forward to a vacation: now is the hardest pull, the month through snow & sleet to spring vacation.

  Since our Christmas ills, broken foot and pneumonia, Ted & I have kept well, knock on wood. Just now it is blizzarding and has been all day in great windy swoops, and outside it is all whiteness swirling in the greenish cones of light from the streetlamps.

  Ted is finding his teaching at the U. of Mass. much easier & rewarding than he thought it would be. He has only 3 days of classes: TThSat and 11 teaching hours: one freshman comp, 2 sophomore great books (Milton,* Moliere,* Goethe,* Dostoevsky, Eliot, etc.), and one small senior writing course which he enjoys and which, of course, his students love. He has been writing some good longer poems lately, one, “Dick Straightup”, about a Yorkshire character, which I think you would enjoy.

  I manage to give about one dinner a week to people on the faculty, three or four, and am becoming a pretty good cook, at least one of my mainline specialties. Did I tell you I’ve taken on an extra job as “reader” for Newton Arvin’s course in Hawthorne, Melville & H. James? This means going to his classes (I took the course years ago) & marking about 50 of his exams a month for which I get paid. I am also going 3 hours a week to a wonderful course in Modern Art which is blessed to my eyes. I have received a letter from a New York magazine, Art News, offering me from $50 to $75 for a poem on a work of art, so I’m hoping to go to the Art Museum & meditate on Gauguin & Rousseau* and produce something this week---it’s so tantalizing to have the outright assignment, I just hope I’m not all dried up.

  I’m teaching plays till spring vacation: Sophocles, Webster & Tourneur, Ibsen & Strindberg, a capsule version of the tragic drama course I took at Cambridge & my own insertion into Eng 11. Should be fun.

  We look so forward to seeing you this summer. Both Ted & I send much love. Write soon.

  Love,

  Sivvy

  TO Jane Baltzell Kopp

  Tuesday 18 February 1958

  TLS with envelope, Indiana University

 

  Date February 18To JBFrom SPHIn re Cabbages & Kings

  Dear Jane . . .

  The most convoluted and purple-fruited academic grapevine has it that you’re now teaching at the University of New Mexico, which I gather isn’t far from Texas and home country for you. I’d be most glad to hear from you & what shapes forms & colors life has taken since those last hot black-gowned days in the exam rooms opposite Trinity. Have you become a completely converted denizen in the academic groves? Every time I walk by Paradise Pond on these whipping windy blue days I feel the blade of irony enter in, being a rather antique and fallen angel on campus, so to speak. Irony with a capital I in class of course. What do you teach? Do you have time to breathe? To work on your own at whatever you want to work at?

  After the first few week of confronting and laying all the unlaid ghosts of former selves, teaching on platforms where my teachers taught, etc., I feel at last come of age, enough, at least, to begin another kind of growing up. Amazing how our old 2000 years of Tragedy course resurrects: I am just about to embark on 4 weeks of drama, a sort of stew-pot of Greek, Jacobean & Ibsen & Strindberg picking up some of the central themes to unify the course, this all in Freshman English, 11, at present a pleasantly free course with 3 classes totalling about 70 very intelligent & eager girls who are fun & stimulating to work with.

  Let this be a pink unofficial prelude (I am unable to resist the stocks of supply closet paper, hence write everything from letters to grocery lists to class notes on this) that The Powers That Be At Smith, and they be very powerful, should be writing you soon & are very interested. As far as I can see, which isn’t too far, this is a wonderful place to teach, with many fine, brilliant & creative people---poets, artists, etc. It is with a double-self very regretful that I resigned, although there was this pressure, as in a high-grade aluminum cooker, for me to stay on. And on. But I don’t want to live all my life, however paradisical it is here, at Smith & found I wasn’t doing my own writing, but making up my courses & cooking & that was it. So I want to take off next year & write for a steady year or else I shall be senile & unable to type at all. Then, we hope to manage a year in Rome if we have produced enough literature to get some kind of grant.

  Ted is wonderfully well, teaching full-time this semester (only 3 days a week) at the U. of Mass. where he does 2 great books courses, a freshman comp class & a senior creative writing class (much more versatile than my program) & does it easily as writing a poem, which he is also doing (being accepted by New Yorker at long last, 3 poems, & Sewanee Review & his book getting good reviews here, in England, Ireland, Scotland, and yes Australia where from the black bush anguished letters come begging for culture and more poems).

  What’s university life like in New Mexico? More casual, spacious? Or just what? What kind of faculty comrades do you have? And what is Stephen* (sp?) doing now.

  For some reason I feel enormously fond of Cambridge, which blooms like a green Eden in my head continually and about which I long to write & remake legends. Was the graduation sumptuous? I feel much more partisan about Cambridge than I ever did about Smith: it seems one of those primitively mystic places, saturated with spirits of the past and whatever. All the gray sodden slovenly weather has vanished in my mind, leaving that delicate baby blue sky, and the ducks at the mill race and every detail bright and haunting as stained glass. How do you feel about it? Even though I remember much misery & weariness & confus
ion I still endow it with the light of gone, very gone youth, or whatever. Which is, I suppose, disastrous and maudlin.

  Do you hear from Isabel? Margaret? My last word from Whitstead was from Jess,* who moved into our old flat and sold our mammoth outrageous couch for a net total of a shilling (we paid almost 10 pounds for it) at an auction & conscientiously wrote and asked me what to do about it. I recommended she stand herself & John to a glass of sherry, but they’re probably teetotalers.

  If you come East to home in RI or here to be interviewed, please let me know if you can come by for a visit. I’d love to see you again and meanwhile would very much like to hear about you, people, and whatever is going on, inside & out.

  Do write.

  All good wishes,

  Sylvia Hughes

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Sunday 2 March 1958

  TLS, Indiana University

 

  Date March 2, 1958To ASPFrom SPHIn re Cabbages & Kings.

  Dearest mother:

  Ted & I have spent a peaceful and lazy saturday evening (seeing an excellent art film on Goya* and a fine bull-fighting film, documentary*) and sunday. We cooperated at cleaning the house this morning like a dual whirlwind & both felt purged and rested for the remainder of the day, enjoying our ritual tea. We are living off a good lamb leg I bought this week, with lots of green salads, and did I tell you we bought an absolutely beautiful wine decanter which holds almost a quart, round, with a round bubble of a top, as a present for the anniversary of our meeting two years ago for only $5 (an Italian decanter made of blown glass at Murano, an island off Venice, which perhaps is an omen of our going to Italy the year after next!) We are immensely pleased with the decanter & delight to look at its beautiful lines on our table. Ted just got his poem “Crow Hill” which you & Marion have read accepted* in the “New Statesman and Nation.” He is giving a brief reading of his poems this Tuesday night* at the University, along with three other English faculty university “poets” (who don’t publish much). Ted has 23 poems toward a second volume of an intended 50 and 11 of these poems are already accepted for publication! Isn’t that fine? I feel there is much greater strength, sonorous maturity and large scope in these poems than in most of the poems in his last book.