by Sylvia Plath
Aunt Frieda sent a darling light blue dress made in the Phillipines this week. She and Walter have moved to a trailer camp which they seem wonderfully enthusiastic about. I’ve got a pass to Ted’s TV show which will be broadcast live this Wednesday & I’m fascinated to see it. Thanks a million for the research into our deposits. Wish I could think what the $71 was. Ted’s being featured in the Observer this week,* a livelier rival to the Times (Sunday papers), with 6 poems and a little article by our friend and critic A. Alvarez. We’ll send clippings.
We’re mailing off a whole load of Meet My Folks today to friends and neighbors in America by sea mail, Aldriches, Cruikshanks (do they have a c in Cruick???), Ruthie Geissler etc. We have our eye on a small station wagon that seats 5 & has two back doors that open for loading luggage and a back seat that folds forward to make lots of room for babies’ beds and so on. We could buy it outright with the money we’ve saved in our account here writing in the last year & probably will. Hardly anybody garages cars. There’s no snow & acres of parking room in front of these houses in our end. Ted is dying for a car (!) because he wants to go off to Cornwall & the country & I think it wise to get it now though it means a big dent in our savings. It will cost about $1,876 new & we’ve decided to get a new one as neither of us knows a thing about cars & we mistrust all 2nd-hand dealers & have no wise car-machine-minded people who could test a 2nd hand one. Ted’s radioplay was broadcast a 3rd time this week bringing his earnings on it up to over $900 this year.* He’s almost finished this huge 5-act play* called ‘The Calm’. You’ll be getting photos of Frieda in good time. “Isn’t April coming soon?” Her birthday picture isn’t of her but a painting of a magical blue landscape an artist friend did & we gave her for her birthday. What’s with Warren & Margaret?* Are they getting married? I hope she’s not too dull, I get no real picture of her at all. Hope I have some good literary news for you soon.
A millions XXXs
Sivvy
PS – Have you ever thought of knitting any booties? Or are they too hard? I’d dearly love some to go with these sweaters! F’s foot is just about 4 inches long from toe to heel
xx
s
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Saturday 22 April 1961*
TLS in greeting card* with envelope, Indiana University
With Happy Birthday Greetings and Best Wishes / from
from Sivvy & Ted & Frieda start here→
Dear mother,
Here are your Birthday pictures.* I hope you like them. Frieda’s much prettier than the colored ones show (taken at 10 months) because she has more hair, as you can see in the one with the two of us together. She is a marvelous child & I’m sure in no time you & she will be very close. She is so outgoing & after the first few minutes of getting used to someone very friendly. I take her up on Primrose Hill every fine afternoon & she crawls in the grass, laughing and waving at babies and dogs and standing up, holding on to her pram. I have such fun with her, I’m just dying for a house and room for lots of babies.
I am working fiendishly at the Merwins study 7 mornings a week, as they are coming home at the end of May and I’ve a lot I want to finish before then. I have found that the whole clue to my happiness is to have 4 to 5 hours perfectly free & uninterrupted to write in first thing in the morning---no phones, doorbells or baby. Then I come home in a wonderful temper and dispatch all the household jobs in no time. Thank goodness the Merwins are going to France shortly after they come home, so I hope to have the study till next fall. When we do get a house, I’ll get a morning nanny I think. I find I enjoy all the little niggly jobs like ironing & floor scrubbing when I’ve had my Morning.
Business: I’m enclosing $200 of checks to deposit. What does that make, with the April interest??? I hope when we come to withdraw most of this to pay for a house you won’t feel too lonely! We hope to get our station wagon in a month or so, we’ve put down a deposit, and Ted is taking driving lessons preparatory to getting a British license. They are much stricter here, & I’ll want lessons as well before I venture on the other side of the road. It will be a small black wagon with light wood frame, red upholstery & goes 40+ miles to the gallon which I gather is rather wonderful. I’m enclosing a little picture* of it. This will mean ease in all of us going to Yorkshire---we’ll probably go for a week from July 17th on (after we’ve come back from Europe) as Ted is going to be guest speaker the next day at his old school and has to read at a poetry festival here in London that day. Roughly, this is what we plan: 10 days to 2 weeks together in London with you on your arrival, our leaving for France the last few days in June, 28th or so, & returning about 2½ weeks in time to leave with you & Frieda for Yorkshire the 17th, then back to London, with maybe a jaunt to Cornwall or Devon before you go. I’m trying to get the bulk of my writing done before you come, but even if I work in the mornings we’ll have the whole rest of the day together & you could take Frieda to the park in the mornings, or see things you wanted to see in London. Less than two months! I am looking so forward to showing you everything & having you see your beautiful granddaughter!
I got a pass to the rehearsal and production of “Wednesday Magazine”,* the hour-long TV show Ted appeared on last week. It was fascinating---a big barn of a studio full of lights & little groups of participants---a famous pianist & her collection of elephants & a grand piano in one corner, an actor & actress in bathrobe & slippers at breakfast in another, Romeo & Juliet going on in Arabic on a balcony in another & a street lamp & pushcart full of artificial fruit with a lavender seller in another & Ted & his interviewer & a huge blown-up drawing of the Owler out of his book in another. The cameras wheeled from one group to another & snippets of movies filled in the intervals. I watched the TV monitor screen at the same time as the real studio. First they did a run through, then criticized it, then broadcast “live”. Ted looked marvelous, so handsome & sweet, & read his Owler poem while the camera moved from his face to the big drawing. I was very proud. I do hope it sells some copies of his children’s book! The minute we got home another TV man called up wanting to do a feature program of him reading poems in Yorkshire, but Ted says this is his first & last TV program. He’ll get another avalanche of publicity on May 31st when he’s presented with the Hawthornden prize, so wants to keep as quiet as possible. I’m enclosing the poems & article* on him that came out in last Sunday’s Observer---the Times’ rival & a far livelier paper. It is so marvelous having married Ted with no money & nothing in print & then having all my best intuitions prove true! Our life together is happier than I ever believed possible and the only momentary snags are material ones---our lack of a house is the one thing we want to change. I want Ted to have a study where he doesn’t have to move his papers or be bothered when there are visitors, and where I can have an upstairs room in peace in the morning while someone minds the children in the basement nursery. Then, too, we’ll be able to plan a year in America, because we’ll have a place to leave our furniture and books and gear. Anyhow, the station wagon will make this summer and our Maugham trip to Europe a joy instead of a burden. It is so easy traveling in a car with a baby when you can feed them when they want, or have them nap on an improvised bed. Ted & I will bring a portable camp stove to Europe too, so we’ll be able to see a lot more than we would if we were carless & stuck in some one town.
I feel so fine now this appendix worry is over and Frieda is safely a year old, I want to consolidate my health and work in the coming year. We have good friends here, most of them our age, and as Ted says, in positions of power, and the older people we know are influential and benevolent, so I feel very much at home. The BBC really supports us. Our income from them in the past year has bought us our car.
Do keep in good health, now, mummy, & have a Happy Happy Birthday!
Lots of love,
Sivvy
PS – Did y
ou & Warren get your Birthday Present Books?
TO Warren Plath
Saturday 22 April 1961*
TLS in greeting card* (photocopy), Indiana University
Dear Warren . . .
With great effort I have figured you must be 26. I say with great effort because I always figure your age from mine and I am having increasing difficulty in remembering mine. I get vague reports of you from mother. I half expect to hear from her that you are married & have ten children one of these days. Who is this Margaret? Give me a picture of her. Verbal or actual. All I can conjure up is somebody sitting in a rocker and singing “Mein ruh’ ist hin. . .”*
I hope these pictures,* which I scrupulously divided between you & mother and which mother will probably appropriate, give you some idea of your neice & godchild (niece?) She is much better looking than the colored ones, as they put a funny yellow cast on them---the transparencies I have of those are better. You will notice Little Bunzo Bear and Raggedy Ann in her animal & people family. She loves them.
When will you know if you can come to the conference in England this fall? I’m dying to see you. Somehow I feel we say nothing by letter & I do wish you could visit us. We’re getting a little station wagon---we’ve put down the deposit & hope it arrives well before mother comes, so we’ll be more mobile now. It makes traveling with Frieda seem possible & we’ll probably take it to Europe with us.
Please write now & then,
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Elizabeth Kray*
Wednesday 26 April 1961
TLS (aerogramme), Academy of American Poets
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
April 26, 1961
Miss Elizabeth Kray
THE POETRY CENTER
YM and YWHA
Lexington Ave. & 92nd Street
New York 28, New York
USA
Dear Miss Kray:
I was happy to have your letter and your kind invitation to read on the Poetry Center “Introductions” series.*
I’m not planning to come to the United States next year, but do hope to make a return visit a year or so after that, so I’ll let you know in advance when I eventually plan to come, and perhaps we can arrange for a reading then.
Ted joins me in sending best wishes,
Sincerely yours,
Sylvia Plath
TO John Lehmann
Wednesday 26 April 1961
TLS, University of Texas at Austin
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
April 26, 1961
John Lehmann, Esq.
31 Egerton Crescent
London S.W.3
Dear John,
I’m applying for a Eugene F. Saxton fellowship (an American grant for youngish creative writers) in order to complete a novel I’m working on,* and I wonder if you would be willing for me to list you as a literary reference.
You’ve been so encouraging about my short story ventures I thought you would be a good person to ask, and I’d be honored to have your name on my list.
With warmest good wishes,
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Leonard Baskin
Wednesday 26 April 1961
TLS (aerogramme), British Library
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
April 26, 1961
Dear Leonard,
Ted and I await your arrival---at any time of the day or night and for one meal or a dozen---with great joy.
Our phone number, not listed in the book, is PRImrose 9132.
Best love to you, Esther and Tobias, from the three of us.
Sylvia
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman & Leo Goodman
Thursday 27 April 1961
TLS with envelope, Smith College
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
April 27, 1961
Dear Ann and Leo,
It was lovely to have your letter and Frieda is very pleased to have two such goldenly constellated godparents. You made yourselves godparents, whether you knew it or not, by your heavenly solicitude last spring. Now that the green and sunny season is come round again it underlines our missing you. Our only consolation is that Leo will probably be flown to England periodically to jack up their statistical flat tires, and you, Ann, will fly with him.
How marvelous the job offers sound. I wish, selfishly, that you would settle in New York which is so near visiting distance from Boston, but if you insist on going back to Chicago we shall just have to track you out there when we finally get round to coming back for a year’s stay, which we hope to do soon after we manage to locate and buy a house in the immediate neighbourhood. We are treating ourselves to a small versatile Morris station wagon this spring which is supposed to do over 40 miles to the gallon and have space for innumerable babies.
A copy of Meet My Folks! is on its way to you. It came out just in time for Frieda’s birthday and some came out in the Sunday Times and I had fun last week watching Ted appear on a “live” TV show called Wednesday Magazine, a very mixed bag of People about Town including a famous lady pianist with a collection of toy elephants, a lavendar-seller and an old-iron collector who remembered the antique cries, an actor and actress from a variety skit, Romeo and Juliet in Arabic, a film clip of spring lambs, and Ted, reading the Grandpa’s an Owler poem in front of a huge blowup of the drawing. He looked beauteous but won’t do it again.
My mother is flying over in mid-June and we are working like blacks to finish things before she comes so we can take a vacation at W. S. Merwin’s farm in mid-France for two weeks while she lives here with Frieda---which will be my first real vacation for too long. Ted is finishing a long five-act play and I am over one-third through a novel about a college girl building up for and going through a nervous breakdown. I have been wanting to do this for ten years but had a terrible block about Writing a Novel, Then, suddenly, in beginning negotiations with a New York publisher for an American edition of my poems, the dykes broke and I stayed awake all night seized by fearsome excitement, saw how it should be done, started the next day & go every morning to my borrowed study as to an office & belt out more of it. I’ll have to publish it under a psuedonym, if I ever get it accepted, because it’s so chock full of real people I’d be sued to death and all my mother’s friends wouldn’t speak to her because they are all taken off. Anyhow, I have never been so excited about anything. It’s probably godawful, but it’s so funny, and yet serious, it makes me laugh.
Frieda had a fine first birthday. I’m enclosing a picture* of her getting acquainted with one of the family of balloons. Our bedroom, by the way, blooms under the Chinese bauble chandelier which is wonderful fun. Frieda is mad for it, and I set it twirling while feeding and changing her under it and she’s quiet as a mouse.
Lots of love from the three of us –
Syl
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 1 May 1961
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
MAY DAY
DEAR MOTHER,
GOOD NEWS GOOD NEWS GOOD NEWS!
I hoped it would come by your birthday, but here it is on Mayday instead.
ALFRED KNOPF will publish THE COLOSSUS in AMERICA! This is no doubt what Mrs. Prouty’s garbled account was about. They wrote me an optimistic letter about a month ago---and I guess I shouldn’t have mentioned it to her until it was definite, so I decided not to jinx my luck and to keep quiet until I heard definitely, which I did today.*
Knopf wanted me to revise the book---leave out about 10 poems, especially those in the last sequence. Well, by a miracle of intuition I guessed (unintentionally) the exact 10 they would have left out, they wanted me to choose independently. I am delighted. I can correct my typing mistakes and leave out the poems that have been criticized to good purpose here, making a tot
al of 40 instead of 50 in the book---40 being the usual length for volumes.
After all my fiddlings and discouragements from the little publishers it is an immense joy to have what I consider THE publisher accept my book for America with such enthusiasm. They “sincerely doubt a better first volume will be published this year”.*
Now you will be able to have a really “perfect” book to buy at Hathaway House, see reviewed etc. etc. It is like having a second book come out---this one the Ideal. Ever since their first letter came I had a night of inspiration and then started writing 7 mornings a week at the Merwins study and have done better things than ever before, so it is obvious that this American acceptance is a great tonic.
I don’t know just when it will appear over there, but I’ll keep you posted.
LOTS OF LOVE,
Sivvy
TO Judith Jones
Tuesday 2 May 1961
TLS (aerogramme), University of Texas at Austin
3 Chalcot Square
London N.W.1, England
May 2, 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 “Flute Notes” and “The Stones” may end my book. I am also pleased that our opinions seem to coincide so closely.
Since last writing you, I have been having second thoughts about “Point Shirley”, and think your idea of leaving it in is a good one.* It is a much more recent poem than the other two you mention and, I think, a more vivid and better one. Of those, I should be glad to leave out “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”. I choose to leave out this, rather than “The Ghost’s Leavetaking”, partly because the reaction to the Ghost over here has been pretty favorable, notably in Roy Fuller’s review in the London Magazine.* Then, with “Black Rook” (and “Metaphors”), left out, the ghost is sandwiched between two very concrete descriptive poems---“Grantchester Meadows” and “A Winter Ship”, which make a better contrast I think, than the two we are going to omit.