by Sylvia Plath
Ironically, I find that although I have always considered myself aware of the modern novel, my main awareness is of Henry James, Virginia Woolf and DH Lawrence. Formidable models and idols when confronting a blank page. So of late I have been cautiously ripping through a more recent vintage of work. Have you come across William Golding,* the British novelist? He has one terrifying and highly colored novel “Pincher Martin”, or “The Two Deaths of Christopher Martin”, the whole book being the blockishly real visions of a drowning man, who dreams in drowning of his struggle to survive on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Hardly the sort of book to reassure a beginner at the trade, but magnificently original and strong. I have also finished the last of the Tolkien* trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, and have been immensely moved by it. I read the children’s book, The Hobbit, which started off the cast of characters that moves, enlarges and immensifies in these books: I confess it moves me more than the Odyssey, or, for that matter, any epic I can think of at the moment. Let me know what you are reading, doing, thinking, writing. Please send me a poem, or any poem, you have done. The last I saw was Wedding Night of Nun, which was awarded the Borestone prize* in their book.
I am now back home. Ted is taking our small tiger cat with an impressive, if not evident, pedigree, to the vet’s with Rosalind Wilson (one of Edmund Wilson’s many offspring by his even more numerous wives)* and the cat (Sappho, of course)’s brothers & sisters, to be vaccinated against distemper. The kitten loves the typewriter and is now curled in my lap in a kind of literary hypnosis, watching the keys go up and down like dancing snakes. In her more energetic moods she tries to cuff them just before they hit the paper.
We have been having fun at the theater here. Got free tickets to a horrible play concocted by Faulkner,* about whom I have great reservations, for his one-time mistress Ruth Ford,* now wife of Zachary Scott,* I think, “Requiem for a Nun”: except for one scene, a flashback, it is all nontheater, verbal rant about the novel “Sanctuary”, from which Temple Drake emerges, twenty years later, even more of a bitch. The plot ambles about the central horror that her negro maid and babytender, a onetime whorehouse confidante, smothers Temple’s baby in order to make Temple stay home from running off with the romeo brother of the guy she loved at the whorehouse (who got shot to death climbing up her drainpipe) and as a result is tried for murder & convicted. I never could quite accept the baby-smothering as a convincing gimmick to get Temple to stay home & be a good mother to her children (she only had one other). This was Theater Guild. This week we saw a new company, the Boston Repertory, do a very fine performance of “Six Characters in Search . . .” at the Wilbur.* Steve Aaron,* of Harvard, & some other Harvard guys are directing the company & it is wonderful to see good otherwiseunseeable modern plays, and old plays, performed by something more than an earnest undergraduate cast. Also saw at MIT a performance on DThomas’ “Doctor & the Devils”,* all about where med students get their cadavers from: written in movie scenes, so a lot of rushing about and reposing, but fun.
We have seen a little of Philip Booth, who is now trying to write at home on his Guggenheim with his wife and beautiful daughters* & sounding as if it were starvation pay. Also have seen a good bit of Robert Lowell whom I admire immensely as a poet, and his wife, who writes stories for the New Yorker. I have been auditing a poetry course he gives at BU with some bright young visiting poets, George Starbuck,* who is an editor at Houghton Mifflin, & has published everywhere, and Anne Sexton,* another mental hospital graduate, who Lowell thinks is marvelous. She is having about 300 lines coming out in the Hudson,* published in the Partisan,* New Yorker,* etc., without ever having gone to college. I like one of her long poems, about a very female subject: grandmother, mother, daughter, hag trilogy,* and some of her shorter ones. She has the marvelous enviable casualness of the person who is suddenly writing and never thought or dreamed of herself as a born writer: no inhibitions. Perhaps our best friends are these Fassetts around the corner: Agatha’s book on Bartok’s American Years* is magnificent. I have never heard her play the piano, but evidently she is accomplished as only a Hungarian can be; or something of the sort.
Please send me a page or more of Guiliani (in your translation).* How is your book coming.* You never told me about the way you got rid of your first grant (wasn’t it a 2-year affair?) and onto the Fulbright. What happened to the Spectator (or was it another?) articles: did you publish there, and when? I really would love to read something of what you are doing.
How is your novel? I felt I had one, or the stuff of one; but encountered a huge block in trying to have the material take off from what actually did happen. I have been doing some poems this month, as always happens when spring nears, but they are grim, antipoetic (compared to the florid metaphorical things I had in Poetry, Chicago) & I hope, transitional.
The Lamont Poetry Prize is now the Thing to get, what Booth got. Dudley Fitts* is editing the Yale Series this year, a fall, I suppose, from Auden. But then, Auden never liked what I wrote. I hate the idea of trying to publish a book of poems without having got some sort of excuse for it which will get it reviewed. It is bad enough to go through the trauma of selecting and rejecting (I have done an immense amount of the latter, and have a ghost-book larger, and more-published than my present slim volume) without thinking nobody will even notice it: better scathing reviews than a dead silence. Or so I tell myself now. Actually, I think one stands a much better chance of having a book published in England, a book of poems – they have many companies, small, idiosyncratic (unlike Faber’s & its classic list) and seem to publish vast amounts of unknowns: in America, an unknown without a reputable publisher is lost, lost. And most publishers are like the Atlantic Press (Little, Brown) & only publish one volume a year & that done by one who has already paid his way in novels or children’s books. Enough.
What happened to your leg? It suddenly came onstage limping & not saying what was wrong. How, by the way, are the hospitals in Rome? Is there an “American” hospital? I don’t know where, but I think I’ve heard of it.
Have you by now invaded the Obscure Avenue* and seen the jeweled hand behind the trilingual annual yet? I understand her poetry editor (his face always altering in the altering lights) floats here and there picking up poems like lint, a huge bundle at his side, which he uses for obscure and unliterary purposes. Why don’t you send them a bundle of stuff? I am deterred simply by trying to figure out return postage. Also I don’t have anything long enough. I grind out little very minor poems. I had 3 of a longer sort in the latest, March I think, London magazine, which I wrote last Spring after a year’s silence. I am leaving the rather florid over-metaphorical style that encrusted me in college. The “Feminine” (horrors) lavish coyness. The poems I have written in this last year are, if anything, “ugly”. I have done many in syllabic verse which gives freedom of another sort & excited me for a good while, but they are pretty bare. The ones in the London magazine are the last of the lyric florid picture-poems.
It was spring yesterday, but now the snow is whitening around the three windows of my bay-desk. You say you have “Some truly strange poems”. Please send me a couple. I may enclose something if only to lure you to do likewise. I read the gaga review on Vassar Miller,* thought her quoted poem boring and the ones in New Poets of England & America* not much better. May Swenson has a couple I like, one about V. Woolf,* among others. Except for M. Moore & Elizabeth Bishop what women are there to look to? A few eccentrics like Edith Sitwell,* Amy Lowell.* And the perennial Emily,* I suppose. Again, I say send me something. I shall send you mimeos of one or two I think and demand an exchange. Yes, I shall.
I have been having second thoughts about graduate school, such as “what fun to get a Phd”. “What fun to have to learn German and relearn French and Latin.” “How jolly to be a professional and have a big thesis on something publishable.” The horror comes when I think, OK, so I have this Phd, so where do I teach? I could only, I think, now consider a place in a city, like Columbia or
Chicago or whatever big city it is they have in California, where my life could be as private as possible. Places, of course, where one has to be Diana Trilling to get a job. And the other places all exude for me the kind of stuffed intricate calm I experienced among the golden groves of Smith last year. I envision being fifty, haggard, stamping about, advancing to teach the Joyce Yeats Eliot course, and so? And the girls younger and more similar year by year. The little voyeuse in me, or whatever it is, says, oh, go live in England & no matter how poor you are, there will be France and Italy and Germany and Spain and Greece and you can study languages there, etc. etc. From this side of the Atlantic I again experience the weight of water between me and Europe that I am sure convinces some people Europe is a figment of a cracked brain.
Please tell me honestly what you think of these poems. Mad Maudlin is the earliest, written two winters ago, Green Rock, Winthrop Bay, written last spring, and Suicide off Egg Rock this spring (winter, rather). In the latter, I didn’t choose the garbagey details to prove I wasn’t going to blench, but wanted the energy of the waves and dog and child to be equally as terrifying to the man in despair. As you will see, I try for certain absolutely “plain” lines in it, pure statement, but of course the words twist in and try to color it up.
We don’t know at present what next year will bring after September 1st when our lease here runs out. I have come to think we may start our first house in England, in the country outside London & expand from there: Ted is very homesick, and I am in many many ways more akin to the English temper than the American, but not in so many as to make me deny that I will feel a good bit in exile. Before we go, we would like to see New Orleans, Mexico, the canyon on the way to California, but that is also in question. An amusing note, I have been asked to be one of the judges of the Holyoke Glascock contest this year, along with John Crowe Ransom.* I don’t know whether to laugh or be silent.
Tell me about you, your bothers as well as your pleasures. I feel an odd sisterly bond, partly because I feel, as I think and suspect you may, a dim doppelganger relationship with the few women I know who are very much physically & psychically akin to me. It would be great fun to see you again, and if you would only stay in Rome another year maybe we would. At any rate, write me faster than I’ve written you and Send Poems.
With Love,
Sylvia
TO Edith & William Hughes
Tuesday 31 March 1959
TLS, Family owned
Tuesday
31 March 1959
Dear Ted’s mother & dad,
As I sit here at my high desk I look out into a grey hazy day, a suitable weather for the last of March, trying to be mild and warmish, but making me long only to limber my fingers around a cup of hot tea. It has been a raw, windy month, with a great load of snow dumped on us last week which is by now melted and gone.
I was very cross with the judges of the Maugham contest,* but after my first anger at the much-traveled Thom Gunn* I reflected that the judges probably figured Ted had enough with his 300 pound first prize this autumn & shouldn’t be made fabulously wealthy with 500 pounds on top of it. I am sure he will win the prize with his next book which is almost done. His last five poems are the most colorful and exciting he has done yet. He will have 5 poems* coming out in a handsome magazine here, Audience, which has a lot of money behind it and prints drawings and photographs: Vicky would enjoy these. Do look up the last two London magazines, my poems are in the March, Ted’s in the April issue;* I had 3 poems about the sea in this spring’s Audience* & Ted will come out in the summer issue: isn’t that nice: we always miss by a month in coming out together, but maybe the chivalrous editors think: Ladies first. I am enclosing a page* from the international newspaper I am publishing a few poems in a poem I wrote about riding a runway horse* in Cambridge, England. I thought the article on the Yorkshire moors* might also interest you.
We had Easter dinner with my brother at mother’s house Sunday, and it was a nice feast. My brother is relaxing more in his work at Harvard and going to work on a project translating scientific Russian this summer on the way to his PhD. Ted is accompanying me twice a week to Cambridge, via subway, where I work two afternoons in the Harvard library as secretary to the Head of the Sanskrit Department, which is fun: he is a poetic soul at heart & has given me two articles of his* on Sanskrit poetry of the Village and Field which Ted enjoyed. Ted is getting books from a Buddhist lady each week (it is almost impossible for a non-Harvard person to get at their great Library without paying large fees) and collecting fox stories which he will write up for a children’s book.
Tonight we are going again to the Fassetts around the corner. They have just had their cat Scylla have another kitten & we will see it. But their cats are so inbred that they never litter like ordinary cats: they have two cats in great pain and one is always born dead, while the other has to be fed milk from the hand to live. Very sad.
This week, for some reason, things are at a standstill. Partly the season, I guess. We should have more news next week. Keep warm & keep working the pools.
With love,
Sylvia
TO Elizabeth Ames
Wednesday 8 April 1959
TLS, New York Public Library
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
April 8, 1959
Mrs. Elizabeth Ames
Executive Director
Yaddo
Saratoga Springs, New York
Dear Mrs. Ames:
We are both pleased and honored to receive your invitation* to arrive at Yaddo on September 9th and remain until November 9th.
We are happy to accept the invitation for the full period and look forward to spending those two months at Yaddo.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes
TO Mary Stetson Clarke*
Friday 10 April 1959
TLS, Smith College
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
April 10, 1959
Dear Mary,
I was so happy to get your kind letter! Right now I am sitting at my desk overlooking the ruddy-brick rooftops of the Hill and the grey waters of Back Bay with the misty spring sky above it, which often puts me in such a rapt mood I am in danger of not getting to work, and spending hours staring at the white sails already visible on the water.
You have been often in our thoughts. I am so glad that our visit with you and Susan* at Smith was a prelude to Susan’s becoming a Smith Girl. It is a wonderful, wonderful place.
I have been having Ted dictate to me from the beginning lessons in the speedwriting book which was a godsend, and you so kind to be involved in the obtaining of it! It is just what I need, although my boss is understanding and dictates at the pace of a turtle.
We have both of us had an excellent and productive year in Boston, Ted just finishing a second book of poems, and me my first. Now I shall start looking about for a publisher, a much more difficult job for a poetry-writer than a novelist or a children’s book writer, although we would like to do the latter very much, too. How magnificent your friend Betty George Speare* received the Newbury Medal: we saw a whole window of her books set out on Park Street & it looking charming.
After a brief trip to Smith and Holyoke this next week we shall be back in Boston till September 1st and wish you would give us a call any afternoon you are in town & drop by for tea threeish or fourish. We work from 7 to 12 in the morning very hard and then are delighted to indulge in recreation of another sort. We hope to spend two months at Yaddo, the writers’ colony in Saratoga Springs, this fall as guests with nothing to do but write. It sounds like a dream just now.
Our best to you and the family,
Sylvia Hughes
TO Monroe K. Spears*
Friday 10 April 1959
TLS, Sewanee: The University of the South
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
&n
bsp; Boston 8, Massachusetts
April 10, 1959
Mr. Monroe K. Spears
Editor
THE SEWANEE REVIEW
The University of the South
Sewanee, Tennessee
Dear Mr. Spears:
I am happy to hear* that you are keeping “Point Shirley” for publication with “The Ghost’s Leavetaking”.
One or two minor changes I have made since in the poem I wonder if you would be so good as to alter on the copy you have: I should like “Revisited” dropped from the title so it reads simply “Point Shirley”. Also I should like to leave out the word “dying” in the last line of the second stanza so it reads “Shark littered in the geranium bed.” And then change the word “wring” in the first line of the last stanza to “get” (“I would get from these dry-papped stones”).
I do hope these slight alterations will not be of any inconvenience.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman*
Tuesday 14 April 1959
TLS with envelope, Smith College
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
April 14, 1959
Dear Ann,
Sometimes I think I am a sleepwalker. I had your letter, with the wonderful happy-making cavorters on it around Christmas and started saving up things to tell you in a letter, and added this and that, and meanwhile the snows melted and with the green leaves coming out in Boston Public Gardens and white sails on the Charles River, which I can see from our window, realize with a pang that a quarter of a year has slipped by. Well, here is the letter and I hope you are not now living in Turkey or Poona or some other place.