by Sylvia Plath
I said very little & Ted & his mother sat stunned. The main thing she seemed to resent was my existence as Ted’s wife, not just me. She of course criticizes poets and people with a vengeance, but my disagreeing with her she couldn’t take, nor my own writing, either. It so happened that at Christmas my book had a whole spate of very good, even rave, reviews in Punch,* the weeklies, the Sunday papers & over the radio---with Ted reading a story on the radio one day, & me reading a poem in a review on the next & maybe this public recognition of me as Ted’s wife & a poet in my own right also irked Olwyn.
The oddest thing is that the main crux of her fury stemmed from a visit she paid us last spring, just as I was expecting to go in to labor any day. She came to London for a weekend (I had visions of a sisterly interest in my feelings, confinement etc. etc. & projected my desire for a comforting woman relative onto her) & instead of coming alone, brought two friends---one of them a total stranger. They sat round & smoked & Olwyn talked to Ted about astrology. I served them all lunch; they stayed on, obviously expecting me to serve them all dinner. I suggested we go out for fish & chips. Olwyn, it turned out, wanted to live with us---in our two rooms (“you had plenty of room” she cried last week). I tried to explain that I wouldn’t want my own mother sleeping on the couch in the livingroom when I went into labor at home & at that point didn’t feel like waiting on houseguests, worried as I was about the hereditary possibility of having a mental defective like Ted’s two cousins. I have an odd feeling she wanted my baby to be her baby. Ted asked her to be godmother & I didn’t object, when the baby was born, although both of us agreed after this Christmas blowup that it was silly to have a godmother & spiritual guide for Frieda who honestly thought her mother was nothing more than a nasty bitch.
As you may imagine my old Wicked Witch trauma came into action again. All the bright right answers about my also being a daughter in the house, if only by law, and the suggestion that Olwyn marry and have a few babies before she lecture me about the meaning of womanhood---said themselves later in my head. She acted like a jealous mistress, down to the red-dyed hair---as if by treating me like dirt & Ted like Prince Charming, we must fall apart by sheer disparity. She also said I’d driven her from her own house, she’d never come home from Christmas again, now wouldn’t I be happy etc. The morning we left---neither Ted or I having slept & his mother having cried all night---she threw her arms around me, smiled, said “I’m sorry” & ran back to bed. I don’t quite know what she was sorry for: surely not for hurting me, or for saying the truth, but perhaps for showing herself in the open before Ted.
That evening, as Ted & his mother just sat round (much as they do when Ted’s idiot cousin comes for tea, greeting everything from her new diamond ring to her yowling “Shut up, damn you” or “I’m going to put my head in the gas oven” with smiling nods & “Now, now, Barbara”.) I put the baby to bed and went for a long walk in the full moon over the moors, utterly sick. What upset me most was that neither Ted nor his mother said anything. I simply said “Go on, Olwyn, tell me all of it.” Ted appeared with his nice sane art-teacher cousin in a car as I was nearing Scotland. He had evidently hit his sister & told her off after I’d gone. Later, he said what we’d just witnessed was a pathological case & that we’d better steer clear of Olwyn till she got married. Luckily I remembered your wise advice that the woman who shouts her head off most seems in the wrong regardless of who’s right & I was glad I hadn’t retorted to Olwyn in kind.
My question is: now what do I do? I honestly don’t feel I can “forgive & forget” & go back to that fake relation of entertaining Olwyn while she talks to Ted through me & lets me wait on them both. I think that next Christmas we’ll stay here at home: I don’t want to live cramped under the same roof up there with Olwyn again, nor do I want her to get one-up on me by staying away and having all the relatives blame me for it, nor do I want to run into the round of double-flu the three of us came down with coming & going. I hope we can visit Yorkshire with mother this summer & continue our pleasant & happy relation with Ted’s parents & aunts uncles & cousins at nicer times of the year. Yet we are between Paris & Yorkshire & I half-expect Olwyn to turn up here & start more trouble. The thing I dont want is what I think she dimly wants: that by my refusing to see her I drive her & Ted to having clandestine meetings, where I would then obviously appear a mean, domineering figure. I think that if she wants to come here or for Ted to come there that the baby & I should go along, although my presence is intolerable to her. Yet as long as Ted thinks we should steer clear of her I’m perfectly happy. Luckily he isn’t in doubt about who he’s married to, although he’s deeply hurt by the whole situation. Do you agree I should just shut up about it, never refer to it or try to underline Olwyn’s hatred---since I deeply feel Ted is with me and for me? What attitude should I take when we meet again? Generous, I suppose.
Earlier, I would have been seriously threatened by all this. As it is, I feel sickened enough, but somehow quite steady. My role as Ted’s wife, Frieda’s mother, a writer, me---is beginning to flower into what I always dreamed of. I think Olwyn would “take” me if I were, like most of Ted’s previous girlfriends a “mealymouthed little princess” (which is what she called them, scornfully). I may have gone through just this goody-goody stage with my series of pseudo-mothers---Mrs. Prouty, Mary Ellen Chase, Mrs. Cantor ad inf, but I am not prepared to regress & efface myself with Olwyn. She has a queer way of trying to judge and bully our marriage: “You’re unhappily married, why don’t you buy a house in the country, London is so ugly . . .” and so on. If I felt worried by this, I would be worried about being worried. We want a town house, a Cornwall seaside house, a car & piles of children & books & have saved about $8 thousand simply out of our writing in the past five years toward these dreams & feel in the next five years we may nearly approximate them. This is our business, & the lord knows our life together since Frieda’s arrival has been full of fun & happiness . . . as if she, by her droll, adorable otherness opened a whole new world for the two of us. She’s like a sort of living mutually-created poem who will, of herself, find a shape, a rhythm & who seems to thrive on the love and games and words we share with her. I think at last that I may break into the women’s magazines over here with stories---I have a very encouraging agent (my ultimate aim is the good old LHJ and SatEvePost) and that this four-hour-a-day stint I put in is utterly consistent with being a good mother: I have a career which is fun & which I respect myself for having & which is a home-career: I’m always on hand for crises, meal-making and child-care and flexible enough to dovetail these with my own work. I also think my whole mind is more lively and inquiring and interested in other mothers and other people because of my new direction (as distinct from the slice-of-life arty story I used to try to do). And the LHJ seems a lot healthier to me than the I-remember-when-I-was-a-child-in-Westchester-county/Bangok/Tibet etc. that one finds in the estimable New Yorker.
Anyhow, my first American ladies’ magazine story will be dedicated to you: it was you started me reading the LHJ. Please excuse the single-spaced rant & write if you’ve a minute.
Love,
Sylvia Hughes
PS. One small footnote that made me feel I wasn’t quite alone in Olwyn’s black book. Ted told me that she was “even worse” (god save her) to her other sister-in-law, a bouncing, blond extrovert Australian who married her other brother (older by eight years). Evidently she so dug in to this poor girl during her first visit to England & her husband’s family that Joan packed her bags in tears & Ted just rescued her from the railway station as she headed back to Australia. As Ted said, “if she did that to Joan, not caring much about Gerald & never writing him, you can imagine how much more she resents you.” I certainly can. She writes Ted a voluminous, loving, intimate letter once a week and goes desperate if he doesn’t reply in kind. I remember your saying when I spoke of their childhood intimacy that this sort of thing never ends or undoes itself. I’m willing to accept this, as I would not be if Ted
seemed more ambivalent in his emotional ties. But what about the future? I can quite imagine Olwyn marrying a man she hates, or committing some other symbolic suicide---her outbreak in Yorkshire was a form of self-mutilation: I forced her into her ugly temper, her exile from her own house & so on.
Anyhow, enough of that. I would appreciate a straightforward word from you. I feel I’ve come a long way since the last bout with Olwyn, but have a long way to go yet before I become the wise wife I’d like to grow into.
You should see Frieda: four teeth, two top & bottom, she stands & walks round her crib and pen holding on, plays with her tub-duck, squeaky rag chicks & bears & has a huge appetite. People still stop in the street to exclaim over her big blue eyes which is heartening as I think she is doomed to straight-as-a-stick brown hair like Ted & me. She shows a marked liking for books---even if her interest is mainly crumpling the crackly pages.
S.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Tuesday 10 January 1961
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Tuesday, January 10
Dearest mother,
Your lovely New Years letters have arrived and meant a very great deal to me. I’m so glad you like the blouse. I just had vision of you in it & it was the only one of its kind & color in the store so I felt fortunate at finding something I thought would suit you so well. I hope Warrie forgives the unimaginativeness of Ties as a gift & likes the color & patterns which I felt would look distinguished on him. I got his dear letter the other day. You are a genius to locate a Speedwriting book! I don’t know what ever could have happened to the one I had! In any case, I’ll guard these with my life---they will probably come in handy more than once. I’m really an awful correspondent this Christmas, I’ve felt so blue with these repeated sinus colds. I just got over a two-week bout at Christmas to come down on an unheated train & got laid up worse than ever & am just now feeling slightly better after 10 days of misery when to cook a meal seemed a superhuman effort. In addition, the sickenly unpleasant scene Olwyn staged at Yorkshire bothered me more than I can tell & the thought that she’s up there poisoning her mother against me is very sad---Mrs. Hughes wrote us a tart letter very unlike her---something to the effect that we should expect to get flu when traveling on a Saturday in holiday season etc. etc. Naturally she would take Olwyns side right or wrong, but the Olwyn has always bossed that house shamefully & as Ted says, her outburst derived from an idiotic jealousy. I hope we can go to Yorkshire this summer for a week together because I am reluctant to give up my pleasant relation with Ted’s aunts, uncles & art-teacher cousin, but I shall see to it that our Christmasses are spent at home where my children imbibe Christmas spirit and not the venom that I had to suffer this year. I can always say that holiday travel brings on flu, which it does & have a pleasant time here. Do encourage me, I feel the lack of some relative or friend to bolster my morale. I am going to have an interview with a surgeon on Friday the 13th (I hope the verdict is more auspicious than the day) about my appendix & I suppose my job is to convince him it should come out before I go to Europe. I hope you second me in this, as I find it a bit hard to more or less volunteer for an operation of any sort that isn’t an emergency necessity.
Dido Merwin has been angelic, encouraging me to have my appendix out (saying she wouldn’t let me visit them in France if I had it in because of the dangers of sepsis, no-anesthesia, peritonitis and on and on if one gets a rupture in the country) & telling me how easy it was for her. We had her for dinner the other night---made Dot’s veal scallopini---do tell her how I think of her while making her recipes & try to pry a few more from her. Made her carrot cake for Christmas. Dido brought the first four volumes of Beatrix Potter’s classic Peter Rabbit series* which are enchanting & plans gradually to give Frieda the whole set. She’s an ideal godmother---full of wise advice about Frieda’s education here and so on. Bill, now in America on a lecture tour, has managed to get Ted & me two reviews to do on the Nation.* They are really the nicest people we know here.
So glad you got the Manchester Guardian review* (how glad I am I left the Ella Mason poem out of my book!) & do by all means send Mrs. Prouty a copy. That’s what I had hoped to do if I got more than my own copy, which I have.
Frieda has settled back into her usual easy schedule now that we’re back & she is sleeping in the livingroom. Her cold has left her---luckily hers are pretty light---and she looks the picture of health & prettiness. I think I’ll probably wean her completely to the cup this month, as if I have my appendix out I shall have to do so. She drinks very nicely from the cup now, a little silver cup, although she is tempted to knock it away and be done with it every now and then. I can’t wait till you see her. I am proud to say she is very good and unspoiled. She is used to company---having us around---but plays by herself all the day and only cries when she is hungry or tired or teething. I want her to be a self-sufficient creature who can read or color or play with toys while I work nearby. Of course at mealtimes, rising & bedding we dandle her and sing to her and make little games, but none of this holding her on the lap all day as Mrs. Hughes did which was nearly the ruin of her. Could you come over mid-Junish rather than early June? If we do go to Europe after my possible operation that would give us the clear 3 months we’re supposed to spend. The other alternative is that I might get a job but that is dubious just now. In any case, we are looking forward to seeing you!
Had a very sweet British poet, Thom Gunn, who is teaching at Berkeley for lunch yesterday, passing through London on his Maugham award.* I wish he lived near us, he is a rare, unaffected & kind young chap. Next week Ted & I are recording a radio program of 20 minutes interview called Two of a Kind----about our both being poets, & Ted’s doing a program for the Carribean services. Now he’s typing out two children’s programs*---one about writing a novel (which he tried successfully with his Cambridge schoolboys) & the other a personal reminiscence about how catching animals turned into writing poems. He & Frieda are my two angels – I don’t know how I ever managed without them.
xxx to you, Warrie & Sappho –
Sivvy
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 27 January 1961
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Saturday (no, Friday)
January 27, 1961
Dearest mother,
Well, your letters have kept coming & coming & increasing my morale immensely through a rather glum period & now that I am recovered enough to write letters I realise how long a silence I’ve plunged into. Do forgive me. I’ve embarked, with Ted’s help, on a drastic program to pull my health up from the low mid-winter slump of cold after cold, & am eating big breakfasts (oatmeal, griddles & bacon etc., with lots of citrus juice), tender steaks, salads & drinking the cream from the tops of our bottles with iron & vitamin pills. We try to be in bed by 10 & are not going out socially at all. I feel immensely homesick when you talk of white snow! All we’ve had here since October is grey rain. One day we got up in muggy greyness & it got blacker & blacker till by 10 am I had to put all the light on. Bless your snow for a change, there’s nothing drearier than a wet grey gritty winter! I’ve hardly been able to get Frieda out at all. I’ve got her down to one 6 am nursing a day & this week hope to tail that off so she’s drinking wholly from her cup. She is cutting a new tooth & very fretful, poor baby. When we let her creep without her pen, she laughs & whizzes over the rug. Her standing is a bit of a problem for she does it all the time in her crib---sometimes I have to lay her down about 10 times in a row when she is ready for a nap, she puts her finger in her mouth for a minute, breathes quietly, & then, even if I hide & don’t go out of the room, she giggles (thinking she’s given me time to leave) & whoops, she’s standing up & walking round her crib.