by Sylvia Plath
New York, New York
Dear Mr. Moss:
I received your letter* on my return from a brief vacation. I thought I’d just send along a note to say that I am satisfied with your suggestions for the three small changes in the poems.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
P.S: After September 1st, my address will be:
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Mass.
TO Gerald & Joan Hughes
c. Wednesday 13 August 1958*
ALS,* Indiana University
I shall add a small note to this, although the reporter above has covered everything from philosophy to pike. It is ‘early’ – 10 am: Ted sits in a rocker, writing & munching pieces of buttered banana bread – he is appearing, it seems, in print every week in England – 2 poems in London Mag,* 2 in New Statesman,* 5 accepted by Spectator: his children’s story in Jack & Jill was marvelously illustrated & only a few fingers of originality removed, not the whole thing butchered, as he’d have you believe. August has turned all at once crisp, blue, cool, what the Americans tenderly call “Million-dollar days”, perhaps because the leaves rustle crisp & green as new bills. I think your house sounds wonderful. Did you design any or all of it? How’s it furnished, etc? colors? Tell us all. We prepare to get some fishing tackle for our week at the Cape now. Ted’s writing better & funnier short stories & I’m trying to persuade him to do a book of “Yorkshire Tales.” Do write to us in much detail soon.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 13 August 1958
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Date August 13: Wed.To MummyFrom SivvyIn re Cape trip, etc.
Ted & I are chafing more & more to be off to the Cape: we plan now, if it’s convenient with you, to move a load of belongings down to Wellesley Friday afternoon (thus we should be at home Friday evening, if for any reason you wanted to get in touch with us). Early in the morning Saturday, we’d like to leave for the Cape & should get there in time for lunch? Now would that be all right with you & Grampy? Where will you both sleep when we come? We don’t want to make anybody uncomfortable.
Ted is dying to rent a little row or motor-boat & go fishing, so we are going to get some rods for his birthday present & hope to go again to the place in Chatham as often as possible. His birthday is the 17th, Sunday, & I’d like him to be on the beach & swimming then, not stifling in Northampton, or driving down. We are having our phone removed Friday afternoon, since we plan to come back only for a few days at the end of the month to pick up the remainder of our things.
The Christian Science Monitor bought my little 3-page descriptive article about the countryside around hidden acres,* the drawings of Mrs. Spaulding & her beach-plum barrel for $15, so I hope it comes out in time to show her. I want her to get ready to tell me about how she designs & builds those cottages, really practical details. The Sewanee Review has just accepted a poem of mine,* which should bring about $20 when it’s published.
It’s a hot, muggy day, no mail, and about to rain. We’re reading Fabre’s books about the life of a spider and the life of the scorpion:* fascinating and terrible.
Already I’m in that limbo between moves: half here, half there.
We are so grateful at the chance for a beach-week & look very forward to seeing you, Grampy & the Spauldings.
Until Saturday noon,
Much love,
Sivvy
TO Elinor Friedman Klein
Wednesday 3 September 1958
TLS, Smith College
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Mass.
September 3, 1958
Dear Ellie . . .
Your letter arrived between several moves, irate landlady, crazy telephone company uproars, and the general untidy chaos of our move from Northampton to Boston. Now that we are here, in our miniscule & marvelously aesthetic two-room furnished flat, I don’t know how I stood living in Northampton for a year. Nobody here has heard of Smith, or us, which is magnificent. I am sitting in my study-dining-room-livingroom-kitchen at the bay window over-looking a superb view of Back Bay: a sizeable hunk of the Charles river, MIT, sailboats, the Hatch Shell,* And, to my Left, the Estimable John Hancock Building which flashes various weather signals in brilliant chromatics. I look over multitudinous chimney pots, tar roofs, tree tops. And can even see the ulmi americani of the Common from my desk. Oh yes, and the Hotel Statler.* You must come see. We even had a whole fire department howl up the hill to greet us at six yesterday morning, with black slickers and axes: smoke began blowing by me in the bed at dawn, and this seemed odd. I jumped up & saw people in the street staring at our windows from which the smoke floated. The hall was full of it & I was getting ready to brave the hideously rickety sixth floor fire escape which involved crawling out a high kitchen window, when the landlord’s janitor said it was only rubbish caught in the incinerator shaft & he’d been dropping bricks on it to fix everything up.
I want to hear more about your job. It sounds fascinating. We’re planning to write here & maybe later in the year I’ll take a part-time job to pay for groceries, but we are investing our time & going to work like fury for the first year of our lives at nothing but writing. Did I tell you I at last made the New Yorker? With two huge poems & a lovely letter & even lovelier check from Howard Moss. One poem, 91 lines, was in the Aug. 9th issue. Do look it up & say if you like. Ted’s poems have just appeared in their first anthology: The pocket book of Modern Verse, ed. by Oscar Williams, the 1958 revised edition. The selections begin with Walt Whitman & end with Ted Hughes: 3 poems. I am very proud of this. We saw Oscar Williams while we were in NYC in June, & saw not the people we wanted to see most but left early, missing you & Alfred Kazin, after commuting hither & yon to see various literary ancients for Ted’s application for a grant* this next year: Marianne Moore, Babette Deutsch etc. We thought we’d come again this fall, but have expended so much on this move that we are saying “next spring”: so when can you come to Boston?
We are at present nursing two goldfish, some mouldy green Anacharis, pale green aquarium gravel and a shell which does the fish as a castle: do you know about where oxygen comes from? The fish have only 50 cubic inches of air surface which is half of the requirement for one fish & they keep hanging on the surface as if longing to come out and have tea in the sweet Bostonian air with us. Ted claims they are suffering, almost dying: we sprinkle anti-chlorine grains in the water, change the water daily. They haven’t died yet, but are maturing under mysteriously adverse conditions, enriched by suffering. I have only a rudimentary & primitive tribal idea about oxygen: little specks, like invisible pepper.
Please write & tell us more about Mr. Crosby,* his wives, mistresses, & your celebrities. And try to come for dinner soon. Bring Leonard, he is so nice. What is he writing now? We promise an exquisite night view of the lit-up John Hancock building which is topped by a flashing red light, over a white light over the now-blue weather signal.
Love to you,
sylvia
TO Lynne Lawner
Thursday 4 September 1958
Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Mass.
Wednesday, Thursday
September 4, 1958
Dear Lynne,
I have predictably lost your letter somewhere in our colossal & piecemeal move from Northampton via Wellesley, to Boston, where we are now ensconced in a miniscule & quite fine little furnished apartment at the above address on Beacon Hill. Two rooms, each with a big bay window overlooking rooftops, chimney pots, mosquito trees, and the blue of the Charles & the Harvard Bridge with elegant reflections at night & sailboats in the daytime. At my right, the pruned & plumed trees of Louisberg Square, at my left, the towering structure of the est
imable John Hancock building which predicts the weather four hours ahead of time by means of colored lights. After Northampton, & the provincial rounds of professors at morning coffee, professors at tea, the same professors at cocktails and dinner and the Evening, and such, we are delighted with Boston. Having no car (a blessing on this hill) we tramp everywhere, to the docks to watch the deep sea crabs being unloaded, through little Italia on Hanover street, all pastry shops with gelati & spumoni and grocery stores carrying nothing in their windows but olive oil in monstrous cans & soap flakes, through the fabulous weekend open market on Blackstone Street which outdoes anything I’ve seen in England & Europe: cheaper than Paris: stalls of tomatoes, peppers, peaches, stacks of chickens & beefs, stalls undercutting each other, vociferous men tugging at one’s arm: “I just cut those pork chops, just brought em up, you want juicy chops for da weekend?” “Razors, buy a razor.” And so on. I renewed my childhood yesterday by riding on the swanboats with Ted. Boston is easily my favorite city in America. We plan to batten down & write here all year for the first time in our lives. We’ve saved enough from our teaching jobs so this is possible, if we only eat & pay rent. I have a very engaging dark-eyed dark-haired tall lean young Southern poet from Sewanee Tennessee here now, a friend of Ted’s, who has published here & there in Poetry & the Partisan Review & who is teaching in Paris this year. I’ve told him about you & wish you would see him when you’re in Paris. His name is E. (for Elvis!) Lucas Meyers, known as Luke, & his address in Paris is: 24 Rue Mouffetard, Paris V. Do look him up.
Tell me how you managed to switch your Fulbright to Florence & why. What happened in your winter & spring at Cambridge? How are KMP Burton, IV Morris tutor, et. al.? I wish you could come this way before you fly or sail over, to tell me about Cambridge at first hand. I’ll make a final huge effort to find your address.
What’s your novel about? What kind of style? I mean who are your mentors. I am ensconced between or among Henry James, Virginia Woolf (who palls, who never, I think, writes more than about tremulous party-dress emotions, except in the odd Mrs. Ramsey* – & who is, amazingly often awkward & lumbering in her descriptions) and DH Lawrence; Have you read his 3 volume collected short stories:* The Man Who Loved Islands etc.? Very fine, although many are, I think, pot-boilers. Where are you sending poems, where publishing: I believe I saw one in a NWWriting,* edited by Philip Booth. Can you send me some copies of recent poems? I am continually rejecting my old ones & am on my third “first book” which is completely different from the one I had gathered at the end of my senior year in college &, except for about 4 poems, completely different from the one I had gathered at the end of my Cambridge year. I keep having about 30 poems in it: as I write more, I reject more. At this rate, I’ll publish when I’m 50. Tell me when your articles come out in Time & Tide. We hope, if we don’t stay a 2nd year in Boston, to aim for Rome for a year after this. Have you met any British (or American) literati over there? Who did you know at Cambridge? I want to hear more about Cambridge. I really quite fell in love with it, probably because Ted happened to be there. I feel completely weaned from Smith: I had idealized the place because of my haloed position there the last two years & thought of it as Elysia. Now it seems like a never-never land where nobody has to do anything but drink coffee, read books & gossip: men gossipers are a million times worse than women, without anything of female solidity.
What do you plan to do after the Fulbright? Go on to degrees? Work? Write? Hold salons? Do write soon.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Peter Davison
Sunday 7 September 1958
TLS (photocopy), Yale University
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
Sunday, September 7,
Dear Peter,
I wonder if you are witnessing the same rainstorm at the moment. Our two bay-windows (one for Ted to write in, one for me) overlook rain-slicked rooftops, chimneypots, mosquito trees, a grey flat Charles river, and, I think, the Atlantic offices themselves, to the left, under the immense bulwark of John Hancock. Our flat is very small, two little rooms, but quiet, scenic and 6th floor airy: we are both delighted with it.
Could you come by for tea sometime after work this Thursday or Friday? Name your day and hour. We’ll both be happy to see you. Our phone number is LAfayette 3-2843 & it should be working sometime early this week if they ever iron out the manifest, manifold confusions of lines, wires, missed appointments, & nonexistent repairmen. So give us a call & say when is best for you. We’re right off Louisburg Square.
I have been working on a new group of poems this summer & was happy to get two long ones accepted by the New Yorker, my first after years of trying them. Ted has written some very fine poems lately & his second book is filling out: three of his first-book poems have just appeared in the revised Oscar Williams Pocket Book of Modern Verse & we are very pleased about this, his first anthology piece. Ted’s written a half-hour verse dialogue (play practice) and a couple of good Yorkshire stories.* He has got out stacks of children’s books from the Public Libe* & wants to work on children’s stories intensely this year. His story in the July Jack & Jill came out delightfully illustrated.
Have you heard anything from Editor Weeks about the fate of our poems & Ted’s stories? We are, as you may imagine, most eager to hear his verdict.
Our best to you,
Sylvia
TO Edith & William Hughes
before Thursday 18 September 1958*
ALS, Family owned
‘September 18th / Happy Birthday / to you / From Sylvia’
decorated with flowers, candles, and a bird>
Dear Ted’s mother & dad –
By now you have read about Ted’s wonderful prize* – don’t breathe a word of it till October 22nd, for it is to be kept strict secret till then! Isn’t it wonderful: the honor & all the money. Ted & I are both extremely happy here in Boston – it is all quaint hilly streets, brick & stone cobbles – and our view is an inspiration. Our apartment is small but extremely attractive – it seems all windows! The livingroom walls are deep green, with gathered white curtains at the windows, a light whitey-grey sofa cover & a white-flowered dark green curtain shutting off the kitchen wall & covering the chairs. The bedroom – which has an even better view, has pale-blue walls & grey & white patterned curtains. Ted got two 6-foot planks very cheap & made himself a wonderful huge desk in the bay window overlooking the rooftops & River & sailboats. Now all you need to do is win the pools, hop in a plane and fly over to see us! We had Ted’s friend Luke Meyers over for two nights & 3 days on his way back to Paris & had a lovely time walking about the city – having tea here, & raw quahogs (a kind of poor man’s oyster) there. We should write a great deal this year with such pleasant surroundings & all the time in the world.
Love to you both –
Sylvia
TO Alice Norma Davis*
Wednesday 24 September 1958
TLS, Smith College Archives
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
September 24, 1958
Miss Alice Norma Davis
The Vocational Office
Smith College
Northampton, Massachusetts
Dear Miss Davis:
Two instructors from whom you may obtain references covering the courses I took at Newnham College are:
Miss. K. M. P. Burton
Mrs. Dorothea Krook
The Pightle
Lecturer in English
Newnham College
and
c/o Newnham College
Cambridge, England
Cambridge, England
Miss Burton was my Director of Studies, as well as my instructor in several courses, so she would be able to give you the fullest record of my work. Mrs. Krook was
also my instructor for two years (for the Moralists paper), and I believe she has returned to her lecturing duties at the University after a year of absence. The head of the Fulbright Commission in London might also be of help in this regard. The address of the commission, when I left England, was:
The United States Educational Commission in the United Kingdom
71 South Audley Street, London W.1, England.
I’d like to expand a bit on my notes about vocational interests. In addition to jobs in downtown Boston, I can also consider jobs in the immediate vicinity of Harvard, as the subway service between Boston and Cambridge is excellent. I am not at all particular about the type of part time work I do, and am open to any suggestions you may offer.
While I am looking primarily for a part time job so that I can continue a writing project of my own this year, I would be happy to consider any full time job that involved newspaper, publishing, or editing work---anything, that is, of special interest in my field.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Hughes
TO Dorothea Krook
Thursday 25 September 1958
TLS, Central Zionist Archives
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
U.S.A.
September 25, 1958
Dearest Doris,
I was so happy and proud to see your review of James in the London Magazine.* It made me most homesick for you, and your magnificent lectures, and the supervisions which, for me, were the major stimulus of my Cambridge experience. I do hope this letter finds you back at Cambridge and that you will forgive me for my long silence and write me a note soon, letting me know what you are doing, writing and thinking about. I have thought of you so frequently this past year of teaching at Smith that I imagine, I guess, that by some mystical intuition you may well be aware of this.
Last year I threw every moment of my time into teaching, and preparation for teaching. As an instructor of three classes in freshman English, each of which met three times a week, my job was to combine teaching of intelligent reading (stories, novels, plays and poems) with teaching of intelligent writing (including the details of source themes, sentence structure, the geography of the library, and so on). My students came from all over the United States with all varieties of preparation. Girls with bear-skin caps from public schools in the wilds of Minnesota (who confessed, with humble desire for improvement, to never reading a whole book) sat next to elegant blonde young ladies from the best New York City preparatory schools deep, at the moment, in Sartre,* or Finnegans Wake. With a few exceptions, most of my students were glisteningly eager to work, think and talk. Our classes, inspected, at intervals, by professors in the department, were “discussion” classes. Instead of lecturing (I did continually, slip in five and ten minute lectures), I discussed. This means, usually, that the success of the class depends on a firm hand and, only too often, on the resources of a TV moderator. I felt a marked nostalgia for the inviolable voice of the lecturer in the upper class courses, and, often, the desire to take the girls on one at a time privately. Gradually, I became accustomed to preparing in rough question and answer outline the lecture I would have enjoyed giving, and getting the class to give me the half I left out, in a kind of cog-and-wheel cooperation. Since we are supposed to have everyone in the class speak at least once, and leave no “cold areas”, students who haven’t done their reading, or who are congenitally tongue-tied, are coaxed to speak up, even if what they say has little value. I am, by philosophy, I think, more dictatorial than is proper for an American. After I managed to work out a reasonably forceful discussion-maneuvering, I had an exciting time. Many of the girls will never need to take another English course; many of them would perhaps never read a poem again; I felt, now and then, like a missionary among the heathen. My texts were my salvation.