by Sylvia Plath
much love,
Sylvia*
TO Philip Booth
c. Saturday 17 December 1960*
ALS in greeting card,* Dartmouth College
Happy Christmas
from Sylvia, Ted & Frieda
PS. A note from the moors of Yorkshire where we are staying till New Years to recuperate from London – it is cold as a well in January & the air like solid clear glass we can walk through miraculously. Frieda thrives. She has suddenly decided to stand up. Her eyes are huge blue saucers. She is an angel to confound us atheists with the gifts of her humour and rosebud cheeks. You must understand this wonder three times over –
S.*
TO Wilbury Crockett
c. Saturday 17 December 1960*
ALS in greeting card, Private owner*
WITH BEST WISHES FOR / CHRISTMAS AND THE NEW YEAR
from / Sylvia, Ted & Frieda Hughes
Dear Mr. Crockett,
I was delighted to have your good letter and to know THE COLOSSUS is safe in your discriminating hands. Most especially Ted & I were joyous to hear of your award and year in New York! We have always longed for the ‘excuse’ or ‘gift’ of a year in that superb city, and it is fine to hear how admirably you & the family take to the rich life.
We are extremely happy in our small northern niche in London where Regents’ Park, Primrose Hill & the Zoo are our backyard, so to speak, & long for a house in an adjoining street. We glut ourselves on the cheap play tickets, foreign films, galleries and all the best fare, while living like Anonymous creatures, Ted studiously avoiding the requests for public appearances that find their way to us. We had a wonderful dinner with T. S. Eliot (who is an editor at Ted’s publishing house), his charming Yorkshire wife & Mr & Mrs. Stephen Spender at the Eliots’ home here. I was thrilled. Eliot has suggested revisions for Ted’s children’s book of light verse which Faber is publishing this spring & we treasure the ms. with his notes on it. A warm welcome awaits you here anytime you pass through London again!
Fondest Christmas wishes to you, Mrs. C. & Debbie & Steve!
Sylvia
PS. Frieda Rebecca Hughes arrived on April first 1960 – at home, delivered by a little Indian midwife & is the sun of our life – we both dote on her!
TO Aurelia Schober Plath & Warren Plath
Saturday 24 December 1960
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Saturday
December 24, 1960
Dear mother (!) & Warren . . .
Happy Christmas Eve. Ted & I have been up here in Yorkshire for a week now & I am writing in the calm before the crowded 3-day holiday. The sun has burned through the mists and grey sheep are grazing on the field in front of my window. We’ve managed to borrow a crib, pen & tiny carriage for Frieda & she is more enchanting every day. I’ve had a tiresome cold for the last week & Frieda has woken us at 3 am every morning with her two new top teeth which are cutting their way through, so I am still a bit haggard, but in good spirits. Ted looks ten years younger. His decision to refuse speaking engagements & cumbersome commissions has relieved both of us---he refused a request to appear on TV as “poet of the year”, much to his mother’s disappointment, but I understand very well how public life appalls him. He is upstairs now working on his full-length play.
I hope you enjoyed that Sunday Observer review about my book* (I was glad we weren’t in London, for I know Dido Merwin was dying for A. Alvarez---the bright young critic who’s married DH Lawrence’s granddaughter by Frieda* & her first husband*---to review Bill Merwin’s book & it would be difficult to toss off such a review where my book got first place, most space & best notices.) I was very encouraged by it. We enjoyed listening to Ted’s story Saturday & my book reviewed Sunday along with Pasternak,* EE Cummings,* Betjemann* & others* & I reading one of the poems. I hope I can persuade the BBC to accept a program about young American woman poets which I am drawing up, now that they seem willing enough to record my odd accent. I’ve had a very heartening letter from my young agent who liked my second woman’s magazine story* very much & has sent it out. I probably won’t hear about either of these first two for weeks, but am beginning a longer more ambitious one today about a girl who falls in love with a beautiful old house & manages finally to possess it: a kind of parable for my loving this house with a bay tree in Chalcot Crescent. I’ll have a story in the LHJournal or SatEvePost yet. Ted & I wrote out the plot for a romance set up here on the moors* & we have two more coming up---a suspense story about an art gallery (I’ll do research on forgeries, lost old masters & quiz our artist gallery-owner friends on this) & one about a lady astrologer for which Ted is going to work out horoscopes. The wonderful thing about these stories is that I can do them by perspiration, not inspiration---so I can work on them while Frieda is playing in the room & so on. My agent wants me to come in & talk to her again---she knows all the editors & magazines & her practical knowhow is extremely helpful. As soon as I am good enough, she’ll send my things to their New York counterpart. I’m heartened she thinks my first two real attempts are good enough to send around here.
Ted & I have had some wonderful moor walks, 10 mile or so hikes, & the air here is superb. Do plan to stay in England at least a month this summer. Ideally, we’d like you & Frieda to get acquainted by your staying near us & having lunch & suppers with us, then maybe we could go off to Ireland or France for 5 days or a week while you lived at our place with Frieda (I trust this wouldn’t be a chore!) & then later we could all go up to Yorkshire for a week where you could stay at a nearby inn with excellent food. If you allowed yourself at least a month, we could take everything in a leisurely way. I wish I could leave Frieda even for a day with Mrs. Hughes, but she is so unwatchful I wouldn’t feel easy. Yesterday for example I went to take a nap & when I came down Frieda had eaten most of a chocolate ornament covered in tinfoil which fell from the tree while Mrs. H. just looked on—“she did seem busy in the corner”. Luckily the bits of tinfoil didn’t seem to bother her, but I could imagine her eating bits of broken glass with Mrs. H having the same reaction! It’s really too bad she isn’t a good cook, or knitter or something beside a tireless & repetitive talker. When you come up you must rival her with memories of us as children! I wish I had some of my own relatives to admire Frieda. Is there any chance of Warren coming to that conference in London?
Do make a final search for that bright yellow paper-back speedwriting book! It must be at home. I think we left some boxes of books in the cellar & in the attic (my first thought was my bookcase, the closets, the bureaus). I am so frustrated without it, as in a few days I could get my speed back & apply for one of these part-time jobs as secretary to a woman journalist or architect or such that come up on occasion. Couldn’t you invent some pretext to get the book from the school as a teacher? By the way, Marion said you’d a job offer in your new field. What was it? I just feel if I walked into the house I could put my hand on the speedwriting book! In future years, if you want an easy solution for presents to us, you might send on piece by piece my favorite children’s books---that big orange “Cuckoo Clock”* for one, & my beloved Red books. We never did get “Mary Poppins”* did we? I’d love her books too. Hope your packages arrived all right.
xxx
Sivvy
PS – Frieda says “Mum-mum” & can sit down as well as stand up with ease, as well as bend down to pick up a rusk with one hand while standing & holding on to something with the other. Hope you liked the colored pictures.
1961
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 1 January 1961
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1
January 1, 1961
Dearest mother,
How good it was to have your happy letter. You sound in w
onderful spirits and I hope you keep them and your health through the longish winter drag till springtime. Ted and I came back from Yorkshire Saturday & had the misfortune to be on a train whose steam-pipe was broken so it was absolutely unheated & freezing cold all the long trip down & we could do nothing about it. Luckily I could bundle the baby in her carrycot (which she has just about outgrown) under two blankets & she wore the lovely pale blue blanket-snowsuit I got her with Dot’s money. Nevertheless, I came down with the worst case of flue I’ve had yet, and the baby caught a cold, so after my week-long cold in Yorkshire plus the baby waking us for hours every night cutting her two top teeth, I have been pretty oppressed. I hope that we can reserve you a nice room at Sutcliffe’s, a fine old-farm house Inn about 15 minutes walk from the Hughes, and stay up in Yorkshire for one week out of your (I hope) at least 6-week stay. Then you could take long moor-walks with us, I could take you to Haworth and so on. I don’t think we will plan to spend Christmas in Yorkshire again. In the first place, winter is an awful time to travel with babies---colds simply spoil everything, and then the Hughes house is too small to take us all. In addition, Olwyn made such a painful scene this year that I can never stay under the same roof with her again. She has never hidden her resentment of me, & her relation to Ted is really quite pathological---I think they slept in the same bed till she was 9 years old & probably this is one of the reasons she never married. In any case, she has never spoken to me, asked me one personal question or done anything but ignore me & make it plain she has come to see Ted. Naturally, this hurt me very much, but I never crossed her, because I knew Ted was fond of her. Evidently one of the things she finds hardest to take is that I have opinions & ideas which Ted respects---she has been used to dominating him in their childhood---and this Christmas my book happened to have a surprising spate of rave reviews (I’ll send you some)---over the radio, in the Sunday papers & so on. Olwyn seemed to have some chip on her shoulder & all at once, when I asked her to please stop criticizing Ted & me, which she had been doing since she arrived, she turned on me with an hysterical outburst of fury, in front of her mother & Ted accusing me of being a “nasty bitch”, eating too much Christmas dinner, acting as if their house was my home, daring to say I didn’t like a particular poet she liked (she has no qualms about criticizing poets I!like) & what seemed worst to her, not putting her up at our place last spring when I was expecting Frieda at any moment. Well, we all sat astounded as this kept on and on---full of venom she had been storing up since I married Ted. I tried to explain I wouldn’t want my own mother living with me in such cramped quarters when having a baby---I think she dimly wanted it to be her baby---but she kept on saying how she was the daughter of the house & I wasn’t & actually calling me by my maiden name “Miss” . . . which I think shows how horrified she was at Ted’s marriage.
It was so apparent that she resented my existence as Ted’s wife---the fact that I had thoughts, a career, a child & had been treated lovingly like a daughter by dear Edith and as one of the family by the aunts and uncles---that this break can never be mended. The insult and venom she let loose---while saying, imagine, that I was intolerant, selfish, inhospitable, immature & I don’t know what else---is something that can never be mended, at least not until she gets married herself. Luckily Ted is mature enough & loves me enough to see what an impossible situation this is and agrees that someone who sees me only as a nasty bitch shouldn’t be Frieda’s godmother and won’t be. Nevertheless, I am rather heartsick about the whole mess, especially at the sorrow all this caused poor Edith, whom I am very fond of. We’ll just plan to stay in Yorkshire in summer instead of winter, because I refuse to be ousted from my “family abroad” through Olwyn’s furies. Evidently she said such awful things to Gerald’s Australian wife when she was staying with them, that poor Joan packed her bags and headed to the train station in tears. So I feel it’s not just me, but the image of a rival in Olwyn’s warped mind that makes her try to annihilate her brother’s wives---and of course her relation to Ted is a rather obvious Freudian one, and quite horrifying.
Well, Frieda luckily is too young to absorb such things & I’m determined she’ll never be in a situation to do so again. I am, as you may imagine, delighted to be back in our little flat & to feel the world come back in proportion. I’m eagerly awaiting word about my two ladies’ magazine stories (which my agent, at least, is delighted with) and working on a longer third. I’ve also been asked to edit an American supplement of modern poetry* by a critical magazine here and to allow two poems from The Colossus to be published in a British anthology of modern British poetry* because I “live in England, am married to an Englishman, & the editor admires my work”. All of which is very nice, & probably my good reviews will bring more such little offers my way. In spite of the oppressions, illnesses & nagging bills of the last six weeks I am happy as I have ever been, & Ted and I are finding continuous & amazing joy in our little Frieda who is, we are forced to admit, getting prettier every day. She has four teeth now, stands & sits down vigorously, walks round her pen holding on to the side rail & bangs her little chicken to make it squeak. Ted’s aunt Hilda & cousin Vicky (a young art teacher) gave her a big brother to little Bunzo Bear and a pair of red rompers & a marvelous brightly painted abacus. She has a nice little family of animals & dolls & we are dying for her to get to the stage of coloring books. Dido sent a collection of children’s poems by Robert Graves* (a friend of hers) to start her book collection.
I do hope you can manage to stay here at least six weeks. When you make reservations definite, do let us know. I wish you could stay past July 31 by a few days, as Ted is giving the speech at his old Yorkshire school at graduation* & it would be convenient to be up there then, but even if you couldn’t stay on, we would. I thought I’d tell you that what we hope---in addition to having you ensconced in a room near here---is that you & Frieda get along so well that we could go to the Merwins wonderful farm in France for a week’s holiday (children are taboo there!) while you live here & care for Frieda. Would that be too much for you? There are all the stores you could want two-minutes around the corner & you’d be comfy in our flat with fridge, stove etc. Then we would also like to plan a few days in Cornwall by some sea-beach, probably with you and Frieda. Maybe we could all rent a cottage for a week. Ted wants to look round for possible houses there. That is about all we’ve planned---we can work out details when you come. I’d like to do a bit of touring London with you while Ted babysits, as I’ve seen so little of it!
We are planning an absolutely unsocial, quiet hardworking winter here now. I have been bothered lately by what my doctor calls a “grumbling appendix”---occasional periods of sharpish pain which then go away, but my appendix is extremely tender to touch. I am thinking seriously of asking him to let me have it out at some convenient (if that’s ever convenient!) time this spring, as I have nightmares about going to Europe on our Maugham grant, getting a rupture and either dying for lack of hospital or being cut up by amateurs, infected, ad infinitum. Don’t you think it would be advisable to have it out now? I feel I’m living with a time-bomb as it is. Have you any idea how long one is hospitalized, how painful it is, etc? Naturally one is reluctant to get oneself in for an operation like that if one isn’t forced to it, but I don’t want to worry about rupture in Europe, or during pregnancy. Encourage me, & I’ll have it out with my doctor. I’d wait, of course, till Frieda was fully weaned & I was in good health.
I’m glad you’re going on with your reading course now that you’re so far with it. What’s the position about the life of your department now at BU? It must be nice to think that you can get good-paying part-time work in Wellesley after you’re retired. What was that job Marion said you were offered? Tell Betty Aldrich how much her marvelous family photo meant to us. That’s my favorite sort of Christmas card. Keep well & much love to you & dear Warren . . .
xxx
Sivvy
PS – The date of Ted’s Yorks
hire speech is July 18th so that would make our stay there earlier.
TO Brian Cox
Sunday 1 January 1961*
TLS, University of Kansas
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1
January 1, 1960
Dear Brian,
Thanks very much for your good letter. I think the supplement of recent American verse is a highly exciting idea and should be delighted to edit it. I already have an embryo list of poems by young poets I know or know of who are too new to be at all familiar here, and of new poems by better-known poets . . . probably the hardest thing will be putting a tight lid on this and keeping the number from growing too great!
Could you give me some idea of a deadline? I want to look through some books that will probably be hard to get hold of over here, and it may take some time to locate them.
All good New Year wishes to you and the CQ,
Sylvia Plath
TO Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse Beuscher
Wednesday 4 January 1961*
TLS, Smith College
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1
January 4, 1960
Dear Dr. Beuscher,
I wonder if I could write you about an old and ugly problem that reared its head with renewed vengeance this last week---namely Ted’s sister. I’d appreciate it immensely if you could drop me a few helpful and commonsensical words on the subject as you did four years ago when she was endeavouring to send a sequence of her female Hungarian friends to live with us.
We all went up to Yorkshire for Christmas: Ted, me, the baby & Olwyn fresh from Paris dressed completely in black with her hair dyed bright red. She has always had a cold, and what I call for lack of a better word “sophisticated” control of her emotions in relation to me: treating me with a definite, yet civil dismissal, rather like an obtuse piece of furniture that somehow got in her way. She never talks to me, but through me, around me and to Ted, and never in all the years I’ve know her has she asked me a personal question or made a comment on anything involving me. I felt, and foolishly it now seems, that she would grow to accept Ted’s marriage and forgive me for being a person with marked opinions, feelings and “presence”, but this Christmas some small spark touched off the powderkeg & she made obvious to Ted & his mother what I’ve known all along: that her resentment is a pure and sweeping and peculiarly desperate hatred. Curiously I was very relieved: her total & patronizing snubbing of me was not pleasant (she always calls me “little”, although I’m a good inch taller than she is). You remember “little” was also a favorite word of mine! – diminishing to innocence & harmlessness emotions I deeply feared!* Anyway, we had been living in the same small house for a week and I felt that the “surface” between us was better than usual, but on the last day of our stay---Ted’s and mine---the outburst came. Olwyn had been nagging at us for being too critical of people ever since she came up & finally I asked her to lay off & said she was as critical as the two of us put together. This is the first time I actually confronted her in the open & the transformation was astounding. She started to fume and shriek and the stream of words ran more or less “youre a nasty bitch, a nasty selfish bitch, Miss Plath” (she calls me by my maiden name as if by that she could unmarry me) “you act as if our house were your palace, I watched you eat Christmas dinner & you certainly stuffed yourself, you think you can get away with everything, you’re trying to come between Ted & me, you bully me and my mother and Ted. I’m the daughter in this house. You criticized a book I bought last year (this being a nice enough poet whose poems neither Ted nor I like), you criticized a friend of mine (this being a dull Dutchman Ted & I found dry & boring) you’re a bitch, an immature woman, inhospitable, intolerant . . .” and on and on. Earlier on, on returning from shopping with Ted, she said to me with one of her inimitable smiles “All the people on the bus thought Ted had a new redheaded wife.” And Ted’s mother did say blandly that the two of them slept in the same bed till Olwyn was 9 and Ted 7. So she does have a five year lead on me.