The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2
Page 70
Oh, she’s so cute now. She’s been fussy with 2 new teeth, making a total of 6, but she’s suddenly become a little girl---her hair’s just long enough & I dress her in little dresses which she immediately gets dirty. She loves to play with magazines & opens them like a book, pointing at the pictures & laughing. Ted’s children’s book “Meet My Folks!” is coming out in time for her first birthday & is dedicated to her.* We’ll be sending along a copy to you when we get our orders---I think it’ll amuse you---8 funny poems & drawings about silly fictitious relatives.
I love hearing all your news about Nancy & Bobby. I made the orange tea bread yesterday & it was terrific, so moist & fruity---don’t forget a recipe each time you write. You make such good things!
Lots of love to all,
Sylvia
TO Alan Ross*
Sunday 2 April 1961
TLS (postcard), University of Texas at Austin
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1
April 2, 1961
Dear Alan Ross,
Thanks very much for your note, but I’m afraid Ted and I won’t be able to make the publication day* this week. All good wishes to you and the magazine in any case.
Sylvia Hughes
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 5 April 1961
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1
Wednesday, April! 5*
Dear mother,
Thanks a thousand times for the enchanting blue-smocked Polly Flinders* dress for Frieda! I dressed her up in it today with the matching light blue tights Dotty sent (together with a beautiful blue corduroy & romper set!) and a new pink coat her great Aunt Hilda in Yorkshire sent & took her out for her first day at the playground. They have little cage swings for babies so they can’t fall out & you should have seen Frieda! She looked marvelous, her blue eyes matching her little blue outfit, & she hung on & laughed & laughed as I pushed her back and forth & she was fascinated by all the other children & the dogs. You’ll have a wonderful time with her---it’s like playing with a live sweet-tempered adorable doll.
I have so many people to thank for things! Tell Dotty I’m delighted with the rompers & blouse & especially the gorgeous tights (which I can’t get here). Do Cruikshank sent a lovely yellow pajama set, Ted’s mother a pink sweater handknit by a traveling nun (!) & red cotton rompers & an easter egg & Hilda the pink coat & an easter egg & Marty Plumer a homemade light blue denim dress that looked wonderfully Martyish. Luckily Ted’s book comes out this month, so we’re blowing ourself to a great stack of copies* and sending them to all these good people we’ve been wanting so much to do something for. We may not have much money, but we’ll always have plenty of books!
I’m enclosing Ted’s half-yearly royalty check from Harpers for deposit---$168. I’m puzzled about your statement of our account: there’s $125.85 more in it than I thought should be in it. Now this queer figure looks like interest, but you wrote me in March, so the April interest couldn’t have been added yet, could it? My last figures are from October, when $97.14 interest made the total up to $5,907.21. Then the total of $266 I sent this month makes $6,173.21. When and what is the $125.85???
We’ve been very hectically busy lately---a spate of seeing people, poets paying Ted pilgrimages, movies, plays, teas. Tomorrow we do a joint broadcast over the BBC for America (it’s called “The London Echo”)*---reading poems & talking about our childhoods. It’s supposed to come out over a lot of networks in America. Next week Ted goes on the BBC television for about 7 minutes talking about his children’s book---probably they’ll flash a drawing on the screen while he reads the poem to go with it. I’m glad he’ll do this as I think it may magnify the book sales considerably & the reason he consented is because it’s not a “literary pose”. He wouldn’t go on TV as a poet of the year before, & I guess it’s a good sign. I’ve asked to come along & see it as we don’t have a set, so it should be fun.
Best of all, he’s just been commissioned by Peter Hall* (Director of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre & husband of Leslie Caron*) for a play for their London company. This is an incredible stroke of luck, as only very wellknown playwrites have been commissioned so far & it means the play Ted is working on will have the best reading & if it’s good enough to produce, the best cast & production it could have.
We are thrilled by this---we have yet to hear just how much money it is---because it means that Ted’s plays will go straight to the best director in England for a reading & even if this one isn’t accepted (we have to keep telling ourselves this, to calm down, because we think it’s a superb play---we’ll be sending to the Poets’ Theatre as well, so you may have a chance to see it too!) the next ones no doubt will be. Oh you wait, we’ll be wealthy yet.
Frieda’s birthday was lovely. We sang to her on getting up in the morning & let her play in bed with us. Then we presented her officially with her books (Ted’s among them), her picture (by our neighborhood artist whose exhibit we’re going to next week), a lovely blue fairytale landscape with Japanese lantern-like plants, her clothes (quite a mound), and five great balloons---one a big green one with zoo animals printed all over it and a long cylindrical orange one with a face and blue ears. The balloons scared her to death at first & I was sorry I got them, but the next day she woke up & rushed over to them & batted them around fearlessly. When they broke because she insisted on biting them she didn’t even exclaim & she’s still playing with the two that are left. I’d made a little cupcake with a pink candle which we lit and give her at teatime & she ate most of it sitting up in her little party dress. She is still playing with your birthday card. Tear them up, the idea! She loves paper cards above all (the rag books count no longer)---crows with delight at the pictures, points to the faces, opens them, pretends to read them and really has a fine time. She is mad for books---probably because we read all the time.
Thanks so much for the $5. You mustn’t go on lavishing things on me!! I’ll wait till I think: oh, I wish I could have that, or do this, & then take it out & get it or do it.
Ted requests that if you ever send any more packages in addition to the hundred you’ve just sent, could you please add a few Crest toothpastes. I believe they have fluoride in them or something.
Well, I’m off to bed,
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Judith Jones*
Wednesday 5 April 1961
TLS (aerogramme), University of Texas at Austin
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
April 5, 1961
Mrs. Judith B. Jones, Editor
ALFRED A. KNOPF INC.
501 Madison Avenue
New York 22, New York
USA
Dear Mrs. Jones:
I am delighted to have your letter* and to know that Knopf is interested in bringing out THE COLOSSUS.
I am very much in agreement with you about the greater part of “Poem for a Birthday”. It is the only poem in the book written under the undiluted influence of Roethke, and I now feel it is too obviously influenced. There are, however, two sections of the poem I wonder if you would reconsider and perhaps be willing to publish on their own---“Flute Notes From a Reedy Pond” and “The Stones”. These poems were written separately and much later than the other five in the sequence and have been published as separate poems in America where the others have not.* I think, particularly in “The Stones”, that the verse form and cadence is like nothing in Roethke. “Flute Notes” I feel is also stable and quite formal and a poem on its own, but I am most concerned about the chance of ending the book with “The Stones”. The whole experience of being broken and mended, together with the ending “Love is the uniform of my bald nurse” etc., seems to me the way I would like to end the book. I’d be delighted to unburden myself of the other five.* Do let me know what you think of this.
I admire Stanley Kunitz* and his work immensely and am particularly g
lad to have his opinion on my book. Here are the poems I would be willing to cut out: POINT SHIRLEY, METAPHORS, MAUDLIN, OUIJA and TWO SISTERS OF PERSEPHONE. If you would consider keeping “Flute Notes” and “The Stones” at the end as two separate poems, that would make a total of 40 poems in the book (instead of 50) which seems to me a good and reasonable number.
There are also two misprints in the book* I’d like to correct: In “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor” on p. 73, verse 3 line 4 on the page, it should be “airy thatching” (not air thatching) and in the last line of “Sculptor” on p. 79 it should be “solider repose” (not soldier!)
I’m eager to hear what you think of these suggestions. As for the rest, I couldn’t be more in agreement with you and Mr. Kunitz.
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO Theodore Roethke
Thursday 13 April 1961
TLS, University of Washington
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
April 13, 1961
Dear TR---
Here is the book* you were meant to have while you were here. I hope you won’t hate me for the last sequence of 7 poems which show me so far under your influence as to be flat out. I’m negotiating with Knopf (bless them) now for an American edition of the book and they’ve made me promise to leave the Birthday sequence out since they think I’m too in love with your work as it is. But I couldn’t wait for the American edition, I wanted you to have this.
It was wonderful seeing you in London though for not long enough & Ted & I hope we may manage a year teaching on the West Coast somewhere within the next couple of years & hope we can see a lot more of you.
If you think any of these are any good or that I should be allowed to write any more would you be a reference for the Guggenheim I’m applying for this year? I’d rather have you than anybody so I ask you first. Please don’t forget to ask your publishers to send on I AM SAID THE LAMB.*
With love,
Sylvia
PS- I’m enclosing ‘Tulips’ written after my latest bout in hospital.
SP
For Theodore Roethke from Sylvia
Sylvia Plath
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
Tulips
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here,
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut,
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage---
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureau of linen, my books
Sink out of sight and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.
I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free---
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.
The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.
Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.
Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.
The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars, like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 14 April 1961
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
April 14, 1961
Dear mother,
Your absolutely beautiful second sweater arrived this week & I tried it right on Frieda and it fits wonderfully and roomily over her little dresses and looks marvelous! I can’t tell you how pleased I am with it. I love the style with the deep bottom turn-up at the waist and she looks a tiny schoolgirl in it! The other sweater you sent is a real party sweater with all the openwork at the top but I think this sort is even handsomer in its way for everyday wear. The nun-knit one isn’t a patch on these---the style is like an old man’s button-down vest, but of course I don’t say so!
It has been real April weather---showery and moist. I have been working like mad in Merwins study every morning and find if I just have five hours to write from 8-1 I can do all my housework and business during the rest of the day with a serene mind. I hope to heaven we’ll have found a place here by next New Year! It’s amazing the change that’s coming over this neighborhood. It’s been a real slum and the lovely houses let go terribly, rented out as rooms for laborers. Now piles of young professional couples our age are moving in, doing the houses over into family residences & planning to settle in with their children near the good state-supported free schools (which even teach Greek in some places!) and parks. I have asked Ted to go off and find out about mortgages this week because I have an awful feeling that nobody will give a free-lance writer a mortgage although our income equals that of most of the people around us in regular jobs. It would be awful to have a good house come up & then find we couldn’t get any mortgage. A couple of ou
r friends who have bought houses have bought them outright, but as most of them cost about 7 thousand pounds now we’d only have about a third to put down. I’m going to ask Ted to try and ask his uncle for a thousand pound loan when we finally do have a house to buy. But I’m skeptical. It’s sad to know in five years we’ll have the money but by then it will be too late. We really need one in the next year. I’m full of this because two houses are coming up for auction* this week in the neighborhood (I could never bring myself to bid for a house!) & I’m going along for the fun of it with a new Oxford-graduate neighbor* of mine whose husband is a financial-page journalist, both lovely, with a darling little girl. I am happier in this neighborhood than I have ever been anywhere in my life and the thought of ever having to move away from my marvelous midwives, doctors, friends, butcher & baker and parks and plays and all I enjoy so much is unbearable. I’d like to live here the rest of my life. Of course as soon as we got a house settled we could negotiate for a teaching year in America as we’d have a place to leave all our stuff here and could easily rent it for a year. I know I’m boring about this, but it’s the main big step ahead and somehow it seems the one problem: we have all the rest: love, work we love & that supports us, a wonderful baby etc. etc.