The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2

by Sylvia Plath

  When I get really proficient in Italian (I’ll take another course after this right up to the time we go abroad) I want to start conversational German & spend our next vacation in Austria---perhaps visiting that Inn you spoke of. My ambition now is to get 3 European languages really well. A unique chance, living so close to Europe. I’ve always wanted to be able to speak & read several languages, & with the reasonableness of these Berlitz courses I can. I would LOVE a subscription to the New Yorker. Ironically, I dreamed of getting one last night before your letter came. Well, best love to you Warren & dear Sappho.

  xxx

  Sivvy

 

  PS – The pressure-cooker ‘thingumbobs’ arrived in good order today with the elegant blue pants – many thanks!

  TO Gerald & Joan Hughes

  Wednesday 28 September 1960*

  ALS, Indiana University

  Dear Gerald, Joan & offspring . . .

  Ted had already sealed up your letter in his secretive way but I made him open it again to let me gossip for a bit. How do you like our chico? Isn’t Ted satanic over her? The lady blessing me & Frieda (who doesn’t give a damn) is our Isis – we had an artist friend blow her up to lifesize from an astrology book. Down the side to the left are her other names: Isis, Minerva, Venus, Juno etc. She’s one of the baby’s godmothers. I don’t think we’ve ever been as happy as in the last six months. The baby is so funny – singing, making faces, cuffing her teddy bear, giggling at our oafish attempts to amuse her. I put her on 3 meals a day at 5 months, so feel to have acres of time now that the 6 · 10 · 2 · 6 · 10 schedule is over. She eats like a pig, taking after her ma. Her eyes are an astounding blue, which neither of us gave her: she gets it from her two grandfathers. Already little boys hang about her carriage acting up for a smile. Every time I leave her to go inside a shop I find somebody or other kootchy-kooing over her when I come out – she looks at everybody & is very curious.

  This afternoon I took her on one of my favorite walks in Regents Park by the ‘Scotchman’s Zoo’ – where you can see a lot of animals without having to pay to go in. I attracted a large white camel from the zoo-goers at the opposite side of the outdoor cage by making sly squeaking noises & got the camel bending over Frieda’s carriage eating grass from my hand. She was amazed & amused. I think she thought it was Ted in an overcoat.

  Don’t believe a word Ted says about his one-hour play! His usual black aftermath of self criticism just because he is working on a new – longer & better one. The play is super – you can’t read it without picturing it happening. Full of brilliant, colorful speakable poetry: not the kind you have to stand stock still & orate. Some of the scenes are killingly funny. All the characters from the fat bedridden mayor with his oyster-farm (in a barrel) to his bawdy wife & her local bedfellows are packed with life – none of the usual stereotypes. It’s terrific. Forget what he says.

  We popped out for a couple of hours to a literary cocktail party in posh Kensington – at John Lehmann’s, editor of The London Magazine. He’s a regular publisher of our stuff. So we cultivate him. Both my publisher & Ted’s publisher were there. And the writer PH Newby from the BBC who accepted his play. Lehmann was serving champagne – popping the corks & fizzing the stuff on his balcony over potted geraniums – and I managed with my usual sleight-of-hand to enjoy a good bit of it. I could live & breathe champagne & only in a blue moon can indulge this instinct. Why don’t you four blow yourself to a two week’s jet flight vacation over here? Sell a couple of cars or something? Frieda says ‘Ga!’ which means she sends love.

  So do I –

  Sylvia

  TO Lynne Lawner

  Friday 30 September 1960

  Printed from Antaeus 28, Winter 1978

  Friday: September 30, 1960

  Dear Lynne . . .

  I have just read your long letter of last winter over and like Van Winkle only realize that more time has passed than I thought possible. I miss you; I hope you are still in Rome. I asked a lady of buxom perfumed proportions who dropped by and drank tea with an astounding amount of sugar if you were still in the Via Flaminia and she, Maria Luisa Spaziani* or something like that, said yes. An immense cowlike and cabbagey calm settled on me during the last months of my pregnancy and this half year of nursing Frieda Rebecca. I am just slowly surfacing. The whole experience of birth and baby seem much deeper, much closer to the bone, than love and marriage. Have one, it’s incredible. I think being mountainous-pregnant was my favorite feeling & I wish I could prolong it, it’s so odd, being bony & thin, to become a pear. Ted hypnotized me to have an easy delivery, & the little Indian midwife who bicycled miles after our call at 1 am on the morning of (yes) April Fool’s Day was amazed to find the baby almost in her lap by the time she arrived. At sunup precisely, 5:45 am, Frieda Rebecca sneezed & began life. I was immensely moved & heartened by the whole experience, which I had deeply feared, having seen a ghastly delivery in a charity ward in Boston at a very impressionable age as a freshman in college. You just can’t get most women to talk honestly about labor. Ironically, after reading & being disgusted with Grantly Dick Read, who at one point says “Childbirth isn’t physical!”* and goes ga-ga over the spiritual Nobility etc. of it all, and says you’re only in pain if you’re nervous, I, being as nervous as possible, had exactly 4½ hours of labor, without any anesthesia (except a barley sugar the midwife had in her pocket). A notoriously easy time for a first baby. All very violent, rapid, rather than the long-drawn-out horrors a German friend of mine describes. After a couple of really impressive contractions the whole stage of getting the baby out is really painless & terrifically exciting. Ted was there, & I in my little rosepapered bedroom, and the Indian midwife a mystical deliveress. The doctor (who was a Classical scholar at King’s a few years before me) came in just in time to see the delivery. No time for the midwife to bike home for gas or anything. I was glad not to have it, for the minute they left I got up & put in a long-distance call home to my nerve-wracked mother. The baby had her first bath in a big pyrex baking dish & never left my side. All the impressive flashing of anesthetics, surgical instruments, masks etc. that goes on in American hospitals was absent & there was a primitive homeliness about everything that I heartily recommend to anybody with my peculiar set of nerves. Frieda is my answer to the H-bomb. I never gave a damn about babies till I had her; now I still don’t give a damn about other people’s, but regard her as a strange private miracle. All the stereotypes about smelly nappies, spoiled squalls etc. are so far fiction. She sleeps, eats, plays with a little silver cup & fur bear & sings and coos & is now gawping up at me with enormous blue eyes (which derive from her two grandfathers) from the floor of her playpen. This probably bores you. But I thought you might be curious, as I was before venturing into the holy state of Motherhood.

  I dogged the shops in Charing Cross as soon as they let me out to walk, but could find no Botteghe’s at all. Could you possibly loan me yours? I’d mail it back almost immediately. I am dying to read your stuff* in it. Ted & I are seriously thinking of taking his 3-month travel grant in Italy from March 1 to the end of May. Do you know of any villas, furnished (with cheap winter rates!) & empty then? Or of any small seacoast towns where we might find one? Please, please. If you are still in Rome I might persuade Ted to make that a base for going out to find a place. Let me know, ask your influential Moravias, etc. It would be so terrific to see you. I would just like a selfish few days where I could do nothing but accompany you about Rome & leave Ted to mind the baby, which he would be glad to do. I suppose you’ll write you’ll be at Columbia then or something equally frustrating. Did you know Janet Burroway at Cambridge? She cut the Ideal Swath: acted in the Marlowe society, got a first novel out by Faber’s, a First in Engl., a play-writing grant to Yale. A Professionale. What do you know of her? I find her cold & very clever, but feel – whether wrongly or not – that you & I are emotional sisters on the other side of the moon. I have an enormous white English pram with
black hood & canopies & fittings & am soaking myself in Christopher Robinism in Regents Park. Ted is a hibernant. We occasionally see John Lehmann, had dinner at TS Eliot’s, but that’s it. He’s got a one-hour poetic play scheduled for the BBC late this autumn. I would love you to share some of your Italianate wisdom with me. How did you learn the language? I’m starting with Berlitz here so I can converse with a doctor about any ailment Frieda may contract, but how did you get so conversation was 2nd nature? Did it take long? Please don’t make me wait a year to find out & excuse my writer’s coma on grounds of cowish amnesia.

  Much love . . .

  Sylvia

  Please stay in Italy till March!

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Saturday 8 October 1960

  TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University

  Saturday morning

  October 8, 1960

  Dearest mother . . .

  Well, ironically just about the time I received your letter announcing Warren had a cold, Ted & I have been down with the most miserable colds. Last week I started with a sore throat and aches in my bones, but managed to resist the nose part till yesterday, when it started to rain while I was out and I sat on a drafty bus. So my eyes and nose have been streaming and everything aching. Ted is just getting over a bad cold, and the dear little baby has a version of a cold---just a light occasional cough, sneeze & wettish nose at present. She seems happy enough, except that she woke me in the night for comforting & a little nurse. Now she is singing and playing with her spoons in her crib.

  I am still miserable, but feel I have endured the worst. Ironically once you get the wet trickly itchy stage nothing seems to help or stop it. Even my strong nosedrops only give a second’s relief. Enter winter. I am enjoying my Italian lessons every Tuesday and Thursday evening very much. We have a class of about 8 now, and by repeating and repeating phrases and questions---(never a cerebral definition or English question, but the expressive teacher makes us understand what he is saying in Italian by his gestures & acting out) one gets to feel what is right and wrong by hearing it. I hope to go on with these lessons.

  Ted is going to buy a cheap radio this week. His story the “Rain Horse” is going to be broadcast over the BBC again next week* (I missed the first broadcast of him reading it), and his translation of a section of the Odyssey in a series of 12 translations by various people, and in November & December his play, which I have just finished typing up in final revised form. So I don’t want to miss any of these. And the Third Programme has a lot I want to listen to---plays in French, etc.

  I have a new & exciting hobby. You will laugh. Yesterday (my last day on my feet) I went downtown and bought three 2-yard lengths of material---one bright red Viyella (at $1.50 a yard), one bright blue linen, and one soft Wedgwood blue flannel with stylized white little flowers on it (both at about 50 cents a yard). I also got a dress pattern & nightgown pattern (Simplicity). Yesterday I completely cut out and basted (as much as possible without a machine) the little nightgown (in a one-year size.) It is exquisite. If I had a machine, I could have finished it then & there, but Marcia Plumer’s friend, Marcia Momtchiloff, promised to bring over her portable sewing machine next week & leave it with me a bit, teaching me about hard bits like buttonholes & back openings which I’m not quite sure how to follow. I pinned the nightgown together to see what it would be like & it’s a little fairytale thing. I plan to cut the blue linen for a long-sleeved dress today & have things all ready to machine-stitch when Marcia comes, with the few questions that need answering. Then I’ll allow myself the luxury of the red Viyella. I’m making these in year sizes, so she’ll not just spit all over them, but have something really pretty. I had priced some nightgowns in ghastly peach & baby blue colors at about $4 & now can have just what I want for her for about $1 a nighty & from $1 to $3 a best dress---and originals! I plan to use the nighty pattern over several times in different colors & patterns. My next purchase I’ll save up for is a sewing machine!, I don’t know when anything has given me as much pleasure as putting together the flannel nightie for Frieda---the pieces are so little they are very quickly done. If I practise a lot now, I’ll probably be able to make most of her clothes when she goes to school. The London stores are full of marvellous fabrics & I look forward to expanding my knowledge of them. Ted & I agreed that when we’re wealthy, we will buy a loom, a kiln & a book-press and go into handcrafts (where the materials are expensive) & teach our children these things. We feel they are the most satisfying things in the world to do. I am awfully proud of making clothes for little Frieda.

  Is your Puerto Rican girl a part of practice-teaching for your reading skills course? I am so glad you had that nice evening with your friends. I felt so badly when you said you had to refuse dinner engagements last summer!

  By the way, the Poets Theater in Cambridge write that they are planning to “do” Ted’s play this month.* We don’t know whether this means just to give it a reading or to produce it & we have airmailed them the revised version. Could you---in the guise of an interested person only---call up or get a copy of their season’s program (they have a box office number) & find if it’s going to be produced & if so go to it & report to us? We want a secret incognito eye to see what havoc they wreak on it since we’re not there to check.

  Love from us all, & keep away from germs!

  Sivvy

  I have also bought* a few yards of matching continental embroidered tapes to sew on skirt border, collars & cuffs – much more handsome than any figured material.

  TO Ann Davidow-Goodman

  Sunday 9 October 1960

  TLS (aerogramme), Smith College

  3 Chalcot Square

  London N.W.1, England

  Sunday: October 9th

  Dear Ann . . .

  It is all I can do not to begin “Dear Mrs. Goodman” simply because I am so happy about your news. I picture you bringing Leo breakfast on your balcony with a view & leading an enviable gallery-theatre-and-vintage-movie saturated New Yorker existence.* Ted & I are very very full of rejoicing at two such good people taking upon them the mystic symbols (etc. etc.) of matrimony. I want a whole ream of your inimitable letterwriting about it all. Leo described so finely the garden ceremony, your toasting, which sounded admirable, and other little particulars at our last supper with him. I have no excuse for not writing sooner (“We must write Ann & Leo”, Ted keeps saying, which means I must) except the rather somnambulistic sense that time doesn’t matter between us. And all of us have been laid flat by bad colds, including Frieda who sniffled and sang while we sniffled and groaned---she seeming to accept her red nose as a perfectly normal part of the fallen state of humanity. Now we have had a long Sunday sit over griddlecakes and maple syrup and bacon and the Observer and Ted is closeted writing a long fantastic story and Frieda playing with her toy spoons and teddy bear and singing and cooing in her pleasant way, and I am just luxuriating in being able to breathe again.

  Leo says your book is “sold out”, and an impressive number of copies at that: how about sending us one as an advance trade for Ted’s, which will be out in Spring 1961 just in time for Frieda’s first birthday? Autographed, of course! I have been dying to see it for so long I will surely perish if not revived by the actual vision. Winter is here, the long wet grey half-year, and the leaves afflicted with jaundice and raining down from the trees. I am enjoying two nights a week at the Berlitz school learning Italian since Ted seems adamant about not spending his travel grant in France. I’m having so much fun saying “The teacher comes from the door and pushes the chair and puts the chalk in the box” in flawless Italian that I may even start another language after I can associate a few more elevated ideas in this one. I’ve also gone against a deep-seated hatred of anything to do with thread or thimble and blown myself to a few nightgown & dress patterns & bright bolts of cloth & rolls of continental embroidered tapes, and on the promise of a loan of a sewing machine & elementary instructions from a friend, have cut & basted some little s
torybook clothes for the baby. This is something of a miracle to me---I never liked dolls or such arrant housewifery, & the instinct has taken over in spite of twenty-seven (almost 28, alas) years of resistance.

  I hope you both think of returning to Europe soon on another of Leo’s superb grants which seem to give him such a magnificent tan, surpassed only by the really gilded Leo-look conferred upon him by marriage.

  Are you working on that idea for a ?was it? Pelican book you showed up watercolor sketches for? Tell me what you are doing, thinking and planning. Also what New York is like. I have always wanted to live there for a year or more and do all the hundred things one can never do on a flying visit.

  Except for a couple of auto collisions, housebreakings, deaths and babies, the jangle of rival icecream wagons and the regular noise of glass breaking outside, our square is peaceful and idyllic. I’m awfully fond of this patchy district now and can’t really imagine living anywhere else. Although we are considering a cottage in Cornwall as seriously as two people can who have not yet put by a fortune. I’m making Ted scout for a little radio as in the next month or two he is having a story, his hour play & a translation from the Odyssey on the BBC & is notoriously casual about hearing them. I love tuning in and hearing his voice come out. Simple-minded pleasures.