by Sylvia Plath
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Friday 2 November 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
November 2, 1962
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
Thank you for your wonderful letter which arrived today. Your letters are a wonderful life-line. My phone is in: the number is NORTH TAWTON 447. I faced the most difficult time this week in London---did my recordings, then went to a literary party and faced everybody, all the malicious questions, the gloating nastiness that is part of the gossip world. Everybody is delighted at what Ted has done---he is so famous, and all I can do is face the spotlight with dignity, not hide. I felt it was best to get it over with at once---as many people as I could. Being the wife of the most famous poet in England is not easy, but I felt I did best to see the lot of people at once. I simply say I am very happy about the divorce because it frees me for a life of writing in peace. They are disappointed, because they expect me to be full of revenge & frustration. Slowly, I hope, the furore will die away. You are absolutely right about the need for me to strike London now. Ireland was an evasion. I am now in the process of trying to get a furnished flat in London big enough for me, the babies & and au pair girl for the winter months. After this dear nurse goes, I shall not be able to get live-in help here, so I must go to London for this. I go up again this week to flat-hunt. I don’t care how awkward it is, as long as I have a girl to mind the babes so I can just sit and meditate, & write.* In spring, I would like to return to my beautiful home---with an au pair girl---for the summer. What I hope to do this winter is get an unfurnished London flat on a long lease for next year, one I really like, in Hampstead. As a London home so the children can go to the fine free schools there (the schools here are awful), saving Court Green for holidays & summers. I would slowly furnish the London flat out of 2nd hand things, then let it at high weekly rates for the summer. There is no trouble renting a furnished flat out in London. I hope to work on writing all this winter so I can amass a sum to buy the lease---they do things on leases a lot here, long leases, not just buying outright. You are a guardian angel to send a check for a mother’s help. I have such difficult things to face this year it will be my salvation to just sit at my desk in peace, gathering the force of my soul, beginning all anew, all over.
I must have Nicholas’ eye operated on some time,* it is a bit skew, or crossed, they tell me, so want to be in London for this too. I also badly cut my thumb and the country doctor here, fool that he is, botched it, so the top is dead, did not mend, & it is septic, so I have an appointment with my old London doctors next week, to see if I will need anything drastic like cutting or plastic surgery. This young nurse I love with all my heart. She knows everything, & has stood by me like an angel, & will move to London with me, instead of Ireland if I can get a flat, till early December.
I am so delighted with this nurse: I went to a movie with her & her nice mother last night, a foreign movie, as their guest. I realized I had not seen a movie or a play (except for that lovely night with you) for over a year! How wise you are to talk about postponing the Ireland trip! I shall only go now as a last resort, if I can’t find a London flat. It seems there is a kind of telepathy between us, for I had just decided that I must have the courage to return to London now, when it is most difficult, or I will find it harder & harder, & be more & more outside the literary business circle. If I face a return now, I can face anything. And nothing could be harder, so it must, of necessity, get easier.
The Observer critic thought my poems were marvellous & took two on the spot.* I feel I am writing in the blitz, bombs exploding all round. I have seen the man about the American Poetry night at the Theatre in London & will do it. I don’t care how hard it is, I shall do it. I am very excited. I want to shirk nothing. To flee nothing. I have bad times, of course, when I feel grim, but have all sorts of ways to cheer myself. Don’t tell mother, but I smoke now. It is a great relief, very comforting. I was up till 3 a.m. last night doing a book review of the Diary of Opal Whiteley,* an Oregon child of the backwoods, written at 6 & published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1920 as “The Journal of an Understanding Heart”*---do you remember it? She had a crude, cruel mother & claimed to be descended from French royalty. A beautiful book, all about her animals & country life. I’ll send you a copy of the review when it comes out---it’s like being back at Smith, working for deadlines! I need hard work & love it. I love you too. Writing & my babies are my life, & you understand both with the heart of a kindred spirit.
With much love,
Sylvia
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Wednesday 7 November 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
London: November 7
Dear mother,
I am writing from London, so happy I can hardly speak. I think I have found a place. I had resigned myself to paying high sums for a furnished place for the winter while I looked for an unfurnished one with a longish lease that I could then furnish & let for fabulous rates in spring & summer while I was at Court Green. By an absolute fluke I walked by the street & the house (with Primrose Hill at the end) where I’ve always wanted to live. The house had builders in & a sign “Flats to Let”; I flew upstairs---Just right (unfurnished), on 2 floors with 3 bedrooms upstairs, & lounge, kitchen & bath downstairs and a balcony garden! Flew to the agents---hundreds of people ahead of me, I thought, as always. It seems I have a chance! And guess what, it is W. B. Yeats’ house. With a blue plaque* over the door saying he lived there! And in the district of my old doctors, & in the street I would want to buy a house if I ever had a smash-hit novel. I am now waiting for the tedious approval of the owner & for my references to go through. Ted is behind me in this, he took me round looking at places. Now he sees he has nothing to fear from me---no scenes or vengefulness---he is more human. His life is nothing to me & I am now staying with a wonderful Portuguese couple, the girl a best friend of Ted’s girl friend, & they see how I am, full of interest in my own life, & are amazed, as everyone is, at my complete lack of jealousy or sorrow. I amaze myself. It is my work that does it, my sense of myself as a writer,* which Mrs. Prouty above all understands. My hours of solitude in my study are my most precious, those, & the hours I spend with my darling babies. I am, I think, & will be when I get this London flat (I hope) arranged, the happiest of women. Now I am free from Ted everybody loves me---I mean everyone I deal with. I am so happy & full of fun & ideas & love. I shall be a marvelous mother & regret nothing. I have two beautiful children & the chance, after this hard, tight year, of a fine career---schools & London in winter, Court Green, daffodils, horse-riding & the beautiful beaches for the children in summer. Pray for this flat coming thru. I would try to get a 5 year lease. Then in 5 years I hope to be rich enough to buy a house in London, rent flats at the bottom & live at the top, rent my furnished part in summers---so easy here it is a sure income. I have real business sense. I am just short of capital right now. I would be right round the corner from Catherine Frankfort etc., whom I’m so fond of, on the Hill, by the Zoo---minutes from BBC! And in the house of a famous poet, so my work should be blessed. Even if I don’t get this place I should be able to get one like it near it sooner or later. It’s about time my native luck returned! And I have, on the advice of Catherine Frankfort, applied for an au pair girl, preferably German. They get only £2 (about 5 dollars) a week plus board & room, & are students, wanting to be part of the family. They would mind the babies mornings & study at classes afternoons & babysit nights, with one day off! Just what I want---for I want to devote myself to the babies afternoons myself, take them to teas & visits & walks. Mrs. Prouty called me. I was thrilled. I am dedicating my 2nd book of poems (almost done) to Frieda & Nicholas in England. Maybe I’ll dedicate it to her in America, if it gets taken there.
I have found a fabulous hairdresser in a town next to North Tawton*---Doctor Webb’s wife, of whom I’m very fond
, told me of them. I had my fringe cut just before I came up to London in the most fashionable style---high on top, curling down round the ears---and kept my long coronet in back. It looks fabulous and the cut, shampoo & set was only a dollar-fifty. From the front I look to have short hair, & from the back, a coronet. I am going to get some fancy combs & clips for the back & do away with the elastic. Ted didn’t even recognize me at the train station! My morale is so much improved---I did it on your cheque. Men stare at me in the street now, I look very weird & fashionable. Now I shall get an Xmas dress for myself with the rest of the money. I hope to be able to move up here before Xmas. I shall get toys for Frieda & Nick with your money, at Hamleys. When I appear at the Royal Court this summer I shall be a knockout. My haircut gives me such new confidence, truck drivers whistle & so on, it’s amazing. I am so happy back in London, and when I came to my beloved Primrose Hill, with the golden leaves, I was full of such joy. That is my other home, the place I am happiest in the world beside my beloved Court Green. If I get the lease now, I should be able to write for 5 years & save up to buy a house there, & then the children would have the best of both worlds. Living apart from Ted is wonderful---I am no longer in his shadow, & it is heaven to be liked for myself alone, knowing what I want. I may even borrow a table for my flat from Ted’s girl---I could be gracious to her now, & kindly. She has only her high-paid ad agency job, her vanity & no chance of children & everybody wants to be a writer, like me. I may be poor in bank funds, but I am so much richer in every other way I envy them nothing. My babies & my writing are my life & let them have affairs & parties, poof! What a bore. Love to Warren & Maggie.
Wish me luck.
Sivvy
TO W. S. Merwin
Thursday 8 November 1962
TLS, Pierpont Morgan Library
Court Green
November 8, 1962
Dear Bill,
Your letter* was waiting for me tonight when I got back from London from flat-hunting & thank you so for writing. I will talk to you straight out as I always did. I want simply to say that I have loved both you & Dido dearly, with immense fondness & sensibility for our close relation in London. When I came to this August, after almost dying of influenza & being left with a high fever, no help, the 2 babies in the country to which I’d come because Ted said it was his life, & faced the practical problems, which were many, my first thought was to turn to friends who might give me a cup of coffee & some practical advice. I’d heard Frieda was a latent schizophrenic, after her shock at Ted’s disappearance & she had upsetting fits, & also the baby needed to see an eye specialist. My one thought was to get back to London where I could get free-lance jobs, good medical care & a flat. I was fantastically relieved when Ted wrote Dido was in London, for I have always admired & loved her, & my first act, after a long seige of illness & on getting to London, was to call her & ask to talk to her, because I had some worries about the babies. I called her as Frieda’s godmother & as a woman I thought would meet me, independently, in my new independence. I don’t know if you can imagine how I felt when I realized Dido was home & refused to speak to me. I was simply stunned. Ted has since told me that Dido is no friend of mine & to forget her. My one thought was---was it an illusion, an hypocrisy, all that love & friendship I thought was for me as well as Ted?
I wrote you after this, in something of horror, wanting to think that perhaps my real admiration for you & your work & just the good times we all had in London were real, that just because Dido would not speak to or see me when I was desperate for a talk from someone wise & whom I’d loved, it didn’t mean you too would simply pack your tent & walk off. Naturally you can’t see from where you are, but there are no sides to be taken. All our mutual friends, the best ones, I have re-established happy relations with for I loved them & they really loved me & I have nothing to say but that I wish Ted well & have loved him so that as long as he is happy & writing it is all I wish. What has been very sad & very hard is to feel that you & Dido alone have turned your backs & evidently feel it impossible to be friends independently. I took you so seriously as godparents for Frieda, & to be refused Dido’s voice when I was desperate to get to London & have her seen by a good child psychiatrist is something I still can hardly believe.* I now believe it, & accept it. What I cannot do is understand it. It did seem incredibly inhuman & hurtful to me. I also feel awful to think that you & Dido are of such a oneness that I must accept her act as yours, too. You ask if you could do anything to help.* The one great good thing you could do is confirm that there was a reality in our friendship & that it might independently continue. You are the only friends that our divorce has cost me, & the hardest for me to lose. Having felt so keenly, last week in London, the loss of Dido, I wanted some sign I might not have lost you. Naturally I wouldn’t think you’d hide anything from each other! I just thought you might not be the same.
As soon as I get back to London, a flat, & can start writing myself to a mother’s help & seeing friends, my life will be what I want. Domesticity always bored me, & I will simply buy myself a foreign girl, as Dido once advised, to free me for what I want to do, which is write. All I want is my own life---not to be anybody’s wife, but to be free to travel, move, work, be without check. I thought you of all people would understand this. I can’t imagine you thinking I’d want you to alter your fondness & respect for Ted when what he’s done hasn’t altered mine! I think he is a genius & the best living poet & I wish him joy. Just at the moment I’ve a lot of practical bothers, but who wouldn’t---they are slowly melting, & I may have a very lucky break about London at any moment. The stereotype of two divorced people being in two camps, & everybody having to take sides, just doesn’t work here. Ted is getting me writing jobs, I am delighted to be free of the need to crop my life to his will or that of any man, & now a London flat looms as possible after my year of intellectual purdah here in Devon, I am intensely happy.
The one mar on my happiness is my very keen sense that you & Dido, alone of all our dearest friends, have taken sides, & such extreme sides, & apparently such irrevocable ones. It just makes me feel I was an idiot to think either of you ever cared for me or my work at all. I meant to give you a poem like a loaf of bread---I don’t have anything else I can give. Ted has told me to give Dido up. Must I give you up too? Ted told me, as the friend of mine he still is, to expect nothing from her. OK. Was I wrong in thinking you were real as well? Please just say straight out. The worst is better said than left silent.
Sylvia
Please send copies of the poems when you’ve got them. My poetic judgment is still pure!
TO Eric Walter White
Wednesday 14 November 1962
TLS, University of Texas at Austin
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 14, 1962
Dear Eric,
Thanks so much for forwarding the letter.* You and Dodo were angels to put me up, hot bath and all. I am working very hard to have a place in London in the New Year, which would be sixth heaven in itself, and, if I get the marvelous place I’ve applied for, seventh heaven at the least. It was lovely, seeing you both so beautifully installed in your new place.
Yes, I’ll be in Devon, till I have the London address I’ve always wanted. I look very forward to planning the American Poetry night for next July, and hope I’ll have the pleasure of seeing you both again when I’m living in my blessed London once more.
Warmest regards,
Sylvia Plath
TO Howard Moss
Thursday 15 November 1962
TLS (aerogramme), New York Public Library
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
November 15, 1962
Dear Mr. Moss,
Thanks very much for your letter.* I’m sending back the second section of AMNESIAC as you suggest. It really is quite independent from the first section, I think---being about the amnesiac, where the first part* is
simply about the town forgotten, the Lyonnesse.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
Mr. Howard Moss
THE NEW YORKER
25 West 43rd Street
New York 36, New York
U.S.A.
P.S. Now I’ve typed it I like it much better without the first half! Thank you.
sp
TO Peter Davison
Friday 16 November 1962
TLS, Yale University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire, England
November 16, 1962
Mr. Peter Davison
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
8 Arlington Street
Boston 16, Mass.
USA
Dear Peter,
I’m sending on this rather alarming wad of new stuff* and eager to have your opinion about it. As I’m rather hard up at the moment, I’d be awfully grateful if you could get a rapid hearing for these!
Best of love to you, Jane and Angus (Is it Angus?).
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Aurelia Schober Plath
Monday 19 November 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Indiana University
Court Green
Monday: November 19
Dear mother,
Thanks so for your good letter. I haven’t written sooner because I have been fantastically busy. My correspondence alone would keep a full-time secretary going---I’ve had letters from physiotherapists asking for a copy of a poem about living in a Plaster Cast to read to her patients and just now a fan letter from an Australian gynecologist who heard from a “colleague in London” about my maternity ward poem for 3 voices on the BBC & wanted a copy as he’d done a lifelong study in miscarriages.* I am thrilled. The medical profession has always intrigued me most of all, & the hospital & doctors & nurses are central in all my work. I’m hoping to get my dear Susan O’Neill-Roe to take me into her Children’s Hospital when we’re both in London. Just now is “one of those weeks”---Susan has a week off in London, my local babysitter is out with flu, Nancy is moving from one house to one nextdoor & all 3 of us have colds. In spite of it, I am happier than ever before in my life. I realize now that all my married life I have sacrificed everything to Ted & his work, putting his work first, going to get part-time jobs, with great faith in his future wealth & fame. I never even got a new dress or went to a hairdresser! Now he goes out with fashion models. Well, I have finished a 2nd book of poems in this last month, 30 new poems,* & the minute I get a mother’s help in London I will do novel after novel. Even in the greatest worry & adversity, I find I have simply neglected all my own talent, & thank God I have discovered it in time to make something of it! I took Mrs. Prouty’s first check, as she said to, & went to the Jaeger shop in Exeter. It is my shop. I got an absolutely gorgeous camel suit (out of Vogue) & matching camel sweater, a black sweater, black & heavenly blue tweed skirt, duck-green cardigan, red wool skirt & in St. Ives got a big pewter bracelet, pewter hair clasp, pewter earrings & blue enameled necklace.* All my clothes dated from Smith and were yards too long & bored me to death. I am going to get a new black leather bag & gloves & shoes & just take my new things to London. I feel like a new woman in them, and go each week to have my hair shampooed & set in neighboring Winkleigh for under $1! My new independence delights me. I have learned, from Nancy, how to keep the big coal stove going in the kitchen, & it is heaven, heats all the water, dries all the clothes immediately & is like the heart of the house---even Ted couldn’t keep it going overnight, & I can keep it going for a week. I love Court Green & am going to see that gradually my dream of it comes true.