by Sylvia Plath
I had two ghastly weeks of correcting papers: 70 term papers of my own. 60 final exams in American Lit. course I correct for (which is very dull, as I know none of the students & have no reciprocal influence on them, but got $100 extra for this in the semester; yet realize I’d have been better off writing two poems for that price) & then all the senior exams in English which I learned the whole English faculty shares reading. My eyes got a queer stinging rash & I was glad to end it all on June 2nd.
Ted & I left for New York City immediately after my last papers & stayed with Patsy O’Neil & her roommate for 5 days which made our trip possible, as we had no rent extra & could cook food there. We lived, with the exception of a few meals, on frankfurts, hamburgs, bacon, eggs & coffee. I’m glad we went. It exorcised the academic year & we came back here to cool rainy green June weather renewed & ready to write. We saw much & walked prodigiously for our stay.
First off we met Charles Monteith & Peter Du Sautoy of Faber’s and lunched with them in a plush pink room at the Biltmore just before they sailed. We liked them immensely & they promised to introduce us to “Tom” Eliot when we came to England next. We’d met du Sautoy at a cocktail party at an amazing modern house overlooking all the green mountains in Amherst & met many Amherst professors, plus Reuben Brower (sp?)* who I understand is master at Adams House & who was very nice. Then we went to the tip of Manhattan, by Wall Street overlooking the bay boats, and climbed six flights in an office building to the little tar-rooftop eyrie of Oscar Williams, the wellknown poet & anthologist who is putting 3 of Ted’s poems at the end of his revised Pocket Anthology of modern verse which begins with Whitman* and ends with Hughes.
Oscar Williams was a queer, birdlike little man, obviously very at-odds since his best friend Dylan Thomas & his beloved poet-painter wife Gene Derwood died in the same year. He lives in a tiny rooftop studio painted light blue, with a skylight, covered with oil paintings by his wife, bright colored animals & portraits, photographs of his dead loves, brick homemade bookcases full of poetry books, tables, floors and bathtub covered and full of unwashed glasses, and a fine little tar roof porch overlooking the gulls & boats and ringed with potted rosebushes & mint plants. He served us drambuie & we got along well. He then took us to two parties, one on 5th avenue at the home of a wealthy man whose poetry he published, where we went up in the same elevator with Lionel & Diana Trilling: and all afternoon had that odd feeling of recognizing famous faces from photographs: the negro writer Ralph Ellison, old Farrar, publisher, of Farrar, Straus & Cudahy; the editor of the Hudson Review & endless boring professors from Columbia. The next party was given by the owner of a famous furniture store on 5th Avenue, Hy Sobiloff, who also publishes poetry with Oscar & occasionally give 10 thousand dollars to buy permissions for new anthologies: very dull & wealthy stupid floordecorators & all Jewish businessmen named Goldstone: we ate well from a lavish bouffet & went home to Patsy’s, very happy with our own lives.
We spent a whole day at the Bronx Zoo which was delightful: most of the animals were roaming in open places, none of the horrible prison-like cages at the Central Park Zoo where the lions can’t turn around and the gorillas are morbidly depressed. Here we saw magnificent gorillas, four enchanting chimpanzees, four white playful polar bears, endless boa-constrictors (how I would like to see them fed!) pig-headed turtles, great raucous rainbow colored birds, and over all the queer scream of the free wandering peacocks who kept spreading admirable tails.
By coincidence on the train to the Zoo we asked a smiling young man next to us where to get off & he turned out to be Clyde Beatty’s brother (the famous animal catcher & trainer) and was on his day off from work in the lion cage. He seemed one of the few people we’d met in NYC happy with his work.
We wandered through Harlem (Ted first thought all NYC was made up of negroes), through Central Park, Greenwich Village where we took Patsy to dinner & the Lorca play “Blood Wedding” and later went to see two most entertaining experimental plays by Ionesco by a fine little troupe in an off-broadway theater seating about 150 people. We walked through throngs of Bowery bums, stared in shop windows, got my fortune told for 5¢ by a mechanical gypsy in the 8th avenue subway; my card had the picture of a mailman on it & said that soon I will get a wonderful letter which will change my life! How’s that for hopeful? The lady with the glass eyes couldn’t have come closer to my heart.
We also visited Babette Deutsch,* a small time poet & critic, who is married to the Russian scholar Avrahm Yarmolinsky*---she’d written in admiration of Ted’s poems. And lunched with Dave Keightley, the friend of ours who was in the car accident & at the Holyoke hospital for several months. His publishing company editors, World Pub., are interested in seeing a ms. of my poetry book (now provisionally titled “Full Fathom Five”) this fall. They’ve never published poetry before, but are interested in “genuine fresh talent” which I hope I have. I’ve been changing, I think much for the better, in my writing style: ironically, of the 35 or so poems I’ve published in my career, I’ve rejected about 20 of these from my book manuscript as too romantic, sentimental & frivolous & immature: my main difficulty has been overcoming a clever, too brittle & glossy feminine tone, & I am gradually getting to speak “straight out” and of real experience, not just in metaphorical conceits. I’ll enclose a recent poem which I hope you may like.
I’ve two poems out in the June London Magazine, one in the obscure New Mexico Quarterly,* one in the British “Guiness” anthology of verse* published this May; Ted & I are each having a poem in the next annual British PEN anthology,* his “Thrushes”, my “Sow”, and each of us have 2 poems coming out in the annual Borestone anthology* in America: encouraging to be between hard covers, but not very lucrative as yet.
One thing which we haven’t told mother for obvious reasons is that Ted applied for a Saxton writing fellowship for this year & we were sure of getting it for him as Marianne Moore et. al. volunteered to write & he had a magnificent project for a poetry book: it was the only fellowship, as a Briton, he was eligible for. Ironically, we learned this week, that the fellowship is run by trustees from Harper’s and as he is published by them his project can’t be considered on merit: if it had been so considered he obviously would have got a grant. So, with supreme & rather distressing irony, the very qualification of his worth, publishing a book, is his one flaw, rendering him ineligible. So I shall apply for the same grant (don’t tell mother about this either) & Ted will apply for a Guggenheim for next year.
We have saved some money from our work this year & also earned about $1500 between us from writing (Ted’s book has sold 1,700 copies in America and about 1,600 in England: supremely good for a poetry book, as is the $1000 he’ll have earned out of it.) So this summer we will write “on salary” & hope for something to turn up in Boston: full-time jobs are obviously out, as our one wish is to write, & we don’t want to live on our savings as they must take us to Europe for our projected year in Italy. We have considered the McDowell Writing Colony* as a last measure and also the possibility of living in someone’s summer house rent-free in return for caretaking. But we would both like to live in Boston near the library, anonymous people, with no need for a car & very near publishers & editors and all Boston & Cambridge have to offer. God feeds the ravens. I hope you understand this better than mother does. When we are both wealthy & famous our work will justify our lives, but now our lives & faith must justify themselves. We live very simply and happily & walk each day in Our Park, which is nextdoor & which noone else frequents. There are several brown rabbits, two magnificent black frogs who swim like suave purple-bellied Martians & return our stares for hours, innumerable squirrels, bright yellow birds, red-headed woodpeckers and fruit trees and a garden which is mysteriously replanted as the flowers die: first tulips and daffodils then hyacinths: then one day we came back to find these gone and beds of geraniums and white petunias in their place. The little rose garden is just coming out, and about once a week we make off with a red or yellow rose
.
We met the mad and very nice poet Robert Lowell (the only one 40ish whom we both admire, who comes from the Boston Lowells & is periodically carted off as a manic depressive) when he came to give a reading at the U. of Mass.* He is quiet, soft-spoken, and we liked him very much. I drove him around Northampton looking for relics of his ancestors, and to the Historical Society & the graveyard. We hope to see him in Boston when we move down.
We’ve become good friends with Jack Sweeney who’s head of the Lamont Poetry Library at Harvard & like him as much as anyone we’ve met here. I’m going to make a recording (did I tell you?) for the Lamont Library of my poems this Friday, so you can go up there & hear recordings of your sister & brother-in-law anytime!*
Ted & I plan to celebrate our 2nd anniversary at home with mother this monday, june 16th. It seems impossible I’ve been married for two whole years, and much more impossible that I ever wasn’t married to Ted! Oh we have rousing battles every so often in which I come out with sprained thumbs & Ted with missing earlobes, but we feel so perfectly at one with our work & reactions to life & people that we make our own world to work in which isn’t dependent on anyone else’s love or admiration, but self-contained: our best pleasure is writing at home, eating & talking & walking in woods to look for animals & birds. Money would be very helpful, but we have everything except this: and Ted’s uncle is almost a millionaire (but very odd, with a mad daughter who will no doubt outlive us) and Mrs. Prouty who has adopted Ted (“he’s so handsome: couldn’t he get on Tv? etc.”) occasionally sends us a hundred $ check for christmas or anniversary & we both feel genuinely fond of her, & see her as often as we can.
Well, I must close now, or I will be typing into tomorrow & next week. Here is a poem I made about the fiddler crabs we found at Rock Harbor when we went to get mussels last summer for fish bait. I hope you like it. If you find anything inaccurate about the crabs do tell me about it. Read it aloud – for the sounds of it.
Mussel-Hunter at Rock Harbor
I came before the water-
colorists came to get the
good of the Cape light that scours
sand-grit to sided crystal
and buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls
of the three fishing smacks beached
on the bank of the river’s
back-tracking tail. I’d come for
free fish-bait: the blue mussels
clumped like bulbs at the grass-root
margin of the tidal pools.
Dawn tide stood dead low.
I smelt mud-stench, shell guts, gulls’ leavings;
heard a queer crusty scrabble
cease, and I neared the silenced
edge of a cratered pool-bed:
the mussels hung dull blue and
conspicuous, yet it seemed
a sly world’s hinges had swung
shut against me. All held still.
Though I counted scant seconds,
enough ages lapsed to win
confidence of safe-conduct
in the wary otherworld
eyeing me. Grass put forth claws;
small mud-knobs, nudged from under,
displaced their domes as tiny
knights might doff their casques. The crabs
inched from their pigmy burrows
and from the trench-dug mud, all
camouflaged in mottled mail
of browns and greens. Each wore one
claw swollen to a shield large
as itself---no fiddler’s arm
grown Gargantuan by trade
but grown grimly and grimly
borne for a use beyond my
guessing of it. Sibilant
mass-motived hordes, they sidled
out in a converging stream
toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to
meet the thin and sluggish thread
of sea retracing its tide-
way up the river-basin.
Or to avoid me. They moved
obliquely, with a dry-wet
sound, with a glittery wisp
and trickle. Could they feel mud
pleasurable under claws
as I could between bare toes?
That question ended it---I
stood shut out for once, for all,
puzzling the passage of their
absolutely alien
order as I might puzzle
at the clear tail of Halley’s
comet coolly giving my
orbit the go-by, made known
by a family name it
knew nothing of. So the crabs
went about their business which
wasn’t fiddling, and I filled
a big handkerchief with blue
mussels. From what the crabs saw,
if they could see, I was one
two-legged mussel-picker.
High on the airy thatching
of the dense grasses I found
the husk of a fiddler-crab,
intact, strangely strayed above
his world of mud---green color
and innards bleached and blown off
somewhere by much sun and wind:
there was no telling if he’d
died recluse or suicide
of headstrong Columbus crab.
The crab-face etched and set there
grimaced as skulls grimace: it
had an oriental look,
a samurai-deathmask done
on a tiger-tooth, less for
art’s sake than god’s. Far from sea---
where red-freckled crab-backs, claws
and whole crabs, dead, their soggy
bellies pallid and upturned,
perform their shambling waltzes
on the waves’ dissolving turn
and return, losing themselves
bit by bit to their friendly
element---this relic saved
face to face the bald-faced sun.
*********
This is written in what’s known as “syllabic verse”, measuring lines not by heavy & light stresses, but by the number of syllables, which here is 7: I find this form satisfactorily strict (a pattern varying the number of syllables in each line can be set up, as M. Moore does it) and yet it has a speaking illusion of freedom (which the measured stress doesn’t have) as stresses vary freely. Don’t follow my example: write soon! And I promise to answer.
Much love –
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 25 June 1958
TLS, Indiana University
Date June 25To YouFrom MeIn re odds & ends.
Remember, a year ago, we first set foot together on American soil? And the lovely party we had under the great awning in the back yard? Ted & I look back on our party with much pleasure.
Nothing of moment has happened since we came back. We’ve slept a lot, and I’ve been making banana bread of which we’re very fond for tea. Both of us have written several good poems, but heard nothing about our work at the tardy Atlantic which has kept it for the usual half year: they ought to reorganize: no other magazine in the world keeps submissions so long.
We climbed to the peak of Mount Holyoke* & hoped to do it often, for there is a magnificent view, but I learned on reaching the top that there is a charge of 15 cents for each person who walks up: I can understand the parking fee, but got very angry that you couldn’t even walk in a State park for nothing. Our park if full of mountain laurel now, very lovely. And the rose garden is in full bloom. I have written another poem about the latter* and about climbing the mountain.*
The thought of our apartment waiting in Boston is very consoling: we are really too isolated here & look forward to walking out in the streets & watching the odd faces, learning odd corners, going to the library, museums & foreign films.
Will write again soon –
Love
&n
bsp; Sivvy
PS: We loved our 2nd anniversary dinner last week. And the stay at home was such a rest for us!
PS: One hour later: VERY GOOD NEWS: In the mail I just got my FIRST acceptance from the NEW YORKER!* And not of a short little poem but of two very fat & amazingly long ones! “MUssel*Hunter At Rock Harbor”* and “Nocturne”,* the first 91 lines, the last, 45 lines! In our materialistic way, Ted & I figured, amid much jumping up and down, this should mean close to $350, or 3 full months of Boston rent! For two poems! They wrote a glowing letter, very generous for the New Yorker. It began:
“MUSSEL*HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR seems to ma a marvelous poem, and I’m happy to say we’re taking it for The New Yorker, as well as NOCTURNE, which we also think extremely fine.”
How’s that for a good beginning to a summer of work! You see what happens the minute one worships one’s own god of vocation & doesn’t slight it for grubbing under the illusion of duty to Everybody’s-Way-Of-Life! This is well over 3 times as much money as I got for half a year of drudgery in that American lit course, correcting exams, and well over a month’s salary for a week’s work of pure joy. The Mussel Hunters may not come out till next summer, as they’re very crowded with summer poems, but I should get the check in a few days. What a nice anniversary gift for our coming to America!
xxx
Sivvy
You see – the gypsy-fortuneteller with her card depicting the mailman was very right!
TO Henry Rago
Wednesday 25 June 1958
TLS, University of Chicago
Apartment 3 rear
337 Elm Street
Northampton, Mass.
June 25, 1958