by Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Sunday 4 March 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Sunday: March 4
Dear mother,
Honestly, you are a marvel of intuition! We have been having our worst cold spell yet here, and I was huddled over the fire with Ted, looking so blue he like Sir Walter Raleigh* took off the Jaeger sweater I gave him for Christmas and put it round my shoulders. Then the doorbell rang. It was the mailman with your latest package. I opened it, and there in the middle of the lovely babyclothes was The Jacket! Surely you never told me it was coming---it was a complete surprise. I put it on right away and gave Ted back his sweater. It is ideal for everything. First, it is beautifully warm, with that furry lining. Next, it is stylish, so I don’t feel like an old bundle of oddly assorted knitting. I can wear it in the house and be both warm and neat looking. In spring and fall I can wear it outside as well. I just love the color and cut. It fits perfectly. It is the nicest thing you could have thought of to see me through the rest of the winter and years to come! I have just got fed up of winter. We are going to see about weatherstripping our outside doors which have rather large gaps around the edges letting in the cold air and wind, and also are investigating builders for putting in the cement foundation under our front two rooms, which can then have lino put down, and we will be sealed and cheered against the onslaught of next winter. We did have a lovely snow a few days ago---my first snow in England. For a few hours every twig was all thick with white and you couldn’t see a thing beyond our land, but then the sun came out and by noon the whole vision had melted.
I received a lovely blue corduroy romper-and-jersey set from Aunt Elizabeth, whom I shall thank.* I loved the baby things for Nicholas you sent---they will be so nice when he is crawling in the sun on a blanket this summer. I am managing to get about two and a bit more hours in my study in the mornings and hope to make it four when I can face getting up at six, which I hope will be as soon as Nicholas stops waking for a night feeding. The day seems to just fly by after noon, though, and I am lucky if I get a fraction of the baking or letterwriting or reading or studying done that I want to. When the good weather comes it should be a lot easier. The winter is a grubby time with little children, indoor washing, and no snow to play in. In six more weeks the time will change, and we’ll have the lovely long days again.
I so enjoyed hearing about Margaret’s wedding dress. It sounds gorgeous. I do wish I could share in all the plans---it would be fun to be so close to a formal wedding. How nice that is what Warren wants, too. Let me know what you and they think about a blanket as a present and I’ll get a list or sampling of colors in Exeter---I hope I’ll be ready to go there in a week or two. Ted has found a good dentist, recommended by our midwife, and I’ll start going as soon as Ted’s finished his own series of sessions.
I have got sent some autobiographies and biographies from the New Statesman for review (where my review of children’s books appeared) and am enjoying the book on Josephine,* Napoleon’s wife, very much. I expect another batch of books this week, from which I’ll choose some, and will try to do a review so they’ll ask me again. It’s fun getting all the free books.
Frieda is getting better and better at imitating what we say, and talks to herself ceaselessly over her picture books in her own brand of prattle. “Oh boy-baby. Bear gone. Moo-cow” and so on. She says “snow” and pronounces the Ws” very carefully. She was very amused by the snow---we took her for little walks in her boots. Oh, a letter came from the London toy store saying you’ve given us 5 pounds credit (a thousand thanks), no toy catalogue though. Honestly, you must go slow, mother! You have been so generous with things for Frieda and Nicholas I am concerned about your budgeting!
I am hoping the next installments of my grant in May and August carry us over the first year’s hump of major expense for furnishings and repairs; it couldn’t have come at a better time. I am getting very excited about the possibilities of our garden, and hope we can conquer our nightly enemies, the snails. By the way, if you know anybody who has ever kept a couple of chickens for eggs, let us know hints about it. I know Dot & Joe keep theirs in battery. Well, we are thinking of simply getting half a dozen & letting them run around loose in an enclosure. I’d adore to have our own fresh eggs!
You would so enjoy Frieda now. She is a good walker and full of tricks to make us laugh. She is always stuffing things in her pockets, nails, nuts, keys, and has mastered the art of saying “Please” (without the l) and the possessive---“Mummy’s poppy” (pocket), “Daddy’s keys” and “Baby’s bath”. I am beginning work on something amusing which I hope turns into a book (novel), but may be just happy piddling. I find long things much easier on my nature than poems---not so intensely demanding or depressing if not brought off. Luckily the English will publish almost anything in the way of a novel, so I have hope. It’s almost April! Take care.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Ruth Fainlight
Sunday 4 March 1962
TLS, Ruth Fainlight
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
March 4, 1962
Dear Ruth,
I’ve been writing to you in my head for weeks but as a result of post-baby lethargy have been absolutely mum. We have a boy baby (his sex a great surprise to us both) named Nicholas Farrar Hughes, born on January 17th at 5 minutes to midnight. I am appalled to see how long ago that is, but my pregnancy cowishness seems to last for some time after I have got back to my pleasant old skimpy-stomached self. Nicholas was a very different experience from Frieda, who arrived bang-bang in under 5 hours with no dawdling. I confidently expected to be in danger of dropping Nicholas in the garden or something. But he took a whole day nagging, in which I sat on a stool & baked great amounts of stuff for us to live on for days afterwards. Then the pains got serious the minute Frieda was in bed & we called the midwife who brought her gas & air. This was great fun---we sat, Ted on one side of the bed, & the midwife, who is a very noble and fine woman, on the other, & I retired behind my mask at intervals & felt very sociable and delighted with the conversation all about the town, our house, its history, past tenants, etc. I was beginning to push, very pleased with my control, when the gas gave out & the baby stuck. There we were. What they call “nature’s anesthesia” kept me from more than a dumb crossness at the delay, but the midwife (not given to alarm) said “I nearly thought we had an emergency” after it was over. The baby flew into the room in a wall of water, very blue, cross and male. I thought I must be torn to bits, but not a scratch. He weighed 9 pounds 11 ounces, compared to Frieda’s ladylike 7 pounds 4 ounces---details which never interested me before my own immediate experience of them. His head had evidently stuck & he looked fearfully low-browed and tough until his skull-plates shaped up. Ted & I had been expecting a girl---thinking, I suppose, that Frieda would be less jealous of a girl, and both having got so fond of her we couldn’t recapture our original desire for a son. It took us overnight to come round. Then a rather wicked 10 days of Ted cooking & minding Frieda & me coping with a succession of strange midwives (mine was on “holiday” tending a father of 80 with pneumonia) and nightly milk fevers with a temperature of over 103 which left me bang, in a sweat, just before the doctor arrived every morning & which nobody but myself believed. Great consternation at me taking my own temperature. All this passed as a dream. Now it seems preposterous & rather funny.
I am so eager to hear your news. Please be better than me & drop one little note about your baby---sex, name, date, poundage, oh you know. Or get Alan to do. We are both hoping you won’t give up the idea of visiting us this spring . . . only 4 hours from Waterloo by carrycot. Do come. We are a baby-farm with every convenience. I am very happy with Court Green, my study, the babies, but mad for someone to talk to & woefully self-pitying about our just discovering you & Alan & then moving off. The women here are much worse than the men, who at least have their work. It’s like a cattery. I neve
r knew what “provincial” meant before. Ted joins in sending love. Please say you may come – Mayish?
Lots of love & good luck. Do write me – it’s so good to get your letters.
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 12 March 1962
TLS with envelope, Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
Monday, March 12
Dear mother,
It was so nice to get your letter saying Margaret & Warren would like a blanket. I’m going to Exeter to the dentist this week so I shall see about ordering the two-tone rose one and having it sent. I was so touched to think I shall pass on your lovely Bavarian china---that’s the set with the dark-green background to the border, isn’t it? One feels a girl is the one to appreciate the domestic things, for she is the one who uses them---I know I shall reserve my treasures for Frieda. I am getting very sentimental about family things. For instance, someday I hope to be well-off enough to send for grammy’s desk. I’d like it to be Frieda’s little desk. I have such happy memories of it, and could never find anything with such associations---it’s close to priceless.
I look very forward to shopping around Exeter with you---I know very little about it, my visits were so soon curtailed. I think the idea of tweed skirts and matching sweaters a handsome one. I’m sure we’ll find something. I hope Dotty’s got my letter with Frieda’s measurements & thanking her for the lovely package. I’m astounded at all the people you say are sending packages!! I look so forward to your visit this summer I can hardly sit still. It is a red-letter occasion for me because for the first time I shall be sharing my house. Which you were so instrumental in enabling us to find last summer, & to buy! I just adore the place. I picked our very first bouquet of daffodils yesterday & put them in a glass & brought them up to Ted’s study with his tea.
I’m sure you’ll find us very rough, still---although we are wonderfully civilized compared to when Warren was here. We have arranged to have the playroom & hall floors filled in with cement & bitumen & lino tiles put down---something I hope’s got over with within a month, this being the last “big” immediate thing. The playroom (where I am typing) is a fun room. I look forward to filling it with handpainted furniture, chests for toys & the like---I want to paint them white, with a design of hearts & flowers, have an old piano and so on. A real rumpus room. Now it’s just bare boards & deck chairs & a welter of Frieda’s toys.
Frieda is christening the wonderful dungaree set you sent today---digging all morning in the garden with Ted. She is beautiful. She has just struck the most perfect stage, pink cheeks, clear blue eyes and her feathery brown hair. She is picking up words very fast now, and phrases---too cold, too hot, a bit hot, boobarb for rhubarb, open nut, daddy’s screw, more tea, and so on. She’s so funny. We’re arranging to have the children baptized on Sunday afternoon, March 25th, by the way. Although I honestly dislike, or rather, scorn the rector. I told you about his ghastly H-bomb sermon, didn’t I, where he said this was the happy prospect of the Second Coming & how lucky we Christians were compared to the stupid pacifists & humanists & “educated pagans” who feared being incinerated etc. etc. I’ve not been to church since. I felt it was a sin to support such insanity even by my presence. But I think I shall let the children go to Sunday School. Marcia Plumer sent me a copy of a wonderful sermon by her local Unitarian minister which made me weep, on fallout shelters. I’d really be a church-goer if I was back in Wellesley or America---the Unitarian church is my church. How I miss it!!! There is just no choice here. It’s this church or nothing. If only there were no sermon, I could justify going to the ceremony with my own reservations. Oh well.
As I say, we are still rough---very creaky floors, leaky faucets, peeling paper & plaster & so on. But the house has a real, generous, warm soul to it. And responds so beautifully to any care we take. I so enjoy sitting here, watching the sun set behind the church. I think I will go just wild when our trees start blooming---there are fat buds on the lilac. I think the most exciting thing to me is owning flowers and trees!
Nicholas is immensely strong. He holds his head up for ages, like a Sphinx, looking round---the result of my keeping him on his stomach. I think his eyes may be hazel, like Ted’s---they are a deep slateblue now. I love him so dearly. I think having babies is really the happiest experience of my life. I would just like to go on and on.
I’m enclosing a check for some poems in the March issue of Poetry Chicago* for deposit in our account. Wasn’t Ted’s Atlantic poem nice!
I am enjoying my slender foothold in my study in the morning again. It makes all the difference in my day. I still get tired by teatime, and have spells of impatience for not doing all I want in the way of study and reading. But my mornings are as peaceful as churchgoing---the red plush rug and all, and the feeling that nothing else but writing and thinking is done there, no sleeping, eating or mundane stuff.
I have the queerest feeling of having been reborn with Frieda---it’s as if my real rich happy life only started just about then. I suppose it’s a case of knowing what one wants. I never really knew before. I hope I shall always be a “young” mother, like you. I think working or having any sort of career keeps one young longer. I feel I’m just beginning at writing, too. Doing prose is much easier on me, the concentration spreads out over a large area & doesn’t stand or fall on one day’s work, like a poem.
Ted has just made another stand for integrity & privacy by refusing to do a TV program on the Poet in the Process of Composing a Poem from Start to Finish. Did I tell you he’s being translated into Swedish? The Swedish language looks wonderful, with the craggy character of German & none of the pedantry. A drawing of Ted, from a photograph, was in the copy of the Swedish magazine that came. Frieda came running in with it, pointing to the drawing and saying “Daddy, Daddy”. Then she pointed to the line that hung in midair at the back of his neck and said “Oh, broken.”
I hope you are going on being very careful about driving in all that snow. There were pictures in our paper yesterday about the wreckage on Fire Island, New York.* Did you weather that storm all right?
Is there any chance of our getting any American corn seed with directions, do you think? Ted is starting to plant things & we are loaded with seed packets & fertilizer, and Slug Death.
Well, I must get supper for my family. Lots of love from us all,
Sivvy
TO Paul & Clarissa Roche
Monday 12 March 1962
TLS, Smith College
Court Green
North Tawton, Devon.
March 12, 1962
Dear Paul & Clarissa . . .
It was wonderful to hear from you. Perhaps (I hope for you) you are by now in Greece. The thought of going alone (or going anywhere alone) must be heaven. What sort of a friend do you have who would look after three children??? I wish we could find one like that. But my own ties to the babies, nursing and so on, are so strong, I don’t think I could stop---we dream of a few months in a place like Corsica, but would have to take babies with, which puts dreams off.
Isn’t there any chance of you two coming down overnight or something? I am particularly desperate that Clarissa does not disappear back to America without my seeing her!! We do have an extra double bed & would so love to see you. Our house is 1 mile from the North Tawton station, which is an easy 4 hours by direct express from Waterloo. How about a flying visit??? We are so stuck, with this new infant, and very broke with piles of necessary house repairs, plus investment in what Ted hopes will be a sort of lucrative garden, but hopeful as I am, I am oppressed by the large nocturnal armies of invisible slugs which devour everything local. We are armed with lethal pellets of SLUGIT and SLUGDEATH. Wish us success.
The all-to-brief heaven of our moving in last fall to halcyon weather and our own (very small) apple harvest was neutralized by this awful winter. I thought I was bearing up fine, ho-hoing when the midwife tol
d me that a temperature of 38 was really too chill for a new baby and so on in the bedroom. We all lasted the winter with no colds or illness, then I was diagnosed in the last week to have Chilblains. I had though I’d merely been victim to a horde of migrant fleas or floating stinging nettle pollen, but the word Chilblains undid me. It suggested that all the time I was thinking myself nobly above the cold, the cold was meanly nipping my ankles & leering. I got very grim. Especially as our electric bill rocketed to almost 25 pounds for 3 months and I was still cold. But then a day of sheer sun last week had me & the babies out in the garden, me weeding our antique cobbles with love & pruning roses, and if only the weather would relent, I would be ecstatic, bucolic and so on. Our acre of daffodils is brightly beginning to show. The sparrows hold on our thatch with their communal spirit. Do come and say hello to us. At least write. I am nearly done with a quite grossly amateur novel the small grant for which is enabling us to live with less desperation than usual this year, and to do repairs we could never manage on our uncertain dribbles from poems, reviews etc.
How lovely it would be to see you! Do give us hopes. Ted joins in sending love,
Sylvia
TO Elizabeth Schober
Friday 23 March 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
March 23, 1962
Dear Aunt Elizabeth,
I have been meaning to write for ages to thank you for the darling blue corduroy baby suit you sent for Nicholas, but ever since the baby’s arrival in January I have done hardly anything, it seems, but take care of the children. It has been very, very cold here, and our primitive heating by electric fires a bit too primitive to keep all the cold out, but miraculously the babies seem to thrive anyway, and have had no colds all winter, nor have we.
Ted is busy planning a large vegetable garden, and I took advantage of the first warm sunny day in about half a year last week to put the babies out and weed our antique cobbles in the front and prune some rose bushes. We have a lot of work ahead of us, with our 2½ acres, but I adore gardening (although I am just a raw beginner) and it is so easy to work at it with the babies nearby.