by Sylvia Plath
Mother brought us a little bowl of three Christmas narcissus bulbs & the first one started to unfold its little white flowers today – dainty & star-shaped on top of a long green willowy stem.
Ted seems to have written all the news in his letter.
I just had three poems accepted by The London Magazine last week with a very nice letter from the editor – I don’t suppose they’ll be out for several months, but do keep a look-out for it. We’ll let you know if we find out when they’re appearing.
Keep well & have a happy new year –
with love,*
Sylvia
1959
TO Edith & William Hughes
Saturday 17 January 1959
ALS with envelope, Family owned
Saturday
January 17
Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .
I’ll write on a pink sheet* to make this letter more colorful. Our apartment house has fallen into new hands with the new years & electricians are hammering, lugging great coils of wire & shouting at all hours. We are supposed to be getting new electric stove & icebox (ours is now gas) but they have not arrived yet. For a whole day the heat & hot water was off: “We turned off the switch & forgot it,” the boy explained this morning as I greeted him sniffling with the makings of a cold & a stern, watering eye. And now the heat’s on, but the lights are off. Our poor landlord has evidently left his phone off the hook, complaints must be pouring in & his phone is steadily ‘busy’ through the day. But all this is amusing – we feel greatly relieved that it is not our place. I make great cauldrons of fish chowder & chicken stew which Ted likes – very hot & nourishing in the cold weather. He has been so healthy this winter it does my heart good to see him. His poems are being bought as soon as he writes them & his second book should be finished in a couple of months. He has also written some very good stories which I shall try to type out as soon as he gives me clear copies. Ted is so modest about his own work – I dropped a little note* to the editor of the London Magazine to the effect that Ted was writing some stories about Yorkshire & of course the editor wrote back by return mail* he’d love to look at them. But it’s a wife’s privilege to praise her husband to others!
‘My house’, ‘My grandmother’s house’ and ‘Prison on Deer Island’.
SP drew in waves and wrote ‘ATLANTIC OCEAN’>
We took a trip by train & bus to Winthrop, the town of my childhood – just half an hour’s trip & walked for miles – by the house where I spent my first ten years, the bay I swam in, all barge tar & airplane oil, & out to my grandmother’s house on a road running to a once-island, now joined to the land – the town, once an old fishing port, is gone to rack & ruin – but I love it better than any place I’ve ever been, although I wouldn’t want to bring up a family there. We had one of our pleasantest days & I am now writing some poems* commemorating the place – probably I’m the only poet born there who’s ever wanted to write about the old cinder heap, but there’s nothing as unreasonable as childhood memories.
Have you seen the enclosed clipping* about Ted’s prize? The NY Times Book Review is a very special place to appear.
Ted has got set on living in England & we hope to be able to tour America if he gets either one or the other of his grants before we come back to Europe. I look forward to having a place of our own & not drifting about the globe like a pair of world-circling whales, & I am as fond of England as any place, which is lucky. I wish you could appear at our apartment – win on the pools & fly over for dinner!
Love,
Sylvia
PS – Have you got the Mademoiselle magazine article & poems of ours mother sent?
TO Esther Baskin
Saturday 17 January 1959*
TLS, British Library
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
Saturday*
Dear Esther,
This is a small note to say I was highly relieved to have your letter and spent a pleasant rainy yesterday at the Public Library reading about the Nightjar, Goatsucker, Churn-Owl, Evejar, Fern-Owl, Night-hawk, Puckeridge and Wheel-Bird. Our library is magnificent on birds and death on frogs; all you can learn about frogs here is which nerve twitches when you drop acid on their left nostril, no thank you. Also, I was in a mild state of paralysis between Ted’s poem on Bullfrog (a jolly and humorous little NYorker piece) and Shakespeare. Between us all we will immortalize the animal kingdom: I lie in bed chanting Dog, Cat, Hog, Rat and on and on. I am enamoured of the Goatsucker and give me two weeks, one for the necks and ifrits, one for the poem.
We have The Seven Deadly Sins* and are delighted. I particularly love the brustly-pig-straddling Gluttoness and the old January on the breasted peacock. And Christ is magnificent. Ted, of course, has Lennie’s proof of the wolf-skinned supplicant behind glass and salaams and prays under it. Did he tell you he made a wolf-mask? We had to go to a costume party New Year’s eve and our Hungarian hostess let me raid her attic of Budapest ball gowns and Beacon Hill pomps. I came away with a red cape, for me, and a black mouldering sealskin scarf for Ted. You wolf, I said, and he went into the bedroom with scissors and thread and the fur, and came out with a long black snout and black pricking ears and the evil eye. It was a religious act, and the mask is awesomely comfortable to wear. One day it will stick, and his nails will grow.
He is drawing, at last, on Pikes. Many pikes. The best drawing he will send.
In Yorkshire there is a goose known as the Gabble-Ratchet.
Ted joins me in sending our best to you, Lennie and the gold Tobias,
sylvia
TO Esther Baskin
Wednesday 21 January 1959
TLS, British Library
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
Wednesday, January 21
Dear Esther,
I enclose the goatsucker poem, hoping some of it will please you. I’ve had a wonderful time working on it and it is, as you see, a sort of Goatsucker Sonnet, although the rhymes are half. All the details are borne out by the books, I think, and you probably know them: the Bird’s also called the Puckbird, or Puckeridge after a disease it’s supposed to give cows & weanling calves in England, so it’s a double threat, in superstition, to cows as well as goats. And it’s called the Devil-bird in Ceylon (evidently they call a lot of birds Devils there) and in Paraguay a Goatsucker-hunter, hunting by headlamp, says the bird’s eye reflects light with a red shine, like a coal glowing, or an intense, deep ruby. I wish I could have got in the part about its perching lengthwise on a tree and looking like a warty knot, but there just wasn’t place. Do feel free to not like it, or want this or that other than it is.
Did Ted or I tell you we are owners of a kitling? Granddaughter on one side of a cat belonging to Thomas Mann and, on the other, fruit of a pedigreed line of Mooncats and Honey Owls, Persian cats who move in a nimbus. Sappho, by name. The minute she walked into our apartment she went straight to a book of poems lying flat on the lowest bookshelf and possessed it. The book was a mere anthology, so Ted has substituted Eliot and Sappho approves.
Ted has drawn myriad pike and is sending his final iron-eyed head to you. With the block could he have wise advice? I can’t wait to see the broadsheet.* Robert Lowell has seen the poem and has a good opinion of it, has sent it to IA Richards,* he says.
All Boston is blurred out today in a pale charcoal scrim of rain, sludge, slop, and no snow, only a wet, Old English bit by lamplight last evening, a little close white fur, and today everything in runnels and drips.
I am so eager to hear about the book.* You say it’s about all done. Has Leonard finished the drawings? Do you know the Robert Graves* poem “Outlaws” which begins:
Owls---they whinny down the night;
Bats go zigzag by.
Ambushed in shadow beyond sight
The outlaws lie.
Old god
s, tamed to silence, there
In the wet woods they lurk,
Greedy of human stuff to snare
In nets of murk.
Look up, else your eye will drown
In a moving sea of black;
Between the tree-tops, upside down,
Goes the sky-track.
Look up, else your feet will stray
Toward that dim ambuscade
Where spider-like they trap their prey
In webs of shade.
And on it goes. How pale are doves and lambs by comparison!
Our love to you, Leonard and Tobias
Sylvia
Sylvia Plath
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Mass.
The Goatsucker*
Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear
The warning whirr and burring of the bird
Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard
Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder.
Moon full, moon dark, the chary dairy farmer
Dreams that his fattest cattle dwindle, fevered
By claw-cuts of the Goatsucker, alias Devil-bird,
Its eye, flashlit, a chip of ruby fire.
So fables say the Goatsucker moves, masked from men’s sight
In an ebony air, on wings of witch cloth,
Well-named, ill-famed a knavish fly-by-night.
Yet it never milked any goat, nor dealt cow death:
It shadows only---cave-mouth bristle beset---
Cockchafers and the wan, green Luna moth.
TO Elizabeth Ames*
Wednesday 11 February 1959
TLS, New York Public Library
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
February 11, 1959
Mrs. Elizabeth Ames
Executive Director of Yaddo
Saratoga Springs
New York
Dear Mrs. Ames:
My husband and I have just received your letter* about Yaddo and both of us would be extremely interested in applying for a visit there. We would appreciate it very much if you would be so good as to send us the necessary applications.
I notice from the brochure that the season at Yaddo runs from May to October, although most of the guests are said to come for May-June or July-August. Is there, then, a September-October period also? If there were, we would be most interested in the possibility for applying for this time of the season.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Lee Anderson
Wednesday 18 February 1959
TLS, Washington University (St Louis)
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
February 18, 1959
Dear Lee Anderson:
Thank you for your good letter. I am sending a manuscript---The Bull of Bendylaw And Other Poems---to the Yale Series competition this week. Your letter confirmed a wavering and subversive urge to do so.
Ted and I are living in a little two-room apartment at the above address with a sixth floor view of Back Bay, the Charles River Basin and gulls and sailboats. We would be delighted to see you here any time you chanced to come to Boston.
Ted is completing his second book and within five poems of the close. I am battling a sterner and less bucolic muse. We have a fine wild little cat, a tiger with a green stare.
Ted joins me in sending our best,
Sylvia Plath
TO Elizabeth Ames
Sunday 22 February 1959
TLS, New York Public Library
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
February 22, 1959
Mrs. Elizabeth Ames
Executive Director of Yaddo
Saratoga Springs
New York
Dear Mrs. Ames:
Thank you for your letter* and the application blanks. We are enclosing the four sets of filled-in applications* together with clippings from our work.
I would like to note here that of the thirty-two or so published poems I have listed on my sheet over two-thirds were written while I was an undergraduate and do not form part of my projected book as, in one way or another, I do not consider them sufficiently mature work.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Edith & William Hughes
Thursday 26 February 1959
TLS with envelope, Family owned
Thursday
February 26, 1959
Dear Ted’s mother & dad . . .
Snow has fallen here at last. We had a lovely teatime the other day, sitting high in our sixth floor eagle’s lookout and the room bright with the white light of the falling snow, which fell down past us in large flakes to pile up on ground floor level where somebody else would have to worry about shoveling, and we could simply enjoy the landscape of peaked white rooftops and the white river behind the dark steeples and gables of the buildings. The air is clear crisp blue now and very invigorating.
Last night we went to the Blue Ship Tearoom* which is at the end of a perilously sagging wharf which looks about to cave in at any moment. The Tearoom is of old vintage, as my mother & father went there when they were courting, I believe, and on the third floor of the wharf with a fine view of the bay and ships and gulls. Inside it is very low ceilinged, all painted light blue with fishnets and Chinese crabs shells and lobstershells decorating the room, and gay blue tablecloths covered with a pattern of Moby Dick the white whale from Melville’s book, and the fisherment hunting him down. We went to celebrate the third anniversary of our meeting at the party for the St. Botolph’s Review, where I first saw Ted’s poems. Ted had two delicious mountain trout after a fresh fruit cup, and I had a little fat duck, and we brought a bottle of French wine as the place didn’t serve drinks, and enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. There was an oddly homespun quality about the evening as there were only about three other tables of diners beside ourselves (the place has just opened again after the owners spending the worst of the winter in Florida) and the waitress kept forgetting essential things like spoons which I would slip over and get when she’d gone out of the room, so as not to hurt her feelings. There was also a greyhaired pianist who evidently is installed there for life, who has been in France and plays Chopin, Debussy and Moonlight-Sonata Beethoven for the diners. Drunk with the idea of an audience (he seemed to be afraid we’d boo him and drive him out of the room with a pelting of T-bone steaks) he came in before every piece to ask us if “we’d like to hear the story behind it”. One could hardly say no to the poor man, so he told us about the perfumes of the flowers of the French gardens that blew through this Nocturne, or the odd harp quaverings that inspired another. He even had a little contest, the reward being a rupee from someplace in India (worth, he said about thirty cents) for someone who could divide the distance to the moon by the distance around the world. I was so stunned at the simplicity of the question, and Ted was so chivalrous, that we didn’t open our mouths, and a little lady from a country town a hundred miles away won the rupee.
I have been having fun braiding on a rug* which has light blue and red bands in it: I get the wool remnants from a Mill End shop out near mothers, cut the strips to the right size, and go to work. I have also been learning to use the sewing machine at the house of Marcia Plumer,* a friend of mine from college, and am making my first simple pattern, a black and white print overblouse, very straight and not fitted, so the work is easy. You must smile at this, because you probably can sew blindfold & Walt’s factory must make immensely complicated trousers and so on. Anyhow, I hope to finish the blouse this week and will draw the style of it.
Another book has come out with some of our poems in it---mine are old ones and much changed, or left out of the book I am working on. You might like to get a copy, I think it’s 8/6. The title is POETRY FROM CAMBRIDGE, 1958, edited by Christopher
Levenson and published by The Fortune Press, 15 Belgrave Road, London, S.W.1.* Ted has five poems in it (Thrushes, The Good Life, Historian, Dick Straightup, and Crow Hill) and I have four. Levenson, with his usual waywardness, has let several misprints get by in my things, as, on the contents page,* I am quoted as having gone to Brown University. and in the poem “Epitaph for Fire and Flower” on page 45 it should be “every weather-cock kiss hang (not hand) fire” in the fourth stanza, and “star’s spent wick” (not wink) in the fifth.
Tell Vicky I think her nit-spotted Bug-gobbler is superb---very witty and sensitive with a colorful personality of its own, much better than the blue winged creature which I don’t think a child would relate to, its so abstract. Also liked her drawing of her head and of you, very expressive lines. I have had a child’s poem on a Goatsucker, in rough sonnet form, which I wrote for Esther Baskins book on Night Creatures (which Ted wrote “Tomcat” for) accepted by Hornbook, a monthly magazine that reviews children’s books. On second thought, it wasn’t the Goatsucker one, but one called The Bull of Bendylaw.* I sent the two, and willfully reversed them.
We are counting on you to win the Pools. One of the great rewards of living in England, in fact one of the great morale builders, must be the half-hopeful feeling one might just as well as not happen to win 75,000 Untaxable Pounds on the Pools & be set up for life. Keep making out those sheets. And when the great day comes, wire us, and we’ll all set off for a trip round the world---you come pick us up here and we’ll all sail on a luxury liner to Australia and from there to the Riviera and the Rhine and home again. Ted keeps telling me to realize all the odds against winning, and I probably do, but keep on dreaming.
We’re just leaving now for a little walk in the snow.
Love to all,
Sylvia
TO Lynne Lawner
Wednesday 11 March 1959
Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978
March 11, 1959
Dear Lynne,
I am seizing a few moments after having typed my afternoon stint and while waiting for my very part-time boss* to come in and dictate me more letters to Poona etc. I work here in the shadowy stacks of Widener two or three afternoons a week: I should have shorthand, but by dint of furious made-up abbreviations, manage pretty well. Your Italian vignettes* are delightful, wonderfully colored and full of a special gilded light. Why don’t you set a novel in Rome? The damnable thing is that Henry James has done it all, with his endowed and innocent Isabel Archer. The main interest about an American girl abroad is her slow mellowing into corruption, what else? I am envious. We dream of large sumptuous grants on which we will spend a year in Rome.