The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2
Page 79
Did I tell you I got 100 pounds (or $280) for about 130 pages of poetry manuscript of mine from a bookseller in London who is buying stuff for the University of Indiana? They’d already bought about £160 worth of Ted’s stuff, & he got £80 from some other dealer, so we’ve made a good bit off our scrap paper. Needless to say this comes in very handy just now.
Take care of yourself these grim, dark days. Love to you & Warren.
xxx
Sivvy
TO Olwyn Hughes
Monday 20 November 1961*
ALS, British Library
Dear Olwyn –
It was very good to hear from you & to have the lovely book of Billetdoux* – just what both of us need. I’ve been sitting in front of the wood fire Ted builds each evening & cutting the pages of “Va Donc”* which I’ve just begun: fascinating & queerly delicate & weird. We thought ‘Tchin-Tchin’* superb in London & I wish we could see this too when it comes on. You have no idea what a treat something like this is to us immured among cows & sheep & the amiable stump-warts, as I call the local women – (our lane in particular has odd deformities – an ancient hunchbacked lady named Elise,* apparently born without parents of either sex, a wildly blind man* & so on – but all very nice.)
Our move is a great & pleasant shock to both of us – it happened so fast & seemed such a gigantic thing, sinking our lives & savings into a place chosen from a two-day tour, but our instincts, which we operated on, stood us in good stead, & the place has all sorts of odd, wry, endearing advantages which emerge bit by bit. Ted has a wonderful study under the thatch – peaked, insulated by straw (which itself is crammed with birds) & up its own steep stair. I have one on the second floor overlooking the front yard & local church & graveyard which suits me beautifully. None of the old stowing of manuscripts under the carpet when the cooking pots came out. Frieda loves it & trots around boldly pointing to birds & mimicking sheep & dogs. She is very odd looking, with great blue clear eyes & feathery straight brown hair (like Ted & me), & a sort of lit expression. She’s incredibly loving & trusting – rushing up to strangers in the street & grabbing their hands & running along with them, chasing cats with little kissing noises & so on, & out-of-the-blue coming over to hug one or the other of us.
I can’t imagine living anywhere else now, nor can Ted. He’s got through a pile of commissions that have been chasing him for the last half year & divides his time between gardening & carpentering & writing & looks years younger, very vigorous & happy, this being just what he wanted. Our unique combination of seclusion on our 2½ acres, & 5 minutes distance from surprisingly good village shops; and antiquity in the house itself, but with hot water & gas & so on – is ideal for us. We are still very primitive inside – both of us being a bit morbid about our acres of bare floorboards stained & redolent with death-watch beetle killer. But now I at last have this American writing grant (for a novel) which comes in 4 installments & will provide carpet money & a lot of needed repairs – we have a sort of 5-year plan of these. But spring should see us with carpets, new house foundations, an acre of daffodils, apple trees in bloom & all the rural delights. We are both working wonderfully well & seem to have – at last – all the time in the world to do so – plus planning tons of strawberries & a great vegetable garden for next year. Winter is the real test – already it is bone cold & we have ordered more Pifcos. I hope to get carpets in to stop some of the most howling drafts. Have you read Marguerite Duras?* Is she good? Or any of those in her group we keep hearing about over here?
Love from us all,
Sylvia
TO Gerald & Joan Hughes
Wednesday 6 December 1961*
ALS in greeting card,* Indiana University
With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year
with love from / Sylvia, Ted, & Frieda
Court Green
North Tawton, Devon
Dear Gerald, Joan et al.
We are undergoing genuine Christmas weather – yesterday, driving back from Plymouth where Ted did a BBC Broadcast* & we shopped for a rug to cover some of our acres of as yet bare boards (he ended up buying a 2' × 4' Chinese goatskin on top of an Indian rug – guess whose side of the bed it will be on!) The first snow flew down at us & it was awe-inspiring driving back over the dark reaches of Dartmoor. Hail this morning – then everything clear again. I miss my crisp white 6 foot American blizzards – we used to have such fun sledging & building igloos. I suppose I’ll be telling Frieda about “the old days in the old country” where everything was just slightly legendary.
We are gradually getting Court Green into shape – a house this old needs one five-year plan, then another. Ted is now painting the ghastly floorboards upstairs which were driving us both to feel like ill-kept horses in a barn, & we hope to have carpets in by Christmas to keep out the drafts. Next spring the floors of the front downstairs should come up & the woods-joists on wet-earth foundations be changed for concrete to keep us from sinking any further into the ground. The wallpaper should hold the plaster up for a few years & the billion birds hold the thatch on for as long out of sheer self-interest – they live under it, too. I love it here, & so does Ted. He looks wonderful, very happy & is able to be relatively unbothered by his famousness which hounded him in London. I’ve an American grant to finish a novel, so we shall weather the first year of giant bills & tax inspectors all right. Loved the pictures of you. Do write – you too, Joan.
xxx
Sylvia
TO Ann Davidow-Goodman & Leo Goodman
c. Thursday 7 December 1961*
ALS in greeting card,* Smith College
With best wishes for Christmas and the New Year
from Sylvia, Ted & Frieda
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
Dear Ann & Leo –
It seems ages & years since our wonderful summer with you & we miss you very much. We have, in one swoop, left London & bought a wonderful ancient country house, white, with a peaked thatch & its own cobbled court surrounded on 3 sides by thatched barn & stables (empty as yet, Ann!). The oldest walls of Court Green, originally a farm, are 3 feet thick & we have a historic fortress-mound under a giant elm on our property of 2 ½ acres, plus 70 apple trees. We have a spare bedroom & a thatched cottage (very dilapidated – which we hope to fix up) & are only 4 hours from London by express train. Please come back to England & visit us.
We live in the midst of a thriving & friendly Devon town, our house being more or less the ‘manor house’ the boyhood home of one Sir Robert Arundell, who sold it to us. We all three adore it. Frieda moos & baas & peeps back at cows, sheep & birds. We are again painting ancient floorboards & going to country auctions to buy odd bits for our 10 or so rooms. To my surprise, I miss cosmopolitan life very little. Devonshire people are curious, but very warm & friendly.
Please do write & tell us how you both are, what doing & all.
All the best Devonian & Cornish beaches are within an hour’s drive. Come for a little holiday.
Much love from us 3 –
Sylvia
TO Marcia B. Stern
c. Thursday 7 December 1961*
TLS, Smith College
Court Green
North Tawton, Devon.
Dear Marty,
It was terrific having your letter and all the good news. Oddly enough, just as you wrote about your new sink I was having my sink ripped out & a new one installed: my old sink being 2½ feet high, set on two columns of rotten bricks & a kind of antique upchuck speckled color, with perpetually damp drainingboards & a drain up which enormous slugs with black horns climbed overnight to greet me first thing in the morning. I still have scars on my wall which Ted plastered after about a month & someday now will try to match the elusive shade of pale green paint, which graces our kitchen walls. The house itself though is just wonderful. I a
m quite used to its peaked thatch & love the millions of birds who live in it, even the blue tits who drink the cream off our milk. I don’t know just how much I told you about the place, which is right in the middle of the quite ugly, grey cementish town of North Tawton (now seeming beautiful & sweet to me). When all the foliage is out, you can’t see any houses, nothing but the 12th century Anglican church facing the house across an acre of green field. Now, though, with the leaves gone, we are surrounded by neighbours which comforts me on dark nights, as some of the desolate country places we saw gave me the creeps. And I like being two minutes walk from the shops & chemist & PO. Spring at our place is, from all accounts, idyllic, with 70 apple trees in bloom, laburnum, lilac & a field full of daffodils, but right now we are battening down for the full blast of wet English winter. Up to now we have been living on the bare, dirtyish floorboards which the British seem to specialize in, but we have just budgeted after the first staggering pile of solicitors & surveyors fees, downpayment, plumber, electrician, mover, back income tax ad inf. & have ordered carpets for the upstairs bedrooms, hall, stair and front room, which I hope may arrive by Christmas. I have been stitching curtains & snake-shaped draftstoppers on my handwind singer, & Ted is painting the floorboards, after much procrastination.
The people of the town are obviously very curious about us (and how we live), but extremely friendly & nice: everybody says Good morning to everybody in the street. We have all those small things which I depend on: a good baker, a good butcher, a good chemist. I have a robust red-cheeked woman named Nancy Axworthy come in for 2 mornings a week to clean for a total of just over $2: a lifesaver, because the house is huge. If you knew how we were counting on your coming to visit us when you come to England, you would buy your tickets right now! How soon do you think you can come? At last we have lots of room. Upstairs we have our bedroom, a small one for F, & my study facing front, & the bathroom, guestroom & an other room we won’t use till we refloor it probably, over the back. Plus Ted’s attic study up a flight of stairs. I hope someday we can make our thatched cottage into a guest cottage. But that will be after our 5 year plan of repairs, which continues this spring with laying a cement foundation in place of the wooden joists on bare earth in the front of the house, & laying lino in the children’s playroom & hall over that. Once that’s done, I shall feel we can rest a bit. And someday we’ll have to have the whole interior repapered and re-plastered, as the plaster is crumbling behind the paper in places. But not for a bit.
I find I miss London very little. My thoughts of having an eventual city house there have faded, & on my one or two visits back I was oppressed by the dirty air & crowds & got quite homesick. We are surrounded by high green pastures full of cows & sheep, which Frieda loves, & Dartmoor is just 15 minutes away. I hope we find some nice beaches this summer, as we’re under an hour from all the Cornish & Devon ones. I think the twins would have wonderful fun here---loads of space to run round, and the 4 hour express to & from London is just a mile down the road. What I miss most is (I don’t quite know how to put it) “college-educated” mothers. I got to know several nice, bright girls in London whom I miss, but there is nobody like that round here---I’ve met one very pretty local girl (named Sylvia, queerly enough) with 3 daughters whom I like, but it’s all baby talk. I find myself liking baby talk, but I miss the other things---notions, ideas, I don’t know what. Luckily Ted keeps me from getting too cowlike.
How I envy you, the Fair Housing Practices Committee & the Unitarian church! This seems to me so valuable and practical, such a satisfying way of putting abstract principles into groundroots action! I think our little local church very lovely---it has 8 bellringers & some fine stained-glass windows, but I must say the Anglican religion seems terribly numb & cold & grim to me. I started going to Evensong on Sundays as a purely community thing, having asked the Rector (a rather stupid little Irishman who knew Jomo Kenyatta* in Africa, but is terribly dull & full of platitudes) to tell me about the service. The singing & chanted responses of the first half are fine & in an aesthetic way I can respond to them, but the sermons! All the awful emphasis on our weakness & sinfulness & being able to do nothing but through Christ etc. I am perfectly prepared to see in one’s innate laziness & faults an analogy to an original flaw, but the Trinity seems to me a man’s notion, substituting the holy ghost where the mother should be in the family circle, almost a burlesque. And I guess I am simply what the minister called one Sunday “an educated pagan” (after seeing our books, I’m sure, which apparently terrified him). But I do want Frieda to have the experience of Sunday School, & the Anglican church is the church in the community, so I may keep up the unsatisfactory practice of going, although I disagree with almost everything. I’m sure if there were simply an intelligent minister it would be better. Tell me your thoughts on this. Weren’t you at one time an Episcopalian? I know I always envied my mother’s having been brought up in the Catholic church as a child because she had a rich & definite faith to break away from, & I think that it’s better to have a child start this way, than be the only one who doesn’t go to church at an age when religious and philosophical arguments mean nothing to them, & he only feels curious and outcast.
In theory, we divide our days, so I work in my study in the morning & Ted carpenters, gardens, does odd jobs & minds Frieda. Then I take over & cook & sew & have Frieda with me in the afternoon while Ted writes. Then we spend the evenings by a crackling wood fire reading or listening to music or whatever. But I feel to do very little work. A couple of poems I like a year looks like a lot when they come out, but in fact are points of satisfaction separated by large vacancies. I’ve done a woman’s magazine story which came out here & have hopes of someday turning something out good enough for the Ladies Home Journal---this a kind of journeywork I’d like because it would be a good source of income. As it is, we have been very lucky piecing together a pleasant living from odd jobs---reviews, radio broadcasts, poems and so on. It is a relief not to have money flowing out in rent, never to return. I shall be happy when we have paid back our borrowings from our parents & our relatively modest mortgage & have only upkeep and running expenses to worry about. It isn’t accurate to say we live on writing, as we’ve been lucky with writing grants & prizes which have seen us over financial humps that the weekly trickle of earnings wouldn’t cover, but now we have space, we have all the time we need to work & none of the old worries about where we shall be next year.
We are also expecting a 2nd infant this next month, as Peter D. has probably told you (I am amazed at how he heard of it, but Ted mentioned it to some Cambridge person in London & woof! it flew). The reason I haven’t made announcements etc. is because we lost our second baby 4 months along last year (it was supposed to be born on Ted’s birthday in August), & I had started to tell family & relatives, & felt so depressed at telling them we’d lost it that I thought I’d wait this time till the event was safely upon us. The doctors gave no reason for a miscarriage, but as I had my appendix out 3 weeks later, it might have been that, or not. Anyway, I am crossing my fingers that this one will be fine, although once you lose a baby, or know about anyone else who had one born with this or that wrong, you feel what a precarious miracle the whole process is. Frieda is at last spouting words after everybody telling me they talked at 8 months etc. I just can’t get worried about walking & talking ages---after all, you do both the rest of your life, & simply let her grow as she feels like it. Now she babbles about doddies & pawbooks & dark (she runs & points & says “dark” as soon as the sun sets, because one morning we took her out when it was dark & tried to explain it to her). She is lots of fun & very dear. Still with bright blue eyes unlike either of us. Do write soon.
Lots of love from us all,
Syl
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Thursday 7 December 1961
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton, Devon.
Thursday: December 7
; Dear mother,
It is a marvelous, crisp, clear December morning, and I am sitting in the front room with Ted & Frieda overlooking our acre of grasses which are white with frost. After a week of black, wet sunless weather, everything seems suddenly bright & Christmassy. I am trying to get off the bulk of my American Xmas cards by ordinary mail today so I will be a bit saving.
The reason I haven’t written for so long is probably quite silly, but I got so awfully depressed two weeks ago by reading two issues of the Nation---Juggernaut, the Warfare State,* about the terrifying marriage of big business- and the military in America, and the forces of the John Birch Society etc., and another about the repulsive shelter craze* for fallout, all very factual & documented & true, that I simply couldn’t sleep for nights & with all the warlike talk in the papers such as Kennedy saying Kruschev would “have no place to hide”, & the armed forces manuals indoctrinating soldiers about the “inevitable” war with our “implacable foe”, I began to wonder if there was any point in trying to bring up children in such a mad self-destructive world. The sad thing is that the power for destruction is real and universal, and the profession of generals who on retirement become Board Heads of the missile plants they have been feeding orders. I am also horrified at the U.S. selling missiles (without warheads) to Germany, awarding former German officers medals---as the reporter for the liberal Frankfurt paper says, coming back to America from his native Germany it is as if he hadn’t been away. Well, I got so discouraged about all this that I didn’t feel like writing anybody anything. Ted has been very comforting & so has Frieda. One of the most distressing features about all this is the public announcements of Americans arming against each other---the citizens of Nevada announcing they will turn out bombed & ill people from Los Angeles into the desert (all this official), & ministers & priests preaching that it is all right to shoot neighbors who try to come into one’s bomb shelters. Thank goodness there is none of this idiotic shelter business in England: I just wish England had the sense to be neutral, for it is quite obvious that she would be “obliterated” in any nuclear war & for this reason I am very much behind the nuclear disarmers here. Anyway, I think it appalling that the shelter system in America should be allowed to fall into the hands of the advertisers---the more money you spend the likelier you are to survive, etc., when 59% of taxes go for military spending already. I think the boyscouts & the American Legion & the rest of those ghastly anti-communist organizations should be forced to sit every Sunday before the movies of the victims of Hiroshima, & the generals each to live with a victim, like the human conscience which is so lacking to them. Well, I am over the worst of my furore about all this. Each day seems doubly precious to me, because I am so happy here, with my lovely home & dear Ted & Frieda. I just wish all the destructive people could be sent to the moon.