by Sylvia Plath
I’m finishing my job as secretary to the head of the Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard, and I’ll miss my boss---I only go 3 afternoons a week, so that is just enough to be fun, and I do his lecture notes up and letters to Buddhist monks and ad men and night watchmen and Governors of Virginia etc., as he is not only a teacher, professor, rather, an editor, writer, and father and speaker of Sanskrit, but the President of a Corporation and head of a fabulously wealthy Virginia Spa which is now making itself a ski-lodge and hiring a snow-maker to boot in the far south. The letters I do are much fun and I feel that, incognito, I have much insight into his family matters. He has an aunt who is a Lady in London, and earns, on the income tax forms I typed up for him, over $30,000 a year, and is always getting me to write the stock markets, selling hundreds of shares of National Can and buying Sheraton this or that. Well, enough. A rather special man for a professor.
Here is a heavenly sponge cake recipe which you should make in a high cake pan with a funnel in the center so the cake has a hole in the middle:
6 eggs (separate)
1½ cups sugar (sifted)
1⅓ cups cake flour
1½ teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
6 tablespoons water
½ teaspoon lemon extract
1 teaspoon vanilla
Directions for sponge cake: Beat yolks till lemon colored. Add sugar gradually. Add water & flavoring. Beat. Add flour gradually, beating.
Beat egg whites to froth; add baking powder and salt to frothy egg whites. Beat until very stiff. Fold gently, but thoroly into egg yolk mixture. Sprinkle granulated sugar lightly over top of cake before putting it in the oven.
Bake for one hour at 325°. Do not remove cake from pan till cake is cold.
Happy eating,
love
Sylvia
TO Seymour Lawrence*
Saturday 30 May 1959
TLS (photocopy), Yale University
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
May 30, 1959
Mr. Seymour Lawrence
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
8 Arlington Street
Boston, Massachusetts
Dear Sam:
I am sending along two stories---THIS EARTH OUR HOSPITAL and ABOVE THE OXBOW---which I hope may interest you for possible publication in The Atlantic Monthly.
With the last manuscript I sent in, I waited over half a year for a No, and I wonder if I could get a faster verdict this time.
All good wishes to you and your wife,*
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Frederick Morgan
Monday 1 June 1959
TLS, Princeton University
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
June 1, 1959
Mr. Frederick Morgan
THE HUDSON REVIEW
65 East 55th Street
New York 22, New York
Dear Mr. Morgan:
I am happy to hear you are taking four of my poems* for THE HUDSON REVIEW, and particularly happy you have chosen the ones you did.
Here are some biographical notes: Born in Boston, 1932. B.A. from Smith College, 1955, and Cambridge University, 1957 (Fulbright Grant to England from 1955-1957). Instructor of English at Smith College, 1957-58. Secretary, Adult Psychiatric Clinic, Massachusetts General Hospital, 1958. Secretary to Chairman of Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies at Harvard, 1959.
Poems of mine have appeared in Accent, The Antioch Review, The Atlantic Monthly, Audience, Harper’s, The London Magazine, Mademoiselle, The Nation, The New Orleans Poetry Journal, The New Mexico Quarterly, The New Yorker, Poetry (Chicago) and The Spectator.* Other poems are scheduled to appear shortly in Arts in Society,* The Partisan Review,* The Sewanee Review.
After July 1st, my address will be: 26 Elmwood Road, Wellesley, Massachusetts.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Emilie McLeod
Thursday 11 June 1959
TLS (photocopy), Yale University
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
June 11, 1959
Mrs. Emilie W. McLeod
Editor of Children’s Books
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
8 Arlington Street
Boston 16, Massachusetts
Dear Mrs. McLeod:
I was so happy to get your good letter* today. After a month away from Sue and Will I find them bothersome and your ideas for alteration stimulating and right. I have already begun revising along the lines you suggested, dropping the two children out, and the narrative line, and adding a verse or two for a loose (very loose) continuity.
It is exciting to see how much brisker and more fluid the book becomes by doing this. At this rate, I should have a revised version ready for you to look at next week. I hope you think the changes make for a better book. Ted wonders if there should be more beds, but I think you can judge from the Ten here, and those I mention at the beginning, whether you think the ms. stands as is.
I think what I may do is hold the ms. and give it to you when I see you. I’ve left a message today at your office for you to call me, and Ted and I would like so much to see you before you go to Palo Alto. The secretary said you come in Tuesdays and/or Wednesdays, and we’d be around any time after two Tuesday, & on Wednesday (Ted would be in all day, if you called). Other days are pretty free also, as we are working like fury on finishing our projects, hoping to start a camping trip to California and Mexico by about July 1st.
I may, if I get through to my satisfaction, send along the book to your office anyway at the beginning of the week and so perhaps it will be on your desk when you come in. In any case, do call during your day up here and let’s try to get together.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman
Friday 12 June 1959
TLS with envelope, Smith College
Suite 61
9 Willow Street
Boston 8, Massachusetts
June 12, 1959
Dear Ann,
It was wonderful to get your letter. I have withered to one of my silent centers where I feel very untalkative and so will simply say please come to Boston at the end of June. We are trying to sublet our place (as is everybody else in Boston) for July and August and if we are lucky enough to sell our view, height, light, air, peace and “Isn’t-it-just-like-the-rooftopsof-Paris” aura we will be taking a camping trip to California and Mexico via National Parks and Pacific Ocean for those 8 weeks. But we’ll be sure to be around upto the end of June. As I probably told you, our two rooms are so small we are constantly sitting on the cat, or I would ask you to stay here nights. But you would probably be happier in a Room of Your Own anyway nearby and we’d count on you here for meals, and I personally would count on talks on Public Garden Benches, etc. Funny, how little time we ever spent together, and yet how I feel you are one of Those Few People I really can talk to.
I wish you would bring samples of Let’s Draw.* I’m amazed myself you don’t rival Rosalind Welcher and her intellectual greeting cards, after that marvelous Christmas piece you sent.
I have finished my 9 page single- (I mean, double, but I am trying to pad it) spaced first book for Children, as I may have told you, about 10 fantastic and exotic beds. I think it would be highly amusing to have the first book I published (if ever) called the Bed Book, which this one is. Based on the fiction that children’s beds, by nature of their age, are dull, merely for sleeping or resting, I rhyme, very simply, 200 two-beat lines about these queer beds. I have got the ms. back from the first place I sent it, a Press across the Public Garden* that produces only 4 children’s books a year, so is a backwater of sorts, but also choosy, and the editor asked me to leave out the narrative frame & the broth
er & sister I had talking about the beds, so I’ve done this, and it seems better, and they asked to see it afterwards. The only trouble with this place is that their illustrators are generally completely without color and verve, to put it clearly, lousy. IF they accepted it (I’d actually, ideally, want a live place like Knopf or Macmillan or such) I’d try to beg them to line up Maurice Sendak* or Joseph Low* or Roger Duvoisin* or whichever one of the Will & Nicholas* duo does the drawings, but for a first book I suppose I would eat crow just to get it published. Only pictures mean so much for a children’s book; make or break it.
I am currently quite gloomy about this poetry book of about 46 poems, 37 of them published (and all written since college, which means leaving out lots of published juvenalia). I just got word from the annual Yale Contest that I “missed by a whisper”, and it so happened that a louse of a guy* I know personally, who writes very glib light verse with no stomach to them, won, and he lives around the corner & is an Editor at a good publishing house here, and I have that very annoying feeling which it is tempting to write off as sour grapes that my book was deeper, if more grim, and all those other feelings of thwart. I don’t want to try a novel until I feel I am writing good salable short stories for the simple reason that the time, sweat and tears involved in a 300 page book which is rejected all round is too large to cope with while I have the book of Poems kicking about. Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing, which remark I guess shows I still don’t have pure motives (oh-it’s-suchfun-I-just-can’t-stop-who-cares-if-it’s-published-or-read) about writing. It is more fun to me, than it was when I used it solely as a love-and admiration-getting mechanism (bless my psychiatrist). But I still want to see it finally ritualized in print.
Slowly, slowly, I write poems and they are about cadavers, suicides, Electra complexes, ouija boards, hermits, fat spinsters, thin spinsters, ghosts, old men of the sea, and, yes, fiddler crabs and mammoth pigs. They sell to magazines, I have broken in to the Partisan, the Hudson, the Sewanee Reviews this year and how nice. Only Poetry Books are a losing business: there are two annual award-and-publishing contests a year which assure the book reviews, purchase by book stores, notice. Other than that, there is the list of publishers, most of whom publish one book a year to prove they are furthering the unlucrative arts, and that usually by somebody who has done novels, or sellers already for them. Tra-la. I must stop this. I have a Little List of places where I must send the damn thing. It is called “The Devil Of The Stairs”.* The 6th title.
Please let me know when you are coming. The earlier in June the better. If youda stayed in Chicago Ida come to you this summa.
With best love,
Syl
PS: our phone number is LAfayette 3-2843 & Willow Street is the bar of an “H” between Mt. Vernon St. & Chestnut St., overlooking the oh-soelegant Louisburg Square.
TO John Lehmann
Tuesday 16 June 1959
TLS, University of Texas at Austin
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Massachusetts
June 16, 1959
Mr. John Lehmann
LONDON MAGAZINE
36 Soho Square
London W.1, England
Dear Mr. Lehmann:
I am enclosing a group of recent poems* in hopes you may like something among them enough for publication in THE LONDON MAGAZINE.
Ted and I are both working hard now on some stories and I think we may come up with something good enough to show you late this summer or in early fall. Ted’s stories are set in Yorkshire, and I find them quite exciting---a new departure for him---and I am hoping to get him to give me some of his re-revisions final enough for me to type up.
With all good wishes from both of us,
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
P.S. We may be reached at the above address for the next half year or so.
TO Critical Quarterly
Friday 19 June 1959
TLS, Private owner
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Mass.
June 19, 1959
Proofs* corrected and enclosed.
Please note change of address to the above and send author’s copies of the issue in which these poems appear together with the check to me at the above address.
Thank you.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman
Thursday 25 June 1959
TLS with envelope, Smith College
26 Elmwood Road
Wellesley, Mass.
June 25, 1959
Dear Ann,
By now you must be about to leave. We’d probably be here on the 29th, but in a state of chaos, and probably you better stick by your friend. We are plugging our children’s books. I go see an editor at the Atlantic Press tomorrow, probably to get a rejection. Ever since an old jealous would-be-poet “friend” of mine, a very weak mixed-up male, got on their staff they’ve been rejecting my poems and publishing his (he publishes nowhere else)* and I am sure he would die if I ever turned out a publishable novel. Ted has got one rejection for his kids’ book from his poetry publishers, Harper’s, which has a very lively children’s department, but practically the same day T. S. Eliot wrote from the publishers he works for in England and said he liked it but felt it needed final polishing which he was suggesting on the ms, more exact rhymes & rhythms in some places. We are framing the letter. I never trust anybody until there is a signed contract.
Am just back from buying sleeping bags, camp stove etc. All we need is a tent and twenty bush natives to carry corn niblets and beer.
Write us at the above address (my safe home address) from England and make Ted homesick.
We will take a large raincheck on seeing you.
Love,
Syl
TO Poetry Editor, Accent
c. Monday 29 June 1959*
TLS, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
To Poetry Editor, ACCENT
I’m sending along a batch of recent poems* in hopes you may like something well enough for publication in ACCENT. My new address is: 26 Elmwood Road Wellesley, Massachusetts
With all good wishes,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 9 July 1959*
ALS (postcard), Indiana University
Thursday
July 9th
1.
Dear mother –
Look at your map of the USA & Canada to the large green section of Algonquin Park in Ontario. I am writing this from a great rock facing the setting sun surrounded by nothing but soughing birches & pines overlooking Rock Lake one of the ‘wildest’ campsites here – 4 miles off a dirt road under the bend of Route 60. We arrived here about tea-time yesterday after crossing the St. Lawrence River & Customs & like it so much – we found a fine tent site right on the lake between two birches so the car is in the shade, rented a rowboat & last night rowed (the only people on the huge lake) under the stars & new moon on mirror-clear water. Our 1st night stop was in Whetstone Gulf in upstate New York between Boonville & Lowville on your map.* We fished all day today in perfectly deserted & lovely waters under great cliffs but caught nothing though we had many bites & lost lots of worms. Our camp-to-camp route involves much 10 hour driving so we are going to try spending a day or two after long stretches as we are doing now. The car is doing fine & we are thriving – hoping for more fishing & nature-trail walks tomorrow – then on to Sault Ste Marie & the long haul to Yellowstone
xx
Sivvy
TO Warren Plath
Thursday 9 July 1959*
ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University
Thursday – July 9
Dear Warren
Just wrote a USA-stamped card to mother & realized I can’t mail it in Canada. We are camped on Rock La
ke, right at water’s edge with our own little beach; birch trees & rented rowboat – fished (caught nil, tho’ the man right next door’s wife caught 2 big lake trout) & had a fine time exploring our corner of this big lake – the park is full of lakes & very wild (Algonquin Park). We saw a baby raccoon where we stopped our 1st night in upstate New York. Picked wonderful wild blueberries at sunset over the lake. You & mother should try camping up here. Our equipment works fine – we have all we need of it.
With love,
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 11 July 1959*
ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University
Provincial Park: showing Lake of Two Rivers.>
Saturday
2
Dear Mother –
Ted & I are lunching in the sun in a meadow ten miles south of North Bay in Canada. Have had fine weather. Yesterday spent all day in our rowboat on Rock Lake under stone cliffs catching lots & lots of small lake perch – saved 11 of the largest & fried them for supper by the lakeside – desert being blueberries we picked on the high rock ledges. Today got up to the sound of loons at six – took a two mile ‘nature trail’ walk & fed lovely reddish deer from our hands with our leftover blueberries. One stuck its head in the car window & licked Ted’s face! We hope our pictures of this come out well – Now—on to Sault Ste Marie – follow us on your map! Will call Sunday
xxx
Sivvy
TO Joseph & Dorothy Benotti
Saturday 11 July 1959*
ALS (picture postcard), Indiana University
near Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada.>
Saturday: July 11
Dear Dotty & Joe . . .
We’re driving west in Canada in the general direction of Yellowstone Park after two fine days tenting by Rock Lake at Algonquin Park – an unspoiled green wilderness where deer came down to the lake to drink & eat blueberries out of our hands. Spent 2 days rowing & fishing – caught enough small perch for a fish-fry supper. The weather & country are wonderful –