by Sylvia Plath
xxx
sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 16 January 1960
TLS in greeting card* with envelope, Indiana University
Let me be the first last / To wish you a / Merry Christmas!
Sat’day, January 16
Letter 2
Dear mother,
I’ve just been out for a brisk late afternoon walk in the sun to post an airletter to you, but this will probably also come at the same time as there is no collection till Sunday afternoon. I’m enclosing 3 checks made out for deposit to the 5¢ Savings Bank, totalling, I think about $113. I’m also enclosing an envelope which doesn’t need stamping & a filled-out deposit slip. This should simplify things: just drop the envelope, with slip & checks in mail & they’ll send the book back to you with a new envelope & slip. Could we leave the bank book with you (not the bank) to deposit checks from time to time? It wouldn’t cost anything since you can bank by mail free in America. One thing: Do tell us the total every time the book comes back so we can see what we have: & keep track. I love seeing the account grow & we don’t want to touch it. Bank interest here is a miserly 2% a year, not really worth it compared to the lush 3½% at the Boston 5¢ Bank. The only thing worth buying is National Savings Certificates which mature at 4% in a seven year period. Like Savings Bonds, only of course the percentage starts lower & goes up fast at the end of the period, so if you cash unmatured bonds you really don’t get any more than you put in. The most you can buy is 750 pounds worth which matures to 1000 pounds in 7 years ($2,800). Don’t you think it would be a good idea to buy as many of these as we can with our small poetry account here instead of leaving our poetry account in savings at only 2%? All dollar checks we’ll simply plop into our Boston Savings account.
My maternity clothes are working out beautifully & are very warm. Although my London walking & trudging stairs tired me, I have been in surprisingly good health, probably because of the fresh air & exercise. I am taking your Vitamin C pills, 3 calcium pills & 3 iron pills a day. The iron pills my London doctor prescribed & they cost me 12¢, the token fee for filling a doctor’s prescription under the Health System. I also get (or should) a reduction in milk price & vitamins after I send in a certain form to the Ministry of Pensions, as an expectant mother. My doctor explained their system to me & it sounds very sensible. I will have the baby at home & I think this emotionally will be reassuring to me. As I probably said before hospitals here keep you 12 days, only 2 allow husbands to be around during labor etc., food is poor usually, sleep almost impossible with this hospital routine & only in abnormal cases do doctors deliver babies anyway. As soon as I tell the doctor my address next week, he will introduce me to the local midwife (a respected profession here) who will deliver the baby: he himself will stand by to give injections or analgesia if necessary. The midwife will come twice a day thereafter to help me bathe and care for the baby & instruct me about it. Ted’s presence will be a great comfort & he will take wonderful care of me. I’ll also probably go to a clinic for relaxing exercises & labor preparations as soon as we move in to our flat. I shall be relieved when the landlord’s* signed copy of the lease arrives!
Delighted to hear you manage to get more tights. I am sure they are a main reason, along with vitamins & fresh air for me not getting a cold. We love to hear about Sappho: you paint such vivid pictures of her. I think we stuck the addressed envelopes to the Atlantic for the 2 NYorker stories in the bookcase in Warren’s room (your room). I’d love to see some of those photos of grammy! I wrote Marion thanks before we left, in her Christmas card. So touched to hear Madeleine Sheets* wishing she might be my nurse; how I’d love to have her! I remember her wonderful combination of absolute efficiency & capability with her warmth and tenderness. Do tell her I love her for thinking of it.
Just drop the little enclosed card in the mail to the Academy of Poets, will you? They put an American stamp on it. And forward all our mail here to the Beacon. We won’t be moving in to our flat (3 Chalcot Square, London N.W.1) until after February 1st anyway, or a few days later. We’ll be at the 18 Rugby St. address this Wednesday night for a few days, to see my doctor, hunt for a bed, stove, etc. We hope too to have a phone without having to wait too long & if all goes well I should be able to talk to you right after the baby is born; or if I am voiceless, Ted will call right away. I can’t imagine it being anything but a Nicholas. In the Drs. office I heard a mother say “I’ve brought Nicholas in” just by chance, & even Briget Bardot has given birth to a Nicholas.* Otherwise we’ll have to get used to Katharine Frieda. From now on I hope to write at least once a week & more fully, of course, when we get settled. Maybe by the time you come in 1961 we’ll have moved into a place big enough to put you up, but meanwhile, we’ll just cross our fingers & look forward to that time
All our love to you & Warren,
xxx
Sivvy
PS: I don’t think there’s anything to add to the bank deposit slip enclosed in the envelope except the number of the bank book which I don’t have.
I’ve been expecting a few bills which I can pay by what’s left in my Wellesley Fells checking account which I hope to close soon & wonder if they’ve come yet. One from Dr. Brownlee (though he really did nothing for my ear), the Music Box & maybe another odd one or so. Do send them right on.
I’ve just washed my hair & tights & so feel much recovered. Mrs. Hughes made us some nice deep-fried haddock in batter for lunch. That is something she does well. The other thing is rice pudding, which as you may well imagine I let Ted devour. I have some steak & lettuce, which I shall soon wash & mix with some French dressing I made & eat a bowl of. Also oranges, which I squeeze for breakfast on an implement made to squeeze half a small lemon & hold just that much juice. I guess I am inclined to be more critical because I wish she were more like you . . . that I could learn things from her about cooking, babycare, etc. But I must really be a terror of a daughter-in-law, (Ted always brags of my cooking), typing away all day & measuring ingredients & eating meat rare & not falling into the rhythm of starches, sweets & tea which I am sure is the ruin of British teeth & health. So I shall concentrate on the good things she does: sewing, for example, & making excellent light fried foods; & gossip about Ted & London.* Once we get our own flat & the baby comes, we won’t be visiting so much anyway, & when I do visit I’ll feel more inclined to be sociable. When I’m critical I find it hard to hide it, as you know, & I’ve specially kept out of the kitchen today & eaten what she’s made & praised it etc. She’s really very warm & good-hearted & if anything, I think, inclined to be a bit frightened of me, so I’ll try to relieve that.
Funny how critical one’s inclined to be of one’s own relatives: yet in comparison to one’s inlaws how flawless & superior they seem! I remember how angry I was with Frank & Dot for that underhand business with grampy’s money; well, Ted’s Uncle Walter really infuriates me on occasion, fat & entertaining & apparently fond enough of us as he is. Ted used him as a financial reference, or social reference, at the agents’ in London & they wrote asking if Ted would be responsible in paying a 9 guinea a week rent (for that furnished place we wanted first). We heard this weekend that Walter had been scared by this letter, thought it was too much rent, Ted might run out of money “the year passes so fast”, & he didn’t know if he should write them. He also obviously feared he might be held responsible for Ted’s not paying, a ridiculous thing for any business man to think. I was naturally outraged. Of course Ted will explain to him & get him to write something, but to think that that man has millions, or a million, earns $2,000 interest from stocks and shares every month or so & buys his mad daughter fur coats & diamond rings & highbred dogs, when Olwyn, Gerald & Ted & one other cousin are his other heirs, is so queer as to be unbelievable. Of course, it is a similar irony in our own family that Dotty & Joe have so much more money than we & couldn’t have children of their own. Walter & his wife must secretly feel that the
Hughes are intelligent & handsome & by definition deserve none of their help. Our lives could be quite different if Walter were enlightened. Houses in certain areas in London, like ours (once fancy private homes, then slums & boarding houses, now being done-over in a modern way) can be bought for very little now (4,000 pounds, for example) & gradually renovated (as ours is), many with back gardens, lived in, the top floors rented at high rents with as strict limits as one likes about tenants’ quietness, & literally provide an income, as does the Merwins’. We’d love to do something like this: buy a house in London with a garden, modernize the 1st two floors, with studies, modern kitchen, play area, & also fix up the top two floors & rent them to quiet people. The demand for housing in London is constant & fantastic. $45 a week is moderate for a clean furnished flat with bathroom, kitchen, & about 3 other rooms. When the Merwins travel abroad, they rent their two floors to people who love cats (they have a marvelous Siamese), won’t enter Bill’s study, have no children, etc. And pay very high. The marvel about London houses is this back-garden in the better ones: you literally have flowers & trees in midcity, quiet, & all the advantages of city life. Ideally, we’d like a London house we could rent & get income from when away from it, & a little cottage by the sea, not the horrible compromise of a house in a dreary suburb. Commuting to London is lethal. In rush hours it takes about 2 hours to merely get across the city! Anyway, if we ever had any windfalls or won the pools, we’d look around for the right house. The thing to do is get it before it is done over. Dido Merwin did over hers from a bombed ruin & it is now a mansion. She bought it for 1,000 pounds just after the war. It is at the end of a deadend lane* facing directly onto Primrose Hill & their two top floors (they rent the bottom two) look out over endless miles of treetops. Bit by bit they have made it a mansion, using rents to improve it. She’s a marvelous practical woman & I hope to learn all sorts of things from her. Our landlord, for example, makes a living buying up houses in rundown but pleasant areas, painting them & putting in bathrooms on every floor. From our house, for example, he must get over $100 a week. What one needs is the capital & the shrewdness & imagination. Dido’s friends have almost all done this sort of thing. Investment in certain London real estate is a very solid thing, especially if you live in the place you buy & do a lot of the work, painting & finishing & so on. Well, enough of that. I would just love the chance of ending rent-paying & getting an income as well as a house of our own in London.
Do write soon & forward our letters.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Brian Cox*
Saturday 16 January 1960
TLS, University of Kansas
c/o Huws
18 Rugby Street
London W.C.1
January 16, 1960
Dear Mr. Cox,
I was pleased and honoured to hear* that “Medallion” has been chosen for one of the Critical Quarterly awards.* I should be very happy if you wish to consider the other poems* for publication in the magazine.
I wonder if you would be so good as to have my first name written out in full under the poem; if there’s not time to do this before the poem goes to the printers I can always write it in on the corrected proof.
With all good wishes,
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tues.–Fri. 19–22 January 1960
TLS/ALS* (aerogramme), Indiana University
Tuesday, January 19
Dear mother,
It is about 3:30 in the afternoon. I am sitting in the parlor with the coal fire burning and a wet, sleety blizzard blowing outside against the windows, making the most of the dying light. The electricity mysteriously went off as I was about to heat some soup for lunch & heaven knows when it will come on again. Luckily I had just that moment finished baking a batch of oatmeal cookies to take down to London with us tomorrow. The stove here is electric (very poor for baking of any sort) & I’m glad not to have wasted my efforts. We have our lease cleared for the unfurnished flat in 3 Chalcot Square, London N.W.1 & will get a gas stove for that. We’ll put what would have been our shipfare to America from the Guggenheim into a stove, a bed & mattress, &, I hope, into a small refrigerator. Unfurnished here means literally nothing: not even cupboards. We do have one small closet & will have to store most of our stuff for the time-being in our trunks until we get together a few bureaus. The main thing at this point though, is a pleasant location in London itself & nearness to my doctor. In a year, or a year and a half, we can move to a bigger place. Probably we won’t be even barely settled in the apartment till the first week in February (our lease starts the 1st), so forward all mail here to the Beacon until February 1st. Would it be too much trouble to send on to us those 3 stories Mademoiselle rejected,* if they are not too dogeared to send out again? Send them by sea mail.
It has been a real treat to bathe & wash my hair & clothes & sit around in my warm bathrobe over french toast and coffee in the mornings after the horrible two weeks in London. We’ll be going down again tomorrow till the weekend for my doctor’s appointment & to see if we can pick out a stove & bed to be installed & delivered by February 1st. Both of us look forward to having a place of our own & gradually accumulating pieces we like. Of course I have to wrestle with myself not to hanker after the things I left at home---the iron & board, the kitchen cupboard, china set, & most of all my beautiful mixing bowls which I preferred to leave than risk breaking. Objects do exert such a tyranny over one. There would have been so much I could borrow from home, too, if we’d been in America: the baby bureau and so on. Mrs. Hughes has given me two pure wool crib blankets, one pink & one blue, which are very nice, & I have just heard, o joy, that there is a diaper service in London (which I must investigate) which would be a godsend as I don’t have a washmachine & will have enough to do without that. Drying space is the big problem here---no leaving things in the bathroom overnight, or down the cellar. When & if we buy a London house we will put in central heating & an American kitchen!
London: Friday January 22 – Arrived two days ago to find the lovely tights & mail waiting for us. Do forward Harper’s letter* of acceptance of Mushrooms* – if they sent any. I need to see that kind of mail now. Could you put the two checks straight into our Boston 5¢ account along with the 3 checks I sent with the silly card last week. Your bed letter came in good time – we made what I hope will be a few good investments in these exhausting 3 days. Saw my doctor – the young one of the pair I’ve signed up with who I feel great trust in – I was tired & tearful from just the burden of all this walking about & decision making & he showed very kind & helpful understanding, prescribed a sedative & advised Ted to have me rest in Yorkshire a week (we go back tomorrow) & was immensely reassuring about the baby
most) this should be durable. We ordered a big size (costs more) at £59 ($165). Is that outrageous? These two are our main purchases – eating & sleeping being the center of one’s existence, after all, & we will have them when the year’s rent is gone. We also picked out a mottled black linoleum for bathroom, kitchen & hall floors (about $30) – the floorboards are awful – big, uneven, unfinished. We’ll paint them French grey in livingroom & bedroom. Chose lovely rose paper for bedroom – white with exquisite pink roses – not cabbage, or bundles at abt $2.50. An 11 yard roll, a white ground with pleasant gay rose-red & green pattern of figures for two main opposing walls of the kitchen (a washable paper) at less than $2 a roll (the other 2 little opposing walls we’ll paint white). Bathroom (minute) we have a black, brown & white print for – little cars, trains, birdcages wittily drawn & will waterproof it – I felt I could be daring there. Hall & living room we’ll paint white ourselves & hang our pictures & put up bookcases. I’ll send samples of the paper. The place always makes us very happy after each visit, no matter how tired & shop soiled we are & the location is near 2 charming parks & a marvelous shopping center.