by Sylvia Plath
Now that I write “March” it seems close to real spring and liberation. I have had all sorts of suggestions & temptations to stay on here---teaching part-time, & it was even suggested to propose Ted for a position, but we both find the noise of route 9 & the closed-in community very tiresome & long to walk out into the little crook-streets of Boston and not onto a roaring highway, & to have the cultural advantages of Boston, too---museums, concerts, and libraries, with the pleasure of anonymity. I am itching to begin my novel and poems for my book, whose third and I hope final title---“The Earthenware Head”---will be my last, and auspicious title, leading to publication: I project a year from this June which is the date of the competition I want to send it to.
I am really writing, as much as anything, to ask you to do some investigating for us via Dean Graham, or whoever is suitable. Would there be any possibility of Ted’s getting a position as Instructor in English at BU next year?
He will have excellent qualifications: his MA from Cambridge he received this winter, excellent recommendations will be forthcoming from the University & he has varied experience with 3 different courses there. He likes the “unaffectedness” of the University students in contrast to the spoiled girls at Smith & finds what he calls the dowdiness of some of the University students refreshing. He teaches only 3 days, morning & afternoon of 2, and morning of the 3rd, and would like, if possible, a concentrated program, either all in the mornings, or on 3 days. Would there by anything at all available? He is, of course, publishing regularly.
We figured that teaching, IF he can get a good program at college-level, will be the best thing: vacations, free time during the week, and a full year’s salary. Ted is very good at it, and enjoying it, and as I will be free I can take on the full load of household chores, which he has been halving with me this year, and even help him with his papers.
Could you find out if any place will be open at BU, and, if so, what kind of program would be possible. If anything is open, perhaps we could see about it at the end of March & the beginning of April when we come down.
I suppose Tufts might be another possibility, but BU would be ideal. The students, I suppose, would be a cut above the University, if anything.
Do let us know as soon as you can about this.
I hope you are keeping rested & well. I look forward to my vacation which begins in 2½ weeks & am crossing my fingers that my good health keeps up so I can work on that art poem as well as prepare my final 8 weeks of teaching. We are living economically & trying to get our budget down from its alarming previous average of $300 a month (so high partly because of doctor’s & clothing bills) to $200, or, at least $250. Food, rent, and phone alone amount to about $200, with gas for the car. I’ll welcome any budget-saving recipes you can send me. Made a batch of molasses crinkles this morning, which Ted likes.
Goodbye for now. Write soon,
Love,
Sivvy
TO Gerald & Joan Hughes
Tuesday 4 March 1958*
TLS, Indiana University
Date March 3, 1958To Gerald and JoanFrom SylviaIn re Cabbages and Kings.
Hello, you two. It seems months, years, even, since we’ve written you, & I hope you don’t treat us as badly, but write back soon! I am about to walk a mile to the class in American Lit. which I’m “reading” for (this means correcting about 60 exams a month for the professor who is too august to do anything but lecture) and pick up a stack of blue books: my own teaching is going so well that I am doing this extra job for, obviously, extra money. I probably have told you that I am going to take this next year off to work full-time on a novel about an Americaine in Cambridge & on finishing a book of poems which I have about half done. I am having fun making up this month of my freshman course which I decided would be plays, and so the girls are having a very much condensed dramatic course drawn up from the year course I was examined on last June at Cambridge. I am rather amused thinking they are working on the same plays I was working on as a student last year: poetic justice and all that. I am also going three times a week to a lecture course with wonderful slides in Modern Art & loving it.
The lecturer in art, Mrs. Van der Poel, is very petite, dapper and exotico, who speaks about Picasso* as if he were a good friend, and he probably is, as she goes to Europe every years and owns her own African primitive masks and statues, her Picasso ceramics, her original Dufy,* etc. etc. I sit, letting the brightly colored Rousseaus, Gauguins, and Klees* sink into my head and make their own little weird worlds---whether of leafy jungles and moon-eyed tigers, or of Tahitian medecine-men & starched basquebonneted ladies watching Jacob wrestle with his angel, or of little tipsy gilt spirits floating in a golden chaos, and ghosts like bundles of bedding waving adieu. Much fun & provocative. I keep wishing Ted could come to share it.
Ted, in case he is too modest to mention it, is writing wonderfully. Better than ever. He has 23 poems toward a second book (almost 24, as he is working on a fine Wolf-head poem* now) and 11 of these are already published. Last minute bulletin! 13 already accepted – 2 bought today by Harpers!* In a year from now, he should have about 50 & all of them as good or better, richer, stronger, than the best in “The Hawk In The Rain”. I am very proud of him, & his development.
He also has picked up a full-time teaching job, 3 different courses & 11 hours altogether, & is doing a professional job at the University of Massachusetts. Tonight I’m going over with him while he gives a reading of some of his poems to students along with 3 other faculty members who “write”, but don’t really publish. I say “full-time”, but Ted only teaches 3 days a week, Tuesday, Thursday & Saturday & gets full pay for half a year for teaching 14 weeks (in other words, he gets paid for a 12 week holiday in effect!) This kind of program is obviously much better for writing than any 5-day 9 to 5 job for him, especially with the long vacations, & it pays as well as a profession, which office jobs, or even editing jobs wouldn’t do, so he’s thinking of trying for a position in University teaching in Boston next year if he can get something as concentrated. If so, we will both spend the whole summer writing like mad.
Symbolically, last week, on the anniversary of the day we met (O fatal day) two years ago, we got a joint letter from Mademoiselle, a posh ladies literary magazine, accepting a poem from each of us.* Ted also has got a very fine lyric “Crow Hill” (has he sent it to you) accepted from “The New Statesman and Nation” the same week. I prophesy that he will be England’s greatest poet in 10 years time: he is that now, of course, although everyone doesn’t know it yet.
We have good fun: eat fresh steaks & roasts & salads & make a daily ritual of tea, which is somehow most sustaining & relaxing after a day’s work.
Your house sounds amazing: how big is it, what colors is it inside? Did you design it: describe it to us as if we were walking in the front door with you. I wish you and the boys could take a vacation when we’re in Italy which we hope to be in 1959-60, so we could all have a grand reunion at the Beacon. Is that impossible to dream about?
Must trudge out in the sludgy slushy march snow, which is all melting in great wet puddles, grimy, gritty, under a dirty-dishwater sky.
Write soon & tell us your news.
Much love to you both,
sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 22 March 1958
TLS, Indiana University
Date March 22, 1958To MotherFrom SivvyIn re
Just a note to say that I have at last burst into a spell of writing. I was rather stunned Thursday morning, my first real day off after a week of correcting 70 papers, averaging midterm grades and writing a report on another senior thesis, but I had about seven or eight paintings and etchings I wanted to write on as poem-subjects and bang! After the first one, “Virgin in a Tree”, after an early etching by Paul Klee,* I ripped into another, probably the biggest
and best poem I’ve ever written, on a magnificent etching by Klee titled “Perseus, or the Triumph of Wit over Suffering.”* A total of about 90 lines written in one day.
Friday went just as well: with a little lyric fantasy on a lovely painting by Klee on the Comic Opera The Seafarer,* a long and big one on his painting “The Departure of the Ghost”* and a little lyric on a cat with a bird-stigma between its eyebrows,* a really mammoth magic cat-head. These are easily the best poems I’ve written, and open up new material and a new voice. I’ve discovered my deepest source of inspiration which is art: the art of primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin and Paul Klee and DeChirico. I have got out piles of wonderful books from the Art Library (suggested by this fine Modern Art Course I’m auditing each week) and am overflowing with ideas and inspirations, as if I’ve been bottling up a geiser for a year. Once I start writing, it comes and comes.
I am enclosing two of the poems.* I am sending the two poems on the etchings to the sumptuous illustrated magazine “Art News” which asked me to write one or several poems for their series of poems on art. This assignment sent me off on a rich vein, and I hope they take both my poems & illustrate them, as I’d dearly love to possess copies of those two rare and generally unavailable etchings.
Today I had a reaction, feeling miserable and exhausted with my period, and drugging myself to a stupor with aspirin for lack of anything stronger. But after chicken broth I revive and am looking forward to writing another 90 lines tomorrow. If I can write, I don’t care what happens. I feel like an idiot who has been obediently digging up pieces of coal in an immense mine and has just realized that there is no need to do this, but that one can fly all day and night on great wings in clear blue air through brightly colored magic and weird worlds. Even used the dregs of my inspiration to write about 6 of those Dole Pineapple Jingles! We could use a car, or 5, or $15000.
Hope you like these little poems.
Love,
Sivvy
40
“Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer”
(After Paul Klee)
It beguiles---
This little Odyssey
In pink and lavender
Over a surface of gently-
Graded turquoise tiles
That represent a sea
With chequered waves and gaily
Bear up the seafarer
Gaily, gaily
In his pink plume and armor.
A fairy tale
Gondola of paper
Ferries the fishpond Sinbad
Who poises his pastel spear
Toward three pinky-purple
Monsters which uprear
Off the ocean-floor
With fanged and dreadful head.
Beware, beware
The whale, the shark, the squid.
But fins and scales
Of each scrolled sea-beast
Troll no slime, no weed.
They are polished for the joust,
They gleam like easter-eggshells,
Rose and amethyst.
Ahab, fulfill your boast:
Bring home each storied head.
One thrust, one thrust,
One thrust: and they are dead.
So fables go.
And so all children sing
Their bathtub battles deep,
Hazardous and long,
But oh, sage grownups know
Sea-dragon for sofa, fang
for pasteboard, and siren-song
For fever in a sleep.
Laughing, laughing
Of greybeards wakes us up.
Sylvia Plath
45
Departure of the Ghost
(After Paul Klee)
Enter the chilly noman’s land of precisely
Five o’clock in the morning, the no-color void
Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot
Of sulphurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums
Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much,
Gets ready to face the ready-made creation*
Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets.
This is the kingdom of the fading apparition,
The oracular ghost who dwindles on pin-legs
To a knot of laundry, with a classic bunch of sheets
Upraised, as a hand, emblematic of farewell.*
At this joint between two worlds and two entirely
Incompatible modes of time, the raw material
Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus
Of ambrosial revelation. And so departs.
But as chair and bureau are the hieroglyphs
Of some godly utterance wakened heads ignore,
So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing,
Speak in a sign language of a lost otherworld,
A world we lose by merely waking up
Into sanity: the common ghost’s crowed out,
Worms riddling its tongue, or walks for Hamlet
All day on the printed page, or bodies itself
For dowagers in drafty castles at twelve,
Or inhabits the crystal of the sick man’s eye---*
Trailing its telltale tatters only at the outermost
Fringe of mundane vision. But this ghost goes,
Hand aloft, goodbye, goodbye, not down
Into the rocky gizzard of the earth,
But toward the point where our thick atmosphere
Diminishes, and god knows what is there:
A point of exclamation marks that sky
In ringing orange like a stellar carrot;
Its round period, displaced and green,
Suspends beside it the first point, the starting
Point of Eden, next the new moon’s curve.
Go, ghost of our mother and father, ghost of us,
And ghost of our dreams’ children, in those sheets
Which signify our origin and end,
To the cloud-cuckoo land of color wheels
And pristine alphabets and cows that moo
And moo as they jump over moons as new
As that crisp cusp toward which you voyage now.
Hail and farewell. Hello, goodbye. O keeper
Of the profane grail, the dreaming skull.
Sylvia Plath
TO Peter Davison
Tuesday 25 March 1958
TLS (photocopy), Yale University
Date March 25thTo PeterFrom SylviaIn re
this Sunday: Ted & I would both very much enjoy seeing you in Cambridge.* Would four or four-thirtyish in the afternoon be agreeable to you? We’ll come then, if we don’t hear different.
Both of us are looking forward to being in Boston this next year. In the last week of vacation I struck a good vein of poem-writing and am perishing to be at it in earnest and through with making up reasons for why people should like Gerard Manley Hopkins. Perhaps I shall just toss out critical weapons and read poetry aloud hour after hour and if they are still deaf, they’re deaf. By this time next year I plan to have a poetry book ready (really my third, I’ve tossed a good two out in the past five years)* and at least a close-to-final version of a novel. Vacation this week has shown me how it will be: very unsocial, but fishing deep and reveling: it exhausts, but not like teaching or other people’s work. Like my work, so that’s all right.
Looking forward to Sunday. Our best to you.
sylvia
TO Peter Davison
Tuesday 22 April 1958
TLS (photocopy) on Department of English, Smith College letterhead, Yale University
Apartment 3 rear
337 Elm Street
Northampton, Mass.
April 22, 1958
Mr. Peter Davison
The Atlantic Monthly Press
8 Arlington Street
Boston 16, Mass.
Dear Peter,
Ted will send a group along shortly, as he is just finishing one he likes & would like to include. By the way, do you know if the editors have taken any action on the two stories he sent them, yes, eons ago? I believe they were titled “Grand Songs, Great Songs” &, I think, “Rats.” We haven’t heard a thing.
You were noble & heroic to forge through that demonish sleet (was it 11 days ago already?) and come to the reading.* Have you had anything as juicy as the Lana Turner-daughter murder* in your justicing?
We appreciate the books.* Ted snitched the Jung* first, I the novel: you were most thoughtful. I admire much in the novel, as far as I’ve gone: very fine vibrations, no? A sensitive net he casts. I am particularly interested in Rome as a setting & in the way it can be created: but I guess I am much more concerned with lights, colors & the painter’s view of the world than the abstract philosopher’s view, although I find myself with keen interest in the possibility of a certain creative morality, which is, I guess, in some eyes, dangerous amorality. But this is all going to work out in prose. I must now be quiet about it.
Do you think any of these poems are possibilities for the Atlantic? Does Editor Weeks think so? I would like very much to meet him some day, & so would Ted. Perhaps when we move to Boston?
Tea that day at your place was very good. Let us have any news: of you (& how is Nora?* have just finished her “Gift Horse”)* the publishing world, & our writings,
Best wishes,
Sylvia
TO Warren Plath
Tuesday 22 April 1958
ALS in greeting card* (photocopy), Indiana University