The Letters of Sylvia Plath Vol 2
Page 103
Am going to dinner with Winifred Wednesday & bringing the Taroc cards as she is having friends. Had Clarissa Roche, the American wife of a British poet teaching at Smith when I was, for the weekend with her newborn, 4th baby. Went Saturday for lunch with Susan’s parents at their gorgeous home in Belstone with Frieda and met Mark Bonham-Carter,* the handsome Liberal candidate down here (married to an American) & also director of a London publishing house. Liked him immensely. Frieda, I wish you could have seen her! In a new blue wool dress I got. Absolutely marvelous manners, sat up & ate all through the long dinner like an angel. Very polite. I love going out with her. Already she is saying “Go to London. See Zoo. See lions and baby owls.” She will love it there.
I am in an agony of suspense about the flat. I was first on the list of applicants! Already I have met an offer for £50 more a year, now they have sent out for my “references”, in other words, to solicitor, banker, accountant, to see if I can afford it. I had the uncanny feeling I had got in touch with Yeats’ spirit (He was a sort of medium himself) when I went to his tower in Ireland---I opened a book of his plays in front of Susan as a joke for a “Message” & read “Get wine & food to give you strength & courage & I will get the house ready.”* Isn’t that fantastic? I would have to get a stove, new furnishings. Then I could rent it out by the week at fantastic rates in the summer when I was at Court Green and almost cover the year’s rent! I am a real businesswoman, & if I only had capital would make a bid for the house from the owner, rent the bottom (bsement) flat, keep 3 floors for myself & rent those furnished for the half year I wasn’t there. Then I would have an income! It is so frustrating not to be able to do this! I will die if my references say I’m too poor! Living in Yeats House would be an incredibly moving thing for me. I didn’t tell you of my thumb*---it’s now healed---because Dr. Webb made an assy botch of it, it is now deformed, because he did not put a proper bandage on it or even a tape to hold the top in place, nor look at it for 10 days, just left the black smelly bottom part of the bandage & put a clean outside on. I went back to my darling Regent Street* doctor who fixed it properly, as much as he could & saved the top, although the side is gone. They say one of Nick’s eyes is slightly crossed (!) so I’m seeing an eye specialist this week. And my dentist. Am riding twice a week now. Have some fascinating historical biographies from the N. Statesman to review; am sending the almost full-page children’s book review to Mrs. Prouty. Got $50 from Dot. Bless her. Will write her.
Love to all,
Sivvy
TO Douglas Cleverdon
Monday 19 November 1962
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 19, 1962
Dear Douglas,
I wonder if you could have a copy of the script of “Three Women” sent to an Australian gynecologist who is very interested in it. His name & address are:
W. J. Rawlings FRCOG*
12 Collins Street
Melbourne, Australia.
I also wonder if you could send me about half a dozen mimeographed copies, as I’ve had several requests for it.
So sorry to have missed you & Nest* the night I was in London, but I was flat out after travelling from 5 a.m. I hope, with luck, to be installed with the babies in London in the New Year, finishing a second novel and free lancing, & would so enjoy seeing you & Nest again then. Love to Nest and that marvelous pre-Raphaelite boy* whose name I always forget.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Stevie Smith*
Monday 19 November 1962
TLS, University of Tulsa
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
Monday: November 19
Dear Stevie Smith,
I have been having a lovely time this week listening to some recordings of you reading your poems for the British Council,* and Peter Orr has been kind enough to give me your address.* I better say straight out that I am an addict of your poetry, a desperate Smith-addict. I have wanted for ages to get hold of “A Novel on Yellow Paper”* (I am jealous of that title, it is beautiful, I’ve just finished my first, on pink,* but that’s no help to the title I fear) and rooted as I have been in Devon for the last year beekeeping and apple growing I never see a book or bookseller. Could you tell me where I could write to get a copy?
Also, I am hoping, by a work of magic, to get myself and the babies to a flat in London by the New Year and would be very grateful in advance to hear if you might be able to come to tea or coffee when I manage to move---to cheer me on a bit. I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO W. Roger Smith
Monday 19 November 1962
TLS, Random House Group Archive & Library
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 19, 1962
Roger Smith, Esq.
Agreements & Rights Department
William Heinemann Ltd.
15-16 Queen Street
London W.1
Dear Mr. Smith,
Thanks very much for your letter of November 5th. I’m glad to hear they want “Mushrooms”* for a spoken recording, and certainly grant permission. I must say 2 guineas seems a tiny sum. How about 5 guineas? Or am I just sounding like an American capitalist. Maybe you could sound them out about it. I’d rather have 2 gns. than nothing, but would rather have 5 than 2. See what you can do and let me know.
Best wishes.
Sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Leonie Cohn*
Tuesday 20 November 1962
TLS, BBC Written Archives Centre
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
November 20, 1962
Miss Leonie Cohn
The BBC
Broadcasting House
London W.1
Dear Miss Cohn,
My husband has written telling me that you would like a few sentences of outline for the programme “Landscape on Childhood”.* I enclose* a paragraph. I’d be grateful to hear from you* direct what sort of emphasis you precisely want, as my husband has given me only the most general of notions.
Yours sincerely,
Sylvia Plath
TO Olive Higgins Prouty
Tuesday 20 November 1962
TLS, Indiana University
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire England
Tuesday: November 20
Dear Mrs. Prouty,
I have been meaning to write you as soon as my state of almost unbearable excitement and suspense is over, but as it still continues, I decided I couldn’t keep quiet any longer. What has happened is that by a kind of magic fate I saw the flat (unfurnished) in London and am now waiting to see if the client approves of my references. Let me tell you a little of the background. When I was in Ireland in August* after my long seige of flu, I went to visit the tower of the famous Irish poet W. B. Yeats. What I found there was a magic, untouched spot, no sign of people, only a poem on the walls, wild rhubarb, an apple orchard gone wild and a soft grey donkey with kind eyes. Although at that time I felt dead and ill in body, I felt my soul respond to that peace and felt somehow in tune with Yeats who must have loved it. Then, when I was last in London, rather depressed with all the ugly furnished hideously expensive flats Ted had taken me to look at, I felt compelled to walk down my dear streets by Primrose Hill and Regents Park where I’d had Frieda. I felt compelled to walk down Fitzroy Road, and there to my amaze was Yeats’ old house (with a blue plaque “Yeats Lived Here”) with builders in and a signboard up “Flats to Let”. I was astounded---I’d walked by that house time and again and wished it were for let or for sale. I flew to the agents. By an absolute miracle (in London where people are cutting each others throats for flats) I was first on the list to apply! It is a very
complicated process---they write your banker, accountant & solicitor & ask if you can meet payments etc. then you get your solicitor to draw up a lease. I am in agony. It is just what I want, right round the corner from my old panel of wonderful doctors & the park & minutes by bus from the BBC. My dream is selling a novel to the movies and eventually buying the house from the present owner. I am applying for a 5 year lease, the longest I can get.
The strange part is that when I came back to Devon I said laughingly to my young nurse “I will shut my eyes and open my book of Yeats poetic plays & get a message from him.” I did this, and the words I put my finger on were “Get wine and food to give you strength and courage and I will get the house ready.” I was amazed. I knew Yeats was a sort of medium and believed in spirits, and although I am very sceptical, I certainly think it would be symbolic for me to live in the house of a great poet I love, which happens to be on the street I would love to live on most in London! But probably the owner won’t approve of writers! If I could get it I would try to be in by Christmas.
I am a very good businesswoman, and what I would plan to do with this unfurnished flat on 2 floors---3 bedrooms upstairs, a large lounge-dining room, kitchen & bath downstairs---would be slowly furnish it, poem by poem, in beautiful taste from second hand shops, living on straw mats & pillows in the meantime, then rent it at very high rates by the week in the spring and summer which would cover a large part of what I pay for it unfurnished. The weekly rents for furnished flats in London is astronomical, and I could make this quite economical by letting it out when I want to be at Court Green with the babies in spring and summer, when London is flooded with tourists. Eventually I hope to write a novel that will sell, really sell (I have novels in me, one after the other, just crying to be written) and buy a house in this road and furnish it---3 floors for myself, a mother’s help & the children (there are only about 2 rooms to a floor), a garden, & a basement flat let out. When I went to Court Green I would have no trouble letting my flat, and my rent income should cover my expenses. I am amazed at my practicality & business sense. Having to handle this large place, taxes, insurance, repairs, has made my hardheaded streak define itself. Now winter has come, I lug great buckets of coal and keep the Rayburn stove going in the kitchen day and night. I am very proud of being able to run it (Ted never could), my cleaning woman taught me how, and it keeps the water boiling hot, dries the wet clothes overnight and is really “the heart of the house.” I also carry dustbins, mow lawns and next spring will try to learn to dig so I can have some garden. I would like to live in London for the school year, so the children can go to the good free schools (the schools in Devon are awful), so I can have a mother’s help & write (no mother’s help wants to live in the country) and fill myself with art exhibits, interesting people, books and cultural life. The utter lack of cultural life of any sort this last year and a half has been a great trial to me. When I was back in London I literally wept to see paintings, I had missed them so. I was so happy there, and faced all the people including Ted and now have nothing to fear, only work to look forward to.
I must tell you that I took your advice and went shopping with part of that first check you sent! I looked in my wardrobe & was astounded. In the 7 years of my marriage I have never bought a new dress or had a hairdo! All my clothes dated from Smith and were too long and o so familiar. I had always thought I would never cost Ted anything, so he could write & not have a job, and now he is going out with fashion models after telling me he thought clothes were superficial! Well, I got the front of my hair cut & set and kept the long coronet of braid at the back. Then I bought a gorgeous camel-colored suit at Jaeger’s, with a matching sweater, and a pewter hairclasp and bracelet, and a black sweater & blue-and-black tweed skirt and new shoes & I felt like a new woman. When I met Ted at the train in London he didn’t even recognize me. I am going to leave all my old Smith clothes in Devon & just take these new ones to London. I want my life to begin over from the skin out.
I am enclosing a copy of my review* of children’s books which came out last week in the New Statesman, as I thought you might enjoy it, especially the part about the Opal Whitely book, which fascinated me. My children’s reviews are beginning to “take”---Faber & Faber quoted one in an advertisement* & I opened one book to find a former review of mine of an earlier one in the series on the back jacket.* Needless to say I love doing children’s picture books as the art & production interest me most & I have piles of free review copies for the children. They liked my review at the New Statesman & have just sent me 5 historical biographies from which I am to choose one to review. If I were living in London I’d simply see these editors, tell them what I’d like to try, and get lots more work. I would also have no trouble getting a mother’s help as they all want to live in London.
I hadn’t told mother about my cut thumb as I thought it would worry her, but I guess the midwife wrote her. My country doctor made a shocking botch of it---he didn’t even affix the cut top with a tape or stitch and when the time came to look at it a few days later just left the dirty black bandage & put something clean on top. As a result, in 10 days, I had a deformed & very stinky thumb---my nurse thought it might be septic. So I went back to my dear London doctor who bandaged it properly & saved most of the top, although the side has a bad scar. He said it could have healed perfectly if it had been taken care of properly in time. So you can imagine how eager I am to get back to my old doctors! This one is a fool and is spoiled by only having ignorant country folk as patients who never question him. I am all right now, thank goodness, although for a while I thought I might lose my thumb.
I saw the producer of the poetry week at the Royal Court Theatre & am definitely doing the American Night in July. I am very excited about this.
The children are blooming, although we all have had colds this week---my nurse’s week off. They tell me Nick has a slightly crossed eye, which I, doting mother that I am, never noticed. So I’ll have it seen to by a specialist when I get to London. I bless the welfare services in medicine time & again. I took Frieda to lunch with the parents of my nurse & the Liberal party candidate Mark Bonham Carter (son of Lady Violet Bonham Carter)* and a director of Collins publishing house. He was charming, and Frieda ate with the grownups & behaved enchantingly. I am very proud of her. She keeps saying “Go to London and see the zoo!”
I hope to really get into my second novel this winter & finish it as soon as I get to London & can count on a mother’s help. It is to be called “Doubletake”, meaning that the second look you take at something reveals a deeper, double meaning. This is what was going to be the “Interminable Loaf”---it is semi-autobiographical about a wife whose husband turns out to be a deserter and philanderer although she had thought he was wonderful & perfect. I would like very much, if the book is good enough, to dedicate this novel to you. It seems appropriate that this be “your” novel, since you know against what odds I am writing it and what the subject means to me. I hope to finish it in the New year. Do let me know if you’d let me dedicate it to you. Of course I’d want you to approve of it first!
With love,
Sylvia
TO Ruth Fainlight
Tuesday 20 November 1962
TLS (aerogramme), Ruth Fainlight
Court Green
North Tawton
Devonshire
Tuesday: November 20
Dear Ruth,
Thank you so for the wonderful long letter & the poem. I think Mist* has a beautiful pace to it, the way it rises & crests, I most especially like “Layered like receding planes of a Japanese print” & “Mind’s heedless gliding to the final sea./The trees were more than noble vegetables/More than convenient gallows.”* It is lovely. I have been up to my neck in pragmatics. You can imagine how easy it is hunting for a flat in London from down here! By great luck my midwife cornered a lovely 22-year-old on holiday at home from the Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital where she is a nurse and she is with me till mid-December. Just now she’s
got a week off, my local babysitter is sick & my char is moving from one house to another & all 3 of us have colds, plus me with 5 historical biogs to weed out for the New Statesman, so basta! I did manage two visits to London in the last month, with the young nurse living in, & was astounded at my reaction. I almost wept to see paintings, I could not stop talking with people---I have been literally culture-less, movie-less etc. for well over a year, and totally incommunicado with intelligent adults since Ted left, now 4 months ago. My one drive is to a flat in London, and if my fantastic experience comes true I shall think I am a medium.