by Sylvia Plath
By the way, how did our total get to be $5253.57 with the $3.60 Partisan check.* I had $5219.97 down plus $32 (Ted’s partisan check)* written beside it: I don’t know if that meant the $5219 included it, or should have it added. In either case, I cant see how it adds to $5253. Did you mean $5223.57? or $5255.57? Let me know, & what it makes with the $178 I sent last week, so I can keep my records straight.
Much love,
Sivvy
PS- Ted likes his socks very much.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 13 September 1960
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Tuesday morning: September 13
Dear mother,
By now you must be back home. I hope the Cape gave you good weather. Tell us about it and make us homesick. Did Warren’s girlfriend come down, and what is she like? September has brought us some extremely pleasant crisp sunny weather, and I have been able to get Frieda out in a sunsuit on a blanket on Primrose Hill, which she enjoys, kicking, laughing, and looking about. She is marvelous now, 15 pounds 1½ ounces on her 5th month birthday, healthily chubby and very bouncy. Her eyes are big and blue with striking long black lashes, and she has a head covered with light brown silky second hair. She is very curious, and when I have her out on her stomach in the carriage in the morning sun, which luckily strikes our little granite yard, she spends a long time head up, peering at the passersby and smiling at them so old ladies stop and coo at her. Ted & I are idiotically admiring of her. I put her on a different schedule this month which is working very well: I nurse her when she wakes up and let her play till we have breakfast when she gets her cereal. Then she has lunch of vegetable, fruit and grated cheese at 12:30, orange juice in midafternoon, & supper about 5:30. Gone are the 10 and 2 day feeds which so broke up my time. I just wish you could see her: she would steal your heart away, she is so sunny and full of chuckles at the little games we play with her.
Have you got to see Mrs. Prouty? It would be nice if you could do something for her like staying overnight when her servants are away: she has done so immeasurably much for us. I suppose your school has started. For heaven’s sake promise not to ruin your good schedule by hurling yourself into more courses!!! And tell me just how your job stands, and pension & all. We are concerned about these things & want to know. I have a poem about the baby in this month’s Atlantic and Ted has a wonderful review of his book by Stanley Kunitz* in the book section of this month’s Harpers. Also, his picture & two poems* were in the September 9 issue of the special number of the Times Literary Supplement on the British Imagination, which it might amuse you to look up in the library. He has 3 or 4 speaking engagements at colleges and schools around London this fall for about $35 a time.
We are now thinking seriously about looking for a house on the seacoast in Cornwall---not a summer cottage, which most people want down there, but a sizable house with grounds. The rents are much much lower and one really gets something: I read of a charming place on the sea with a couple of acres, stream, orchard, just the thing, for about 4 thousand pounds. 4 or 5 thousand pounds could buy something very fine outright, I think. We’ll wait till Ted finishes a full-length play & sees if he can get it staged, then get, hopefully, a station wagon, then a Cornwall House. If he is ever financially very successful, as he may well be, we would like to get a Hampstead house, right on the heath, an area which is full of exquisite houses and gardens, all expensive, but the sort of thing a playwright could afford. Anyway, tell us when you think you would be coming over here next summer & how long you could stay. We are cudgelling our brains to think of the best time to take our 3 months in Europe & probably will try this next March, April & May. Then we would have some money left over we hope, to live on the summer you came. If Ted could just get a play written & staged we could retire to the country & he could really work. He works 5 days a week in the lady’s livingroom upstairs, a very quiet place, but dependent on her kindness, & he needs a study, so do I, and a yard for the children to play in. Well, these are all hopeful projects.
We went to two plays this last week, the remainin parts of the Wesker trilogy* which covers about 20 years (often in one play) about a Communist, or Socialist Jewish family: the ideology isn’t at all moving, but the human situations are. The boy hugs his mother with the words “Well, the Labor government’s in!” & it isn’t the words, but the hug that matters. Ted’s radio play is so queer & interesting that I’m dying to see this next one, which came to him in a dream. We left the baby with a girl at Merwins’ & wangled a pass to the Picasso exhibit* again (we’d had to go separately before) Sunday morning when it was only open to a few people with passes, not the 6 thousand-a-day & had it all to ourselves. Met our friend & professor at Harvard, Jack Sweeney, who recorded us for the Lamont Library & he is due any minute for a visit to see the baby & we’ll lunch with him tomorrow. Hope you got the new photos & my New Yorker check. Do let me know the exact amt. in that bank! Wasn’t it only 7 thousand you paid for our lovely Wellesley house?* How I wish you had a country place near here. I envy my neighbors who have English country grandmothers & are always exchanging visits!
Ted & your beautiful granddaughter join in sending much love –
Sivvy
If there’s any bank interest – do say how much – I think it shouldn’t come till later this fall. Is it still 3¾%?
PS – Got your good letter from the Cape today – the $178 check arrived with the pictures didn’t it? The new place you lived at sounds superb. How I long for Nauset beach! Perhaps Ted will get a lectureship in a few years to finance our going over.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 16 September 1960
TLS, Indiana University
Friday: Sept. 16
Dear mother . . .
I hope you weathered the hurricane safely.* It sounded a powerful one from the papers. I am enclosing the real check this time, I hope. Yes, I had forgotten to add Ted’s $30 Nation check which makes our totals agree: $5431.57. (including this chk.) I figure the interest should be $180ish. I’m also enclosing some ghastly snaps Mike Lotz took of us as you have a viewer.* He was sitting down in a chair & so got the baby from under her fat chin & she was fussy as due to be fed. Private viewing for you.
I have one or two little nagging details I wonder if you could help me with. One is: the rubber automatic air vent flew out of my pressure cooker & is evidently too tired to work. Could you order me one: PART NUMBER 1509 (75 cents) of MODEL 704 (4-Qt.) cooker from National Presto Industries, Inc., Eau Claire Wisconsin? Order one sent to me, I mean. They ask part & model number & the cost, & as I no longer have a $ checking account I can’t send them the money. Also, I’m enclosing my Smith due sheet for the same reason. If there’s any cash left from that bit I made over to you in my Wellesley Fells account, could you send the enclosed form off? Otherwise, throw it out.
The cold weather, rain and so on is on us again & I don’t suppose it will let up for six months. I am so glad the Cape did rest you up. You still haven’t answered my questions about what is the official position of your department, job & pension with BU. Please do let us know about this in detail & what those louts are telling you they’ll do with you, or to help you!
Have you seen anything of Mrs. Prouty since you’ve been back? I hope Warren has a pleasanter year this year. What is his Cambridge address & is he still living there? I hope he finds a girl he falls in love with, not just a girl who fills in the application blank of good-cook, good-looking-ina-bathing-suit, tall etc. He should feel the one he marries is the only one not just one of many who would also do. Waiting for the right wonderful person is so much more important than getting the outer comforts of marriage at an early age. I feel I know what I’m talking about because I can’t imagine being able to remotely stand any one else in the world but Ted. There he is, after him a huge gulf, and then the rest of the little people.
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br /> Let us know roughly when & how long we can expect you for next summer. I’d like to start looking forward to it now.
We had Leo Goodman, the young handsome statistician from Chicago here to dinner last night: he’d flown back from NYC for a few days and since we last saw him had married Ann Davidow which delighted us all. He is a rare person & so is she, our favorite couple along with the Baskins.
Frieda is better and better. Singing and holding a little glass of milk and sipping from it now---very clumsily, but making good tries: I hold the glass & guide it really, but she pretends to be doing it. The rest of the time I nurse her & am so glad to have avoided the ridiculous bother of sterilizing bottles & measuring formula which I only did once or twice early on when I went out to the theater. I am beginning to use the study (really the lady’s little livingroom) upstairs 5 mornings a week. Hope I can get something done: very pleasant there.
Love to all
xxx
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 23 September 1960
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Friday: Sept. 23
Dear mother,
Hello. I hope your first weeks of teaching haven’t been too strenuous and that you’re coming right home after your last afternoon class! I’m enclosing these enlargements* of our favorite pictures out of the lot we sent you, thinking you might like them & want to send the little ones to some friends. Aunt Frieda & Mrs. Prouty already have copies of one or two of these, but I’ve sent them to noone else. I wonder, by the way, if you could look up the yellow-paper-backed copy of my speedwriting book (it should be in my bookcase or drawers or closet, near the surface of piles of magazines or something) & send it on to me. I’m also enclosing a check for two light poems from Harper’s for $88* for deposit in our account.
Last night Ted & I went to John Lehmann’s fashionable house* overlooking a green crescent in Kensington for drinks (it happened to be champagne, we were lucky). He’s editor of the London Magazine, where we both publish a good deal, and is very odd and nice. I met my young publisher there and Ted the writer PH Newby* on the BBC who had accepted his play. The little balcony was open & the evening pleasant. Ted’s play is being broadcast twice late this fall here, & his translation of 100 lines or so of the Odyssey* too as part of a series done by about a dozen different people. He found a word for word literal translation & made poetry of it. He’s also been asked to be one of 3 editors of an annual anthology of poems* that carries a fee of about $70 which is nice.
I have just enrolled today at the Berlitz school* here for lessons in beginning Italian, as Ted I think would most like to go to Italy for his Maugham award & I definitely want to be able to speak and read Italian to profit by this. The fee is 3 pounds for 15 hour lessons (small group lessons), about $8.50, which I think reasonable, & if I get on well & like their methods, I might try classes in German or French---they meet 2 nights a week usually. I have a unique opportunity to “try out” languages on the continent & want to take advantage of it. My first lesson is next week. I am also investigating the extension courses at London University which I am too late to register for this year, but which I would like to get into next year.
Frieda is thriving and at a very easy stage now. Don’t get any rubber pants, if you haven’t yet, as I’ve found a good place to get them here. I’m having great pleasure looking at baby things: got a little blue duck today that floats in the bath. When I hold Warren’s teddy up to her and growl she bursts out laughing. Marcia Plumer’s friend, newly married to an Englishman & now named Marcia Momtchiloff,* came for tea today bringing a nice snowsuit from Marcia---big, but Frieda will grow into it. She also offered to loan me her portable featherweight Singer sewing machine if I got some easy patterns & material to make Frieda dresses, which I’d like to learn to do with an eye toward getting a machine myself some day, and to help me learn to use it, which is lovely. Got a bright cheerful letter from Dot which means a lot to me. Glad to hear Bobby’s on the football team & Nancy doing so well. I hear my girl, so I’m off to give her her supper & bath.
Love to you, Warren & Sappho.
xxxxxx
Sivvy
PS: Could you send me your measurements & Warren’s for blouses, shirts, shoes, gloves – the lot – in case I ever come on anything nice?
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 28 September 1960
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Wednesday
September 28
Dear mother,
It was so nice to receive a letter from you today on the heels of your last, that I thought I’d drop you a note on the heels of my last & take the chance of enclosing this $50 check for two of Ted’s poems from Mademoiselle* for deposit in our Boston account. What months do they do interest, by the way? I’m dying to see how much it is! Ted went off at 9:30 this morning to get the train to a Teachers College in Sussex where he is giving an hour talk and reading for $36. He has several odds & ends of projects to finish up now---the Oddyssey poem-translation for the BBC, revisions on his play-script which is scheduled for two broadcasts in late November & early December. Do you know anyone whose radio can get the BBC? It would be so nice for you to hear it. In Yorkshire we sat round at tea with all the relatives, tuned in and heard Ted reading two of his poems, one of them a speech from the play, which was lovely. He is also grunting over an article on the Arnold Wesker trilogy* of plays which we enjoyed seeing here this summer for the Nation. He was originally going to refuse to do the article, but I felt it was because he out of his great modesty felt he didn’t know enough about the American theatre of the 30’s & Clifford Odets’* plays (also about Jews & Communists), so I very slowly persuaded him to take a day or two to read Odets at the British Museum & that his own instinctive reactions were better than most garbled criticisms I had read. I also bought Penguin paperback editions of the 2 plays in print. Usually I let his judgment be the final arbiter on such matters, but here I felt he’d be glad he’d done an article which is right up his alley: Wesker is just my age & his play “Roots”, the middle of the trilogy, is about Norfolk farmers & full of good things: it’s coming to America this year, so see it if it comes to Boston. Although the Nation pays very little, both of us admire the magazine very much, & what it tries to do (Ted only got $30 for his book-review), and if the book editor likes what Ted does it will mean a couple of assignments a year and the odd extra $100. Ted is slaving on these bits now to clear the decks for his own play The Calm* which sounds marvelously exciting, very fully realized. One success could buy us a house: it’s a gamble & takes faith, but Ted has every reason to feel he can do it. When Charles Monteith at Faber had lunch with Ted & Thom Gunn last week, he said “Tom Eliot is delighted with the drawings & poems in MEET MY FOLKS!” I can’t wait to see the book: it is scheduled for Spring 1961, about in time for Frieda’s first birthday. Did I tell you we went for drinks at John Lehmann’s posh Kensington house (he’s editor of the London Magazine) where both our publishers were, & the BBC man who’d accepted Ted’s play & arranged for him to read his “Rain Horse” story, a writer I admire very much. We had lots of champagne on the balcony overlooking the green square. London is inexhaustible. Although I’d very much like to have a house in Cornwall I would have to have some arrangement whereby we’d be in London half a year and there half a year. Or 9 months & 3 months. Oh well. I am much more a city-dweller than Ted. September has brought crisp blue American weather: I have had Frieda out in her pram almost all day each day for the last week. She loves being in the little cement area out front because she can put her head up and watch all the people go past: she’s very curious about everything.
I have grammy’s warm fur carriage rug over her & she is down there now. You are an angel to get all those Carters things for her. She has plenty of summer clothes for next year when she’s a year old, but very little except sweaters for this winter. I think I’ll go out next week & get some red flannel & see
if I can make up a couple of zippered sleeping sacks (I have one of Marcia’s which is wonderful: the warmth of a flannel nightie but just an oblong bag so if she kicks her covers off, which she always does, she will be warm enough anyway. This isn’t a heavy bag. Perhaps this other Marcia will show me how to cut a pattern from it & make a couple on her machine.
This weekend Ted & I are taking Frieda to the country house of some friends of ours: a Scots mathematician & his little American wife whom he stole from Radcliffe before she graduated. They are extremely nice & have just bought this house: will pick us up here Friday night & take us back Monday morning, as he starts teaching then. I look forward to this: they have lots of land.
Had my first Italian lesson at Berlitz last night. Very interesting. All verbal: he didn’t speak a word of English (although he knows English, I think). Just 5 of us in the class (they can go up to 15): all girls. One a very good one---has been in Italy & understands Italian & knows French & German & works for a wool export firm in the City. The others are little very young office-type girls, very cute, but already having trouble. We will get a Berlitz book, but not yet. We spent the whole time learning vocabulary of things in the room, masculine & feminine endings, negative & positive word order: a very good method I think, repeating things after the young, expressive teacher & learning by repetition. So much simpler than English or German! I want to work on my own in the little self-teaching Italian book I have so as to get the very most from my lessons. Tentatively we plan on going to Italy from March-May, to avoid the tourist rush. I’m going to ask my doctors about precautions for Frieda. She’s marvelous now: her cheeks are getting pink from being out. I took her to the Scotchman’s Zoo (the free outer walk in Regents Park where you can see some of the animals) & enticed a camel to bend over her carriage by feeding it grass. She was amazed & stared & stared. Every time I give her Warren’s teddy & growl she laughs & pummels it. I bought her a little blue celluloid duck for the tub & she spends her whole bath trying to grab it & the minute she catches it making little squealing noises of delight. Ted & I are overjoyed with her. Ted’s friend Luke sent her a really tiny silver baby cup (with Rebecca on it!) and flowers on the handle & she has been playing with this all morning. What fun we’ll have when you come over! Be sure you bring a really waterproof raincoat and good overshoes so we can walk out no matter what! As soon as you can, let us know your dates. What kind of a place would you like to stay here? Bed & breakfast? How cheap? We could be looking around.