The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2

by Sylvia Plath

  Ted is on the brink of real wealth. His mss. sell for $100 a poem, just the handwriting. He is at the peak of fame. I was scrimping 6 years for this, balancing check books, dying for first nights, trips, dresses & a nanny. His family wants him to give us nothing. He has left me no address, I have no word, & no sign he means to live up to his pledge of £1,000 a year. I hope time may mellow him toward the children, but I doubt it. His ethic is that of the hawk in one of his most famous poems, being taught to all British schoolchildren: I kill where I please, it is all mine. He was furious I didn’t commit suicide, he said he was sure I would!

  Just tell me where all this hate comes from? He says he thinks I am “dangerous” toward him now. Well, I should think so!

  I see, too, that domesticity was a fake cloak for me. My trouble is that I can do an awful lot of stuff well. I can give a floor a beautiful scrub, cook a fine pie, deliver a baby with ease, and stitch up a nightgown. I also love hanging out a clean laundry in the apple orchard. But I hate doing housework all, or much of the time. I have been running a 103 fever out of sheer mad excitement with my own writing. I am ravenous for study, experience, travel. I love learning how to manage things---I have kept bees this year, my own hive, & am very proud of my bottled honey, & my stings. I am learning to ride horseback & the riding mistress is delighted, I am a natural. My mind is dying of starvation here. And I am tied by nothing but money. And the sense my husband wants to kill me by cutting it off altogether, so I am hogtied & can’t work. It’s enough to make any woman sail to Lesbos!*

  What I don’t want is a nice, safe, dull, sweet reliable husband to take Ted’s place. He has to marry again---who’ll cook? And what a showpiece for looks he’s got! But me. My independence, my self, is so dear to me I shall never bind it to anyone again. Most men who are domestic are dull---I hate routine jobs, and most men who are creative or scientific miracles are bastards. I don’t mind knowing a bastard, or having an affair with a bastard, I just don’t want to be married to a bastard. I suppose it sounds as if I think all men are bastards, I don’t, but the interesting ones I would rather have as either friends, lovers or both, than husbands. Faithfulness, the ethic of faithfulness, is essentially boring. I see that. Ted made much better love while he was having these other affairs, & the tart in me appreciated this. But I also just haven’t the time to be married to a philanderer. That bores me too. There is so much else besides sex. I want my career, my children, and a free supple life. I hate this growing-pot as much as Ted did.

  I guess I haven’t really been “cured”. I seem to have acted, in a different key, my mother’s relation with my father---and my joy in “getting rid” of Ted is a dangerous one. I don’t think I could bear living forever with one man, or even for long with one. I like being alone too much, being my own boss. I am not attracted to women physically, although I do admire beauty---I say that is the novelist in me & maybe it is. By brains and variety & I hope a slowly learned subtlety, I have to make up for the looks I haven’t got, but I am so happy, everything intrigues me, I have become a verb, instead of an adjective. It is as if this divorce were the key to free all my repressed energy, which is fierce from six years of boiling in a vacuum. I still am very interested in other men, or rather, after 6 years of having only one man attract me as much as Ted---what I wouldn’t give to see him now!---I am again interested in other men, but few men are both beautiful physically, tremendous lovers & creative geniuses as Ted is. I can’t even imagine anybody ever making me feel passionate enough to have an affair, after him. And I am so bloody proud & particular. Well anyway, if I can only crawl back to a niche in London I should have enough men friends & enjoy dinners, plays, the peripherals.

  One thing this has intensified is my dislike of my mother. She has identified so completely with me or what she thinks is me, which is really herself, that she can’t eat, sleep etc. What I see now I despise about my mother is her cravenness. Her wincing fear, her martyr’s smile. Never has she taken a bold move, she has always stuck quietly in one place, hoping noone would notice. Her letters to me are full of “one can’t afford one enemy”, “the world needs happy writing”. Basta! If I couldn’t afford an enemy, I couldn’t afford to live, & what the person from Belsen wants to hear is that someone else has been there, and knows the worst, too, that he is not a freak, not alone. Not that the birdies still go tweet-tweet.

  When I get a good nanny my life will be possible. When I get back to London, & maybe some money, it will be heaven. I love you for listening. Each of your letters is so rich, they last like parables. Shall get the Fromm book.*

  With love,

  Sylvia

  TO Ruth Fainlight

  Monday 22 October 1962

  TLS, Ruth Fainlight

  Court Green

  North Tawton

  Devonshire, England

  October 22, 1962

  Dearest Ruth,

  I have been meaning for so long to answer your lovely, long fat letter. My riding mistress (I am learning to ride!) has been spinning me the most marvelous tales of her wartime life in Algeria & North Africa so that, with your description of your heaven, I would give my good thumbs, or whatever, to fly to you this winter, even for a week. If I should have a stroke of luck, meaning selling a very long poem or something, would you consider it mad---just me?

  The Elm poem has had a kindly fate. The New Yorker just took it. I thought it astoundingly bloody & morbid for them, but they took it, only they made me leave off the dedication---for them---because they said it looked as if you & I had a secret & they didn’t want their readers to feel left out! So I shall have to postpone our secret to my 2nd book, in which your name will be blazed. It is your poem.

  My next news may make you sit down. I am getting a divorce from Ted. I write you in confidence, and as a sister-mother-muse-friend. I know you & Alan must have all sorts of wonderful and famous friends, but to me you are the dearest couple I knew in England. You can imagine, Ruth, after our talk about less-famous, or even infamous wives of famous husbands, how I automatically assume that all “our” friends will now of course be just Ted’s friends. I hope that with us it is not so. I am very happy about the divorce, it is as if life were being restored to me. The details, however, are very unsavoury.

  A week after I almost died of influenza this summer Ted took the opportunity of telling me he had never had the courage to say he didn’t want children, that the house in the country (his “dream”, for which he got me to leave the life in London I loved) was a sort of hoax, and bye-bye. His family wrote how lucky I was to be able to earn my whole (!) living at home instead of having to put the children in an orphanage & go out to work for a boss. Ted told me I could economize by not drinking sherry, smoking, eating expensive meat & that the children could learn to “live like the people”. I guess you and Alan know what that is like. And also just how much the odd poem brings in. I guess this is just one step in the path of poetic genius, but being temporarily stuck in deep country with a running fever of 103°, two babies, no help, and the threat of no money---and none of the cultural life, movies, plays, art shows, museums, libraries, people which I so loved in London, & Ted in London, spending his very considerable income on himself, is enough to drive me up the wall. It will be probably a year before I can work myself & the babes back to a London flat where I can get a live-in nanny (so I can work!), none want to live here in cow land, and right now, after this year of hand-hemming curtains for Ted’s dream house & producing a son he never bothered to tell me he would promptly desert, a year seems one long, unending limbo.

  Well, so much for this mother in me. The writer is delighted. I am up at 4 a.m. every morning when my sleeping pill wears off, madly writing a poem a day before breakfast and the babies wake. I am engaging a local nurse, home from London hospital, for about six weeks, after two agency “nannies” came & went, to help me in the day so I can try to finish the second novel. There is not enough money, of course, for me to move very far. I have provisionally le
t a cottage on the wild sea of Galway in Ireland where I am thinking of wintering with the babies. I’d have to milk cows, draw well water, burn & cook on the lovely peaty turves, but I think I might get back my health. I have to have a chest Xray, with these fevers & rather shocking loss of weight. I feel you & Alan will be able to imagine pretty much what sort of a life it is. In London, I could have a nanny, free lance work, writing time, good free schools, & all the people & events I could wish. You can imagine how I feel about Ted watching us invest everything in this place, he writing glowing letters about it, and then quite coolly saying plenty of children get along without fathers and are poor etc. and walking out for good.

  If you know anyone among your friends who might like to rent this very comfortable place for three months this winter or, more important, for half a year or more starting next fall, do let me know. Maybe when you are back in London yourselves you could keep an eye out for me for a furnished London flat in your area that would hold me, the babes & a nanny or au pair girl. I know flats are fantastically hard to get, & from outside London an impossibility, but I must get back. Maybe you will have a friend who wants to sub-let. Anyway, do promise to come for a visit, all of you, and lovely David, who will probably be having wrestling matches with Nick, who is a real bruiser now, as soon as you can on your return next spring. I shall probably return with the daffodils & stay the summer, when the great cold & emptiness of my beautiful Malmaison is not so noticeable.

  Psychologically, Ruth, I am fascinated by the polarities of muse-poet and mother-housewife. When I was “happy” domestically I felt a gag down my throat. Now that my domestic life, until I get a permanent live-in girl, is chaos, I am living like a spartan, writing through huge fevers & producing free stuff I had locked in me for years. I feel astounded & very lucky. I kept telling myself I was the sort that could only write when peaceful at heart, but that is not so, the muse has come to live, now Ted is gone, and my God! what a sweeter companion.

  Please do write. My one communication with the outer world at the moment is by mail, and your letters so dear. Tell me what you are thinking, doing, looking at. What is Alan writing? When will you come home, and will it be to the London flat? I am dying to see you, & if any of the financial grimness of my life lets up before you return, would so love to fly out for a short visit. But that, I guess, is just a dream right now.

  Love to you, Alan & David,

  Sylvia

  TO Aurelia Schober Plath

  Tuesday 23 October 1962

  TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University

  Court Green

  Tuesday: October 23

  Dear mother,

  Please forgive my grumpy sick letters of last week. The return of my fever, the hideous nanny from whom I expected help, and my awareness of the “Hughes position” combined to make me feel the nadir had been reached. Now everything is, by comparison, almost miraculous. I hardly dare breathe. Winifred found me the prettiest, sweetest local children’s nurse, age 22, who lives in the most gorgeous house at Belstone, just overlooking Dartmoor, who is coming in days until she goes back in December to be staff nurse at a famous children’s hospital in central London. She has been here two days, from 8:30-6, and the difference in my life is a wonder. I think she will go to Ireland & see me settled in. With her it would be a lark. I see now just what I need---not a professional nanny (who are snotty & expensive) but an adventurous young cheerful girl (to whom my life & travel would be fun) to take complete care of the children, eat with me, at midday---an “au pair” girl, as they say here. “One of the family”. I shall try to get an Irish one when I am in Ireland, then maybe a foreign one (preferably German so she can teach me the language!) if I get back to London next fall. This girl is the daughter of the local secretary of the Bee Keeper’s Society, a lovely woman with a gorgeous home, and her step-father is a writer of children’s books! How’s that for luck! I love Susan O’Neill-Roe, she is a dear with the children. I come down & cook us a big hot lunch and we & Frieda eat together in the playroom. Then I lie down for an hour’s nap. I make a pot of tea in midafternoon & chat over a cup. O it is ideal. And Nancy does the cleaning. I am so happy & doing so much work, just in these two days,* I can hardly believe it. My study is the warmest, brightest room in the house. After Susan goes in the evening, I come up with a tray of supper & work again, surrounded by books, photos, cartoons & poems pinned to the wall.

  I have put my house deeds in our local bank, under my name, with Ted’s life insurance policy & the fire insurance policy. The bank managers beautiful 14-year old son, a friend & the b-m’s little daughter came Sunday to see Ted’s works, helped me translate a Latin children’s book I had on Ferdinand the Bull,* to review, and utterly delighted me over apple cake & milk. I am having a heater put in the car, & shall now start all my arrangements for the formidable trip to Galway through the AA.

  Susan is coming up overnight while I go to London for a few days next week---to record a poem for the BBC, to see Mr. Moore I hope (I’ve written him), and, hopefully, the head of the British Arts Council who has just put an exciting job in my way. There is to be another big Poetry Festival* in London this July at the Royal Court Theater (a big famous adventurous theatre) for a week. I’ve been asked to organise, present and take part in the American night! It means I’d have to be an actress-hostess of sorts. A fantastic challenge---me, on the professional stage, in London. But I think I shall undertake it. By next spring I should have managed to come up with a live-in girl, & this Arts Council man I think will help throw a few jobs my way when he knows my predicament & sees I am willing to tackle everything. Don’t you think I should do it?

  O the package came today, too! How wonderful. I am mad for Nick’s fuzzy red pants. And the blue sweater set! Thank Dot a billion times. And the pastels, both sorts. O mother, I shall find time to use them too. I must be one of the most creative people in the world. I must keep a live-in girl so I can get myself back to the live, lively, always learning & developing person I was! I want to study, learn history, politics, languages, travel. I want to be the most loving & fascinating mother in the world. London, a flat, is my aim, and I shall, in spite of all the obstacles that rear, have that, and Frieda & Nick shall have the intelligences of the day as their visitors, and I the Salon that I will deserve. I am glad this happened and happened now. I shall be a rich active woman, not a servant-shadow as I have been. I am so glad to have SHIP OF FOOLS.* I have been dying to read it. I shall bring it for wild, wet nights in Ireland.

  Now do write Winifred and thank her a thousand times for obtaining this girl for me at the most difficult & necessary period of my life! I feel this London trip will do me a power of good---I shall cram in every film & play I can! To think that bastard Ted has been secretly doing this all summer & spending everything, & me stuck home, scrimping! It just makes me boil. I should love to use your birthday check on a Chagford dress.* I want some of those hair-grips---copper, or wood, a curved oval, with a kind of pike through it, for the back of my hair, & to get the front cut in a professional fringe, so the front looks short & fashionable & I can have a crown of braid or chignon at the back. I shall have to take all my hems up. Almost all my clothes are 10 years old! Just wait till I hit London. Ted may be a genius, but I’m an intelligence. He’s not going to stop that. I’ve taken my first lot of the vitamins---a thousand thanks.

  Love to Dot, Warren & Maggie too

  sivvy.

  TO Eric Walter White

  Tuesday 23 October 1962

  TLS, University of Texas at Austin

  Court Green

  North Tawton

  Devonshire

  October 23, 1962

  Dear Eric,

  I am writing you in the same post that I am writing Patric Dickinson* to say how interested I am in the American evening at the Royal Court this July and proposing to see him to discuss the organizing, which I am on the fence about, but certainly interested in.

  What I wonder, Eric, is if you and dear Dod
o could possibly put me up on the night of Monday, October 29th. I know you mentioned you might do this when the Sweeneys were here, which is why I ask. I’m recording a long poem at the BBC Monday, and having to stay over on business, and just have no place to sleep. Please do say if you have guests, or children in residence! I’d probably try to take in a movie or a play, as I am starved for these things, after a year of enforced exile from my beloved city, and would just sleep quietly if you had the odd corner.

  In any case, I would dearly love to see you & Dodo again. I may have to stay till Wednesday. I have no phone, though I’m having one put in, but a letter reaching me by Saturday should do it. I’ll be in London by Monday at 10:30 am & recording till noon.