by Sylvia Plath
Take care.
Sivvy
TO Robert Hemenway*
Sunday 7 August 1960
TLS, New York Public Library
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
August 7, 1960
Mr. Robert Hemenway
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York, N.Y.
USA
Dear Mr. Hemenway:
Thank you for your letter.* I am glad you like ON DECK and TWO CAMPERS IN CLOUD COUNTRY.
I think that the three changes you suggest are needed to clarify the poems and hope the following suggestions may meet with your approval.
In ON DECK I do want the transition to be from players of ship’s games to players with the emotions. Shuffleboard certainly does suggest daytime games. Would “The bingo players” be all right with you here? Bingo is an evening game, and I meant “players” to have the slightly wider connotation of “people who habitually play” or “people who are fresh from playing”. This phrase could thus include people out for an airing between games, or after games.
In TWO CAMPERS I agree with you about lichens; they would indeed probably grow on such rocks (although not on the precise rocks I remember). I would like to change the wording to read “These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people,”---widening the reference to all vegetation.
In TWO CAMPERS, seventh stanza, “In a month we’ll forget what plates and forks are for,” is perhaps a little too strong. I’d prefer “In a month we’ll wonder what . . .” which implies plates and forks are still there, but that they seem a bit fancy and superfluous as one descends more and more often to using fingers-easier, quicker, less washing up.
Let me know if you think these changes are helpful, or if you have any more questions. I wonder, by the way, how I should go about obtaining copyright for WATER COLOR OF GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS which appeared in one of your spring issues---I’ve had a request from an anthology for it.*
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tues.–Wed. 16–17 August 1960
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Tuesday: August 16
Dear mother,
I have a feeling I haven’t written for ages so probably haven’t. Ted is off for the afternoon with his friend Danny Huws to look for some sturdy wooden chairs for us in the antique & junk dealers in Portobello Road and Frieda is woo-wooing in bed after her lunch feed preparatory to dropping off for her afternoon nap. Nothing much is new here. I have been getting little surprises ready for Teds birthday tomorrow---a Fortnum & Mason* chicken pie, expensive, but which he loves, a bottle of white wine, a photograph album in which I’ve pasted all our good pictures & written notes under them to encourage us to take more, a jar of maple syrup, and an original (!) painting in bright colors & ink of a sort of Aztec king done by the owner of our local art gallery & I feel marked down for me by his wife out of kindness, this last being the main item. If it’s nice I hope to go on a picnic with him & Frieda in Hampstead Heath or just Primrose Hill, even though I have a dentist appointment early in the morning. I thought I would go to the Merwin’s dentist in Harley street,* even though he is private & not a health system dentist & see if I like him. I am very suspicious of Health Service dentists, although probably if I got a good one I would be as well off as with my doctor-panel. But I am a bit unwilling to risk it. Friday I think we’ll pack off to Yorkshire. Ted is a bit homesick for the moors & I think both of us would benefit by a change. With luck & an express train, the trip should only take half a day. We’ll come down again next Wednesday, in time for Frieda’s vaccination Thursday.
Your lovely package arrived this morning, and the card of the marvellous sad sack, which I’m saving tomorrow to put on top of Ted’s gifts. Perfect timing. The socks are just handsome. I also loved Frieda’s jersey & T-shirt. The little undershirts I tried on, and they are just what I need---very roomy, something for her to grow into. She is popping the seams of her first ones. Thanks so much. Mrs. Churchill* by the way sent the most adorable red & white checked gingham dress with hand smocking. I’ll write & thank her, but you might mention it if you see her. Also please do tell Dot thanks for the cup! I had a suspicion it wasn’t all from grampy. The knife, by the way, had the initials engraved on the wrong side, not that it matters. Do I need to write her a separate letter? I’ve written her before & haven’t had a word from her since the baby came. Why don’t you thank her for me.
We had lunch with one of the editors of the Texas Quarterly* last Saturday at his rented rooms, with several other people. He is a professor & charming, odd man. In addition to taking $100 worth of poems from the two of us,* he is buying one of Ted’s stories (he’s taking back two to decide which) for $100 also. He asked us to bring Frieda, and she was very good, sleeping the whole time. That evening a friend of Ted’s sister, a young Hungarian poet & playwrite,* took us to dinner at a good Hungarian restaurant. I went off on my own last night to save the price of a babysitter & saw Lawrence Olivier in the movie of “The Entertainer”.* An amazing part for him, very much the un-hero.
So glad you saw Mrs. Prouty. We are very concerned about her. Do stay overnight with her if you suspicion she might like it: the rich are so often merely left alone with their servants, oddly enough. I sense Maugham is also lonesome.
Warren was so good to write us on the day of Ted’s book publication. Odd how he describes his dates by height! I have a kind of running graph in my mind of their heights and nothing else. Tell him to send us an autographed copy of his anthology with the essay in it. I’d be very proud to have it. As you were reading your World War II book about Colditz I was finishing Allan Morehead’s Gallipoli:* absolutely fascinating & terrifying. One senses the awful stupidity of generals (all these were safe on islands & boats & utterly out of communication with the soldiers) & the criminal negligence of politicians in this greatest fiasco of the first world war. Ted’s father fought at Gallipoli & a diary in his breast pocket stopped a bullet, so I felt incalculably lucky as I read of the mammoth, pointless slaughters that he survived & fathered the one husband I could imagine. I am trying to have a rigid housework schedule---laundry & market Monday, iron Tuesday, etc. to counteract the otherwise helterskelter days. When one only has one’s inclination to consult, it is too easy to procrastinate. I am managing a fair amount of time for reading---just finished translating a play by Sartre---Le Diable et Le Bon Dieu*---but have had little energy for writing in anything but my diary, and a few light poems,* two of which I think the New Yorker will take. My ms. of poems should come back to you from the Yale contest, which I didn’t win this year: the editor likes witty light verse & I guess mine’s too serious for him. Keep the ms. & use it for scrap.* I do feel sorry no publisher in America seems to want my book, for I am sure it is better than most first books, but I am glad it will come out here. We have been having a few dry sunny days at last after a ghastly cold rainy summer, & I do hope we can get out in Yorkshire. The baby has hardly been out of sweaters all summer. She is getting very clever at holding on to things & still keeps her bright blue eyes, is growing a furze of light brownish second hair. She reminds me very much of shots of Warren when he was a baby. We should soon have more photos to send on.
Love to all,
Sivvy
PS: I’ll be glad to hear your gruelling summer’s over & you’re at the Cape!*
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 27 August 1960
ALS with envelope, Indiana University
Yorkshire: The Beacon
Saturday: August 27
Dear mother –
Ted & I have been up here in Yorkshire for a week, now & I am just beginning to feel that deep peaceful energy that comes from having completely unwound & caught up on months of half-fatigue. We have been simply eating, sleeping & taking long walks. I think you would love it up here – the unique combination of breathtaking scen
ery & invigorating air and no tourists. Ted’s cousin Vicky drove us to Whitby, a British seaside resort, for a day & a night. We took the baby – who is a very good traveler. I always have to do a lot of thinking & preparing beforehand – bottles of orange juice, canned vegetables, diapers – but she is lulled by the motion of cars & trains. Whitby is a fishing port & resort – part of it “quaint” – incredibly steep cobbled streets, vistas of sea, bright painted herringboats, and the ruins of an abbey and old graveyard on one of the headlands with acres of bright pink-lavender heather in full bloom not a mile back – but there is something depressingly mucky about English sea resorts. Of course the weather is hardly ever sheer fair, so most people are in woolen suits & coats & tinted plastic raincoats. The sand is muddy & dirty. The working class is also dirty – candy papers, gum cigarette wrappers. My favorite beach in the world is Nauset & my heart aches for it. I don’t know, there is something clean about New England sand, no matter how crowded. It poured the first day we were there & in spite of our waterproofs we got drenched, doggedly walking at the sea front & climbing the steep cobbled alleys. Thursday morning was fair, so we dried out our tempers & shoes & ambled through the streets to various outlook points – buying Ted & me two identical fisherman’s sweaters of white & black wool for about $6 apiece, and a brown sailcloth top for me & a shirt for Ted.
Ted’s mother has a lovely little garden up here – daisies, roses, poppies brightly surviving in the lee of a black stone wall. I prefer this landscape & air to the sea. If only we had a house to ourselves near none of Ted’s relatives in a similar lonely spot we could get an immense deal done. As Ted says, most people’s problem is lack of ideas, while his is that he has so many ideas & no really settled quiet place to write them. We’re going to ask the lady in the attic above us if he can work there while she’s at her job.
While up here we heard Ted read two poems on the BBC – one a speech from his play & the other called ‘Thistles’. We’ve written Mrs. Prouty & sent her a copy of ‘Thistles’ & some (2) photos of Frieda & Ted & me from this batch I’m sending you.* What do you think of her? She loves playing with her toes & laughs every time I show her her face in the mirror.
I am also enclosing a check from the New Yorker for deposit in our Boston account for $178 – for two bagatelles,* light verse, not poems – I managed to write while going to the Merwin’s study. I really hunger for a study of my own out of hearing of the nursery where I could be alone with my thoughts for a few hours a day. I really believe I could do some good stories if I had a stretch of time without distractions.
I made a meatloaf for supper last night, but have been letting Ted’s mother do most of the cooking. I feel she hardly does anything but gossip & drink tea the year round & If I use her kitchen I feel to want to scrub it from top to bottom, so I’ve taken a vacation of sorts. She has been good about washing the baby’s things – which I usually take to a laundromat at home. But I resolved before I came up that I would not do twice as much work as I do at home, which is what I did over Christmas – cooking for everyone, simply because no one bothered. I use disposable diapers for the baby while we’re away, which are very convenient, if not as absorbent as the cloth ones.
I hope you have been having a good Cape vacation & resting from your arduous summer. Tell us about this new place you’ve gone. The baby is still wearing Mrs. Spaulding’s exquisite sweater & bonnet & bootees – the handsomest things she has.
Lots of love to you & Warren. How is Sappho? What did you do with her while you were away?
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 31 August 1960
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Wednesday: August 31
Dear mother,
Ted & I are back in London, having come down on the train yesterday, and are immensely refreshed after our 10 days in Yorkshire. We only had one day without rain, but in our waterproof slickers and Wellington boots managed frequent good walks through Hardcastle Crags and up around the neighboring farms, admiring new calves and kittens and breathing the absolutely pure clear air. When you come over next summer, you must take a room around the corner at Sutcliffe’s,* an excellent inn with good cooking & reasonable rates, and Ted & I and the baby will stay at his place. It would do us all a world of benefit. Both of us feel to have deeply rested & gotten a valuable perspective on our lives here. All the frustrations of habit fell away & we made several long-range plans. One of the things we enjoyed most was the freedom to walk out between the baby’s feeds together, while Ted’s mother babysat. It would be so marvelous to have you babysit for a few evenings or afternoons with Frieda next summer while we went out together. She is so good. She was an angel all the while we traveled. I am still nursing her and she is getting so eager to hold bottles & cups that I’m thinking of trying her with a sip of milk from the cup now at each meal. The diaper service is a wonderful help. I couldn’t do without it. I found the 6 nappies a day just enough & now I only change her 5 times, I use the extra one as a bib. Ted’s Uncle Walt & Aunt Alice gave her a lovely coverall towelling bib & sweater & bootees while up there. She discovered the coal fire, which fascinated her, and pleased everybody. If your are thinking of anything for Frieda, rather than a sleeper I’d love some more of those wonderful Carter’s nighties you sent & which she is still wearing. She fills them now & I think they were 6 month size, so maybe the year size would be the next thing. Those rubber pants you got, in large size now, would also be convenient. Only please don’t be extravagant. Anything blue, anything blue. Or white. She is a knockout in those colors. We are thinking of having her christened this fall when the Merwins come back (they are her godparents & Mrs. Spaulding’s outfit & Aunt Frieda’s dress should fit her then) if we can get the minister who married us to do it. I’m enclosing 2 copies of snapshots* I sent to Mrs. Prouty of the same vintage as the last bunch I sent you.
Ted has asked the kindly bohemian Mrs. Morton, who works as French translator at the telephone exchange, if he can use her room upstairs to write in while she’s out. She was agreeable & he is up there now. We’ll leave her a bottle of sherry every now & then as a thanks token. Much better than the Merwins. No obligations, & he just has to pop down when I call, for lunch. A lifesaver. He says its much more quiet & peaceful without all the distracting books & giddy hairdresser sublessees at Merwins. She leaves at 7:30 & is back at 5:30, so he has a good day. I wish you could see the mail he gets! Italian translators asking the British Council to speak to him, American editors over here hoping to meet him, magazines & newspapers panting for his poems & stories. He has already sold his 5 or 6 new poems several times over. He wants to work on a 3-act play now. He read his speech from his BBC play wonderfully over the radio & I can’t wait to hear it produced there this fall. There is a fantastic market for plays in London---all youngish authors.
All he needs is one really good successful play, & we would have a good start. Our wish now is to get a car, a beachwagony affair, tour Cornwall & Devon, & buy a spreading country house with some land & settle down to write & raise a family. Once he has a successful play produced we could do this. And then buy a Hampstead-London house overlooking the Heath if we ever got really wealthy. I’m sure we could do a great deal in the peace of the country & a London house is simply out of our reach now---we’d ideally like to buy outright, or as nearly so as possible, to cut rent & rates. Well, since being in London, we’ve made the equivalent of $1,250 in pounds, which is nice, not counting what we sent you in dollars, which we pretend doesn’t exist.
I am so relieved to hear you are through with that blasted summer school and that your c
lasses are full up for this year. Is that even without the degree offered? FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE don’t take any afternoon classes, but go home at 2 pm!!! Both Ted & I are vehement about this. It probably secretly makes you feel you are doing something to run yourself ragged every minute. Are you still in the dark about the fate of the secretarial department? Will they stop it at the end of the year? You said they didn’t list it in the 61 catalogue, didn’t you. Well, surely you can ask pointblank what’s up as you can’t really plan anything till you know. I’ve never heard of such disgusting behavior on the part of administration anywhere else. How would it affect your pension if the department folded? Do say if it’s definite they’re ending it! By all means don’t “lash yourself” another year at this remedial reading work! You have 2 fulltime jobs as it is. You have tenure. BU has no right to demand you knock yourself out at your time of life at this crazy double teaching-study program.
And don’t think you should take courses to show them you’re “game” for anything. You have your health and wellbeing to consider & nobody, no matter what age or health, could survive for long on your all-grind, no pleasures schedule. For your own sake & ours promise not to saddle yourself with any courses this year (unless German). Couldn’t you find out if you could get a medical secretarial class at any of the other Boston schools? It is hardly a subject that isn’t in demand. Why should you jump horses in midstream? I wish you’d spend half as much time in your afternoons playing with women’s magazine stories, with feeling. Get a plot, imagine it in several scenes, with a character changing through events & finding something out about life & resolving problems. I’ll edit anything you do for what it’s worth. I bet if you pretended this was the way you had to earn some money, you’d turn out two or three things in the year. Why don’t you try? Marion isn’t around. You wouldn’t be exhausted after a long day. Start with the things you know, your friend’s stories, & pare them objectively to have a beginning, middle & end. Not just to copy the long span of life. You could do it. And I bet once you started, you’d have fun. You might start with someone resembling yourself, only with young children or something, whose job is threatened, & work it out via another character. Call it THE QUESTION MARK. What do you think?