by Sylvia Plath
I would like some time to have you discuss what you suggest about being in my own womb & having babies & my “prehistoric cave”. I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being pregnant & nursing. But I must say, I get a terrific sensual pleasure in being light & slender & fucking as well.
Can you think of any other discontents of Ted’s I might forsee? I think he will need to prove conclusively & perhaps several times (soon), then maybe less often, that he is “free”. He says this means travel, not tarts, but I feel naturally now the two go together. What I don’t want to be is an unfucked wife. I get bitter then, & cross. And I feel wasted. And I don’t just mean the token American what-is-it twice a week, front to front, “thank you darling” either. It might simplify things if I could desire other men, but I need to admire them too, & find them attractive, & there are very few of these, & I’m not likely to meet them in cow country.
Practically, Ted needs a job of some sort that takes him away quite regularly. I think this might be managed with speaking engagements: he gets enough requests, & could thus travel throughout England, spacing them one or two a week. But I honestly don’t feel like sticking through the bloody country winter with no husband to come home & share experiences for weeks on indefinite weeks. I like to go on long holidays too.
Can you suggest a gracious procedure when you see some little (whoops, not little, big!) tart is after your husband at a party, or dinner or something? Do you leave them to it? Engage a hotel room? Smile & vanish? Smile & stand by? What I don’t want to be is stern & disapproving or teary. But I am only human. I have to feel I have some ground-rights. So far, I have only said I don’t want the bitches to sit around the house expecting me to cook them nice dinners. But I don’t find joy in the general sexual exchanges one finds in our world. I mean, Ted is unique to me. I would like to be unique to him. And wise. Yes, wiser than he is in some ways. By the time I am 50 I want to be very experienced & have purple hair & be very wise & have interesting children & piles of money.
Can you weed through this & tell me where you think I am fooling myself, near truth, downright stupid. What can I legitimately ask of Ted? And he of me? A funny footnote: all through this Ted’s been writing a radio play fittingly called “Difficulties of a Bridegroom”. It was accepted on the condition that he re-write the reality frame of the bridegroom’s encounter with a dream femme fatale so the audience would know what was real & what wasnt. A nice parable illustrating your point about the reality of this woman.
Thanks a million times for the letter. Do answer this. & bill me for the lot.
Love,
Sylvia Hughes
P.S. All day I have been planting out my seedlings from their greenhouse “growing pots” into open ground. “Hardening them off” is the horticultural expression.
TO Marvin & Kathy Kane
Friday 10 August 1962*
TLS, Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Friday: August?
Dear, dear Marvin & Kathy---
It is all set. Ted will pick you up at your place around about noon on Monday, deposit your boxes where you will and bring you back for a late dinner with us Monday night. We are both very happy about the prospect of you coming.
I came back* with marvelous train companions---an absolutely stunning blond pure Cockney girl and completely unspoiled working at Butlin’s holiday camp* (Ooo it’s a brothel) who told me all about everything including her love for her boss (He’s only 25 years older ’n’ me) and left me all her pork sandwiches at her stop, then a very swish English mother whose husband is a biologist and who descanted to me on the rareness of happy marriages (hers being one, she says, roundly thumping on wood).
There is a woman it seems eager to come 5 mornings a week to mind the babies, so I should be initiating her Monday I hope, and starting to write mornings again.* I just heard from my sometimes patroness that she is alighting in London this Wednesday* night midway between a trip from America to Russia & wants to see Ted & me for dinner that night in London. So maybe you can babysit for us that night??? She is very impulsive (with a huge lineage of great-grandchildren, alas) and I feel this is a very important meeting. I hope to sort of mention in a casual way my dreams of scrimping & making over the cottage.
Thank you thank you thank you for an absolutely saving day. I felt terrific coming back, renewed in every cell & slept the sleep of the deserving, sans pills. So you see what a fine influence you both are!
Much love,
Sylvia
TO George MacBeth
Wednesday 15 August 1962
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
August 15, 1962
Dear George,
I think the Penguin book of Sick verse* is an inspired idea, and am delighted to hear you are doing it. I’ve been meaning to send off these two recent poems* to you for consideration for the BBC, and I thought I’d enclose them now, In case they strike you as being darker than my other darks, sicker than the old sicks.
Very best wishes.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
George MacBeth, Esq.
44 Sheen Road
Richmond
Surrey
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Friday 17 August 1962
TLS, Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
August 17, 1962
Dear mother,
I am enclosing these pictures* for you, which I think came out very well. I took them to London on Wednesday to show Mrs. Prouty. I will have a couple made up and send them to Marcia Plumer. We did go to London, had cocktails, dinner & saw Agatha Christie’s “Mousetrap”, a play which has run for 10 years. She put us up at her hotel, the Connaught, and it is the loveliest hotel I’ve ever stayed in---very intimate, clean, yet antique-feeling. No great impersonal grandeur. We had hot baths & breakfast in bed. It was wonderful to see Mrs. Prouty again, and that nice Claire,* her rather dowdier sister-in-law companion. It is so sad---did you hear, Mrs. Prouty’s nasty cook (whom I never liked) deserted her to work in a bank, her maid had a heart attack & her gardener, or is it chauffeur, is demanding more money when she thinks he already gets too much. None of her children* want anything from the house. I can’t bear to think of her selling it. Evidently she undertook this strenuous trip to escape those painful worries. She was beautifully keen, although Claire says she suffers from aphasia, and forgets terribly. She asked Ted & me about our work with her usual insight. She means an immense deal to me. I hope you drop over to see her now and then. Her loneliness must be appalling.
Winifred has at last found me a nice shy woman with two children in school to come work for me 4 hours a morning 5 mornings a week. It would have been impossible for Nancy to mind babies & clean too, I should have seen that, but at least she will feel I thought of her first. Both Nancy & this woman are on holiday this week, so you can imagine what a mess the house is & how little peace I have.
But Monday I shall train the new woman, and Tuesday Nancy is back, so help is in sight. At least I should be able to count on them. A business arrangement, with money paid, is the only thing I can count on. I am very eager to get the cottage started this winter & try to finish it by next summer. Then get a full-time nanny.
We now have with us a young American writer who was evicted from his London flat, and his wife. They are fantastically neurotic, she has dozens of illnesses, all untreatable because she has decided she is allergic to any medicine that might help---for instance, she has ulcers, she says, yet can’t swallow, she says, milk. And migraine, but is allergic to codeine. And she is a fanatic about food. I just take all this calmly. They are living in the guest room---I said we would take them in rent-free for a month or 6 weeks until they got rested enough to look for another flat, if they would help pay for the food and help wi
th the children. They took over the day we were in London and it nearly killed them. They have said they will stay while we go to Ireland, which would be wonderful, as the children get on beautifully with them, but I have grave doubts as to their staying power. I shall ask them to tell me now, so I can hire a nurse if necessary. I simply must go to Ireland and sail for a week. Mrs. Prouty is scheduled to come to dinner here September 9, Sunday, & we hope to leave the next day.
It was very kind of you & Warren & Margaret to remember Ted’s birthday. I have seen the doctor’s wife, whom I very much like, about riding lessons & she is going to ask the woman next week & we may take them together. She is going to get a pony, & someday I would like a pony for Frieda.
Lots of love to all,
Sivvy
PS: Thanks for F’s pretty pants. I’m enclosing a wellmeaning letter* from dear dumb Edith.
TO Richard Murphy
Friday 17 August 1962
TLS, University of Tulsa
Court Green
North Tawton
Devon.
Friday: August 17
Dear Richard,
Your latest telegram arrived yesterday when we were away for the day in London and we have no phone, so I am writing. As things now stand, I am reasonably sure we can leave Devon on Monday, September 10. I don’t know how long it will take to get to you, but when we do we could stay about a week. Do you have life preservers! I don’t want you writing another prize-winning poem about our eyeballs boiling in the sea!*
Could you drop us a note with some advice about the best way to get to your place from wherever the boat to Ireland lands? We will be without a car & travel by train or bus or mule or whatever is most expeditious. Do let us know what to do about getting to your island! I don’t know when I’ve looked so forward to anything. I am sick of the bloody British sea with its toffee wrappers & trippers in pink plastic macs bobbing in the shallows, and caravans piled one on top of the other like enamel coffins.
Fond regards,
Sylvia
TO Anne Sexton
Tuesday 21 August 1962
TLS (aerogramme), University of Texas at Austin
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
August 21, 1962
Dear Anne,
I was absolutely stunned and delighted with the new book.* It is superbly masterful, womanly in the greatest sense, and so blessedly unliterary. One of the rare original things in this world one comes upon. I had just said the day before “One book I will buy is Anne Sexton’s next,” & there it was, in the morning mail the next day. I have these small clairvoyances. But I don’t have to be clairvoyant to see the Pulitzer and National Book Award and the rest in your lap for it.
I think “The Black Art” comes in my top favorite dozen, with Northeaster Letter,* Flight, the Letter Crossing Long Island Sound,* Water, Woman with Girdle, Old, For God While Sleeping, Lament. Hell, they are all terrific.
Tell me what it is like to be a Lady Poet Laureate. How was the Radcliffe Grant,* did it really free you from the drudge of housework? And who is He? of the letters & Flight? Tell me how things are with you, with Maxine and George. Who do you see, know, now? I am bedded in the country with Frieda and a very fine 6 months son Nicholas, keeping bees and raising potatoes and doing broadcasts off and on for the BBC. I would love one of your newsy letters to stick on the wall.
Let me know when & where I can see the new stuff you must have done since the book. I loved the flies in their foul caves poem,* but see no magazines except the New Yorker, which is a free copy. More power to you, although you seem to need nothing---it is all there.
Love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 27 August 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Monday: August 27
Dear mother,
Thank you very much for your letter, and the sweet little bunny cards for Frieda. She plays with the pop-beads all the time and the other day came into the room with her red sweater and said “Gammy make noo.” We have a young couple living with us now, the Kanes, he an American writer of plays & depressive, & she a big-boned kind Irish orphan and manic. After the usual jerks of a living-in relationship, we seem to have settled down. In return for free board & room Kathy helps me with the babies & cooks one meal a day. So I hope to have my “mornings” as long as they care to stay, and that they will at least stay through my hoped-for Ireland trip about September 10, to 20. Mrs. Prouty is scheduled to come for dinner Sunday the 9th, so hope she can make it. I am thinking seriously of closing the house up for the winter and taking the babies to winter in Spain. I have just recovered from a bad bout of flu, which the babies caught too, and my weight has dropped after this worrisome summer, and I do not think it wise to try to undergo another English winter just now. If plans work out, I should drive down in mid-November, get a villa and stay till early March. I do not know what I would have done without Kathy Kane to mind the babies while I was sick; they were evicted from their London flat and our mutual needs seem to coincide.
We have removed 3 combs from the beehive and used Winifred’s honey extractor & should have about 10 bottles. It is delectable stuff. The weather here has been ghastly---nothing but rain. Today is sunny & blowy & I hope it keeps up, for I have my first riding lesson this afternoon,* and after Ireland hope to share them with Joan Webb, the doctor’s pretty and very nice wife who has taken them for a year.
I hope you will not be too surprised or shocked when I say I am going to try to get a legal separation from Ted. I do not believe in divorce and would never think of this, but I simply cannot go on living the degraded and agonized life I have been living, which has stopped my writing and just about ruined my sleep and my health. I thought I would take almost anything to give the children an illusion of home life, but I feel a father who is a liar and an adulterer and utterly selfish and irresponsible is worse than the absence of a father, and I cannot spend the best years of my life waiting week after week for the chance returns of someone like this. What is saddest is that Ted has it in him to be kind and true and loving but has just chosen not to be. He spends most of each week in London, spending our joing savings on himself & his pleasures, and I feel I need a legal settlement so I can count on so much a week for groceries and bills and the freedom to build up the happy pleasant life I feel it in myself to make, and would but for him make. I have written Edith telling her I deeply love her & Willy & Walter & Hilda & Vicky, & told her the truth of Ted’s desertion during your stay & his utter faithlessness & irresponsibility. I just could not receive any more of her sweet dumb letters asking about the garden and saying what a fine, happy, restful time you must have had. I have too much at stake and am too rich a person to live as a martyr to such stupidity and heartlessness. I want a clean break, so I can breathe and laugh and enjoy myself again.
The woman Winifred got for me came one morning, then sent her husband to say it was too hard work. Well, I have Kathy for the time being and really couldn’t afford anyone now. The kindest & most helpful thing you could do is send some warm article of clothing for Frieda at Xmas. I have plenty for Nicholas. And a big bottle of Vitamin C tablets for me if you would! I can’t afford another cold like this one. I do hope Warren & dear Maggie will plan to come in spring, & that I can have Marty & Mike Plumer as well. I try to see the Comptons weekly & have met some nice couples with children there. I would, by the way, appreciate it if you would tell no-one but perhaps Margaret and Warren of this, and perhaps better not even them. It is a private matter and I do not want people who would never see me anyway to know of it. So do keep it to yourself!
I am actually doing some writing now Kathy is here,* so there is hope. And I feel if I can spend the winter in the sun in Spain I may regain the weight & health I have lost this last 6 months. I meant you to have such a lovely stay, I can never say how sorry I am you did not have the lovely reveling and rest I meant yo
u to have. I am glad to hear that grampy is better off in the home and think that decision was the best & only one. Tell Dotty to go on writing me, she means a very great deal to me. I love you all very very much and am in need of nothing, and am desirous of nothing but staying in this friendly town & my beautiful home with my dear children. I am getting estimates about re-doing the cottage so I someday can install a nanny & lead a freer life.
Lots of love,
Sivvy
TO Howard Moss
Friday 31 August 1962
TLS (aerogramme), New York Public Library
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
August 31, 1962
Mr. Howard Moss
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York 36, New York
U.S.A.
Dear Mr. Moss:
I’m sending along ELM again, with some new poems.* I thought your comments* perfectly good and well taken.
There is absolutely no relation of the poem’s meaning to the girl I dedicated it to---she is simply someone I like who liked it, and when I print it in a book, I’ll dedicate it to her then. No need to in magazine printing.
The poem, without the dedication, I hope explains itself. The “she says” is the elm. The whole poem is the elm talking & might be in quotes. The elm is talking to the woman who contemplates her---they are intimately related in mood, and the various moods, I think, of anguish, are explored in the poem. Let me know if this makes any difference. I realize it is a rather wild & desperate piece. But, I hope: clear, clear.