by Sylvia Plath
I am so happy you like your work with Dr. Noall* (Know-all, a formidable name for a Professor!) and am eager to hear all you can tell us about it. Wouldn’t it be lovely if you too got assigned to lecture in England! Please do take special care of yourself in this precarious weather. The illusion of spring has receded here, & it is again grey, damp & wintry. Ted’s book is officially out here tomorrow: do let us know when you get your copies. I am so proud of it. His story anthology should be out next fall, along with my book of poems, his children’s book much later, in winter. Glad to hear of the tiny Partisan Review cheque* arriving & the note from the Yale Series. I wonder when & if my book will come out in America: it is a good, fat solid 50-poem book now & deserving of print there. I naturally would be very happy to be recognized in my own country!
Ted took me to the Regent’s Park Zoo Monday afternoon & we had a wonderful time: saw the lions, tigers & birds of prey fed. One of the most undepressing zoos I’ve been to & a superb place for children: they have free pony rides in the summer & an enclosure of little common animals, rabbits, chicks, lambs, etc., for the children to pet. The reptile house is excellent: enormous anacondas, pythons & stone-age-looking white Chinese crocodiles. Great wierd rhinoceros, elephants, monkeys of all sorts. The most frightening specimen I think is the monkey-eating eagle which stares with mad blue eyes from under a feathery mop of hair past a fearsome bluish beak at a children’s playground right in view of it, probably taking them for hairless monkeys. I do so wish we’d thought to go through Daddy’s books before we left! If you found any Fabre books, or books with engravings & good illustrations, could you send a few on some day? Ted joins me in sending much love to you, Warren, & Sappho!
xxx
Sivvy
PS – Have you ever tried this recipe for red cabbage? It’s especially good with pork or sausages. Warren should like it: Sauté an onion or two, chopped fine, with a few strips of bacon, cubed. Add a cut-up red cabbage, shredded, which has been soaked in cold water, 2 tart cooking apples, sliced fine, a handful of raisins or sultanas & a cup of cider or red wine. Cover tightly & simmer for 2 hours, adding more cider or wine when* the first is absorbed – do try it!
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 24 March 1960
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Thursday, March 24
Dearest mother,
It was so good to get your letter yesterday & hear how people are asking about the baby. It isn’t due till the 27th (since it evidently isn’t going to arrive early I wish it would come on that day to keep up family tradition!) and may of course be tardy. Another girl who goes to my doctor had hers two weeks late. So don’t get too impatient. Of course, I am very impatient. This last month has seemed an eternity & I find it difficult to imagine this eager waiting will ever end. As I perhaps said, our phone PRIMROSE 9132 is working. The elusive little paperer has come & fixed our three delinquent walls & Ted has painted them. It only remains to paint one wall of the kitchen & the little hall a rose-vermilion, fix a windowcord, put up a kitchen shelf curtain . . . little things. Helga very sweetly hemmed two ceiling-to-floor length green corduroy drapes for the bedroom (which I cut & pinned) on her machine, so now the bedroom is pitchdark at night & the 4 o’clock dawn light doesn’t wake me anymore. Of course the baby will soon take care of that! Anyhow, the dark forest-green looks handsome with the rose-wallpaper & white woodwork. We are delighting in our place more every day & Ted is back at work at his desk, much happier. He gets almost nervously sick when he hasn’t written for a long time, & really needs careful handling. Once he has time & space to write, he is fine. That is the one thing I must always fight to give him: & these last 5 months have been a hard enough fight.
I was very sorry to hear about your laryngitis: ironically, your letter came just as I have lost my voice. This follows on the end of a very trying sinus-cold I came down with Saturday, after a Saturday dinner I gave for Helga & Danny Huws & their Madeline & Barbara & David Ross (she is an English teacher for foreigners & he the diabetic stockbroker) & their little Simon. I thought it might well be the last entertaining I do for some time, & both of those couples have been so kind, immeasurably, I wanted them. Simon’s diaper came loose & he smeared a large mess over the floor before indignant Madelin brought him to our notice, so Barbara popped him in our tub. Both children are beautiful, healthy & very amusing. Helga is due for a second in November & is very happy about it. My cold really knocked me out for two or three days, but Ted has been an angel, cooking, washing & waxing the kitchen floors, doing the last painting & getting me strong nosedrops & almost drowning me with honey & vinegar. As a result, my head is still stuffed, but I am no longer runny & twitchy & in excellent spirits. Glad to get the cold over with before the baby comes, even at the last minute. I only hope you haven’t had a cold: loss of voice is usually the warning sign of too much fatigue. Take care of yourself! How I wish you & Warren could be miraculously transported over here to see the baby! I do so instinctively expect a Nicholas Farrar I hope I won’t be too shocked at a Frieda Rebecca!
A picture & little writeup about Ted & his new book came out in THE QUEEN (a sort of posh ladies’ magazine like VOGUE) along with 4 other young writers this week. He’s written the BBC (at my suggestion, he is too modest to think of it himself) he is in London, & they have suggested 2 programs he might work up: one autobiographical & one an editing & reading of poems on animals---which would mean very good fees. Ironically, the editor of HARPER’S BAZAAR in America wrote Ted raving about “The Rain Horse” which she’d read in the London Magazine & offering $275 for it. Of course we’ll have to say it’s been done in America. But it’s nice to have the story get such wide, enthusiastic notice.
My Irish midwife came yesterday, very cheering, pointed out all the baby’s parts to me & its position. She too is a sinus-sufferer & so was hearteningly sympathetic. Your copy of the Ladies Home Journal arrived on the best possible day: Monday, when I was too miserable with my cold for anything but that. I read it from cover to cover & enjoyed it immensely. Perfect sickbed reading!
It is a fair, sunny day. Birds singing. Children playing in the square. But I am not going out at all now, lest I prolong my cold. Very cosy indoors. Felt well enough to make a banana bread, applesauce & chicken liver paté. Ted made a great vegetable soup. Saw both parts of Sergei Eisenstein’s marvelous tour de force IVAN THE TERRIBLE* last week with the Merwins. A marvelous folklore library is just down the street from us.* I think I’d rather live in London that anywhere in the world: and get a seaside cottage in Cornwall someday too! This flat is the most delightful we’ve ever lived in. Ted’s going to work on a libretto* for a modern young Chinese opera-composer we met at Yaddo. I hope that works out. Both of us send love to you & Warren
xxx
Sivvy
*PS: Wonderful news via telegram just came for Ted – he’s got the Somerset Maugham Award* for his book – about £400 – just over $1,000 – which has to be spent ‘enlarging his worldview’ in about 3 months abroad. We are envisioning the Greek islands next winter & all sorts of elegant sun-saturated schemes.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Edith & William Hughes
Friday 25 March 1960*
ALS with envelope, Emory University
PS – Please send on any clippings you see reviewing Ted’s book! We never see any papers here, it seems!
Love to all.
S.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sat.–Mon. 26–28 March 1960
TLS (aerogramme),* Indiana University
Saturday noon: March 26
Dearest mother,
Well, all is quiet & uneventful. I somehow imagine I should be seeing large comets or lions in the street at this point, but can’t believe the baby will ever come. I sort of expected it early---didn’t we
arrive early?---and really am set on the 27th, that mystical number for a date now, but this waiting feels ready to go on forever. The diapers came yesterday, no duty, & are neatly stacked under the crib. Only a few things---a bit of painting & hammering--remain to be done around the house. Except for supper at the Merwins Tuesday night I’ve stayed in for a week---annoying, especially as I have my enforced confinement coming any time---but I felt it would be best for my cold. My doctor came to the house after his calls Thursday & prescribed me some wonderful germ-killing spray. My nose still stuffs up, but this clears it immediately & for hours. I am up & about, had my first excellent night’s sleep in a week last night. I keep imagining & looking for twinges; nichts. The only other large expenses we have ahead are a vacuum cleaner, which I may go to order Monday if it is sunny & nothing has occurred, and the pram. What a blessing to have no large doctor’s bills to look askance at!
Your letter about Lupercal arrived today, & we’re so pleased you like it & that the copies came intact. Ted is now in the middle of writing on a second play* & I am convinced it is only a matter of time before he does a stageable one. We got his official letter from the Secretary of the Somerset Maugham Trust today: he’s got the 1960 award “on the strength of the literary quality and promise” of THE HAWK IN THE RAIN. This year the Award is £500! One hundred more than usual. About $1,400. We have to spend it within two years from now by spending “at least three months outside Great Britain and Ireland, with the object, not of having a holiday abroad, but of acquainting yourself with the manners and customs of foreign nations & thereby having an opportunity to increase your experience & knowledge for your future literary benefit.” So we will take the three months in the sunny south (we’ve thought of France, Italy, Greece) either next winter or the one after that. Ideally we’d rent a furnished villa on the Mediterranean, near a large & cosmopolitan enough city so I could register the baby with a doctor & have one of those foreign maid-babysitters so I could have at least 4-6 hours a day free to write too. The prospect of avoiding a dreary English winter & having enough to cover our rent here & a comfortable stay in Europe is very heartening to us both at this point. Of course I shall ask my doctor’s advice about baby-care & plan to get all its injections over with before we go---they do them in the first years here. They ask Ted to write a thank-you note to Maugham in his French Riviera villa: how I would love to meet him! I am especially partial to the French Riviera because of the relative ease in language, but Rome & environs are a possibility---an immense English-speaking civilization there.
We hear the clear song of a certain thrush at dawn each morning. The square is full of children playing something like baseball with flat bats. The daily icecream truck jingles to a stop & the little ones all rush up. Oh, I am so impatient!
Monday noon: March 28. Well, I am about to go out shopping, round as ever. Since the baby did not take advantage of the significant 27th date I am sure it will wait till April Fool’s Day, just to get into the main Plath Month.* Ted’s bought me a marvelous huge covered French earthenware casserole & I cooked a whole pile of little tough pigeons in it (9cents each) & served them* with rice in which I stirred a delectable mixture of fried onions, garlic, raisins & blanched almond slices when it was cooked dry & fluffy. Marvelous. Ted took me to a good French movie “Les Enfants du Paradis”* last night---a period piece about the theater in 1840 France. I think we’ll go to a movie a night now, there are such fine ones here---always 4 or 5 to choose from---or we’ll perish of suspense.
Yesterday, lazing in bed & leafing through the Sunday Observer, I came on a marvelous review of LUPERCAL by A. Alvarez,* the intelligent reviewer (Oxford-Princeton, etc.) who had been approving, but with reservations, about the HAWK. A column & a half: excerpts: “There are no influences to side-track the critic, no hesitations to reassure him. Hughes has found his own voice, created his own artistic world & has emerged as a poet of the first importance . . . What Ted Hughes has done is to take a limited, personal theme and, by an act of immensely assured poetic skill, has broadened it until it seems to touch upon nearly everything that concerns us. This is not easy poetry to read, but it is new, profound & important.” We cooed & beamed all day. At the movie everybody was reading the Observer & some were just at Ted’s review! I turned a bit further: his picture, among the S. African massacres, news about the Maugham Award* & even a note about me “his tall, trim American wife . . . who is a New Yorker poet in her own right.” We’ll send you copies when we get some. Ted is being marvelously good & understanding. He’s as impatient & eager as I, if that’s possible. Well, keep calm for another week.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath
Thurs.–Fri. 31 March–1 April 1960
TLS/ALS, Indiana University
Thursday evening: March 31
Dear mother & Warren . . .
I thought I’d enclose one of those Sunday clippings* about Ted’s prize I wrote you about. It was good getting your letter today with the news about Lowell’s National Book Award*---we love clippings about literary goings-on in America as we have really no other way of keeping in touch. I’ve read the Folk Medicine book* through & enjoyed it, although I think his emphasis on stopping drinking citrus juices is silly & his claims for honey & vinegar (that, for example, it will both reduce you & keep you from losing weight) are a bit extravagant. However, with the assurance it can’t hurt us, we have our dark jar of mixture & spoon out doses daily.
Well, I guess I am going to have an April baby! I never did like the month of March---an exhausted, grubby end-of-the-year month---and except for the magic date 27, really wasn’t too eager to have a baby with a March birthday. Now April is another matter: spring in the very sound of it. Any day will be fine, after the first!
In her infinite wisdom,* the baby is waiting until my cold is all gone (I’m just at the last vestiges now, & feel close to my old self again), till the weather improves (it’s been raw, sleety, utterly grey & nasty till today---which is green, sunny & lambish), and till the very last touches are calmly put on the apartment. My midwife came yesterday & cheered us by laughingly predicting it would arrive at 2 am Sunday: I wish it would, because she is on duty this weekend, & if I had her (there is a shift of 3 midwives) I’d be overjoyed: we both are very fond of her. I saw my doctor today who examined me inside & out and said everything was ripe & ready for my having the baby in the next few days.
I am planning to wash & wax the kitchen floors tomorrow, wash my hair, etc. etc., so maybe the baby will be traditional & reward me by coming Saturday. I’ve finished sewing green corduroy curtains like those in the bedroom to cover my long & short sets of kitchen shelves, so now, when I have the pots & dishes put away, I can draw the curtains & the kitchen doesn’t look “busy”. We’ll probably paint the hall tomorrow. And I’ll go look at vacuums. As the doctor said, the baby can’t get much bigger. He estimates about 8 pounds.
Ted & I took a lovely quiet walk this evening, under the thin new moon, over the magic landscape of Primrose Hill & Regent’s Park: all blue & misty, the buds a kind of nimbus of green on the thorn trees, daffodils & blue squills out on the lawns & the silhouettes of wood pigeons roosting in the trees. A heavenly hour of peace & easy strolling, our first in weeks, what with my sinus cold & the atrocious weather.
I think, while I have the time & energy, I will write letters to people like Marty, Patsy, etc., & leave space to put a note about the baby & have Ted mail them when it comes. I want to have nothing to do after it comes, so am busying myself, cleaning house, etc. now. Waiting for Dot’s meatloaf in the oven. Will make a big fish soup tomorrow.
Ted’s been getting a flood of letters from all sorts of people about his award, a real stack of mail. Two requests to give readings (one in June, with me & someone else,* & one in December, which would pay about $35 for the hour), editors asking for poems, old friends stirred into writing, etc. I must type answers for him tomorrow, or they’ll never get done.<
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Well, I’ll put this aside for a day, in case I collect any more news.
PS*
April 1st: 1:15 pm: Well, just twelve hours ago I woke up groggy from two sleeping pills after one hour hardwon sleep & everything began. The miraculous rapidity of the delivery amazed even my seasoned doctor & midwife – which is why I had absolutely no anesthesia. The midwife – a capable little Indian woman I had visit me once before, came on her bicycle “to see how I was getting on” about 2 am & planned to see my contractions establish, leave & return after breakfast. In no time I was contracting violently with scarcely a second’s rest – I thought the worst pains, just before the second stage of pushing began, were only the beginning & didn’t see how I could last through 20 more hours of them, & suddenly, at 5, she said I was fully dilated & showed me the baby’s head – a crack of it – in the mirror. She called the doctor, but he was at home & had no anesthesia handy & he came about 5:30 just in time to supervise the delivery. I looked on my stomach & saw Frieda Rebecca* white as flour with the cream that covers new babies, little funny dark squiggles of hair plastered over her head, with big dark blue eyes. At 5:45 exactly. The afterbirth came shortly after. Ted was there the whole time, holding my hand, rubbing my back & boiling kettles – a marvelous comfort. I couldn’t take my eyes off the baby – the midwife sponged her beside the bed in my big pyrex mixing bowl & wrapped her up well, near a hot water bottle in the crib – she sucked at me a few minutes like a little expert & got a few drops of colostrum & then went to sleep. From where I sit propped up in bed I can see her, pink & healthy, sound asleep. We can’t imagine now having favored a boy! Ted is delighted. He’d been hypnotizing me to have a short easy delivery – well, it wasn’t “easy,” but the shortness carried me through. I slept an hour or two after calling you – feel I could get up & walk about, but am of course, wobbly. The miracle is how after my sinus siege of two weeks & sleepless nights I should be lucky to have only 4½ hours labor – “A wonder child” the midwife said. Of course, of course! Ted brought me breakfast – I’d vomited up all that meatloaf at the start of labor – & a tuna salad, cheese & V-8 lunch which I’ve just finished with gusto. I feel light & thin as a feather. The baby is, as I said 7 lbs 4 oz, 21 inches long – and, alas, she has my nose! On her, though, it seems quite beautiful. Well, I have never been so happy in my life. The whole American rigmarole of hospitals, doctors’ bills, cuts & stitches, anesthesia etc. seems a nightmare well left behind. The midwife came a second time at 11 am & will come again at tea time to wash me & care for the baby. I’ll write soon again –