The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2

by Sylvia Plath

  As I say, Ted’s been getting all sorts of requests. One just came from a boy’s school in Canterbury for a reading (with fee & accommodation) next fall. I hope to go along with the Pooker to see that lovely town. Of course his animal poems are naturals for reading to young people. He wrote out a 10 page single-space sheaf of notes explaining his poems for Mrs. Prouty which I’ve typed up & sent off: she is so willing to try them out, we wanted to give her all the help necessary.*

  You will probably get a letter from Ted’s mother* about her visit. I could see the dear woman was trying to notice everything, what I wore & all, to tell you. The baby was very good on the whole. Tell Betty Aldrich I dressed her up in the dear little pink outfit with the blue embroidered Pooh, Piglet & Eyore on it for her first Sunday with relatives. We propped her up on a blue pillow which just matched her eyes, & with her little smiles she looked an angel. I’m feeding her a teacup full of cereal (instant Farex) twice a day now, & she wolfs it down, smacking, getting her hands in it, making humming noises. Today I’m going to try pureed carrots for lunch. Orange juice upsets her stomach yet, & causes her to spit up her last feed, even if I wait two hours to give it to her. When I try giving her cod liver oil she pretends she doesn’t know what a spoon is for & deftly dribbles it all down her collar, so the doctor is prescribing another kind of drops, less fishy. I took her to the Clinic Thursday, at her 10 week mark, & she weighs 10 pounds 13 ounces. Her hair seems to be lightening in front, & her eyes are beautiful & blue as ever. We are mad about her.

  I’m enclosing a check for $32 to add to our Boston writing account. Ted has just finished his second verse play: marvelously amusing & vivid, making his first one seem mere scratchwork in preparation. We’ll try this with the BBC & the Poets Theater in Cambridge at home. They obviously want to do something by him there now his reputation’s rocketed so, & were willing to do a reading of his first, & probably a performance if he rewrote it, but now we’re withdrawing that, as he doesn’t want it done, feels there’s no poetry in it. This one is a marvelous thing. I was fascinated every minute. About a revolution’s effect on the inhabitants of a mayor’s farmhouse. He is also working---in his spare moments---on a novel about Yorkshire, which I am delighted about. Spurred, I think, by a review of a book on Yorkshire miners written by a young American journalist he was asked to try by the Nation.* I do hope they print it. He felt, of course, that he could do much better. And so he could.

  Did I tell you we’ve seen the black & white line drawings for his children’s book? Very fine & witty, for college people as well as children I feel. We’ll get reams of copies & have fun giving them to the Aldriches & all our other friends: a real gift book. I can’t wait to see the book itself. Ted got a very heartening notice from Fabers in the mail today: his book is selling so steadily & well (for poetry) that they are doing a second printing of it! So soon! We are delighted.

  The marvelous box of baby-things arrived this morning. They are darling. I held them up in front of her & she gooed at them. I think you are dressing her for your arrival next summer! I find it hard to believe she will ever be big enough to fit them! Do by all means wash the things before you send them so they can go second hand. You have no idea how much it means to me to dress her in partly American clothes. I must find a good baby store over here, though.

  My vacuum also has paper bags, a very odd semi-hemisphere shape, since the machine is round. I do hope they plan to keep them in stock for the next 20 years! By the way, I have been disturbed by finding a number of clothes moths flitting about. I only have our big trunk to store our woolens in: how can I guard against the moths & where do they come from? I think I will go to Dido Merwins dentist on Harley street. He is not National Health, but she says if you want to keep your teeth, you pay a dentist. We are so lucky to be able to profit by her wisdom. I’m keeping the house full of June roses from their garden.

  How did the kittens invade your room? How adorable they must be. Congratulations to you & Warren on your exam results! What is Warren doing this summer? Ted’s mother brought down a German flash camera they bought at a low price from the father of a boy who stole hundreds of dollars worth, no, bought, hundreds of dollars worth of goods after he ran away with his parents savings, & lived in great style in a hotel till his parents caught up with him. The camera was among his booty, & the poor father trying to get some money back. So we’ll try to get a few good pictures now.

  Love from us all,

  Sivvy

 

  PS – I’m enclosing a proof of one of the poems* The Atlantic accepted & which an Edinburgh printer offered to set up in Christmas leaflets free of charge – another admirer of Ted’s work.

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Friday 24 June 1960

  TLS, Indiana University

  Friday: June 24

  Dear mother,

  These pictures,* taken when Frieda was 10 weeks old, the week Ted’s mother came, give more of an idea of her. I love the one where she’s looking up adoringly at Ted. The two larger snapshots were taken by Ann Davidow at Knole, & while the baby coyly stuck her hands in front of her face, I think they’re good of Ted & myself. I’m sending these straight along to you & having another set made up from the negatives for us.

  Last night Ted & I went to a cocktail party at Fabers given for WH Auden. I drank champagne with the appreciation of a housewife on an evening off from the smell of sour milk and diapers. During the course of the party Charles Monteith, one of the Faber board, beckoned me out into the hall. And there Ted stood, flanked by TS Eliot, WH Auden, Louis MacNiece on the one hand & Stephen Spender on the other, having his photograph taken.* “Three generations of Faber poets there,” Charles observed. “Wonderful!” Of course I was immensely proud. Ted looked very at home among the great. Then we went to the Institute of Contemporary Arts & read our poems to an audience of about 25-30 young people with another poet (or, rather, non-poet, very dull).*

  Thanks for the notes on moths. We love hearing about the progress of Sappho’s babies: they seem to be having about the same care as ours! I’m sending along this little check by the way for deposit in our Wellesley account. Very grey here today; yesterday it poured, thundered & lightened. I am trying to arrange a little nap for myself in the afternoon. I get tired so easily. After a midnight curfew like last night, getting up at 6 am to feed Frieda (yes, we call her that now & it seems to suit her: we did really intend to name her after Aunt Frieda; she can take Rebecca if she goes through a romantic stage) I am exhausted by noon. I have kept up a schedule this week of going over to the study in the mornings, Ted giving Frieda her morning cereal which holds her till I come back. I am at the depressing painful stage of trying to start writing after a long spell of silence, but the mornings at the study are very peaceful to my soul & I am infinitely lucky we can work things out so I get a solid hunk of time off, or, rather, time on, a day. Ted goes in the afternoons. He has written three or four very good poems toward a third book. Now he is out at a rare book dealers* who is going to sell the manuscripts of his two books to the University of Indiana, we hope, for a few hundred dollars. Of course they’ll be worth more later, but he’ll have other manuscripts then & we can do with the money now, skimping along as we are on the end of the Guggenheim which ended officially May 31st. Glad you liked the New Yorker poem. I should have another about women in a Spanish fishing village coming out this summer. Now I need to write some more I can sell to them. Ted is a marvel of understanding: helps me with dishes or a meal when he sees I’m especially tired & is strongly behind my having 3-4 hours of writing & study time a day. And he is wonderful with the baby, who dotes on him.

  Well I shall sign off for now with love to you & Warren and Sappho and progeny.

  Your own,

  Sivvy

  TO Dido & W. S. Merwin

  Friday 24 June 1960

  TLS,* Pierpont Morgan Library

  Dear Bill and Dido,

  It is a wet, ghoulishly grey
evening, mucky-muggy, and all peaceful here, Frieda sleeping without murmer, very nice of her, and a big blanquette de veau conjuring up the two of you, your spirits at least, on the stove. Making your recipes, Dido, is a delectable rite in memory of you. Gradually we have got the baby so we can more or less not notice her, be surprised by her, so to speak, when we go into the bedroom. She’s so funny, very droll and smiley with queer singsong noises she thinks is conversation, that we’re entertained and wonder how we ever did without her. I’ve at last come out of my little treadmill of domesticity and now spend mornings in the study while Ted works at home, and he spends afternoon there. This is a very good arrangement for us both and it is absolute heaven for me to get away for 3 or 4 hours from the innumerable little umbilical cords tying me to icebox, phone, doorbell, baby and so on. Ted is relatively impervious.

  Last night we went to the Faber party for Auden. I go mainly for the champagne, which I find more interesting than Auden, & consider it a duty to my thwarted sybarite soul to consume at least a bottle. We had a good time; I met McNeice, for whome I feel sort of amused and fond; he’s a bit of a mess, but nice. Isn’t Hedli Anderson* a superb splurge of colours? all flamey haired, green lidded, and encased in an expanse of vast flowery stuff. Spender there, very drunk; his wife drunker. Eliot amiable and ditto his blonde strawberry and cream wife. Afterwards we left for the ghastly ICA. Luckily we were well fortified with champagne, so managed to get through the evening in the angularly and marmoreally modern Dover Street rooms. An Alan Brownjohn, a nonpoet, read with us, short, fat-handed, dull, all the curses and a teacher too. Of the deaf. However, there was no yattering from the bar, which seemed closed. Wine and dry sandwiches were laid on for us. I am getting very commercial about reading for free, since it costs us a good deal for a baby-sitter. Money is the one argument.

  The larkspur are magnificent, very hot blue-purple. I am especially fond of the little rose bushes at the back there, one with quite small pinky red blooms and another with hot orangey ones. All of sudden one day last week the central heating men vanished, an amazing feat. The day before I’d picked my way upstairs over pipes and an infinite array of queer dangerous bits of metal, the phone man was tinkering and I think somebody was there about plumbing. The next day not a stray nail and a shiny new boiler affair radiating potential efficiency from the closet. Popo has become madly affectionate after so crueely ignoring me last winter: every step of the stair he is plastered like a fur poultice against my ankles, saying whaat? whaat? Arnold Wesker’s trilogy* is in the middle of playing here, so we’ll try to see it. Do you know his things? Also Brecht’s Galileo,* which I don’t know at all. Soon, soon,

  Love to you both from us all,

  Love,

  Sylvia

  TO Ann Davidow-Goodman

  Wednesday 29 June 1960

  TLS (aerogramme), Smith College

  Wednesday afternoon: June 29

  Dear Ann,

  The pictures arrived, with your welcome letter, and they are splendid. I don’t know whether it’s your camera or the kindly spirit you took them in (a little of both I suspect), but we have never had any really good pictures of the two (now three) of us together, and these are It. We are delighted.

  Strange, isn’t it, that we had to hit upon London for our ten-year rendezvous. I felt all that time evaporate---a feat, when you consider what we must have crammed into that time on our separate courses. And it was wonderful to meet Leo. I can’t tell you how he impressed us, so brilliant, kind, versatile & so very handsome, A match, a match. He dropped by briefly one afternoon a couple of days ago, extremely tan, or, rather, bronze, from horseriding he says. We extracted a promise that he return so we can all go to see Brecht’s Galileo together when he comes to London for good.

  I am gradually getting my nose above crib-level and going over to our study-on-loan after breakfast till lunch---as yet not the full four hours I plan to have, since I am pokey.* Ted feeds Frieda her cereal & milk from the bottle in mid-morning, angel that he is. Then he has the whole afternoon at the study. I am in that desert of trying to get back to work after over half a year silence, feeling very rusty & superficial, & wondering, as ever, if I shall ever do a good poem again. Ted says its a deal about trading a LET’S DRAW for a MEET MY FOLKS. We hope we see it in print this winter, in time for Christmas, but don’t know just when. The artist evidently agreed to put in some Heath-Robinson* inventions for Uncle Dan,* but didn’t dare put a fiercer head on the thistle. And he’s leaving the American flags off the cover, I think.

  We hired a babysitter from the agency last week for one of our rare jaunts to town together (a white-haired little ex-chicken-farmer came, who had lost several fingers with foul pest & called Frieda “the nipper”) to meet W. H. Auden at a cocktail party at Ted’s publishers. I always hate meeting famous people at Affairs as I never can think of anything to say to them in that passing moment of introduction. But I do love the champagne Faber’s serves & made a point to polish off the better part of a bottle. Ted had his picture taken with the other Faber Poets, Eliot, Auden, Spender & MacNiece, & it evidently came out in the Times,* which I haven’t seen yet, but I was very proud of him. When one is so close to the red side of a checking account, there need to be compensations.

  We miss you immensely. But hope at least to have a visit or two with Leo before he returns.

  Love from us three,

  Syl

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Thursday 30 June 1960

  TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University

 

  June 30: Thursday pm

  Dear mother,

  I hope by now you have the little snapshots of Frieda Rebecca I sent. Surely we are not doting to think she is a pretty, lively baby. I took her this morning for her second series of triple-shots (whooping cough, diptheria & tetanus). She should be through all her shots by eight months. I feed her cereal in the morning now, a vegetable (carrots or peas) in the strained Heinz can (not jars, alas; she eats half a can at a time) for lunch, and cereal, or one of the strained-fruit & cereal combinations for supper. She has a wonderful humor. This week she triumphantly started sucking her thumb. Usually I let her suck on one of those rubber pacifiers (dummies, they are called here) & this satisfies her great urge to suck at this stage. I give her concentrated rose hip syrup (three times as much vitamin C as orange juice) in 4 ounces of water once a day between meals & she drinks it to the last drop. I’m also cautiously experimenting with concentrated orange juice greatly diluted in water, after her spitting upset the first time I gave it to her. She drinks some, but doesn’t like it as much as the sweeter syrup.

  Something odd happened to me today which both elated & depressed me. I was walking the baby about the neighborhood after her injection, the air too cold & windy to go far, and half-dreamily let my feet carry me down a road I’d never been down before. I came up another street I seldom if ever use a block away & saw a house being painted & papered with a Freehold for sale sign. Now Freehold houses (outright yours after buying) are rare in London: most have 99 year leases from an agency which keeps ownership, or, if they are freehold, have “part possession” which means they are let out, a couple of floors at least, to people under the old rent control laws which means they only pay a couple of dollars a week & don’t have to move out. All seeming very odd to me, but I’m learning bit by bit. Of course houses are expensive here, as they are in any place where there is immense & continuous demand. But in our area, really quite slummy, there is great opportunity to get a house for less than it will be in even a few years, as it is just beginning to be fancied up. I was so excited about this house, 41 Fitzroy Road, the street where Yeats lived,* & one end of it showing the green of Primrose Hill, that I ran home with the carriage & called Ted up at his study. He came to have a look at it. I have been thinking ahead a good deal & this house had just the right number of rooms---built on the narrow plan of the houses here, at the end of a r
ow joined together (very good, quiet on one side) & instead of backing onto another row, overlooking a charming Mews in back, only one floor high, so light floods in. A livingroom, diningroom & large light kitchen on the first floor overlooking a charming quiet little garden with one big tree, two big bedrooms & a bath on the second floor, two bedrooms on the third, & a marvelous big single-room study at the top. The basement, a self-contained flat, is let out, & the rent would be a sort of little income. All quiet, light & spanking clean, with only the floors to be done. Well, of course I had visions of a study for Ted in the attic there, a study for me, a bedroom for us, a nursery for the baby & a room for guests (you) now & the next baby (babies). Plus the dear garden to hang laundry in & put playpens in (It’s a walled garden.) Such a house, behind the posh Regents Park road, yet part of an area not done-up as yet, on a corner, overlooking such a marvelous prospect, is just the Thing. I feel after our 3-year lease here (we could easily sublet this place) I simply don’t want to move into rented rooms again. And Ted needs a study, & the baby will need a room. Thus a house is the only solution, & I’d rather pay off a mortgage than feel a landlord get everything. And we don’t want a house to do up---we just aren’t ready to give the time (or money) to that sort of chancey proposition. This place is priced at 9,250 pounds (multiply by $2.80 for dollars). We called up the London County Council (after being advised by a house agent that they were better than banks or building societies as their rates of interest don’t fluctuate). What they do is send a surveyor to value the property. They loan you 100% of their valuation (which may be less or more than the price) & I guess your payments to them are the mortgage & the difference between their valuation & the price a sort of down-payment, or what you have to pay outright to the owner’s agents. Ted, of course, is much more hesitant than I to commit himself. I just don’t want to touch that $5 thousand in our bank & am loth to jeopardize Ted’s writing which he has just got going. One of us will probably have to take a job this fall in any case, as we are stretching the Guggenheim out till September 1st. Well, I am so tempted to somehow get hold of this place. London is the one place in Europe we could both easily get work & live cheaply in. I am thinking of work myself, if Ted would just feed the baby her noon meal, so he could write (I’ll spill this over onto a second letter, with which I’ll enclose a request to our Wellesley bank to draw out $1,000 & send it over) & earn us something. Have you, by the way, any ideas or suggestions. I do so miss somebody who has had experience in these matters to talk it all over with.